The BBC’s solar eclipse
5:53PM BST 03 Aug 2013
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Having been reprimanded by the BBC Trust for daring to stray from the BBC’s line in favour of welfare benefits, John Humphrys was, by Friday, showing that he was firmly back on message in an interview on the ever more vapid Today programme, starring the Government’s former chief scientific adviser, Sir David King. True to the BBC’s statutory obligation to impartiality, Sir David was allowed to plug a newspaper article he had written calling for the world to make a mammoth push for solar energy, comparable with the effort made to land a man on the Moon. For balance, Today then wheeled on a journalist to say that she “echoed” Sir David’s views, while Humphrys himself confessed that he has put “a solar thing” on his own roof.
What Today considered irrelevant was any mention of recent reports from Germany and Spain, which have poured billions of euros into subsidising solar panels, only to find that this was such a catastrophically expensive waste of money for very little result that they are cutting back drastically on subsidies, with Germany due to scrap them altogether by 2018. Even here in Britain, where we pay subsidies of up to 150 per cent to persuade people to join the solar scam, those hundreds of thousands of panels that are disfiguring roofs and vast tracts of our countryside managed last year to produce, on average, only 135MW of power – less than the output of 70 diesel generators. But none of this would trouble Sir David, who once courted controversy over a seeming prediction that unless we curbed our CO2 emissions the world could get so hot that the only continent left inhabitable would be Antarctica. He may be right up the BBC’s street, but why the rest of us need to listen is a mystery.
The BBC’s solar eclipse
5:53PM BST 03 Aug 2013
Related Articles
Having been reprimanded by the BBC Trust for daring to stray from the BBC’s line in favour of welfare benefits, John Humphrys was, by Friday, showing that he was firmly back on message in an interview on the ever more vapid Today programme, starring the Government’s former chief scientific adviser, Sir David King. True to the BBC’s statutory obligation to impartiality, Sir David was allowed to plug a newspaper article he had written calling for the world to make a mammoth push for solar energy, comparable with the effort made to land a man on the Moon. For balance, Today then wheeled on a journalist to say that she “echoed” Sir David’s views, while Humphrys himself confessed that he has put “a solar thing” on his own roof.
What Today considered irrelevant was any mention of recent reports from Germany and Spain, which have poured billions of euros into subsidising solar panels, only to find that this was such a catastrophically expensive waste of money for very little result that they are cutting back drastically on subsidies, with Germany due to scrap them altogether by 2018. Even here in Britain, where we pay subsidies of up to 150 per cent to persuade people to join the solar scam, those hundreds of thousands of panels that are disfiguring roofs and vast tracts of our countryside managed last year to produce, on average, only 135MW of power – less than the output of 70 diesel generators. But none of this would trouble Sir David, who once courted controversy over a seeming prediction that unless we curbed our CO2 emissions the world could get so hot that the only continent left inhabitable would be Antarctica. He may be right up the BBC’s street, but why the rest of us need to listen is a mystery.
Pelka: social workers let down the children who really need them
Social services are at fault for failing to intervene when it is justified, but also for being too ready to do so when no action is called for
This, however, is belied by the statistics that show that in the past three years, the number of children removed from their families for “physical abuse” has actually fallen, from 5,000 to 4,600. By far the biggest percentage increase, 56 per cent, has been in children removed for “emotional abuse”. This includes that wonderfully vague excuse, increasingly fashionable with social workers, of “the risk of emotional abuse”, meaning that they don’t even have to show that children have been actually abused, merely that there may be a possibility of this happening sometime in the future.
The real scandal, of course, is not just that social workers too often fail to act where a child is being genuinely ill-treated, but that they are far too quick to seize children from responsible parents for wholly inadequate reasons. The teachers at Daniel’s school recorded abundant signs of how he was being neglected and physically harmed, without any action being taken. But too often the situation is the very reverse, where teachers misinterpret some remark made by a pupil and are then much too quick to call in social services, with devastating results. Hence several such cases I have reported here, such as the loving mother who lost both her children simply because a teacher overheard her daughter saying, “My mother hit me”, when this was no more than a slap on the arm with a roll of cling film, because the girl was not getting on with her homework.
Social workers love to defend themselves by saying, “We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t”. What they cannot understand is that in reality, both these things can be true. They are at fault both in failing to intervene when it is justified, but equally in being much too trigger-happy to intervene when no action is called for. The tragedy of all this can be summed up in a phrase I coined years ago to describe what is going on with our regulatory system in many different areas – that it is “taking a sledgehammer to miss the nut”. Nowhere is this more obvious than in a system that tears thousands of families apart for no good reason, while somehow managing at the same time to turn a blind eye to all the evidence that children such as Daniel Pelka are being slowly tortured to death.
The BBC’s solar eclipse
Having been reprimanded by the BBC Trust for daring to stray from the BBC’s line in favour of welfare benefits, John Humphrys was, by Friday, showing that he was firmly back on message in an interview on the ever more vapid Today programme, starring the Government’s former chief scientific adviser, Sir David King. True to the BBC’s statutory obligation to impartiality, Sir David was allowed to plug a newspaper article he had written calling for the world to make a mammoth push for solar energy, comparable with the effort made to land a man on the Moon. For balance, Today then wheeled on a journalist to say that she “echoed” Sir David’s views, while Humphrys himself confessed that he has put “a solar thing” on his own roof.
What Today considered irrelevant was any mention of recent reports from Germany and Spain, which have poured billions of euros into subsidising solar panels, only to find that this was such a catastrophically expensive waste of money for very little result that they are cutting back drastically on subsidies, with Germany due to scrap them altogether by 2018. Even here in Britain, where we pay subsidies of up to 150 per cent to persuade people to join the solar scam, those hundreds of thousands of panels that are disfiguring roofs and vast tracts of our countryside managed last year to produce, on average, only 135MW of power – less than the output of 70 diesel generators. But none of this would trouble Sir David, who once courted controversy over a seeming prediction that unless we curbed our CO2 emissions the world could get so hot that the only continent left inhabitable would be Antarctica. He may be right up the BBC’s street, but why the rest of us need to listen is a mystery.
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