A day of judgment for Britain's liberal bishops

The strangest thing happened last week, though few people noticed it. America officially ceased to be a Protestant country. According to the Pew Forum, the percentage of Protestants has dropped to 48 per cent, down from 53 per cent in 2007. That’s a huge shift.

But, before Catholics start punching the air, let me point out that the percentage of Catholics has been flatlining for years at 22 per cent. The big jump is in unaffiliated Americans, including atheists – up from 15 to 20 per cent. These “Nones”, as pollsters call them, are laying waste to the religious landscape of the United States. And Britain.

Here’s the question that intrigues me. Once the old, routine churchgoers have died off, and now that “None” is the default position for liberal-minded young people, what will the churches of the future look like?

We’re beginning to find out. More to the point, the clapped-out Anglican and Catholic bishops of the English-speaking world are finding out, too – and it’s giving them nightmares.

Those youngsters who once went to church out of obligation are now spending Sunday mornings in the supermarket or the gym (body worship is a flourishing faith). That means that the only young people in the pews are true believers who really want to be there.

If you’re a “go-ahead” bishop, vicar or diocesan bureaucrat, this is a scary development. You’ve spent your career reducing the hard truths of Christ’s teaching – such as the inevitability of the Last Judgment – to carbon-neutral platitudes. Suddenly, the 20-year-olds in your flock are saying: no thanks, we’ll take the hard truths. Eek!

In the Church of England, young evangelicals are embarrassed by the thespian agonising of Rowan Williams, the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury. If there’d been a hand-wringing event at the Olympics, he’d have shattered all records.

In the Roman Catholic Church of England and Wales, the disconnect is even more stark. Young Catholics take their cue from the traditionalist Pope Benedict XVI, rather than from dreary bishops who only occasionally wake from their slumber to mumble something about renewable energy. (Remember Jack in Father Ted? You get the picture.)

Also – and I can’t tell you how much pleasure it gives me to report this – the Vatican has pulled a fast one by appointing two new diocesan bishops, Mark Davies of Shrewsbury and Philip Egan of Portsmouth, who are in tune with conservative youngsters rather than an English Catholic bureaucracy run by crypto-Marxist megabores trained in the public sector.

Bishop Egan has only been in his post for a few weeks, but already he’s been telling orthodox young Catholics what they want to hear: that they should adore the Blessed Sacrament, advertise their faith by making the sign of the cross, and even keep a rosary handy in the car. Cue barely suppressed shrieks from the old guard in Portsmouth, whose “director of liturgy”, the composer Paul Inwood, writes cod plainchant decked out in the harmonies of a 1970s cocktail lounge.

None of this should surprise us. When religions come under attack, they attract believers who invest in their more dogmatic, countercultural teachings – and who deliberately raise the degree of tension between themselves and society. There are few things more countercultural today than Bible-based evangelicalism or strictly orthodox Catholicism. For decades, Liberal bishops have droned on about how they wanted to draw young people back to church. But I don’t think this is what they had in mind.

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“Tolerance is the basis of all our freedoms”

In a free society, everyone, even those we consider repugnant, must have the liberty to express themselves and their ideas

Frank Furedi

About three years ago, I was giving a lecture in Amsterdam. In the course of the lecture, I told the audience that if you believed in freedom, if you believed in freedom of speech, it meant that you should be able to say whatever you wanted and society did not have the right to censor the content of whatever it is you wanted to say.

An example I gave was the way that in many parts of Europe, Holocaust denial is deemed to be a crime. Even though a lot of my family perished in the Holocaust, I still feel it was totally wrong to suppress an idea bureaucratically. It is far better that it be debated, argued over and ultimately discredited. And at that point this guy gets up, puts up his hand, and says: ‘I’m really glad you said that Professor Furedi. I’m a Muslim and I too think it’s wrong that a Holocaust should be denied. The only thing I think should be censored is when someone like the prophet Muhammad is criticised or questioned. That should not be allowed.’

A week later, I was in Berlin on the same lecture tour, and a Jewish person got up to say almost the opposite: that it was perfectly okay to criticise the prophet Muhammad, but it was totally immoral that the Holocaust should be denied. And that’s really when I decided to write my book on the issue of tolerance. It became very clear to me that in many parts of Europe, tolerance basically meant tolerating the ideas that you agree with, but at the same time being intolerant of the ideas you disagree with. I thought it was important to explain why it is that European societies find it so difficult genuinely to be tolerant.

Tolerance is a very difficult accomplishment, it’s something you have to struggle with. To be genuinely free, and to be committed to freedom, not just on a rhetorical level but in real-life terms, is not an easy project to carry out. And I think that one of the problems we have in our society is that we are continually finding it difficult to be truly tolerant. We always find good reasons as to why some views are beyond the pale: they cannot be said, they cannot be expressed, while others are totally fine to communicate.

Recently, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, there was a very interesting exchange in the aftermath of all those Muslim riots about the American film that criticised the prophet Muhammad. The presenter, John Humphries, was talking to a Muslim speaker, and he put it to him that in the UK we believe in free speech, and yet we feel intimidated and scared to criticise the prophet Muhammad because Muslims react by burning down embassies and killing people. The Muslim speaker, who was defending some of the people who had been rioting and demonstrating, pointed out that in the UK there are, in fact, limits on free speech, like criticising troops in Afghanistan or speech that incites hatred of religion.

So, a Muslim speaker was defending the intolerant demonstrators for going around killing people and beating people up, but his was the same moral claim as that made by John Humphries; they were equally intolerant. We may believe that our society is liberal and tolerant, but when we scratch the surface, we always find good reasons why we shouldn’t listen to somebody we really dislike.

An objection I hear frequently is: ‘Why should we tolerate intolerance?’ The assumption is that tolerating views that you don’t agree with is like a gift, an act of kindness. It suggests we’re doing people a favour by tolerating their view. My argument is that tolerance is vital to us, to you and I, because it’s actually the presupposition of all our freedoms.

You cannot be free in any meaningful sense unless there is a recognition that we are free to act on our beliefs, we’re free to think what we want and express ourselves freely. Unless we have that freedom, all those other freedoms that we have on paper mean nothing.

Throughout most of human history, tolerance was not even seen as a virtue. In fact, until about the seventeenth century, the main virtue was to be intolerant. And most philosophers, for example Catholic and other religious thinkers, actually boasted about the fact that society was intolerant of any disrespect for religion. To be tolerant was seen as a sign of moral weakness. Only the really weak, pathetic individuals could be tolerant. Why would you tolerate a view that you held to be abhorrent?

The first person in the world who put forward an argument for tolerance was the liberal philosopher John Locke. I give his brilliant essay, On Tolerance, to all my students and friends to read whenever I see people being a little intolerant. But even Locke gave two cases in which we should not be tolerant. Firstly, tolerance could not extend to Catholics in England, because Catholics were not loyal to the king, they were only loyal to a foreign power: the pope. He also said that there could not be tolerance for atheists, because atheists are loyal to nobody. So even Locke had reservations as to how far tolerance could go.

It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that some of these ideas about tolerance were further developed. For example, you had with John Stuart Mill the idea that people not only had freedom of conscience, the freedom of belief, but also freedom of speech. Freedom of conscience meant nothing, he argued, unless you had the freedom to communicate that belief. The only way that your moral autonomy, your integrity as a human being, could be realised was through the capacity to speak out freely about what you believed and to take responsibility for the words that you expressed.

For Mill, it was far better to allow people to express erroneous opinions, and even lies, than to suppress them. Because it’s through having to struggle with erroneous opinions and lies that real clarity is gained, that individuals manage to work out for themselves what is right and what is wrong. Nothing can be worse than passively accepting an opinion that someone gives you, and merely repeating what society holds to be right. If all you do is mouth what society tells you to say, it becomes entirely external to yourself, you really are not a human agent.

These points still stand today. If we are truly to be free, moral beings, then we must demand tolerance for all – even for those who hold views with which we strongly disagree.

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No ‘victims’ veto’ on press freedom

Celebrity demands for British PM  to back state regulation of the press have revealed the true mission of the Leveson inquisition

Being a victim of historical phone-hacking by the News of the World (deceased) entitles you to public sympathy (less so if you are a PR-hungry celebrity in the first place of course), and possibly to redress through the courts.

What it does not entitle you to is any sort of veto over the future of a free press in the UK. Yet that is what the celebrity anti-tabloid crusaders, and the illiberal campaigners who use them as voiceover artists, now clearly expect as a result of the Leveson Inquiry.

Hacked Off, the campaign for statutory regulation of the press, has written an angry letter to prime minister David Cameron demanding that he agrees to pass a new law to police the press if and when Lord Justice Leveson proposes it in his report, expected out next month. Anything less, it makes clear, would be a ‘betrayal’ of the victims whom Cameron promised to satisfy. The letter is signed by the usual celebrity suspects - Hugh Grant, Steve Coogan, Charlotte Church, Jude Law, JK Rowling, Max Mosley, etc - alongside more sympathetic figures such as survivors of the 7/7 London bombings and members of the Hillsborough Justice Campaign.

The outraged Hacked Off letter was written in response to press reports suggesting that Cameron might reject statutory-backed regulation even if Leveson backs it. In the most revealing passage, the signatories express their anger at backtracking remarks from the prime minister’s spokesman, suggesting that Cameron ‘had not intended to give a veto to any particular victims over the new system of regulation’. This is the ‘betrayal’ they are really talking about. They believe the prime minister promised to allow the victims of phone hacking an effective veto over the future shape of press regulation, and expect him to fulfil that pledge.

This ridiculous letter has done us all the service of spelling out what the entire Leveson Inquiry has really been all about. It was never about phone-hacking. That should have been left to the police to investigate (which they are doing on an irrationally grand scale). Instead, those historical offences linked with one (closed) tabloid newspaper employing a single private detective were turned into the pretext for Lord Justice Leveson’s judicial probe into the entire ‘culture, practice and ethics’ of the British media.

The Leveson Inquiry/inquisition has been a mission to purge the ‘popular’ press, using high-profile victims as human shields, high-ranking celebrities as voiceover artists, and high-minded talk of ‘ethics’ as a code for advancing an elitist agenda: the ‘ethical cleansing’ of the media. Thus the demand from the crusaders today is not for redress for the individual victims of specific offences, but for the government to set up a state-backed regulator to tame the entire press industry and wash the naughty newspapers’ mouths out with soap.

If it was not so serious it would be laughable to see the celebrity crusaders insist that Cameron must approach Lord Justice Leveson’s proposals with ‘an open mind’. There has been little sign of any such openness in their evidence to Leveson and public pronouncements, with Grant accusing the tabloid press of nurturing ‘a culture of pure evil’ and Coogan dismissing press freedom as ‘a lie’ made up by newspapers, while their snooty supporters in the liberal media declare that tabloid hacks are ‘a different breed’ and ‘not like us’. A more narrow-minded display of respectable bigotry would be hard to imagine.

Behind all the talk of protecting ‘ordinary people’, the elitism of the tabloid-bashing crusaders also shines through in the Hacked Off letter. Written in long-winded legalese by the campaign’s lawyers and academics, it refers to the celebrity signatories, without explanation, as ‘the Module 4 CPVs’. Who or what these might be, we ‘ordinary people’ can only wonder. It turns out to mean the Leveson Inquiry category of ‘Module 4 Core Participant Victims’, which might leave most none the wiser. This coded talk confirms that the letter is part of a closed elite discussion about how far to turn back the clock on the historic struggle for a free press.

What is most disturbing about this, as it has been all along, is not actually the antics of such risibly puffed-up characters as Hugh Grant or Steve Coogan. It is the extent to which the supposedly liberal-minded journalism academics and civil liberties campaigners who hide behind them have gone over to the other side in the culture war about press freedom. As ever, the shrillest voice demanding statutory regulation around the PR letter was not Charlotte Church but Brian Cathcart, the left-wing journalist-turned-professor of journalism who drives Hacked Off. Some might think that the way such people have abandoned the defence of press freedom in its hour of need is the ‘betrayal’ we should be worried about.

Campaigners for tougher press regulation have expressed their disgust that Cameron should be wavering on statutory-backed regulation for ‘political reasons’ to do with opposition within his government, and demanded that the new system of press regulation must be kept ‘free from politics’. What they mean, of course, is that politicians should intervene, but only to do as they are told and pass laws to set up a powerful new policeman of the press.

Nobody wants to see politicians regulating the press. But some of us think the idea of the press being policed by judges or ombudsmen or other unelected, unaccountable state-backed apparatchiks is just as bad, if not worse – at least we can still get rid of politicians if we object to what they do. Worst of all is the notion of a regulator handing an effective veto over a free press to any self-proclaimed victims of media misdeeds. That sounds like a sort of celebrity Star Chamber to decide what is fit for us to read and write, just as the King’s Star Chamber had to licence everything that was printed in the past.

It would be little wonder if the prime minister was having doubts about the prospect of statutory-backed regulation of the press. Setting up and operating such a system of indirect state interference could turn into a nightmare. This is of course Cameron’s own fault, having painted himself into the corner by setting up the Leveson Inquiry with carte blanche to give the press a kicking in the first place. In response to the letter, Cameron again indicated that he would agree to Leveson’s proposals so long as they were not ‘bonkers’ or too ‘heavy-handed’.

In any case, as we have argued on spiked, the ‘alternative’ proposals for a new system of ‘self-regulation’ are little better. They would set up an ‘independent’ regulator with more powers to investigate, expose and punish newspapers than those currently enjoyed by the ‘heavy-handed’ police teams.

All sides of the debate remain too much in thrall to the celebrity crusaders because they have accepted the central myth of the post-hacking furore: that the press is too free to be run wild and must be subdued and sanitised. It is high time those who care about the future of freedom of expression in our society raised a banner to declare that the press is not nearly free or open enough, even before a new regulator wades in.

Freedom of the press is for all, involving the right both to publish what you see fit and to read, see or hear all that you choose. That is far too important a liberty to sacrifice to anybody’s demands for special treatment and protection. There are many problems with the UK press. But the solution is never less freedom.

A free press must mean one that is free, not from being judged or subjected to the normal criminal law, but from being restrained or punished on the grounds of taste or ‘decency’ or offended feelings or outraged sensibilities. The misuse of our freedom by some is not an excuse for allowing the authorities to misappropriate it - or high-profile victims of phone-hacking to claim a veto over it. That would be seriously ‘bonkers’.

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Spy writer Jon Stock: How I survived an online literary mauling

Far from throttling serious criticism, internet reviews can be helpful to authors

The review headline didn’t exactly mince its words: “Stock: misogynist and serial killer”. It was posted on Amazon at the weekend, in Britain and the United States, across all three of my recent Daniel Marchant spy thrillers. The wording was identical for each review and in each case the reviewer awarded me one star – the lowest. Ouch. That will teach me to look at my reviews. But as any author will tell you, comments on Amazon and on literary blogs are important and should not be ignored.

Sir Peter Stothard, chairman of this year’s Man Booker prize judges, thinks otherwise. Earlier this week, he warned that the burgeoning amount of internet chatter about books was damaging literature. “If the mass of unargued opinion chokes off literary critics… then literature will be the lesser for it,” he said. “There is a great deal of opinion online, and it’s probably reasonable opinion, but there is much less reasoned opinion.”

Tell me about it. And yet, although I am still smarting from my vicious mauling, many online reviews and blogs are written by educated lay readers sharing their views for the benefit of potential book buyers. They lie outside the clique of newspaper reviewers and, read alongside other genuine reader reviews, they can be more illuminating.

To be fair to my latest Amazon reviewer, she is not your average punter. She is a professor of English at the State University of New York at Geneseo, and her review was 700 words of well-reasoned, if flawed, criticism. I know this because I tracked her down. Without wishing to sound like a serial killer, I track down all my hostile reviewers, sooner or later, particularly the anonymous ones (although I’m still working on “FleetStreetMan”). In this age of “sock puppetry”, when authors attack each other online under false names, it’s a necessary part of the job.

Creditably, my reviewer not only used her real name, Julia M Walker, she also provided an email address. The online world would be such a happier, more informed place if everyone was obliged to put their real name beside reviews or comments. At first, I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to say to her, given that she was “deeply annoyed and mildly furious” with me. Her chief gripe was that I had bumped off the two lead female characters in my trilogy. “Stock kills them both, even as each expresses remorse for her treachery, thus remaking the paradigm that’s been around since Boccaccio, at least: a good woman is a dead woman.” To rest her case, she had dug out and read an earlier novel of mine, The Cardamom Club, in which, er, the lead female also dies a horrible death.

I realised she was on to something. That evening, over a quiet supper, I discussed the review with my wife and explained what a misogynist was to the children. “Four novels, three dead women,” I said, quoting from the review. No one could argue with that. But, despite the one star, Prof Walker had found much to like in the books. The Indian elements were “fascinating”, Marchant was “vintage damaged-but-true with some interesting bits” and my female head of MI5 “gets better as the books go on”. I was also flattered that she had bought and read the entire trilogy in one sitting. I felt that she was someone I could do business with.

So that night, when the house was quiet, I wrote to her, explaining that she was, of course, entitled to her opinions and that she perhaps had a point about the dead women. I also asked if she might consider writing an individual review for each book, rather than using the same blanket comment for all three, as I thought this was unorthodox and unfair. The first two, Dead Spy Running and Games Traitors Play, had been widely reviewed and could look after themselves. Her comments would sit in the context of a range of other online opinions. But Dirty Little Secret had barely set out on its journey into the world, and hers would only be the second review on Amazon.

She couldn’t have been nicer. We had a civilised exchange of emails (“It’s great that the already dead ex-girlfriend in your next book won’t die again”), agreed on the cravenness of anonymous reviewers, and she offered to withdraw her review from Dirty Little Secret, “the one I like best, despite its passing strange conclusion”. And although she mainly teaches Milton, she also runs a course on thrillers and has promised to put Dirty Little Secret on the syllabus for the next class.

For me, the whole exercise was an example of the internet working as it should, a place where people with wildly differing opinions, in this case about books, can engage in constructive dialogue. The literary critic, as championed by Sir Peter Stothard, has its place, but so do online reviewers, even the hostile ones.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS,  DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine).   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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Vicious British bureaucrats determined to "get" Branson  -- even if they had to make up and misapply the numbers in rail bid

Branson is Britain's most prominent businessman  -- and far too successful for socialist bureaucrats.  But their nasty little fraud fell apart when threatened with exposure in court

THE Government lost or failed to save key calculations underpinning its decision to award the West Coast rail franchise to FirstGroup, a report commissioned by the Department for Transport shows.

The study from accountants PriceWaterhouseCoopers highlights crucial flaws in the handling of the bid that led to last week's decision by Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin to pull the contract.

They include the absence or loss of vital computations showing how civil servants arrived at their decision and the failure to examine the risks around GDP forecasts for the final three years of the contract.

The DfT appointed PwC in late September to re-run the numbers on the rival West Coast bids after Virgin Rail, the losing incumbent operator, applied for a judicial review of the process.

Heavily redacted copies of PwC’s report were handed to the bidders earlier this week as the Government provided initial feedback on a decision that has left the taxpayer with a bill of at least £40m to reimburse bid fees and seen the suspension of three civil servants.

One insider said: “It looks like they ran the numbers and didn’t save the results. PwC tried to repeat the outputs and it couldn’t.”

It is unclear whether officials failed to save results, lost key calculations or deleted some of the workings behind their decision.

The report also shows the “GDP resilience model” was not properly applied for the last three years of the contract, while the DfT made errors confusing real and nominal inflation.

It is in the final three years to the end of 2028 when there is a ramp-up in payments to the taxpayer from FirstGroup’s £13.3bn bid.

Last week Mr McLoughlin admitted “mistakes were made in the way in which inflation and passenger numbers were taken into account, and how much money bidders were then asked to guarantee as a result”.

The PwC report shows revenue forecasts were not correlated with how many passengers could actually fit on the trains.

A DfT spokesman said: “We are not going to give a running commentary on what went wrong.”

A FirstGroup spokesman said: “The DfT has provided us with information and we are working through it.” Both PwC and Virgin declined to comment.

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Disabled boy, 18, allowed to fall to his death because health and safety fears meant carers could not restrain him

"Health and safety" is a standard excuse for employee laziness in Britain, even when it leads to death

A disabled boy fell to his death because care home workers were too afraid to restrain him over 'health and safety' fears.

James Dean Brotherhood, 18, had brain damage and was susceptible to blood clots following treatment for a brain tumour, which was removed when he was eight.

But despite his medical history and the evident danger, carers at a specialist unit stood by and watched as James pulled himself up onto a windowsill with his wheelchair still strapped to his back.

The teenager fell and hit his head - and within hours was dead. His family have now received a four-figure payout.

When asked by a coroner why he did not intervene in the moments before the tragedy, one of his carers wrongly stated the home had a 'no restraint policy' due to health and safety rules.

Following the out of court settlement, James’s mother Suzanne said: 'If a toddler ran out into the road, would they have stood by and let them get run over by a car?

'His carers said they didn’t want to move him or stop him because they were scared they might get hurt, but one of them was a 6ft bouncer - it was simply ridiculous.

'After the accident, I was told that he had suffered a slight knock but in the inquest I discovered he had received a severe blow to the head.

'There were three carers in the room at the time and they just stood next to him and watched him for several minutes before he fell.

'They should have just grabbed him and stopped him from doing it, then my little boy would still be here.'

Mrs Brotherhood added: 'If he had died from the cancer I might have been able to live with that, but knowing his death was preventable has made it impossible for me to move on.'

After his death, bosses at the Aarons Specialist Unit, in Loughborough, sent his family a £12 cheque for James’s funeral flowers after the inquest in May.

Now, the home’s owners Rushcliffe Care have agreed to pay Mrs Brotherhood and her ex-husband Dean, 46, an undisclosed sum, although they continue to deny any responsibility for James’s untimely death.

An inquest in May this year heard how three members of staff were with James when he pulled himself up on a window frame to try to see a motorbike outside.

He was still strapped into his wheelchair and the hearing at Loughborough Coroner’s Court heard his carers tried to persuade James to climb down but at no point did they physically intervene.

In evidence, they said there was a 'no restraint' policy and that health and safety regulations prevented them from stepping in.

Senior care assistant Dale Watret told the inquest that he was in the room with James when he climbed on the windowsill, but he could not physically step in to get him down because of a health and safety policy.

Mr Watret said carers were told to talk to patients and distract them from behaving in ways that might cause them to harm themselves.

Mr Watret, who is no longer employed by Rushcliffe Care, said he shouted for help.

Coroner Robert Chapman asked Mr Watret: 'Why didn’t you grab him?'

Mr Watret replied: 'Health and safety policy states you don’t catch anyone to break their fall.'

Mr Chapman asked if that was the firm’s policy. Mr Watret replied: 'It’s health and safety policy all over the country, I am led to believe.'

He told the inquest he was concerned about being injured himself.

Mr Watret said: 'I was asking him to come down. The back of his head hit the floor. It happened so fast. Everything after that is a bit of a blur.'

Coroner Robert Chapman recorded a verdict of accidental death caused by bleeding on the brain.

At the time, he said: 'The issue I find the most difficult to deal with is that for one or two minutes James was holding on to the window frame with his wheelchair strapped to his back.

'The staff realised it was dangerous. No attempt seems to have been made to take simple action to intervene.'

Darren Carnwell, a senior manager with Rushcliffe Care, which owns the unit, said staff should have been trained to physically intervene 'as a last resort'.

Mr Chapman also said James’s care plan meant he should only have been in his wheelchair when being moved around the home, but staff members with him when he fell did not know that.

He said he was further concerned James was not always made to wear a protective helmet, as his care plan suggested.

Following the payout, Neil Clayton, a specialist in medical negligence and care home neglect with Harvey Ingram Shakespeares solicitors said: 'This was a tragic accident that would have been avoided if Rushcliffe Care’s staff had used basic common sense.

'There were several opportunities that were missed to prevent James climbing on the window and to get him down safely once he had done so. I hope that lessons have been learned and that an awful event like this will never happen again.'

When Mail Online contacted Rushcliffe Care a man, who refused to give his name or his position in the company, said they would not be giving any comment on the case and hung up.

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Houston Man Receives Visit from FBI after Photographing Clouds

The war on photography never stops.  The guy only got off because he had an "official" reason to take his photos

A man who snapped photos of a brewing storm last month received a visit Friday from an FBI Agent, inquiring why he would want to take such photos.

Michael Galindo explained that he was simply volunteering for the National Weather Service.

And FBI Agent David Pileggi seemed to be satisfied with that response.

But Galindo was left wondering whether he now has a permanent FBI file.

“He told me, ‘you’re not a threat and you are doing a public service but just be careful next time,’” Galindo said in a telephone interview with Photography is Not a Crime.

The problem arose because Galindo happened to be taking photos near the Lyondell Refinery outside of Houston on September 13, even though he was never standing on the refinery’s property.

Someone from the refinery spotted him and called police, whom apparently arrived after he had left.

Police then contacted the local FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, which bills itself as “nation’s front line on terrorism.”

“I was pretty freaked out when he came but I had no idea what it was about,” said the 26-year-old man. “The worst thing I’ve done is get speeding tickets, but I haven’t gotten one in three years.

“He said I was spotted near the refinery but I couldn’t even remember doing that. I thought it had to be somebody else.

“It wasn’t until he mentioned my camera that I made the connection.”

Galindo told the agent that he volunteers for a NWS program called Skywarn that trains citizens to monitor the weather in the name of “protecting lives and property.”

He said when he pulled off to the side of the road and began taking photos of a brewing storm and potential tornados, he didn’t even notice the refinery, but made sure there weren’t any “no parking” signs around.

“I told him I had been looking for a clear line of site and I had found it,” he said.

Although Pileggi seemed a little surprised by that response, he pulled out a three-page document and began asking questions off it, inquiring whether Galindo had ever been in the military or had ever traveled overseas and about what schools he had attended in the past.

“I wasn’t sure what that had to do with anything,” Galindo said.

The 20-minute visit took place less than a week after a scathing report was released on the inefficiency and ineptitude on urban fusion centers, such as the Miami-Dade Police Department’s Homeland Security Bureau, which was monitoring my Facebook page because of my blog, as well as the Houston fusion center, which produced a video depicting photographers as terrorists.

Joint Terrorism Task Forces are a little different than fusion centers but they both operate under the Department of Homeland Security and are under the assumption photographers are terrorists.

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Australia:  Uproar as students dress as 'traditional' Aboriginal people



The publication of a photograph of university students at an official college function dressed up to look like "traditional" Aboriginal people, with their faces and limbs painted brown, has forced an internal investigation and rapid re-education program.

The eight female students from the co-educational Cromwell College within the University of Queensland were depicted in the photo - taken last Tuesday - with wild hair, holding sticks and wearing material fashioned into makeshift loin cloths.

The photo made its way on to online social networking sites and quickly raised the ire of a number of indigenous Australians from around the country.

At least one contacted the college and the university directly, sparking the investigation.

"Think #racism and #blackface are unacceptable in Australia? ... Let UQ and Cromwell College know," one Twitter user wrote yesterday.  Another posted the photo again with the words included: "University of Queensland Cromwell College for aspiring racists everywhere."

But the residential college, which is associated with the Uniting Church and was founded in the 1950s, said the students acted out of ignorance, not malice.

The Cromwell College principal, Ross Switzer, said he had called a meeting of the entire college body last night and spoken to the young women involved in the photo.  He described their behaviour as "a young person's uneducated approximation of Aboriginal life".

"They were not aware of the blackface mocking or demeaning indigenous people," he said. "They were trying to give a tribute to indigenous Australians, not mock or demean them.

"I know that ignorance is no excuse for that behaviour [but] it was ignorance rather than an attempt to laugh at indigenous Australians."

Mr Switzer said the photo was taken shortly before an annual college dinner celebrating diversity across the world and that he had, since last night, organised cultural awareness training for his 250 residents.

The dinner was centred on Thanksgiving in honour of the college's exchange students from the US, he said.  However, the group of young women dressed to depict Aboriginal Australians went to the most trouble with their outfits, he said.

The Diversity Council Australia said the incident showed a deep ignorance of Aboriginal culture and religion in Australian society.

"I think is a societal thing," chief executive Nareen Young said.   "Because Australia denied Aboriginality for so long, the understanding of the religious and cultural significance of ceremony isn’t in the community."

Ms Young, who has an indigenous background herself, said Cromwell College responded appropriately yesterday by promising to bring in cultural awareness training. It also needed a reconciliation action plan, she said.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS,  DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine).   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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Egypt's Christians - Distraught and Displaced

Reuters reported last week that "Most Christians living near Egypt's border with Israel [in the town of Rafah in Sinai] are fleeing their homes after Islamist militants made death threats and gunmen attacked a Coptic-owned shop." Photos of desecrated churches and Christian property show Arabic graffiti saying things like "don't come back" and "Islam is the truth."

All media reports describe the same sequence of events: 1) Christians were threatened with leaflets warning them to evacuate or die; 2) an armed attack with automatic rifles was made on a Christian-owned shop; 3) Christians abandoned everything and fled their homes.

Anyone following events in Egypt knows that these three points-threatening leaflets, attacks on Christian property, followed by the displacement of Christians-are happening throughout Egypt, and not just peripheral Sinai, even if the latter is the only area to make it to the Western mainstream media. Consider:

Genocidal Leaflets

On August 14, El Fegr reported that leaflets were distributed in areas with large Christian populations, including Upper Egypt, offering monetary rewards to Muslims who "kill or physically attack the enemies of the religion of Allah-the Christians in all of Egypt's provinces, the slaves of the Cross, Allah's curse upon them..."

As a testimony to just how safe the jihadis feel under Egypt's new Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi-who just freed a militant jihadi responsible for the burning of a church leaving several Christians dead-the leaflets named contact points and even a mosque where Muslims interested in learning more about killing Christians should rally "after Friday prayers where new members to the organization will be welcomed."

On the same day these leaflets were distributed, a separate report titled "The serial killing of Copts has begun in Asyut" noted that a Christian store-owner was randomly targeted and killed by Salafis.

Muslim Attacks on Christian Properties and Persons

For months, Arabic-Christian media have been reporting ongoing stories of Muslim "gangs" and "thugs" attacking Christian homes, abducting the residents, including women and children, and demanding ransom monies-not unlike what is happening to Christians in Iraq and Syria. In one particular case, the Muslim gang attacked the home of a Coptic man, "releasing several gunshots in the air, and threatening him either to pay or die." The gang "picked this specific village because Copts form 80% of its inhabitants." Such reports often conclude with an all too familiar postscript: Christians calling police for help and filing complaints, all in vain.

A Coptic Solidarity report from August 20 titled "Copts in Upper Egypt Attacked, Beat, Plundered," tells of just that-how Christians are being beat, their businesses set on fire, and their properties plundered (see also here and here for similar reports). Likewise, according to Al Moheet, a new human rights report indicates that, in Nag Hammadi alone, there are dozens of cases of Muslim gangs abducting Christian Copts and holding them for ransom. Concerning these, the Coptic Church is daily asking for justice and receiving none.

Christian Displacements

The exodus of Copts from their homes also has become an ongoing crisis, so much so that a recent statement by the Holy Synod of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt lamented the "repeated incidents of displacement of Copts from their homes, whether by force or threat." The statement also made clear that what happened in Sinai is no aberration: "Displacements began in Ameriya, then they stretched to Dahshur, and today terror and threats have reached the hearts and souls of our Coptic children in Rafah [Sinai]."

Indeed, back in February, a mob of over 3,000 Muslims attacked and displaced Christians in the region of Ameriya, due to unsubstantiated rumors that a Christian man was involved with a Muslim woman. Christian homes and shops were looted and then torched; "terrorized" women and children who lost their homes stood in the streets with no place to go. As usual, it took the army an hour to drive 2 kilometers to the village, and none of the perpetrators were arrested. Later, a Muslim Council permanently evicted eight Christian families and confiscated their property, even as "Muslims insisted that the whole Coptic population of 62 families must be deported."

A few weeks ago in Dahshur, after a Christian laundry worker accidently burned the shirt of a Muslim man, the customer came with a Muslim mob to attack the Copt at home. As the Christian defended his household, a Muslim was killed. Accordingly, thousands of Muslims terrorized the area, causing 120 Christian families to flee. One elderly Coptic woman returned home from the bakery to find the area deserted of Christians. Rioting Muslims looted Christian businesses and homes. Family members of the deceased Muslim insist that the Christians must still pay with their lives.

The same time the media reported about the displacement of Christians from Rafah, a quarrel between two school girls-a Christian and a Muslim-ended when several "heavily-armed" Muslims stormed the home of the Christian girl, causing her family and three other Christian families to flee the village. When the father returned, he found that all his saved money and possessions had been plundered. When he asked police for help, the officer replied, "I can't do anything for you, reconcile with them and end the problem."

Indeed, this has been the same attitude of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood led government: in all of the above cases, the government looked the other way, or, when called on it, denied reality. Thus the Coptic Holy Synod made it a point to assert in its statement that "nearly one month ago the media had published the violations against the Copts but the Egyptian authorities have not taken the necessary measures to protect the Egyptian families, who have the right to live safely in their homes." As for the Rafah incident-the only incident to reach the mainstream media-Prime Minister Hisham Qandil denied that Christians were forced to flee, saying "One or two [Christian] families chose to move to another place and they are totally free to do so like all Egyptian citizens."

Such governmental indifference is consistent with the fact that, despite promising greater representation for Egypt's Christians, President Morsi just broke his word by allowing only one Copt-a female-to represent the nation's 10-12 million Christians in the newly formed cabinet.

SOURCE







A cesspit: BBC Chairman's damning verdict on Savile abuse scandal and the cover-up by TV bosses

The Jimmy Savile scandal was branded a ‘cesspit’ yesterday by the BBC’s own chairman.  Lord Patten admitted that heads could roll if corporation bosses were found to have acted improperly.  He said he feared that the television and radio star may have been helped in his sordid sexual exploitation of teenage girls by other BBC employees.

Lord Patten also suggested the BBC was likely to broadcast a prime-time apology if the inquiries into Savile came back with damning findings.

Yesterday the former Tory MP asked director-general George Entwistle to review the corporation’s guidelines on child protection following what he called the ‘appalling’ allegations of sexual abuse against Savile.

He also said an independent inquiry at the BBC, supervised by an outside figure, should be started as swiftly as possible following a police investigation into Savile’s activities.

Former patients at Stoke Mandeville hospital in Buckinghamshire and another in Leeds yesterday claimed they had been assaulted during visits by Savile in the 1970s and 1980s.

Teenagers in wheelchairs and others recovering from cancer were among those said to have fallen victim to the DJ.

One claimed nurses told young patients to pretend to be asleep whenever the star visited their wards.

And in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, his elaborate tombstone was removed from a cemetery at midnight out of respect for ‘public opinion’.

Police have said they believe Savile was a ‘predatory sex offender’ who could have abused up to 30 victims over a period of more than 40 years beginning in 1959.

Lord Patten and others at the BBC are still struggling to explain who knew what and when about the decision to drop a Newsnight investigation into allegations against Savile.

On Sunday former director-general Mark Thompson, who left his post last month, said he had never heard any rumours or received any complaints or allegations about Savile when he was in charge.

But yesterday Lord Patten – who said he himself first heard about the Savile allegations less than two weeks ago when he read about them in a newspaper – insisted said Mr Thompson had been made aware of the Newsnight investigation last December by director of news Helen Boaden.  When asked to confirm that the former director-general knew about the investigation, he said: ‘Yes’.

His comments were later retracted by the BBC Trust, which said he ‘misspoke’ on the matter.

When asked if he was convinced there were not others taking part or helping Savile with these type of activities at the BBC, Lord Patten said: ‘No’.

He also said that bosses could lose their jobs if they were found guilty of impropriety over their handling of the issue.

Addressing a Broadcasting Press Guild lunch yesterday, Lord Patten began with the words: ‘I would like to say one or two things about the appalling allegations and the cesspit of the Jimmy Saville allegations.’

But later there were tough questions for him to answer about how current BBC director-general George Enwistle could oversee the organising the independent inquiry when he was one of the executives facing questions about what he knew.

Mr Entwistle was one of the executives who were told about the Newsnight investigation into Savile last year, although it is denied he knew the exact nature of the allegations.

There had been criticism that the BBC had ditched the investigation on its Newsnight programme late last year because it would have run counter to other celebratory shows about the once popular presenter which were then being prepared for broadcast.

But Lord Patten said yesterday the editor of Newsnight was ‘not leaned on’, and no BBC executives had intervened.

Earlier this week Mr Entwistle made an apology to Savile’s victims during an interview on Radio 4’s Today programme and said there would be an inquiry to follow the police investigation.

Lord Patten said yesterday: ‘The BBC has in place child protection policies, processes, guidance for us by all staff on and off the premises and independents making programmes for the BBC.

‘We’ve asked the director-general to assure us that those policies are up to date and fit for purpose that they’re effective in protecting minors and under-age children.

‘We’ve also said that we want to be satisfied on the arrangements in place for dealing with sexual harassment, bullying and whistleblowing and we want to be sure that those guidelines that do exist are gold standard and up to date and comply with current best practice.’

Lord Patten suggested that the internal inquiry will not look at the editorial decision by Newsnight, saying he did not want to question the ‘journalistic integrity’ of people.

But insiders admitted yesterday that it is likely to look at what bosses did with the information contained within it when they were made aware of the allegations.

Asked what would happen if any current BBC employees such as the director general and other executives were found to have acted improperly, Lord Patten said: ‘You would not expect any employee of a newspaper or the BBC to survive if her or she was found to have behaved improperly.’

He said he was sure the BBC inquiry will look into allegations made by other presenters such as Liz Kershaw, who revealed she was groped by a colleague while she was on air.

Scotland Yard has formally recorded eight criminal allegations – two rapes and six indecent assaults – against the former Top Of The Pops presenter so far in its Operation Yewtree investigation.

And Greater Manchester and Tayside Police became the latest forces to receive complaints of abuse by Savile, who died in October last year.  Greater Manchester Police said allegations about his activities have followed day after day following an ITV documentary which aired last week.

Jimmy Savile is today lying in an unmarked grave after a dead-of-night operation to remove his £4,000 headstone at the request of his family.

Undertakers worked in the dark to rip out the giant memorial and have said it will 'be broken up, placed in a skip and used as landfill'.

SOURCE







Signs of the times: British deaf people drop hand signals that use slanted eyes to describe the Chinese and a limp wrist for gays

Pressure to avoid offending minorities has caught up with Britain’s 150,000 users of sign language for the deaf, according to a Government-funded report.

It found that younger deaf people have changed the way they give the sign to say someone is gay, or to describe Chinese, French and Jewish people.

The old gesture that meant gay – a flicked limp wrist – is now considered offensive among some users of British Sign Language, researchers at University College London said.

Similarly it is no longer acceptable among politically correct deaf people to give a slanted eye sign to indicate something Chinese, nor to mime a hooked nose to mean a Jewish person.

Over three years, scientists at the Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre at UCL filmed the signs for more than 100 words used by 250 people in eight cities.

Centre director Professor Bencie Woll said: ‘The younger deaf community doesn’t use these old signs because of a clear process of political correctness, in the same way that the hearing community no longer calls gay people “pansies” or “queer”.’

Young deaf people have also dropped the sign of twirling an imaginary moustache for France, said the researchers.

They sign a gay person with an upright thumb on one hand in the palm of the other, wobbling from side to side, and India is signed using the triangular shape of the subcontinent.

Professor Bencie Woll, director of DCal, said that the changes to sign language were much like the changes to spoken English

She said the change in sign language has been faster because when signers began to communicate over the internet they could see for the first time how 'foreign signers referred to themselves'.

She told the Guardian: 'The younger deaf community doesn't use these old signs because of a clear process of political correctness, in the same way that the hearing community no longer calls gay people 'pansies' or 'queer',' she said.

'But what the hearing community doesn't understand about sign language is that even though the traditional signs are now considered offensive, they are not producing a real-life insult when they are used because they are not just visual representations of a concept.'

The revelation follows a study by the British Sign Language Corpus Project which has been studying how deaf people use sign language.

They have filmed and interviewed 249 deaf people from eight cities across the UK.

Dr Kearsy Cormier, who was in charge of the three and a half year project, hopes that deaf children will benefit from the findings.

She said it would give deaf people a better understanding of regional variations in sign language. An online dictionary is expected to be created following the research.

However, there are concerns among the deaf community about these changing signs and new political correctness.

Gwilym Morris, from the deafness cognition and language research centre (DCal) at University College London, told the newspaper: 'We are nervous about this being seen as another example of political correctness because the changes are more about evolution rather than dictat of some body that approves language.'

Those who took part in the survey, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, were filmed in pairs and had to recount a personal experience, engage in a 30 minute conversation and participate in an interview on language awareness and attitudes.

They also had to elicit 102 signs known to vary across the UK.

SOURCE





Left Wants Multiculturalism to Trump Free Speech

    Victor Davis Hanson

The American Left used to champion free expression. We were lectured -- correctly -- that the price of being repulsed by occasional crude talk and art was worth paying. Only that way could Americans ensure our daily right to criticize those with greater power and influence whom we found wrong and objectionable.

When 1950s comedian Lenny Bruce titillated his audiences with the F-word and crude sex talk, liberals came to his defense. They reminded us that vulgar speech is not a crime: The First Amendment was not just designed to protect uplifting expression, but also rarer blasphemous and indecent speech.

For liberals, the burning of a flag on campus and the full frontal nudity of Penthouse magazine were also First Amendment issues.

When artist Andres Serrano photographed a crucifix in a jar with his own urine ("Piss Christ"), the avant-garde Left not only protected Serrano's constitutional right to offend millions, but also saw no problem in the U.S. government subsidizing the talentless Serrano's sophomoric obnoxiousness.

But the worldview of the Left is self-contradictory. One of its pet doctrines is multiculturalism -- or the idea that non-Western cultures cannot be judged critically by our own inherently biased Western standards.

Female circumcision or honor killings in the Muslim world don't merit our attention in the way that a woman's right to free abortion pills from her Catholic employer does in the West. When it comes to the Middle East, we neither criticize strongly enough the region's sexism, homophobia or racism, nor do we defend without qualification our own notions of free expression as inherently superior to the habitual censorship abroad.

Fear plays a role, too. Championing the right of Andres Serrano to show his degrading pictures of Christ wins liberal laurels. Protecting novelist Salman Rushdie's caricatures of Islam might earn death.

The Obama administration went to great lengths to blast -- and even arrest -- an Egyptian-American Coptic Christian for posting on the Internet a juvenile movie trailer ridiculing Islam and offending Muslims. After riots across the Middle East and the murder of the U.S. ambassador in Libya, American officials did not wish to concede that radical Islam hates the United States -- even when Barack Obama is president. And they did not want to admit that their own lax security standards, not a film trailer, led to the horrific murders in Libya, or that in an election year their Middle East reset policy is in shambles.

No obnoxious American in the last half-century -- not Larry Flynt, not Daniel Ellsberg, not even Julian Assange -- has warranted so much condemnation for his antics from the president of the United States, the secretary of state and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as have one crackpot preacher in Florida and an inept Coptic film producer.

Outraged Arab-Americans in Dearborn, Mich., demonstrated in favor of anti-blasphemy laws last week. They demanded an end to any expression that they find religiously offensive -- and thereby prove to be embarrassingly clueless as to why many in their communities left their own homelands to come to America in the first place.

The new Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, recently lectured the U.S. on its decadence and wants a global ban on the caricaturing of Islam. He, too, forgot why he once fled to the United States to be educated, employed and to freely say things that would have gotten him killed in his native Egypt.

Another Egyptian immigrant, frequent CNN and MSNBC guest pundit Mona Eltahawy, recently spray-painted over a public anti-jihadist poster that she disliked. In her world, defacing public property is OK if by her own standards she judges it offensive. Eltahawy, like the Dearborn protestors, is oblivious to the fact that her self-appointed censorship would soon turn her adopted country into just the sort of intolerant society from which she, too, fled.

It is past time for U.S. officials to insist that our traditions and laws apply equally across the board, regardless of where we come from, or what we look like, or the anger and danger we incur from abroad.

Schools could do better by cutting back on their multicultural classes and reintroducing study of the U.S. Constitution. All immigrants need to pass a basic test on the Bill of Rights as part of winning citizenship.

"Speaking truth to power" is not Sandra Fluke grandstanding to ovations at the Democratic convention on behalf of government-supplied free contraception. It is instead our elected officials reminding rampaging Middle Eastern terrorists and bigots that they will not alter our Constitution -- and better not try.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS,  DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine).   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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British homeowners win right to use lethal force on burglars: 'Disproportionate levels of violence' backed

The long campaign to give householders the right to use maximum force against burglars will end in victory today. Chris Grayling will announce he is changing the law to allow people to use ‘disproportionate’ levels of violence to protect themselves and their families.

The Justice Secretary said it would ‘dispel doubts once and for all’ over the right to fight back against intruders.  The new rules could, in some cases, allow for lethal force.

The move is designed to remove the threat of a burglary victim being arrested – let alone charged – if they use violence to drive the intruder away or stop them from advancing through their home.

Currently, householders are entitled to use only ‘reasonable’ force.

The change satisfies the demands of MPs and campaigners since Norfolk farmer Tony Martin was jailed for shooting dead a burglar in 1999.  The call for action gathered momentum after the murder of financier John Monckton, who died from stab wounds in his Chelsea home in 2004.

Last month a judge warned that burglars who break into country homes can expect to be shot at by their victims if they are licensed gun holders.

There have been a string of changes to the law in recent years – including one made by Kenneth Clarke last year.  But ministers have always stopped short of delivering on the right to use ‘disproportionate force’.

The decision by Mr Grayling to try to change the law as soon as possible sets down a marker that he intends to be  a tough Justice Secretary.

It will mean someone who is confronted by a burglar and has reason to fear for their safety, or their family’s safety and in the heat of the moment uses force that later seems ‘disproportionate’ will not be guilty of an offence.  This could include the use of lethal force. Only force which is ‘grossly’ disproportionate will not be permitted.

Mr Grayling said: ‘Being confronted by an intruder in your home is terrifying, and the public should be in no doubt that the law is on their side. That is why I am strengthening the current law.  ‘Householders who act instinctively and honestly in self-defence are crime victims  and should be treated that way.  ‘We need to dispel doubts in this area once and for all, and I am very pleased to be delivering on the pledge that we made in Opposition.’

The demands for change began when Mr Martin was imprisoned for killing one burglar and wounding another who entered his Norfolk farm.

More recent cases suggest prosecutors and judges have been giving greater weight to the legal right of householders to use ‘reasonable force’ to defend themselves.

Last month Judge Michael Pert QC spoke out after a lawyer demanded leniency for a criminal who, he said, had been hit with a shotgun by Andy Ferrie at his home near Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, in ‘a form of summary justice’.

The judge replied: ‘If you burgle a house in the country where the householder owns a legally held shotgun, that is the chance you take. You cannot come to court and ask for a lighter sentence because of it.’

Mr Grayling’s move follows changes made by his predecessor Ken Clarke, which removed a legal requirement for householders to retreat.

Guidance for police has also been changed to encourage fewer arrests of those defending their home.

Mr Grayling will also introduce measures to make sure every community sentence contains a proper punishment.

They include a requirement to include a punitive element in every community order, a power to impose location monitoring  and the removal of the £5,000 cap on compensation in the magistrates courts

Mr Grayling said: ‘We inherited a weak, “soft-option” programme from Labour, which saw offenders working only minimal hours or simply not completing their sentences.  ‘Yes, we should rehabilitate. But criminals also need to receive a proper punishment.

SOURCE





£11,000 for a policewoman's hurt feelings: Yard must pay for taking away her sniffer dog when she fell pregnant

"Discrimination" gone mad

A policewoman who had her favourite sniffer dog taken away when she became pregnant has won more than £11,000 from Scotland Yard.

PC Katherine Keohane was so distressed after being told that one of her two dogs was to be taken that she broke down on the train home, prompting a member of the public to call police to report a crying pregnant policewoman.

She sued the Met at an employment tribunal after her dog, Nunki Pippin, was allocated to another officer when she became pregnant for the second time in less than 18 months.

PC Keohane, who still works for the Met, was awarded £9,000 for ‘injury to feelings’ and a further £2,584 for loss of overtime as a result of the decision.

She said the reallocation of Nunki Pippin would ‘greatly affect’ her role as a drugs dog-handler and would adversely affect her promotion prospects and her chances of paid overtime.

PC Keohane joined the Met’s dog support unit as a narcotics dog-handler in 2005.  She was allocated a ‘proactive’ dog – one used to detect illegal drugs, firearms and cash, and to carry out searches – called Borg Warf.  In 2008 she was also allocated Nunki Pippin, a ‘passive’ dog able to detect the presence of drugs by sniffing someone. Both dogs lived at home with her.

In April 2009 PC Keohane, who is married to a dog handler, told her boss she was pregnant with her first child, due that September. She was allowed to keep her two dogs during her pregnancy and maternity leave.

She returned to work part-time in February 2010. By this time the Met had changed its policy so that part-time officers would not normally be allowed to keep two dogs, but PC Keohane was still allowed to keep both of hers.

In October 2010 she told her bosses she was pregnant again and was informed that Nunki Pippin would be allocated to another handler because of a shortage of passive dogs.

Giving their reasons, her bosses noted this was ‘the second occasion within 17 months’ she had given notice of pregnancy.  The reasons also referred to the dog’s inactivity for nine months due to her first pregnancy.

In October 2011, Nunki Pippin became available again and PC Keohane, who was still on maternity leave, asked if the dog could be returned to her.  After being asked when she intended to return to work, her request was turned down and the dog was reallocated to another officer.

PC Keohane brought tribunal claims of, among other things, direct pregnancy and maternity discrimination.

The tribunal at Watford found in her favour on those claims, saying it was influenced by the references to her pregnancy during the decision-making process and the apparent pressure she had been put under to return to work after her second child was born.

Tribunal chairman Judge Michael Southam said the reallocation of Nunki Pippin risked affecting PC Keohane’s status as a dual dog handler and her career prospects, and meant she lost the opportunity to earn overtime on her return to work.

SOURCE





HuffPo Publishes Racist List

How else would you characterize a list with this title:  "The 15 Most Overrated White People"?

Could you imagine a similar post about black people? Not that it is difficult to imagine who would belong on it – Barack Obama, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Michael Jackson, Danny Glover, Snoop Dogg, and Halle Barry all come immediately to mind as contenders for inclusion. But actually composing such a column and then getting it published would be beyond consideration – after all, such a thing would be considered utterly racist. So why the double standard here?

SOURCE




Australia:  Conservative doubts on storing digital data

OPPOSITION communications spokesman Malcolm Turnbull has given a thumbs down to the government's plan to allow greater interception and retention of private digital information.

Mr Turnbull said although he did not want to pre-empt the findings of a parliamentary inquiry, he had "very grave misgivings" about the proposal, which would give government more ability to monitor and gain access to data.

"It seems to be heading in precisely the wrong direction," he said, delivering the Alfred Deakin Lecture in Melbourne.

"As the digital age shifted us from a default position of forgetting things to one of perpetual memory, we should be restoring as far as possible people's right not just to privacy, but to be able to delete material as they have been able to do in the analogue world."

Mr Turnbull said under the government plan internet companies would be required to store parts of everyone's data, but clarity was lacking as to what would be kept.

Nor had there been an explanation of the costs and benefits of this "sweeping and intrusive new power", including what, if any, cost was ascribed "to its chilling effect on free speech".

It had not been said whether any gains in national security or law enforcement - which were asserted as justification for the changes - would be monitored and verified.

Mr Turnbull said that, as a matter of principle, "if I am lawfully entitled to burn copies of the letters I have written to you and the letters you have sent me in return, why can I not do the same to my emails?

"If I can throw my diary and my photo album in the bin, why can I not delete my Facebook page?"

SOURCE




Secret proposals threaten the end to a free, open internet

Comment from Australia

It is the "most important meeting you've never heard of" — a behind-closed-doors battle for control of the internet that one of the web's founders fears may "put government handcuffs on the net".

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a United Nations organisation representing 193 countries, is reviewing international agreements governing telecommunications with a view to expanding its regulatory authority over the internet.

The ITU will hold a summit in Dubai in December where member countries will negotiate a treaty (last updated 24 years ago in Melbourne) that sets out regulations on how international voice, data and video traffic is handled.

The ITU, founded in 1865 at the dawn of the telegraph, presently focuses on telecommunications networks and radio frequency allocations but some members such as Russia, China and Iran will use the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) to try to expand the treaty to include internet regulation.

Secret WCIT proposals from several stakeholders have been leaked on the website WCITLeaks.org, giving rise to fears from civil liberties groups and the technology industry that the days of a free, open internet are coming to an end.

Chris Disspain, chief executive of Australian domain name administrator auDA, said moving from the current multi-stakeholder model to a government-centric UN-run model would "stifle innovation", be non-inclusive and result in new binding regulations on member governments.

"What it could mean is a whole series of ... new regulations reached by consensus or horse trading amongst governments, with no input from the community, on such things as data retention, censorship, usage, charging models, all sorts of things," Disspain told Fairfax.

Disspain, who is a member of the UN Secretary-General's Internet Governance Multi-stakeholder Advisory Group, said he was aware of European telco proposals for the ITU advocating the move to a user-pays model for services such as email.

He said at the UN, many proposals get "nodded through because people can't be bothered objecting" and there was a risk that "active governments like China and Iran and Russia" who were pushing to control the internet "may end up winning the day".

The issues will be discussed in Canberra tomorrow and Friday at the first Australian Internet Governance Forum.

Google Australia, one of the forum's sponsors, said the internet risks becoming a "slow and stale shadow of its former self" and it would use the event "to draw attention to global threats to the web's freedom from undemocratic and totalitarian regimes, using the ITU to drive their agenda, and the risks for Australia".

Kurt Wimmer, partner with Washington law firm Covington & Burling who has consulted on internet governance issues since the 90s, touched down in Australia yesterday ahead of this week's Canberra forum.

He told Fairfax decentralised regulation of the internet had been "more of a feature than a bug" and he worries the ITU proposal will legitimise the internet censorship conducted by some countries.

"It also hurts someone in Australia who is then unable to communicate effectively with a growing number of people on the internet who are going to be fenced off by these country-by-country systems," said Wimmer, former senior vice president and general counsel for newspaper group Gannett.

Washington DC-based Tom Wheeler, who previously worked in telco policy for three decades including as CEO of the US Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA), called the Dubai summit "the most important meeting you've never heard of".

"What's really afoot, however, is an effort by some nations to rebalance the internet in their favour by reinstituting telecom regulatory concepts from the last century," he said.

"It is a struggle between nation-states — and their vassals — created in an era when networks aggregated economic and political power, and the new era in which the network's distributed architecture has a disaggregating effect on both economic and political power."

He said countries such as India, South Africa and Brazil would attempt to grab a piece of the internet's revenue in the same way they can apply tariffs and other regulations to those connecting with their telephone networks. Other countries like China and Russia would seek to place controls on the freedom of the internet.

"Seemingly benign proposals to allow for regulation related to 'crime' and 'security' would grant international imprimatur to the exertion of control over internet content," he said.

"The recent sentencing of Russian punk rockers Pussy Riot is illustrative in this regard. The Putin-protesting group was sentenced to jail for being a 'crude violation of the social order', a legal construction that WCIT could permit to be extended to the internet and justified as 'within international accords'."

Vinton Cerf, Google's chief internet evangelist who has been recognised as one of the "fathers of the internet", wrote in The New York Times in May that the internet stands at a "cross roads" and any attempts to make it a more closed, controlled medium could "wreak significant social and economic damage".

"The decisions taken in Dubai in December have the potential to put government handcuffs on the net," said Cerf. "To prevent that — and keep the internet open and free for the next generations — we need to prevent a fundamental shift in how the internet is governed."

He said of the 193 member countries, 40 censor internet content (up from four in 2002), and at the conference repressive regimes had an equal voting power to everyone else. Heavy lobbying was going on in secret discussions.

Russian president Vladimir Putin said last June the goal of Russia and its allies was "establishing international control over the internet" through the ITU. Other countries including China, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have also submitted proposals to the UN for international internet regulation.

It is easy to see why Google is freaked out. Wheeler said the European Telecommunications Network Operators were lobbying to regulate "over the top" internet users which he said would add new regulations to companies like Google, Netflix and others who use carrier networks.

"It is another last-ditch effort to return to the day when regulators protected carriers from the nasty realities of innovation and competition," he said.

The US, which already has a significant influence on the internet and its core infrastructure, wants to maintain the status quo. US ambassador Terry Kramer, who will head the US delegation to the ITU conference, told reporters this week that doing nothing "would not be a terrible outcome at all", arguing the internet should be left as free and open as possible.

"We need to avoid suffocating the internet space through well-meaning but overly prescriptive proposals that would seek to control content or seek to mandate routing and payment practices," he said.

"That would send the internet back to a circuit switch era that is actually passing in history."

A spokesman for Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said the multi-lateral forums that currently govern the internet have delivered us the "internet as we know it" and "to change the existing arrangements a strong case would need to be made".

While not specifically mentioning the ITU treaty, Opposition communications spokesman Malcolm Turnbull came out in support of internet freedom in his Alfred Deakin lecture at the University of Melbourne on Monday night.

He criticised the Australian government for its attempts to control the freewheeling internet, previously with its internet filtering policy but now with proposals to store all Australians' internet usage data for two years.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS,  DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine).   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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A Conservative superstar

He's famously "incorrect" and spontaneous but lots of Brits seem to see that as a breath of fresh air.  Despite his often unkempt appearance he was recently named as the most respected man in Britain -- and he got a rockstar reception at the annual conference of the Conservative party



Boris Johnson last night launched a crowd-pleasing demand for a return to grammar schools.  The London Mayor sought to boost his standing with the Tory faithful by announcing his ‘strong belief in competitive education’ and selective admissions.

It is the first time in more than a decade that a Conservative heavyweight has advocated a return to selection.  Mr Johnson, who does not control the  capital’s schools, again hinted at his  prime ministerial ambitions by saying he was not able to shape party policy in  education ‘yet’.

He was given a rock star reception at the Birmingham conference.

A crowd chanting ‘Boris, Boris, Boris’ gathered at New Street station when he arrived by train and he faced a scrum of delegates and media at the conference hotel.



At a rally in his honour attended by around 1,000 grassroots Tories, Mr Johnson said: ‘I’m a strong believer in competitive education. What was the Olympics? It was a pageant of competition. We should be allowing children to compete academically.

‘I personally have no objections to selective admissions at some stage.’

He said ‘some people object’ to the 11 plus, which divides pupils at that age, but he said it should be possible to select at later ages. And in a clear hint that he wants a wider national role, Mr Johnson concluded: ‘As far as party policy is concerned I’m not in a position to do this – yet.’

He also said he would continue to speak out in favour of a new hub airport, an idea the Coalition has punted into the long grass.

His provocative intervention on education may not please David Cameron, who decided against reopening the grammar school debate back in 2007.

But not everyone has been swept up in Boris-mania. Veteran minister Ken Clarke today said Mr Johnson had to grow up.  'If he really wants to be a prime minister for serious reasons and not just getting his picture in the paper more often, he really does have to settle down and demonstrate he can seriously deliver on some complicated subjects,' he told a meeting hosted by Channel 4 on the fringe of the conference.

He added it would be 'disastrous' if Mr Johnson could not get the 'fashionable' speculation under control.

Health minister Anna Soubry also played down the idea that the public was gripped by Borismania: 'Not one person in my constituency ever has said anything to me about Boris.'

But the Boris Johnson circus still threatened to overshadow the main keynote speech today from Chancellor George Osborne.

Mr Johnson refused to say if Mr Cameron was a better Prime Minister than he would be, insisting the claim was ‘unverifiable’.

And  the London Mayor used his newspaper column to claim the government had left the 'struggling middle' feeling 'utterly ignored.

Last night he addressed hundreds of supporters at a rally organised by the ConservativeHome website under the triumphal banner 'Re-elected and Olympotastic'.

He was careful to praise Mr Cameron, and said he was one of the first Tory MPs to back him as party leader.

The London Mayor said the Conservative party had to remain squarely on the centre ground and claim back the One Nation mantra from Ed Miliband.

But he refused to rule out publicly challenging policy drawn up by the coalition.  Mr Johnson said: ’Of course I am going to fight what I think might be ill-conceived Lib Dem plans for a mansion tax when I read about it.

'Of course I am I going to continue to lobby for a long overdue solution to our aviation capacity problems.

'No-one, as a result of that, should have any cause to doubt my admiration of David Cameron.  'He, George Osborne and the government are doing exactly what is needed to clean up the country and the mess Labour left.'

The success of the London Olympic and Paralympic Games on his watch has boosted Mr Johnson's popularity just as Mr Cameron's has waned.

Mr Johnson joked: 'I sometimes think after the great success of the Olympic and Paralympic Games is we need more things like it. What's next? The Politicians Olympics.'

'Jeremy Hunt would be wanging the bell end. Me for the zip wire, Seb Coe for the 800m, William Hague for the judo.  'And Ed Miliband for the high jump.'

The remarkable scenes as Mr Johnson arrived in Birmingham contrast with the low key arrival of Mr Cameron at the conference centre on Saturday and confirm Mr Johnson's reputation as political box office winner.

Asked if he was in Birmingham to make trouble for Prime Minister, Mr Johnson replied: 'I'm here to support the party.'  He ignored further questions as he was chased through the hotel.

Then today he will make a more traditional speech from the main conference stage.

Mr Cameron has been repeatedly forced to answer questions about the threat to his leadership posed by his old schoolfriend from Eton.

This week the PM said he 'was relaxed about having the blond haired mop sounding off from time to time' after Mr Johnson challenged him over Europe, aviation policy and tax.

On Sunday a a survey by pollsters Opinium for The Observer gave Mr Johnson him a net +30 rating among voters, compared to -21 for the Prime Minister.

SOURCE






Nine in ten Scots 'living off state's patronage'

Almost nine out of 10 Scottish households take more from the public purse than they contribute in taxes thanks to a “rotten system” of state patronage, the Tory party conference will hear on Monday.

Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Conservative leader, is to highlight official figures showing that only 283,080 households north of the border – 12 per cent of the total – pay more in tax than they receive in public services.

She will tell delegates that, because the public sector is seen as the key provider of everything from housing to employment, state spending now accounts for more than half Scotland’s wealth.

She will blame Alex Salmond, the SNP First Minister, and his Labour predecessors for nurturing a “corrosive sense of entitlement” among voters that has prevented her party making a comeback in Scotland.

Miss Davidson will argue this Left-wing “stranglehold” suits Labour and the SNP but has made it difficult for the Tories as so many voters are reliant on the public sector for their household income.

But the Nationalists described it as her “Mitt Romney moment”, in a reference to the Republican presidential candidate’s comments that 47 per cent of Americans pay no income tax and are dependent on the state.

According to the most recent figures, Scotland contributed 9.6 per cent of Britain’s tax take and accounted for 9.3 per cent of public spending.

Her strongly worded attack on state patronage follows David Cameron’s warning to the Scottish Tories last autumn that they had no excuse for their dismal election performances.

But Miss Davidson will tell the conference that Scotland’s “staggering” and “frightening” reliance on the public sector must be taken into account.

“The rotten system of patronage, which denies so many people real choices in their lives, has created a corrosive sense of entitlement which suits its political gang masters,” she will say.

Referring to her party’s dismal election record, the Scottish Conservative leader will conclude: “If the gang master state is the only provider people can see for their housing, education and employment, it’s no surprise those who seek to break the stranglehold find barriers in their way.”

Anyone who challenges the status quo is deemed an “enemy of the state”, she will argue, before claiming this is the real reason some political commentators have written off the Scottish Tories.

She will argue that Labour and the SNP still blame her party for problems that are their responsibility, pointing out that the former has been in control of some of Glasgow’s most deprived areas for decades.

Miss Davidson supported her claims by publishing figures from the Office for National Statistics, which showed the average Scottish household consumes £14,151 more in public services every year than it pays in tax.

Even the families in the middle income groups consume around £20,000 more in state spending than they contribute.

However, those in the top 10 per cent pay £17,205 more in tax than they receive in public services.

Kenny Gibson, a Nationalist MSP, described it as Miss Davidson’s “Mitt Romney moment”. He added: “At least Mitt Romney only insulted around half of Americans, while Ruth Davidson believes almost 90 per cent of Scots do not 'contribute’ to society.”

Miss Davidson will also tell English party colleagues that their support is required if the Unionist campaign is to win a decisive victory in the referendum on independence, something she will argue is necessary if the separatists are not to try to hold another vote soon.

SOURCE





Scotland was not always a nation of parasites

The Scots were a nation of strivers, until the state promoted a toxic dependency culture

In 1926 my father, aged 19, left an Aberdeenshire farm to be a rubber planter in Malaya. Apart from a year back home after enduring a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, he didn’t return to live in Scotland until he was almost 70. He was dismayed by what he found. It seemed to him that the Scots were no longer the hard-working, energetic and self-reliant people they had been in his youth. Instead they were given to self-pity and the belief that the world owed them a living and the state would provide.

There were exceptions, of course. The oil-rich north-east was not short of people starting their own businesses. But in general he believed that the Scots were sunk in a dependency culture, and this depressed and irritated him. He was out of sympathy with modern Scotland, though he was quite typical of his own era, when the Protestant work ethic ruled and the judgment “he’s done well for himself” was an expression of approval.

My father wouldn’t have been surprised by Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Tory leader, asserting that only 12 per cent of Scottish households make a net contribution to the economy, and that Scotland is suffering from the “depression of dependency which has held our country back for so many years”. He would probably have approved. Admittedly, Miss Davidson’s eye-catching figure looks a bit dodgy. I think she is lumping in everything that people receive from public services, which, of course, includes education and the NHS. It depends how you measure these things, and the household figure might not be so very different in the rest of the UK.

Nevertheless, both my father and Miss Davidson have a point. Scotland was one of the places, along with the North of England and the English Midlands, where the Industrial Revolution took off. It was also at the same time a pioneer in devising means of providing capital for industry and business; it was a Scottish bank which invented the overdraft and Scots who invented investment trusts. A favourite text for Presbyterian sermons would be taken from the Parable of the Talents, where the servant who buries his talent in the ground is condemned while those who put their talents to work to create more wealth are approved and rewarded.

Scotland in the 19th century was a meritocratic country, a place where poor boys who applied themselves did well. The great civil engineer Thomas Telford was the son of a shepherd and apprenticed to a stonemason. A favourite school-prize book was Self-Help by Samuel Smiles, with its message that hard work and enterprise would be rewarded by success. By the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, Scotland was one of the industrial powerhouses of the world.

That last sentence is both true and misleading. The income was very unequally distributed. If the story of Victorian Glasgow, and indeed Scotland, is one of triumph, of an expanding economy, of wealth on a previously unimagined scale, it is also a story of degradation and misery, of the harsh exploitation of man by man. A Victorian reporter investigating social conditions in Glasgow could scarcely believe that “so large an amount of filth, crime, misery and disease existed in one spot in any civilised country”.

It was intolerable. Social action was taken. The state set in to repair the damage that free enterprise had done. The provision of housing, for instance, became a municipal responsibility. By the 1970s a higher proportion of Scots lived in publicly owned houses than in any country west of the Soviet bloc.

There was another side to the coin. The heavy industries that had created the wealth failed to meet foreign competition, and went into decline. The reliance on heavy industry meant that Scotland missed out on the new light industries that brought prosperity to the south of England. From having been aggressively enterprising, Scotland became defensive, engaged in damage limitation. The idea that industrial regeneration was impossible without state-provided finance and regulation took root. Individualism was suspect, communal action approved. Even the Scottish Tory Party never embraced Thatcherism, to my father’s contemptuous dismay, for he recognised in Mrs Thatcher’s message the self-reliant Protestant work ethic that had been instilled in him as a boy.

A good society seeks and achieves a balance between individual and social action. The excesses of the money markets show the dangers of rampant individualism and of the belief that greed is good; the somnolence of an unenterprising culture is the consequence of relying too heavily on the state and the public sector, and lands people and communities in the dependency trap. Ruth Davidson exaggerates, but she is right to draw attention to the absence of vigour and self-belief in much of Scotland, where the balance between individual and social action has been tilted away from the former.

SOURCE






Getting people off welfare is NOT uncaring - it's a moral duty and the only way to save us from fiscal suicide

There is no subject about which more  lies are told than  benefits and welfare. It is as though the truth is simply too  terrible to state.

In the U.S. last month, Mitt Romney was widely said to have blown his chances of beating Barack Obama in next month’s presidential elections after the release of a video in which Romney said that 47 per cent of Americans pay no income tax and so would probably not vote for him anyway.

The response to this comment was not to address the catastrophic social problem Romney was highlighting, but to scorn him for mentioning it.

As so often, what was regarded as a ‘gaffe’ was simply a rare political truth.  It is one we ignore at our peril.

The fact is that Britain, America and Western Europe as a whole are now permanently balanced on the edge of a financial precipice.

Yes, one reason is the disgraceful behaviour of parts of the financial sector, and another the collapse of the eurozone. But even if the 2008 banking and subsequent euro crises had not happened we would still be plummeting towards economic apocalypse.

The reason is as straightforward for the nation as a whole as it is for  any household: we spend more money than we earn.

In national terms, that is because the number of people who make a net contribution to the economy keeps shrinking while the number taking more than they give keeps growing.

Chancellor George Osborne and Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith should be applauded for trying to tackle this with their welfare reform programme.

They were right when they stated in yesterday’s Mail that they were bequeathed ‘the worst economic inheritance in living memory’ and right to announce a further £10 billion in welfare cuts.

But, as both men well know, they inherited not only an economic but a moral catastrophe as well.

Just how large a catastrophe was revealed yesterday when the Centre for Policy Studies think-tank released a report of devastating clarity. Its figures — based on those from the Office for National Statistics — show that more than half of the homes in the UK are now a burden on the state.

The cost of benefits payments and services received outweighs the taxes gained from at least 53 per cent of households.

In other words, more than half of the households in Britain make no net contribution to  the state, because they receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes.

In Scotland the situation is even worse, with only 12 per cent of households — just over one in ten — paying  more to the state than the state pays them.

Little wonder that George Osborne spoke up yesterday for the strivers in society, for ‘those who want to work hard and get on’, and who are fed up with being the providers in a nation where most people are takers.

This horrific situation has  not crept up on us slowly. Rather, it exploded during  the last Labour government’s time in office.  Prior to its post-2001 debt-spree, fewer than 44 per cent of households made no net contribution to the state. That figure had increased by only 0.7 per cent since 1979.

But the Labour government had a cynical agenda.  Voters who are reliant on the state are unlikely — as Mitt Romney pointed out in the U.S. — to vote Tory, or at least for people who would take those benefits away.

The Labour government deliberately built up a huge, Labour-voting client base by making thousands more households reliant on the state. And this — it must be remembered — did not happen during a recession. It was during a global boom, when private enterprise was thriving.

All logic should have dictated that fewer people, during such a period, should have been dependent on the state.

At the same time, tens of thousands of jobs were created. But they were not filled by British workers.  The Labour government invited hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to come to this country and fill nearly all of those vacancies.

By importing a new working class, they made many  among the traditional working class unemployed and state-dependent.

As a result, by keeping such people in a benefits limbo, the number of households which took more in benefits than they could pay in tax rocketed.

Today, the Labour Party claims that the solution to our economic woes is to further tax the minority who already pay their way — in order to sustain the ever-growing number of people who do not.

They seek to punish those who make a net contribution in order to reward those who do not. It hardly needs to be said that this is a recipe not only for fiscal, but national, suicide.

This week, the Conservative Party has its chance to grab the nation’s imagination and try to ensure there will not be a future Labour government that could plunge us ever further into a culture of dependency.

First, they must continue to remind voters of the economic mess left by their predecessors.

The Labour government not only failed to mend the roof while the sun shone, it spent taxpayers’ money bribing people not to notice the roof was caving in.

At a time when Ed Miliband and, more particularly, Ed Balls are intent on rewriting history on this score, it is essential the electorate is reminded of this point, time and again.

Second, the Conservatives must better explain their vision for the future of the welfare state. Iain Duncan Smith cannot do this alone. The party must make it clear that the Tories do believe in the welfare state — but not the one of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s creation.

More importantly still, they must explain the moral case for getting people off welfare and into work.

Across Western democracies, the Left has nearly bankrupted countries because it has succeeded in promoting a  particular lie.

It is one based on emotion, and specifically on the idea that it is ‘uncaring’ to try to wean people off lives of welfare dependence.

In fact, the very opposite is true. While, of course, it is essential to protect the most vulnerable in society, it is positively immoral to condemn those capable of working and contributing to society to a life of dependence on the state.

Just as the Left forever talks about lives being ‘saved’ by welfare, the Conservatives must explain how millions of lives are wrecked by it, and many millions more are only half-lived.

Finally, the Conservatives must explain that this  social tragedy cannot be remedied within the five-yearly electoral cycle.

Policies must be adopted that tackle the generational nature of the problem: spelling out how welfare-dependent parents are more likely to produce welfare-dependent children in a cycle that is as destructive as it is expensive.

What the last Labour government did was wicked. It borrowed money for handouts to bribe the electorate. And the grotesque amount of debt it amassed in doing so will hang over generations to come.

Unless we now act firmly and decisively, more than half of the households in this country will remain enslaved to welfare dependency, and lumber those not yet born with the debts to pay for it.

The success or otherwise of the Tories in spelling out that message in the coming days will decide more than which party comes to office in 2015.

It will determine what kind of long-term future — if any — we have as a country.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS,  DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine).   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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