From Compass magazine
Liverpool Council has proposed sticking an X certificate on any film with smoking, which would rank all the classic Bond movies alongside pornography and Kung Fu violence. What future, then for 007 in the modern world? We present James bond, as approved by Liverpool City Council.
‘Ah, morning Mish Moneypenny, you’re looking as beautiful as Lake Geneva on a summer morning, perhaps I could treat you to a Swiss roll a little later.’
‘That’s enough, James, M wants to see you right away.’
‘Ah, Bond! Come in. Now, we have a bit of a problem with our diplomatic relations.’
‘Yesh, I heard rumour that SPECTRE has been interfering with MI6’s communications channels.’
‘No, no, no, Bond. Bit of an internal problem, it’s about Miss Moneypenny and sexual harassment.’
‘Sexshual harassment? I admit there might be a little, ah sexshual frishon, but I wouldn’t say she’s harassing me.’
‘Bond you’re stuck in another era. And put out that cigarette, please, this is a non-smoking building.’
‘Are you telling me sir that you’ve brought me back to base because of this?’
‘Well, partly, yes, but we do have a problem with SPECTRE. They’ve been buying up muesli factories using legitimate front companies and are selling products with extremely high salt levels. The entire population of the civilised world will suffer early and agonising deaths.’
‘Yikesh!’
‘We need to send you out to Monte Carlo, where we believe Nokiablokov is setting up meetings to distribute a new brand of cereal. Heavy on salt and sugar. Go and see Q, and he’ll sort you out with what you need.’
‘Morning Bond. Off on your travels again? Well, this little treasure is perfect for nipping in and out of the streets.’
‘It looksh like a teapot on wheels.’
‘You’re behind the times, Bond. The G-Wiz AEV (Automatic Electric Vehicle) is twice winner of the Best City Car award from the Environmental Transport Association.
‘Turbo-charged I preshume.’
‘Bond, Bond, we don’t turbo-charge our vehicles any more. There’s the environment to think of. It does have a range of 60 miles, though, and is exempt from car tax.’
‘Where’sh the button for the machine gun ports and the ejector seat?’
‘The boys over at Health & Safety aren’t going to countenance an ejector seat. And you must know it’s Foreign Office policy to have not links with the arms trade. We can issue you with this very high-powered catapult, though.’
‘I might as well cycle, Q.’
‘Ha ha, very funny, Bond. But good show, keeps dangerous emissions down, what. Moneypenny has your tickets.’
‘Here you are, James. Carbon offset has been paid. See you in court.’
Shot of plane landing at Nice airport. Cut to a casino. Inside a one-eyed Russian with a pile of chips looks menacingly at 007 as he takes a seat at the roulette table. A beautiful blonde places a hand on Nokiablokov’s shoulder, but looks at Bond. ‘Martini, shaken not shtirred, and whatever she’s having,’ he tells the waitress. ‘I’m sorry sir, it is management policy not serve anyone who has had more than three drinks.’ ‘Then get me the management,’ says Bond, sparking up a Morland’s. ‘And it’s strictly no-smoking, sir.’
The wheel spins and the Russian wins. He picks up his chips, and Bond tails him to the cashier and through the lobby. The G-Wiz is brought up to the forecourt. With the ‘Please fasten your seatbelt sign flashing’ he sets off in pursuit of Nokiablokov’s limo, but headlights fill his rear-view mirror. Bond puts the accelerator to the floor, cut to speedo showing 35mph. A speed-camera flashes. Bond is overtaken.
We cut to a huge underground bunker and technicians surround Bond’s G-Wiz.
At a desk in a control room is Blofeld, with the Russian and the blonde behind him. ‘Very ecological Mr Bond but too late, I’m afraid, the planet will soon be mine.’ Technicians in neo-communist uniforms adjust machinery churning out packets of ‘Sugar Pop Pops’ and ‘Spicy Salty Popcorn’. ‘The helpless fools who fall for these products will soon be craving sugar that only I can provide them with.’
‘You have the scruplesh of a boa constrictor, Blofeld.’
‘And you Bond, are history. Take him to the room we reserve for special guests, if you don’t mind Mr Nokiablokov.’
As Bond is being led down a raised gantry, he produces the catapult from his pocket, fires off two coins that fell guards in the distance, pushes Nokiablokov away, grabs the girl and they dash onto a small underground train pulling trucks of Sugar Pop Pops. They whiz down a shoot and out into the open, climb onto a tandem that’s waiting in a village and make their escape. The mountain explodes in a cascade of cereal.
Bond’s mobile rings. ‘I’m on my way shir,’ he answers. ‘I think we can say that we’ll all be back to having our oats again.’
This article first appeared in Compass magazine
Simon Hills is associate editor of The Times Magazine and author of Strictly No! How We’re Being Overrun by the Nanny State
Thursday, 19 June 2008
Thursday, 8 May 2008
Let's ban sausages now!
From The Free Society website
We learnt last month, thanks to the World Cancer Research Fund, that eating one sausage a day raises the likelihood of contracting bowel cancer by a fifth. Yes, processed meat’s a killer.
Indeed, Professor Martin Wiseman, the charity’s medical and scientific adviser, said: ‘We are more sure now than ever before that eating processed meat increases your risk of bowel cancer, and this is why SCRF recommends that people avoid eating it. The evidence is that whether you are talking about bacon, ham, or pastrami, the safest amount to eat is nothing at all.’
The trouble is, sausage-eating is socially acceptable in today’s society. The smell of cooking fat infects our bars and restaurants, even cinema lobbies. Pre-school children are offered sausages by their parents and then their peers, and before long they are hooked, perpetuating the cult of sausage eating.
Surely, now is the time to take action.
A new organisation ASH (Action on Sausages and Health) should be set up to push for a number of measures to be taken urgently. Firstly, there should be a vigorous campaign to point out the dangers of eating sausages.
It should as soon as is practicably possible (running down of freezer stocks etc) be illegal for anyone below the age of 18 to eat sausages. It will be an offence to sell sausages to anyone below this age. Hotlines will be set up so anyone seeing a butcher sneaking a chipolata to a minor can be reported to the authorities. Councils will be given government grants to employ sausage wardens to ensure the law is being complied with.
Sausages should be subject to a tax of 85 per cent. ASH believes the best way do discourage sausage-eaters is to hit them in the pocket.
Of course many people are unaware of the health risks associated with sausage eating. ASH therefore proposes signs taking up a minimum of 35 per cent of the packaging with wordings in association with the European Union Commission for Public Health. Suggested wordings include: ‘Sausages Kill’; ‘Sausage-eating harms you and those around you’; ‘Sausage-eaters die younger’
In time, it is envisaged that pictures of the results of sausage-eating should be shown – cancerous bowels in particular – and sausages should not be on public display but kept under counter. Butchers will of course claim that their livelihoods will be threatened, but the health of the nation is at stake.
These measures might seem draconian, but ultimately, what we are looking for is a society where sausage-eating is a socially unacceptable as smoking, and in time outlawed altogether.
We learnt last month, thanks to the World Cancer Research Fund, that eating one sausage a day raises the likelihood of contracting bowel cancer by a fifth. Yes, processed meat’s a killer.
Indeed, Professor Martin Wiseman, the charity’s medical and scientific adviser, said: ‘We are more sure now than ever before that eating processed meat increases your risk of bowel cancer, and this is why SCRF recommends that people avoid eating it. The evidence is that whether you are talking about bacon, ham, or pastrami, the safest amount to eat is nothing at all.’
The trouble is, sausage-eating is socially acceptable in today’s society. The smell of cooking fat infects our bars and restaurants, even cinema lobbies. Pre-school children are offered sausages by their parents and then their peers, and before long they are hooked, perpetuating the cult of sausage eating.
Surely, now is the time to take action.
A new organisation ASH (Action on Sausages and Health) should be set up to push for a number of measures to be taken urgently. Firstly, there should be a vigorous campaign to point out the dangers of eating sausages.
It should as soon as is practicably possible (running down of freezer stocks etc) be illegal for anyone below the age of 18 to eat sausages. It will be an offence to sell sausages to anyone below this age. Hotlines will be set up so anyone seeing a butcher sneaking a chipolata to a minor can be reported to the authorities. Councils will be given government grants to employ sausage wardens to ensure the law is being complied with.
Sausages should be subject to a tax of 85 per cent. ASH believes the best way do discourage sausage-eaters is to hit them in the pocket.
Of course many people are unaware of the health risks associated with sausage eating. ASH therefore proposes signs taking up a minimum of 35 per cent of the packaging with wordings in association with the European Union Commission for Public Health. Suggested wordings include: ‘Sausages Kill’; ‘Sausage-eating harms you and those around you’; ‘Sausage-eaters die younger’
In time, it is envisaged that pictures of the results of sausage-eating should be shown – cancerous bowels in particular – and sausages should not be on public display but kept under counter. Butchers will of course claim that their livelihoods will be threatened, but the health of the nation is at stake.
These measures might seem draconian, but ultimately, what we are looking for is a society where sausage-eating is a socially unacceptable as smoking, and in time outlawed altogether.
Friday, 11 April 2008
Pedal and be damned
From The Oldie
Cycling, if we are to believe our political masters, is as close as we’ll get to Godliness.
A country stroll is punctuated by a fluorescent fleet of velocipedes bearing the legends GIANT, KONA, TREK, RIDGEBACK, CANNONDALE on their Day-Glo frames, ridden by excited wholesome young professionals taking in the country air and politely but insistently pushing you to the side of the footpath.
No city or even most modest of towns is complete without a maze of lurid green paths – although as close to nature as Apollo 13 is to an elm – to denote its environmentally correct credentials. Special traffic lights, blue circular signs and dedicated cycle lanes have become part of the firmament of civic life.
Frankly, though, these huge injections of public money into cycling paths and the ever-increasing popularity of off-roading has turned cycling from being the pursuit of left-field eco warriors into something rather more establishment. As practised by the leader of the Conservative Party.
Enter, then, the fixed-wheel bicycle.
It has no truck with panniers and bells and a gentle pedal to the office. The fixed-wheel bicycle is so-called because it has no gears and in many cases no freewheel, either. Based on lightweight track bikes, if you want to slow it down, you pedal more slowly. If you want to stop you stop pedalling and hope you don’t go flying over the handlebars. A piddly front brake is grudgingly added only to make it street legal.
The cult of the fixed-wheel bicycle was started by couriers. For them mudguards, a set of brakes and some gears was as near as dammit driving a luxury saloon – strictly for squares. Far better to careen around town on a stripped-down piece of carbon fibre that looks like an oversized insect on wheels. Not only that, having your feet in motion all the time made them as hard to ride as an unbroken horse. A junction for the fixed-wheel cyclist is merely an inconvenience at which he pedals impatiently backwards and forwards like a unicyclist, his machine balanced beneath him, ready to spring as soon as the heel of the last pedestrian has gone past his front wheel. The fixed-wheel machine is the Johnny Rotten of bicycles, and has no truck with niceties of civic life.
It was inevitable that this couldn’t give a toss I-do-this-for-a-living elitism of its rider would transfer over to the mainstream commuter.
For a certain type of cosseted middle-class man, with only a spread sheet and a presentation to get the blood coursing, the bicycle already allows him a certain dweebish machismo. But with the purchase of the fixed-wheel Bianchi Pista Steel road bike he can satisfy his lust for machines (Aprebic AC-3033 butted CroMo forks; Wellgo LU-895 pedals, anyone?) and at the same time live out his Wild One fantasies, minus the nasty cigarettes and, God-forbid smelly, petrol burning engines.
Because fixed-wheel bicycles are extremely light and extremely fast, so it is, with a Brando-esque sneer, their riders have a better chance of overtaking cabs, white vans, bendy buses, articulated lorries etc while negotiating the Elephant and Castle.
“The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets,” wrote the American essayist Christopher Morley in the early part of the last century.
Pah! Not any more, mate. The bicycle certainly is no longer the dignified conveyance favoured by Oxbridge undergraduates, artisan factory workers or Derek Guyler’s Corky the policeman in Eric Sykes. As we have become more dependent on our cars and at the same time more health-obsessed, the bicycle has become a political statement.
And this is where again the fixed-wheel cycle scores double eco Brownie points. Because you have to pedal all the time, you have to be very fit. So for your fixed-wheel cyclist the calm free-wheeling past the Radcliffe Camera to the verdant college quad, clicking down a trusty Sturmey-Archer gear to ease the pain of pedalling uphill is pleasure never-to-be-found.
This kind of commitment means that fixed-wheel riders also have to be young. Which is just as well. Because they’re so difficult to ride, especially in London traffic, you have to be young enough to have as much fear (and reckless bravado) as Eddie the Eagle. You will also be far too callow to have come across Mark Twain, who wrote,
“Get a bicycle. You will not regret it if you live.” You can’t help thinking that for the fixed-wheel cyclist, this aphorism is still terrifyingly apt.
Cycling, if we are to believe our political masters, is as close as we’ll get to Godliness.
A country stroll is punctuated by a fluorescent fleet of velocipedes bearing the legends GIANT, KONA, TREK, RIDGEBACK, CANNONDALE on their Day-Glo frames, ridden by excited wholesome young professionals taking in the country air and politely but insistently pushing you to the side of the footpath.
No city or even most modest of towns is complete without a maze of lurid green paths – although as close to nature as Apollo 13 is to an elm – to denote its environmentally correct credentials. Special traffic lights, blue circular signs and dedicated cycle lanes have become part of the firmament of civic life.
Frankly, though, these huge injections of public money into cycling paths and the ever-increasing popularity of off-roading has turned cycling from being the pursuit of left-field eco warriors into something rather more establishment. As practised by the leader of the Conservative Party.
Enter, then, the fixed-wheel bicycle.
It has no truck with panniers and bells and a gentle pedal to the office. The fixed-wheel bicycle is so-called because it has no gears and in many cases no freewheel, either. Based on lightweight track bikes, if you want to slow it down, you pedal more slowly. If you want to stop you stop pedalling and hope you don’t go flying over the handlebars. A piddly front brake is grudgingly added only to make it street legal.
The cult of the fixed-wheel bicycle was started by couriers. For them mudguards, a set of brakes and some gears was as near as dammit driving a luxury saloon – strictly for squares. Far better to careen around town on a stripped-down piece of carbon fibre that looks like an oversized insect on wheels. Not only that, having your feet in motion all the time made them as hard to ride as an unbroken horse. A junction for the fixed-wheel cyclist is merely an inconvenience at which he pedals impatiently backwards and forwards like a unicyclist, his machine balanced beneath him, ready to spring as soon as the heel of the last pedestrian has gone past his front wheel. The fixed-wheel machine is the Johnny Rotten of bicycles, and has no truck with niceties of civic life.
It was inevitable that this couldn’t give a toss I-do-this-for-a-living elitism of its rider would transfer over to the mainstream commuter.
For a certain type of cosseted middle-class man, with only a spread sheet and a presentation to get the blood coursing, the bicycle already allows him a certain dweebish machismo. But with the purchase of the fixed-wheel Bianchi Pista Steel road bike he can satisfy his lust for machines (Aprebic AC-3033 butted CroMo forks; Wellgo LU-895 pedals, anyone?) and at the same time live out his Wild One fantasies, minus the nasty cigarettes and, God-forbid smelly, petrol burning engines.
Because fixed-wheel bicycles are extremely light and extremely fast, so it is, with a Brando-esque sneer, their riders have a better chance of overtaking cabs, white vans, bendy buses, articulated lorries etc while negotiating the Elephant and Castle.
“The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets,” wrote the American essayist Christopher Morley in the early part of the last century.
Pah! Not any more, mate. The bicycle certainly is no longer the dignified conveyance favoured by Oxbridge undergraduates, artisan factory workers or Derek Guyler’s Corky the policeman in Eric Sykes. As we have become more dependent on our cars and at the same time more health-obsessed, the bicycle has become a political statement.
And this is where again the fixed-wheel cycle scores double eco Brownie points. Because you have to pedal all the time, you have to be very fit. So for your fixed-wheel cyclist the calm free-wheeling past the Radcliffe Camera to the verdant college quad, clicking down a trusty Sturmey-Archer gear to ease the pain of pedalling uphill is pleasure never-to-be-found.
This kind of commitment means that fixed-wheel riders also have to be young. Which is just as well. Because they’re so difficult to ride, especially in London traffic, you have to be young enough to have as much fear (and reckless bravado) as Eddie the Eagle. You will also be far too callow to have come across Mark Twain, who wrote,
“Get a bicycle. You will not regret it if you live.” You can’t help thinking that for the fixed-wheel cyclist, this aphorism is still terrifyingly apt.
Wednesday, 27 February 2008
Green Is The New Red
From The Free Society website
Do you remember the excitement of seeing, up close, your first Ferrari? Gleaming like a newly painted pillar box – so low slung it was only as high as your stomach even then – snarling at the traffic lights as if it was going to eat them?
Or your first Rolls-Royce, gliding past you on the pavement; only the hiss of tyres on tarmac telling you it was mechanical? Who was inside? Somebody famous? A Royal? A film star? Michael Caine, maybe, or Sean Connery, giving the old girl a bit of a spin while he was back in Blighty?
The excitement of these vehicles, the stomach-churning roar of the Ferrari or the whisper of the Rolls-Royce, were the embodiment of power, style and freedom. Oozing personality, they said that if you were rich enough, you could accelerate away down country roads with your hair standing on end, or sink into leather, switch on the radio and let the world glide by outside. They were about wealth, character, excitement, aspiration.
Now you can forget all that. Red Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, has become Green Ken Livingstone, and that means these symbols of power and wealth will cease to set the heart racing of any young boy or girl walking the streets of London.
Green Ken’s Congestion charge is this month being adjusted so ‘gas guzzlers’ have to pay such prohibitive amounts either to enter (£25) or stay in central London (£6,000 a year) that their owners will simply transfer them to the house in the country. In the name of saving the planet, the charge has become a tax. Green Ken has for years persecuted motorists for having the temerity to pick the children up from school and go to Sainsbury’s and now, at last, is his chance to have us drive drab little proletarian vehicles in the fashion of East German Trabants and promote cycling to the extent that London will resemble 1960s Peking as the workers ring and ding their way to the office.
Green Ken, in other words, and Red Ken are one of the same without the need to mention the word – let’s whisper it – socialism.
Ken might not be able to stop the City Boys from larging it up at Spearmint Rhino, but by God he’s going to make sure they go there by bicycle. The politics are the same, it’s just the colour that has changed.
It is no surprise that it should be Hilary Benn, son of Tony, the man who would have had us nationalise the building industry and the banks (thus nipping in the bud any Ferrari-buying tendencies at source) who is our Secretary of State for the Environment. He came back from a gruelling conference on climate change in Bali (the facilities at Rotherham just weren’t up to it) at the end of last year telling us that the United Kingdom would make carbon emission cuts by 25 to 40 per cent by 2020.
Back he came warning not just of climate change, but ‘dangerous’ climate change. What does this mean? It means that cars are dangerous. Aircraft are dangerous. Nasty plastic bags are dangerous. Eating meat is dangerous – cows farting, heat from abattoirs, deforestation etc. Heating our buildings is so dangerous that Mr Benn’s department Defra is making taxpayers fork out £28.3 million to make two buildings in York, only constructed in 1994, sustainable, saving 15 tons of carbon a year – the equivalent emissions, we’re told of nine houses, yes nine houses.
We are led to believe that unless we genuflect before our green commissars and accept their burdensome edicts the world will come to an end.
Reviewing How to Tackle Global Warming and Still Keep the Lights On by Gabrielle Walker and David King, Sunday Times reviewer Richard Girling wrote: ‘It will be said of this book that it should be pressed into the hands of all those who deny the reality of climate change, or who think that human activity is not contributing to it. But of course it won’t be and, even if it were, they wouldn’t open it. Those one Planet Exxon are beyond the pull of reason.’
The idea that should you question some the most dubious, propaganda-ridden scientific rhetoric every produced, then, makes you fit only for the asylum. The same reasoning, in other words, that sent dissenters of the great Socialist Revolution of Russian to mental institutions to get their heads fixed.
In fact, there is much debate to be had. The US Senate last year received reports from more than 400 scientists stating that the average surface temperature of the Earth has not changed statistically in the past decade. The global warming we have experienced since the 1970s is cyclical and nothing to do with man's activities, or CO2, they reported.
Even more significantly, many of these 400 scientists were, or are, members of the International Panel on Climate Change who have changed their minds as a result of observational fact.
Certainly more of these 400 would be joined by others around the world if it were not for fears of financial retribution from their political masters. Again is this not the touchy-feely equivalent of Stalin’s Great Purge? To have the temerity to criticise Green politics sets you up for the same opprobrium meted out to Soviet scientists who dared question, say, ruinous collective farming.
Instead of asking scientists to explain how – if as we were all told at school that water expands when turned to ice, and 90 per cent of the Arctic is under water – it is that this global catastrophe will cause floods, governments are fermenting a collective hysteria, ignoring dissenting voices, and pouring millions into climate change projects.
Ask for a grant to carry out research into the feeding habits of squirrels and you’d be unlikely to get a 20p piece. Ask for a grant to carry out research on how global warming is destroying the squirrels’ habitat, as Nigel Calder, former editor of The New Scientist pointed out, and you’re in. This is where the money is, boys. Climate change is a catch-all for more taxes, more quangoes and more government jobs. Just as communism was about the functionary rather than the proletariat, so green politics are empowering a whole new generation of busybodies.
Councils are deciding how they deploy bin police to make sure we’re putting our rubbish in the correct receptacles, and from next year will be allowed to employ bailiffs to collect unpaid ‘bin taxes’. Before we can sell our house we are to be visited by a functionary with a clipboard to work out our thermal output formula. Haringey Council lashed out £21,000 on an aeroplane porting heat-seeking cameras to find out which homes wasted the most energy. ‘This single study will play a key role in helping us address three of the biggest issues currently facing Haringey – climate change, fuel poverty and housing waiting lists,’ claimed Labour councillor Isidoros Diakides.
Well, councillor, the biggest issues facing most Haringey residents is the fact that your council is unable to clean its litter-strewn streets, feral youths make many of them impassable and your educational standards are lower than the Victoria Line.
Meanwhile just as the Communist Party used to subject schoolchildren to the horrors of capitalism and the ruination that was round the corner for the capitalist West, so today’s children are packed off to the local library to be told that the planet will cease to exist if they don’t recycle.
Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, plans geography lessons that will ensure children will learn about man-made global warming in order to help ‘lock in a culture change that could, quite literally, save the world’.
But this isn’t really for the children, of course. It is for them to persuade their parents to become good greens, in the same way that Soviet children would persuade them to be good communists and die kinder in 1930s Germany would come back from camp demanding their parents play Wagner and give them a good scrub behind the ears every day.
Just as Communist Party leaders would take themselves off to their dachas to discuss the progress of the emancipation of the proletariat, our leaders burn huge quantities of carbon fuel building glass-clad office blocks and flying to conferences in Bali to discuss how we might worker harder to, as Alan Johnson simpered, ‘quite literally’ save the planet. London’s mayor and a coterie of 60 fly off Venezuela to blag a load of cheap oil from the people’s president Chavez, for example. Meanwhile Green Ken Livingstone’s version of Pravda, The Londoner, is offering a ‘light bulb amnesty’ to those of us destroying the planet by using a 60-watt Osram in our sitting rooms. An amnesty? Er, sorry, we didn’t know lighting our homes was a criminal offence.
These lightbulbs, anyway, will soon be unavailable in the United Kingdom thanks to Comrade Benn Jr, who is happily forcing us into a half-light paradise reminiscent of Seventies Leningrad.
As we descend into an era of unprecedented political control and a world in which citizens will be rewarded for shopping neighbours who put their empty bottles in the wrong bin, there is one sentence that surely should be writ large in every institution in the land. It comes from the American journalist H.L. Mencken, who wrote 100 years ago: ‘The desire to save mankind is almost always a false front for the desire to rule it.’
Do you remember the excitement of seeing, up close, your first Ferrari? Gleaming like a newly painted pillar box – so low slung it was only as high as your stomach even then – snarling at the traffic lights as if it was going to eat them?
Or your first Rolls-Royce, gliding past you on the pavement; only the hiss of tyres on tarmac telling you it was mechanical? Who was inside? Somebody famous? A Royal? A film star? Michael Caine, maybe, or Sean Connery, giving the old girl a bit of a spin while he was back in Blighty?
The excitement of these vehicles, the stomach-churning roar of the Ferrari or the whisper of the Rolls-Royce, were the embodiment of power, style and freedom. Oozing personality, they said that if you were rich enough, you could accelerate away down country roads with your hair standing on end, or sink into leather, switch on the radio and let the world glide by outside. They were about wealth, character, excitement, aspiration.
Now you can forget all that. Red Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, has become Green Ken Livingstone, and that means these symbols of power and wealth will cease to set the heart racing of any young boy or girl walking the streets of London.
Green Ken’s Congestion charge is this month being adjusted so ‘gas guzzlers’ have to pay such prohibitive amounts either to enter (£25) or stay in central London (£6,000 a year) that their owners will simply transfer them to the house in the country. In the name of saving the planet, the charge has become a tax. Green Ken has for years persecuted motorists for having the temerity to pick the children up from school and go to Sainsbury’s and now, at last, is his chance to have us drive drab little proletarian vehicles in the fashion of East German Trabants and promote cycling to the extent that London will resemble 1960s Peking as the workers ring and ding their way to the office.
Green Ken, in other words, and Red Ken are one of the same without the need to mention the word – let’s whisper it – socialism.
Ken might not be able to stop the City Boys from larging it up at Spearmint Rhino, but by God he’s going to make sure they go there by bicycle. The politics are the same, it’s just the colour that has changed.
It is no surprise that it should be Hilary Benn, son of Tony, the man who would have had us nationalise the building industry and the banks (thus nipping in the bud any Ferrari-buying tendencies at source) who is our Secretary of State for the Environment. He came back from a gruelling conference on climate change in Bali (the facilities at Rotherham just weren’t up to it) at the end of last year telling us that the United Kingdom would make carbon emission cuts by 25 to 40 per cent by 2020.
Back he came warning not just of climate change, but ‘dangerous’ climate change. What does this mean? It means that cars are dangerous. Aircraft are dangerous. Nasty plastic bags are dangerous. Eating meat is dangerous – cows farting, heat from abattoirs, deforestation etc. Heating our buildings is so dangerous that Mr Benn’s department Defra is making taxpayers fork out £28.3 million to make two buildings in York, only constructed in 1994, sustainable, saving 15 tons of carbon a year – the equivalent emissions, we’re told of nine houses, yes nine houses.
We are led to believe that unless we genuflect before our green commissars and accept their burdensome edicts the world will come to an end.
Reviewing How to Tackle Global Warming and Still Keep the Lights On by Gabrielle Walker and David King, Sunday Times reviewer Richard Girling wrote: ‘It will be said of this book that it should be pressed into the hands of all those who deny the reality of climate change, or who think that human activity is not contributing to it. But of course it won’t be and, even if it were, they wouldn’t open it. Those one Planet Exxon are beyond the pull of reason.’
The idea that should you question some the most dubious, propaganda-ridden scientific rhetoric every produced, then, makes you fit only for the asylum. The same reasoning, in other words, that sent dissenters of the great Socialist Revolution of Russian to mental institutions to get their heads fixed.
In fact, there is much debate to be had. The US Senate last year received reports from more than 400 scientists stating that the average surface temperature of the Earth has not changed statistically in the past decade. The global warming we have experienced since the 1970s is cyclical and nothing to do with man's activities, or CO2, they reported.
Even more significantly, many of these 400 scientists were, or are, members of the International Panel on Climate Change who have changed their minds as a result of observational fact.
Certainly more of these 400 would be joined by others around the world if it were not for fears of financial retribution from their political masters. Again is this not the touchy-feely equivalent of Stalin’s Great Purge? To have the temerity to criticise Green politics sets you up for the same opprobrium meted out to Soviet scientists who dared question, say, ruinous collective farming.
Instead of asking scientists to explain how – if as we were all told at school that water expands when turned to ice, and 90 per cent of the Arctic is under water – it is that this global catastrophe will cause floods, governments are fermenting a collective hysteria, ignoring dissenting voices, and pouring millions into climate change projects.
Ask for a grant to carry out research into the feeding habits of squirrels and you’d be unlikely to get a 20p piece. Ask for a grant to carry out research on how global warming is destroying the squirrels’ habitat, as Nigel Calder, former editor of The New Scientist pointed out, and you’re in. This is where the money is, boys. Climate change is a catch-all for more taxes, more quangoes and more government jobs. Just as communism was about the functionary rather than the proletariat, so green politics are empowering a whole new generation of busybodies.
Councils are deciding how they deploy bin police to make sure we’re putting our rubbish in the correct receptacles, and from next year will be allowed to employ bailiffs to collect unpaid ‘bin taxes’. Before we can sell our house we are to be visited by a functionary with a clipboard to work out our thermal output formula. Haringey Council lashed out £21,000 on an aeroplane porting heat-seeking cameras to find out which homes wasted the most energy. ‘This single study will play a key role in helping us address three of the biggest issues currently facing Haringey – climate change, fuel poverty and housing waiting lists,’ claimed Labour councillor Isidoros Diakides.
Well, councillor, the biggest issues facing most Haringey residents is the fact that your council is unable to clean its litter-strewn streets, feral youths make many of them impassable and your educational standards are lower than the Victoria Line.
Meanwhile just as the Communist Party used to subject schoolchildren to the horrors of capitalism and the ruination that was round the corner for the capitalist West, so today’s children are packed off to the local library to be told that the planet will cease to exist if they don’t recycle.
Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, plans geography lessons that will ensure children will learn about man-made global warming in order to help ‘lock in a culture change that could, quite literally, save the world’.
But this isn’t really for the children, of course. It is for them to persuade their parents to become good greens, in the same way that Soviet children would persuade them to be good communists and die kinder in 1930s Germany would come back from camp demanding their parents play Wagner and give them a good scrub behind the ears every day.
Just as Communist Party leaders would take themselves off to their dachas to discuss the progress of the emancipation of the proletariat, our leaders burn huge quantities of carbon fuel building glass-clad office blocks and flying to conferences in Bali to discuss how we might worker harder to, as Alan Johnson simpered, ‘quite literally’ save the planet. London’s mayor and a coterie of 60 fly off Venezuela to blag a load of cheap oil from the people’s president Chavez, for example. Meanwhile Green Ken Livingstone’s version of Pravda, The Londoner, is offering a ‘light bulb amnesty’ to those of us destroying the planet by using a 60-watt Osram in our sitting rooms. An amnesty? Er, sorry, we didn’t know lighting our homes was a criminal offence.
These lightbulbs, anyway, will soon be unavailable in the United Kingdom thanks to Comrade Benn Jr, who is happily forcing us into a half-light paradise reminiscent of Seventies Leningrad.
As we descend into an era of unprecedented political control and a world in which citizens will be rewarded for shopping neighbours who put their empty bottles in the wrong bin, there is one sentence that surely should be writ large in every institution in the land. It comes from the American journalist H.L. Mencken, who wrote 100 years ago: ‘The desire to save mankind is almost always a false front for the desire to rule it.’
Tuesday, 5 February 2008
Let the youth be politically correct
From Compass magazine
In October last year, our primary school children were invited to take part in Walk to School Month. The theme was the ‘local environment, and how walking to school can help create sustainable local communities’.
Walk to School Month is a ratcheting up of that vital part of our children’s education, Walk to School Week, which took place earlier in 2007 and included a leaflet featuring a cartoon foot called Strider, who attacks the ‘evil pollutants’ created by cars that create global warming and will ‘destroy’ your planet. Sure beats maths, doesn’t it?
Our children might not be able to read or write but by golly they will become politically correct citizens.
The erstwhile Education Secretary Alan Johnson, insisted there should be geography lessons that would ensure children learnt about man-made global warming in order to help ‘lock in a culture change that could, quite literally, save the world’. Very New Labour, but quite why he thought this blatant propaganda might work when half the nation’s under-16s are ‘quite literally’ incapable of placing Britain’s major cities on a map – some London children even placing their own homes somewhere in the region of Cardiff – is a mystery.
But when a Secretary of State of Education talks like this, one thing that is certain is that soppy PC sentimentalism is fast replacing academic rigour in our schools.
In June this year a report entitled The Corruption of the Curriculum published by the think-tank Civitas claimed that crucial elements of the school timetable have been dispensed with in favour of trendy subjects. Teaching at state schools has been infused with politically correct dogma.
‘Traditional subject areas have been hijacked to promote fashionable causes such as gender-awareness, the environment and anti-racism,’ it says. ‘Teachers are expected to help achieve the Government’s social goals instead of imparting a body of academic knowledge to their students.’
No sooner was the report published than the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) announced that secondary schools should ditch lessons in academic subjects and replace them with month-long projects in subjects such as global warming. In pilot schemes history, geography and citizenship have been merged.
‘The challenge for schools is to create a nourishing and appetising feast that will sustain learners and meet their needs,’ said the QCA’s curriculum director Mick Waters.
This vapid rhetoric tells you all you need to know about how political correctness is infusing our education system. The challenge for schools, surely, is to teach children to read, write, have a core understanding of scientific principles, be able to develop logical argument, compete in sports, win or lose with good grace and develop the skills to become responsible adults. It is not waffling on about nourishing the needs of ‘learners’.
Nor is it issuing them with a Home Energy Check from Creative Environmental Networks (cen) for mum and dad to fill in, or questionnaires to measure whether primary schools are improving children’s psychological wellbeing, as planned by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. What, pray, might they be asking them: ‘I feel stressed and it’s doing my head in’ please mark from number one to ten, where one is ‘strongly agree’ and ten is ‘strongly disagree’. Or maybe, I’m like, really hassled a) never; b) sometimes; c) often; d) always. Please discount trips to McDonald’s, Legoland or play zones.’
Some staff are not unnaturally exasperated by this nonsense. A petition signed by 130 science teachers protested at the removal of some of the academic content of a science GCSE curriculum because it requires pupils to discuss ‘issues’ such as pollution but not to learn ‘hard science’ such as the periodic table.
What is so disgraceful is that the period of the great one-size fits all comprehensive experiment has been the one where social mobility has been at its lowest. The educated middle class either tutor their children, move house to be near to a school that actually teaches its pupils or pay for their children’s education.
And they might be doing so for some time, if Mick Waters gets his way with timetables built around the ‘needs’ of pupils. ‘The idea is to offer less prescription and more opportunity to interpret the curriculum,’ he says. ‘Cutting across all subjects are curriculum dimensions; a set of themes including creativity, cultural understanding and diversity.’ Not much chance of the periodic table fitting in there, then.
In October last year, our primary school children were invited to take part in Walk to School Month. The theme was the ‘local environment, and how walking to school can help create sustainable local communities’.
Walk to School Month is a ratcheting up of that vital part of our children’s education, Walk to School Week, which took place earlier in 2007 and included a leaflet featuring a cartoon foot called Strider, who attacks the ‘evil pollutants’ created by cars that create global warming and will ‘destroy’ your planet. Sure beats maths, doesn’t it?
Our children might not be able to read or write but by golly they will become politically correct citizens.
The erstwhile Education Secretary Alan Johnson, insisted there should be geography lessons that would ensure children learnt about man-made global warming in order to help ‘lock in a culture change that could, quite literally, save the world’. Very New Labour, but quite why he thought this blatant propaganda might work when half the nation’s under-16s are ‘quite literally’ incapable of placing Britain’s major cities on a map – some London children even placing their own homes somewhere in the region of Cardiff – is a mystery.
But when a Secretary of State of Education talks like this, one thing that is certain is that soppy PC sentimentalism is fast replacing academic rigour in our schools.
In June this year a report entitled The Corruption of the Curriculum published by the think-tank Civitas claimed that crucial elements of the school timetable have been dispensed with in favour of trendy subjects. Teaching at state schools has been infused with politically correct dogma.
‘Traditional subject areas have been hijacked to promote fashionable causes such as gender-awareness, the environment and anti-racism,’ it says. ‘Teachers are expected to help achieve the Government’s social goals instead of imparting a body of academic knowledge to their students.’
No sooner was the report published than the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) announced that secondary schools should ditch lessons in academic subjects and replace them with month-long projects in subjects such as global warming. In pilot schemes history, geography and citizenship have been merged.
‘The challenge for schools is to create a nourishing and appetising feast that will sustain learners and meet their needs,’ said the QCA’s curriculum director Mick Waters.
This vapid rhetoric tells you all you need to know about how political correctness is infusing our education system. The challenge for schools, surely, is to teach children to read, write, have a core understanding of scientific principles, be able to develop logical argument, compete in sports, win or lose with good grace and develop the skills to become responsible adults. It is not waffling on about nourishing the needs of ‘learners’.
Nor is it issuing them with a Home Energy Check from Creative Environmental Networks (cen) for mum and dad to fill in, or questionnaires to measure whether primary schools are improving children’s psychological wellbeing, as planned by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. What, pray, might they be asking them: ‘I feel stressed and it’s doing my head in’ please mark from number one to ten, where one is ‘strongly agree’ and ten is ‘strongly disagree’. Or maybe, I’m like, really hassled a) never; b) sometimes; c) often; d) always. Please discount trips to McDonald’s, Legoland or play zones.’
Some staff are not unnaturally exasperated by this nonsense. A petition signed by 130 science teachers protested at the removal of some of the academic content of a science GCSE curriculum because it requires pupils to discuss ‘issues’ such as pollution but not to learn ‘hard science’ such as the periodic table.
What is so disgraceful is that the period of the great one-size fits all comprehensive experiment has been the one where social mobility has been at its lowest. The educated middle class either tutor their children, move house to be near to a school that actually teaches its pupils or pay for their children’s education.
And they might be doing so for some time, if Mick Waters gets his way with timetables built around the ‘needs’ of pupils. ‘The idea is to offer less prescription and more opportunity to interpret the curriculum,’ he says. ‘Cutting across all subjects are curriculum dimensions; a set of themes including creativity, cultural understanding and diversity.’ Not much chance of the periodic table fitting in there, then.
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