Global Warming Alarmism: Politics not Science

Sanity breaks out in Britain every once in a while, which just highlights how crazy the society as a whole has become. In the following story in the Times of London the Advertising Standards Authority has banned several ads created by the Labour government that attempt to scare the population over a non-scientifically proven global warming threat.

"TWO government advertisements that use nursery rhymes to warn people of the dangers of climate change have been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for exaggerating the potential harm.

The adverts, commissioned by Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, used the rhymes to suggest that Britain faces an inevitable increase in storms, floods and heat waves unless greenhouse gas emissions are brought under control.

The ASA has ruled that the claims made in the newspaper adverts were not supported by solid science and has told the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) that they should not be published again.

It has also referred a television commercial to the broadcast regulator, Ofcom, for potentially breaching a prohibition on political advertising."

Read the rest here. Here is the ad:

I have some sympathy for portraying AGW as a nursery rhyme, but that of course was not the government's intent. The story specifically asserts Advertising Standards Association was concerned that the public would take a political agenda as scientific fact. Ed Milibrand and the Labour Party can't, apparently, tell the difference. How long is it until the election again?

Anti-Christian Legislation Defeated by the House of Lords: Long Live the Aristocracy!

Last night the British House of Lords demonstrated why it deserves to exist as an institution separate from the House of Commons by defeating (by a vote of 216-178) the most outrageous provisions of the monstrous "Equality Bill," which would be more appropriately entitled "The Government Take Over of Churches and Secuarization Act." See the story in the Daily Telegraph here.

Gerald Warner on his blog at the Daily Telegraph site explains in a post entitled: "Equalities Bill: Church leaders defeat Government over gay staff"

"Last night’s defeat by the House of Lords of the aggressively anti-Christian provisions in Harriet Harman’s Equality Bill should not be allowed to gloss over the malevolent intent of the House of Commons in promoting this legislation. The impertinently intrusive provisions of the Bill demonstrated that the state has acquired pretensions far beyond its legitimate scope and urgently requires to be cut down to size.

The Bill attempted to force churches to employ people even if they do not lead lives consistent with the teachings of the Christian faith. On a narrow interpretation the Bill could even have compelled the Catholic Church to ordain women as priests. The Bill’s supporters want churches to employ homosexuals and transsexuals. The theology of the Catholic Church condemns homosexual practices as one of the Four Sins Crying to Heaven for Vengeance and, as with any other mortal sin, teaches that those who die unrepentant face damnation.

By what conceivable logic could that same Church be expected knowingly to employ people committed to such conduct? As Baroness O’Cathain asked in the Lords debate: “How would a rape crisis centre operate if it was forced to employ male counsellors? This is the state trying to tell people who they can and can’t employ.” That is the nub of the matter and it goes far beyond religious issues: the increasingly totalitarian tide of intrusive state control must be rolled back.

The early draft of the Harman Bill illustrated the infatuated self-conceit of its sponsors, by attempting to impose female ordination upon the Catholic Church. In Catholic theology the priest, during the Mass, acts in persona Christi at the moment of consecration; that is to say, he takes on the personality of Christ who, in his human nature, is male. The Church, as infallibly confirmed by John Paul II, does not possess the power to ordain women. Nor can that power be conferred on it by the House of Commons.

There is something comically pathetic about the pygmy Parliament on the Thames, now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Brussels, attempting to interfere in such spiritual matters. And look at who these people are who attempt to reconfigure the morality of Christian churches: MPs are seen as a bunch of thieves who have robbed the country blind. Many of them are leaving Parliament to avoid paying back illicit expenses or because they cannot live under a more regulated regime that imposes on them the financial morality commonplace in other institutions.

. . . snip . . .

It is not just Christians who are harassed by the control freakery of Parliament. It is a serious threat to democracy as we have known it. To paraphrase a famous parliamentary resolution of 1780, “the power of the Commons has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished”. Whether that diminution is implemented by a new Bill of Rights or some other device, our traditional liberties require that this encroaching tyranny be curtailed."

Warner is right and he does not overstate the case one iota by portraying it as an attack on Christianity by the Labor government. The sooner the election is held the sooner Britain can breath free again. More cheerful news today came from a Social Attitudes Study showing that the people of the UK (as opposed to their political masters) are shifting to the right. Janet Daley summarizes:

"The study shows that a majority of people now believe that the poor should take more responsibility for looking after themselves, and that taxation should not be increased – significantly, not even in order to raise spending on services such as health and education. Only one in five now think that unemployment benefits are too low (compared with nearly 54 per cent in 1994). Suppport for wealth redistribution even among Labour voters has dropped from two thirds to less than half. In other words, twelve years of Labour government have tested to destruction the idea that all social problems can be solved by government seizing a higher and higher proportion of people’s earnings either to fund state-run services or to provide income for those who are not working."

There is no doubt that the Leftist agenda has been given a good try over the past 13 years in the UK and it is clear now that NuLabor is an awful lot like old labor only with less morality and more hostility to Christianity. Now if Dave Cameron would only catch up to the people and start acting like a principled conservative, rather than a mere politician.

Hopefully, better days are ahead for the mother of Parliaments and the longsuffering British people. We need to pray for a revival of faith in Britain, which is the only hope for a country tormented by atheists and a paternalistic, bureaucratic, managerial state.

The UK's Labour Party Tries to Portray Itself as "Familly-Friendly"

In a move that is as cynical as Adolph Hitler suddenly announcing in early 1945 that "some of my best friends are Jews," the UK's Labour government has attempted to spin on a dime with regard to its policy on marriage and family. The Telegraph's Will Heaven reports:

"Since the launch of Webcameron, when the David Cameron allowed a “homemade” video of himself to be broadcast online, the Conservative leader has made it clear that the Tories are the party for families, and that they back marriage. In a speech in March at the Welsh Conservative Conference, he affirmed this, saying: “We want to see a more responsible society, where people behave in a decent and civilised way, where they understand their obligations to others, to their neighbours, to their country. And above all, to their family. Families are the most important institution in our society. We have to do everything in our power to strengthen them.”

Now Labour, recognising the success of this idea, are to publish a green paper in January supporting wedlock and conceding that children fare better when parents stay together. “In the past I think our family policy was all about children. I think our family policy now is actually about the strength of the adult relationships and that is important for the progress of the children,” Ed Balls told the Sunday Times."

Now I trust that readers of this blog will not be surprised that I refuse to be taken in by such blatant posturing and one can only hope that voters in the UK will realize that a death bed "conversion" based on polling numbers is no substitute for a government that actually will implement policies to enhance the institution of marriage. It doesn't take a political Einstein to know that handing out condoms to 12 year old boys in school are not the kind of policies that strengthen marriages or families.

Even the Times of London exhibits a skeptical tone with regard to what it labels in its headline as "Labour's U-Turn on Love and Marriage Ahead of Election"

"Gordon Brown is preparing to pitch Labour as the party of marriage and the family in an audacious bid for core Tory votes.

In a shift in strategy ahead of the general election, the government is abandoning its long-standing ambivalence towards wedlock, conceding that children fare better if their parents are together. A green paper to be published in January will outline new measures to shore up “stable parental relationships”.

Labour’s 11th-hour acknowledgment of the importance of marriage has been derided by the Conservatives, who accuse the government of ignoring evidence about the benefits for the past decade. The Tories are preparing their own green paper on promoting family units, setting the scene for an election battle for the parental vote.

Since 1997 Labour has directed resources at children rather than their parents, fearing voters would see attempts to shore up the declining traditional family unit as discriminatory or judgmental."

I wouldn't call it so much audacious as laughable. But note the final sentence where Labour's excuse for undermining traditional marriage is said to be that it did not want to appear "discriminatory" or "judgmental." How can you be discriminatory for strengthening the family? Who are you discriminating against? Who is potentially being judged? Adulterers, promiscuous individualists who abandon children, swingers? Why not judge such people? What kind of failure of moral nerve causes a person to be hesitant to say that marriage is good and that children deserve to be raised by their biological parents? Tradition, the accumulated experience of the human race, and social scientific studies agree that children thrive in intact families but suffer in broken families.

If Labour has largely abandoned economic Marxist ideology, it has yet to depart from cultural Marxism and its anti-family bias. This is what drives Labour policy and no green paper produced in a hurry just before the Spring election can paper over the evil, anti-family policies and biases of this government. One hopes that the voters treat this tactical maneuver with the disdain it rightly inspires.

The Drive to Abolish Childhood in the UK

From the UK, news that the government is imposing sex education on children as young as 7 years old. Gerald Warner, in his blog at the Daily Telegraph, has a trenchant analysis of the never-ending drive of the Labour government to abolish Christian morals and entrench an ethic that holds promiscuity as the highest good in the UK. He begins:

"The drive to abolish childhood continues apace. The government is ordering “sex education” to be imposed on primary school children from as young as five. The premature sexualisation of children and the encouragement of prurient interest in sexual matters at a tender age has already provoked increasing numbers of underage pregnancies (which the hypocrites enforcing this degenerate agenda claim it is designed to reduce), but still the fanatics persist in destroying what little remains of childhood innocence in this decadent age.

While anti-paedophile hysteria prevents a mother from pushing her own child on a swing in a playground without undergoing criminal record checks, the most widespread child abuse in this country is being perpetrated by the government."

This is indeed systematic, institutionalized child abuse. But he is just getting warmed up. He notes the anti-Christian arrogance:

"A further aggression against conscience is the imposition on faith schools of a duty to teach this rebarbative curriculum. The cosmetic concession is that they may do so within the “tenets of their faith”; but they must impart the factual information on contraception, homosexuality, etc. So, are Catholic schools supposed to say to pupils: “Contraception is a mortal sin. Now, here are the methods and how to employ them…” or “The Church condemns sodomy as one of the Four Sins Crying to Heaven for Vengeance, but in case you are interested, here’s the deal…”?"

And why is the government doing this? Warner calls a spade a spade:

"If that seems insane, it is in fact simply a cynical method of enforcing anti-Christian values on faith schools. It will be interesting, however, to see how the government sets about the enforcement of such teaching in the more robust environment of Muslim schools. Suddenly, it’s fatwah time for New Labour…

This New Labour government has been the most virulently anti-family, anti-Judaeo-Christian ethic administration in British history. It has unravelled the whole fabric of society with its anti-family crusade. In this it betrays its Frankfurt School of Marxism agenda, which it shares with the EU. Compulsory sex education was always a major plank in the Frankfurt School’s programme."

As if the government bureaucrats and their political masters had the guts to try and impose this on Muslim schools. They won't. They wouldn't dare. The hypocrisy is breath-taking. They are doing this to Christians just because they calculate that Christians can be bullied and won't fight back - even at the ballot box.

Well, it is time for parents to rise up against the arrogant, child-abusing, Marxists and throw them out. Past time. Way past time. Memo to the formerly free people of the UK: no state will allow you to have freedom; you have to take it. .

The Labour Party: A Preview of the Democratic Party's Coming Collapse?

Rod Dreher has a useful analysis of the election of two British National Party candidates in the recent UK European Parliament elections here. A snippet:

"Lots of pearls-clutching in the UK right now over the election the other day of two members of the far-right British National Party to the European parliament. The BNP drew its support not from disaffected Tory voters, but from working-class voters who are fed up with Labour, which typically won their votes. Neil Clark reflects on why this happened, and how the middle-class left's obsession with cultural leftism, at the expense of economic leftism, is costing them plenty."

One problem here: the British National Party is not a "far-right" party unless this is meant in the sense that the far right and far left actually meet. Actually, the BNP is a leftist party with many characteristics of fascism. But fascism is not a conservative phenomenon, but a leftist one (National Socialism, remember?). So drawing support from Labour is a natural development for the BNP.

What I wanted to draw attention to is the point that the roots of working-class alienation from center-left parties like Labour is rooted in the obsession with cultural leftism rather than economic leftism. Homosexual rights, abortion on demand and fighting restrictions on pornography are not the highest priorities for many working people. The Democratic Party's recent victory depended heavily on its cultivation of libertarian and capitalist voters who want the left to win the culture wars. In this sense, the Democratic Party's traditional economic leftist convictions are in an uneasy alliance with right wingers who rightly, I think, see the cultural left issues as dominant in today's Democratic Party.

The danger for the Democratic Party is that if blue collar workers come to believe that the Democratic Party does not represent either their (leftist) economic interests or their (traditional) social concerns, then they may well see no point in continuing to support it. This may already be happening to the Labour Party in Britain and if the Democrats want a glimpse of their future, they might want to keep an eye on Gordon Brown's sinking ship. Are there really enough Hollywood liberal and East Coast elite votes to keep the Democrats in power? I don't think so.

Edubabble in Action

The Times of London reports that the language of managerial bureaucracy and corporatism is infiltrating the British school system in an article entitled: "Edubabble is turning British schoolchildren into customers." If you understand this sentence, then you might be a bureaucrat in the ministry for the management of learning outcomes and social engineering: "Performativity is forcing curriculum deliverers to focus on desired outputs among customers in managed learning environments." All over Britain, apparently, little boy and girls, when asked "what do you want to be when you grow up?" now reply "A curriculum deliverer in a managed learning environment."

The article goes on to say that,

"Edu-babble has become so common that it earns censure today in a review of education led by professors at the University of Oxford. Their report criticises the “Orwellian language seeping through government documents of performance management and control that has come to dominate educational deliberation and planning”."

The report also blames (surprise!) the government:

"It claims that ministers’ micro-management of schools and colleges has resulted in a narrow curriculum, teaching to the test, and a high number of disaffected teenagers not in education, employment or training.

The report says: “The increased central control of education brings with it the need for a management perspective, and language of performance management — for example, levers and drivers of change, and public service agreements as a basis of funding. The consumer or client replaces the learner. The curriculum is delivered. Stakeholders shape the aims. Aims are spelt out in terms of targets. Audits measure success defined in terms of hitting targets. Cuts in resources are euphemistically called ‘efficiency gains’. Education becomes that package of activities (or inputs) largely determined by government.”

It adds: “As the language of performance and management has advanced, so we have lost a language of education which recognises the intrinsic value of pursuing certain sorts of questions, of trying to make sense of reality, of seeking understanding, of exploring through literature and the arts what it means to be human.” "

It is noteworthy that it is the party of socialism, not the party of capitalism, which is responsible for introducing the language of business enterprises into schools, where it has no business being.

In a related story, Boys to Get Credit Cards for Condoms, The Times describes the latest scheme hatched by the managers of schools, uh, er, managed learning environments, to increase sexual activity among children. Boys as young as 12 will be given "credit cards" that can be used to pick up condoms at barber shops, football grounds and scout huts so they can be spared the embarassment of buying them in a drugstore. And if you can imagine the backward and pessimestic thinking of some people, we are told that:

" . . . critics believe it will encourage children to be sexually active from a younger age."

How cynical can you be? I mean, just because . . .

"Britain has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe and the government has failed in its pledge to halve rates of pregnancy in girls under the age of 18."

One supposes that in the Orwellian world of Labour Party social engineering masquarading as education the encouragement of schoolchildren to engage in recreational sex would be described as "mitigating the consequences of pleasure seeking" and sleeping around would be "experimenting with novel social interactions." Oh, and in this parallel universe, raising the teen pregnancy rate is known as "cutting it in half."

Labour's motto: If what has been done for the past 12 years has failed spectacularly, do more of it more diligently. As Gordon Brown and the Labour Party implode, one can only hope that the next election will destroy the party completely once and for all. That would be a "desired outcome" to be fervently desired, along with the ending of centralized government control of education.

After the Labour Party Debacle: Picking up the Pieces in the UK

Here is a terrific article from the British magazine The Standpoint entitled "Brown's Britain is Bankrupt." It is actually a conversation featuring Labour backbencher Frank Field and political philosopher Jeremy Jennings and moderated by Daniel Johnson. Frank Field was elected in 1979 and he became a member of Tony Blair's first cabinet, only to end up resigning in frustration. (He must have been doing something right!) He has since become a prominent critic of New Labour from the backbenches and has been continuously re-elected.

The reason the article is so exciting is the obviously conservative (not neo-conservative) ideas that Field enunciates. He talks about the Victorian age postively because of its emphasis on rearing children well. He dissects the horrendus "Equality Bill" that is currently being considered. He talks about reducing the size of government and allowing for more personal responsibility and the development of civil society. He actually thinks it might be a better society if more people went to church. (Radical thinking indeed!) He is a kind of socialist, but one who seems to be able to name and critique most of the weaknesses of contemparary leftist politics.

Here is a tidbit from Field to whet your appetite:

"Two things are happening when looking in the mirror. One is we've looked in it and it's all pretty shocking, because I think probably lots of people hadn't realised how representative the House of Commons was of the outside world. Therefore, we have shattered what was all part of this: that people in public life aspired to it, somehow their characters were ones we looked up to. And I don't think after the last few weeks that they could say that.

It does come back to what I think is the central problem we have as a society, that somehow if we on the centre-Left raise character, that we were somehow trying to promote a moral means test, so that we could fail people. Instead of thinking that this was the great engine force which changed Victorian into Edwardian England, into Georgian England — something glorious — there was then a backlash against it, and everything was going to be mechanical. And of course we can change the laws with MPs and with bankers, and of course we can enforce them and put them under the criminal code. But all of that is a glorious demonstration of failure, isn't it? You want people to have freedom and behave properly, and have a sense of order about their life and know what their duties are. That's what's so shocking about the last 18 months, isn't it?"

It is food for thought. Read it and think about how great it will be when New Labour is finally defeated and the UK has a chance at recovering from the nightmare of Blair-Brown and their clumsy and heavy-handed attempts at social engineering.