Civitas Blog

This blog last Thursday wrote about whether or not the government was pushing the public health agenda too far without proper debate on the implications for civil liberty. Apparently, this doesn’t seem to matter a jot to the Department of Health.

Last Friday, Gordon Brown’s latest attempt to appear at “getting on with the job of running the country” saw him reshuffle EU Trade Commissioner, Peter Mandelson, back into the UK cabinet.

At last week’s Tory party conference, shadow education secretary Michael Gove committed his party upon their return to power to restoring the teaching of narrative British history in schools. He reportedly said:

‘Instead of being taught about the Magna Carta the Glorious Revolution and the heroic role of the Royal navy in putting down slavery, our children are [now] either taught to put Britain in the dock or they remain in ignorance of our island story, That is morally wrong, culturally self-defeating – and we would put it right.’

The Conservatives' plan to encourage social entrepreneurs, charities and parents' co-operatives to establish new schools in our poorer areas is a promising idea that deserves the praise it has been getting.

But it has a potentially fatal flaw that could undermine any advantages it might bring. Above all, the new Tory academies lack the independence necessary to defy an interfering central government.

Continue at the Daily Telegraph Blog.

Many conservative leaders are in a quandary about the financial crisis. They approve of de-regulated markets but these selfsame institutions seem to be in need of regulation. Many people in the financial services industry have behaved without regard to the good of others and even without reference to the interests of their own companies. Their conduct has been so self-centred that the most stalwart defenders of a market economy have been embarrassed. Indeed some of the most trenchant criticism has come from enthusiasts for the market.

Open Europe, the independent think tank backed by some of the UK’s leading business people, has produced the first independent report estimating of the cost and wider effects of the EU’s new package of climate change measures, currently still under negotiation.

Last month, Britain’s biggest examinations board AQA decided to drop a popular poem from its GCSE syllabus written by Scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy.

Entitled ‘Education for Leisure’, the poem takes the form of a stream of consciousness account of the thoughts and increasingly violent deeds of a bored and alienated unemployed teenager while he languishes at home, immediately before picking up a bread-knife to go out and commit an act of gratuitous violence.

Explaining his board's decision to drop the poem, AQA's director-general Mike Cresswell said that it had been taken out of ‘concerns about the topic of the poem in the light of the current climate surrounding knife crime’. A spokeswoman for AQA has added that: ‘the decision was not taken lightly and only after due consideration of the issues involved.’

Exactly what are those issues?

Defenders of a society based on a liberal political culture and a market economy have often disagreed over the best way to handle drug taking. One of the great champions of free markets Milton Friedman was famously in favour of legalisation. Others favour strict control. This week the Home Secretary announced that cannabis is to be reclassified as a class B drug, instead of class C. Simultaneously she proposed a measured approach to enforcement. A first offence of cannabis possession would lead to a warning, a second to a fixed penalty fine of £80, and a third to arrest.

What should we do? Continue at the Telegraph blog.

The Annual Health Check of NHS organisations, released today by the Healthcare Commission, presents a picture fit for the NHS’ 60th birthday bash earlier in the year. Sixty-two per cent of organisations are now rated ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ on quality of services, up from 41 per cent two years ago, and those rated ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ on use of resources are up a fantastic 45 percentage points to 61 per cent. Can we then pop open the champagne?

"Family structure doesn't matter," is a favourite Labour mantra. The government's keenness to distance itself from confused Tory "family ideals" is understandable, and on the basis of equality, in principle more appealing. There is a problem with Labour's "diversity" embracing position, however, and that is that it's inadvertently also embracing deprivation.

Continued at Comment is Free

A report published by the independent Brussels-based think tank the Thomas More Institute for European Studies examines the performance of the French Presidency of the EU Council so far, assessing its contribution to the long term development of EU policy. The Presidency, which started in July this year and will end on 31st December, scored 11.5 out of 20 possible marks for its mid-term performance, writes Judith Gollata.

According to recent newspaper reports, philosophy is currently being taught in primary-schools to children as young as eight years.

Since that subject does not have the widest application in the marketplace, one cannot help but admire the enterprise a philosophy graduate has shown by persuading several primary schools to use the services of his company to bring it to their classrooms. From reports of what it is purveying, however, one cannot also help but wonder whether the company might not be in breach of the Trade Descriptions Act. For whatever is being purveyed, and however worthwhile its purveyance might be, philosophy it surely is not.

‘The number of people who will die as a result of diabetes is forecast to rise from one in ten to one in seven in less than 20 years unless obesity rates can be reduced significantly. Costs to the NHS of treating the disease are expected to rise by a third by 2025 as the number of people suffering from diabetes reaches a record level. The figure is forecast to rise to £12 billion, before inflation, by 2025,’ says Diabetes UK. All true; it fact, if the NHS’ current productivity trends are to continue, it will probably be worse....unless, of course, we start working in a completely different way.

A variation on the usual theme, the pantomime over ‘dumbed down’ standards between ministers and critics was this week played out in higher education. In a similar vein to what the government like to condemn as the ‘annual carping’ around rising school exam grades, the rising number of first-class and 2:1 undergraduate degrees is being attributed to ‘inflation’ rather than improvement. However as in this instance it is those actually marking the papers who are the critics, it’s a little more difficult for the government to refute.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, the new Defence Secretary, John Hutton, has backed the creation of a European fighting force, writes Judith Gollata,

This coming Sunday sees the start in the Cornish town of St Just of a two-day festival that takes place there each year to celebrate its fourteenth century church. As well as that church and an obligatory public house that stands next door to it, the town also boasts a small secondary school catering for several hundred local children who traditionally have been given the Monday off to join in the festivities.

When she joined it from London earlier this year, the school’s new head Jackie Steele decided that henceforth it would remain open on these Mondays.

The Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) - the framework that offers GPs financial incentives for meeting certain standards of care - has been accredited with improving clinical quality across general practice and cutting health inequalities for certain core diseases. But, as ever, we should be concerned with unintended consequences.

Continued at bmj.com.

Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), an organisation armed to the teeth with legal powers to protect groups that claim to be victims of oppression, recently expressed fears that the recession will not only harm ethnic minorities but also some white people.

"It is clear," he said, "that what defines disadvantage won't be black or brown, it will be white. And we will have to take positive action to help some white groups".

Was he saying that we should help people when they need assistance, regardless of their colour? If so, he was spot on.

Continue at the Daily Telegraph Blog.

‘Schools hit by more “ministerial fiddling” than any other public sector’ reports the Times Educational Supplement (TES) today. Reporting the findings of a recent parliamentary committee, the TES reveals that in just a single year, schools were on the receiving end of 135 new curriculum regulations.