Posts Tagged charity
National Trust goes green
Posted by Nick Cowen in British History on 25/07/2007
The National Trust is to celebrate reaching a 3.5 million-membership landmark by changing its focus. No longer will it just look after the buildings and artefacts that constitute our national heritage. Now it will “advise people how to adapt their lifestyles to climate change and challenge government to be more ecologically aware.” How is it beginning? By throwing its weight behind opposition against the expansion of Stansted airport.
As it so happens, there are a number of simple things that the National Trust could initiate in order to reduce its own ‘carbon footprint’, if indeed that is to be considered a genuine priority. The most obvious would be to eliminate the farming of animals on all its land. Since, according to the currently popular theory of anthropogenic climate change, world meat consumption is a large contributor to global warming, this would mean the National Trust would reduce its own contribution to climate change and be taking a principled stand for other landowners to follow. Indeed, they could set aside their land not for carbon inefficient British agriculture but to grow more forests to act as carbon sinks. Whether the National Trust will commit do doing this remains to be seen.
Manufacturing Concern
Posted by Nick Cowen in Civil Liberty, Crime, Health on 02/05/2007
Last week, Alcohol Concern, ‘the National Agency on Alcohol Misuse’, managed to generate a significant amount of media coverage with its recommendation to ‘make it illegal to provide alcohol to anyone under the age of 15.’ The reasoning behind this was that since unsupervised consumption of alcohol is spiralling, along with associated anti-social behaviour, among young people, the natural solution is to imprison parents who offer a thimble of wine to their child at the dinner table.
When faced with that as a consequence of their proposal on the BBC’s Today programme, Alcohol Concern’s spokesperson argued that the change in the law was still necessary in order to ‘send a message’. I am not sure what sort of message about this society would be sent out if Jewish Passover services (where every family member is encouraged to drink a traditional sweet red wine throughout the evening) were raided by the police, but I doubt the delinquents in town centres will see the relevance to them. The alternative ‘message’, that such laws won’t be enforced to the letter so best to work out one’s own interpretation of justice would be the likely unintended consequence.
Social Trends
Posted by Nick Cowen in Education, Family, Marriage and the Culture on 11/04/2007
The Office of National Statistics’ release of the latest Social Trends report has brought the issues facing Britain about which we are most concerned into sharp relief. David Green was interviewed on Radio 4’s Today program this morning on the consequences of increasing lone parents (listen again here).
Robert Whelan was interviewed by the Daily Mail, commenting on several problems that the social trends report highlights. He also commented on the dangerous trend, sanctioned by the government, of treating poor pupil behaviour differently according to their ethnic background. Minority children over the years have gone from feeling the stings of racism to experiencing the patronising stereotypes of so-called ‘anti-racism’. All without even the brief respite of being judged equally as peers regardless of the colour of their skin or religious background.
And finally, Nick Seddon has an article published in the Guardian on local government leisure trusts and their misuse of charitable status to redirect funds from the voluntary sector into providing statutory services.