“Almost exactly a year ago The Guardian carried an interview Alistair Darling in which he warned that the economic cataclysm which was just starting to engulf us would be “arguably the worst in 60 years”. How we jeered, how the accusations of gaffe and blunder were hurled at the poor fellow.  We learned that Gordon Brown was infuriated by the Chancellor’s candour - Mr Brown being a politician who has never done candour - and the air was thick with speculation that Darling’s days were numbered. But of course he was right, bang on the money”

avers David Hughes in The Daily Telegraph today.

That is not how I remember it.  I recall that HM Government was playing down how serious an economic mess it had caused, and the Chancellor’s gaffe was to have let the cat out of the bag, rather than to have told us something that neither the Government nor we then knew.  Whilst Darling was right in his assessment of the state of the economy, so was everyone else who predicted that we were in danger of suffering potentially the most serious recession in fifty years, if not a century.

I have noticed how this story of Alistair Darling being an all-seeing prophet concerning the economy has gained ground during the course of the mainstream media’s silly season. Even if the Chancellor had been uniquely prescient as is now (falsely) claimed, he does not deserve any credit in the light of his almost immediate “clarifying” of what he had told The Guardian as reported in the The Daily Telegraph the following day, 31st August 2008.

Not long after assuming power in 1997, the Labour Government changed the method of calculating unemployment such that a significant proportion of unemployed people were hidden from the official figures (designating a large number of individuals as long term sick rather than unemployed, being one device).  By this means, the Labour Government was always able to compare favourably their jobless figures with those of the proceeding Conservative administrations.

Today the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported that the number of households with no one over the age of sixteen years old working has increased by two hundred and forty thousand over the past year to a total of 3.3 million. Furthermore, the ONS recorded that the number of working-age people in workless households rose to 4.8 million in the year to June 2009.

Put like that, it doesn’t look good, does it?

“The reality is people are bored with it.  Even at Channel 4 the vibe among staff is that if you like Big Brother you're not cool.”

Big Brother “to be scrapped”

“The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one’s whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved.  And when such a narrowly conceived freedom is made the touchstone of public policy, a dissolution of society is bound to follow.  No culture that makes publicly sanctioned self-indulgence its highest good can long survive: a radical egotism is bound to ensue, in which any limitations upon personal behaviour are experienced as infringements of basic rights. Distinctions between the important and the trivial, between the freedom to criticize received ideas and the freedom to take LSD, are precisely the standards that keep societies from barbarism.”

Theodore Dalrymple

“There are some brave folk who suggest that Britain will experience a sharp V-shaped recovery and the economy will grow buoyantly next year. But this is not credible. This recession is unique in terms of its combination of difficulties. In addition to the prospect of sharp tax increases and/or tough public spending constraints, the continuing impairment of the banking system and the restrictions on bank lending will, at the very minimum, act as a drag on recovery.”

Ruth Lea

Following developments this week, once again there is great wailing and gnashing of teeth concerning the purportedly low conviction rates for rape.  Now it is the turn of Janice Turner to wring her hands in despair and lament the denial of justice to rape victims.

The fundamental point frequently glossed over is that in many trials the entirety of the evidence does not assist the jury in reaching a verdict of guilty. It is this inability or refusal to confront the crux of the issue that prevents progress being made whereby the truly guilty can be convicted and punished appropriately.  In a significant number of cases, too often the prosecution case simple recites facts that would apply to any “courtship” taking place daily, up and down the country but where in the case before the Court, some four-fifths of the way through the ritual that would in almost every other case have led to consensual sexual intercourse, something went awry.  It is not a simple problem of it being one person’s word against another’s.  I have met women who have been raped in a social or “dating” situation.  Having known each woman for some time, I had no doubt in accepting as true what they had told me, but how is a jury to make such a determination of veracity, having met the victim only once upon the occasion of her giving evidence from the witness box? Is it so surprising that jurors err on the side of caution, particularly given the burden of proof borne by the Crown?

The “something must be done” campaigners have rarely had the benefit of sitting through numerous trials where having listened to the Crown’s evidence, it has become impossible to dismiss the thought that “something doesn’t add up here”. You have to be involved in a trial and listen dispassionately to the evidence before you can understand how a doubt about a defendant’s guilt can creep into a juror’s mind.  In those cases where the mating ritual has proceeded to that final stage, the reason for it coming to an abrupt halt must be plausible.   Perhaps fearing the loss of the Court’s sympathy (or more importantly that of the Police) in some such cases for instance, victims omit evidence that explains their behaviour and makes the Crown’s case truly complete.

In reality, a low rape conviction rate is little to do with juries having prejudices about how a woman should or should not behave.  Juries are not packed with individuals who were born before sex was invented in 1963.  Most have “been there, done that” and any curio from a bygone age would be put right, quickly. Tinkering by way of “re-educating” juries must just as surely lead to miscarriages of justice as would rigging the rules of evidence.

Whilst some inaccuracies in films are understandable, for example there were two bridges at Arnhem but just a road bridge in A Bridge Too Far and others are pure Robin Hood style fiction from start to finish (such as Braveheart, The Patriot and Gallipoli) it is always disturbing when falsehoods are unnecessary to the plot, such as Lord Burghley’s (formerly Sir William Cecil) political demise in Shekhar Kapur's 1998 film Elizabeth.  Why do cinema and TV film script writers do it?  What purpose does it serve?

Hollywood’s distortion of the truth

Under the headline,

“Almost 400 dentists earn more than £300,000 a year, NHS figures reveal”,

explains The Times,

“Almost 400 dentists working in England and Wales earn more than £300,000 a year, according to the latest pay and expenses figures.

 

Data released by the NHS Information Centre showed that 6 per cent of the 19,000 dentists earned a taxable income of more than £200,000 last year. Of these 1,172 dentists, 392 were in the top bracket of at least £300,000.”

The Times report continues,

“In England average salaries were calculated at £126,527, once average expenses of £218,843 for building hire, staff and other running costs were deducted. Dentists without a contract with the local primary care trust or health board earned £66,259 on average.”

 According to the NHS Information Centre in its report Dental Earnings and Expenses, England and Wales, 2007/08 published on 4^th August 2009 and referred to by The Times,

“As is to be expected, [the tables] show that average gross earnings, expenses and taxable income increased [as dentists] increased the average time per week they devoted to dentistry.”

and

“For all self-employed primary care dentists, taxable income for those dentists who worked an average of more than 45 hours per week was £147,283, compared to £69,330 for those who worked an average of less than 35 hours.”

The really useful information disclosed by this NHS report shows that depending upon the number of hours worked, the average dentist’s taxable income varied between £69,330 and £147,283.  These figures are not excessive given the professional qualifications that have to be secured by an individual in order to practise as a dentist and the number of hours worked by those earning the highest income.

Undoubtedly some people will be outraged that a very small percentage of dentists earn so much money, but the NHS report is hardly evidence of an overpaid profession.

“A comparison of the incomes of public figures between half a century ago and now is instructive. In 1958 the salaries of the prime minister, the lord chief justice and the director general of the BBC were easy to remember as they were all the same, £10,000 a year. Last year the prime minister was paid £189,994, the lord chief justice £236,300 – and the director general £816,000 (plus bonuses).

There are now at least 47 BBC executives paid more than the prime minister. Everyone who works in the media has heard the stories about people retiring early from the BBC with personal pension pots of anything between £4m and £8m, and the their expenses must have impressed even MPs adept at claiming for champagne flutes or "flipping" residences.”

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Much has been made of the BBC practising ageism by dispatching older females from its programmes, only to replace them with “younger models”.  Notwithstanding the glaring clues, the point overlooked is that the BBC’s core objective is to ditch its audience.  In the main, particularly on a Saturday night, the BBC’s light entertainment audience is largely middle aged or older, with conservative tastes.

As reports  The Daily Mail,

 “BBC insiders have revealed that Strictly Come Dancing is undergoing an overhaul before the next series, to give it a ‘sexier’ feel and attract a younger audience” (my italics).

What more needs to be said?

“A publicly funded exhibition is encouraging people to deface the Bible in the name of art — and visitors have responded with abuse and obscenity”

reported The Times on 23rd July 2009.

 The exhibition, Made in God’s Image, at Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art, is part of the Sh(out) project, which we are told, aims to celebrate and raise awareness of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people.  The work Untitled 2009, by the Rev Jane Clarke of the Metropolitan Community Church, a Church that celebrates “racial, cultural, linguistic, sexual, gender and theological diversity”, urged the public to “write themselves in” to the Bible if they felt excluded.  Perhaps predictably considering the target audience of the exhibition, some of the comments written into the Bible were not entirely thought provoking or uplifting.

Rev Clarke made it plain that she regretted the insults that had appeared.  This has not prevented Mark O’Neill, the Director of Art and Museums at Culture and Sport Glasgow, lambasting critics of the Bible exhibit as being motivated by an opposition to homosexuality and “[trying] to divert attention from the issue that the artwork aims to highlight: how religion marginalises homosexuals.”  Adds Mr O’Neill,

“If they want to condemn homosexuals, that’s up to them but using the Gallery of Modern Art as a vehicle for that condemnation, I don’t think is legitimate.”

Or perhaps Christians just don’t like their holy book being so deliberately and provocatively defaced no matter who is the perpetrator, Mr O’Neill.

 The Sunday Times

“The government has promised it will ensure the hacker facing extradition to the US would serve any prison sentence in the UK amid a deepening row over whether it has legal power to stop the transfer”

reports The Times.

How can the Government ensure anything of the sort?  All it can ask of the Americans is “pretty please”.  This is nothing more than a ploy by Labour’s Deputy Leader Harriet Harman to avoid acute political embarrassment of the Government’s own making. This sleight of hand should be seen for what it is, not only an attempt to avoid the heat but, given that Mr McKinnon's matter might not be resolved one way or the other until well into next year, also to ensure that any fall-out occurs on someone else’s watch – the Conservative Government’s.

“One of the characteristics of those most determined on assisted suicides is that they are powerful personalities used to exercising total control — the polar opposite of those who would be the most likely victims of their campaign, were it to succeed. Purdy is quite typical, described in The Guardian as “a self-confessed adrenaline junkie who had revelled in travelling the world diving from planes, conquering mountains, trekking through jungles and exploring the depths of the oceans”.

You can see why such a personality cannot bear to contemplate the complete loss of control that her condition might impose. Debbie Purdy is, in so many ways, an admirable woman. Yet when I saw her declare last Thursday, “I feel like I have my life back”, my stomach heaved. It is a sick society that regards assisted suicide as an affirmation of life.”

Dominic Lawson

Notwithstanding Daniel Hannan’s ruthlessly effective debunking of the “progressive” media’s recent attempts to smear Michal Kaminski, the Polish head of the new Eurosceptic Conservative and Reformist (ECR) bloc in the current European Parliament, The Daily Telegraph is seeking to breath life into the proverbial flogged dead horse.

Given that the Conservatives have contributed to the formation of an effective Eurosceptic bloc in the European Parliament, one might have thought that the rabidly Europhobic Telegraph would have been ecstatic but patently not, given sympathetic reports it has published concerning the European Union appreciative, former Conservative MEP, Mr McMillan-Scott’s criticism of the much maligned Mr Kaminski.

The Telegraph's thin veneer of columnists and commentators of moderate conservative persuasion  is insufficient to hide the fact that it has long since given up any pretence of being a newspaper which broadly supports the Conservative Party. For too long, too often the slant of reporting is indistinguishable from that of the BBC or The Guardian.  I have never subscribed to the Telegraph, ironically because in the past I had considered it to be “too Tory”.  Thus I am now denied the considerable delight of cancelling any subscription.