Today at Communities Committee…

…we had a report on Lancashire County Council’s funding of the “Voluntary, Community and Faith Sector”, which sounds a bit humdrum until you realise that it’s £38 million of your money every year, and that while some of it is well managed and we’re clear what we’re getting for it, we’re not able to say that about all of it – and only now do we have a database of who is getting what, so that we can begin to find who is being funded multiple times from different bits of the Council.
So I asked about whether we could pick out how much the “faith” sector got, and how each religion was doing in attracting the cash, but no, we can’t. My reason for asking the question is that once in my day job I had the fun task of distributing money to groups that could divert kids from troublemaking during the school holidays. In amongst the various ways we did that were projects with three groups, one Hindu, one Muslim and on Christian. I had no questions from the funding source about any of these groups, except the Christian one, who were required to ensure that all sorts of people could access the equipment the money bought. And I had no problem getting police involvement with any of the groups, except the Christian one, as the local bobby wasn’t fond of the church. Consequently I have suspicions that Christian groups may not face a level playing field on public funding, in addition to a general liberal secular bias against all faith groups.
Anyway, I wasn’t happy that we just breeze over 5% of the Council’s budget in a morning without ensuring it was spent right, and fortunately the rest of the Committee concurred with my suggestion that our Chairman open up discussions with the Council’s Cabinet and other committees with a view to ensuring that we had a system that ensured we got value out of this money – which is important, because this sector has the potential to offer really good value to the taxpayer, once we can know which are the best organisations to deliver what the taxpayer needs.

The Final Countdown

In 100 days it will be 7th May. It may not be that long till the day after the General Election, but it is hard to think that it could be any longer. So, chin up. The darkest hour is just before the dawn.

We are snowed in…

It’s wonderful.
Clearly, as a nation, we are grumpy about it, but that ignores the beauty of the landscape and the chance for children to play in what feels like perfect snow.

Badman and Balls

There’s still time – just. Despite being relatively well connected into the political scene and home education, I only today found out that the Government had rushed out a consultation on a few recommendations of the Badman report into home education, and that the deadline for responses is tomorrow night. After shopping around for views on home education for a few years, they finally found someone who was prepared to tell them what they wanted to hear, you know, in order to protect the young, which if I remember rightly is what other people claimed to be doing when they handed Socrates the hemlock.

Anyways, what they want to do is throw another one of our traditional British rights and freedoms on the bonfire, and replace it with a register – you know, like sex offenders have. If you want to home educate you will have to register, you will have to allow someone from the Council to come into your home, you will have to proffer an explanation of your approach to education, in the hope that it meets with their favour and doesn’t offend their politically correct sensitivities, you will have to allow them to interview your child, and if they decide so, do this without you being present.

Because they’re not your kids – they belong to the Government, remember?

But we can still resist this nonsense – by replying to the Consultation, and by making sure that anyone who gets within earshot of Michael Gove, the hoped-for next Secretary of State for all this, to make sure he knows what a bad idea it all is.

This is some background information – http://home-ed.info/home_ed_under_threat.html

This is the document to respond to – http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/consultations/index.cfm?action=conDocument&consultationId=1643&menu=1

This is the response by Education Otherwise – http://tinyurl.com/eoconsult161009

This is where you can do a response – http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/consultations/index.cfm?action=Respond&consultationId=1643&menu=1

Why is the left so hostile to Israel?

The following was written at the Conference, but the wifi was dodgy, hence the late post.

Well, here I am at the fringe of fringes at the Conservative Party Conference, the Taxpayer Alliance/Freedom Association/Conservative Way Forward  “Freedom Zone”, which began at 8 am this morning with Stephen Crabb MP and Douglas Carswell addressing a packed room on the topic of “Why is the left so hostile to Israel?”  I was there in the company of some very sound people, and Polly Toynbee, but she didn’t hang around for long.

Many solutions to the predominantly anti-Israel sentiment of the left were offered, including the observation that Israel was the epitome of the nation state, and attracted the ire of the left on the basis that they preferred supra-national organisations, that take power as far away from the people as possible.

One other interesting thought was that the left has lost most of its recent leads, in terms of the impracticality of Marxism and so on, and had now regressed to the ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau, with his fondness for pre-industrial society as preferable to modern capitalist democracies. Israel is an island of modernity and advancement in an ocean of less-developed neighbours, and this is an inconvenient reality.

Which is OK, but if you can go that far, then consider something else – what is unique about Israel is its religious history, its attachment to the Jewish people, and its Biblical background, and this is, I think, the problem that the left have.

If you take the view of American conservative Evangelicals, the existence of the state of Israel is a miraculous fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy and evidence itself in human history of God’s existence and involvement in human affairs. It would be unsurprising if the left, which treats the state as Messiah and man as the measure of all things, were less than happy with some divine competition.

Israel has always been the embodiment of one idea – a chosen people. This accepts the idea that some people will obtain more favourable outcomes than others, that some groups of people are different from others, and that some of those differences may be morally relevant. Israel (which in Hebrew means “prince with God”) as an idea, rather than a state, is the opposite of the bland and lowest common denominator  version of equality that is so popular across what remains of the left.

Number 6

Today had a bit of a theme.

1) I don’t make a habit of being awake before 7 am to listen to Radio 4’s Today programme at stupid-o’clock, but today I was driving to the railway station to get to the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester, and so happened across a segment on Quiverfull families in the United States (now available in text version here).

2) On returning from said conference I find a package I ordered some time ago has finally arrived – the DVD set of the TLC series, “18 kids and Counting”, featuring Jim-Bob and Michelle Duggar, one of those Quiverfull families, if ever there was one.

3) I then accompanied my wife to the local hospital for the one bit we had prearranged, which produced this:-

Feeling sorry for Brown

OK – you’ll not see me do this again, so savour it –  but I’m going to rush to Gordon Brown’s defence and criticise the BBC for being too hard on Labour (that’s how I know it won’t happen again – those taxpayer-funded media liberals won’t let me down).

Today on the Andrew Marr show, on the pretence of asking tough questions (when he had just let Brown get away with selective quotation of less unfavourable economic stats), Marr asked Gordon Brown about whether he used painkillers or tablets to get through the day. OK – I see the reason to paint him into a corner around his health, should he feel the need to use it in the one remaining month that his party has to ditch him. Brown winced, perhaps tellingly pulled a hand to his mouth in a classic lie gesture, and moved the subject on to his eyesight, where he had a prepared answer.

But first he said something I agreed with, criticising the way these questions were creeping into the British political landscape.

You see, Marr had made the point that, if Brown were a US president, the media would be crawling all over his medical records. But that’s it, you see, he’s not the US president – he’s the British Prime Minister. British, you see, like the British Broadcasting Corporation, whose employee  Marr is. And we may have our national foibles and eccentricities, but poking our noses into other people’s business is not one of them.

We don’t ask people how much they are paid, and consider it vulgar if they tell us anyway. We don’t ask pointed questions about their health, and see “How are you?” as a greeting, not a question. We will happily watch politicians with their children, but we don’t view them as legitimate political targets, because while there is an element of personality in any politics, there is also an element of appropriate reserve, respect, and relevance.

If Gordon Brown is popping pills to get him through the day, I’m fine with that. I want him out because of how his policies and his bizarre view that he is doing everything right are actually intruding into our world, not because of any intrusion by us into his own private universe.

How not to argue, lesson 1- “If you don’t agree, you must be stupid”

I’ve been ‘briefed’ today, on climate change. While the politician introducing the meeting was sensible enough to start with the line of “whether you believe in climate change, we all want to save energy and save money”, the next speakers were more than happy to reproduce the climate change lobby line, which sees the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the authority. Well, it is, if you are already so committed to accepting the party line on climate change that you are willing to surrender your judgement to what is essentially a political body representing the victors in each nation around the world, whether or not their victory was by democratic means.

Our hero, Dan Hannan MEP, rewrites Genesis for modern Britain

Unintended consequences, and incomplete sentences.

What do you do with a would-be rapist with a conviction for killing someone? Why, put them in a place full of women where none of them can run away, of course! So say the courts as the varied parts of New Labour’s nonsense legislation come home to roost.

This is what happens. A man kills another man, gets 5 years for murder, does half that, gets out of jail and within 5 days tries to rape a woman, and goes back to jail on a life sentence. Then he uses some hormone therapy and Labour’s Gender Recognition Act to be legally reclassified as a woman, and then says “Hey, I may still have all the bits I was born with, but I should be in a women’s prison.” The Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, who embarrassingly voted for said Gender Recogntion Act, says no, only to be hoist by his own petard when the courts say that this is a breach of the prisoner’s human rights, according to the Human Rights Act that Jack and his New Labour friends voted into law. Hence very shortly the ladies in one of our prisons will shortly have an additional disincentive to reoffending moving in. That’s the main problem with a taxpayer-funded life in prison – the company you have to keep.

Madness! The natural order is reversed. Here we have bad law making hard cases. Let’s repeal it all.