Bishop Hill May 27, 2007 Conservatives Listening to Any Questions just now, Michael Gove was asked whether his ability to speak freely was restricted by David Cameron. Gove replied that Cameron doesn't believe in any restrictions at all.
Given that Cameron has said that no frontbench spokesman may call for withdrawl from the EU, this was a lie.
Bishop Hill May 26, 2007 Education The catfight by the Conservatives over the issue of grammar schools has been mildly diverting, if only to confirm my belief that the majority of Tories are now so statist as to be hardly worth saving.
In an op-ed piece in the Times last week, David Cameron set out his vision, such as it is, for the future of education in England and Wales. In his usual vapid, sub-Blairesque style he praises American charter schools and Labour's city academies (which are basically the same thing) and the voucher systems in Sweden, Holland and parts of the US. He tells us that he wants to open up the supply of education so that something called "social enterprises" can open schools too. He also says that money should follow the pupil. What he appears to be saying is that he will retain the model of a city academy - which is to say a school which is independent of local government - but he hints that he will try to increase the number of them by introducing a voucher system, and by making it easier for people to start their own schools. He is clear though that the freedoms he claims to want for these new schools will not extend to deciding their own admissions policies.
Is this enough to deliver a reasonably functioning education system? I think not. What Cameron proposes is not a market - at best it's one of those ersatz monstrosities so beloved of the Westminster village - the internal market. There are so many things wrong with the proposal it's hard to know where to start. For example, city academies are companies limited by guarantee. They are non-profits to all extents and purposes. So we can expect education to move from the crazy dynamic of a bureaucracy to the much saner, but hardly earth-shattering dynamic of the Sue Ryder shop. This will be an improvement, no doubt, but we don't look to Oxfam to radically change the face of high street retail and so we shouldn't expect a non-profit schooling system to bring home the educational bacon. The education system needs entrepreneurialism and it needs hard-nosed shareholders breathing down the necks of managers. It needs managers losing sleep at night over whether they are losing pupils to a neighbouring school. It needs risk-taking and it needs investment. This is just not what non-profits do. So why, we ask, are the Conservatives - the party of the free market - proposing such a statist halfway house. Why will they not just privatise it all?
Also, it is sadly indicative of an unreconstructed statist that Cameron will forbid selection. What does he know about it? Can't people try if they want to? And who the hell does he think he is to forbid it anyway? I would have thought an applicant for a post on the below-stairs staff would have a better chance of getting the post if he told us how he would scrub the bogs so they shone, rather than giving us a lecture on what brand of bleach he's going to let us use.
There is going to be a great deal of devil in the detail too. After all, we know he will not allow selection, but the question is, what other requirements is he going to force upon the new schools. They will presumably still all be subject to inspection by the HMIs, who are, as is often acknowledged, a huge part of the problem because they insist on the use of antediluvian trendy teaching methods. Again, it comes down to whether you believe that the best results will be delivered by a bottom-up market-led system, or a top-down experts 'n' inspectors system. Given that the latter has failed for the last thirty years, we are justified in asking why the Conservatives are not proposing to scrap it in favour of the system which allegedly forms part of their key beliefs. Why are they choosing statism?
Discipline is another mantra repeated by David Cameron, perhaps in the belief that by doing so he will appease the tweed-clad grassroots. The Conservatives will apparently legislate to allow headteachers to expel unruly pupils without fear of being overruled. Why, we wonder, does he feel the need to legislate? Wouldn't a free, private school be perfectly within its rights to expel anyone it wanted to? Wouldn't this be simpler to manage and simpler to implement? Why statism? Why not the free market?
Cameron is right about one thing; the argument about grammars is stale and irrelevant. He doesn't know whether they are better than the alternatives and neither does anyone else. The question is whether he has the maturity to stand back and let the market discover the answer. Unfortunately, on the basis of his column in the Times, he is still a long way from learning that lesson.
For an example of a non-statist Tory approach to this issue, try this.
Bishop Hill May 25, 2007 Quotes Childhood
Who runs the country?
Adolescence
I want to run the country
Adulthood
I want my party to run the country
Maturity
I makes no difference who runs the country
Second childhood
Who's running the country these days?
Bishop Hill May 24, 2007 Climate: WG2 Climate: WG3 The greens have got it wrong again!
Kevin Vranes, writing on the Nature Climate Feedback blog recounts the sad tale of some more perverse results of the Kyoto Protocol. It's like this. Rich countries that can't meet their Kyoto obligations pay poor countries to reduce their emissions instead. While this might be doneby means of something obvious like building biomass incinerators or windfarms, one outlet that has proved very lucrative for the third world has been the burning of a chemical called HFC-23.
Now, HFC-23 is the by-product of the manufacture of a refrigerant with the equally romantic moniker of HCFC-22. Both of these substances are chlorofluorocarbons and therefore can damage the ozone layer. Despite this their manufacture is still allowed, under a developing country exemption from the Montreal Protocol. When Kyoto was put in place however, the developing countries discovered that as well as depleting the ozone layer, both chemicals were also greenhouse gases. In particular HFC-23, the by-product, turned out to have a very long lifetime in the atmosphere. Because of this Kyoto was going to reward them, and reward them big-time, for burning it rather than releasing it into the atmosphere. As Vranes puts it:
[P]roducers of HCFC-22 now make more money burning HFC-23 than they do selling HCFC-22. Imagine what being paid handsomely to burn your waste does to your incentive to reduce your waste. If your waste stream costs you to dispose of it, you might try to improve your production to reduce waste and thus save money. And even if you did get paid to burn your waste, it might make financial sense to reduce waste anyway if your efficiency improvements paid more in reduced operating expenses than burning waste generated in income. But neither is the case for HCFC-22 factories. For them a double financial incentive now exists: keep making HCFC-22 in copious amounts at a profit, which will produce HFC-23 as a now-valuable waste product. And since HCFC-22 producers need not even lift a finger to burn their HFC-23 (those funding the CDM project fund the capture and burn device), any incentive for switching away from the ozone-depleting HCFC-22 as a refrigerant is also destroyed.
The great law of unintended consequences strikes again. Now just explain to me again why Mr Bush was so wicked for not signing Kyoto?
Bishop Hill May 24, 2007 Civil liberties Several fine denizens of the blogosphere have commented unfavourably on the discovery that three million households in Britain have now been "bugged" - that is their bins been equipped with microchips so that the council can monitor how much you've thrown away and how much you've recycled.
Apart from lynching your local council leader, I wonder if the only correct response to this is to start bugging the recycling so you can find out just how much of it is shipped abroad, how much is landfilled and how much actually goes to be recycled. Perhaps if you put one of those Tracker devices in the glass bin, you would end up tracing it to Felixstowe docks.
Only the guilty have anything to fear.
Bishop Hill May 24, 2007 Climate: McIntyre Climate: other FOI The IPCC has finally released the reviewers comments on its recent 4th Assessment Report. If you want to study them they are available in hard copy only at the Littauer Library of Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. You may think that this means that if you are a hard up climatology student from, say, India, you are completely stuffed. But no, the IPCC have thought of everything. The staff at Harvard will arrange to copy up to 100 pages for you at a cost of $34 plus $0.40 per page. If you can afford to employ a researcher they are happy for someone to come in to see which pages might be of interest. Otherwise you will have to make do with 100 pages at random...so maybe the Indians are stuffed after all.
Does this situation remind you of something?
PROSSER
But Mr. Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.
ARTHUR
Oh, yes, soon as I heard of this plan, I went straight around to see them yesterday afternoon. You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call much attention to them, had you? Such as maybe telling someone about them?
PROSSER looks more uncomfortable.
PROSSER
Well, the plans were on display –
ARTHUR
On display? I had to go down to the cellar to find them!
PROSSER
That’s the display department.
ARTHUR
With a flashlight.
PROSSER
Well, the lights had probably gone.
ARTHUR
So had the stairs.
PROSSER
Er – well – you did find them, didn’t you?
ARTHUR
Oh, yes. Yes, I did. The plans were on display, in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, stuck in a disused lavatory, with a sign on the door reading “Beware of the Leopard.”
It is not known if the Littauer Library has stairs, or whether the Environmental Science and Public Policy Archives are, in fact, located in a disused public convenience.
(Source here. Hitchhikers Guide reference shamelessly ripped from the comments).
Bishop Hill May 24, 2007 Labour Labour Home has a thread up about David McLean's outrageous bill to exempt MPs from the Freedom of Information Act. Encouragingly the punters there are pointing the finger at their own MPs and condemning them in no uncertain terms. I had expected lots of cringeworthy party loyalty from LH, so if the message is getting through that politicians are the problem, not the solution, then we may have a major step forward on our hands.
In related news, Alistair Darling is trying to emasculate the FoI Act even further.
Bishop Hill May 21, 2007 Greens The BBC wonders if a bit of over-strident campaigning by the greens alienated Japan at just the point where it was about to give up whaling. Result: lots more whaling.
It's starting to look as if environmentalists would actually achieve more of their aims if they just went back to their tofu plantations and kept quiet.
Bishop Hill May 20, 2007 Greens Further to my story on the greens getting upset over proposals to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere using genetically modified plants, here is another story to get our environmentalist colleagues choking on their herbal infusions.
Senior cabinet ministers are pushing for Britain to be the first nation in the world to get much of its power from the tides, as part of a massive new expansion for renewable energy. The Environment Secretary, David Miliband, Welsh Secretary Peter Hain and Trade and Industry Secretary Alistair Darling want a giant £14bn barrage to be built across the Severn.
This would generate about 5 per cent of Britain's electricity without producing any of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
Their move is not meeting any serious opposition within the Cabinet but will spark off a furious row with environmental bodies, which say that the barrage would devastate the estuary's wildlife.
You couldn't make it up could you? Can I suggest to all my environmentalist friends: You've been 'ad mate!
(Hat tip: EU Referendum)
Bishop Hill May 20, 2007 Blogs Civil liberties I've often wondered what "quaequam" means - as in James Graham's Quaequam Blog. My latest theory is that it must be something along the lines of "eviscerate with maximum prejudice" which is what he has done to Tom Watson's ridiculous attempt to justify his support for the FoI amendment bill. Watson is surely the only man in the UK blogosphere who can rival Mike Ion for toe-curlingly unquestioning party loyalty. Truly a revolting specimen.
Bishop Hill May 20, 2007 There's a very interesting section on 18 Doughty Street's "End of the Day Show" with Dominic Lawson taking on Professor Ivor Gaber on the subject of climate change. Lawson seems to be very well informed. Gaber seems to treat it as an issue of faith. He also thinks that the crisis in Darfur is caused by climate change! Amazing what a difference a half degree rise in temperature can make.
Bishop Hill May 19, 2007 Conservatives The behaviour of politicians is usually revolting and their actions in trying to hide their expenses behind an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act is more than usually stomach churning.
This is a black and white issue. Honest people respond by saying "No". Anything else is just another way of admitting that you're a crook. David Cameron responds by saying he's neutral. This tells us something about him. Either he doesn't know right from wrong, or he has good reasons for tolerating a certain level of corruption among his MPs.
It also tells us that we shouldn't under any circumstances, vote for him or the pondlife that surround him.
Bishop Hill May 17, 2007 Climate: Briffa New Scientist has published a Climate Myths Special today which has been welcomed with open arms in some corners:
"I have already forwarded links to my local FoE and Social Forum lists, to draw other people's attention to it." says one particularly diligent commenter in the NS Environment Blog.
I don't know why a publication like New Scientist would take sides like this in such a controversial issue. If they're wrong, they end up with their reputation in tatters, and nobody will notice if they're right. Climate Audit has already pointed out the excision of embarrassing data from their 1000 year temperature graph, (compiled for them by Dr Rob Wilson of the University of Edinburgh).
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If you follow the dark blue line (Briffa 2001) into the choke point of the graph in the 1960s you will notice that it doesn't actually come out again. It's hard to see because it has been stopped right on the choke point so that you can't make out where the line ends. Was there no data after 1960? Unfortunately for the commercial reputation of New Scientist there was. In a previous paper using the same raw data, Briffa had shown the full set of results through to 1994. And of course, the proxy suggests that temperatures were in fact falling throughout most of the rest of the century (the green line on this second chart).
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Bishop Hill May 17, 2007 Climate: other Journals Via Nature Peer to Peer Blog, this is an interesting article by a philospher of science called Janet D. Stemwedel, which throws a little light on some of the issues around the idea of replication of scientific results before publication.
Stemwedel wonders if it might be possible to create a paid job of "peer reviewer". This would solve the problem of having your work reviewed by your scientific rivals. But the biggest gain might come from having these reviewers actually try to recreate the science - hence replication would take place prior to publication. There's a very interesting comments thread which is well worth reading too.
Whether this would work or not would depend on the specialism. For many studies, the idea of collecting the data a second time is, frankly, ridiculous, but even for these cases there would still be immense value in reproducing the trail from raw data to results. It would certainly make cherry-picking of data and dodgy adjustments to the numbers much harder to get away with.
Bishop Hill May 17, 2007 Civil liberties The Times is reporting that the Lord Chancellor maintains a list of judges and magistrates who have been disciplined for misuse of their computers. The offences apparently include the viewing of pornography.
I'm amazed that the article doesn't discuss the obvious implication of the existence of this list, which is that the judges and magistrates concerned can no longer be considered to be independent of the government. They are so obviously open to blackmail that they must be considered incapable of performing their jobs.
The Government is currently refusing to release even the numbers of judicial staff or offences involved - someone more cynical than me would point out that this conveniently retains the power of blackmail with the government. But there is no doubt that at the very least, the names and offences will have to be released, or the culprits quietly released from their positions. While the information is secret, these people are tainted with the suspicion that they can be influenced, and that strikes hard at the independence of the judiciary.
