Badger Culling Doesn't Work

Not guilty!

Farmers today have described the suspension of the cull of Pembrokeshire's badger population, ostensibly to combat bovine TB, as a 'disaster for farming', according to this report. I'm sorry but I just do not for one moment buy that. The link between bovine TB and badgers is merely accepted wisdom based on, at best, anecdotal and/or coincidental data.

But even if you refute this strange farmers' reasoning with real evidence, or just subscribe to a different interpretation of existing-though-discrete data points, you are laughed at simply because its not the fashionable view. (Remind you of any other field of 'settled science'?). Furthermore, even if one member of the badger-cow TB camp could spurn the hysterical anti-badgerism, that person would still, without a shadow of a doubt, advocate the boneheaded position 'ah yes, maybe so, but better to be safe than sorry, right?'. Again, this reminds us eerily of another scientific cop out.

And sorry, but no, it isn't 'better to be safe than sorry' especially in this case because it is very likely that you are, in fact, still ignorant, more vulnerable having been lulled into a false sense of security by the massive badger bloodletting, and with one more innocent native British species of wildlife pushed onto the endangered list as a consequence of pitchforks and burning torches approach to countryside and agricultural management. A lose-lose-lose scenario. And it's pathetic. Why? Well, one South African (?) expert in the field, Martin Hancox, writes:

Accepted “Wisdom” after 35 years repetition is that badgers are the MAIN Reservoir of TB, and transmission is one-way badger to cow. The Emperor’s New Clothes, no-one apparently can “SEE” that thanks to the cattle TB crisis, the exact opposite is true: cattle are the MAIN reservoir and transmission is 99-100% cow to cow (and spillover to badgers and deer etc).

Cows give badgers TB!

The rest of his stout defence of Meles meles or Brother Brock is entertaining, quite compelling and well worth the read. Hats off must go not only to him but also to the Liberal Democrat AM, Peter Black, who has helped to halt the cull in Pembroke, and thus, quite possibly (since Pembroke was intended as some kind of trial), the rest of Wales, if not Britain. In addition, praise must go to those farmers who, while still strangely believing implicitly in the badger-bovine TB link, have the common sense and conservation-minded decency not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

You'd think it would have dawned on them why culls have failed for forty years when they have been tried wouldn't you? Well, it hasn't, so we'll have to spell it out for them: IT'S NOT THE BADGERS' FAULT, STUPID!

Not going to get through to them any time soon though, is it? It's very sad how destructive people can be in their ignorance, but too proud to stop themselves even when the truth is right there staring them in the face. Pity.

Silly Season At The BBC: Obesity and Exercise

To be fair, though, it's not just the BBC - it just reported it on its website and then followed it up with a debate on Today this morning between a silly man called Fry and some other dude who wasn't quite so silly - it's a bunch of extremely silly scientists who have published a very silly paper on the relationship between exercise and obesity in children. To call the scientists' conclusions "silly", as covered in the BBC web story is, however, to be very generous. They're not merely silly, to my mind they're potentially dangerous.

The researchers at the EarlyBird Diabetes Study, based at the Peninsula Medical School in Plymouth, has been following a group of more than 200 city school children for the past 11 years.

As part of the long-term study, they monitored body fat and exercise at regular intervals over three years.

They found no indication that doing more physical activity had any effect on weight, but they did find that children who put on weight did relatively less exercise.

And so it goes on, hedging and blurring its way to the final, soggy-wet-fish-in-the-gob conclusion - that without exercise children get fat and when they get fat they do less exercise and, because of their big tummies, crave more food. Well, duh.

How many millions of pounds was wasted on this ridiculous study just so the ultra-bleedin' obvious could be restated, but couched in pseudo-scientific terms, complete with the thinnest of anecdotal statistical 'links'?

But that's not the point is it? The real point, if the the Today broadcast this morning was anything to go on, is that this just represents yet another extension of the ongoing battle between intervention and information, between the answer of the Left (to ban and order) and the libertarian Right (to inform, suggest and trust).

The BBC, in its boundless silliness, has clearly decided that Andrew Lansley's decision to reverse the previous government's failed policies on people eating too much and not exercising enough, and save enormous sums of money into the bargain, must be challenged - because a new study, however silly, says so; because something called the "National Obesity Forum" says so. Because the improbable Mr Fry, who wants to regulate the entire food industry and then, presumably, eating itself, says so.

In other words, because nanny (the interventionist Left) says so. If it wasn't so pathetic it really would be silly.

Oh, by the way, if you want children to be less fat, feed them fruit, milk, bread & butter and beans on toast and let them play for as long as they want every day - which will be a lot. Oh, right, in Labour's Britain, even play must be regulated - and the streets aren't safe any more (we are led to believe by the generally hysterical media), so buy the little darlings an Xbox and plonk them in front of the TV out of the way...and see what happens (has happened).

Unlock your children, folks. They need the exercise!

Not NICE Again!

Swansea city centre last Friday night. NICE!

Another one of these pejorative, interventionist (socialist) medical reports has just been released by one of the UK's many health scare professional quangos, this time calling for enforced national temperance. I have several bones to pick not just with this particular, latest piece of medical meddling in people's lives, but with these kinds of moralising "experts" and this sort of lifestyle intervention nonsense period. They seem to think that if something "costs the NHS" x-billions of pounds, they have the right to launch into moral crusade mode, as if the NHS is some sort of precious thing with a life of its own that must be protected as an institution over and above the people who pay a fortune for it and whom it is bloody well meant to serve, doubleplusungood lifestyle or not. These are the same clowns who helped give us the pub smoking ban, with no discernible impact on smoking rates anywhere seen so far as a result of it, but the destruction of the entire pub industry imminent thanks directly to it. Hewitt's and Labour's masterpiece.

I'm not going to rant too much about this latest here - haven't got the time this morning - but I will say two further things. NICE is the same quango that regularly fails to take on big pharmaceutical corporations to get the price of, for example, life saving cancer drugs down so they are affordable. Instead it simply rations them, but never objects when the NHS iniquitously refuses further free treatment to patients who opt to buy the drugs for thousands of pounds privately. Why does NICE behave like this? Well, I was unsurprised to find out from Private Eye not that long ago (no links, sorry) that a suspicious number of "experts" who work for NICE also have strong connections with big Pharma. Surprise surprise. So it is hardly surprising that I do not trust them when they start pontificating about how people should live their lives. Sure, drink related illnesses kill 10,000 people a year (so they say). But you know what? About 500,000 people died last year, many after prolonged periods of treatment for things like heart disease and cancer and most of those diseases were the product of old age rather than any specific, chronic lifestyle problem.

Of the 500,000 dead, most were over the age of 75 (some 66% of all deaths for 2009, says the ONS). So the real "problem" for the NHS is that better diets, hygiene, sanitation, inoculation, peace, affluence, antibiotics and yes, medical technology, means that Britain's annual death rate is plummeting. And that means the NHS is having to cope with tens of thousands more elderly and infirm bods each year - and guess what, it can't. But it can't talk about that so it allows one of its quangos to go into displacement activity overdrive by talking about binge drinking which, let's face it, is far more a social ("Broken Britain") issue than it is a health issue. Ask anyone who lives in any town centre anywhere in the UK.

That's the general point. The second point is that while there are lots of good reasons to encourage people to live healthier lifestyles, especially if they are drinking too much, smoking, not getting enough exercise and/or taking drugs, you have to give them a reason why. Attempting to force people to drink less by hammering them in the pocket and saying that a) it's for their own good, and b) it's for the good of the NHS (as if some patients are somehow more 'deserving' than others) has never worked, won't work today and will never work in the future. All it will do is hammer the poorest and those millions in Labour heartlands up and down the country living on benefits while annoying the hell out of the middle classes who have done nothing wrong generally speaking (although NICE or that moron Liam Donaldson will doubtless come up with another spurious, anecdotal study on middle class binging), but who will be forced to stump up another chunk of money to fund the biggest bottomless pit the world has ever seen - the NHS.

But that's what this is really all about, isn't it? The National-bloody-Health Service. Well, at least Andrew Lansley, the new health minister, has seen some sort of sense.

"Regarding Nice's recommendations... it is not clear that the research examines specifically the regressive effect on low income families, or proves conclusively that it is the best way to impact price in order to impact demand."

He went on: "The root causes of social problems lie not just in Government policies - although 24-hour drinking legislation has severely undermined clinician and police efforts to get to grips with this problem - but in social norms and peer influence.

"We must work across Government, society, communities and families to challenge negative social norms and promote the positives."

Between the sociology-speak lines, this is more or less a comprehensive rubbishing of the report and a libertarian reading of the causes of the binge culture. A cause for hope, then, if not for celebration. We finally have a health minister with a brain. Next thing he can do is use that brain again to save his department, and us, about, oh, potentially £70 million in 2011 by abolishing Labour's drug-rationing, talkative, 1999 brainchild altogether.

the Institute [has grown since 1999] from an organisation with no staff, premises, or bank account and a nominal budget of £8.5 million a year, to a body now employing over 270 people, with offices in London and Manchester, and an annual budget of £35 million which is set to more than double over the next few years.

...said one of its talking heads last year. Well, there's been an election since then and there will be no need for a shadow, unelected Department of Health, inventing work for itself and expanding its remit daily, from now on thanks all the same. Abolition should be imminent. Well, you decide. Here's its website. It looks suspiciously like another Department of Health to me. So, and I say this with unabashed relish, this report should be that particular expensive quango's swan song.

'NICE' to have known you as they say.

Dale Destroys Labour's Latest Lies

The latest PEB from Labour represents a new low in hate politics, exploitation and smearing propaganda, even for them. This is it:


Fortunately, Iain Dale, having highlighted it in the first place, in one of the most apoplectic posts I've ever seen him write on his blog in the two years or so I've been reading it, quickly destroys the claims too. A GP has emailed him cataloguing the lies underpinning the most dishonest campaign video in British political history. Read it here.

Well done to him and to Mr Dale for knocking it down before it has a chance to gain any kind of traction. I trust this will be all over the MSM tomorrow - with the story being not only the Labour lies and filth about Conservative health and child support policy, but the abject bankruptcy of the Labour election campaign as a whole.

Mind you, they are totally desperate so they will probably get even worse.

National Care Service? Not In My Lifetime

Listening to Andy Burnham on the way to work this rainy Tuesday morning was one of the less pleasant experiences of my life. What a load of tosh that idiot spouts, and in that ridiculous yob voice of his. I've never heard such a giant stream of steaming waffle, hissing piffle and stalling widdle in my entire life!
Life! Ah, life. Yes, indeed - life. As in 'long life' - and getting longer. My five year-old nephew, so we are told, can reasonably expect to live to the age of 100+. However, I think that figure could be even higher. The generation of my family born at the turn of the last century almost all died in their 80s. What is more, we read today that a horny old goat (who is 75) has just impregnated a woman.

It wouldn't be unfair to imagine, therefore, that with medical technology advancing at the rate it is, my nephew, who will hit the royal telegram age in the year 2104, can 'reasonably expect' artificial organ replacements, bionic limbs and eyes, anti-aging gene therapy and, above all, a cure for cancer. And every bit of it will be available on the NHS (honest). With all that intervention, he can 'reasonably expect' to live until he's 200 - and actively, too. He could be the first centurion daddy.

So what, I hear you scream, is the point of all this? I will tell you. The point is that the problem of care for the elderly is a problem we are facing now. It's my parents who very soon will need the kind of care that only children and expensive professional 'carers' can provide. There are elderly people now who are on their own and struggling to cope, or have lost their life savings and equity to pay for the privilege of being neglected in some dump of a care home. (This was the result of one of the most iniquitous laws ever passed, in my view. But that's another story).

It seems to me that all I heard from Burnham was a piece of pisspoor procrastination on a social issue that he doesn't seem to get (well, he's only young himself). Let's set up a commission and see what they say in five year's time, he suggested. Thank the Lord for the Big Ideas, eh readers? So, after his Death Tax suggestion was rightly rubbished, and ruled out by Darling, this whole thing appears to have been kicked into the very long grass by Labour, simply because it's too big a challenge for them to confront.

The Conservatives, by contrast, have a plan that can be implemented now. Lansley was excellent on Radio 4. Sure, the insurance plan might not help people who are already in old people's homes today, but it would certainly help my parents, who are heading in the same direction; give it a decade. By the time they need it, the system would be well-established - mature, even - and well-funded. The Labour grand plan for a National Care Service would, by that time, you can guarantee it, have been delayed, would be billions over-budget and just about to be scrapped. The Conservatives are telling us what's do-able, and how to do it.

Labour just gives us pie-in-the-sky pipe dreams that wouldn't work anyway. 'Twas ever thus.

So the Tories had better win the next election - if nothing else, then for my parents' sake! As for my nephew, well, he won't be needing a National Care Service. He'll be taking part in the Olympics when he's 150 (in 2154 - I believe they're being held in Kandahar that year).

Don't get me wrong, care where care is needed is a decent idea. But it should be the duty of children to provide that care. That's the real sign of a healthy society. I would expect, however - demand, even - that that sense of duty finally be recognised, and financially rewarded, by a Tory government. As for the State, well, its duty is clear: where there is no alternative, i.e., where there are no close family members who can provide support for their elderly or infirm loved one(s), or where that family, motivated by some form of perverse selfishness, has abrogated their duty and abandoned the needy member, the State intervenes.

Where the care becomes too difficult for the dutiful family, however, that's when the Conservatives' insurance scheme really will come into its own. It is not merely a step in the right direction - and Labour and Liberal Democrats won't even admit that, remember - it is an excellent solution to a problem confronting Britain now. The Lib Dem spokes-idiot said that a similar scheme in France only had a "20% uptake". What the Lib Dem spokes-idiot probably doesn't know (or would care about if he did) is that the other 80% in France look after their own families. Always have, always will. So the problem of how we mend Britain's broken society, where grown-up children turn their backs on sick or elderly relatives, is a separate, massive problem, you see, and one that no fantasy 'National Care Service' is going to fix.

The National Care Service is, therefore, a red herring (surprise surprise). Rather than opposing it with the expression "over my dead body", however, (which seems to be tempting fate), I'll just make a prediction: "National Care Service", laugh out loud. Not in my lifetime. Not in anyone's lifetime, for that matter. Certainly not my nephew's. He won't need the stupid thing.

And neither do we.

Browned Off

While this article from Lloyd Evans on today's pmqs is certainly very entertaining and worth a close read, especially when he takes the mickey out of the Bercow's risible performance in the Speaker's chair, I must concur with Iain Dale, who, unlike Evans, thinks that Brown was "flailing all over the place" and that Cameron "had him on the ropes." Evans, for some reason, thought that Brown's performance was "steady" and "predictable" but that Cameron's was "pretty good", but "not quite excellent."

Well, I'm sorry Lloyd, old chap, but you must have been watching a different pmqs because Iain Dale is dead right: on this latest piece of Labourist nonsense over "free" - but uncosted - home care for the elderly (a typical, bungled piece of Labour hijacking - and mucking-up - of an excellent and costed Tory policy proposal, motivated by a cynical desire, as Cameron said, merely to help the Labour party rather than to help the elderly), Brown was absolutely terrible. He came across as either crowing or just bad-tempered, but never once did he answer the substantive question that Cameron had skewered him with: death tax or no death tax? (We all know the answer - death tax).

Cameron was excellent today. With that in mind I suppose it could be necessary to form the opinion that his performance is being measured against far higher standards than Brown's. It's just possible that the only reason for this is that even slightly right of centre professional journos like Evans (and Iain Martin) are so used to Brown being appalling, that they unconsciously let him off lightly. By the same token, because many people who write blogs are so desperate to see Cameron and his party take Labour and Brown to the cleaners for what they've done to this country, what would be regarded as a good day for Brown is condemned as a shocker for Cameron. That browns me off a wee bit.

Iain Dale, at least, has maintained his objectivity in suggesting that Brown was crap this week, just like he was last week. And Cameron was great.

Anti-Smoking Fanatics Will Lose

Warning: this is a bit of a boast post.

A few days ago, the truly horrible Duncan Bannatyne published a truly horrible set of thoughts (it hardly qualifies as an article) on the Grauniad website about why he would "only be happy when smoking was banned" and calling for children to report parents who smoke in their presence to the police. Their own parents! I was so incensed by his fascistic attitude to what is certainly an unhealthy habit, but nowhere near at the apocalyptic, genocidal levels anti-smoking fanatics like him would have us believe, that I posted a few innocuous remarks of my own in response.


The piccy is hard to read unless you click on it. This is what I said:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Another proselytising ex-smoker banging on about his Damascene conversion and the need to treat evil smokers like second class filth. It's not the anti-smoking thing that gets me, it's the sheer hatred masquerading as concern and justified by a dangerous sense of moral superiority.

Stick to making money by exploiting the hard work and creativity of others, mate. That's what you're "good" at.

Next!

Not quite an exocet, I know. Yet a few days later, when glancing at it again, I was pleasantly surprised by the response my gripe had stimulated, complete with 800-odd "recommends", which is pretty high for Cif.

But I was far more impressed by the deluge of other (far better) comments that together nailed Bannatyne comprehensively and deservedly. Old Labour, Brownite brown-nose that he is, too, the ubiquitous condemnation couldn't have happened to a nicer man.

Suffice to say, a far more libertarian, anti-authoritarian mood is definitely emerging in this country, and that is a cause for optimism. There is hope for Britain after all.