Cameron's Caring Compassionate Tories: no longer the Nasty Party

A Tory MP has been arrested on suspicion of assaulting his wife.

Croydon Central MP Andrew Pelling was questioned by police after Lucy, 26, his wife of less than a year, called the police.

The couple married last November after starting their relationship while Mr Pelling was still married to his first wife, with whom he has three children.

Mr Pelling, 48, who is also a London Assembly member for Croydon and Sutton, was taken to a south London police station on Tuesday and released on bail without being charged.

He is due to return to a police station on 1 October.

Of course, we should remember that he has not yet been charged, still less convicted. All that we know for certain is that he is an adulterous scumbag, with a penchant for wasting parliamentary time and public money with early day motions about the dogs of minor celebrity chefs. So, he's a bit of a shit, but not necessarily a criminal one.

Incidentally, the verdict in Miranda Grell's case is due in tomorrow. Those "mainstream" politicians, eh? Beacons of respectability, every last one of them!

So, where did you go for your holidays?

An airport toilet.

Today's Scum

A retired lecturer who moved to the seaside in search of "the good life" was kicked to death by a thug who started pestering her in the street.

Susan Grundy, 56, was walking home after an evening with friends when Stephen Browning approached her for a cigarette.

When she refused, Browning, a convicted thug who had just been bailed by police after a drunken outburst, unleashed the most sickening attack.

He punched, kicked and stamped on Mrs Grundy more than 20 times, Bradford Crown Court heard.

High on a cocktail of drink and drugs, he then stripped her naked, sexually assaulted her and left her dying on the ground.

Then he went to a nearby nightclub and bought a round of drinks with £50 he had stolen from her purse.

Browning, 31, who admitted murder, was jailed for life and ordered to serve at least 25 years.

So, he'll be 56 when he gets out - the same age Mrs Grundy was when he killed her. Personally, I think that Stephen Browning is an excellent argument for the death penalty. I think that there can be no doubt that such a vile creature deserves nothing less than an appointment with Jack Ketch.

And there's more:

Two weeks earlier, he had been released from a four month jail term for an assault on his girlfriend in November 2006.

After his release on January 9, he went to his sister's home and got drunk, before being arrested for breaching the peace and obstructing a police officer.

He was still on bail at the time of the murder. He was also separated from his wife, whom he had attacked in 2002.

So, if this man, with his clear predilection for violence, particularly, it seems, against women, had not been granted bail, then Mrs Grundy would still be alive today. Another great triumph for British justice!

The threat faced by apostates of Islam

Once again, the Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, has proved a rare voice of sanity and common sense in a Church of England sliding ever further into the morass of cultural and moral relativism. While the likes of the Revd Canon Chris Chivers go into spasms of delight as they discuss the wonders of Ramadan, Mr Nazir-Ali warned tonight's Dispatches programme on Channel 4 of the dangers faced by people in Britain who have publicly rejected Islam, saying:

It is very common in the world today, including in this country, for people who have changed their faith, particularly from being Muslim to being Christian, to be ostracised, to lose their job, for their marriages to be dissolved, for children to be taken away.

He added that he suspects that it is only going to be so long before a Muslim apostate in Britain is killed.

Certainly, he is right that Muslims who convert are at risk. Consider these cases documented by The Times in February 2005:

THE first brick was thrown through the sitting room window at one in the morning, waking Nissar Hussein, his wife and five children with a terrifying start. The second brick went through his car window.

It was a shock, but hardly a surprise. The week before, another brick had been thrown through the window as the family were preparing for bed in their Bradford home. The victim of a three-year campaign of religious hatred, Mr Hussein’s car has also been rammed and torched, and the steps to his home have been strewn with rubbish.

He and his family have been regularly jostled, abused, attacked, shouted at to move out of the area, and given death threats in the street. His wife has been held hostage inside their home for two hours by a mob. His car, walls and windows have been daubed in graffiti: “Christian bastard”.

The problem isn’t so much what Mr Hussein, whose parents came from Pakistan, believes, but what he doesn’t believe. Born into Islam, he converted eight years ago to Christianity, and his wife, also from Pakistan, followed suit.

[...]

Ruth, also of Pakistani origin, found out recently that she had only just escaped being murdered. When she told her family that she had converted, they kept her locked inside the family home all summer.

“They were afraid I would meet some Christians. My brother was aggressive, and even hit me — I later found out he wanted me dead,” she said. A family friend had suggested taking her to Pakistan to kill her, and her brother put the idea to her mother, who ruled against it.

Cases like this illustrate the fundamental difference between Western civilisation and Islamic barbarism. In Britain, or other Western nations, you can renounce the established religion and join any other religion you please, and the only option open to those who wish to prevent this is to try to convince you by force of argument. Whereas, if you reject Islam, then those who object to this will have swift recourse to the threat of sheer physical force in order to induce you to change your mind. How anyone can argue that there is any form of equality between these two cultures is completely beyond me!

Some Muslims, such as the author of the Islamics blog, have claimed that Mr Nazir-Ali is merely scare-mongering. They say that he is demonstrating his "prejudice and the deep rooted hatred...for Islam". As evidence for this, they say that while Islam does mandate the death penalty for apostasy, it only does so for those who commit apostasy in Islamic countries, and that, since Britain is not an Islamic country, apostates here have nothing to fear. There are two points to consider here. First, even if what they say is exactly true, then it is hardly a ringing endorsement of Islamic civilisation to say that Muslims only violate the right to freedom of thought when they form the majority of a nation's population. If nothing else, this should further demonstrate why it is imperative that we do all we can to resist the Islamification of this country.
However, the second point is that what they say is not true. However the Koran may be interpreted, the fact is that the cases that I have cited from The Times, demonstrate that for a Muslim in Britain to renounce Islam is to put themselves at risk of physical harm from their former coreligionists. This is also the case in other non-Islamic countries. In the Netherlands, for example, Ehsan Jami, the chairman of the Dutch committee of ex-Muslims, has been provided with increased security after he was attacked by three Muslims outside a supermarket. This was the third such attack to which he had been subjected.

The Islamic death penalty for apostates is something of which a great many people are unaware. Indeed, I have found many people who refuse point-blank to accept that it exists, so well indoctrinated have they been into the mantra of "Islam is a wonderful Religion of Peace". Michael Nazir-Ali's willingness to come out and tell the truth about this is once again to be welcomed.

Yet another idiotic education proposal

Pupils should mark their own class work and decide what their school tests should cover, according to the Government's exams advisers.

Teachers should train secondary school children to set their homework and devise mark schemes, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) said.

Pupils should then assess the results, grading their own efforts and giving "feedback" to their classmates, the latest National Curriculum guidance said.

The QCA, which devised the new secondary curriculum, said such an approach helps children support each other and develop independent study skills.

It said: "Peer assessment and self-assessment are much more than learners simply marking their own or each other's work. In order to improve learning, self-assessment must engage learners with the quality of their work and help them reflect on how to improve it.

"Peer assessment enables learners to provide each other with valuable feedback so that they can learn from and support each other."

The guidelines suggested teachers in schools that decide to adopt the system would need to train pupils in marking techniques.

The suggested "strategies" for developing pupils' peer assessment skills could include asking pupils in groups to write five questions on a topic and, following whole-class discussion, pick the two best questions from each group. "Then ask learners to answer all the selected questions for homework."

Pupils could be asked to "analyse mark schemes and devise their own for a specified task", or to "mark each other's work but not give them the answers. Instead, ask them to find the correct answers from available resources".

The QCA proposed that pupils should also be involved in drawing up internal school tests and assessment tasks, which are separate from the official National Curriculum "Sats" tests and GCSEs. The QCA's guidance said the approach had "fundamental implications for the learning ethos in a school" and should be adopted across all subjects areas.

These "fundamental implications" presumably consist of screwing the final nail into the coffin of the British education system.

Let's get this straight: children are not adults, and pupils are not teachers. The ability to set, and, more especially, to mark, work in an objective and impartial manner requires a certain level of maturity; a level of maturity which the average schoolchild is unlikely to possess. Are they really going to be willing or able to give poor marks to their fellow pupils (particularly those with whom they are friends), for example? (I appreciate that this question may be academic, since the concept of "poor marks" seems to be disappearing rapidly from our exams system).
Equally, whatever training children may be given in marking, will not come anywhere near to equalling the years of training and experience possessed by the average teacher. It is an essential part of a teacher's job to be able to set exam papers that relate directly to the most important parts of the syllabus, and to mark them in an appropriate, objective, and at the same time constructive and helpful manner. A good teacher is an expert at doing this; a child, no matter how intelligent, is not. And on that note, I wonder how children of below average intelligence will cope when it comes to marking and providing feedback? Are we supposed to believe that they will be able to do it anywhere near as well, or as usefully, as a trained teacher?

Why, oh why, must educationalists insist on foisting this rubbish on teachers and pupils? What, may I ask, is so very wrong with the idea that pupils should just be taught? Not taught by self-assessment, not taught by "analysing mark schemes" but taught by a teacher who stands up at the front of the class and teaches them things they need to know. That's what used to happen in schools, and standards were far higher then than they are now. Proposals like this, if put into practice, would simply waste good teaching time.

Dhimmi of the day

For this deep sense of what it means to be truly integrated, I am so grateful to my Muslim sisters and brothers for Ramadan. I love its measured rhythms and purifying disciplines. They are truly restorative for my own faith. But more than this, at a personal level they address me directly, as they invite me to redress the imbalance I so often detect in my failure to care properly for my own body while deluding myself that my soul's passage to heaven is assured through the power of my intellect and the spiritual insights which may come through regular theological reflection.

The holy month of Ramadan reminds me that I need both body and soul to be in good shape if I'm to approach the heavenly courts. It also teaches me that the taqwa, which is the divine gift to all people of faith and goodwill, will only come my way when I achieve a more balanced nurturing of both.

So, who wrote this then? Some devout Muslim, no doubt?

Well, no, actually. It was in fact the canon chancellor of Blackburn Cathedral, the Revd Chris Chivers, who has written an article in The Guardian bearing the headline "Thinking about the meaning of Ramadan has made me a better Christian". He adds that "Muslims seem to express a more integrated relationship between body and soul" than Christians.

Looks like we might just have another Ann Holmes Redding on our hands!

And does anyone want to speculate on the chances of a Muslim imam talking of how grateful he was to his Christian brothers and sisters for telling him about Easter, and thereby making him a better Muslim?

Environmentalist nutters of the day

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. It does what is says on the tin.

Are these people serious? They appear to be, but you can never quite be sure about a movement led by anyone bearing the name Les U Knight.

Lib Dems in good idea shocker!

Patients needing emergency NHS treatment after becoming drunk or incapacitated by drugs would be charged under proposals yesterday from Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman.

The plan is one of a series of policy shifts in a strategy paper he published before the party's annual conference in Brighton next week. Mr Lamb said: "If you get rat-arsed on a Friday night and get taken to A&E where you are foul and abusive to staff, is it right for the taxpayers to fund your life-saving treatment?"

He called for wide public debate on whether the community should pay for the excesses of the individual. There was a strong case for charging drunks for stomach pumps or treatment of injuries, and pubs and clubs should also be made to contribute if their complicity could be proven.

You know, aside from this very last bit, I actually agree. I really fail to see why the taxpayer should fund the treatment of those who use up valuable resources through their own vice and stupidity. I recall that on the one occasion when I was unfortunate enough to find myself in A&E, the room was filled with the sound of drunken idiots, and a nurse told me that I was the only person in there who was not there as a result of alcohol or drugs. And this was a Tuesday night - imagine what it must be like on a Friday or a Saturday. No, as far as I'm concerned the taxes that we pay entitle us to free NHS treatment when we fall ill through natural circumstances which are no fault of our own. When, on the other hand, we fall ill entirely as a result of our own actions, then we are imposing a burden on the NHS that we could quite easily have avoided imposing, and we, not the taxpayer, should bear the cost of that.

Why do I disagree with that last bit, about pubs and clubs also being obliged to contribute? Well, basically, because it's not their fault if their customers drink too much. It is not unreasonable to expect individuals to exercise self-control, and, indeed, the Lib Dem proposals seem designed to promote the idea of personal responsibility. Thus, if you go into a pub, and have a drink, you are responsible for seeing that you exercise self-control in the amount of alcohol you consume. This is your personal responsibility, and not that of anyone else, including the person who supplies alcohol to you. To suggest that pubs and clubs should bear part of the responsibility if a drunk injures himself is to deny or reduce the personal responsibility of that drunk for his actions.

Universities biased against the poor?

The universities secretary John Denham has complained that top universities are biased against state schools when it comes to admissions. As evidence for this, Denham pointed out that it is generally the case that the better a university is, the fewer of its students were educated at state schools.

However, while this is undoubtedly the case, Denham makes the classic leftist mistake (also made when discussing supposed racist or sexist discrimination) and assumes that inequality of outcome proves the existence of discrimination. In fact, in cases where widespread discrimination on the basis of background has been alleged it has almost always been the case that admissions tutors were engaging in "positive" discrimination against those from private schools, and sometimes also against those from high-performing state schools. And does anyone really believe that academics, who tend overwhelmingly to hold left-wing views, are deliberately refusing to offer candidates places based in whole or in part on the fact that they do not come from a well-off background?

What John Denham might like to consider is, that it is the poor quality of the education that many of those from the poorest backgrounds are receiving in state schools that lies behind their failure to achieve places at elite universities. The fact is, that while there are excellent state schools and appallingly bad private schools, state schools do tend, on average, to be worse (with the distinguished exception of grammar schools, which are usually better). Those that educate pupils from the poorest background are often the worst of all, in terms of both basic teaching quality, and school discipline. As such, it is almost certain that if you have two newborn babies of equal ability, and you send one off to the Dragon and Eton and the other off to a state primary where the children carry knives, and a secondary school where they carry guns and deal drugs, then the first one will perform at a substantially higher level in his exams. Doing something to genuinely increase the standard of education at state schools (as opposed to increasing the number of state school pupils passing increasingly easy exams) might be the answer that Denham is looking for, if he wants to reduce the disproportionate number of the privately-educated at our best universities. But, of course, doing something useful is the difficult option for a Labour politician; it is far easier to play at class warfare and blame someone else.

The climate change debate is not over

Global warming is an entirely natural phenomenon and its effects can even be beneficial, according to two leading researchers.

Recent climate change is not caused by man-made pollution, but is instead part of a 1,500-year cycle of warming and cooling that has happened for the last million years, say the authors of a controversial study.

Dennis Avery, an environmental economist, and Professor Fred Singer, a physicist, have looked at the work of more than 500 scientists and concluded that it is very doubtful that man-made global warming exists.

Since I am not a scientist, and, indeed, have little interest in most areas of science, I do not tend to write about climate change a great deal, nor do I tend to espouse any particular position on the issue. However, I am interested in seeing that impartial debate takes place, and desire that the public in general, and schoolchildren in particular, are not brainwashed into accepting as absolute fact a theory which is, in truth, not generally accepted as true by those who do know about these things.
As it is, the government and the MSM has unquestioningly accepted the claim that man-made global warming is a proven fact, and treat those who oppose it as dangerous heretics. Some readers may recall that in February it was announced that every secondary school in England was to be sent a copy of Al Gore's propaganda film, "An Inconvenient Truth". The then Environment Secretary David Miliband claimed then that "the debate over the science of climate change is well and truly over". When I recently had occasion to visit a primary school, I found a vast wall display at the centre of the school telling children that they were killing the Earth. Meanwhile Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician and former Greenpeace activist who is sceptical of the existence of man-made climate change, was physically assaulted by an environmental activist, for daring to suggest that, actually, we aren't all doomed. And last week, Greenpeace released a video which came rather close to threatening similar (or worse) action against those who oppose its ends.

The existence of man-made global warming is increasingly treated as an article of faith by those on the left, and those who, like Mr Avery and Professor Singer, dissent from it, are increasingly regarded as, not just wrong, but actually evil. And this is what our schools brainwash the nation's children into believing. After all, since Al Gore is in no way a scientist, and since his film can in no way be said to represent a balanced assessment of the subject, it is simply brainwashing to show it as representing some form of scientific truth universally acknowledged. Contra Miliband, the debate appears to be far from over, and adults and schoolchildren alike deserve rather rather better than to have politicians and the media attempt to brainwash them: we deserve a continued debate on this issue, and we deserve the real, rather than the politically-correct, truth.