Finally, after being called a ‘crackpot’, a ‘flat earther’ and, most sinisterly and despicable of all given the connotations it raises, a ‘denier’, it turns out that I, along with countless others, was right to be sceptical about climate change.
And I’m pretty darn smug about it.
I’ve had countless arguments with the vegetarian mafia on this issue. Over dinners and drinks, in the newsroom and the living room, even in the street. Never in my life have I seen such effective brainwashing.
To those who likened me to a Nazi sympathiser by labelling me a ‘denier’, I say this - this worldwide epidemic of disinformation, telling us to cough up the dough or the earth will die, is the closest thing to Third Reich propaganda I have experienced.
We’ve been told for years that the science is ‘settled’, that the only scientists who don’t believe it are mad or on the payroll of Big Evil Corporations, that if you don’t believe in it you’re some kind of neo-fascist. The argument has been presented as being as black and white as a zebra (an endangered one, of course).
And now we learn the whole thing is, if not utter rot, a very grey area. Emails leaked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have revealed that for years and years top UK and US scientists have been completely over-blowing the whole situation. They’ve been skewing statistics, utilising ‘hockey stick’ graphs that will make any data you like spike sharply and alarmingly.
Now, let me get this straight, I am not for any minute saying that climate change is not a serious issue. It is. It needs attention. It needs it sooner rather than later. However. We are paying through the nose for something which, let’s be honest, is still just a theory. Las year our government passed, without a flicker of doubt, the most expensive law in British history (£18 billion a year, as you ask - that’s nearly a grand per household).
I am not, get this right before you slate me, against tackling this problem. If it needs money throwing at it, so be it. This is the future of our planet we’re talking about, for heaven’s sake. I can scarcely imagine a more important way for my taxes to be spent.
But please, please, can we get the science right first? I can’t pretend to know the nitty gritty, and no one expects me to, but we know now that temperatures worldwide have dropped this decade, sea levels haven’t risen anymore than they have for the last 200 years and we have same amount of ice at the poles as we did 30 years ago.
It’s hardly a climate catastrophe, is it?
Here’s an inconvenient truth for you - we’ve been lied to for years. We’ve been told to dig deep into our pockets on the say-so of a handful of scaremongers and doom merchants.
Climate change is a massive issue but it‘s not, as we’ve been told, the end of the world.
@2 years ago
When it comes to the issue about NHS nurses needing degrees in the future, I have only one thing to offer. Personal experience.
I’m not going to go into detail but a few years ago I was in hospital for a while following an operation. The service I received from the nurses, as I recovered, was nothing short of impeccable.
Now, look, I’d be the last person to claim that the NHS is perfect. It’s not. But the nurses that aided me through my recovery, particularly in the first few difficult days, were nothing short of brilliant.
And were they ‘educated’? Did they have high class degrees? Would they win Brain of Britain?
No, no, and no again. But were they perfect nurses? Yes, yes, yes a thousand times.
Let me tell you about Julie. Julie grew up in a house without running water or an inside toilet. She did not go to university. To be honest, she never had the option. She didn’t even receive what we now call A Levels.
What was she trained in? Nursing.
And what was she brilliant at? Nursing.
Ok, so it’s a simple argument. But you can NOT teach empathy. You cannot teach bedside manner. Some people are born nurses. Some people are born doctors. There is a difference.
Please, let’s not confuse the two.
Being a nurse is a very different profession from being a doctor. Doctors, in my experience, are cold, analytical and brilliant. Nurses, on the other hand, are warm, responsive and brilliant.
Being a nurse is like being a teacher. It’s a vocation.
Don’t put people off with degree courses and the like. I would have really struggled without Julie. And she would have struggled with a degree.
This is backwards thinking from people with no experience of the frontline of the NHS.
@2 years ago
After letting off a bit of steam over Afghanistan yesterday, I was hoping to tackle a different subject today.
But Gordon Brown’s letter of ‘condolence’ to the bereaved mother of Guardsman Jamie Janes deserves comment. And then some.
When I heard about the incident my first thought was ‘lay off him’. I know, I was as surprised as anyone! It’s generally pretty hard to muster much sympathy for old Broon but I thought that this was simply media vindictiveness.
I was dead wrong.
After being filled in on the details of story I found myself in the unfamiliar position of defending the beleaguered PM. Come off it, I thought, this is the Prime Minister we’re talking about! We’re fighting an impossible war, we’re in a recession. I want his mind on the job. The very fact that he makes the time to write personalised letters to the families of the soldiers who lose their lives in action, well, I find that admirable.
So, I defended him. I told people to ‘get a life’. A sense of perspective was needed, priorities put back in order. Brown has enough bad points to highlight without having to resort to petty jibes about his penmanship.
And then I saw the letter.
What a disgrace. I think Jacqui Janes, already struggling with a grief most of us can only imagine, was commendably restrained in only ‘throwing the letter across the room’. If it was me, I’d have thrown it, stamped on it, spat on it and torn it into pieces.
The letter, sorry, the scrawled memo is an insult to the memory of every dead British soldier. Barely legible and containing more mistakes than the average 6 year old’s homework, this letter sums up the doomed PM. Sloppy, lazy and arrogant.
He clearly dashed it out a single minute without a moment’s thought. The irony is, it only would have taken a couple of minutes more to write a well-worded, well-presented and genuinely comforting letter to a family who have already given more to this country than Brown could dream of.
I’m sorry to sound so bitter but if the government want us to believe in this war then they need to convince us that they truly do care about every single British life lost.
This kid was only 20 years old, for goodness’ sake.
And does this letter prove the government gives a fig?
I’ll let you decide.
@2 years ago
Mr Flash just can’t stay away, can he?
Now, I’ve kept my silence on the Blair/EU President debate all week but I feel it’s safe to do so now. In fact, I’m almost feeling a little sorry for Boney Blair. Almost.
The arrogance of the man is staggering but the events of the past few days will have been a chastening experience for the man who would be king. I’ll bet he thought his old mucker, Gordon Brown, was going to be his biggest obstacle. Far from it.
In fact, Brown threw his weight behind Blair with surprising vigour. It’s just everybody else , and I mean everybody, who balked at the idea of President Blair.
Blair was always going to face stiff opposition in Europe. It goes without saying that he’s treated with some suspicion in Brussels (and Paris and Berlin) but he must have banked on his reputation and authority winning people over. The man’s certainly influential. He can quite literally pick up the phone to anyone in the world. He has the ears of people Brown and, perhaps, even Obama hold no sway with.
And if he’d approached this with even an iota of humility, he would found far more open arms across Europe.
Perhaps now Tony Blair will understand the depth of loathing there is towards him, even in his own country. Particularly in his own country.
Forget Iraq, forget the economy, forget Cherie. The reason people don’t want Tony Blair to be the brand new President of the EU is because he really, really wants to be.
‘Over my dead body’ was William Hague’s position and he found an awful lot of sympathy in 27 European capitals.
His supporters point out, quite correctly, that Blair doesn’t need the money. The £300,000 a year that’s been bandied around for this role pails into insignificance against the purported £15 million Blair has earned since leaving office.
His services are coveted and he receives £2 million a year from Deloitte alone. TBA has become a mega global corporation. Tony Blair the politician and turned Tony Blair the man into a serious cash cow.
So, he doesn’t need the money. Sure. What does he need then? Sadly, exactly what I am giving him here. Attention.
Make no mistake, he misses the limelight. He misses the column inches, the dinners with heads of state, the public handshakes. Remember how grimly he hung onto power? He wants it all back.
And most of all, he wants to be President. To be President of Europe. To finally stand shoulder to shoulder with an American president.
‘I’ll take the job as long as it’s big enough’, he’s allegedly said.
Could he not have foreseen how repulsive this would sound? It’s more than arrogance, it’s ignorance.
A word of warning. The Conservatives and European heads of state are correct to be suspicious of Blair. Goodness knows what kind of role he wanted but it wouldn’t have been good for anyone (except Blair, of course). He clearly wanted more power and influence than was reasonable.
But Mr Flash is not the only dangerous ego out there. The self-styled ‘kingmaker’ of Europe, Angela Merkel, should be watched equally closely. She doesn’t want Blair around because he would tread all over her toes.
Merkel has so much influence that what she says about the EU presidency pretty much goes. And she wants someone she can control. She could never control Blair.
If she has her way, and she will, it’ll be a straight shootout between Jean-Claude Juncker, president of that global powerhouse Luxembourg, and Jan-Peter Balkenende, the Dutch PM, famous only for a passing resemblance to Harry Potter.
Blair’s bling or Merkel’s stooge? It’s hardly a glittering future for the EU.
And Britain are well off out of it.
@2 years ago
Mr Hammond will be beginning to offer up his thoughts and opinions on current affairs in this daily blog very shortly. Please keep clicking back and he will be with you from the newsroom directly…
Veronica, PA to Geoffrey Hammond
@2 years ago
Far be it from me to agree with a man who talks to plants but from time to time the Prince of Wales speaks an awful lot of sense. His concerns about Ed Balls’ latest wacky scheme to reform primary school education should be taken very seriously indeed.
If it’s not broke, don’t fix it, I say. But our education system is broke. It needs fixing. But carefully, delicately, sensitively. The children’s secretary’s latest effort is akin to Edward Scissorhands trying to thread a needle.
Under his new reforms, the 13 stand alone subjects will be hacked down into six ‘areas of learning’. Give this guy a couple more years and he’ll be deciding we need to strip schooling down to the three R’s and learning by rote. The measures include bundling together subjects such as geography, history and citizenship (whatever that is) into ‘historical, geographic and social understanding’. Confused? Your kids will be.
So, subject content ‘must be reduced’. Sure, I can understand that. The bright ideas being offered up? Want to hear them? If you’re holding a hot drink I suggest you put it down.
Ministers have suggested that certain subjects could be taught together. For example, history and art. What a great plan! Your children will be coming home from school having painted a beautiful portrait of Queen Victoria but with no idea who she was or when she ruled, as their wasn’t enough time in Historarty this week to cover that.
Let’s get serious. This is gimmick-laden, vote-winning nonsense and it threatens to do a lot of damage to our children. What would you prefer your child learnt at school? World War Two or Google Earth? Dickens or blogging? This isn’t just silly, it’s dangerous. Global warming is all over the news. Technology is in the home. These are things children will pick up naturally.
Oh and your five year olds are going to be having sex education lessons. That ok?
At primary school your child will be encouraged to become an airy-fairy, wooly-thinking, eco-friendly technophile. And then they’ll be thrown into secondary school where they’ll have to grapple with alien notions such as ‘subjects’. The future 11 year old won’t have a clue what learning ‘English’ or ‘Science’ means. And then they’ll be expected to sit exams.
The left hand really doesn’t know what the right is doing. The real problem here is that New Labour don’t know what it wants. They want to please all the people, all the time. They want to win votes. To win elections. But when it comes to clear, positive policies that will help make our education system the envy of the world once more. Well. We get ‘mathematical understanding’ instead of maths, ‘scientific and technological understanding’ instead of science and ‘physical development, health and well being’ instead of PE.
We get words instead of actions. We get gimmicks instead of policies. We get short-changed.
And in the meantime, our children get a shoddy education.
@2 years ago
Here’s a neat bit of New Labour doublespeak for you. Or lies, if you prefer.
Professor David Nutt, the home secretary’s recently sacked chief drugs adviser, was lead to the gallows because he had ‘crossed a line’ into politics.
Translation: Professor Nutt was fired for not towing the Labour party line, despite the Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs that he represented being an independent body
It really is a marvellous bit of hypocrisy. It’s like a schoolboy cuffing his playmate round the ear and then crying ‘he started it!’ There’s only one person meddling in politics here and that is Alan Johnson. He didn’t like what Professor Nutt was saying, so he got rid of him. Some independent body, eh?
And now three more members of the ACMD have resigned following a ‘clear the air’ meeting with the home secretary.
What does the government want? Real, honest advice on drugs? Or do they just want to hear what they want to hear? The answer is fairly obvious.
Ok, let’s play devil’s advocate for a moment. The government upgraded cannabis to a Class B drug, putting it somewhere between painkillers and heroin. Now, I have no real problem with this. Some idiots still need teaching that illegal drugs are illegal for a reason - they can seriously harm you. I’m in favour of doing whatever it takes to ram home the message. Upgrade it to class A+ and put a hat on it for all I care, as long as you’re tackling the problem.
Professor Nutt stated that the decision to do so was ‘political’. It was his job to give advice, not opinions. He was to present the facts, not comment on individual government policies. Perhaps he was meddling in politics. Maybe he did have to go.
Naturally, the council bristled. They felt that their independence was being impinged upon. But, don’t worry, here comes the home secretary in to sort it all out. To ‘clear the air’. And the result? Three more members resign and the 25 remaining have ‘outstanding concerns’.
Goodness knows what kind of damage Alan Johnson could do as foreign secretary or, perish the thought, Prime Minister.
Oh, and what was Johnson’s reaction to the conciliatory meeting that resulted in three resignations? ‘The discussions were very constructive.’
For who, Alan, for who?
@2 years ago
After paying my own respects to the thousands of British men and women who have laid down their lives for this country, I came to home to read two very sad pieces of news.
Today, on Remembrance Sunday, two more of our boys have been killed in that most aimless of wars in Afghanistan. And a survey has revealed that four fifths of children in Scotland do not know that the Dunkirk evacuation was part of the Second World War.
I’m not sure which one depressed me more.
How can we ask our children to wear their poppies and respect a minutes silence, when they have no idea what they are doing these things for?
More, importantly how can we ask our soldiers to keep fighting, and dying, in Afghanistan when they have no idea what they are fighting for? I’ve read countless reports of soldiers who claim to be confused about their mission. More worryingly, most UK soldiers believe the war to be unwinnable. And they should know.
This is now reflected in public opinion here in the UK. Most of us want the soldiers back, most of us don’t know why we are there, most of us don’t think it is worth it.
At the moment, I do not agree with public opinion. But there’s only so long I can keep positive about this war.
I do think bringing stability and democracy to Afghanistan is worth it. Yes, even worth losing British lives for. But am I convinced that our current campaign will work? Sadly, I am not.
When I read today about those two soldiers, from 4th Battalion The Rifles and 2nd Battalion The Rifles, I couldn’t help thinking they had died in vain.
I could quite easily explain to a child why it is important we wear our poppies with pride. Why it is important to remember the fallen. I could easily explain why men and women died in the Somme or at Passchendaele, and the subsequent good that has come from their sacrifice. But Helmand? Kabul? Sadly, that’s more difficult.
I hope I am wrong. But, like everyone else, I am going to take some convincing. We need a clear strategy and we need some reasons for optimism. At the moment, the MoD is clutching at straws.
And that is not good enough when our countrymen are dying.
@2 years ago
Christmas seems to come earlier each year, doesn’t it?
Now, thanks to Disney and their 3D whizzkids, it hit last night (yes, November 3rd) in the middle of London. I was at the premiere of A Christmas Carol starring Jim Carey and Colin Firth which was presented by all the cinemas in the square - Odeon West End, Odeon (the big one, not the small one) and Empire. I wonder what the shared finances are like…
But a really fun family film, however something about the whole experience felt a bit odd. It’s not Christmas! Okay they want to cash in on the pre-Christmas sales but won’t it be a bit old by the time it gets round to Christmas Eve? I’ve said the C-word too much. Let’s just stop talking about it. Enough.
I’m looking forward to the Avatar release.
Follow me on Twitter @ http://twitter.com/GHammondat10
@2 years ago
