spring of hope: an update in pictures

I'm not doing too well this Lent. Last year, I gave up a couple of pints a week and gave the money to charity. This Lent I've had to learn editing from scratch to publish the village magazine - although I was priveleged to learn from somebody who'd done the job in professional and voluntary roles for decades.

So it was good to be sent a photo-update of a charity I was made aware of soon after moving to the Draughty Old Fen: the Spring of Hope foundation (part of the Youth with a Mission group) which helps disabled children in Uganda - much are in their clinic in Wabwoko, which is in the Kayunga District of Uganda, shaded orange in the map to the left. I'd like to share some of these photos with you, with the original comments.

Click here to go to the Spring of Hope blog

Emily (volunteer) and Victor (OT student ) on a home visit!! Feb 2010, we saw our first Uganda OT students come from Mulago training hospital!!

Our deaf children from both schools were able to visit the zoo in Entebbe thanks to Roxy fundraising!! 22nd Feb 2010

We bought our 2nd bike, after a previous volunteer Melanie fundraised. Moses is now out and about in the community. Children in Wabwoko are at last receiving weekly home visits!! Bought Feb. 11th!!

Carolyn(volunteer) and Moses counting medications at the end of a very busy clinic,. At this clinic in Wabwoko we received 96 epileptic patients!! Feb 12th!!

Children and parents at the clinic in Wabwoko. Feb 12th!!

The last pic really struck a chord with me because I remember the sense of wonder and getting bigger exuded by both my children when they started school, something I think one can see on the face of little Zachariah as he starts on his own incredible journey of education, thanks to Spring of Hope.

top tip for Tuesday

Only time for one tip this week, as I'm experimenting with the seat-of-the-pants style of editing the church mag: but what a tip it is.

Last Friday John Smeaton, director of SPUC (the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children) drews a line in the sand in response to the Government's abusive proposals for sex education in schools, which bode ill for the Christian, Jewish, Hindu and Muslim voluntary grant-aided

Smeaton cites a Government media release praising St Thomas More's RC School in Bedford on the grounds that, among other things,

St Thomas More delivers SRE [sex and relationships education] through the pastoral programme in conjunction with the RE syllabus...the school explicitly recognises the reality that some young people may choose to be sexually active and, if that is the case, they need the knowledge and confidence to make an informed choice to protect themselves from pregnancy and STIs. The school nurse provides students with clear accurate information about the full range of contraception and STIs and details of local services...Pregnancy options, including abortion, are also discussed in a non-judgemental way with the RE syllabus requiring students to understand the spectrum of pro- and anti-choice views on abortion.

Smeaton provides a long list of tenets of the Roman Catholic faith that these grounds violate, after announcing that "I will be writing to St Thomas More school, asking them to confirm or deny the government's claims about what is happening in its school."

Later that day, the Telegraph's Blogs Editor, Damian Thomson forecast Bad Things for Oona Stannard, chief executive of the Catholic Education Service, which, as Smeaton identified, had helped the Government draw up its guidelines. Fr Tim Finnegan, a frequent flier on this feature, refers to both posts as he runs with the theme on his blog The Hermeneutic of Continuity. He asks how far the moral relativism will be taken:

I doubt whether you would get Healthy Schools Status if you taught that there was a range of views on the advantages of smoking tobacco; and I don't suppose there is meant to be a valid range of views on the pros and cons of nazism as a system of government. The relativism of Ed Balls and his friends who are setting the agenda for secular Britain is actually only applied to the "views" they disagree with, such as Catholic moral teaching on the sanctity of life, marriage, and the procreation of children.

The Government is mounting an attack both on one Faith and on faith. I remember minor Scottish politicians muttering about "Rome on the rates" and, as they have risen, they have dripped their poison slowly through the years in the hope that the erosion would create a cavity large enough to insert their specious moral outrage about "religion on the rates".

As John Smeaton notes, today - Tuesday 23 - is the day when Parliament is due to vote on what is effectively the nationalisation of the bodies, minds and spirits of our children.

Smeaton remarks that St Thomas More "preferred to sacrifice himself rather than put the state's demands above the church's teachings", as can be seen in the 1966 film
A man for All Seasons starring, among others, Paul Scofield and Susannah York. I wonder if the Government was careful to use a school bearing his name as a Trojan horse to try to use the state's demands to extinguish the church's teaching?

curtains for truth as hostilities begin

In 1988, a favourite rock group of mine called Magnum had a hit called Days of no Trust which had lines that are ironically appropriate:

The truth's not a curtain
To be drawn back and forth
It's a flame that keeps burning
Everlasting torch

The reason for their appropriateness is that we are in the political conference season, and the next party up to the line is the present party of Government, the Labour Party.

Labour as it exists now, whether or not you prefix the "New", is a neo-conservative project which sees humankind as something that can be perfected solely by that which arises from itself. As such, it sees its roots as being in the Enlightenment and is hence related to disastrous 20th century undertakings to improve the human race with faux-science and ideology. In his 2007 work Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia John Gray summarises how Tony Blair, one of New Labour's founding fathers in the last days of his premiership, saw the truth - not as an "everlasting torch" but in an entirely instrumental sense:

It is not so much that [Blair] is economical with the truth as that he lacks the normal unerstanding of it. For him truth is whatever serves the cause, and when he engages in what is commonly judged to be deception he is only anticipating the new world that he is helping to bring about...Blair's stance...must by ordinary standards be judged to be thoroughly dishonest, but it is clear he believes ordinary standards do not apply to him. Deception is justified if it advances human progress - and then it is not deception. Blair's untruths are not true lies. They are prophetic glimpses of the future course of history...

The present political landscape is so littered with the detritus of the abuse of truth I have to focus down and pick three instances of lies, damn lies and deliberate misinformation fuelled by ideology.

Education

While the Government sticks to the sort of abusive agenda which led to the NHS in Sheffied informing schoolchildren that an orgasm a day keeps the doctor away, its slavish adherence to its target of 50% of school-leavers joining university is resulting not in more educated school-leavers, but rather dumbed-down university courses to accomodate the increasing amount of kids who leave school functionally illiterate in spite of their crop of A-grades.

And while expulsion numbers are being massaged to give the impression that schools are taking care of bad behaviour, when a member of staff - like dinner lady Chloe Hill (right) of Great Tey Primary School in Essex complied with school policy to appraise a child's family of the egregious bullying of their daughter, the school acted after the manner of the Government when ordinary people tell a truth inconvenient to those more powerful than them, and fired her.

I accuse Labour of using the younger generation as a means of generating statistics that proves to ministers in their distant towers, and nobody else, that their Trotskyite onslaught of depressing, disempowering and dumbed-down policies passes for successful education.

Social Services

When Baby P (Peter Connelly) was tortured to death by his mother, her boyfriend and their lodger in Haringey (the London borough which gave us the horrendous death of Victoria Climbié, social services there said more about themselves than they realised when a statement was released saying that too many people are expressing concerns about children being abused. In fact, in social services, the definition of a "child at risk" (as opposed to a "child in need") is a fluid one, depending on how many children in danger are on a social work department's boods.


When the children's charity Barnardo's advised that more children need to be taken into care, Ed Balls - Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families - replied on an ideological basis that chidren could be cared for best at home. Miss Climbié and Master Connelly might have disagreed had they had the chance. In a similar development, a women's refuge in Dorset is being closed down in Dorset because the quango in control of its funding, Supporting People in Dorset, considers that women at risk of having nine bells knocked out of them by their partners are best sared for when being supported to live at home (and its cheaper).

I accuse Labour of sacrificing women's and children's happiness, safety and sometimes even lives on the altar of ideological purity.

Defence

In many ways this is the big one, not because of the amount of servicepeople in Afghanistan and Iraq, but because Labour's ideological idées fixées are at their most pronounced here. Case in point: on Clive Anderson's Chat Show last week, hard-left MP Diane Abbott summarised the view of many Labour MPs (with some honourable exceptions) on our nuclear deterrant by saying all one needed to know about it was the similarity of nuclear missiles to "what a man has between his legs". 'Nuff said.

With the determination, inherited via the Campaign for nuclear Disarmament from early hard-left politicians like James Maxwell, subject of a biography by Gordon Brown, that most wars can be avoided by sitting round a table and having a meaningful discussion (and thank God when such a strategy can prevent war), ministers must be under a huge temptation to manage the narrative, after the manner in which Sir David Varney, writing on behalf of the Government, calls for a single source of truth. Just so, MoD press officer, John Salisbury-Baker, has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after years of lying to the families of slain troops about the adequacy of snatch Land-Rovers.

I accuse the Government of putting British forces in more danger than necessary in order to produce a narrative in the public's minds that the War against Terror is unwinnable and troops should be brought home. Whether or not this happens, Labour is tampering with the evidence in the court of public opinion to create pressure that they will gladly bow to.


And so, as the Labour Party Conference begins in Brighton, it's worthwhile reminding ourselves that we've been here before, in 1978-9, when, then as now, Labour went out of control fiscally and the Tories had to sort things out in the form of applying traditional conservative remedies pragmatically to the problems of the day. It will be interesting to see how much substance appears in the brave speeches through the week as Gordon Brown struggles with the Blairite hydra while pretending to attack the Conservative Party, and how much rhetoric is merely Parthian shots fired by tired politicians determined to head for a quiet place to bury New Labour in opposition.

Should this happen, the Conservative party will be faced with the grim task of tearing down the veils suffocating truth - again.

prawns in the dark - surely not the last night?

It's not often that people go to a music show, let alone one featuring classical music, for the compére as much as the acts. But that's what happens every year at the BBC's Proms in the Park, which has been presented by Sir Terry Wogan - who lampoons it as "Prawns/Prams in the Dark" - for fourteen years; the audience of 40,000 broke into chants of "Ter-ry! Ter-ry! Ter-ry!" several times.

The show was on the radio, which as far as I'm concerned is superior to the TV because we have a limited number of senses and the telly ties up two of them almost totally. But it was engaging, so much so that I put the Telegraph crossword down several times. That doesn't happen often.

This year's Proms in the Park opened with Strike up the Band by the BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by Martin Yates. They also backed Icelandic tenor Garđar Thór Cortes and modern forces' sweetheart Katherine Jenkins, who performed live for the first time her operatic rendering of Evenescence's Bring me to life, which was given its first airing by Wogan on his Breakfast Show last week. If you have a look at this clip of her singing Music of the Night at the 2006 Proms (sorry, Pam!), you'll understand why Terry announced after her spot "that shattered a few windows at the Dorchester!"






Wogan's hilarity in the face of spin, bombast and hyperbole is the reason why he's so popular, even among folk like me who view the BBC with suspicion. He triggered diplomatic complaints from Denmark when, presenting the Eurovision from that country in 2001, he referred to hosts Soren Pilmark and Natasja Crone-Back as "Doctor Death and the Tooth Fairy", and his response to the swine-flu hysteria earlier this year was "pandemic - my granny!" Famously, when Northern Rock was nationalised after disappearing up its own bad debt he read out, on his show, an excerpt from Das Kapital in which Marx called for banks to be brought under state control.

The DJ has been referred to as one of the "untouchables" of the BBC, in that they don't dare get rid of him, no matter how politically incorrect he becomes, due to his audience figures - at the last count, eight million people tune in to his breakfast show every morning. So there was a sense of shock when he announced his retirement from Wake Up To Wogan last Wednesday; I felt I knew what it must have felt like to hear that the Beatles had split up.

And in true style in the Park, he lauded Martin Yates as "the only conductor who can play the spoons...Captain Corelli on his belly, and I won't tell you where he plays his Humperdinck...", and when the orchestra vacated the stage for Escala, announced that they'd just gone "for a quick fifteen pints". In his new book, he describes his "loyal, ever-offensive listeners" as "the gratuitously hurtful folk who declare that I'm very popular in hospitals because the listeners abed there are too weak to reach out and switch me off".

Proms in the Park goes for a lighter experience than is traditionally meted out in the Proms proper, but still Barry Manilow introduced his epic performance of Could it be magic with a section of Chopin's Prelude in C major whose chord structure inspired the music and shortly afterwards went into my favourite - Copacabana.

The last 45 minutes of the programme came from the Albert Hall, as we joined The Last Night of the Proms. I had planned to watch some of this on TV, but was frankly left rather cold by the thought of an Arnold overture with parts for vaccuum cleaners and floor-polishers, even if one of the latter was operated by David Attenborough. David Robertson, principal guest conductor for the night and musical director of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, apologised for the misunderstanding involving tea in Boston, then used it as an excuse to gently chide the promgoers for inserting a glottal stop in place of the final "T" in Land of Hope and Glory's last line, "God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet". We also had those other two mainstays that make the last night so wonderful, Jerusalem and Rule Britannia before God Save the Queen ended the night.

The warm embrace of their country by so many of its (and others') young people was both comforting and poignant in the light of a report by the University of London's Insititute of Education that showed 74% of teachers surveyed as applying words like "brainwashing" about patriotism; a description, notes Cranmer, that many don't apply to "secularism, sex, contraception, abortion, drugs, global warming, anti-capitalism, the glories of the EU, the wonders of the UN and a myriad of Marxist agendas."

The BBC has expressed its discomfort with the night's "Britishness" in the past. I'm not sure whether it's now reconciled itself to the country it serves, or if corporate heads have been temporarily focussed by the thought that the next Last Night may take place under a government that values that country and its people more than Labour's actions and pronouncements show that it does.

Whichever, I live in hope that Sir Terry's retirement won't be complete. We need the sheer common sense he ingeniously wraps in a surreal coating. And I'm always happy to listen to somebody grumpier than me.

it was 70 years ago today

Historian and author Colin Heaton has kindly responded to this post - click here to go to the update.

My Mum, God rest her soul, was always clear about her last day of school in 1939, when she was 14 - the leaving age in those days. As usual, a tune played on the piano called all the children on St Roch's Secondary School in Glasgow to their lines. Then the headmistress, in tears, prayed that the coming storm not last too long.

Her Dad - my Grandad, who I regret to say I never met - had been a Sergeant in the first war, and was under no illusion as to the prosecution of the war or its likely length. The three children were given the chance to be evacuated, but her Mum decided that if they were to die, they would die together. By the grace of God, all survived.

My Mum sometimes admitted guilt that for her, the War was a time of innocence and fun. Childhood's end didn't come until 1946 when, waiting in Glasgow's Central Station for the return of soldiers who had been taken prisoners by the Japanese: I remember a fellow without a nose, because of the beating visited by the butt of a Japanese guard's rifle.

It was a different time, but a time that continues to shape our present. Franklyn Delano Roosevelt comes under fire for prosecuting the War, once his country had officially entered it, with a "Germany first" strategy. My view is that, Hitler having marched on Russia in 1941, his defeat at Stalin's hands was a matter of when rather than if: and the US would have stood against a Soviet Europe. Perhaps that's wrong, but as a (right-wing) Brit I bless FDR's name.

My Mum is gone now, and so have many of the soldiers and evacuees. But many remain alive - please remember them.




Acclaimed historian and author Colin Heaton says of Rooseveldt's "Germany-first" stance:

"There was a reason for the Germany first approach. It all had to do with U-boats, which were sinking aid being sent to the UK and USSR. The Soviets had lost 80% of all their war making materiel by December, 1941. They had manpower, but few vehicles, little ammunition and powder, little bomb making potential, and almost zero aircraft until 1942. Most of their ability to hold back Hitler was due to US aid, hence the U-boat menace. Japan was pretty self contained after Midway and Coral Sea. There major carriers were sunk, our subs were sinking 90% of their transports, and 25% of the warships. Remember that US submarines sank 97% of all enemy shipping, but only made up 3% of the total US Naval forces.

"I remember talking with a Stuka pilot, who knocked out over 20 trucks on a road in the Ukraine. After the battle, he saw they were all Ford vehicles, made in Detroit, and half the aircraft shot down were British-made Spitfires and American P-39 Airacobras, used for ground attack.

de superbia nordovicumque

I'm sorry if the title seems a little arrogant. I didn't intend it to be so - I'm not even absolutely sure it's correct - it was just, as it were, a postcard from the past.

Many years ago, I attended St Scylla's, a secondary comprehensive school in Glasgow's East End. One of my favourite subjects was Classical Studies. Mr Dux's gentle Irish brogue guided us through the regiments of gods governing Greece and Rome, and helped us navigate translations (in prose) of the Odyssey and the Aeneid. I expressed an interest in Latin, as the resemblances to (and differences from) the Italian I was learning in Modern Languages intrigued me. He seemed to sense some sort of aptitude, and gave me Book One of Ecce Romani, the standard Latin course, followed by the sequels as I devoured each one. He was unable to give me any tuition as his schedule was full, but the experience of learning a language by myself introduced me to autodidacticism. I have so much to thank him for.



The reason that arrogance is on my mind is because of a remark by polymath Minister Harriet Harman, MP for Camberwell and Peckham, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Leader of the House of Commons and Minister of Women and Equality, on Conservative candidate Chloë Smith's convincing win in the Norwich North seat, previously held by Labour. As reported on Iain Dale, "the Tory reaction to the Norwich result is "arrogant" because...it means they have now won the general election, and it's in the bag". (Go to Dale's site to see the video, which I can't embed here because despite - or because of -my daughters' gentle ministrations, my computer is still in a huff.)

There will be much analysis of the Norwich North election in the days to come and in the months before Gordon Brown suffers us to have a general election. I would, of course, like to wish Chloë Smith well deserved congratulations, but would otherwise like to concentrate, in descending order, on three aspects of arrogance that seem not to have occurred to Ms Harman.

ARROGANCE No 3:

Identifying targets will lead to improvement

Obviously we all need goals, but the target culture is something entirely different: it is the application of game theory to management thence assumed into politics - basically that if you give targets to sectors then leave it to them as to how to meet those targets, the result will be all things to all people. Case in point: Labour plans to have as few people as possible claiming unemployment benefit, therefore one would assume that the party would direct as many unemployed people as possible towards work; instead, it directs them towards other benefits, such as incapacity benefit or DLA, thus making life harder for those (of whom I have been one) who have genuinely had to take advantage of one of these. Things have gotten so bad that before the financial crisis, the Telegraph's Edmund Conway reported that there were over nine million people of working age without a job in Great Britain.


I was one of them. Having had an exacerbation of my manic-depression and not wishing to work as a nurse any more, I went to the local jobcentre, explained my position, and was refused admission, the lady on the desk (flanked by two rather big chaps) explaining that I'd have to go down a different "pathway" because I was disabled. So I did, and when I explained to the lady at the rainbow's end that I didn't feel I could work with people in a therapeutic capacity any more because of my illness, she exclaimed that she had just the job she could have me trained up for: a youth worker. 'Nuff said.

ARROGANCE No 2:

Reducing education to the lowest common denominator will raise standards

The government seems to be forever bellycaching about the 7% of children who are privately educated, without considering the situation of the 93% it is doing its best to betray. The number one culprit is the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, Ed Balls - who, for example, in March of this year accused private schools of trying to cream off brainy kids with the offer of an international qualification.

School is, of course, the best place to get qualifications, because childhood is the best time to learn anything. But while opportunities for education of various kinds will present themselves throughout life (a friend in his 80s is writing a thesis for a degree), the drive that some young people have to start working and start earning can be so easily smothered by the demands of an educational process from which they have felt detached for some years. So why can't people under 16 apply for apprenticeships? Could it be that, if they have been educated in a failing state school, they - like their older peers - don't have the skills to start work?

ARROGANCE No 1:

What's possible is right

In the early 19th century, Mary Shelley used her novel, Frankenstein, to explore the consequences of "can" being treated as a synonym for "may". Tony Blair's enthusiasm for research into the possibilities of embryonic stem cells continued unabated despite Professor Hwang Woo-suk's high-profile admission of fraud. (This despite it being easier to list the parts of the adult body that pluripotent stem cells can't be gotten from than vice versa.) At the other end of life, there is a movement to legalise assisted suicide, which is economics dressed up as compassion. Thankfully, that movement is being resisted; as just one example, the son-in-law of a man who was killed in Switzerland's Dignitas clinic was moved to question the profits of the place, if they were providing such a service to mankind. I should also say that, having been a nurse, I find it disturbing that the Royal College of Nursing has adopted a "neutral" position on assisted suicide.

I realise that Bismarck described politics as "the art of the possible", but much more is possible now than was in the days of der Eiserne Kanzler. Politics is now so much more than the art of the possible: it is the arena within which our leaders must discern between that which is possible and can build up society, and the possibilities which will lead us to hell in a handcart.

We need to be led by people who have the strength to choose the better of the two, which is why in the next election I will be following the wise lead of the people of Norwich North and voting Conservative - not least because it was under a Conservative government that a teacher was able to give me, with his Latin textbooks, the greatest gift of all: the ability to learn outside of the classroom.

education: a cover for state oppression?

I recently accompanied a young lady to her school, a secondary faith school in the region, where she's not been doing too well academically for various health reasons that demand her absence frequently. A meeting had been arranged with her teachers.

I'd arrived slightly stressed, being aware of the extent to which governance of institutions has been infested by a managerial compulsion to ensure compliance has been achieved by conforming to governmental targets and dicta on such things as diversity and anti-discriminatory laws used to oppress people from a Judaeo-Christian faith background. Case in point: Jennie Cain, secretary at Landscore Primary School in Devon, was told by her headmaster not to return to work after she asked for prayers for her daughter (who'd been disciplined for talking to a classmate about Jesus) in emails that never reached a school computer.

On the other hand, there are still many headmasters in the mould of the legendary Felix Porter from Glasgow, whose sometimes thunderous solicitousness for his charges pointed many a tearaway towards the right tracks. (One of the many ways in which he lives on is in an award named after him.) Working in social housing, I remember one of his successors striding into the office to inform us that we were now part of the truancy reporting scheme. We didn't argue.

It's no metaphor to call education a war-zone. For example, Radagast, a senior teacher in a Catholic school, writes of "the police visiting schools to 'interrogate' students about their beliefs".

One of the major fronts in the war is home education. I wrote earlier this year about Baroness Morgan's assertion that homeschooling "could be used as a 'cover' for child abuse such as neglect, forced marriage, sexual exploitation or domestic servitude."

I find this rather strange. The man known as the "British Fritzl", who made his daughters pregnant 19 times, did not emulate his vile Austrian namesake by imprisoning the girls in a cellar: rather, he moved them around the country so that they would not make attachments who might have raised the alarm, but - crucially - sent them to schools. In a scenario that is becoming depressingly familiar, social services and police were alerted but took no further action - indeed, police told the girls' worried grandmother that "slander is a criminal offence".

Likewise, a harrowing case involving a woman accused of taking obscene pictures of young children is emerging in the south of England. But she's not a homeschooling Mum - she works in a nursery which operates from an adjoining school.

Education Otherwise, the charity for families with children being educated at home, provides a laminated card for children to carry if they are picked up by police on a "sweep" for truants. I find it quite surprising that a need for them to print the information that home education is legal in the UK, given that the 2007 guidance from the Department of Schools, Children and Families on these sweeps mentions homeschooling several times. The online version links to a 2006 document from the Department of Education and Skills called What to do if you're worried a child is being abused, which lays down powers already possessed by the relevant authorities to take allegedly abused children to places of safety.

As above in the House of Commons with MPs' expenses, so below with the safety of ordinary folks' children: what is needed is not new laws, powers and regulatory bodies, but for existing ones to be used effectively and with ideological blinkers removed.

Questions remain, however, about what to do when the child abuse is state-sponsored - for example in an assembly in Bromstone Primary School in Kent, when a video of two men canoodling on a bed was shown to children as young as four as part of a drive against homophobia, leaving girls afraid to be friends with each other. Or when the state abets the abuse by rendering certain groups with "alternative" lifestyles effectively untouchable, which led to the debacle surrounding the stepfather of Baby P.

And the young lady I chaperoned to the meeting at her school? I needn't have worried. Her teachers took a blue pencil to her timetable so that she's now concentrating on three subjects, including English and Maths. They did this in the face of Government targets steamrollering teachers into fixing five good GCSE's for pupils. Had she been homeschooled, of course, this would have already been done - one good thing coming out of this farce is that more people are learning about home education than would have even considered it not so long ago.

But to my young friend's teachers, as to Radagast and all those who labour endlessly to try to get a good education for their charges in the face of government oppression, I owe something I don't think those teachers hear often enough:

Well done!


Related post: Home schooling - next in the crosshairs

propaganda in words and pictures

Exams season is on us again - and boy do I mean again: secondary schoolkids seem to have so many exams they talk like a multiple choice test ("what pizza do you want: a)Margherita...").

I've come into the posession of a couple of science past-papers that caused me concern, both from the Foundation element of "Twenty-first Century Science". I've scanned in some exerpts and posted them - apologies if parts are slightly blurred, they're a bit creased.

In one, from January 15 2008, there was a complicated scenario about a family united to ensure that an infertile sister could have a baby:




Three things bothered me. The first was the phrase at the bottom of the above scenario, informing examinees that "Hannah...gave birth to a healthy son, Jake." Genetically, at least, the embryo's being "healthy" (if that means without detectable deformity) is a slam-dunk job, because under the terms of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act (HFEA), it is illegal to choose a disabled embryo for implantation at the expense of an able-bodied one.

Secondly, teenagers sitting the exam are informed that "Rebecca had an operation to remove an egg". I grant that the search is on to identify a method whereby a single egg can be extracted for the purposes of in-vitro fertilisation and implantation, but at present the only means to do this is for a woman to take medication to cause hyperovulation so that a bumper crop of ova can be harvested. This might result in a baby without overt disabilities, but hyperovulation not only results in unborn human beings being discarded, but is by no means unsafe for mothers.

And lastly, look at the question at the bottom of this cartoon vignette:


So where has this politically-motivated exam questioning come from? It certainly didn't spring fully-formed from the board of OCR, the examinations syndicate which boasts that it works in "close consultation with...government to ensure [qualifications] are relevant for learners today".

I would answer that it is the endgame of a process of cultural colonialism by radical left-wing intellectualists, who see complex concrete problems as abstract diversions to be resolved by methods that are judged according to their propinquity to liberal-socialist praxis instead of relevance to real life. Case in point: Harriet Harman's loudly-trumpeted plan for employers to be given the power to choose a female applicant over an equally-qualified male one. A good plan, but the Minister for Equality forgot one thing: employers have always had this power.

As Townhall.com's Sandy Rios shows, key academic and political posts in civilised societies have been occupied by the ideologically beautiful, who are more interested in promoting propaganda to young people than resolving problems up to and including preserving life. They have jumped through the appropriate hoops (or, as Rios says, "gamed the system") until theirs is the dominant clamour to the exclusion of more reality-based voices.

Once in position, the ideologues need to spread their message - to reproduce their memes, if you want - by propaganda. The best way to do this is, as the Soviet Government found, by means of pictures. Although pictures are a great way to educate in general, hence the success of the "For Beginners" series, one group of people loves to learn through pictures: children.

Sophie Grillet is a cartoonist born in Cambridge who is now resident in the US. Her 1997 Feminism for Teenagers is available in libraries as far apart as Stornoway in Scotland's Western Isles (Outer Hebrides) and the Waimakariri District of New Zealand's South Island.

The book makes many complex points with the aid of cartoons, for example that gender-based wage parity is to the benefit of all in that men do not find themselves undercut in the labour market, and that "reproductive rights" campaigns in third-world countries serve interests which "want to prevent people in poor countries from 'breeding' too much".

On abortion, however, Grillet tows the establishment line:

We still don't have control of our own bodies, our own wombs. The Government, the Church and various extremists fight for control over my internal organs. As long as women can be forced to bear an unwanted child - we can never be equal.

With this, Grillet sidelines all the many women - like Don't Poke the Baby's Linda or Alison Davis (left)of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children's group for disabled people No Less Human - who are not "on-message" with her. Needless to say, there's a strong anti-religion element, as indicated by the cartoon below right. If she'd done her homework she'd have found that the pro-life movement is almost totally composed of people who follow a religion and are without doubt pro-family, but part of our job is to make it easier for women who are single because they are unmarried or have been abandoned to choose life for their children.

The book is ostensibly aimed at teenagers, but while even Letterbox Library ("celebrating equality and diversity in the best children's books...Our expert selection process means only books of the highest quality are chosen") says it is aimed at young people aged 12+, the London Borough of Waltham Forest advertises it on its libraries site as "feminism - children's literature".

Meanwhile, pictorial education goes on, even in the exams. In the Twenty-First Century Science past-paper from 14 June 2007, we are given the following reactions to genetic testing for genes for breast-cancer - with no clarification as to what post-screening advice to affected adults might consist of, eg have an abortion; or deny yourself children because, presumably, never to exist is preferable to have one's life terminated by that which cuts short every life:

OK, there are two voices against and two for, which is vastly better odds than we usually face, but context is everything: here is what the students have been exposed to on the previous page:


Last year Dr Jessica Ringrose (left), Senior Lecturer in the Sociology of Gender and Education at the University of London's Institute of Education - who lists her interests as "postfeminist, neo-liberal educational discourses of gender equality and feminine 'success', feminist and critical pedagogical theories of power and privilege (i.e. race, 'whiteness', class)" - called for feminism to be taught in the classroom. She would like to see girls empowered against the pressure to define themselves with pejorative sexual epithets as objects of male desire.

All the best to her; but - as her interests indicate - she will know as well as any of us that when the parts of the different shcools of feminist thought that seek to empower and enable women clash with the destructive, hegemonic pro-abortion agenda of established power, the latter will win every time. So you won't see any indication in Sophie Grillet's book that when women have maternity leave or career-breaks to raise families, the biggest losers are anti-family money-worshippers to whose music feminists dance. Which is why you won't find the whole truth in Feminism for Teenagers any more than you will in modern educational policy abuses for which works like Grillet's provide the Sitz-im-Leben. As, to finish, Radagast explains:

When gifted writers...abandon the notion that moral truth is objective and that the development of the human person is deeply related to truth, they contribute to a culture that has also abandoned the idea that the child needs truth to flourish.

Anne Frank

I don't often to to hospital for non-medical purposes, but today Maxima and I went to Cambridge's Addenbrookes Hospital to see an Anne Frank exhibit in the Treatment Centre. The hospital's now so big that it provides a rather large car called a "courtesy bus", which took us round the huge campus to the centre, aka Institute of Metabolic Science.

The exhibition was in the form of two sets of photos on screens, starting with the dire econimic situation in post-Versailles Treaty Germany, which bred resentment against the Allies, which Adolf Hitler took advantage of in the years following his outburst at a meeting of Anton Drexler's German Workers' Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)persuading him to prefix Nazionalsozialistische: the Nazis had been born.

The presentation stressed that the majority of Germans were unaware of the true agenda of the Nazis until after their election in 1933. After this point, the exhibition grew ever darker, and you would see groups of nurses, physiotherapists etc gathering round words and pictures in silence. It related that 80,000 handicapped people were killed in order to prevent "enfeeblement of the race"; another photo showed a Jewish man, Julius Wolff, being driven down the street by SS soldiers alongside his "Aryan" girlfriend Christine Reemann in Norden in 1935, each bearing signs that said "I am a defiler of the race".

Interspersed with the indications of mounting horrors were the lives of Anne and her family, who moved from Germany to the Netherlands in 1933. In 1940, their country of exile was occupied and they took to hiding in rooms behind the business where Anne's father had worked, which she called "the secret annexe" - which was the original title of the book. One of the families foremost helpers and concealers was Miep Gies, who said:

'It seemed perfectly natural to me. I could help these people. They were powerless, they didn't know where to turn. I always emphasize that we were not heroes. We did our duty as human beings: helping people in need.

I stood looking at the quote underneath her picture for a couple of minutes, unable to speak. There were further details of how, even in the summer heat, Anne and her companions had to burn leftovers to destroy evidence of their clandestine existence. Another quote from the diary referred to the five books that Ms Gies, who recently achieved her century, brought them form the library every Saturday: "We long for Saturday because that means books". However, the quote that moved me most was underneath the world-famous picture of Anne gazing into a future that she would never see:

I long to ride a bike, dance, whistle, look at the world, feel young and know that I'm free, and yet I can't let it show.

The family was arrested in August 1944. Anne, her sister Margot, and her mother Edith were sent to Auschwitz, where their mother died, having starved herself to give her daughters extra rations. By the time she died, Anne and Margot had been sent to Bergen-Belsen, where they died in a Typhus epidemic less than a month before the camp was liberated by British soldiers in April 1945.

Anne reaches out to us beyond her death. The Government has placed Diary of a Young Girl on the English National Curriculum; and in the UK, the Anne Frank foundation awards people who make a change in their community. For example, Uanu Seshmi, a teacher in the Peckham area of London, received an Anne Frank award for his amazing work in getting young black boys, who had been excluded from school, back into mainstream education. In Cambridgeshire, a self-confessed "boy racer" called Nick Bennett, whose hobby had landed him in a wheelchair was honoured for his work in going round schools informing teenagers of the dangers of his former occupation.

Anne's story is one, I believe, that makes the Holocaust comprehensible by providing an antidote to Stalin's dictum that "one death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic" - although it was sobering to learn that before Hitler embarked on his dark project there were eleven million Jews in Europe - the Nazis got more than halfway in their obscene scramble towards the Final Solution. Many years ago I found another part of the story contextualised when, during my first placement as a student nurse - in a medical ward - I met one of the soldiers from the unit which had liberated Bergen-Belsen. Having been a member of the Church of Scotland, he described how he had looked around, and his faith had vanished like a snowflake in a furnace. When I met him in the late '80s, he was still an atheist.

The diary has been attacked as a fraud - notably by lawyer Edgar J Steele, who claimed in November 2003 that "It wasn’t Arabs who forged the Anne Frank “diary” - it was jews [sic]" in a bizarre rant which ends: "And, lest we forget:It wasn’t Arabs who had Jesus Christ crucified - it was jews."

Professor Calculus has told me that he remembers from his boyhood slurs about the Jews being "Christ-killers"; and it is a troubling thought that, had the Hitler/Schickelgrueber family moved to, say, France or Britain when the children were young, Adolf might not have had much trouble starting a movement that resembled the Nazi Party in its anti-Semitism; certainly Oswald Moseley found people flocking to his New Party.

So perhaps it's a good thing that the Anne Frank Foundation will be delivering diversity training to Addenbrooke's staff, even though the concept of diversity has become so loaded with so much ideological baggage pertaining to unilateral multiculturalism that it is increasingly becoming a bad word among followers of many political creeds. Hopefully, the Foundation will be able to inject some reality into a troubled subject, in this corner of East Anglia anyway, before a backlash is unleashed that may snowball towards disaster.

Anne Frank
1929-1945
Thank you

how The Simpsons made my day

Yesterday, as my faith in my ability to stand against politically correct fascism faltered, I little suspected that The Simpsons would come to my rescue.

Having a day off after my foray into London, I got a call from Minora, who'd just completed a Foundation Exam, saying that one of the questions had asked her whether it was right to use human/animal embryos in the search for a cure for Alzheimer's disease. She hadn't answered the question. I commiserated with her, trying to reassure her that I would either have left the question myself, or answered it with the contempt it deserved.

Science doesn't happen in a moral void. It always happens in an ethical framework, the question merely being which one. For example, animal testing, although not perfect, has a definite part to play in maintaining human health, a vivid example of this being when Baxter International, which is working on a vaccine for swine flu, sent avian flu vaccine containing live bird flu virus to Czechoslovakia. On taking the routine step of administering vaccine to ferrets, a subcontractor noticed that the vaccine killed the animals, and a disaster was averted. But when animal liberation fanatics get so tied up with non-human rights that they would gladly unravel the hem of the cloak of creation to salve their fevered consciences, we see big-hearted adolescents served up leading questions by exam boards in an attempt to stunt their moral and intellectual growth, thereby to reduce the ranks of free-thinking individuals who might see through their snake-oil salesmanship.

Then, I read Stephen Exley's exclusive in the Cambridge News about Cambridge University's Newnham College dropping its traditional range of Latin graces referring to Jesum Christum dominum nostrum, and substituting pro cibo inter esurientes, pro comitate inter desolatos, pro pace inter bellantes, gratias agimus - "For food in a hungry world, for companionship in a world of loneliness, for peace in an age of violence, we give thanks". My first reaction was to hope their food isn't as bland, then I realised what they were saying. A suitable paraphrase would be: for being fed and not going without, for being popular and not lacking friends, for being priveleged enough to live without fear of mixing with the uncouth, we worship here at the altar of our own worthiness. It's a fitting epitaph for a society which tries to plug the God-shaped hole in our hearts with that which comes from ourselves.

Lastly, I came upon a report about Hilary Clinton's visit to Brazil over at Don't Poke the Baby, recounting how Hilary Clinton had claimed that a hospital she visited had been packed with a disproportionate amount of women recovering from botched abortions. It appears the poor women suffered from the same condition as the snipers who fired at Clinton when she landed in Tuzla, Boznia in 1996 - an acute lack of reality. However, Baby blogger Linda deftly teases out the pertinent point in the story of a Brazilian woman who had had an abortion as her relationship with an abusive husband ended: "My sympathy is for her living in a situation where she is raped...Where are the defenders of her freedom before the pregnancy? [my italics]"

So I was feeling somewhat beaten down by the time I settled down to watch The Simpsons with my family. I like this show, and it's been praised by many Christian publications - for example the Scottish Catholic Observer - for providing a view of a nuclear, churchgoing family. But you could have knocked me over with a feather when the episode on C4 (#8, 15th season) turned out to have a pro-life lesson.

The episode was entitled "Marge vs. Singles, Seniors, Childless Couples and Teens, and Gays", and involves the blue-haired matron's fight against members of the above society when they sideline families with children as pariahs. Their ringleader, Lindsay Naegle, affirms her belief in abortion; and when Marge tries to get her daughter Lisa to win her heart over, Naegle replies, "I hope one of my eggs I sold turns out like you".

After refusing a (literally) Satanic temptation to give up the campaign, Marge founds her own society - "Proud Parents Against Singles, Seniors, Childless Couples and Teens and Gays". After a media campaign almost sunk by her husband's best-intentioned efforts, which are often his most destructive, the denouément occurs in the school playgound, as the anti-family activists prepare to tear the school down. In a charm offensive,the children hug the adults, who are stricken with hellish ailments because they have lost their immunity to the germs that kids harbour.

As Lisa says, the protestors have been defeated by "the humblest things that God in his wisdom has put upon the earth - children". It is, of course, a send up of HG Wells' The War of the Worlds, which was to be released in a modernised version by Stephen Spielberg later in 2005. But it touches on a truth which would be sobering, were not anti-lifers so intoxicated with their own rhetoric: a society lacking sufficient respect for children to suffer them to be born is its own Nemesis. Praise God for hiding these things from the wise and the learned and revealing them to children and Matt Groening.