the bug letter: when 1 is more than 63,000

Recently, I got a letter from a friend who lives in a nearby old fen and, like me, used to work with people who use illicit drugs. Inside were two letters from the BBC to him, in response to two letters of complaint he had sent about an objectionable song by The Beastie Boys called She's on it turning up on Dale Winton's show Pick of the Pops, which airs on Sunday afternoons from 2.30-4.30.

My friend, Iratus, was unhappy with those of the lyrics he managed to make out, and so looked them up on the web. When they did, he found the vocabulary of a situation that unfortunately is not uncommon today: a young lady (in the song a schoolgirl) being given cocaine in return for sexual favours. He wrote to the BBC, complaining that while he realised BBC Radio 2 did broadcast challenging material, this usually happened later in the evening and always with a warning.

Iratus received a prompt reply from the BBC, stating:

We are of course concerned if our programmes offend people and we never set out to offend but of course our public service role includes reflecting the world as it is...

I appreciate the strength of your views on these matters. Accordingly, I would like to assure you that I have registered your comments on our audience log. This daily report of audience feedback is circulated to many BBC staff, including members of the BBC Executive Board, channel controllers and other senior managers. The audience logs are seen as important documents that can help shape future decisions about future programming and content. They are also published on the BBC's intranet site, so are available for all BBC staff to view.

Thank you again for your interest in the BBC..."

When I took the letters to Professor Calculus to look over, upon reading the first he threw back his head and laughed, exclaiming: "They've given him the bug letter!"

Seeing my puzzled look, Calculus told me a story about a passenger on a cruise-ship who complained to the owners upon finding a bedbug. He got a reply stating that the member of staff responsible had been sacked and the captain reprimanded and, stuck to it, was his original complaint, with the words written on the back: "Give him the bug letter."

It was an amusing story, and when I investigated further I found that "the [bed]bug letter" had an interesting life as an urban legend. Anyway, Iratus didn't need any pointers to enlighten him to the fact that he was being fobbed off, and therefore iterated his complaint, adding that to give cocaine in return for sexual favours was to commit a criminal act.

This nugget appears to have exercised them down at BBC complaints. Their second reply to Iratus stated:

Having considered your further comments...I raised your concerns with senior management at the Radio 2 network. They acknowledge the record was not appropriate and suitable for this show. They pass on their apologies for any offence and thanks for bringing this matter to their attention.

Calculus and I looked at each other significantly like a pair of '70's detectives at this. So much for the "audience log" referred to in the bug letter!

Today, Andrew Porter interviewed Shadow Culture Media and Sports Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who was attending the Conservative Party Conference. Hunt questioned why the BBC should expect to receive a "£3 billion guaranteed cheque" every year and press onwards with a "lack of vision" regarding how it can help people and government tackle the pressing social issues of the day: "the rise in knife crime, gun culture, broken families".

He also referred to the £100 million per year that it takes to run BBC3 for "miniscule audiences". Too right. We bought a Freeview box in not in anticipation of the proposed switch from analogue to digital TV, but because it frustrated me to pay the license fee every year for so many services - BBC's 3 and 4, the childrens' channels, the digital radio stations - that I was unable to receive.

One way in which the BBC could help heal our broken society, which was Mr Hunt's main topic, is not to attack the backbone of our Christian society, which is still its religion. I'm thinking mainly of its decision to air Jerry Springer: the Opera in the face of the most complaints it had ever received prior to its being aired (it was already in the public realm as a stage musical).

There was some discussion about the actual number of complaints, but this was put to bed by the BBC Press Office, which reported that it received about 55,000 complaints prior to the show's broadcast and 8,000 complaints afterwards, with about 2,200 messages of support.

In other words, there were around 30 times more complaints than pats on the back: in spite of this, communications regulator Ofcom found in its meeting on the subject that "The Content Board...suggested that whilst the programme would have offended some people, the requirements of freedom of speech were such that it must be permissible on occasion to cause offence."

I accept the principle, but it isn't practiced. In autumn 2006, a summit looked at the requests of performer Sacha Baron Cohen, who was invited to throw his pet hates into the bin in the BBC's Room 101. Cohen, a fair man, chose kosher food, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bible and the Koran. Almost everybody at the summit, including the show's producer, agreed that all of these items could be binned except the Koran.

Andrew Marr, senior journalist with the Corporation, was admirably honest:

“The BBC is not impartial or neutral...It’s a publicly funded, urban organization with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.”

The BBC, in fact, has also been criticised roundly for its anti-American and anti-Israeli stances from both internal and external sources. William D Rubinstein, formerly of the Social Affairs Unit, asked at the time why no politician was willing to take serious action to tackle the BBC's bias. Perhaps Jeremy Hunt is in the vanguard of politicians who aren't afraid of the big bad Beeb.

Anyway, Iratus should be pleased; I don't know how many complainants got past the BBC's bug letter in the battle against Jerry Springer: The Opera, but in his own fight to get the BBC to admit it was wrong he's succeeded where 63,000 failed.

Related posts:

what the hell was all that about?

strictly sociopathic - the bbc has bullied us enough

death, taxes and the comedown

Right now, every time you pick up a newspaper there seems to be news or rumours concerning the collapse of another financial institution and how this will affect the taxpayer. As the burden becomes ever more Sisyphean, I wonder if Labour MP's still sing The Red Flag as each company sinks, as they did with the Northern Rock affair?

The concept of Tax Freedom Day was first posited by The Tax Foundation, a US educational body, and identifies the day when, if you paid your taxes continually from January 1st, you would stop paying taxes and start earning for yourself. This year, Tax Freedom Day was 23 April in the US, and 2 June in Great Britain (calculated by the Adam Smith Institute). I expect many will await the setting of next year's tax freedom days in various countries, as a measure of how the present crises have impacted on taxpayers.

In the context of skyrocketing taxes, The Sentinel Stars by Louis Charbonneau poses a unique but dystopian solution to the dilemma of one's tax burden being so high that working it off within one's lifetime may not be an option. Written in 1963, the book is set in a post-apocalyptic world where babies are born with the inheritance of their parent's tax burden, which they must work off - in addition to the tax they accrue through their lifetimes themselves - before they can become Freemen, if they live that long. (Alternatively, a lucky few are Freemen at birth, as they are born with an inheritance which is in credit.)

At 156 pages, The Sentinel Stars is shorter than a Mills and Boon novel, but, like much speculative fiction from the mid-50's to around the mid-70's, is bursting with ideas.

TRH-247 is the 247th person to be born with the name Thomas Robert Hendley in the Organisation, an outfit roughly analogous to Oceania in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, with the difference that conflict has ended in TSS with the Merger of East and West.

Thomas meets Anne, loses her, and meets her again when he is sent to a Freedom Camp for a day as moral therapy - his importunity having been to go for a walk when he should have been at work. Having looked at some extreme sports, such as golf, he finds himself in a nightclub where the clientéle are in search of more lubricious pastimes. Anne explains:

"I have long legs and I'm athletic and I can dance. And I have a pretty face. I was picked out when I was ten years old. Every day since then I've done the right exercises and eaten the right foods and had the right creams massaged into me. Every day! Some of the girls are lucky. They stop growing too soon, or they get dumpy or their skin ages too quickly, or they just don't turn out to be as pretty as they seemed in the beginning. They're transferred out of out section. I wasn't."

Like Rabelais' Abbey of Thélème, there are no clocks in the Freedom camp, and no rules. Thomas, stuck in the Freedom Camp, is besieged by terrible freedom on every side, and finds himself dreaming of a return to too much government to escape the anarchy of too little. Eventually a doctor in the camp arrives at a diagnosis explaining his inability to accept the Organisation's norms. Genetic therapy, which is usually inflicted on the unborn disguised as prenatal screening, has not taken in Thomas' case. He is normal.

Surprisingly, illicit drugs feature only marginally in the novel. A habit-forming opiate called "the weed" is smuggled into Freedom Camps - Thomas asks, rather naively, "here there are no pressures, no worries, no frustrations. Why would anybody be driven to using drugs?" He appears unaware that in describing an anomic society he's answered his own question.

Unfortunately, drugs are a pedestrian reality in our real-life world and infest all walks of life. However, some professions are liable to do more harm when under the influence of mind-altering substances than others. Just over a fortnight before the Northern Rock privatisation story broke, the Financial Times published a piece by Stanley Pignall about drug use at work, in which Pignal stated: "The new data suggest cocaine use is no longer limited to bankers working long hours. Suspicions of widespread drug use in the City are common, but few firms conduct random drug tests." US lawyer and political scientist Ted Becker describes the additional obstacles law enforcers face in bringing higher-functioning drug users to book:

Apparently, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) had set up a sting operation with the intent of ensnaring a large number of overwhelmingly white professionals - lawyers, physicians, stockbrokers, professors, CEOs - in a cocaine ring. They were the “buyers” who called the dealers and had amounts of pure powder cocaine delivered to their homes in New York City like pizzas...The DEA had hard evidence on all these elite buyers including “wiretaps, on videotape, on phone records.” It had taken a year to obtain all this evidence

...The result: “Prosecutors are contemplating stern letters to the suspects warning them to keep their noses clean” (Barrett 2001). “Sources say that since the dealer’s arrest...many of the buyers have hired lawyers who have bombarded officials with phone calls, insisting their clients not be charged...”

However the present crisis is resolved, whether it be through a Capitalism 2.0 or by some other means, I think the best we can hope for is stronger structures in place to buffer the bust which will follow the next boom. Those dealers (by no means all of them) who have projected their comedown onto society as a whole will not be caught. If, for example, they were asked to give a hair sample, they would reinvent the skinhead hairstyle.

Maybe I'm being too pessimistic. After all, life's stranger than fiction.

The Sentinel Stars
Louis Charbonneau
pp 155
Bantam, 1963 (US)
Corgi, 1964 (UK)

Links to top 100 Conservative blogs

I always wanted to have a look-see at the other blogs in the British politics magazine Total Politics' top 100 Conservative blogs, so I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone. It looks like just about everybody else in this group has posted the list, so much so that it seems ungraceful of me not to recoprocate. So here they are - hyperlinked!

1 Iain Dale
2 Conservative Home
3 Dizzy Thinks
4 Burning our Money
5 John Redwood MP
6 Archbishop Cranmer
7 Mr Eugenides
8 Daniel Hannan MEP
9 Donal Blaney
10 Waendel Journal
11 Nadine Dorries
12 Letters from a Tory
13 Shane Greer
14 A Very British Dude
15 Daily Referendum
16 Paul Scully
17 Glyn Davies
18 Croydonian
19 James Cleverly
20 Raedwald
21 Tory Bear
22 Pint of Unionist Lite
23 Ellee Seymour
24 Scottish Tory Boy
25 Matt Wardman
26 Ewan Watt
27 Centre Right
28 Andrew McConnell
29 Hunter & Shooter
30 Alan Collins
31 Sinclair's Musings
32 Mike Rouse
33 Newmania
34 Neil Reddin
35 Zehra in Gloucestershire
36 Angels in Marble
37 Faulkner Journal
38 Web Cameron
39 Andrew Allison
40 Bristow Blog
41 Debatable Land
42 Fugitive Ink
43 Man in a Shed
44 Nourishing Obscurity
45 Iain Lindley
46 Not Proud of Britain
47 West Brom Blog
48 Jeremy Hunt MP
49 Laban Tall
50 Lone Voice
51 Prodicus
52 Tory Radio
53 Cassilis
54 David Jones MP
55 Matt Dean
56 Appalling Strangeness
57 Linguanaut
58 Right Student
59 Antony Little
60 Daily Pundit
61 Free Market Fairy Tales
62 John Moorcraft
63 Douglas Carswell
64 Mike Flower
65 Nicolas Webb
66 Play Political
67 Richard Spring MP
68 you are here
69 House of Dumb
70 Depleted Uranium
71 Dylan Jones-Evans
72 Ed Vaizey MP
73 Fulham Reactionary
74 Havering On
75 James Barlow
76 John Ward
77 Laura Rose Saunders
78 Monkey with a Blue Rosette
79 Rachel Joyce
80 Tory Heaven
81 Bel is Thinking
82 Evan Price
83 Roger Evans MLA
84 The Tap
85 UCL Conservatives
86 Cameron Rose
87 Charlotte Leslie
88 Kevin Davis
89 Tracey Crouch
90 A Conservative's Blog
91 Alfred the Ordinary
92 Andrew Bridgen
93 Conservative History Group
94 Curly's Corner Shop
95 Dave Luckett
96 Maida Vale Conservatives
97 Phil Taylor
98 Prince Park Conservatives - can anybody help find this link?
99 Thunder Dragon
100 Tommy the Tory

UPDATE, JULY 24 2009: voting is open for British political blogs 2009-2010 - you don't need to be British to vote, but only British political blogs are considered for the poll - just click the link above, or the pic at the top of the post. Don't forget to remember your friendly neighbourhood happy yellow dog!

Europe's worst nightmare returns

On the Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2 today, an article was aired that Vine stated he was amazed to hear himself talking about, and I have to say I shared his astonishment.

It appears that there was a Nazi rally in the town of Redhill in Somerset on Saturday, 20 September. Vine interviewed a husband and wife who fled from their nearby house, but who had managed to make a short recording of a lot of male voices shouting "Seig Heil, Seig Heil!" A bit of film was also taken and appears on a BBC news-page, in the section dealing with Somerset.

Vine interviewed a representative of the rally (ostensibly a scooter rally, but there were no scooters present). He justified people shouting "Seig Heil" (a German Nazi salute variously translated as hail victory, hail to victory, or salvation through victory) because the occasion was a tribute to Ian Donaldson, the vocalist for the neo-Nazi band Skrewdriver who died in a car crash in 1993.

Apparently there were a lot of East Europeans at the rally. Certainly Naziism flourished in East Germany (as was), as it was the only substitute for Communism that thrived underground.

Nazis on the continent and in the US are exploiting community tensions centring around travellers and Muslims - and, of course, pushing anti-semitism, which has not a whit more basis in reality than it did when Hitler et al used their slogans to hypnotise and mobilise the masses.

We have community tensions here in Great Britain, which figures such as the Bishop of Rochester and the Archbishop of York having been warning the government about for some time. The fact that these tensions have gotten so bad is due to patronising politicians who assume that tensions shouldn't exist, therefore they don't exist.

This January, I wrote that decent white people are "being pushed into the waiting arms of the BNP" (the BNP is advertised in a side panel of the website of the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party). We need to be on our guard for these hate-peddlars corrupting the minds of our children by taking advantage of the rebellion-factor that our children may see in the disgust adults feel at their policies. We need to monitor children's and adolescents' TV, music and magazines, because many mainstream media providers, having thrown morality out of the window, increasingly think that causing publicity makes something right.

The owners of the Bungalow Inn, where the "scooter convention" was held, claim to have seen or heard nothing unusual. Vine put the obvious question to them: as Inez puts it, "how on earth is it possible that I can see the swastikas and hear the "Sieg Heils" in the video, while the pub owners--who were there--can claim that they did not?"

I have another question. Several hundred Nazis in regalia and flags held a rally in Great Britain four days ago. Why has it only made the national news today?

hpv vaccination: the day I embraced Dawkins

Today, through John Smeaton's blog, I found a blog written by Radagast, Senior Teacher in a faith school. He expresses deep concerns about the forthcoming vaccination of young (and I mean young) secondary schoolchildren, predominantly girls, against human papillomavirus (hpv) - which can cause cervical cancer in the 10% of women who don't spontaneously clear the virus.

Minima has now moved up to secondary school and, despite wars and rumours of wars, loves it. But, now having two girls liable to be considered by the education authorities as liable for the vaccination, this was the part of Radagast's post, entitled Cerevix and sexual freedom, that caught me:

To vaccinate my child against a disease that she is most likely to get from taking multiple sexual partners seems to me to capitulate to a culture in which the image of the human person has become grossly distorted. It is to admit and promote the idea that sexual activity between young people before marriage is inevitable and unstoppable despite being potentially harmful. It is to accept the lie that sexual freedom means being able to act without consequences...

The thing is, for parents to be armed with the necessary knowledge to make a choice, they need proper information, and that was not what was on offer on BBC Radio 4's Case Notes, of which a transcript has been posted on the show's website. What first made me feel uneasy was Professor Jack Cuzick of the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine minimizing the range of hpv types that could be harmful:

there are well over a hundred different types now, so it's kind of a stamp collecting activity that people continue to identify new and rare types but in fact there are only a few that really matter.

The number of types of hpv that can cause cervical cancer is variously reckoned between 30 and 40. In their paper on the subject, for example, Muñoz et al put the number of potentially carcinogenic types at 30 in 2003.

Let's look at Muñoz' conservative data in the light of the protection that Ceravix is projected to provide - ie, against hpv types 16 and 18. That leaves: types 6, 11, 26, 31, 33, 35, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 58, 59, 61, 66, 68, 70, 72, 73, 81, 82 and the incongruously-named CP6108.

When Dr Mark Porter started discussing the risk of a mutation of the hpv virus arising through natural selection, I was gripped by a biting sense of irony. I've been introduced in depth to the theories of Charles Darwin through Richard Dawkins' exegesis of them, precisely because I oppose Dawkins' conclusion - itself a statement of faith - that embracing the theory of evolution leads ineluctably to atheism.

A not insubstantial portion of The Selfish Gene is given over to Dawkins' espousal of the Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS), a statement of game theory whereby the different elements of a population will remain at constant proportions if all other factors remain constant.

And there's the rub: although Ceravix is manufactured in order to take the two allegedly most carcinogenic hpv types out of the picture, it is suspected by Case Notes' participants that "we don't really need to worry about that". In a sense I agree - the risk of a mutant version of type 16 or 18 seems to be small against the risk of one or two of the other 28 types establishing a new Evolutionary Stable Strategy by becoming the new bullies on the playground. The naïveté is stunning: can you imagine taking out the two biggest gangsters in the city and expecting all of the 28 remaining contenders to play nice?

The NHS certainly isn't playing nice in its resources for the campaign. A leaflet for 12-13 year olds advises them, on the subject of consent:

You may be given a consent form that your parents should sign giving permission for you to have the vaccination. It’s important that you return the signed form before your vaccination is due.

If your parents are not sure that you should have the vaccination you should still return the form and speak to your nurse, doctor or other healthcare professional. Having the vaccination now will help protect you against the most common causes of cervical cancer for many years.

The gist of this appears to be that if a girl of 12 or 13 is not allowed by her parents to have the injection, it can still go ahead. Working in the addictions sector, however, we were clear that in English law a child of 12 was a totally different creature from one of 13, in that we were not allowed to give any service whatsoever, either concerning drugs or sexual matters, to a child under 13 without the explicit consent of the parent or guardian because, in English law, consent given by anybody under the age of 13 is meaningless.

So how is a child of 12 or 13 supposed to make a decision about how she will behave as a young woman of 16? As Radagast says: "the assumption that girls will probably become sexually active at the age of 16 is made without considering the possibility that some girls and young men might not." Indeed, the default assumption is that girls will be sexually active at or before the age of 16. The present administration seems to contain many individuals who are threatened by the ability of a young woman to choose chastity, even though if this is not an option, then the concept of sexual freedom itself is a fiction.

Perhaps the fevered compulsion with which this strategy is being pursued signals a quiet admission of defeat in another aspect of "reproductive rights": research reported in the New England Journal of Medicine concludes that when condoms are used during intercourse 100% of the time women have a 20% risk of contracting hpv (by my calculator - work it out yourself: all you need to know is that for these purposes "patient years" means the number of patients in a trial multiplied by the amout in years that the trial lasts). Which raises the old chestnut of the effectiveness of condoms against viral particles - but that's for another day.

I hope that my girls will feel confident enough to speak to their Mum and/or me about this. We'll pray about it, as we have before about matters relating to their developing bodies, as well as looking at the biological facts. They have already told me they don't want the vaccination, when they've heard the subject on the radio. I'm proud of them - but we can't be with them every step of the way to stop them making a mistake or acting under the influence of alcohol or going starry-eyed at a nasty piece of stuff. But to think that a vaccine effective against two types out of thirty of one particular STD is going to protect them from any of that is like allowing them to think that a suit of armour made of tissue-paper (or latex) will protect them from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Anyway, it strikes me as astonishly sexist that women should be left to worry about the unintended effects of sex. Men should take a share of the load if they want a sexual relationship with a woman when they're not sure if she's "the one". For example, circumcision has been shown to lessen the risk of cervical cancer, without altering the balance of power in the virological gangland. Who's first, lads?

Post Offices and the meaning of "election"

When the Cambridge News came through our letterbox today, the fact that our post office has been saved from closure actually made me feel a bit guilty that, of the 23 branches threatened with closure in and around the county, only one was reprieved. 22 are due to have their doors closed forever.

This was never an even battle. Based on the profitability of individual post offices in an environment where services were being peeled off like layers from an onion and reconstructed in cyberspace, it was a David-versus-Goliath battle with the country as the doomed giant and central government manically throwing stones.

I'd like to take just four post-offices marked for closure as examples.

Although it had never featured in the original criteria, it had been intimated that post-offices would not be closed if they were the only shop nearby. In fact, all four closures in Fenland, the most remote area of the county, leave residents with no retail amenities of any sort nearby - and I link to Cambridgeshire ACRE's (Action with Communities in Rural England) analyses:

Christchurch, proposed to be replaced with a mobile service for 1 hour on weekdays, nearest permanent branch 5 miles away in Upwell;

Benwick, proposed to be replaced with a mobile service 3 hours per week, to be confirmed, nearest permanent branch 4 miles away in Doddington;

Wisbech Harecroft Road; no replacement - other branches available in this rather large town one-fifth of whose population is retired; and

March - as above, but a quarter of population retired.

The Government's targets in the May 2007 report The Future of the Rural Post office Network are for 95% of the total rural population to be within 3 miles of a post-office, and 95% of the population in postcode districts in remote areas to be within 6 miles of a post office. I've found it difficult to find the official designation of Fenland, but it looks as if we may be up against averages here. Also, it appears that mobile services may count as post-offices, even though, as in the proposed case for Christchurch, they may only be in the village for an hour every weekday.

There's also the issue of post-offices being hosted by pubs: a good idea, but what if somebody for whatever reason has a medical or moral objection to entering one? Again, the above document has suggested churches taking up the slack - but what if a church-run post-office should find that it has, for example, been unwittingly passing on pornography, or material militating against religion?

I don't think it's realistic for a business to be expected to run at a loss. But the post-office isn't entirely a business, it's a government department. If, say, hospitals, police stations or barracks were expected to show profits or fold, Great Britain would be an even more dangerous place to live in.

And yet a postal service can serve its community and make a profit. The United States Postal Service makes a massive profit precisely by providing the services that people need to be part of a connected society. The Post Office could never hope to make as much as we are a small island, but a profit could be made. Whereas the USPS provides 157 services, the PO provides 93 and falling. It doesn't help that providers of some amenities are putting surcharges on any method of payment other than direct debit.

And there's the rub. The Post Office seems determined to collude in the downfall of its rural branches, even though for many villagers it is their main source of socialisation and local knowledge. A small side-article in the Telegraph of 18 September stated: "[A] study by the Post Office found that families could save...if they...paid their bills...online".

This county seems to be perceived as relatively rich by the Government, but possession of a car and/or a mortgage do not confer membership of the Institute of Directors. I suggest that the powers that be at the moment pull out their dictionaries and look up the meanings of "rural" and "remote". Then they might look up "election".

a coup from the shadows

I was a member of a Justice and Peace group until relatively recently, growing more and more dissatisfied with the outlook of the other members. For me, the end came when a Lent campaign against climate change was planned as part of preparation for Easter. I brought up the fact that there were two sides to the anthropogenicity debate surrounding climate change - nothing stronger than that - and was met with an icy silence. I left soon afterwards.

The same dark forces in our society who want to stifle argument about climate change are doing the same for the so-called debate which sees faith and science as opposed and irreconcilable.

This debate is being fought ostensibly on the 4004 front, ie concentrating on Bishop Ussher's chronology which placed Creation as starting on the evening of Sunday, October 23 of that year.

Personally, I don't know anybody who believes this, although I realise there are some members in many Christian denominations who do.

However, the mere fact of issues relating to faith being in the public sphere is raising the hackles of figures who would like to chase religion and religionists out of public life. Thus, Professor Michael Reiss (left), until recently director of education at the Royal Society, Great Britain's premier scientific institution, stepped down from his post yesterday after, as the First Post put it, "he appeared to suggest in a speech last week that creationism should be taught in schools alongside evolution". As he objected on the BBC's Jeremy Vine show on Friday 12 September, when the furore was let loose, this was not what he said. Indeed, he had posted on his Guardian blog the day before:

the excellent book Science, Evolution, and Creationism published by the US National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine, asserts: "The ideas offered by intelligent design creationists are not the products of scientific reasoning. Discussing these ideas in science classes would not be appropriate given their lack of scientific support."

I agree with the first sentence but disagree with the second. Just because something lacks scientific support doesn't seem to me a sufficient reason to omit it from a science lesson. When I was taught physics at school, and taught it extremely well in my view, what I remember finding so exciting was that we could discuss almost anything providing we were prepared to defend our thinking in a way that admitted objective evidence and logical argument...

I do believe in taking seriously and respectfully the concerns of students who do not accept the theory of evolution, while still introducing them to it. While it is unlikely that this will help students who have a conflict between science and their religious beliefs to resolve the conflict, good science teaching can help students to manage it – and to learn more science.

So far so fair. But this intellectual honesty forced the real reasons for objections within the Royal Society to Reiss's education post into the open: he is a Church of England priest. As the backlash was being orchestrated, Richard Dawkins stated, as he admitted in a letter he was "working on" getting published in the British press, that "A clergyman in charge of education for the country's leading scientific organisation - it's a Monty Python sketch". (The letter was snapped up by New Scientist. Unlike most of NS's long articles, you can view the whole article without taking out a subscription.)

The letter that seems to have hit the Royal Society's main artery was a letter by Sir Richard Roberts stating that

We gather Professor Reiss is a clergyman, which in itself is very worrisome. Who on earth thought that he would be an appropriate Director of Education, who could be expected to answer questions about the differences between science and religion in a scientific, reasoned way?...Ill-conceived opinions by a representative of the RS will only encourage those teachers, both scientists and otherwise, with a creationist agenda to speak about it to their students in the classroom.

The letter is reproduced by a volunteer for the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science, who comments on his blog:

Is it possible that Sir Richard has not read Reiss’ actual articles?...criticism of Reiss should be based on his actions, and not speculation or misunderstanding of what he has done...Sir Roberts [sic] sent his letter the day after the Royal Society sent a press release with Reiss’ clarification. My concern is that this whole fiasco will turn into a farce that will not exactly show secularist and those for science education in a positive light."

I am sure that the text of any official speech made ex cathedra by a senior Royal Society office-holder would have been made available to senior RS members shortly afterwards, if not before. Pace the respect for reason and truth of Homo Economicus shown above, he doesn't seem to have quite gotten the point of this plot. Rev Reiss would have been pushed if he had said nothing more controversial than "if you boil water you will get steam". His role as RS Director of Education was scheduled for destruction by virtue of his being an ordained priest and nothing else. Dawkins, the Establishment's pet atheist, and the éminences grises Sir Richard Roberts, Sir Harry Kroto and Sir John Sulston decided he had to go, and Daniel Palmer strained foaming at the leash in his New Scientist blog.

At the end of a series of bogs about Dawkin's series on Charles Darwin, I asked: "Personally, I trust in God. You may have another position, which indeed you have every right to hold: but can you justify it outside the realm of strangling those voices with whom you disagree?"

Dawkins, it seems, is at the service of those who have neither that disposition nor ability.