David Aaronovitch - Times Online - WBLG

After this Stern admonition, our world will never be the same again . . .

ONE MIGHT almost suspect Gordon Brown of having appointed Sir Nicholas Stern to inquire into the economics of global warming on the basis of his name alone. The Stern Review sounds so appropriately admonitory, given the energy habits of the Western world. When Mr Brown becomes prime minister we may perhaps expect the Strict Report on examination standards, or the Cross Inquiry into modern parenting. I have some thoughts, too, on who might look at sexual health, but I’ll keep them to myself.

Stern is wonderfully clear. Assuming the scientific neo-consensus on global warming and its causes to be broadly right, Stern examines the economics of doing a lot to cut emissions versus doing little, and concludes that doing a lot will most likely save us a great deal of money as well as trouble and death. If temperatures rise by five degrees we will lose up to a tenth of world output, if they rise by two to three degrees the loss will be nearer 3 per cent. But for a one-off investment of 1 per cent of global GDP we can stabilise emissions over the next 20 years, and see them fall after that. Tony Blair has described the review as the most important document produced for government since 1997, and the other political party leaders generally agree.

Can it be right to learn apart? (Jewish Chronicle)

The Education Secretary Alan Johnson thinks that Lord Baker speaks some sense when he talks about faith schools. The sense that Lord Baker is speaking concerns his view that faith schools can be socially divisive, and this view is the reason for his amendment to the Education Bill to the effect that new mono-faith establishments - where they are oversubscribed - may be required to allow up to a quarter of their intake to be made up of children of a different or of no faith. Lord Baker specifically made reference to Muslim schools where the selection criteria makes it clear, “that they want to create a total Muslim personality, and at the age of 11 pupils are asked if they've read the Koran, or are they fluent in Arabic, have they learnt the prayers. That means that children of other faiths will not apply. And I think that further divides society."

Whatever else you think about this move (and the Church of England have already decided to adopt the policy voluntarily) it seems illogical to limit it to new schools. If you think that its bad that children should be automatically excluded from a particular school either because they are of the wrong faith or because the school’s practices are effectively exclusionary, then it makes ense - over time - to extend the policy to all faith schools.

A proper British veil-wearer

The best approach to religious differences is to read, discuss and understand, not confront and ban

DO YOU, DEMANDED the war-time leader of his large audience in February 1943, want a Total War? Absolutely, they yelled back, and the more total the better. If you listen to tapes it was one the most splendid moments in the history of the sectarian impulse. Let’s give it to ’em! The sectarian impulse of this country is in much more diluted form, but it still exists. I felt it give a little kick while watching Aishah Azmi, the niqab-wearing teacher from Dewsbury at the weekend. “The children,” she declared, “are aware of my body language, my eye expressions, the way I’m saying things . . . I don’t think my wearing the veil affects the children at all.” She was, as my psychoanalyst friend remarked to me, a black-belt passive-aggressive. “What me? I’m not a problem, I just want to teach, but they won’t let me!” Even if she takes to wearing a tweed skirt and bangs she shouldn’t be allowed to teach kids, because she doesn’t appear to give a toss about them.

You want to know why North Korea did it? It's their economy, stupid . .

THE NORTH KOREAN regime is apparently so bad that even George Galloway has never been there to offer his support. Or maybe that’s because it’s so broke.

And just in case you think that I’m indulging in a little neocon demonisation (perhaps you heard Andy Kershaw’s two-part Radio 3 series on North Korean music three years back and agree with him that the lifestyle in the Democratic Republic is simply a little quaint) then let’s recall that up to 400,000 have died as a consequence of political persecution, that on occasion entire families have been murdered because of one member’s drunken disloyalty to the Dear Leader — the “Sun of the 21st Century” — that there is no press or broadcasting freedom whatsoever, and that as many as two million may have died in recent famines.

With only 22 million living in the country, North Korea’s totalitarian system is both far more complete and far less porous than ever Stalin’s was. It is also far more capricious, as its various bizarre adventures in the worlds of assassination, counterfeiting and kidnapping will attest.

Come and join Dave Myung Moon in his world of Infinite Enlightenment

MY FAVOURITE saying from the world of psychoanalysis (after Freud’s recognition of the “intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition”) is the simple dictum “the bigger the front, the bigger the back”. And nowhere more so than in politics.

Take Mark Foley, the former Republican congressman from Florida. It was three years ago that Mr Foley was writing to Governor Jeb Bush to complain about a naked youth camp being organised by the American Association for Nude Recreation. One magazine reported on 16-year-old “Gordon”, who had spent a fortnight at the Lake Como Family Nudist Resort singing Kumbayah and playing the violin while in the buff (the cello might have been more decorous). Mr Foley told Governor Bush that, in his opinion, the camp was “exploiting nudity among minor children to make money”. He was concerned, he said, about sexual abuse.