State of Fear

While everyone else is reading the final installment in JK Rowling's very profitable Harry Potter phenomenon, I've spent the day racing my way through a book that a friend recommended to me last weekend: Michael Crichton's environmental adventure, State of Fear.

Rather predictable, it nevertheless made for an entertaining few hours. The author clearly intends to open the eyes of anyone of the opinion that "Everyone believes in Anthropogenic Global Warming!" However, my guess is that few people are going to become scientifically informed or challenged by a thriller, and even fewer take the effort to investigate the many source references that he provides.

Crichton attempts to summarise his assessment of current beliefs in his speech, Environmentalism as Religion. Yet, for all his attempts at persuasion, it's far easier to accept the dismissal from groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council (who are "the earth's best defense" — or so they claim!) than to risk being branded a heretic. After all, nobody likes to be the object of a witch-hunt (except certain Hogwarts fans, I suppose). And these days, even some churches and Christian organisations are treating AGW sceptics as "wounded" (to borrow the Pope's recent description of non-Catholic Churches). Which is rather ironic for, as another friend recently put it to me, "Given that the Bible clearly states that the whole of creation is to be destroyed, what are Christians doing jumping on the bandwagon to save the planet when their commission is to save souls?"

On one point at least we can surely all agree that Crichton is right: "Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance." When it comes to environmentalism, as with all matters political, scientific, and religious, we need open and informed debate.

A New Politics?

On the grammar school farce, one could ask why Willetts didn't come out with something less open to confusion in the first place. Was this another over-intellectual gaffe in the fashion of the supposedly incomprehensible Oliver Letwin earlier this month?

Alternatively, is it possible that David Cameron and the Conservative Party are attempting to overcome political apathy and disengagement by introducing more intelligent debate into the political arena? If so, we should perhaps be somewhat more forgiving and hope that they persevere in their efforts to find a way of raising the level of debate. For, as I have said before: "What we need in the post-Blair era is a new approach to political leadership in which politicians are brave enough to argue their case and engage in intelligent debate — and so influence, instead of simply following, public opinion." However, let us also hope they find the way without leaving themselves open to misrepresentation too many more times!

Where Are My School Vouchers?

Last week, The Stonemason asked "Where are my school vouchers?"

Echoing Graeme Leach's article from the March edition of The Difference, calling for the introduction of education vouchers, the current edition of The Economist reports, "New research shows that parental choice raises standards—including for those who stay in public schools."

Citing studies from Columbia, America, and Sweden, the evidence shows that children who receive vouchers are:

• 15-20% more likely to finish secondary education,
• five percentage points less likely to repeat a grade, and
• much more likely to take college entrance exams

— and all this even though the state spent less per pupil than it would have done had the children been educated in normal state schools. Crucially, it is not just the pupils at the private schools that benefit as when "public schools must compete for their students with schools that accept vouchers, their performance improves."

More than fifty years after Milton Friedman originally proposed the idea, when might we see the separation of the financing and administration of schooling in Britain?  Once the Conservative Party feels that it has convinced the electorate that it is the party that understands their needs and concerns, perhaps we can hope that it will also be the party that is able to convince them that ideas Labour might caricature as "cuts" or "elitist" are in fact in everybody's best interests.  What we need in the post-Blair era is a new approach to political leadership in which politicians are brave enough to argue their case and engage in intelligent debate — and so influence, instead of simply following, public opinion.