Stick a Fork in Him, Gordon Brown is Done

Last Friday Gordon Brown rang The Priory to inquire about the health of Susan Boyle, the singer who became an international sensation on Britain’s Got Talent, but had a meltdown when she didn’t win. This Friday, Susan Boyle rang Downing Street to inquire as to the political health of Gordon Brown, who is having his own meltdown as the most troubled Prime Minister since Anthony Eden.

Four Cabinet Ministers and two Ministers of State resign within three days, one suggesting that Brown should join him so as to make it less likely that the Conservatives will win an election. Meantime, the British public is sending a strong message through the polls that the Labour Party has lost its favour and that, while the other parties are not much better, anyone but Labour will do. Labour is set to lose significant ground in its municipal heartland, if early English results are anything to go by.

Brown has rushed a cabinet shuffle and conceded ground to both Milliband, who stays at the Foreign Office and, more significantly, Alistair Darling, who stays at Chancellor. This decision to keep Darling in place is a blow to Brown, and reveals his vulnerability. He had made it clear during this last week that he wished Ed Balls, the Education Minister, to move to the Treasury but Darling had made it clear that he was not moving. He either stayed in the Chancellorship or he left the front bench. Brown conceded and both Balls and Darling stay where they are.

This is the end for Brown. While he may survive till Sunday, the European Election results due Sunday afternoon will rekindle the anger and bitterness within the party and push the plotters further. At least two former cabinet members suggested or hinted that Brown needed to go and a third left rather than accept a demotion, unhappy with Brown’s leadership. A backbench hotmail campaign calling for Brown is gaining ground, even as Alan Johnson, the imputed alternative leader to Brown, accepts the position of Home Secretary, thereby confirming his allegiance to Brown.

“Stick a fork in him, he’s done”, said one backbencher today when speaking of Brown. He may be Prime Minister by name, but continues to battle his own party and is distracted from running the country. Infighting, bickering, power struggles, campaigning has taken over the Labour Party, who are now less than a year from being required to hold a General Election. The Conservative Party and the Liberal Party are both calling for an immediate general election, one Labour is certain to lose in a most dramatic way. Whether Brown likes it or not, there is no leadership, no strategy and no plan to either rebirth the British economy and its social development or to fight off the Tories at the next election. The Party, as Nick Clegg, the Liberal Leader, rightly observes “has run out of track and the train is derailed”.

The collapse of the Prime Ministers authority and the debacle within the Labour Party is spectacular. A sequence of high profile resignations, culminating in that of the Defence Secretary late yesterday, challenged Brown through a form of Chinese torture – each resignation being another drip of venom pouring down on a beleaguered and ham fisted Prime Minister. Even the Queen, who appoints him, must be wondering whether she call him in and ask him to go.

The surprising thing is how Brown has boxed in Alan Johnson. Many backbenchers and a large number of political commentators, most notably Polly Toynbee in The Guardian, had seen Johnson as the next leader of the party. A strong communicator, steady pair of hands and supported by many in the party, he was seen to have the “moxy” to push back at Cameron and begin the turnaround in Labour’s fortunes. In interviews on both Wednesday and Thursday he supported Brown and today has accepted a senior role in the Brown cabinet. This makes the plotters work more difficult and requires Brown to voluntarily relinquish his post, which no one expects him to do. Leaderless and limping, the plotters now have to find a new champion to rally behind. It wont be easy. The “I come to bury Brown, not to praise him speech” is a difficult one to give.

Brown has bought a few days of time to consolidate his inner circle and rally his own support, but it is temporary. This thing will not go away. It’s the swine flu season, after all. Brown will see most of his opponents as swine.

The End of New Labour is in Sight

Gordon Brown must feel very strange. He is supposed to be in command of a government. He is supposed to be the one who determines who is in and out of Cabinet, what they will focus on and how they should work with the public. All of a sudden, he has no real moral authority.

Two Secretaries of State – the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, and the Communities Secretary, Hazel Blears – have indicated to the media that they have resigned ahead of a cabinet shuffle which will happen between Friday morning of this week and Tuesday afternoon of next. Two junior Ministers, those for Children, Beverly Hughes, and Europe, Tom Watson, have also resigned. Due to the never ending revelations about expenses, others may well have to – including the Chancellor Alistair Darling. It’s a mess – an unprecedented debacle and a tragedy for Labour. As Oscar Wilde indicated, losing one is unfortunate, but four speaks to negligence.

It will get worse. Tomorrow, it is widely expected, Labour will suffer its worst electoral defeat in municipal and European elections in over twenty five years. The public, tired of this government and its polemic, rhetoric and lack of substance, will show that it is in charge of the political future of those at Westminster and it is in a foul mood. As one veteran observer has indicated, the general public’s mood is that “crucifixion is too good for some people” – and it is Gordon Brown they have in their sights.

Worse, he faces a backbench revolt over a rumored cabinet appointment. Ed Balls, currently the Education Minister, is widely tipped to replace Alistair Darling as Chancellor. A tough enforcer and a close ally of Brown’s, his appointment is being resisted by many in Government and in the party. In part it is because he is too closely allied to Brown, is a bully and is not respected. More significantly, it is a test of the authority of the backbench. If they can stop Balls they can oust Brown. And oust they must do, since Brown, no matter how bad Bleak Thursday’s poll results are, he will not resign.

Plotting is rife at Westminster. Alan Johnson is widely regarded as the safe pair of hands who can steer Labour out of the crisis and into the general election, which must be held on or before June 3rd 2010. The Guardian and other newspapers have been pushing his name as Brown’s immediate successor and he had made no moves to indicate his disinterest. It will take a series of refusals to serve in a new Brown cabinet and significant letters of no confidence from the party over the week-end to force the issue, but egos being what they are, it is doubtful that key party members have the courage to do what is best for Britain and force Brown out. Instead, they will accept the grace and favours of a cabinet post, even if its only for twelve months.

A lame duck Prime Minister (more likely, a lame gannet – a protected Scottish bird) at a time when Britain is in deep economic trouble is not good for Britain. Nor is a government starved of imagination, fresh thinking and concrete proposals for action. Debt ridden, lurching from crisis to crisis with no over-arching strategic intent, the government of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland is in desperate need of an injection of fresh leadership. Only a new politics, a new language and a new commitment to smaller, less interventionist and less expensive government will satisfy the people. A reform of how parliament works and of Cabinet is essential.

A new path for the economy which relies less on Government bail-outs, hand-outs and dole and more on entrepreneurship and self-reliance is key. Cutting government programs and reducing the bloated public service and its various illegitimate cousins – non government agencies funded entirely by government – and capping public sector pay are all essential actions to reduce deficits and debt. While Labour chants that the Tories “will cut government programs”, the Conservative party needs to say that it will and will do so with gusto. Its what Britain is ready for. The fact that Brown and his remaining three or four friends want to expand Government shows just how far out if touch he and the party is.

When you wake up on Friday morning you will be witnessing the beginning of one of the most intriguing week-ends of British politics for a quarter century. Watch what happens carefully and witness the beginning of the end and the end of New Labour, for that is what we are witnessing right now.

All Fur Coat and No Knickers

Momentum is gathering amongst world leaders with respect to the agenda for Copenhagen in December – the world gathering to develop a post-Kyoto treaty on climate change. We can expect lots of lies, damn lies and statistics to appear between now and then, some from scientist seeking to sway the agenda and others from polemicists and activists seeking a new world order in a post-carbon economy. It will be messy and verbally violent.

Recently, there was a report that some 300,000 persons a year die and a further 30 million impacted as a result of climate change. Sponsored by an organization headed by the former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, this disreputable report uses sleight of hand and deception to reach this conclusion. Treating all deaths from hurricanes, floods, tsunami, earthquakes and other naturally occurring events as “climate change impacts”, they arrive at this figure. It is surprising they did not include the 500,000 people a year who die from flu to boost this number. Despite the widespread condemnation of this piece of rhetoric by serious scientists, the media continue to report this as is if it were fact.

Then we have had the deniers. Those who deny the facts and prefer instead to rely on climate change models for their “evidence”. These models have singularly failed to predict the climate since they began to appear and be taken seriously some twenty five years ago. The fact is that the earth has not warmed since 1998 and has been in a cooling period since 2001, due in part to changes behaviour of the sun. Also a fact is that the polar bear population in most of the polar bear communities is either stable or increasing, not decreasing and that the Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker. These inconvenient truths are denied by climate change campaigners and their camp followers, since models show that these satellite based observations do not tally with the model predictions.

Prince Charles has suggested that we have just 100 months to save the planet, by which he means reforestation of the rainforest and a substantial reduction in the use of carbon based fuels and in CO2 emissions. Supported by twenty Nobel laureates, he suggests that action now can “change the climate” and save the planet. In this kind of rhetoric he is following a royal tradition, established by King Canute who thought he could command the tides to change and drowned as a result of how own stupidity. Man cannot change the climate and “stop” global warming unless man alone causes climate change, and there is little convincing evidence that man is responsible for the climate. The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) makes clear in its extensive report that the evidence favoring health effects of climate change or the impact of climate change on ocean levels is not at all the story the IPCC would have us believe, and is not as fear-mongering as the press like to hear. The NIPCC study, supported by more scientists than have been involved in the IPCC work, is also clear that the impact of CO2 emissions from man-made systems on the climate are not as serious or threatening as many would like us to believe.

The story of the arctic is the story that seems to convince most people that climate change is real. The story is that the arctic is melting so fast that, within a very short time, the Northwest Passage will be open and the North Pole will be a grassland. As a result of the melt, the oceans will rise and a number of small islands will disappear in the flood of ocean water that will occur.

Now to some facts. The opening and closing of the Northwest Passage is not a new phenomenon – it has happened several times before, the last time being in 1906. The ice melt which has occurred is part of a cyclical pattern of ice melting and is connected to a variety of factors, not least of which is the pattern of ocean currents. Despite claims to the contrary systematic measurement of ocean levels on the coast of the vulnerable islands do not show any rise in ocean levels significant enough to threaten these islands. Once again, computer models are the basis of these claims, not observed data.

The scares will keep coming, getting more intense as it becomes clear that the compromises and fixes that the politicians will deal in over the next few months will not appease the most ardent of the climate change deniers – those who claim that man made climate change will destroy the planet, in denial of the facts. Greenpeace and others will be shrill and their scientific allies, fearful of the loss of their grant farming and rent seeking resources, will come to their aid with more scare stories.

If Kyoto is anything to go by, there will be a lot of talk and very little actual achievement. Bu then, I guess this is the nature of the climate change business – “all fur coat and no knickers”, as my grandmother used to say when warning me to be careful around certain kinds of people. She may well have been right.

Academic Dishonesty?

In a gesture of public spiritedness, seven academics who include three lead authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a former director of the World Climate Research Program wrote to Australian power generating companies on April 29 instructing them to cease and desist creating electricity from coal....

“The warming of the atmosphere, driven by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases, is already causing unacceptable damage and suffering around the world.”

No evidence is provided for this statement and no signatory to this letter has published anything to support this claim. These university staff are unctuously understanding about the plight of those who face employment extinction in the smokestack towns of Australia. Worse, they are using their positions to assert a moral authority and a right to command which they do not appear to posess.

They write: “We understand that this will require significant social and economic transition that will need to be managed carefully to care for coal sector workers and coal-dependent communities.”. This love for fellow workers brings tears to the eyes.

The electricity generating companies should reply by cutting off the power to academics’ homes and host institutions, forcing our ideologues to lead by example.

We're All Going to Die ! (Well, Maybe Not...)

The media widely reported a study issued by the Global Humanitarian Forum which suggested that some 315,000 or more would die each year as a result of global warming.

It is nonsense and an example of bad science being used to set the stage for the global climate change conference in Copenhagen in December. We can expect more of this shoddy work by scientists concerned about polemics rather than science in the next few months.

Here’s why it is bad. First, natural disasters such as hurricanes, flu, tsunami’s, earthquakes have been occurring since the beginning of time – plagues and pestilence, floods and swarms of locusts appear in the Bible. There is no established link between human induced climate change and such naturally occurring disasters. In particular, hurricanes and extreme weather events occur as a result of a range of phenomena, of which climate change is one, but have occurred with greater frequency (especially hurricanes) than currently experienced before human induced climate change was an issue.

Second, many of the assumptions in the report are based on some very odd claims. For example, the report looks at earthquakes in 1980 and compares them with those in 2005 (no explanation of why these two dates are chosen) and then suggests that all weather patterns connected to disasters follow the same trajectory as the difference in number of earthquakes between these two years. This is irrational. It is like looking at baseball scores in 1980 and 2005 and suggesting that all events in cricket can be explained by the differences observed in baseball scores between these two years.

Third, even though their premise is absurb, it gets worse. All deaths and unfortunate outcomes over and above those which occurred at the 1980 level in each subsequent year are attributed to a single cause – man made global warming. No evidence, no partitioning of the data into different categories of cause, just the assumption that it “must be global warming” and man made warming at that.

Fourth, the increase in disasters observed worldwide can be entirely attributed to socio-economic changes. This is what has been extensively documented in the peer reviewed literature, and yet — none of this literature is cited in this report. Not one serious review of this literature is included. Instead the report authors rely on this cooked up comparison between earthquakes and weather related disasters. To be fair, the paper does cite the Stern review of the impact of climate change, but several subsequent reviews of the Stern data and analysis show clearly that these estimates were off by an order of magnitude and relied on a similar sort of statistical gamesmanship to develop its results (which is why serious researchers dismiss Stern’s analysis).

These kind of reports – scaremongering fiction masquerading as “science” – will begin to appear more strongly in September and October as the pre-Copenhagen meetings start in earnest. They will reveal that science, rather than being a disciplined and systematic approach to the study of a given phenomena, is becoming more like a branch of politics with edited and made up data and poor methods being excused because the conclusions and claims “fit” the political rhetoric needed to steer world political leaders in the “right” direction in December. As a scientist concerned about methodological integrity, such polemical nonsense is offensive. As a journalist, I am concerned that my colleagues treat such reports as factual when in fact they are fiction.

Rethinking Schools

Schools shape our future as a society. They are the bedrock of a community – a place in which all of our futures are nourished and developed. A place where skills are taught, enabled and encouraged. We should all care about what happens in schools, even if we do not have children attending them. One of those kids stood at the bus stop with baggy jeans and a funny hat may well become your pension fund manager just a few years from now. Others will run businesses that will hire your granddaughter or work to ensure our planet survives the onslaught of climate change.

But there is something wrong with our schools. They are burdened with too much direction about what they should teach – too many curriculum objectives, too many politically correct imperatives and too many instructions for our instructors. They are held accountable but are not given the tools for the responsible tasks they are given. They are subject to high stakes testing where students, on a single day, determine the fate of the school and its teachers. They are vulnerable and stressful. They are permanently failing to deliver to all of our expectations.

We also do not treat our teachers as true professionals. They are given limited scope for independent action – as if we do not trust them, despite their years of training, to do the job entrusted to them. We disdain their professional development activities and scoff at their summer vacations. We do not show them respect when, as they must do, they tell us that our son or daughter is not the paragon of excellence we thought them to be and that they are struggling.

We also see schools as a preparation for something else – for work, College or University – rather than places of learning in their own right. In fact, as one keen observer has noted, much of schooling is seen as a preparation for the work of a few – those who go to University - and is not, therefore, a great place for those for whom the trades, or creative arts or community service or retail is their chosen destination. We therefore teach, through our structures, large numbers of students to live with failure.

It is time for a radical change. Our schools need to do more to help our students be part of the solution to the problems our communities face – homelessness, poverty, isolation of the elderly, climate change, driver irresponsibility, the growing challenges of obesity and early onset diabetes, to name just some. Our schools also need to become less focused on being the pathway to post-secondary education and more focused on developing the skills which would enable all students to be life-long learners at any level and at anytime.

We need to counter the view that schools should narrow their focus to the basic science, mathematics, literacy and technology subjects and instead encourage a richness of personal learning which involves creativity, emotional intelligence, physical education, wellness and social skills as well as the more usual subjects. Creative diversity is a better bet for our future that a focused insistence on just a core. All need literacy and numeracy, but the development of these skills needs to be based on authentic and engaging learning activities.

We should reduce our division of knowledge into subjects and focus more on real world problem solving for authentic audiences where students are asked to contribute directly and in a meaningful way to the solution of problems facing their community. By focusing on project based work, the need to learn and develop skills normally associated with our “traditional” subject areas will arise naturally and be driven by student engagement rather than Provincial requirements.

We should empower and enable teachers to determine large “chunks” of the work their students do, rather than directing them with curriculum requirements – one Grade 9 science Provincial curriculum has over 260 objectives which teachers “must” complete during the year, 60% of which are likely to appear on a Provincial Achievement Test. This is pure nonsense, driven by the demands of post-secondary institutions rather than the learning needs of students. If we give schools back to the teachers, we should indicate the competencies at a broad level which students need on leaving school and let them, as professionals, determine the best route to these outcomes.

Finally, we should accept that teachers are best place to assess their students and reduce the focus on standardized, annualized, aggregated, average test results and focus instead on frequent, systematic and focused teacher assessments as the basis for pupil evaluation.

Our schools and the curriculum which informs their work were designed for nineteenth century education for an industrial world. It is the twenty first century and an age in which knowledge rather than industrial systems drive our economy. Our schools need a transformation – they need to be part of the twenty first century, not stand apart from our time.

Goodbye Gordon and Hello Opposition

Gordon Brown has been seen on television hugging babies. Accompanied by his wife, he was visiting day care facilities, possibly to get some idea on how to deal with recalcitrant and misbehaving children, some of whom grow up to be expense guzzling Members if Parliament. Later in the same day, his parliamentary colleagues began their Star Chamber examination of those who have committed the most heinous offences in the “expensegate” scandal that has gripped British politics and crippled parliament.

Earlier this month he had dinner with David Blunket, disgraced former Home Secretary, and his predecessor, Tony Blair, stimulating speculation about a cabinet shuffle and an October election. Indeed, several former cabinet colleagues appear to have been consulted on a repositioning of New Labour shortly after the expected debacle of the municipal and European elections due on June 4th.

It doesn’t matter. Shuffling the deck chairs as a ship is sinking and changing its final destination will not lead to a turnaround in Labour’s fortunes. The party is finished, at least for a while. There are three reasons.

The first is that it has become irrelevant to the future of Britain. It continues to use old Labour party tactics to deal with a post-modern, post-carbon set of economic and social challenges. The party has no vision, no strategy and, most important of all, no new language to talk in direct and clear terms about what it stands for and what it is seeking to achieve. Worse, it seeks to use deception and obfuscation as its primary method of sounding authoritative when all know that it is bankrupt of ideas and desperate to cling to power. The April budget showed this deception, obfuscation and bankruptcy in crystal clear terms.

Second, as the expense scandal demonstrates, all political parties have taken the British people for granted and for a ride - New Labour, more than others. While the conservative party are not immune to the fallout from the scandal, it is the governing party that will take the blame. And so it should. The party’s history is “of the people, for the people” – not mention of “for myself, ripping off the people” you will notice. There is a sense in which a scandal for a conservative is expected and one for a Labour party representative is reprehensible – they are more likely to be on “our” side, it used to be thought, than the Tories, who have always been in it for themselves.

Finally, there is the Gordon problem. Anointed as leader – no one stood against him – and deteriorating in leadership, Gordon Brown is an all round dithering disappointment. He started badly, suggesting a quick snap election and then backing away once polling numbers suggested he may not win. He progressed haltingly and then he had a few successes. Just a few weeks ago he seemed to do well at the G20 summit, but its all gone now. And gone is what most of his colleagues wish of the Prime Minister. Alan Johnson, an amiable and affable foil, is touted by several as an interim replacement tiding the party through its inevitable defeat and managing the aftermath. But Gordon won’t go. He is too stubborn, too deluded and too myopic to think that his departure might actually do some good.

So now the question within the Party becomes one of solace. How can the party be relieved of its agony and politics in Britain move beyond its current preoccupations with scandal and back to the real business of British politics - reinventing Britain?

There are four things that need to happen for Labour. First, it needs a strategy for the New Britain. Forget New Labour, think about the country. Focus on what it will take to restore social and economic well being and the pride of the British people.
Second, it needs new leadership. A new leader and new faces throughout the key portfolios of government. A new generation. These new leaders, who need to be of a different generation from Brown, Mandelson, Johnson, Blair and have a new rhetoric of change, have much to do to rebuild the self confidence of the party. David Milliband comes to mind as a possible leader of this generational coup. It needs a very British coup.

Third, there needs to be an election and quickly. October is the earliest which makes sense, but only if the first two actions outlined here are in place. While no one likes February elections – especially those of us who have managed them – this is the better date. It gives a chance for new thinking, new people and new policies to develop and effervesce with the people.

Finally, Labour needs to plan for defeat and to use the time in opposition wisely. If it does not, it could be in the wilderness for as long as the Liberal Party – close to a hundred years. Smart opposition, planned policy development and a systematic approach to rebuilding the party from the ground up will all be needed to restore Labour to power within ten years.

But it needs to start now. Each day that passes without action on this agenda is another year of opposition. Get used to it.