Just have a skim, if you can bear it, through the witterings of Policy Exchange’s creepy-sounding policy wonk Henry Featherstone on the Conservative Home website:

Smoking remains a controversial issue in our society. And today, our report, Cough up, has re-ignited the debate. First, let’s be clear that smoking remains the biggest single preventable cause of death and serious disease in our society – 83,000 deaths in England last year. But it’s legal, some people enjoy it and tobacco duty raises £10 billion for the Treasury.

So why all the fuss? Well, because for the first time we have exploded the popular myth that smoking is a net contributor to the economy. Our research finds that every single cigarette smoked costs the country money – 6.5 pence each time someone lights up. That’s £2.82 billion in lost revenue each year, when we’re running a budget deficit of £177 billion. So following earlier Policy Exchange research that indicates that tobacco taxes are the most popular way to raise additional revenue, we suggest that tobacco taxation should be increased by 5% in the next Budget. This would see the price of a typical pack of cigarettes rise by 23 pence from £6.13 to £6.36 per packet and generate over £400 million for HM Treasury.

Ah! I hear you say, but won’t increasing taxes just increases smuggling? Not necessarily. Since 2000 there has been a concerted effort to tackle tobacco smuggling into the UK and as a result the market share of smuggled cigarettes has fallen by 50%. This has been achieved through increased co-operation with some tobacco companies, but sadly not all of them. It should also be noted that the type of tobacco that is most frequently smuggled, hand rolled tobacco, is the tobacco which enjoys the lowest level of duty.

Of course the risk of just ratcheting up tobacco tax is that it ends up being regressive, since poorer people are more likely to smoke. So we had identified about £180 million of interventions to reduce smoking prevalence aimed at particularly hard to reach groups like pregnant teenagers. We suggest that direct financial incentives to stop smoking of £10 per week should be offered to pregnant women of, or below, the age of 20. This would cost £36 million annually and would be very cost-effective, with NICE already identifying huge cost benefits for reducing smoking in pregnancy. If we’re going to be serious in our attempts at reducing health inequalities and stopping the cycle of tobacco addiction, then we need to do what works.

Is it just me, or does every one of those words sound like it was written by some noisome Nu Lab apparatchik at a grisly public health Quango?

I love the way he can airily claim that bunging £36 million to smoking mothers – most of whom will presumably carry on puffing away, but just lie to whoever’s doling out the dosh – is “cost-effective.”

I also love the completely random maths of Policy Exchange’s assessment:

Whilst tax on tobacco contributes £10 billion annually to the Treasury coffers, the true costs to society from smoking are far higher, at £13.74 billion, think thank Policy Exchange’s latest report finds. This cost is made up of the cost of treating smokers on the NHS (£2.7 billion) but also the loss in productivity from smoking breaks (£2.9 billion) and increased absenteeism (£2.5 billion); the cost of cleaning up cigarette butts (£342 million); the cost of fires (£507 million), and also the loss in economic output from the deaths of smokers (£4.1 billion) and passive smokers (£713 million).

£2.9 billion lost because of smoking breaks? And how do they KNOW? What about all the productive thoughts that smokers have while nipping outside and talking to the fellow-most-interesting-people-in-the-office? What about the improved productivity-rate induced by having had a good blast of nicotine and fresh air? What about all the time the non-smokers are wasting surfing porn sites and catching up on Facebook?

Of course I loathe Dave Cameron’s other favourite think tank DEMOS. But at least DEMOS admits to being an out-and-out left-wing think tank, while Policy Exchange’s pallid bunch of lettuce-chomping social workers actually have the gall to claim that they’re conservatives. That’s why I hate them more.

Yes! Great! Tick in the margin! Here is a great novelist at the height of his powers summing up perfectly the atavistic impulse which leads generation after generation to believe it is the chosen one: the generation so special that it and it alone will be the one privileged to experience the end of the world; and the generation so egotistical that it imagines itself largely responsible for that imminent destruction.

The Aztecs thought it; Medieval peasants thought it; green doom-mongers think it today. But the fact that generations of credulous berks believed these things does not make their guilt-laden, quasi-religious convictions any more valid now than they were a thousand years ago. The end of the world is not nigh. We will go on evolving and adapting as we have always done. The richer we get, the more advanced our economies, the more money we shall have to spend on conserving our environment. This is how the real world works as opposed to the fantasy one devised by Millenarians, eco-loons and other frothing nutcases.

Now contrast those wise words at the beginning, with that of an AGW-believing celebrity author recently interviewed on the BBC who rather ridiculously claimed, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, that:

“The world of science is not at loggerheads. The consensus is colossal.”

(Not just “settled”, note. Actually “colossal”, don’tcha know?)

Now here’s the weird part. The clever, wise author who wrote the sentence at the beginning and the rather silly chicken licken one quoted by the BBC are one and the same. Ian McEwan, author of a new global warming novel Solar. I must confess that I haven’t yet read the novel, so I can’t be sure quite how far down the path of climate scepticism McEwan’s book dares to venture. But I do know that certain deep Greenies have been slightly miffed at the way McEwan satirises their antics on a pleasant freebie – sorry, important scientific mission – he took up to the Arctic Circle on an agreeable sailing boat with the Cape Farewell project.

Could it be that McEwan is suffering a severe case of cognitive dissonance, with the achingly PC, AGW-believing, public version of Ian McEwan battle for supremacy with his inner creative genius which seems to have a much, much more insightful understanding of the real issues at stake with AGW?

Some of these issues are discussed on the BBC’s Review Show – which I urge you to watch before it gets taken off the BBC website, partly so you can admire the heroic defence of empiricism and commonsense by the New Culture Forum’s Peter Whittle, partly so you can discover the true meaning of rhyming slang courtesy of libtard historian Tristram Hunt.

The villain of the piece was the psychiatric establishment. Throughout the 1980s, we learnt — perhaps it’s the case still — it was standard practice for trainee psychiatrists to be taught that there was no connection between violence and mental illness. This means that many of the consultants running our regional Mental Health Trusts are basing important decisions about public safety on a politically correct lie.

(to read more, click here)

It’s called The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand, and if you haven’t read it that’s quite understandable as the Russian-born novelist and philosopher Rand (née Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in 1905) is much bigger in the US than she is over here. Though she’s now better known for Atlas Shrugged (1957) — currently enjoying a massive revival in the US as part of the Obama backlash — it was The Fountainhead (1943) that made her name and has since sold around 6.5 million copies.

(to read more, click here)

Greens steal more than non-Greens; they are more likely to cheat and lie. And it’s not me making this up here. We’re talking hard scientific fact. Way harder than anything you’d find in, say, the Fourth IPCC Assessment report. See for yourself. It’s in The Guardian.

Do Green Products Make Us Better People is published in the latest edition of the journal Psychological Science. Its authors, Canadian psychologists Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, argue that people who wear what they call the “halo of green consumerism” are less likely to be kind to others, and more likely to cheat and steal. “Virtuous acts can license subsequent asocial and unethical behaviours,” they write.

The pair found that those in their study who bought green products appeared less willing to share with others a set amount of money than those who bought conventional products. When the green consumers were given the chance to boost their money by cheating on a computer game and then given the opportunity to lie about it – in other words, steal – they did, while the conventional consumers did not. Later, in an honour system in which participants were asked to take money from an envelope to pay themselves their spoils, the greens were six times more likely to steal than the conventionals.

Mazar and Zhong said their study showed that just as exposure to pictures of exclusive restaurants can improve table manners but may not lead to an overall improvement in behaviour, “green products do not necessarily make for better people”. They added that one motivation for carrying out the study was that, despite the “stream of research focusing on identifying the ‘green consumer’”, there was a lack of understanding into “how green consumption fits into people’s global sense of responsibility and morality and [how it] affects behaviours outside the consumption domain”.

The researchers claim to have been surprised by what they found. I’m not. You only have to hear the Hon Sir Jonathon Porritt plotting the destruction of the mud flats Severn Estuary or to hear George Monbiot talking about wind farms to understand that the very last thing greens want is to make the world a better place. It’s about making THEMSELVES feel better, which is another matter entirely.

The same rule, incidentally, is also true of socialists, liberals, Lib-Dems, Cameroon ‘Conservatives’, and libtards generally.

Can you imagine the leader of Hamas being given freedom to explain in a national British newspaper column how his party had always been an ardent supporter of Israel and a great lover of the Jewish people and how to suggest otherwise was an outrageous slur on his good name?

Or Jose Manuel Baroso running an article saying that one of the great things about the EU was the way it had lowered taxes and regulation, enhanced liberty and made everything more democratically accountable?

Or Jeffrey Archer being given a thousand words to explain how Tolstoy had learned everything he knew from reading Kane And Abel?

Though I’d very much like to read the last one – and the first two come to think of it – I doubt they’d ever be allowed to run. The comment editor would take one look at them and go: “But this is just nonsense! It contradicts all reason; it completely ignores pretty much everything this person has ever done. It’s a pack of unsupported assertions and ‘facts’ which bear no connection whatsoever with observed reality.”

So why aren’t the same standards of objectivity, balance, verifiability and reason applied to members of the global climate fear promotion lobby? I’m thinking, for example, of that hideous eructation of unutterable bilge that the New York Times generously allowed Al Gore to spew into its pages the other day; or the number of solemn AGW-promoting articles you see being run by the likes of the Hon Sir Jonathon Porritt; or the Royal Society’s Lord Rees; or dreary but dangerous Lord Stern.

This is classic argumentum ad verecundiam – the logical fallacy of the “appeal to authority”. Just because they’ve got titles and represent grand-sounding bodies, their words are treated as holy writ. They are allowed to repeat the same pack of lies ad nauseam and they’re never, ever called on it. (Except, highly entertainingly, by the commenters below online versions of the articles).

I was going to give you examples of all the bits from Sir John’s article that stretched the bounds of credulity. But re-reading it, I realise that to do that, I’d have to run the whole piece.

Let’s try though:

In truth, it’s far easier to find what now looks like excessive caution in IPCC reports.

Interesting use of “in truth” there. Presumably as in “in truth I did not cut that cherry tree down”.

Or try:

The IPCC is too big an organisation to be captured by an ideological cabal or fall foul of group-think.

Or this:

The IPCC is not a self-selected group of scientists with a political agenda.

I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting Sir John. But I’m sure I’d recognise him instantly by his extraordinarily long nose.

UPDATE: for a thorough Fisking of all the arrant porkies in Sir John’s Times-endorsed propaganda statement, I heartily recommend the great Lubos Motl’s blog. Here he is analysing Sir John’s “Let’s be honest….” paragraph defending the IPCC’s integrity. (Hat Tip: Dropstone)

Houghton only mentions GlacierGate because it’s the only one for which the IPCC has apologized – kind of. It hasn’t apologized for the other scandals even though they’re inherently more serious than the GlacierGate. The IPCC hasn’t apologized again, and switched backed to the mode of denial, because it had previously “promised” itself that the GlacierGate was the only mistake in the 2007 IPCC report.

This statement of theirs is, however, completely absurd. Virtually every single statement in the IPCC report that looks worrisome is based on ideology, science that suffers from childish mistakes and deliberate mistakes, and is only supported by gray literature. That includes the statements about the glaciers, about the destruction of rain forests by climate change, about the dropping agricultural yields in Africa because of climate change, about the majority of the Netherlands being under the sea level, about the rising inherent damages caused by natural disasters, and everything else that makes the IPCC relevant in the political discourse and the media.

The IPCC is not “science at its best”: it is a shame that discredits all of science and is dragging all other scientific disciplines under the water. It doesn’t deserve to be defended: it deserves to be eliminated. People should pray that the damage caused by the IPCC to the institutionalized science in the whole world may be corrected in a foreseeable future.

And as Ban Ki Moon himself says, keeping a studiedly neutral position on the issue:

“I have seen no credible evidence that challenges the main conclusions of that [Fourth IPCC Assessment] report. The threat posed by climate change is real.”

Make no mistake, we are accelerating at breakneck speed towards hell. There are now so many political entities dedicated to creating a regulatory system predicated on the existence on AGW – besides the UN these include the European Union, the Obama administration, the EPA, the terrifying Carbon Disclosure Project, the Labour government and the forthcoming Heath administration – that none of them is remotely interested in hearing any answers they don’t want to know. It will be like another of those EU referenda where the only acceptable answer is “Yes”, even when the people keep saying “No.”

As ever, Richard North has been unearthing some choice examples of the vast sums of taxpayers’ money which is about to be squandered in the name of ManBearPig and end up lining the pockets of a few canny businessmen, and of the mad schemes being dreamt up to “combat” AGW.

Here’s one that will involve the British taxpayer spending the equivalent of four aircraft carriers a year, every year, forever.

And here’s a possibly even crazier scheme to harness the flatulence of Welsh cows.

I said before the battle ahead of us was tough. It just got a whole lot tougher.

This Literature Festival is a case in point. All morning I’ve been watching authors like Martin Amis, Conn Iggulden, Francis Wheen, Roger McGough, Alexander McCall Smith and the world’s goriest children’s author Darren Shan wandering round in a daze, some of it maybe due to the time zone shift (we had to get up for the opening at the equivalent at 4.30 am UK time) but most of it due to sheer amazement that in these dark recessionary times there is as a place in the world where writers still get treated like royalty. Global literature festivals are a penny a dozen these days. But I don’t think there are many gigs left where pretty much everything – including your wife or husband’s business class flight (if you’re an author; not my wife unfortunately) – is paid for. And yes of course it’s all front – designed to project an image to the world that says “Dubai financial crisis? What Dubai financial crisis?” But I don’t notice many of the guests complaining about it.

The only thing the festival hosts won’t stump up for is booze (shame because a beer here costs about £7). This reflects Dubai’s rather awkward relationship with its fellow Emirates (and the rest of the Middle East). On the one hand they like the way it proves to the world that Arabs CAN do modern business and aren’t just relicts from the Middle Ages who only got lucky because of oil; on the other, they feel that the place has sold itself down the river by at least partially accommodating the wicked licentiousness of the West. Even though you can only buy booze in hotels here, Dubai is by some way the most liberal of the United Arab Emirates.

You can still get arrested for canoodling on the beach, being found drunk, swearing or even making a rude hand gesture, but I totally see why so many expats are drawn here. Partly, it’s the fact that as a free port it’s all tax free (though rumours of the cheapness of goods here are greatly exaggerated), partly, it’s because like many of us would rather like Britain still to be – as if PC had never happened.

I noticed one small example of this at the festival’s (surprisingly good) opening, when about two hundred kids trooped on stage dressed up as their favourite children’s characters (Pippi Longstockings, Worst Witches, Harry Potters etc) and did a really high-quality song and dance number. It was quite an eye-opener for anyone used to the achingly PC standards which obtain in most British state primary schools these days: the kids who got the starring roles were ruthlessly chosen either because they had the best singing voice or because they were prettiest, rather than to create balance or make the ugly losers feel better about themselves. And crikey, was the show all the better for it!

Here’s part of the embarrassed kiss-off Prof Plimer received from the RSA’s chief executive:

I am afraid I am writing to you with some disappointing news regarding
the Prince Philip Annual Lecture on 5 May.

As you well know, the debate around climate change has recently become
highly politically charged, both globally and especially in your home
country. Equally, as I am sure you are aware, members of the Royal
Family need to be scrupulous in avoiding any appearance of advocating or
supporting a particular political stance. The RSA’s charitable status
also requires us to maintain absolute political independence in our
programme of events and research events.

After discussion with Buckingham Palace, it is therefore with great
regret that we must withdraw your invitation to give this year’s Prince
Philip Lecture. The Duke of Edinburgh is personally disappointed as he
read your book with great interest and was looking forward to hearing
you speak, but I know that you will recognise that the now highly
controversial debate surrounding this issue would make it inevitable
that he was seen to be taking a particular position.

Actually, no I don’t think that Prof Plimer DOES “recognise that the now highly controversial debate surrounding this issue would make it inevitable that he was seen to be taking a particular position.” Au contraire, he’d consider closer to being a case of bringing a sense of balance and proportion to a hitherto very one-sided debate. After all, if the Prince of Wales is permitted to take such an extremist “100 months left to save the world” approach to AGW, why on earth shouldn’t his Dad be allowed to adopt a more sensible, sceptical position.

As Plimer puts it: “Strange that those who preach environmentalism at The Palace are feted as concerned scientists with no political agenda whereas those that try to speak rationality
are regarded as political.”

Question Time: celebrating the cosy consensus

Watching another dismal episode of the BBC’s Question Time last week, I realised why British politics is in such a dire state. It’s because the language of debate has been hijacked so comprehensively by the liberal left that not even conservatives dare speak up for right-wing views any more for fear of being dismissed as extremist.

By “right wing” I don’t mean anti-semitic, xenophobic, “racist”, “sexist” or any of the other glib caricatures routinely imposed on us by the left. I simply mean believing, as I do, that a society is at its most fruitful, happy and successful when individuals are left free to live their lives unburdened by all but the bare minimum of taxation or regulation, where time-honoured traditions and institutions (be they the family, or the church or the military) are cherished, where politicians are our servants not our masters, and where equality of opportunity may be a desirable thing – but DEFINITELY not equality of outcome.

What liberal-left organisations like the BBC have managed very successfully to do is frame the debate in such a way that such opinions aren’t even up for discussion. On Question Time last week, for example, the first question (given unfeasibly large quantities of impossibly boring airtime by the complicitous chairman David Dimbleby) was about Michael Ashcroft and Tory party funding; another was about one of the killers of James Bulger; another was about the Chilcott inquiry. None of them enabled any of the panel seriously to address any of the major problems facing our country today. The Bulger one was merely an opportunity for a bit of tabloid-columnist-style moral posturing. The other two were essentially about political process.

Political process is solely a left-liberal preoccupation. For libtards it is an article of faith that political activity of any kind must perforce be a good thing because it involves two of their favourite things – government intervention and changing the status quo. What libtards don’t like is big ideas – liberty; empiricism; small state; low taxation . That’s because these are right-wing arguments which they will always lose. Hence their tendency to shut down the debate whenever they can by shifting the argument ad hominem.

I’ve noticed this same technique much in use in the student-rag left-liberal blogosphere, of late, over the small matter of the Young Britons Foundation. Because the YBF’s splendid, funny and ideologically sound chairman Donal Blaney has called his organisation a “madrassa” for young conservatives, Guardianistas and redbrick-junior-common-room-Spartists have seized on it as evidence is that the YBF is some kind of borderline terrorist organisation. Eh? As I mentioned earlier, I addressed the YBF in the Commons last week, and extremist is the very last word I’d use to describe them. “Not nearly extremist enough” would be my preferred definition of these pallid young politicos. These kids have been so effectively brainwashed by the propaganda of socialists like Ken Livingstone, Tony Benn, Ken Clarke, Dave Cameron et al, they actually think “progressive” means something worthwhile and that “investment” is what you do when you squander money you haven’t got on the least efficient healthcare system in the known universe.

As I said to them last week, “Unless you understand why it is that conservatism is the ONLY political philosophy that works, unless you are capable of appreciating – and explaining – why it is not merely the philosophy of self-interest and expediency but also the one which leads to by far the happiest outcomes for by far the most people, then there is NO POINT IN YOUR BEING A ****ING CONSERVATIVE at all.”

There is not much we can do to change the BBC insidious leftism, unfortunately. But what we can try to do is restore some backbone to conservatism and – if this is what the YBF is trying to do then we should applaud it. Until conservatives can learn to stop being embarrassed about their ideology, Broken Britain is never going to be fixed.