Full length version of my column for The Teacher this month

As some of you know I write a column for The Teacher magazine (the magazine of the NUT, the National Union of Teachers). This month due to space issues they cut my piece down quite a lot which is fair enough and very much within their rights to do but I thought I'd give you the full length version here, maybe also interesting to those of you who wouldn't get to see the magazine...

Last month while I was appearing at the Edinburgh Fringe David Cameron was in Westminster putting together a hilarious little skit of his own. My favourite of his jokes was “sometimes politicians shy away from talking about the family”.

No they don’t. Politicians love talking about the family. They think it makes them seem less like swollen corrupt egos in sweat-creased suits and more earthy and wholesome. Given the chance they would gladly wrestle one another to the ground to get their puckered lips on a photogenic baby. Posing on the school run and being interviewed by MumsNet are rites of passage for the ambitious modern politician as much as pretending to be working class or explaining away photographs of dominatrices.

Family is also a great subject on which to show a little stage-managed weakness, an exercise overpaid PR consultants probably call "humanising". The kid with the gappy teeth, the tussle for the remote control, airbrushed into adorability by the same PR egos. Ooops! Mum’s dropped the Christmas turkey! But they muddle on ignoring Granny's snoring and rolling their eyes at Dad's dodgy jokes like the Waitrose Waltons.

Sure enough for his next punchline Comedy Cameron pretends to be self-depreciating. “I am far from the perfect father and husband”. 

He'd never say "I'm far from the perfect economist" because it's true. He stupidly quotes the long-disproven pseudo-economics that is the Laffer Curve and insists that trickle-down economics is a real thing. The best way to get money to poor people is by giving it to rich people? What next, help the hungry by feeding the obese? Improving health by operating on the fit and well?

The flip side is that while he did leave his daughter at the pub that one time and you or I shiver at the thought of waking up next to his smug doughy face, in many respects he is the “perfect” father and husband. He’s loaded, well-connected and even takes them on loads of fancy holidays.

Teachers know that most families in Britain are nothing like the Camerons. The prime minister’s family probably haven't noticed the child benefit freeze, the bedroom tax, the cut to the childcare component of Working Tax Credits or the fact that you now have to work an extra eight hours a week to even qualify for them. They could always balance out the shortfall by christening their new yacht with a jeroboam, rather than a methuselah, of champagne. (And, yes, I've won a lot of pub quizzes!)

And another thing. Let's be frank - some families are rubbish. Some too busy and stressed out to care, and some who just downright don't care. Heartbreaking, yes, but utterly unsurprising as the only qualification required for parenthood is leaving your condom in your other coat.

The group of people who have qualifications to support young people is of course teachers. [Insert your own snide remark about unqualified teachers and bear in mind that it’s unlikely the very worst of them could be as dangerous in their job as one M. Gove. Good riddance.]

What we can't do is guarantee every child a top-of-the-range family but we could guarantee them a good teacher. A fully qualified teacher with a class size small enough to spot those who are struggling, the resources to support families falling through the gaps and the back-up to intervene where families are failing.

And the joke is ultimately on him because that's exactly the sort of thing politicians like Cameron do shy away from talking about.

WOW, in every sense

Yesterday for International Day of the Girl I took part in a mentoring session on the London Eye with some teenage girls from Tower Hamlets. This was being organised by the Women of the World/WOW team at the South Bank Centre (in case you thought I had just hijacked the London Eye). And here's a lovely photo of the rainbow that showed up halfway through to remind us about the importance of gay rights or that God sometimes needs to drown people.

One of the conversations I had shocked me to the core. A thirteen year old girl told me that when she grows up she wants to be a physicist. Awesome, right? Then she asked me about GCSE choices. I said "do all the sciences". She explained that her school only lets a few students do all three sciences, and she doubted they'd pick her. So I suggested writing to her head teacher, talking to her science teachers, generally making a fuss, etc. At this point her teacher who was monitoring the mentoring stepped in and advised her to "pick which two sciences she liked best". The girl said physics and biology. The teacher advised dropping chemistry.

I jumped back in to the conversation and said if you want to be a physicist you need to do chemistry GCSE too. The girl said she wanted to do chemistry, but it was the science she found the hardest so they wouldn't let her do it.

Then I asked both of them, the girl and the teacher, what other GCSEs she would do. The teacher replied "everyone does English, everyone does Maths and everyone does R.E."!

A thirteen year old girl from a deprived inner city area who dreams of being a scientist is being forced to study religion instead of chemistry?

I am going to turn green and smash things.

City Academy Plug

During a discussion about the forthcoming Squeakies movie on the Sunny and Shay show on BBC London last night one of the producers gives a lovely plug for the comedy course I teach at City Academy and how great my students are (I agree). You can listen again here and the bit where I'm mentioned starts at 1h44m in.

I'll add a couple of points about comedy courses, cos there seem to be some FAQs...

1) Can you really teach someone to be funny?

I don't really subscribe to this notion that people "just are" or "just aren't" funny. We all have different senses of humour. A course can definitely help you explore your sense of humour and different ways of bringing it across onstage. And if you met someone who wasn't a very good singer - would you tell them not to take a singing course? No - lots of people enjoy learning about singing, practising and performing to friends, anyone who fancies it should give it a try. Ditto comedy.

2) Surely you'd learn more by getting onstage and doing it?

You can certainly learn a lot by doing gigs, yes, and if that's how you'd prefer to learn no-one is stopping you. New act nights can be tough though - small distracted audiences, badly set-up rooms, and often they can be unreceptive to anything a bit different. If you can learn it in front of an audience, why not learn it in front of your classmates with the help of a professional comic as a teacher.

3) Do you just teach people to be like you?

Well I worry about that but I try very hard not to - I try very hard to provide skills and tools and techniques that can be applied to a wide range of acts. Some of my ex-students do character comedy, some do puns, there's a fair range...

4) What if I just want to boost confidence and presenting skills?

Yes, definitely, got a best man/woman speech or work awards do coming up? I can help. One-on-one or join a class.

5) What has happened to your ex-students? Are they all famous yet?

I've only been teaching just over a year - give them a chance - but some of them are doing really well. Here's a clip of one of my graduates Stephen Bailey performing in a pub in Manchester, if you're interested.

Funnily (sort of) enough the comedy course is one of the City Academy courses most often bought as a gift for a friend, which is quite a sweet way of saying "You've got a lot of interesting stories to tell, give it a go!". The link to City Academy website is above if you are now itching to sign up...! I promise you'll have fun.

Dream On

Dear Jamie Oliver,

So while attempting to have a night off tonight I decided to watch your "Dream School" show. I thought the idea of using big names to try to inspire and educate kids who had been failed by the education system was interesting. I liked the notion of finding out how much difference a good school and great teachers could make.

However one thing on tonights show made me really angry. One of the students, a young mum, arrived at school with her child - the kid had chicken pox and so couldn't attend a normal daycare centre. The student was sent home and left the program in floods of tears saying that having a child had ruined all her chances in life.

Can't we even DREAM of a future where a really good school would be able to help a woman in that situation? Is a school hardship fund to cover emergency childcare something we can't even DREAM of? Or what about the possibility of one of the teachers (perhaps someone who has had chickenpox as a child so isn't at risk) going round to visit her later and providing one-to-one catch-up.

To be quite frank - call me - I will gladly do either or both of those tasks. And yes I've had chickenpox!

Add to that that earlier in the same show when other students were bullying her over her status as a young mum the response was to encourage her to toughen up rather than to educate the other pupils to think more carefully about what they were saying. Frankly I can't help thinking your school needs a really good sex education teacher - not of the Anne Widdicombe "it's immoral!!" school of education but, frankly, again, me.

If we as a nation are to accept the message you claim to spread about improving our society and giving our young people the opportunities they deserve we have to include young parents in that. Not least because they are the ones raising the next generation of young people.

And what message are you sending to the wider world if your response to the issues of time management which affect parents is to chuck them out immediately without even sitting down to try and figure out a way of working around the problem? It is deeply irresponsible.

But my guess is it's just inconvenient for you to change your filming schedule or give up a little bit of your free time to actually help someone else. Once the cameras are off the enthusiasm for helping others is off too.

Well some of us don't take that attitude. As I've said above I'd be happy to help. And I mean that whether the cameras are on or off. Seriously contact me, your school could use a head of feminism I expect.

Yours Kate

NEWSFLASH: Jody McIntyre 3 million times more articulate than news presenter

Now this is how to do a great BBC News interview!

The Porn Generation

This is not new news - many researchers have shown links between porn and sexual violence and harrassment before. I don't even understand why we need research to demonstrate a link - isn't it obvious? Still whenever I mention it I am always scrutinised for the exact details of the research in an incredulous way so I'm posting up the link since it's in the news today.

"young boys who see pornography are more inclined to believe there is nothing wrong with pinning down or sexually harassing a girl"

Now I know that young people today have more access to porn than the did a few years back. Did you know that the average amount of time per week that teenage boys spend watching porn is 90 minutes? I'm not sure what exact age range this (shoddy journalism) is but it's frightening because there is a real sense I hear from people that there's no point passing laws to keep kids away from porn, they're going to see it anyway. Well I understand they'll spend a couple of minutes curiously peering at it, and I can cope with that. 90 minutes a week? That's more than they spend studying science in some schools! No wonder they come out with a totally messed up attitude towards women.

Schools of Thought

Ah doesn't this piece demonstrate *exactly* why faith schools are a dreadful idea? Turns out that every religion has it's own interpretations of what constitutes a member of their faith... So Jewish schools claim the child's mother must be Jewish, Catholic ones claim it's about being Christened in a Catholic church while very young and when I went o a Church of England school when I was a kid it was pretty clear that my parents flimsy last-minute flurry of attendance at the local church had much less of an effect than my good grades and behaviour record. If you look at faith groups it's pretty clear that they divide up along heavily ethnic lines. So faith schools allow some schools to quietly carry on being selective and turns others merely act to divide children up to be educated along lines of race. Add to this the implications to science and reason from allowing religious leaders to be involved in the selection of teaching staff and I really don't see what possible reason there can be for the government to continue funding them.

Human Sacrifice Related Thought For The Day

On Sunday I was "informed" by various over-the-top religious activists that there is far too much sex ed in schools (see post below). This afternoon I was helping a friend's 8-year-old with her homework which included a worksheet about the Aztecs. All well and good, there were some missing words to fill in and so on. Then there was a blank box above which it said "In this box draw a picture of a human sacrifice". Huh? So we can't talk to kids about sex but it's just fine to have them drawing dismembered bleeding corpses? I suggested she just write in the box "Are you serious, I'm eight!" and her mum suggested drawing the temple without the gory bits but then we left her to make her own choices so for all I know she's been carefully colouring in blood puddles and extricated still-pumping hearts...

Sex and the Classroom

Seems that suddenly sexual harassment and sexist bullying in schools is being taken seriously in some quarters. I hadn't really thought about it until now, at that age I was rather preoccupied dealing with the abuse I was getting at home (which I'm sure made me an easy target, but so what what - easy targets deserve to be bullied no more than anyone else). But thinking back sexual harassment happened a lot when I was at school. When I was about 12 I remember boys in my class making sexual remarks to me and pretending they were aroused by me as a way of teasing me. At 13 I had moved on to upper school and there was a boy, older than me who sometimes followed me around and grabbed my bum. When I turned on him and demanded he stop he denied that he was doing it and ridiculed me for "thinking he might fancy me" (I didn't - I thought he was trying to upset me). Like Cath I told no-one. I was far too embarrassed about it - but also I didn't know it even really counted as bullying and I certainly didn't know that anyone would deal with it without humiliating me in the process.

And sexist bullying - well it's hard to know what was sexist and what was just "regular" bullying but certainly it was a fairly constant feature of school for me. Getting punched and kicked and pushed around and screamed at by boys was what happened at school. I was bullied a bit by girls too so it's hard to draw a line but of the four bullies I remember the most vividly, three were boys.

Some of the stories coming out in the documentary and recent surveys do seem to me to suggest the problem is growing and I can't help thinking of course it's growing - school boys these days have access to Lad Mags, to internet porn and to a much wider standard of sexism in the media. Hey if Jonathan Ross and Jeremy Clarkson do it on national TV - why can't I?

Photo by Ian Britton from FreeFoto.com.

Guess Which Paper...

...ran today with the headline 'Sex Clinics "To Open" In EVERY School So Pupils As Young As 11 Can Be Tested...Without Parental Consent'? Ten points if you said the Daily Mail. And minus ten points for having ever read it.

Now firstly how can you have a headline with the words "to open" in inverted commas. Either they're going to open or they're not. When they use inverted commas it's a good guess they're not!

Secondly a third of secondary schools already have an onsite clinic which is able to offer sexual health services like contraception and pregnancy testing. So really the headline should be 'Inequality In Provision Of Health Service To Young People "To End"'.

Thirdly all young people are supposed to be able to access these services. They are provided on the NHS at your nearest appropriate clinic. This issue is the inconvenience of having to travel to access these services, especially for young people who may have to rely on others for transport.

Fourthly if children as young as 11 need sexual health services we should DEFINITELY provide them. I think that's obvious.

Fifthly children who have a good relationship with their parents will turn to them when they are worried about sexual matters and sexual health matters. The average pregnant eleven-year-old probably doesn't have the best relationship with their parents. And of course no mention is made of children whose parents (a) would harm their children if they knew they were sexually active, (b) are not interested in their children and wouldn't bother to help them seek out the services they need or (c) are simply not there and their children are fending for themselves or in the care of the state.

But far be it from the Mail to be reasonable about the issue. Instead they quote the crazy comments of the researchers at the National Children's Bureau "Not all young people will need to use a sexual health service at school age, but providing a service in school is the best way of making sure that those young people who need the service can use it.". Does anyone really not get that?

Lets hear instead from anti-sex campaigner Norman Wells: "The fact that these clinics keep parents in the dark is also a great concern. Confidentiality policies drive a wedge between parents and children and expose young people to the risk of abuse and disease."

Now lets remember that 99% of sexual abuse of young people happens IN THE FAMILY - surely offering services confidentially from parents will reduce the risk of abuse by empowering young people to understand what is going on and seek help to stop it. And providing contraception also reduces the risk of disease...

Well I could go on all day. I just believe young people have a right to know how their bodies work and make their own choices. Young people respond poorly to an abstinence-only program because it's based on lies. Sex is not immoral.

Stating the Obvious. Slowly.

Hope you all saw me on BBC One this morning explaining why expecting kids to wear school ties is (a) pointless - they will always push the rules and wear them as untidily as possible, (b) out-dated - no-one from investment bankers to boy scouts wears ties any more and (c) classist - if we teach kids that you must wear a tie to be respected we teach them to respect accountants and lawyers but not builders and shop-keepers. All went pretty smoothly. The guy I was debating with (Nick someone - I have no idea who he was) was a significant idiot...

Dressed like a Victorian dandy, cravat, silk hanky, cuff-links, leather briefcase and probably sock-suspenders but I tried not to look. In the waiting room the floor manager came through and said they were ready for us in the studio. I leaped up and headed for the door, he started making a cup of tea as though a national television show would be happy to wait for him. Oh yes we'll just fill in chatting about the weather until you prepare yourself with Pimms and a quick twenty minutes of birch twig self-flagellation!

Then - and this was really the amazing bit - while we were waiting for the cameras to come to us he asked me what I did for work and I said I was a stand-up comic to which he said "good grief, what is the world coming to?". Not sure what he thought WOULD be appropriate work for me: scullery maid? seamstress? lady in waiting?

Once the sound was rolling he said "Jesus Christ" loudly, resulting in the presenter having to apologise to viewers for the blasphemy. I'm no fan of the religious anti-blasphemy lobby but really before you go on air the only thing they tell you is "don't use bad language", how hard is it?

Anyway here's how prepared he was for the interview - half way through he admitted that "if we're going to use logic" I was right. And then kept talking as though listeners had tuned in to a news show to hear his illogical faeries-and-pixies-based theories!

Another quickie for this morning - an article from the BBC about the joys of sexism. Apparently men with "sexist" views about the role of women in the workplace earn more than men with more liberal views. Now I don't quite get their point here, they seem to be saying: Career path moving too slowly? Try misogyny for an instant boost!

Maybe the point(s) to be concluded are a little more subtle, maybe (1) people who are a**holes in one area are a**holes in other areas too. Maybe being an a**hole in general gets you ahead in business. (2) Maybe guys with old-fashioned beliefs also believe that it is their responsibility as men to be the bread-winner, to earn all the money to support the whole family. So maybe they are more incentivised to do that, even when it means sacrificing family time or indeed principles. (3) Maybe guys with sexist views about a woman's role are likely to marry women who want to stay home and look after kids, etc and maybe when your partner does that you need to get ahead in work in order to support the family on a single income rather than sharing that burden. Or (4) maybe it's because these cultural dinosaurs are more likely to be wearing a Hawke and Pilkington kerchief and cummerbund combo tied in a reverse triple Windsor knot with Queen Anne tassles unachievable without three years at finishing school and a very open-minded man-servant!!

Can someone remind me which century this is? I seem to have missed a meeting!

Schools and Relationships

The NSPCC, and I'm sure not going to make myself popular arguing with a group as respected as them, are saying that schools should teach more about relationships in sex education. This comes in response to data from Childline suggesting 50 children a day ring up saying they feel pressured to have sex. And in that light the NSPCC suggestion sounds wildly sane but I have to admit it actually made me flinch a little.

At the moment schools are only obliged to teach the facts of human reproduction. The first thing that frightens me is that if the syllabus is expanded out to include relationships, what is the risk that the facts of biology will be lost? I think children have a right to understand how their bodies work in factual scientific terms. Many especially faith schools are reluctant to teach these facts and given the chance to hide them discreetly behind a barrage of warnings about the unholy nature of any kind of relationship not fully approved by religious leaders, the message could be watered down beyond recognition.

It's also difficult to understand how children will react to hearing the facts of biology lined up next to what can be nothing more than advice about relationships. I think a clear line needs to be drawn between the facts of how the human body works and advice about how to deal with the stresses and strains of relationships.

And finally who exactly is going to set the relationship agenda? I'm sure religious leaders would love to. And so would some of the virginity cults that we seem to be importing from the US at the moment. The uproar from religious parents if their children were taught that anything other than chastity and fidelity was acceptable and enjoyable means that the education is always going to be skewed. Who is going to let kids know that promiscuity, safely practiced, can be a lot of fun? And we all know the fuss that ensues if you teach children that it's ok to be gay.

All that said, I'm not totally against raising in school the subject of dealing with pressure to have sex. I think children should be taught that they have human rights, and that one of those is the right to make their own decisions about sex (or this could be covered under the women's studies addition to the national curriculum that I've been talking about forever). But I'd like to see that taught separately from the biological facts of sex.

(Reposted from the F-Word, photo by Reading is Fun)

The Real McCain

Seems like John McCain has wrapped up the Republican nomination and I am starting to feel very uncomfortable with the number of people telling me that he's "better than Romney, Huckerbee* or Guiliani". That's like being the world's most sophisticated Telly-Tubby - there isn't a prize!! McCain, let us not forget, wants to take America to war with Iran, Pakistan and very probably any number of other countries. Brave News Films have some coverage. Here are a few reasons to be very afraid of him:

Foreign Policy:

• "Naive to exclude nukes; naive to exclude attacking Pakistan." (Aug 2007)

Abortion:

• Supports repealing Roe v. Wade. (May 2007)
• Voted YES on barring HHS grants to organizations that perform abortions. (Oct 2007)
• Voted YES on notifying parents of minors who get out-of-state abortions. (Jul 2006)
• Voted NO on $100M to reduce teen pregnancy by education & contraceptives. (Mar 2005)
• Voted YES on criminal penalty for harming unborn fetus during other crime. (Mar 2004)
• Voted YES on banning partial birth abortions except for maternal life. (Mar 2003)
• Voted YES on maintaining ban on Military Base Abortions. (Jun 2000)
• Voted YES on banning partial birth abortions. (Oct 1999)
• Voted YES on banning human cloning. (Feb 1998)

Civil rights:

• Voted NO on adding sexual orientation to definition of hate crimes. (Jun 2002)
• Voted NO on expanding hate crimes to include sexual orientation. (Jun 2000)
• Voted YES on prohibiting same-sex marriage. (Sep 1996)
• Voted NO on prohibiting job discrimination by sexual orientation. (Sep 1996)
• Voted YES on banning affirmative action hiring with federal funds. (Jul 1995)

Death Penalty

• More death penalty; stricter sentencing. (Jan 2000)
• Pro-death penalty; more prisons; increased penalties. (Jul 1998)
• Voted YES on limiting death penalty appeals. (Apr 1996)
• Voted YES on mandatory prison terms for crimes involving firearms. (May 1994)
• Voted YES on rejecting racial statistics in death penalty appeals. (May 1994)

Education:

• Voted NO on $52M for "21st century community learning centers". (Oct 2005)
• Voted NO on $5B for grants to local educational agencies. (Oct 2005)
• Voted NO on shifting $11B from corporate tax loopholes to education. (Mar 2005)
• Voted NO on spending $448B of tax cut on education & debt reduction. (Apr 2001)
• Voted YES on declaring memorial prayers and religious symbols OK at schools. (May 1999)
• Voted YES on $75M for abstinence education. (Jul 1996)
• Voted YES on requiring schools to allow voluntary prayer. (Jul 1994)

For a fuller version see On The Issues here. Also Johann Hari has a great piece about him.

*When I try to write Huckerbee on my computer my spell-checker tries to "correct" it to Bloodsucker.

Maths and More Maths

The Qualification and Curriculum Authority (who I had never heard of until today) have announced that they think Maths A-Level is too easy and a further qualification should be introduced to stretch brighter students.

Now firstly the solution to exams getting easier should surely be to make them harder and extend the curriculum, not introduce new extra exams.

Secondly there already is a qualification called Further Maths A-Level (I should know, I've got one). So it sounds like they might as well be saying "cutting a whole lawn with nail scissors takes ages, there should be a machine with rotating blades and a small engine that does this job...".

Finally I think the trouble really with maths is that everything else is being dumbed down. Maths is about thinking and modern school curricula leave so little room for thinking that by the time students get as far along their educational careers as the sort of maths that requires thinking, they've long since been taught not to think.

The way to prevent dumbing-down in education is to nationalise the exam boards. The very idea that different exam boards compete to supply exams in schools is ridiculous. Schools, under pressure themselves to beat their own previous exam pass rates inevitably shop around for the easiest exams. Certainly I was bored senseless at school, when I wasn't being bullied by the other students or vicitmised by the teachers.

Now the law in the UK says:

"The parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to receive efficient full-time education suitable-

(a) to his age, ability and aptitude, and

(b) to any special educational needs he may have, either by regular attendance at school or otherwise."

Certainly the schools I went to (which were supposed to be the better ones in the area) were not efficient, at all, we learnt the same things over and over again, long after most of us had memorised them. And if you consider me (a) being smart for my age, well ahead of the rest of the class most of the time, and (b) being an emotional disaster due to the abuse I was getting at home, you could definitely claim the places weren't suitable for my ability, aptitude and special needs. Which made me wonder if it might not be technically illegal to send your child to one of the particularly bad state schools in the UK...?

Homeschooling is certainly on the rise and has benefits for those who have the time and energy to do it. Sadly it also has benefits for those who wish to indoctrinate their kids with religious nonsense/fascist views/etc.

Shit Yourself Thin!

Am I the only person cynical to think that the authors of the press release behind this story were actually trying to increase sales of sugar-free gum? Apparently chewing too much of certain types of gum can cause weight loss, up to 20% of your bodymass. That would be more or less exactly the difference between, say, a normal woman and Kate Moss. So don't chew gum kids unless you want to look like a supermodel...

The truth is that sorbitol, found in many sugar-free products has a mild laxative effect. As long as you're not having very much you shouldn't notice any effects. When I was a kid though one day a lorry overturned on the motorway next to the school field (you can tell how old I am - my school had a field) and spilled hundreds of thousands of packets of Velamints (containing sorbitol) onto the road. Of course the kids hurdled the fence and collected pocketfuls of the "free sweets". The following day was the annual school trip to Colchester Castle, the capital of Roman Britain. The trip was spoiled somewhat by the fact that every child in the whole school had uncontrollable diarrhea and there was no toilet on the bus, unless you count the floor.

I'll end the description there in case anyone reading this is eating. Trust me enough sorbitol makes you lose weight, fast, in a way that you don't want to.

News Podcast 10th Jan

Here's todays podcast, extra material by David Mulholland.

Click here to get your own player.

Text for you poor souls without earphones or speakers:

Starting with the biggest news of the day

Amy Winehouse has had her hair cut. More on that tomorrow, and every day for the next six weeks.

A very bad day for UK politics today.

Firstly the news that Schools secretary Ed Balls made something of a gaffe in the Commons when asked to list the colours of the rainbow. He apparently responded red, yellow, pink and green, purple and orange and blue when the correct answer is Why the fuck are we discussing this in the house of commons? Shouldn’t we be talking about important stuff like how to maintain the health service and how to bring peace to the middle east?

Secondly today is the day the government is going to quietly push through the formal approval for a huge slew of new nuclear power stations. It’s strange this because we’re essentially being told it’s our fault for wanting carbon emissions reduced. It’s like when you tell your mum you don’t like cabbage, hoping you’ll get extra pudding instead, but she replaces your cabbage with sprouts. We wanted fields of majestic windmills preferably all round Noel Edmonds house. Slight diversion but at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales there’s an area with a “range of opinions” on wind power and lots of celebs saying how much the planet will benefit from harnessing natural energy from the wind and in the middle is a quote from Noel Edmonds saying he thinks windmills are ugly. Ah the irony, cos I think Noel Edmonds is ugly. But I digress. The new power stations will all be built, most likely by EDF energy, a company whose media relations officer, I discovered in Private Eye this week – is Gordon Brown’s brother. Conflict of interest? What? Where? Dunno what you’re talking about.

Food

Yesterday the daily mail had a lengthy opinion piece poo-pooing campaigners against brutal battery chicken farms. Today their front page is horrified at the state of a horse farm in Buckinghamshire. The main difference between the two is that the chickens are sold in UK supermarkets while the horses are exported to be eaten by dirty French people.

Health

The front page of today’s Independent says that British dental care is the most expensive in Europe. They say the average filling in Hungary or Poland costs only £5 including x-ray, drugs and overheads while in the UK it costs £117 including x-ray, drugs and the dentist’s travel over from Hungary or Poland.

Another report in the Independent says a cloned pig whose genes were altered to make it glow green in the dark has passed on the trait to it’s young. They say the development could lead to the breeding of pigs for human transplant organs. I’m not sure that if I needed a transplant I’d want a luminous green one. Wouldn’t it keep you awake at night. Maybe it’s a solution to reducing energy usage, giving people a natural flashlight in one finger. Most frightening would be if you had an accident and needed a face transplant and woke up with a luminous pig-face. If you were the sort of person who was at risk of losing their face (I know I can never find my passport and my oyster card, usually got the face to hand though) you could keep a couple of pigs with your face pre-grown on in the garden – would sure be a talking point at dinner parties.

Education

The way in which secondary schools are measured is changing. Until last year they measured the percentage of students getting five or more Cs at GCSE. However now they have been instructed that the five GCSEs must include English, maths and science. This is to prevent the existing problem of schools boosting their performance by offering GCSEs in finger painting, making macaroni necklaces and eating play-doh.

The requirement for a science GCSE has caught out some faith schools including St Augustine’s Catholic School in Trowbridge who have seen their pass rate drop from 84% to 3%. Apparently the drawing a flow diagram of how Richard Dawkins should be burnt at the stake isn’t enough for the Cambridge Exam Board any more.

Foreign Affairs

Civil servant Derek Pasquill has been cleared of leaking damaging government documents. The information he was accused of letting slip was that the Iraq war was fuelling Muslim extremism in the UK. Luckily “stating the bloody obvious” isn’t illegal in the UK. I’m amazed it needs saying but just in case anyone doesn’t get it: Bombing the crap out of people doesn’t make them like you.

Arts

Jane Austin has been given a makeover for the cover of a book about her life. Apparently the only confirmed existing portrait of her just doesn’t give enough sizzle to shift copies. Hopefully when the impact on sales becomes apparent they’ll insist that for sleeve photos and press conferences Martin Amis wears a burqa.

Women and Unicycles

I'd be angry if I wasn't laughing so hard at this pathetic BBC article. It claims that an "expert" - Sam Shuster (should that be shit-ster?) from (wait for it) the University of Norfolk reckons men are funnier than women because "humour comes from testosterone". Well so far already I'm smelling a bit of a rat because the whole issue of what is and isn't funny is very personal. Some people might like a testosterone-charged angry act. Others would rather watch the Mighty Boosh or Jimmy Carr - hardly likely to be taking Ricky Hatton on in the ring any time soon.

But now lets talk about his research method. Apparently he went round the country on a unicycle and noticed that men made more jeering comments at him. That doesn't sound to me like a good test of who has a sense of humour. It might be a good test of who has had too much to drink today already or who has the least self-respect, but I hardly think jeering a unicycle is the indicator of a superior sense of humour. His other claim is that there are more male comedians. True enough but there are more male plumbers too and that doesn't necessarily mean testosterone makes you more interested in human excrement.

And of course this idiot has been funded by money from us the taxpayers to do this "research". Now I'm all in favour of funding education and research. I think we should encourage scientists. However I would really rather my personal taxes were spent on those scientists curing cancer and AIDS and figuring out how to slow down global warming, not unicycling round the country seeing how many jeers he gets. I mean was there seriously a conversation with Shuster in a careers office somewhere along the lines of "Well Sam, the bad news is the circus won't take you - they've got too many unicyclists, they're only hiring tightrope walkers at the moment. But the good news is the University of Norfolk are interested..."

Even more pathetic the BBC, also funded by my money, through the license fees then goes and prints the story, as though it were a piece of important conclusive research. Which is how the headline-only reading public may well take it, especially those who already wanted an excuse to think that anyway...

I was on BBC Leeds earlier talking about this though and we did talk about some of the great comediennes - Jo Brand and Victoria Wood. Then when asked to name the best up-and-coming comediennes one of the other panellists said Sarah Millican (pictured) and ... me!

School Film Club Revisited

Since the courts have started ruling on what can and can't be shown in schools* - should someone start a case about this one? There's a lot more questionable science in it than Al Gore has ever come up with, in fact there's pretty much exclusively questionable science in it.

*Brag points for the Cru-blog: some super right-wing idiot site reacted to my post linked above with a feature on me entitled "Portrait of a Complete Moron". They think I have been "brainwashed by Al Gore". Guess the Nobel Prize committee were too then? They must all be "complete morons" too. Mmmm.

Doing Everything "Right"

This is just horrific reading, from Feministing. That women often do not report immediately is often held up as one of the many excuses for the pathetic rape prosecution and conviction rates. It reduces the chances of getting DNA evidence as well as blood samples if a date-rape drug is suspected to be involved and among ill-informed rape deniers, reduces the credibility of the victim. So when a woman goes straight to hospital and reports the case to the police too, to ensure DNA evidence is taken - what do they do? Refuse to help her. Three times.

This Would Be Funny If...

...it wasn't so frightening. Some idiot called Stewart Dimmock has decided schools can't show An Inconvenient Truth to kids because it doesn't present "both sides of the argument". What argument? Anybody with half a brain can see human activity is heating the planet up. The humour though is in this BBC story on the subject, titled "Gore Climate Film's 'Nine Errors'". Scroll down to the bottom and there's a link to another story "Flood Legacy: the devastating effects of this summer's flooding"

The Guerrilla News Network has done the leg-work on this one. What I can't seem to find out though are which of the mega-polluters are paying for his campaign. Anyone got any idea? Both funding groups - Scientific Alliance and Straight Teaching say they accept corporate donations but they don't list major donors. I'd like to know who exactly is paying to set the agenda our kids are taught, and I bet we'd be horrified if we knew.

Speaking of Al Gore though I really hope he gets the Nobel Prize and then decides he will run for US president after all. I suspect the world may genuinely end quite soon if he doesn't...