PM Glass Box for Monday
Would you like to tell this evening's Editor, Rupert Allman, what you thought of today's edition of PM? He'll look at your views after we've finished our 6pm meeting.
All the best,
sequin
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Carolyn and Rupert:
Thanks for offering an great overview of the programme....
=Dennis Junior=
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This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
1 DJ
You mean from the top of the tree?
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I hope you'll be cautious about mentioning leaving comments on the blog today Sequin! It's been just a little chaotic.
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listened to the item on faith schools, (on the lighter side) instead of a new law to 'punish' parents who lie to get their kids into the given school, can't they simply be punished as 'heretics' and, perhaps, burnt on the stake? after all, Abraham's god is pretty vengeful.
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Regarding Alan Johnson comments about Professor David Nutt-it sounds a strange concept to be sacked or dismissed from a post that he had volunteered to fill. Sounds like more matcho language from this Government
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I was surprised to learn that that twenty times more people die from consuming alcohol than from taking drugs.
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How horrifying were those vox pops from Glasgow? "I was brought up to vote Labour."
A total absence of thought and responsibility which does the fabled quality of Scottish education no favours at all. It makes you wonder what a party would have to do to convince some voters to change their habits.
Usually it's Hugh's reports from the Middle East that make me despair of the human race (or have me cheering for the sheer Grace shown by some of the people he talks to) but that piece makes me think we get exactly the government we deserve...
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But supporting drugs or restricting alcohol can end political careers.
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When RBS went under their choice of non bankers for their Board of Directors, I think their chair was ex-Asda and now runs Boots, came under criticism. Yet now the government wants to put these banks within non-banking companies like Asda or Tesco?
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In pulling out Dr Abdullah doesn't loose an election nobody expects him to have won and weakens his opponent who looses the credibility of winning an election everybody expected him to win.
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This former chair of this advisory committee was a volunteer. It's a committee of expects who work outside of government who continue to work outside of government and so need to interact with others. Scientists publish what they think and encourage others to challenge them, they teach what they believe to be true, they answer questions. If this professor's views were wrong he should have said what he believes or published these views. Then others should have pointed out where he was wrong, they should have debated and, if he was wrong, that is how he would have learned that. That is how science works. Then he would have been better placed to advise the government.
Or, maybe, he's right and the government or Gordon Brown wanted to shut him up rather than admit something they could not accept for political reasons.
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Good programme. Sequin, well done you for not suggesting the blog tonight!
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@7 newlach said he's surprised 20x more people die from alcohol that taking drugs. What may surprise him even more is that approximately NONE of those drug related deaths result from consuming cannabis and only a very few from consuming ecstacy.
Even those deaths that do arise from ecstasy are most likely not actually from the ecstasy itself but from impurities in it. Indeed, it is highly probable that comparatively few of all drugs-related deaths actually arise innately from effects of the drug, but from circumstances arising from and surrounding the fact that those drugs are illegal.
By making drugs illegal the government effectively gives up any control of them. You cannot apply quality control legislation and procedures to an illegal substances. Neither can you effectively control who has access to them. IMO all that is achieved by the present failing prohibition of drugs is to provide an amazingly lucrative business opportunity to the criminal fraternity.
However that is not the issue between Professor Nutt and Alan Johnston. The nub of the issue is about the classification of cannabis and ecstacy.
The Act divides drugs into three classes depending on the degree of harm attributable to each drug. The drugs which are deemed most harmful are in class A and those deemed least harmful are in class C. Since this system of classification is defined by the act I do not understand how it is possible for the government to decide on the relative harm caused by different drugs. Surely that is an essentially scientific question and it is the responsibility of the legislators to ensure that the classification is scientifically accurate.
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Perhaps if we knew how much criminalising it costs, and how much could be raised by taxing its legal sale, the debate might change. Given that we don't have money to throw around at the moment.
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The first woman to work as a beefeater claims to have been bullied out of her job. It's hardly unusual in the history of male-dominated workforces. So, who would you expect PM to invite to comment on the story? Perhaps an academic with relevant expertise? or a woman who has fought and won a similar case? Ah, no. Let's find a man who once worked with the beefeaters, got told off by one of them when he made a mistake but it was all forgiven a couple of days later, and who thinks they are 'nice chaps' although it might be a good idea to get 'a couple' more women in to 'break up the pack'... I couldn't believe my ears. It's as if the last 30 years hadn't happened. Shame on you for turning a serious story about harassment in the workplace into a joke.
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When costing criminalisation it is necessary to work out several sets of costs, eg: the costs of enforcement (police, lawyers, imprisonment etc), and the costs arising from consequential crime (thefts by addicts to finance their habit), and costs arising from health consequences arising from bad quality, impurities etc.
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Nils mentions RBS getting rid of some investment arms.
The idea behind this is supported by Mervyn King. It seems axiomatic to current 'right on' thinking about the credit crunch that these investment arms should not be able to get bailed out when in trouble.
Indeed, so we are told, it was a regretable matter, bailing them out in the first place - a fine case of creating moral hazard.
I find this view odd.
The many sat back and thrilled to the high rates of return on these banks' savings accounts, to the speculative bubbles their 'money creation' caused in stocks and shares (their pensions and insurance payouts), in property (the equity it created that apparently could be realised and spent with impunity), the inflated salaries for top dogs in every large public company (driven by financial sector'compensation'), the fostering of the 'no work', touch screen economy.
Never had so much been trousered by so many through the silence of so few.
The silent ones? Why, the politicians, all conniving in that 'money for nothing' culture, and, of course, Mervyn, who while worrying about share and house prices, said not one dickie bird about the inflation and multiplication of paper assets.
It was simple. The banks bought up promises to pay, inflated their value and lent against them n-fold, often to each other, on the grounds that they were liquid assets.
There was not a single word from the GOVERNOR of the BANK of ENGLAND about the usurption of its role here, as creator of money and controller of credit by these upstart private sector outfits, with grandiose titles, RBS etc.
Why? Because the consequent patterns of wealth and income distribution suited New Labour Britain just fine.
Now it's all collapsed,Mervyn's criticisms, as Peston says, seem 'exquisitely well timed'. Indeed yes, exquisitely well timed for Mervyn to give the impression that none of this happened on his watch (and that he was not first in line asking for secret powers to help banks with investment portfoilo problems using fly-by-night funding, to keep banks' hole-in-the-wall high street punters happy)
But then on 275 thousand a year whilst not saying anything during the speculative bubbles, this man knows any full analysis which would have to start and end with notions of horizontal and vertical equality. HGe researched it himself in his young day. Now, it can't be hoped for from him, these days, nor of course from the Gordon or the Tories, whose idea of a fresh start seems to be, at best, to return to the social divisions of Warmington on Sea and Upstairs Downstairs, respectively.
There does seem a real prospect that bit by bit this government will dismantle casino banking. I fail to see why those who said nothing about its excesses at the time, should not fall with it now.
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I do like the musical interlude halfway through the PM programme.
It reminds me of the Goon Show.
Michael Jennings is determined to re-popularise the phono-fiddle, a noble cause, good luck Mike, you might need it.
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#19 The morning news show used to start with a musical interlude, a mix of national tunes, which I thought was great but a new controller of Radio 4 wanted to make his mark and got rid of it.
Perhaps we could bring that piece of music into the beginning of the PM show.
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It is only natural that any caring parent wants the best for their child, but is this the right way to run our education system. How do we define "best". If we push our children too hard what damage will it do to their social and mental wellbeing. we should be careful to ensure that our choices are the best ones for each individual child, not best for the parental status or some mis conceived idea from a misleading league table. In a Utopian system each child would be assessed to determine the best teaching methods to give the child the best chance of success. Limited resources will make this utopia impossible to achieve but parents who really care should spend time trying to understand what their child needs to succeed in life.
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I,m intrigued as to why the latest government advisor was sacked. Suppose he got off lightly for talking to the press. Remember what happened to the chap who worked for unscom.
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Parents buying places for their children in school whatever next. I previously worked in Nottingham and in the Bulwell area they had one of the highest achieving primary schools in the country. Bulewll was also one of the most deprived areas in the UK. Getting a place there was very difficult. Once children reached 11 they could transfer to the Catholic High School which offered quality education. I didn't see many parents renting properties in the Bulwell area so their childen could win a place at the school. The increased costs of insuring your house and car outweighed the financial benefits.
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Harassment in the Tower of London was the last place I expected to see where bullying took place. But then again, the beefeaters are all ex forces of long standing service where there has always been a culture of making derogatory comments about women through the armed services. It's a great pity that what appeared to be a very priviledged post army position for exceptional service for your country has turned into another nightmare for women in the work place. Let's hope that once the old guard have retired they'll be replaced by candidates who not only have an outstanding service record but will have some understanding of equal opportunities and understand the important role that women play in society.
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Carolyn just sent this through ..... Hello,
We are on drugs this evening.
The row that isn't going away and rumours that the Home Secretary Alan Johnson faces more resignations from the government's drugs advisory body over his decision to force out its Chairman, Professor David Nutt. We'll bring you a statement on this from the House of Commons - expected this afternoon. And find out what the drugs situation is like in Mr Johnson's own Hull West and Hessle constituency.
We are also going to school.
Our other big topic tonight - school places and the tactics some parents use, including lying and cheating, to get their child into a better school. The schools adjudicator in England has published a report calling for tougher measures to punish such parents. It does raise an interesting question though, would you lie or have you ever lied to get a better school place for your child? You can tell us can't you??
And we're off to the Tower.
We hope to find out what's going on at the Tower of London. Two Beefeaters have been suspended over allegations that they bullied a female colleague, Moira Cameron. She was the first woman to join the Beefeaters since they were formed more than 500 years ago.
Otherwise: We'll reflect on the decision not to go ahead with a second round of elections in Afghanistan and look ahead to the forthcoming by-election in Glasgow North East.
Lots more to come at 5pm
Carolyn
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"However [..] the issue between Professor Nutt and Alan Johnston [..] is about the classification of cannabis and ecstacy."
You think? Sounded to me like the nub - stripped of the politician's language, was "He's being nasty to me, it's not fair and I don't want to play with him anymore!". Mr Nutt disagrees with Mr Johnston; Mr Nutt has the knowledge and ability to explain the basis of his opinion; Mr Johnston either does not or is too ashamed of the bases of his that he dare not risk it. So Mr Johnston stamps his little foot. In Transactional terms, I'd say Mr Nutt was operating as Adult and Mr Johnston is trying to sound like Parent whilst responding to a large extent as Child.
Mr Nutt did point out that he understood the need for politicians to make moral judgements; his objection was to them calling them scientific judgements. The legalisation debate is a hugely complex one; the assessment of the risk of harm is relatively straightforward and Mr Nutt has a better grasp of it than Mr Johnston.
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Mmmm, just got mine too, Jonnie - I thought the newsletter might have been swallowed up in the blog blackhole, then i remembered I hadn't had one on Friday either, and things were still normal then. Well,*normal* perhaps.
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18
Warminster.
The war was of course being FOUGHT heroically, hence their absence from the programme, by young men who are today are condemned as part of the 'underclass'.
The next election seemed, then, too, a lifetime away.
Perhaps it would sweep away those who were clearly way past their sell-out-by date, take further the wartime experience of rapid and successful social mobility and make slump and mass unemployment a thing of the past.
Time to warm up the kazoos and the phono-fiddle for
'Who do you think you are kidding, all you MPs?'?
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So it's Good Guys Dr Nutt and all scientists against the government and all the Baddies? As someone with a smattering of knowledge about statistics I mistrust Dr Nutt's statements as reported. In saying nicotine and alcohol are worse than cannabis/skunk is he using the same time-span? Lung cancer and heart disease take decades to have their effect and the user has plenty of opportunity to mend his ways. A young teenager on skunk can become psychotic after only one year, and the damage is far less reversible. Can anyone really compare whether it's worse to spend a lifetime being a schizophrenic or to die of lung cancer in late middle age? Or when Dr Nutt compares deaths from horse riding with deaths from taking ecstasy does he really know how many people in this country ride and what percentage of them suffer fatal accidents? I think he is just quoting the numbers of deaths overall, without recognising that far more people ride than take ecstasy. My impression is that he tried to "sex up" some rather biased stats in order to make a bit of a splash. Now he has more time on his hand he should visit some of our overcrowded psychiatric wards and listen to the victims of these "recreational" drugs.
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Elizabeth (29):
Interesting. So what are the numbers nationally and regionally for people who take ecstasy and people who ride horses?
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elizabeth taylor @ 29
Yes, you're probably right - the scientist probably made it all up, and the politician is the person we should trust to know what's what.
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Ecstasy: 500,000 users, 30 deaths a year. Acute harm: 1/10000 episodes.
Horse-riding: 10 deaths and more than 100 road traffic accidents (some fatal) a year. Acute harm: 1/350 episodes.
I don't know how many people ride.
You can, of course, read the original article in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
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14. idontcareanymore - right up to a point, but all ecstasy related deaths are actually from water poisoning, because users get hot dancing, and drink in excess, the body becomes overloaded with water with the inevitable result.
29. elizabeth taylor - do you have stats to prove your assertion more people ride horses than take ecstasy? I doubt very much you are correct, any more than the silly allegation that 'A young teenager on skunk can become psychotic after only one year, and the damage is far less reversible' there is no proof cannabis causes psychosis, there is far more likelihood that the few who are nascent scizophrenics will try cannabis as a means of evening out their barely perceived mental turmoil, and then the parents, fed scare stories for years, panic and blame the cannabis. Since it has been used by humans for millions of years without this danger becoming apparent in any other society but our own drugs obssessed one, I doubt there is any connection whatsoever. There is certainly no SCIENTIFIC link. Deaths from alcohol are very clearly mapped, we know it kills and sometimes immediately, sometimes as a rtesult of driving or violence.
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DoctorDolots (14)- "...but all ecstasy related deaths are actually from water poisoning...".
Utter twaddle. If you'd said 'some' rather than 'all' it wouldn't have sounded so silly.
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That last should have been DoctorDolots (33). But it's still twaddle.
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PF - apparently 83% of all twaddle comes from DoctorDolots ... or was it 38%?
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Frannkly - For someone with the name of DoctorDolots, he doesn't 'do a lot' of research before he broadcasts total nonsense. When someone writes such obvious twaddle the inclination is to dismiss every opinion that they profess.
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Am I alone in considering Carolyn Quinn's questions about the baby at the centre of the current court case not only insensitive, but also trite; the sort of information trying to be extracted more in line with the Sun or Star newspapers?
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No DoctorDolots (33)I don't have the stats, but then who does? Sid(38) talks of 1 in 350 horse-riding "episodes" but who can explain to me what such an "episode" is? Would it include a toddler trotting around on a Shetland led by its mother, or ladies of a certain age enjoying a quiet hack? Does someone employ jobseekers to hide in bushes and enunerate these activities? Or do they simply count the number of horses and assume each one is ridden x amount of times per week? Are other statisticians similarly employed to flatten themselves against the walls in raves to count the number of ecstasy "episodes", or do they simply hand out a questionnaire to the party-goers?
I'm sorry that you oppose my "silly allegation" to your grown-up idea of "nascent schizophrenia". How can you tell that a condition is present or will inevitably appear if it is well and truly nascent? Could you or any doctor go round spotting the nascent schizophrenics BEFORE they took the cannabis? If not isn't it more a matter of faith than anything based on evidence? Are you asserting that no mental breakdowns are ever caused by cannabis? I would like to point out that in my own case I was not "fed scare stories for years" nor in the dire straits of the time could I allow myself the luxury of panicking. Until it happened to my son I had no idea that cannabis was in any way linked to psychosis. It was the university psychiatrist who emphasised that my son should never again take the drug. In addition he said psychotic episodes would return for up to 6 months as the cannabis cleared from his system. My son gradually stabilised until unfortunately he felt confident enough to have another go with the cannabis. The result was immediate and plunged him straight up the deep end again. Now many years later he is a wiser but much sadder person, supports himslf, takes medication which could incur diabetes as a side-effect, and is sure he would never again risk his sanity so lightly. What I would like to know is, would Dr Nutt count my son's experience in his tally or would he say that because he never registered sick he did not suffer permanent damage? How many other cases might have been left out? Could Dr Nutt or his researchers be said to have "nascent" bias? Can we really be sure that he is comparing like with like? To come up with numbers from different sample sizes is a mistake so basic that it appears in Key Stage 2 Maths. So far as I know he has not collected hundreds of clean volunteers, separated them into equally sized groups and offered each group the means of dying (over a stated period of time) from either cannabis, ecstasy, alcohol, nicotine, horse-riding or class A drugs. He should not therefore claim all the kudos of being a scientist without qualifying his remarks and methods in great detail.
An interesting footnote to your comments is that you include car accidents under deaths caused by alcohol, but if a rider was killed by a drunken driver and the drunk survived, where would the statistic go? If a recovering addict whose "nascent" paranoid schizophrnia had been triggered by heavy cannabis smoking a few weeks previously then attacked a nurse in hospital, where would that statistic go? Do we know what percentage of cannabis users cause road accidents? Did Dr Nutt know? Or did he just pretend to know?
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Listen again to Monday's World at One about halfway through. After 2 disgruntled defenders of Dr Nutt comes Prof Robin Murray from the Institute of Psychiatry who says "The Advisory Council has never covered itself in glory regarding canabis... 20% of serious schizophrenics can be attributed to heavy use of canabis ... 90% of first episode psychoses are canabis smokers.." He goes on to point out how the Council had to admit it was wrong about canabis in 2002, 2005 and 2007. I find his measured language has a grater ring of truth than do Dr Nutt's more colourful statements
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Ah, the PM Blogg. Will there be anything on dangerous dogs? It's a pet subject of mine.
#;+)
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