Rescuing Democracy in the United Kingdom from our current Elected Dictatorship
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Spin,
not face-to-face confrontations with the voters, is the Government's
chosen method of communication. Ordinary people are dangerous. Ordinary
people might ask a question which throws a politician 'off message';
the Cabinet member might reveal himself or herself to be a human being
like us, and not a programmed android. Worse still, he or she might
tell the truth.
Ann Leslie - Daily Mail, September 16, 2004
Blair wants to leave his
mark on history - looks more like a stain to me.
Peter Thorndyke, Diss,
Norfolk - Daily Mail, May 23, 2005
I know I'm me - why do I
need an ID card?
"Sorry, officers, I
don't have an ID card. I never applied for one. It seemed a bit steep
at 300 quid. I do have my free passport, my driving licence and my
London freedom travel pass, each with my photograph. I have my NHS
medical card, with its lengthy number, given me at birth, my RAF
service book with my Armed Forces number, and a chit authorising me to
wear a few gongs -including a General Service Medal with Malaya bar,
for fighting communist terrorists on behalf of my country, or so they
told me.
"I've also got various credit
cards and store cards, all with my signature on the back, generally
good for buying the everyday requrements for life as well as the odd
luxury. If you decide to arrest me, I suppose I'll have to be
photographed and given another number, besides my PINs.
"I'm afraid I haven't got a
pension book; it was taken away."
"By thieves, sir?"
"No ... well, not exactly. By the
Government. By the way, may I see your warrant cards please, gentlemen?"
Oh dear, they've disappeared. E.
Harry Gumer, Romford, ESSEX - Daily Mail, June 1, 2005
NO means NO
When does NO mean MAYBE?
When it's not the answer the EU wants. With the courageous French
NON resounding in their ears, shabby, undemocratic self-interested
leaders of Europe propose ignoring the part of their precious
constitution that requires ratification by all members and
continuing without one of the biggest founder members to
prevent derailing the gravy train.
As in Ireland,
they refuse to accept any NO votes, ignoring the will of the people,
and re-stage votes until they can engineer the 'correct' answer. Sadly,
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw dances to their tune like a puppet on a
string. With tactics such as these, how can anyone really believe the
EU has our interests at heart. Letter from Steve Penny, Kingsnorth, Kent - Daily
Mail, June1, 2005
Surely
the French result makes the £1million the EU recently spent on a
treaty signing ceremony seem a trifle premature and extravagant. Letter from Keith Wiseman, Bury, Lancs. - Daily Mail,
June1, 2005
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Britain has
traditionally been one of the biggest net contributors to the EU
because we do not get as much money back from Brussels in farm and
regional subsidies as our rivals.
According to
Treasury figures, between 1995-2002, Britain's average contribution
taking the rebate into account, was £2.6billion, or £43.55
per head of population.
The French -
the biggest recipient of farm subsidies - contributed £1billion a
year or £16.08 per head of their population.
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Tony
Blair should know that respect comes by example - from the
top. If a country's leader has no respect for the rule of
international law and no respect for the truth, how can
he expect anyone to have respect. Letter
from P.J.Atkinson, Ashford, Kent - Daily Mail, January 12,
2006
The
Chancellor's single greatest act of vandalism in almost
nine years in office has been his wanton destruction of
Britain's private retirement industry. By slapping a massive
tax on pension funds, now worth
£7.3billion a year, he has helped to turn
the best private retirement industry in Europe into a basket-case
in perpetual crisis. Together with the adoption of European
accounting rules - which make it much riskier to operate
a company pension scheme - hundreds of firms have shut their
final salary plans to new employees and slashed benefits
to existing staff. From
Allister Heath: "I've seen the future and its grey"
in THE SPECTATOR - April 15, 2006
Nine
years ago the British people were sold a fantasy of clean
and competent government of principle and honesty. Its shiny
wrappings stripped away, the product now reveals its true
nature: Personal greed, arrogance, incompetence, shamelessness,
rash warmongering and an inability to accept - as is clear
to almost everyone else - that it is time to go. Editorial
- The Mail on Sunday, May 28, 2006
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June
29, 2006 (1146 days since war ended)
Death
Toll: 2529 US - 113 UK - >60,000? civilians - 25 media
July
8, 2006 (1155 days since war ended)
Death
Toll: 2543 US - 113 UK - >60,000? civilians - 25 media
Chernobyl's
'nuclear nightmares'
By
Nick Davidson - Producer, Horizon, BBC NEWS - July 13, 2006
On
26 April 1986, reactor number four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power
Plant blew up. Forty-eight hours later the entire area was evacuated.
Over the following months there were stories of mass graves and
dire warnings of thousands of deaths from radiation exposure.
Yet
in a BBC Horizon report to be screened on Thursday, a number of
scientists argue that 20 years after the accident there is no
credible scientific evidence that any of these predications are
coming true.
The
anniversary of the world's worst nuclear accident in April saw
the publication of a number of reports that examined the potential
death toll resulting from exposure to radiation from Chernobyl.
Environmental group Greenpeace said the figure would be near 100,000.
Another, Torch (The Other Report on Chernobyl), predicted an extra
30,000-60,000 cancer deaths across Europe.
But
according to figures from the Chernobyl Forum, an international
organisation of scientific bodies including a number of UN agencies,
deaths directly attributable to radiation from Chernobyl currently
stand at 56 - less than the weekly death toll on Britain's roads.
"When
people hear of radiation they think of the atomic bomb and they
think of thousands of deaths, and they think the Chernobyl reactor
accident was equivalent to the atomic bombing in Japan which is
absolutely untrue," says Dr Mike Repacholi, a radiation scientist
working at the World Health Organization (WHO).
"We're
not going to get an epidemic of leukaemia," Dr Repacholi
tells Horizon, "and we don't expect an epidemic of solid
cancers either." So why have the predictions varied so wildly?
Outdated
models
Scientists
involved in the Forum expect the death toll to rise but not far.
CHERNOBYL
- WHAT HAPPENED?
Scientific
as well as public attitudes to radiation are still dominated by
the devastating effects of the atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese
cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US more than half-a-century
ago. At
least 200,000 people died almost immediately from the blast, and
thousands more were exposed to higher levels of radiation than
anybody had ever been exposed to before. The survivors of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki became the most intensely studied people in the world.
"The
detonation of the A-bomb," explains Professor Antone L Brooks
of Washington State University, US, "was the first time that
scientists had an opportunity really to look and to see the health
effects of radiation; how much radiation was required to produce
how much cancer."
In
1958, using data largely drawn from these bomb studies, scientists
came up with an answer. It was called the Linear No Threshold
(LNT) model and suggested all radiation, no matter how small,
was dangerous.
It became the internationally recognised basis for assessing radiation
risk.
Yet
there has always been a problem with it. The data from Hiroshima
and Nagasaki were for very high levels of radiation exposure,
often in the range of thousands of millisieverts. There were no
significant data for lower exposures, particularly below 200 millisieverts.
"The
model was based on high doses and we just didn't know what was
going on at lower doses of between one and 200 millisieverts,"
says Dr Repacholi. Scientists
simply guessed that if high-level radiation was dangerous then
lower levels would also be hazardous. They made "an assumption",
observes Dr Repacholi.
Chernobyl,
where most people received radiation doses below 200 millisieverts,
has been the first large-scale opportunity to test whether this
assumption is true. The evidence from the Chernobyl Forum suggests
it is not.
"Low
doses of radiation are a [very] poor carcinogen," says Professor
Brooks, who has spent 30 years studying the link between radiation
and cancer.
If you talk to anybody and you say the word radiation, immediately
you get a fear response. That fear response has caused people
to do things that are scientifically unfounded."
Beneficial
effects
Other
studies have come to even more startling conclusions. Professor
Ron Chesser, of Texas Tech University, US, has spent 10 years
studying animals living within the 30km exclusion zone surrounding
Chernobyl. He
has found that, far from the effects of low-level radiation being
carcinogenic, it appears to boost those genes that protect us
against cancer.
"One
of the thoughts that comes out of this is that prior exposure
to low levels of radiation actually may have a beneficial effect,"
Professor Chesser says.
Today,
although most radiation scientists are reluctant to sign up to
radiation hormesis, as this phenomenon is known, there is a growing
body of opinion that it is time to rethink the LNT model and with
it our attitude to radiation exposure below about 200 millisieverts.
However, a number of radiological protection scientists still
advocate the use of the LNT model.
In
April, the WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)
published a report that used the latest LNT-based radiation risk
projection models to update the estimated cancer deaths from Chernobyl.
It concluded that about 16,000 people across Europe could die
as a result of the accident.
Dr
Peter Boyle, director of the IARC, put the row over the figures
into perspective: "Tobacco smoking will cause several thousand
times more cancers in the same population."
Chernobyl
was about as bad as a power station accident gets - a complete
melt down of the reactor core - yet the lessons of the accident
suggest that among the myriad of issues surrounding nuclear power,
the threat to human health posed by radiation has been overstated.
©
BBC MMVI
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