Vladd’s view of the World

By Robert Verkaik, law editor
Tuesday, 21 October 2008

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/big-brother-database-threatens-to-break-the-back-of-freedom-967673.html

Government plans to build a giant database holding information about every phone call, email and internet visit were last night dealt a major blow after the man in charge of prosecuting terrorism in England and Wales warned of the dangers posed by a "Big Brother" security state.

Sir Ken Macdonald, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), told ministers not to "break the back of freedom" by creating irreversible powers that could be misused to spy on individual citizens and so threaten Britain’s hard-won democracy.

Sir Ken’s intervention in the debate over the controversial new database is the latest and most serious among a growing number of senior public figures from across the political spectrum who have raised concerns about the potential misuse of information collected in the name of national security.

Last week, Lord Carlile of Berriew QC, the Government’s independent reviewer of terrorism laws, described the "raw idea" for handing over millions of pieces of private information to the state as "awful".

Under the proposal, internet service providers and telecoms companies would surrender phone and internet records to the Home Office, which would store them for at least 12 months so that police and security services could access them.

But Sir Ken, giving the Crown Prosecution Service lecture in London, said: "We need to take very great care not to fall into a way of life in which freedom’s back is broken by the relentless pressure of a security state.

"Technology gives the state enormous powers of access to knowledge and information about each of us, and the ability to collect and store it at will. Of course, modern technology is of critical importance to the struggle against serious crime. Used wisely, it can protect us."

But he added that "we need to understand that it is in the nature of state power that decisions taken in the next few months and years about how the state may use these powers, and to what extent, are likely to be irreversible. They will be with us forever. And they, in turn, will be built upon. So we should take very great care to imagine the world we are creating before we build it. We might end up living with something we can’t bear".

Sir Ken, who steps down as DPP next month, also described how in 2004 he had resisted pressure from Tony Blair to make it easier to prosecute terrorism suspects by lowering the standard of proof in such cases.

He said: "In all the debates that have raged back and forth, Britain has been absolutely right to hold fast to this course. We would do well not to insult ourselves and all of our institutions and our processes of law in the face of these medieval delusions. As I say, the response to terror is multi-layered. But it should not include surrender."

His concerns are shared by the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, who has said that the creation of the database is a "step too far" for the British way of life. Liberty, the human rights group, has also called for a halt to the plans. Gareth Crossman, the policy director at Liberty, said: "There are huge dangers in the central collection of vast amounts of intimate information about everyone. The bigger the data haul, the greater the temptation to treat innocent habits as suspicious behaviour."

Tuesday, 21 October 2008

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/ken-macdonald-we-must-not-degrade-our-liberties-in-the-name-of-defending-them-967706.html

We need to take very great care not to fall into a way of life in which freedom’s back is broken by the relentless pressure of a security state.

We need to understand that it is in the nature of state power that decisions taken in the next few months and years about how the state may use these powers, and to what extent, are likely to be irreversible. They will be with us forever. And they in turn will be built upon. We should imagine the world we are creating before we build it. We might end up living with something we can’t bear.

Of course our country faces very significant risks. And I have enormous admiration for all those who work with such energy and verve to combat those risks. The prosecutors in my Counter Terrorism Division have similarly distinguished themselves. Their efforts have been absolutely grounded in due process and pursued with full respect for our historical norms and for our liberal constitution.

This has worked. Our conviction rate is in excess of 90 per cent – unmatched in the fair trial world. We have a guilty plea rate of over 40 per cent. So we have been absolutely right to resist special courts, vetted judges and all the other paraphernalia of paranoia.

Of course, you can have the Guantanamo model. You can have the model which says that we cannot afford to give people rights, that rights are too expensive because of the nature of the threats. Or you can say, that our rights are priceless. That the best way to face down those threats is to strengthen our institutions, not degrade them.

It is difficult to see who will maintain a cool head if governments do not. Or who will protect our constitution if governments unwittingly disarm it.

The response to terror is, of course, multi-layered. It has to be that way. But on the streets of our country, violent lawbreaking is dealt with as crime. It is confronted in accordance with our constitution.

In all the debates, Britain has been absolutely right to hold fast to this course. We would do well not to insult ourselves and our processes of law in the face of these medieval delusions.

As I say, the response to terror is multi-layered. But it should not include surrender.

Sir Ken Macdonald QC, Director of Public Prosecutions, was giving the inaugural CPS lecture last night

From The Sunday Times
October 19, 2008

David Leppard

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article4969312.ece

Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.

Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society.

A compulsory national register for the owners of all 72m mobile phones in Britain would be part of a much bigger database to combat terrorism and crime. Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies, insiders say.

The move is targeted at monitoring the owners of Britain’s estimated 40m prepaid mobile phones. They can be purchased with cash by customers who do not wish to give their names, addresses or credit card details.

The pay-as-you-go phones are popular with criminals and terrorists because their anonymity shields their activities from the authorities. But they are also used by thousands of law-abiding citizens who wish to communicate in private.

The move aims to close a loophole in plans being drawn up by GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham, to create a huge database to monitor and store the internet browsing habits, e-mail and telephone records of everyone in Britain.

The “Big Brother” database would have limited value to police and MI5 if it did not store details of the ownership of more than half the mobile phones in the country.

Contingency planning for such a move is already thought to be under way at Vodafone, where 72% of its 18.5m UK customers use pay-as-you-go.

The office of Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, said it anticipated that a compulsory mobile phone register would be unveiled as part of a law which ministers would announce next year.

“With regards to the database that would contain details of all mobile users, including pay-as-you-go, we would expect that this information would be included in the database proposed in the draft Communications Data Bill,” a spokeswoman said.

Simon Davies, of Privacy International, said he understood that several mobile phone firms had discussed the proposed database in talks with government officials.

As The Sunday Times revealed earlier this month, GCHQ has already been provided with up to £1 billion to work on the pilot stage of the Big Brother database, which will see thousands of “black boxes” installed on communications lines provided by Vodafone and BT as part of a pilot interception programme.

The proposals have sparked a fierce backlash inside Whitehall. Senior officials in the Home Office have privately warned that the database scheme is impractical, disproportionate and potentially unlawful. The revolt last week forced Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, to delay announcing plans for the database until next year.

By PAUL WACHTER

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12tipping-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
Published: October 9, 2008

ONE DAY IN November 2006, Jay Porter, the owner of a small restaurant in San Diego called the Linkery, scheduled a staff meeting. Less than two years old, the casual farm-to-table restaurant in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of North Park had already won praise from national magazines. Nonetheless, Porter was troubled. The staff was squabbling, mainly over money: waiters were angling for better shifts and tables, and the kitchen workers didn’t feel they were getting a fair share of the profits. The bickering was typical of the restaurant business, but Porter, who is 38, had no previous industry experience. He had been a computer consultant, one who made good money but derived few other satisfactions from his job.

When he opened the Linkery, Porter said, he hoped his employees would become as emotionally invested in the venture as he was, sharing a sense of purpose and joy in their work. Now that vision seemed hopelessly naïve. “Here I was, winging it as an owner, running into these frustrations, which all boiled down to money,” Porter told me this summer. “I felt there had to be a better way.” After much thought, Porter arrived at a possible solution, which he presented to his staff on that November afternoon. “How do you feel about eliminating tipping?” he asked them.

Porter’s question strikes at the very heart of the American dining experience. Each year, according to the economist Ofer Azar, diners hand over some $42 billion in tips at the nation’s full-service restaurants, which employ 2.6 million waiters, most of whom rely on tips for the bulk of their incomes. While anxieties surrounding tipping abound — Is 15 percent enough? 20? And who is this “captain” on the bill? — studies show that Americans overwhelmingly prefer this discretionary system to a set service charge, which is common in Europe and many other parts of the world. Indeed, at the few restaurants in this country that have adopted a fixed gratuity, diners often leave additional tips.

Tipping, its defenders say, improves service by rewarding good waiters and punishing bad ones. But that’s not what Porter saw when he looked out on his dining floor. In his brief experience, working for tips encouraged selfishness rather than teamwork. Moreover, good service was not always rewarded with a big tip, nor bad service with a poor one. “No other profession works like this,” Porter told me, “and I don’t see why the restaurant business should either.” At his restaurant, Porter and his staff agreed, it no longer would. The Linkery would be more than just a restaurant; it would become perhaps the nation’s only anti-tipping laboratory.

THERE WAS A time, not so long ago in this country, when the Linkery’s no-tipping policy would not have stood out. Tipping was imported from Europe, and when it arrived in America, it met with impassioned and organized opposition. While the precise origin of tipping is uncertain, it is commonly traced to Tudor England, according to “Tipping,” Kerry Segrave’s history of the custom. By the 17th century, it was expected that overnight guests to private homes would provide sums of money, known as vails, to the host’s servants. Soon after, customers began tipping in London coffeehouses and other commercial establishments. One frequented by Samuel Johnson had a bowl printed with the words “To Insure Promptitude,” and some speculate that “tip” is an acronym for this phrase.

Tipping began as an aristocratic practice, a sprinkle of change for social inferiors, and it quickly spread among the upper classes of Europe. Yet even at its outset, tipping engendered feelings of anxiety and resentment. In the mid-1800s, after leaving the Bell Inn of Gloucester, the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle complained: “The dirty scrub of a waiter grumbled about his allowance, which I reckoned liberal. I added sixpence to it, and [he] produced a bow which I was near rewarding with a kick.”

After the Civil War, wealthy Americans began traveling to Europe in significant numbers, and they brought the tip home with them to demonstrate their worldliness. But the United States, unlike Europe, had no aristocratic tradition, and as tipping spread — like “evil insects and weeds,” The New York Times claimed in 1897 — many thought it was antithetical to American democratic ideals. “Tipping, and the aristocratic idea it exemplifies, is what we left Europe to escape,” William Scott wrote in his 1916 anti-tipping screed, “The Itching Palm.” One periodical of the same era deplored tipping for creating a class of workers who relied on “fawning for favors.”

Opposition to tipping was not limited to the media. In 1904, the Anti-Tipping Society of America sprang up in Georgia, and its 100,000 members signed pledges not to tip anyone for a year. Leagues of traveling salesmen opposed the tip, as did most labor unions. In 1909, Washington became the first of six states to pass an anti-tipping law. But tipping persisted. The new laws rarely were enforced, and when they were, they did not hold up in court. By 1926, every anti-tipping law had been repealed.

Ultimately, even those who in principle opposed the practice found themselves unable to stiff their servers. Samuel Gompers, who was president of the American Federation of Labor and a leading figure of the anti-tipping movement, admitted that he “followed the usual custom of giving tips.”

Meanwhile, Europe was rethinking its devotion to the custom. The 1943 Catering Wages Act in Britain established a minimum wage for service employees that helped decrease their reliance on tips. And in 1955, France passed a law requiring its restaurants to add a service charge (“service compris”) to each bill, a practice that has become the norm for most of the continent. By then, the anti-tipping movement had all but vanished in the United States. Its last great champion, the social scientist Leo Crespi, died in July of this year. Sixty years earlier, Crespi published a scholarly study of tipping and called for the formation of a National Anti-Tipping League of diners. But the call went unanswered — even by Crespi, who never dined out.

WORD OF THE Linkery’s anti-tipping policy quickly spread through the local restaurant community. Ken Cassinelli, who owns a nearby Italian restaurant, was appalled. It had taken him 30 years of waiting on tables to set aside enough money to open Apertivo. Tips built his restaurant. “The Linkery is a big sham,” he told me. “All Porter is doing is taking money away from his waiters.”

Notwithstanding the vitriol, Cassinelli may have a point.

Typically, waiters receive an hourly wage — as little as $2.13 in some states, though California law mandates at least $8 — plus tips, some of which they may pass on, or “tip out,” to their support staff. The laws of California and several other states prohibit redirecting tips to restaurant workers who traditionally don’t receive them — owners, managers and members of the kitchen staff. (Earlier this year, a California judge ordered Starbucks to pay its baristas $105 million for tips the company diverted to supervisors.) But a service charge is free of such constraints. It’s also fully taxed, while waiters, on average, fail to report what the I.R.S. says is at least 40 percent of their tips.

Porter considered raising the prices of each item on the menu and simply increasing the wages of his employees. But that would have penalized the restaurant’s many takeout diners. Also, he figured many potential diners would look at the prices and — not factoring in what they spend on tips — compare them unfavorably with those of his competitors. So Porter instead proposed a service fee of 18 percent, to be pooled and split roughly 3 to 1 between the restaurant’s front of the house and its kitchen. In his pitch to his staff, he employed the same arguments Alice Waters had nearly two decades before. The owner of arguably the nation’s most celebrated restaurant — Chez Panisse in Berkeley — Waters wrote her board: “At our restaurant the quality of the food and the skill and taste of the cooks are at least as central to our success as the quality of the service. Unfortunately, traditional tipping has created great disparities in earning between the serving staff and the cooking and support staff.” By introducing a service charge — currently 17 percent — Waters was able to increase income to the kitchen.

A few other high-end restaurants have followed Waters’s example, including Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago, the French Laundry in Napa Valley and Per Se in Manhattan (the latter two are owned by Thomas Keller). None of these restaurants, however, including Waters’s, forbid additional tips. “Some people still tip, and the waiters get to keep that money,” said Mike Kossa-Rienzi, general manager of Chez Panisse.

But Porter, like the anti-tippers of yore, was persuaded tipping itself was pernicious. “If you have a fixed gratuity, but people are still tipping, then you’re back to Square 1 in terms of the money dynamic,” he says.

If he could, he would have raised everyone’s wages, but there wasn’t enough revenue. The restaurant was already paying 65 percent of its employees’ health-insurance premiums, and Porter was working on a scheme to give long-term employees ownership stakes in the business. Still, he worried that his staff might not be receptive to his proposal. Michael McGuan, Porter’s general manager, expected at least half of the restaurant’s eight servers to quit. But only one did, and Porter has had little trouble hiring additional waiters. Cassinelli says that’s because most of them, like their boss, have little restaurant experience. While that’s true of a few of Porter’s hires, most of the Linkery’s servers have waited on tables for years. They have simply drawn different lessons from their experiences.

Cassinelli prided himself on earning big tips. “I could always upsell my tables’ liquor and desserts,” he said, using the industry term for swaying diners to order more than they normally would, driving up the bill and hence the tip. There are other tricks at waiters’ disposal. Studies demonstrate that waiters can increase their tips by introducing themselves by name, squatting alongside tables, touching diners and drawing smiley faces on the backs of checks. While Cassinelli isn’t necessarily an advocate of such ploys, he says that waiters only excel at their jobs when they have the proper economic incentives.

But Chelsea Boyd told me that eliminating tipping had made her work as a waiter at the Linkery more meaningful than any other restaurant job she has had in the previous 10 years. “For the first time, I get to concentrate on the job, and I’m looking at the guests without seeing dollar signs or worried about what anyone else is making,” she says. Under the old system, waiters earned between $25 and $35 an hour, much of which was untaxed. “Now, waiters make about $25 an hour, which is fully taxed,” Boyd says.

Renee Lorion, a former waitress at the Linkery who now works in publishing in New York, liked the new anti-tipping policy too. “As servers, we all took a pay cut, but we knew it was for the general health of the restaurant,” she told me. “What made it work is that Jay was very transparent about the restaurant’s finances.”

Obviously, the kitchen appreciates the new policy. “Earning three or four extra bucks an hour makes a difference,” Matthew Somerville, a cook, says. “In most restaurants, there’s not a close relationship between the front and the kitchen. But here you don’t have that tension, where waiters are trying to accommodate customers’ special requests, while the cooks doing the extra work don’t see any of the tips.”

Today, Porter’s employees appear almost as fervent in their opposition to tipping as their boss. But winning over his staff was only half the battle.

WHEN I CANVASSED restaurant owners across the country, most said that customer opposition precludes any significant move away from tipping. “I like the idea of a service charge, and I’ve thought about having one,” says Hakan Swahn, the owner of Aquavit, a restaurant in New York that serves Scandinavian cuisine and has branches in Stockholm and Tokyo. Because tipping is negligible in Sweden and frowned upon in Japan, at these outposts the cost of service is factored into the bill. But that’s not possible at his Manhattan flagship, Swahn told me. “The customers would protest.”

Eighty percent of Americans say they prefer tipping to paying a service fee, according to Zagat Survey. They do so, Leo Crespi’s surveys first demonstrated, primarily because they believe tipping provides an incentive for good service. But there is little correlation, in fact— less than 2 percent, according to Michael Lynn, a Cornell professor of consumer behavior and marketing.

Economists have struggled to explain tipping. Why tip at all, since the bill is presented at the end of a meal and can’t retroactively improve service? And certainly there’s no reason to tip at a restaurant you will never revisit. “Using a rational and selfish agent to explain tipping, one reaches the conclusion that the agent should never tip if he does not intend to visit the establishment again,” Ofer Azar, the economist, writes. “Yet this prediction is sharply violated in practice: most people tip even when they do not intend to ever come back.”

The single most important factor in determining the amount of a tip is the size of the bill. Diners generally tip the same percentage no matter the quality of the service and no matter the setting. They do so, Lynn says, largely because it’s expected and diners fear social disapproval. “It is embarrassing to have another person wait on you,” the psychologist Ernest Dichter told a magazine reporter in 1960. “The need to pay, psychologically, for the guilt involved in the unequal relationship is so strong that very few are able to ignore it.” Ego needs also play a part, especially when it comes to overtipping, according to the Israeli social psychologist Boas Shamir.

These psychological factors also go a long way in explaining the steady rise of the average tip in the United States from 10 percent in the early 20th century to 18.9 percent today, with little regional variation. “To overtip is to appear an ass: to undertip is to appear an even greater ass,” Benjamin Franklin reportedly noted during his stint in Paris, and his quandary continues to vex American diners.

But not at the Linkery. Porter and his staff have found that most diners accept the no-tipping policy, which is explained on the restaurant’s Web site and menu as well as upon the presentation of the check. This doesn’t surprise Lynn, who says he believes consumer preferences for tipping are not as strong as Zagat Survey suggests. In a less-cited 1987 Gallup telephone survey, only 34 percent of American respondents said a 15-to-18 percent service charge was unreasonable. In Lynn’s own 2004 Internet survey, 44 percent of American respondents said they would prefer to have waiters paid higher wages instead of tips, while only 22 percent disagreed. “Given that consumers’ preferences appear to be weak and are unlikely to have strong effects on patronage behavior, they need not dictate tipping policies,” Lynn concludes.

That has already proved true at the antipodes of American dining — the fast-food restaurant and the private club — where tipping is not usually allowed. And with few objections, many full-service restaurants include service charges for groups of six or more diners. They do so because tip size is inversely proportional to the number of diners. One 1973 study at an Ohio restaurant revealed that individual diners tipped 19 percent on average, while groups of six left 13.5 percent. “[T]o the extent that many people contribute to a check, the responsibility of each to the waiter may be psychologically divided among the people present,” the researchers concluded.

Despite such precedents, every so often diners at the Linkery take offense. “I’ll go over to the table and ask if there is a problem with the service,” McGuan, the general manager, says. “If there is, then I offer to remove the service charge. Almost always, the customers’ issue isn’t about the service but about not being able to handle their loss of control.”

Porter says that he doesn’t mind losing these diners. But most restaurant owners are not as nonchalant. Last June, after the Linkery moved, its old space was taken over by the Sea Rocket Bistro, which focuses on local sustainable seafood. Management thought it would be a good idea to retain Porter’s no-tipping policy, since the restaurant was courting the same customers. But that proved difficult. “It became a strain to explain the policy to first-time customers,” Elena Rivellino, the Bistro’s general manager, says. “We had some people complain that an 18 percent gratuity was too high, and others said they’d like to tip more.”

In his one concession to big tippers, Porter offers them the option of donating money to charity. The Linkery’s charity of the month is printed on the menu, and in two years more than $10,000 has been raised for various causes. “But it’s funny what usually happens when a diner asks why they can’t tip more,” McGuan says. “We tell them we’re comfortable with what we charge for service, and they’re free to donate to our charity of the month. Most don’t.”

Rivellino said that as a new restaurant struggling to fill its tables, the Sea Rocket Bistro couldn’t afford to turn down additional revenue, especially if doing so might offend diners. The restaurant dropped its service charge in a matter of weeks.

OVER DINNER ONE night, Porter told me that he didn’t expect his war against tipping to spread beyond his restaurant. “You might be able to get rid of tipping if you raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon,” he said. We were sitting in the back garden of one of Porter’s favorite San Diego restaurants, Starlite, and I found myself nodding in agreement. Tipping had bested greater foes than Porter.

And yet Porter never tires of defending his position. “At the end of a nice meal, the last thing anyone wants to do is think about math and social mores,” he said. Again, I nodded. But at dinner’s end, when the waiter returned with my credit card, I did some quick mental arithmetic and left 20 percent.

From The Sunday Times
October 12, 2008

Jonathan Oliver and Isabel Oakeshott

Tony Blair personally ordered an exemption for motor racing from a tobacco sponsorship ban after Labour received a secret £1m donation from Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One boss.

New documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show he demanded a change of policy after a meeting with Ecclestone on October 16, 1997, and his officials went on to obfuscate the truth.

The affair was the first sleaze scandal of the new Labour era, and Blair went on television to defend his reputation, saying he was a “pretty straight kind of guy”.

The new documents show clearly that the prime minister personally demanded a change of policy in the days that followed the meeting with Ecclestone. The following month the Department of Health announced a special exemption for F1 from a previously universal ban on tobacco sponsorship.

A Whitehall memo written on October 31, 1997, states: “The prime minister has made clear his wish to see a permanent exclusion for Formula One from the scope of the tobacco advertising ban.”

The documents also show how mandarins tried to protect Blair over the sequence of events, encouraging him to mislead MPs about what had happened.

At the height of the scandal, Tory MP John Maples put down a written parliamentary question asking when Blair informed Frank Dobson, the health secretary, of his plans to exempt F1 from the proposed ban.

A confidential briefing note to the Cabinet Office outlining possible responses to the question reveals that the true date was October 16. It reveals that Blair ordered Jonathan Powell to ring Tessa Jowell, then public health minister, to discuss the issue that evening.

However, the briefing note suggests Blair should name October 29 as the date, to be consistent with his previous public claims that the decision was not taken until two to three weeks after the crucial meeting with Ecclestone.

“The draft reply is strictly true in terms of the final decision . . . but critics could argue that the answer was disingenuous in that the prime minister’s views had been clearly conveyed by the telephone call on October 16,” the document says.

The documents also show Downing Street set out to mislead the public, via the media, about the PM’s personal role in the affair.

A briefing note for Alastair Campbell offers guidance “to dispel the notion that the F1 approach was dictated by the PM alone, after meeting Ecclestone”.

By Paul Vallely
Saturday, 11 October 2008

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/religion-vs-science-can-the-divide-between-god-and-rationality-be-reconciled-955321.html

”A clergyman in charge of education for the country’s leading scientific organisation – it’s a Monty Python sketch,” pronounced Britain’s top atheist, Richard Dawkins, recently.

The problem was that Reiss, as well as being an evolutionary biologist and population geneticist, is a non-stipendiary priest in the Church of England. When he said recently that science teachers should answer questions about creationism if pupils asked them he was deemed to have been advocating the idea that British schools should teach the idea that the world was magicked up (complete with fossils and ancient geology) just 6,000 years ago – and then tell pupils to make their own minds up between that and the theory of evolution to which the overwhelming scientific evidence points.

The hapless Reiss made it clear that he insists creationism is scientific nonsense. But a handful of the Royal Society’s most eminent members began a campaign to have him sacked. Sir Harry Kroto, Sir Richard Roberts and Sir John Sulston said in a letter to the president of the Royal Society: “We gather Professor Reiss is a clergyman, which in itself is very worrisome.” We must all now be on the look-out, it now seems for Revs under the beds.

The idea that science and religion are incompatible is a fairly recent import into contemporary culture. It has been given huge credence by the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. The pronounced motivation of Islamic fundamentalists in 2001 hammered home that some people are prepared to inflict outrageous acts of inhumanity in the name of religion.

Yet the roots of the shift in attitude go back much further. “It came about because of a perfect storm – a wide range of factors came together,” says the atheist philosopher Julian Baggini. Among them were a shift from liberal to evangelical Christianity in Britain, the rise of creationism in America, advances in scientific techniques in biology and changes in public perception on issues as disparate as homosexuality and assisted dying.

But we are leaping ahead here. The relationship between science and religion has had a long and chequered history since the settled days of the medieval consensus, which saw faith and the natural sciences as part of a cosmic whole. Galileo put paid to that with his insistence that the earth revolved around the sun. The Catholic Church, which saw man and his planet at the centre of the universe – and which already felt its authority threatened by the rise of Protestantism – locked horns with him. The clash became a metaphor for the irreconcilability of scientific materialism and biblical literalism.

Things changed with Isaac Newton. His laws of physics led to a world view which relegated God to background status as the designer of a clockwork world which he wound up and then left to its own devices. Newton’s celestial mechanics brought an advance in our scientific understanding but didn’t really work for a faith that wanted to believe that, through the historical Jesus, God had become, in the words of the song “a slob like one of us”.

Next came Darwin. At first many saw his theory of evolution as a threat to religion but mainstream Christianity soon accepted evolution as the answer to the “how” of creation, leaving the “why” questions of meaning and morality to faith. Science and religion exercised authority over two discrete compartments of life between which there could be no link.

But through the latter half of the 20th century a synergy developed. In cosmology the science of the expanding universe and the Big Bang chimed in with a moment of creation. The inherent uncertainty that quantum physics discovered at the subatomic level overturned Newton’s mechanics and created room for a “God of the gaps”. Process theology embraced evolution and said men and women are called to play a part in an ever-ongoing creation. Advances in neuro-science showed that mental and spiritual phenomena depend upon biological processes, undermining the old dualist notions about body and soul and offering a more holistic body-mind-spirit axis.

“Attacks on religion, when I was a student in the Sixties, were largely on political grounds,” says Dr Denis Alexander, the Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion in Cambridge. “It was seen to be on the side of capitalism and the rich.” In Anglo-American philosophy, says Baggini, “religion was seen as wrong but as something that didn’t really matter much. The world was going secular and eventually it would just die out.”

But the rise of Christian fundamentalism in America in the past few decades – the word fundamentalist in its religious sense was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in only 1989 – was mirrored in a milder way in Britain too. Liberal Christianity, so long in the ascendant in the Church of England, began to lose ground to evangelicalism. “Non-literal Christianity failed,” says Baggini, “because it doesn’t capture the popular imagination. The certainties of evangelical Christianity appeal more to those for whom the attractions of religion are on a more visceral level.” This appeal was symbolised through the 1990s by the Alpha course on the basics of the Christian faith devised in London by a curate at Holy Trinity, Brompton, which has since been used by more than 10 million people in 160 countries. The idea that the miracles of the New Testament may have been metaphors rather than literal truths suddenly went out of fashion in Christian circles.

Throughout this time scientists such as Richard Dawkins had evidenced a disdain for such simple certainties. In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene there were a few side-swipes at religion and in 1986 in The Blind Watchmaker he conducted a sustained critique of the 18th-century deist argument that the world is too complicated to have sprung into existence by accident so a rational observer should conclude that it must have been designed, just as someone finding a watch would conclude that somewhere there must be a watchmaker who made it. And by 1991, in response to the question of why evolution had allowed religion to thrive, he had coined the notion that religion was a virus.

But it was the terrorist attacks in 2001 that turned Dawkins into an Alpha atheist and transformed him from an academic backwater into a populist ideologue. Before 9/11, he said, religion may have appeared a “harmless nonsense”. But the attacks in New York showed it to be a “lethally dangerous nonsense”. Previously, he said, “we all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let’s now stop being so damned respectful!” The gloves were off.

But another prominent atheist, medic and secularist, the Liberal Democrat MP, Dr Evan Harris, is not so sure that 9/11 was the nodal point. “It’s not the main thing to scientists,” he insists. “When you talk to them the thing that comes up most often is the influence religion has had on science in America under George Bush.” Religious pressures there have had direct impacts on a wide range of policy – from a ban on public money being put into stem cell research to a refusal to allow US aid programmes to hand out condoms to fight Aids in Africa. “Scientists who are publicly funded can’t go to conferences and speak without being obliged to stick to the Bush line,” says Harris.

Advances in bio-technology have opened up new areas for disagreement. Test tube babies, embryo selection, saviour siblings, stem cell research and animal-human cybrids have all created new battlegrounds between those who think that an embryo is a person from the moment of conception to those who think it is merely a cluster of cells before implantation or even birth – and all variety of opinions in between.

“There is a definite danger of our desire for research outstripping our capacity to anticipate the ethical implications of those advances,” says the feminist theologian, Tina Beattie, whose book The New Atheists argues that Dawkins & Co misuse Darwin and evolutionary biology as much as the Christian fundamentalists misuse the Bible. “Some scientists experience religion as merely an irritating brake on their striving to do new things.” The public, after a list of scientific disasters from thalidomide and nuclear weapons to BSE and the stealing of dead children’s organs at Alder Hey, are much more suspicious, judging that “scientists have problems policing their borders”.

From a very different perspective Andrew Copson, the director of education for the British Humanist Association, agrees. “Scientists are fearful so the issue has become very emotive,” he says. “They fear that, behind what people like Michael Reiss say, there lies a Trojan horse.” It is perhaps significant here that the two main instigators of the campaign to have Reiss ousted from his Royal Society job, Sir Harry Kroto and Sir Richard Roberts, are now based in the United States where creationism is a major phenomenon. Polls suggest that around 45 per cent of Americans are creationists with 40 per cent believing that God worked through evolution and just 10 per cent saying it was nothing to do with a God.

The experience of being a secularist in the US is clearly a radicalising one. “I don’t know if it is too late to stop the slide in Britain but I think it is in the US where [the religious right] have now almost complete control over politics, the judiciary, education, business, journalism and television,” Kroto, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1996, has said, adding darkly: “The Royal Society does not appreciate the true nature of the forces arrayed against it.”

The position in the UK is nothing like that, though the statistics are unclear. A 2006 BBC poll claimed that 48 per cent of the British public accepted evolution with 22 per cent preferring creationism but the definitions it used were so sloppy as to be almost meaningless. A survey of schoolchildren has suggested that more than 10 per cent now believe in creationism. But the Evangelical Alliance, whose members now number around 3 per cent of the UK population, reckons that only a third of its members – about 1 per cent of the population – are creationists. About a third think Genesis is merely symbolic, and a third believe that God worked through evolution but is still capable of intervening in specific ways. Its most recent, unpublished, survey shows that the proportion seeing the Genesis account as symbolic is increasing, the EA’s Head of Theology, Dr Justin Thacker, says.

Evan Harris accepts that the number of British schools teaching creationism is tiny. But, as an MP, he is worried about the increasing activity of religious lobby groups in public life. “Groups like the Evangelical Alliance, the Christian Institute and Christian Action Research and Education are now all much more organised and active in seeking to change public policy. They are making the running in parliament, much more than the leadership of the Catholic Church. The Church of England’s bishops are much more evangelical too; their centre of gravity has changed form the days when liberals ruled the roost. And the C of E has been much more active in Parliament.”

All this is having a real impact, Dr Harris suggests. “In the days of Thatcher all the mainstream Tories voted in favour of embryo research. Twenty years on most of the new suave modernising Cameroonian Tories vote against it.” Academics detect a similar shift. Professor Steve Jones, of University College London, who has been teaching genetics and evolutionary biology for 30 years, has said that religious students – even those studying medicine – are becoming increasingly vocal in their opposition to evolution, demanding to be exempted from classes and exam questions on the subject.

Creationism, like Coca-Cola, came here from the United States. The American lobby group Answers in Genesis, with its $13m annual budget, now has an office in the UK from where staff go round giving illustrated talks about how humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth together. Another conservative group, Truth in Science, has adopted a strategy of lobbying for schools to “Teach the Controversy” in an attempt to get Intelligent Design, a spin-off of creationism, taught alongside evolution in school science lessons. In 2006 it sent resource packs to the heads of science of all British secondary schools; New Scientist claims that 59 schools have used, or plan to use, them.

The fear generated by such tactics is what did for Michael Reiss. “Even if he doesn’t support all this, what he said might be seen to give succour to it,” says Andrew Copson of the British Humanist Association. “I can understand why alarm bells go off with people who are familiar with ‘Teach the controversy’ tactics of people who want to baby-step creationism into our science classrooms.”

All of this mystifies the vast majority of the nation’s Christians who have been taught since the time of St Augustine, who died AD430, that where there appears to be a conflict between demonstrated knowledge and a literal reading of the bible then the scriptures should be interpreted metaphorically. They see no conflict between faith and reason because, as Pope John Paul II put it: “God created man as rational and free, thereby placing himself under man’s judgement.” Just last month the present Pope reiterated the same line, warning of the dangers of fundamentalist readings of the Bible. Each generation, he said, needs to find its collective interpretation of the text. For this task of interpretation – which can never be never completely finished – science offers a major tool.

It all perplexes academics who specialise in the interplay between science and religion too. Creationism doesn’t just involve many scientific errors, it relies on a major theological one too. “When Robert Burns tell us his love ‘is like a red, red rose’, we know that we are not meant to think that his girlfriend has green leaves and prickles,” says the particle physicist and Anglican priest, Sir John Polkinghorne. Why, he wonders, would any rational person want to read the Bible in that way?

The world of science he encounters is a much more subtle one. “There’s a cosmic religiosity among physicists,” he insists, though “biologists see more ambiguity, perhaps because they look at the wastefulness of nature, and perhaps because sequencing the human genome has made them triumphalist.” It is more complex even than that: the head of the Human Genome Project, Dr Francis Collins, last year published a book about his journey from atheism into faith arguing that science and religion, far from being irreconcilable, are in fact in deep harmony.

In the past 30 years an area of inter-disciplinary activity has opened up to explore this. Areas of research include cognitive neuro-sciences and issues like freewill and consciousness and whether human minds are merely matter or something more. In evolutionary psychology they have also explored together questions like the origins of altruism – asking whether evolutionary biology can give an adequate account of why people are willing to sacrifice themselves on behalf of others. In paleobiology they are asking questions like how eyes evolve in different lineages – suggesting that evolution isn’t a random or chance process but is channelled by certain chemically-determined pathways. In cosmology there is a universe versus multiverses debate.

“All that going on, but all the public knows about is Dawkins,” says Dr Denis Alexander of the Faraday Institute in Cambridge. “Academic discussion on the relationship between science and religion is genuinely exploratory, not polarised. To most people in it Dawkins just sounds rather odd.”

John Hedley Brooke, who recently retired as the first Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford, is more sanguine. “These eruptions take place from time to time historically,” he shrugs. “Dawkins is just a throwback to 19th-century rationalism. He has a strong emotional antagonism that is very indiscriminate and treats all kinds of religion the same. A lot of fine distinctions that get lost in the polemics. The problem is that it is all a cumulative process in which the extremes feed off one another.”

“Paradoxically, Dawkins is the biggest recruiter for creationism in this country,” says Denis Alexander. Recently, he says, Bill Demcksi, a leading US creationist, e-mailed Dawkins to thank him for his assistance. “The danger is that all this polarisation will make some believers more anti-science which is not a clever move tactically.” He hopes that whoever succeeds Dawkins as Oxford’s Professor of the Public Understanding of Science is more interested in promoting science than in attacking religion.

On the other side of the argument Evan Harris is unapologetic about contributing to what Julian Baggini waggishly calls this “assertiveness inflation”. “It’s good that there’s this tension,” the MP says. “These debates need to be had in public. Science has nothing to fear from them. I don’t think we’re winning; we’ve won a few battles; but there’s a war to be fought.” He concedes that Michael Reiss may have been sacked unfairly – saying that the “overstrong line” taken by Kroto and Co should not be taken as representative of all on the secular side – but points out that employment injustices are perpetrated every time a church school refuses to appoint a maths teacher because she doesn’t “have Jesus in her heart”.

The danger is that between the strident secularists and the fanatical fundamentalists some important middle ground is being squeezed out. “Dawkins sees religion as credulous, superstitious and prejudiced but mature religious traditions teach people to challenge all that,” says Tina Beattie. “Science will never offer an answer to the parents of Madeleine McCann. Nor will it ever be irrational to go to a Mozart concert, though science can never explain the genius of his music. The new atheism completely misunderstands the way that human beings experience the poetry and narrative of life.”

Perhaps the conflict is not between science and religion but between good and bad ways of doing both. In all of us there will always be a struggle between the craving for certainty, purity and closure and the acceptance of mystery, brokenness and provisionality. At their best, both scientists and people of faith are in a permanent state of awe-struck humility before the wonder and strangeness and messiness of things. At their worst, they are arrogant, dogmatic, and incurious. There’s a bit of both in all of us, of course.

Government dodging real issue of funding, say critics

By Arifa Akbar, Arts Correspondent

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/sombre-libraries-need-chatter-and-coffee-shops-minister-says-955493.html
Thursday, 9 October 2008

Libraries should be social places, according to Andy Burnham

People would be able to chat, drink coffee and watch videos in English libraries under a new government proposal, The Independent has learnt. Andy Burnham, the Secretary of State for Culture, will today launch a consultation on changing the face of libraries which he believes are out of touch.

Under the proposals, libraries could install coffee franchises, book shops and film centres. Noise bans will also be reviewed. Mr Burnham will tell the Public Library Authorities conference in Liverpool that libraries must "look beyond the bookcase and not sleepwalk into the era of the e-book".

"The popular public image of libraries as solemn and sombre places, patrolled by fearsome and formidable staff is decades out of date, but is nonetheless taken for granted by too many people," he will say, adding that the sector would have to "think radical" to modernise. English libraries attract 288 million visitors a year but book borrowings have fallen by 34 per cent in the past decade and 40 libraries closed across Britain last year. The Society of Chief Librarians has warned libraries that they will die out unless they diversify.

In Camden, north London, the council will lift a ban on mobile phones in its libraries this month and users will be allowed to bring in snacks and drinks. The council is also considering providing computer games at its libraries.

A spokesman at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport said the Government wanted to transform the atmosphere of libraries to make them more similar to Waterstones stores.

Earlier, Mr Burnham that said providing more funding was not realistic in the current climate but added that libraries could still be revamped. He suggested that the traditional "silence" in libraries be reviewed and opening hours extended.

"Libraries should be a place for families and joy and chatter. The word chatter might strike fear into the heart of traditionalists but libraries should be social places that offer an antidote to the isolation of someone playing on the internet at home."

Campaigners said Mr Burnham was dodging the real issue of underfunding that had plagued libraries for years.

Tim Coates the former managing director of Waterstones and a libraries campaigner said: "This ought to be about getting more reading books, particularly for children, not about turning libraries into fish and chip shops."

Vladds comment:

NO NO NO!!!

Libraries should be quiet places of study not a social club, you want to eat, drink and chat on your mobiles go to the High Street. Please leave those of us that need to study or just love books somewhere quiet to pursue our love.

For the past week, as never before, we have been told all is collapsing around us. But David Randall gives a full dispatch from the sunny side of the street

Sunday, 21 September 2008

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/the-doom-merchants-cheer-up-britain-936845.html

‘The waters are now surging through Galveston"… "millions are without power or clean water"… "the demise of Lehman Brothers has sent shock waves through the world’s largest economy"… "40,000 jobs may be lost in Britain alone"… "the death toll in Haiti has now passed 600"…

"He is the 27th teenager to be murdered this year"… "more than 6,200 babies have now fallen ill through the Chinese contaminated baby-milk scandal"… "And some experts here in New York fear a rerun of the 1929 Crash and the worldwide, decade-long depression that followed."

For the past seven days, there has been no getting away from the incessant drumming of One Bloody Thing After Another. On television, radio, newspaper page, website, message board, BlackBerry and mobile have come headlines, scenes and sound bites so lowering and worrying that many began to wonder if the Cern laboratory’s attempts to reduce us all to anti-matter may not be such a bad thing after all.

Everything was collapsing around our ears, and we’d better get used to it, for this – as television reporters wearing their funeral director faces assured us – was the new reality.

Well, up to a point. For the journalists’ real world is not the only world. There is another place, one into which we rarely venture, where even the most intrepid of us are unsure and disorientated. There are rumours that here are not murders and mayhem, crises and credit crunches (and all their comfortingly familiar narratives), but rescues, innovations, breakthroughs and happy endings. The stories sounded fantastical, more the stuff of myth than reality, but, in this past week of all weeks, our curiosity was aroused.

Could these seemingly wild tales of good news possibly be true? I was sent to investigate, and this is my report: a full and frank dispatch from the sunny side of the street. Its contents may shock you.

Let us start with the big stuff; for, happily, positive stories don’t just come in "And finally…" bite-sized pieces of trivia. Somewhere in this world there are babies crying who shouldn’t be. They ought, by any former laws of averages, to be silent and quite dead. But they aren’t – and last week came the explanation: deaths of children under five, says the UN Children’s Fund, have fallen by 27 per cent in the past 20 years, and the rate is still declining.

Over now to Rwanda, whence came the week’s most uplifting political story. An election has produced a result that is not just a world record, but a reason for hope. Here, in a land that once virtually trademarked the most brutal kind of macho, tribal score-settling, will now sit the first parliament on the planet where women outnumber men. With three results to come, women have won 44 out of 80 seats – 55 per cent of the total.

Green shoots of common sense have popped up elsewhere, too. In Afghanistan, where opium production has fallen by a fifth; in Colombia, where a group of guerrillas handed in their weapons; in Bangladesh, where a £29.2m programme will give work to two million poor families on repairing the damage caused by floods; and flickers of an intelligent change of mind even in Britain. In Vauxhall Street, Norwich, to be precise, where one of the post offices under threat has been reprieved. Now for the other 2,499.

And, from the waters of the Atlantic Ocean just off New York came an uplifting sound. Microphones immersed in the sea just a few miles away from Times Square and Carnegie Hall have picked up singing – by endangered humpback, fin and right whales calling to each other in the approaches to Manhattan.

There was other good environmental news: a New Zealand firm has produced commercially priced fuel oil from algae; a new plant will raise the UK’s capacity to recycle plastic bottles by 50 per cent; as part of a pilot project, food scraps from 94,000 British homes have been ploughed back into the land as compost rather than sent to landfill; and directors of companies not normally noted for their radicalism – such as BAA, Lloyds TSB and Tesco – have called on the government to take decisive, indeed "transformational", action on global warming.

Lest pessimists respond that anything Britain does is an irrelevance when China is busy belching smoke and chemicals into the atmosphere (and its newborns), one of Beijing’s most prominent policy advisers has said that it must do a U-turn and start seriously cutting greenhouse gas emissions. All that, and Norway showing the rest of the world the way by making the first sizeable donation – of $1bn – to the Brazil Amazon Fund, which fights deforestation. These stories, each one worthy of a TV news bong all to itself, readily found, on the sunny side of the street.

And, strolling along here, smiling, were folk whose extraordinary and upbeat stories were all the better for not needing the midwifery of a conniving press agent. People such as building worker Branislav Gomilic, who fell six storeys down a Montenegrin lift shaft and survived, thanks to his colleagues’ dirty habits – they had been using it as a rubbish dump and Branislav landed softly on a pile of cardboard, packaging and refuse; and Joe Stalnaker of Arizona, who was prone to seizures and had trained his German Shepherd, if the worst came to the worst, to hit the speed dial for 911 and bark like mad. Joe passed out, Buddy did his stuff, and help duly arrived.

Then there was the Lancaster woman pulled from her burning car by a passer-by; teacher Hannah Upp, plucked from New York’s Upper Bay by deckhands on the Staten Island ferry; and two missing girls – Jessica Harvey, 15, from Cambridgeshire, and Jamila Stone, also 15, from Glasgow – whose families will spend this weekend with their daughters rather than giving tearful press conferences.

They weren’t the only good finds last week: a single sheet of a Mozart score in a French library; a Birmingham cat reunited with its owners after going missing for nine years; 500 new species of crustaceans; corals and worms discovered off the Australian coast; a Costa Rican tree frog seen for the first time in decades; the first new sub-family of ants found since 1923; a rare death’s head hawk moth in an Essex garden; the "missing link" between large and small black holes identified by scientists at Durham University; a new world’s largest prime number (almost 13 million digits); and – more graspably impressive – the Lebanese restaurant kitchen worker who opened an oyster to prepare it for the table and saw to her delight that it contained no fewer than 26 pearls.

Found, too, was true love at last by two couples. First, Chester Locke, a Taunton man who was barred from seeing his sweetheart 40 years ago after she fell pregnant, and is now to marry her at last; and, second, Nepalese porter Ramchadra Katuwal, who declared last week that, after 24 failed marriages, he had finally found lasting happiness with No 25. We shall see.

There were innovations too that could brighten everyone’s lives. From the trivial – three-ply toilet paper to be launched in Wisconsin tomorrow and aimed, apparently, at those who regard a trip to the bathroom as "quality time"; and, for the security-conscious woman, the "cleavage caddy", a purse that goes where only the most ungentlemanly thief would rummage) – to the significant: stem cells found in teeth have shown promise in treating stroke victims; and a new test for hereditary breast cancer, which costs a mere £10 a patient, could be available next year.

Whatever next? A report saying that tea, our national drink, rehydrates as well as water, fights tooth plaque, and helps protect against heart disease and some cancers? Sure enough, it duly arrived, thanks to researchers at King’s College London.

And just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, from Germany came news that not all broadcasters are dumbing down. On Friday, Berlin’s Kiss FM will do its morning show entirely in Latin.

And then there came a very special phenomenon. In the sky over Cambridgeshire last week, there appeared a rare upside-down rainbow – a big multi-coloured smile above Britain. Surely it was a sign. All together now: "Grey skies are going to clear up. Put on a happy face…."