Yesterday afternoon, University College London issued this statement in relation to the position of Dr Nicholas Kollerstrom:

Dr Nicholas Kollerstrom

22 April 2008

UCL has been made aware of views expressed by Dr Nicholas Kollerstrom, an Honorary Research Fellow in UCL Science & Technology Studies.

The position of Honorary Research Fellow is a privilege bestowed by departments within UCL on researchers with whom it wishes to have an association. It is not an employed position.

The views expressed by Dr Kollerstrom are diametrically opposed to the aims, objectives and ethos of UCL, such that we wish to have absolutely no association with them or with their originator.

We therefore have no choice but to terminate Dr Kollerstrom’s Honorary Research Fellowship with immediate effect.

If you’ve missed the background to this then the following articles from Blairwatch and here at Liberal Conspiracy should tell you everything you need to know.

Blairwatch - Nick Kollerstrom’s Crap Circles

Liberal Conspiracy - Sieg Heil-De-Heil

UCL is perfectly entitled to protect its reputation as a credible and well respected academic institution, a reputation that could only have been seriously damaged had it continued its association with Kollerstrom, whose writings on the Holocaust, being charitable in the extreme, demonstrate both poor judgement and extremely poor scholarship. As such I can only applaud UCL for taking the right decision and acting swiftly to deal with what must have been a very difficult and, potentially, extremely embarrassing situation.

If there’s one recent piece of first rate investigative blogging that deserves a much higher profile at the moment then it has to be Blairwatch’s ‘outing’ of Nicholas Kollerstrom, a prominent ‘9/11 truther’ (i.e. conspiraloon) and UCL research fellow as a confirmed (and completely unabashed) Holocaust denier.

To give a quick bit of background on the ”truthers’ for those who’ve not come across them before, they subscribe wholeheartedly to a number of bizarre conspiracy theories relating to the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the July 7th London bombings; most of which contend that these terrorist attacks were not the work of Islamic extremists but were in [their version of] ‘reality’ false flag attacks carried out by the US/UK/Israel to justify the ‘war on terror’ as a means of establishing some form of ‘Pax Americana/New World Order’.
Continue reading…

From the file marked ‘Is that a really stupid question or what?’, Iain Dale asks: Could This Video Do For Boris What ObamaGirl Did For Barack?

Only if cheesy and faintly homoerotic are vote winners, Iain.

It must be, what, more than twenty years ago, while working on a local campaign against Housing Action Trusts (the Tory version) that I attended a public meeting on the council estate I lived on at the time at which the invited guest speaker was Dave Nellist, who was, at the time, the Labour MP for Coventry South East.

If the the truth be told, I remember very little about the detail of the meeting and my memories of the campaign are, today, a little sketchy. We won the campaign, in the sense that the Conservative government eventually backed off and dropped the idea of trying sell off the estate to private developers, ran a couple of really good alternative comedy shows as fund-raisers, one of which gave a friend a nice line in personal anecdotes about Attila the Stockbroker, who did one of the gigs in return for a ticket to a West Brom game at the Hawthorns and a curry, and a write-around for support from Labour MPs netted us, amongst the usual typewritten letters on Commons stationary, a handwritten note of support from Tony Benn which included a fiver. Continue reading…

I know that things have been getting a little heated over the big pond, but I never expected the Obama campaign to resort to a bit of subliminal visual humour…

They do say anything goes in campaigns over there. (via)

There has been a somewhat curious development in the ongoing trial of ‘Dawkins vs God’, which is currently in its 77th week (or something) and still going strong, with the defence having called a number of unexpected witnesses, the latest of which being Seumas Milne:

Just as the French republican tradition of liberation came to be used as a stick to beat Muslims in a completely different social context from which it emerged, so the militant secularists who fetishise metaphysics and cosmology as a reason to declare the religious beyond the liberal pale are now ending up as apologists for western supremacism and violence. Like nationalism, religion can play a reactionary or a progressive role, and the struggle is now within it, not against it. For the future, it can be an ally of radical change.

Milne’s by no means the first unreconstructed Marxist to come out on the side of religion in this ongoing debate, Brendan O’Neill of Spiked (ie. Son of Living Marxism) tried the same thing last December to much the same general effect - no one got hurt but a lot of straw men got burned by way of collateral damage - although to be fair to O’Neill at least he doesn’t appear to quite so deluded as Milne, who appears to think that all secular atheists are either Martin Amis or Christopher Hitchens. Continue reading…

The ever vigilant Spyblog has spotted an ‘old friend’ lurking in the bowels of the government’s draft constitutional reform bill (pdf):

It looks as if we will have to again go through all the fuss and lobbying that we saw over the wretched Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006, the previous attempt by this Labour Government to neuter Parliament by Order of a Minister.

Continue reading…

Norm Geras appears to have succumbed to what has become an all too common form of modern paranoia.

Brian Keenan returns to Beirut:

Dahiya, the worst-hit area, had been exclusively Hezbollah territory - a no-go area for outsiders. When I drove into part of it with a Lebanese driver, I could feel waves of repulsion coming out of the rubble of half-demolished apartments. Some people were still living in makeshift accommodation. Their eyes followed our car with suspicion. “Let’s leave,” I said, unable to bear the unspoken accusation that I felt was being thrown at us.

Continue reading…

Sunny asked if I could cross post this investigative article from the Ministry, which examines the use of a private jet, owned by Lord Ashcroft, by Conservative ministers (specifically William Hague) and raises questions about whether these flights are being correctly reported to the Electoral Commission in line with current laws on the reporting of donations.

(The short answer to all this is that it appears that a grey area in law is being exploited to allow the value of these flights to be massively underreported and, as a bit of bonus, an FOIA request I made in January caught Hague making late registrations, more than a year late in one case.)

I’ve given it a bit of thought and I’m not going to cross post the full article - you can all follow the link and read it if you’ve a mind to, although I’d have a cup of coffee and a sandwich to hand as there’s really no short way to do investigative articles which rely on collating and presenting evidence. Instead of repeating myself over here I’ve decided, instead, to extend on from the information in that article and have a crack at demonstrating conclusively that something more than a bit iffy is going on. Continue reading…

Stop me if we’ve been through all this before…

Yes, its yet another article on the subject of the ‘gender pay gap’ on Comment is Free, this time marking the release a the TUC’s report predictably entitled ‘Closing the Gender Pay Gap‘ which is published on the eve of… guess what?

Yep, its the TUC Women’s Conference and this all comes down to nothing more than the usual ‘by the numbers’ exercise in which the existence of a gender pay gap and its cause - discrimination, naturally - is put forward as the unquestioned ‘given’ from which all else proceeds even though its blatantly obvious to anyone with the slightest inclination towards sceptical inquiry that there’s rather more to all this than its proponents seem either willing or capable of admitting to. Continue reading…

Regular readers will (should?) have noticed that one of LC’s contributors, Dave Hill, has written several times on the subject of the government’s growing predilection for recording just about anything it can find out about children in some sort of national database - the most recently announced monstrosity being a national ’school children’s’ database which promises to:

…enable students to build a lifelong record of their educational participation and achievements that can be accessed through the internet. The system would be password protected and would have two points of entry. Students could look up their full records and personal details by using one password. They could then give another password to employers to give them access to a restricted view of the information online.

Continue reading…

I’d like to start by congratulating Jeanette Arnold, who is seemingly, according to her CiF biography…

Chair of the Labour Group on the London Assembly and deputy chair of both the London Cultural Consortium and the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust.

…not to mention ‘the only black London Assembly Member’ - in the village? - for providing a timely and salutatory reminder of pretty much everything I’ve increasingly come to despise over the years about…

…Mmm, what should I call it? The’ race relations industry’, perhaps?
Continue reading…

Time to change the subject over here and what better way of doing it that using this piece of egregious weaselling by Britain’s clerical ‘elite’.

The Church of England’s archbishops have voiced “serious reservations” over the method and timing of the government’s plans to abolish the blasphemy laws and have asked to be reassured about the central position of the Christian religion in relation to the state and society in Britain.

In a joint letter to Hazel Blears, the communities secretary, the archbishops of Canterbury and York said that although the church had signalled for 20 years that the blasphemy laws could, in the right context, be abolished, they had “serious reservations about the wisdom of legislating at this moment”.

Really? And why, pray tell is that? Continue reading…

In my last post I indicated that there were two (hopefully final) issues I wished to address as part of this ongoing debate, one of which - the problem with certain strands of feminist argument - I tackled head on, seemingly in a slightly controversial manner.

The second issue, and one I considerably more importance, was that of why women actually choose to have abortions and, just as pointedly, why we appear know so little, in terms of published evidence, about the answer to this particular question, one which I would consider to be absolutely pivotal to any debate on this issue.

There has, so far I’ve been able to ascertain, been no detailed, published research conducted in the UK, into why women choose to have abortions, in the forty years since the Abortion Act 1967 passed in law - and I that statement does our social research community any disservice that then I’d be absolutely delighted both to issue a correction and to see copies of the report(s) that prove me wrong. Continue reading…

I ought to apologise in advance for this - yes it’s another ‘abortion’ post and yes, you can be forgiven for thinking that we’ve done this issue to death over the last couple of week but there are a couple more points that need addressing before we let this one go, but for (I’m sure) regular updates on the progress of the Human Tissue and Embryology Bill.

The first of these points, and the one to which I’ll confine this post, comes by way of response to this post, by Laura Woodhouse, over at the F-Word.

Oh I am fuming. Absolutely fuming. Just… this:

But “pro-choicers” aren’t short of poor arguments themselves. One goes a bit like this: “Male control over birth rights, over women’s bodies, has been a tool of patriarchal oppression for centuries.” True, but any reasonable ethics only allows remedial action against the oppressor. Most of them are long dead, none of them are foetal - so what’s the relevance to an abortion in 2006? Even if the medicalization of terminations in America involved (male) doctors claiming power over (female) midwives, this is irrelevant. History should only carefully be a guide to justice - and only if it suggests a just remedy. Thin-end-of-the-wedge arguments are usually weak, and this is no exception. DonaldSOh looky there: a man belittling my argument by telling me that male oppression is a thing of the past. How’s about getting yourself a female reproductive system and then trying that one out for size again?

Tell me, Donald, how can you possibly claim that male control of women’s bodies is a thing of the past, that it is irrelevant to abortion today? Are men dead, removing the world of all the sperm? Or have the nasty feminists gone and chopped all their dicks off? Are 80,000 women not dying every year because their male dominated governments refuse them access to safe, legal abortion? Can you spell Nicaragua?

Ah yes, context. Donald’s comments were, and are, written with a very specific context in mind, that of the UK, hence the comment ‘Everyone in the real world has an opinion, so why does nobody in political Britain want to discuss abortion in public?’. Continue reading…

It nice to see Kate Belgrave exhibiting her usual deft touch when it comes to polarising opinions, this time in relation to ‘Call Me Dave’ Cameron’s announcement that he’s be backing amendments which seek to reduce the upper time limit for legal abortions from 24 weeks gestation to 20 weeks gestation - I do enjoy a good, sparky debate.

Cameron’s got it wrong for several reasons, not least of which being that he appears to be taking Nadine Dorries seriously rather than treated her with the derision she so clearly merits; if this is any indication of Cameron’s view of science then I look forward to the day he appoints Mad Mel Phillips as his Chief Scientific Advisor, but until that happy day arises I think it best we take a look at Cameron’s stated reasoning, on this occasion, and explain precisely why it is entirely unsatisfactory.
Continue reading…

My riposte to Donal Blaney’s comments about the BBC’s Asian Network has prompted not only a lively debate in comments here but also a response from the man himself, one that is, by turns, both amusing and not just a little sad in the extent to which it serves to emphasise that even a university education (and a professional qualification in law) offers no certain antidote to deep-seated and wilful ignorance. On a more general note, Blaney’s further remarks, which I’ll outline in a moment and which, from experience, advance a worldview that is far from being uncommon in certain conservative circles, provide a useful example of just how far the Conservative Party still has to go in its efforts to rid itself of its reputation as ‘the nasty party’ when dealing with the issues of race, ethnicity and the demands of providing political leadership in a culturally pluralistic society.

Let’s start at the beginning with Blaney’s opening gambit:

One of things that I find so frustrating about blogging is dealing with people who are either stupid, venal or willfully choose to misrepresent your views. More often than not, these people post anonymously and decide to tar their opponents with the epithet “racist”, “homophobic” or “fascist” in the hope that by using such a description, debate is closed down and they win by default. Such is their intellectual insecurity that they will not engage in honest debate and instead they resort to infantile abuse in an attempt to stifle debate. I cannot help but wonder whether these people would not prefer to live in a police state where only certain views (theirs) are allowed to be held because the venom and vitriol that flows when you dare to stand up to them is quite astonishing. It says a hell of a lot about them and their upbringing.

Oh dear, it seems that Donal’s ‘projecting’ already and he’s barely out of traps with his argument. Continue reading…

There is a fine line between making a legitimate critique of multiculturalism and using the semblance of such a critique as a means of pandering to racist attitudes and promoting a manifestly fascist vision of society…

…and Tory blogger, not to mention Guido Fawkes’ erstwhile ‘libel lawyer’, Donal Blaney, clearly has no idea where that line is:
Continue reading…

At the risk of sounding like Tim Worstall or Chris Dillow, this article on Comment is Free (by Yvonne Roberts) caught my eye this morning because of its poor reasoning:

Once upon a time, women born in the 1940s-1960s believed that with effort life would be better for their daughters and granddaughters - and, therefore, for their men too. Instead, in the 21st century, the glass is stuck at half empty and there doesn’t seem much hope of change as long as society places such a high value on making money while the value of care comes at rock bottom rates.

New research (pdf) by Kate Purcell and Peter Elias of the University of Warwick uses data from a longitudinal study of more than 3,000 graduates who gained their first degree in 1995. They found that young women in their first full time job are already earning 11% less than their male peers. Three years later, it’s 15% and then 19% by 2002/2003. That’s one hell of a chasm.

Well it is a bit of a gap, but the important question is why? Continue reading…

Never let it be said that persistence goes unrewarded because, if only in the interests of a quieter life, I’ve taken the time to read through the Centre for Social Cohesion/Civitas report on ‘honour crimes’ - Crimes of the Community - and come to the conclusion that there are a few observations worth making.

Whether they’re quite same observations that some might want to be voiced… well that remains to be seen.

Let’s get the first question out of the way - is the report actually worth reading? Continue reading…