About the euro, and global warming, it turns out the 'thought criminals' were ... - Telegraph.co.uk

Similarly, as we watch the euro undergoing its catastrophe, for precisely the reasons that the dissenters foretold, it is fascinating to see the disarray in which this leaves the cheerleaders for the cause. We recall the days when the BBC obsessively promoted calls for Britain to join the euro; when Evan Davis, in 2002, was telling us how the euro had made Greece financially “stable”; or when Stephanie Flanders, in 2008, derided those who thought the euro would “crash and burn” and proclaimed that its role as a global currency was now “secure”.

It has been instructive to see Robert Peston admitting that the euro’s problem was that it was “a political project in economic clothing”. That was precisely why some of us, back in the 1990s, were trying to point out that it was doomed to fail.

But how all those commanding heights can now be brought back to any intelligent understanding of the world is another matter. Boris Johnson calls for a Tory director-general to knock sense into the BBC. Perhaps he has forgetten that it already has a Tory chairman â€" that tireless Europhile and global warming zealot, Lord (Chris) Patten.

As a footnote, to illustrate how trivial so much BBC coverage has become, its political correspondent Nick Robinson last week reported David Cameron’s claim to be “winning the debate on the Government deficit”. But I do not recall the BBC telling us that, in March, our public-sector borrowing hit a record £18.2 billion, or £4.5 billion every week. It is not part of the BBC’s “anti-cuts” agenda to tell us that public spending is still hurtling upwards, any more than it tells us about so many other things which do not accord with its deeply skewed world-view.

We do not pay the BBC to have a “line” on pretty well everything it covers, but that is what we get. I fear we can only reciprocate the contempt in which it appears to hold us.

A fatuous metric plea from a 'dead sheep’

Front-runner for fatuous remark of the week was the claim by Lord (Geoffrey) Howe of Aberavon, in the Lords, that “the most glaring omission” from the Queen’s Speech was a pledge that, before the Olympics, Britain will scrap miles, pints and ounces. This, according to the former foreign secretary, would save foreign visitors from the “deeply confusing shambles” of our weights and measures, which “puts us all to shame”.

As a fanatical Europhile, Lord Howe should know that we retain miles and pints under EU law. The revision of EU directive 80/181 which would be needed to scrap them is scarcely something his friends in Brussels could rush through in a matter of weeks.

As patron of a lobby group, the UK Metric Association, Lord Howe does pop up with this plea whenever he can, though never quite so absurdly as on this occasion. The real reason why our weight and measures have ended up in what he sees as a shambles is that, ever since 1965, the campaign to make Britain exclusively metric has consistently relied on stealth, concealment and downright lies, its supporters always always being terrified of putting the issue to a proper debate and parliamentary vote. One such blatant untruth, that we embarked on metrication to meet the demands of British industry, still has pride of place on his lobby group’s website.

What an odd part Lord Howe has played in our national life these past 40 years. Apart from the feline dagger-thrust which set off the downfall of Mrs Thatcher, his proudest achievement was that device in the 1972 European Communities Act which allows EU law to be put into UK law by ministerial fiat, without any need for parliamentary debate â€" perhaps the greatest blow to parliamentary democracy in our history.

Years ago I was asked to speak at the annual dinner of his former constituency association. I was not wholly kind about the supreme object of his devotion, the EU, and when questions were invited, he stood up and rambled on for 10 minutes so inchoately that few of us had any clue what point he was trying to make. Several present came up afterwards to apologise for their former member’s rudeness. I told them that I at last appreciated the force of Denis Healey’s immortal comment, that being attacked by Geoffrey Howe was like being “savaged by a dead sheep”.

Child snatching is now big business

There has been publicity from all the usual quarters, led inevitably by the BBC, that we are in the middle of something called National Fostering Fortnight. So many children are now being taken into care â€" 24,000 last year in England alone â€" that there is a critical shortage of foster carers to look after them. According to Fostering Network, a new foster home is needed “every 22 minutes”.

A point that is rarely heard, however â€" although it may help explain why the seizing of children is at a record level, care applications having doubled in just four years â€" is that fostering has become a very lucrative industry. Foster carers themselves can be paid £400 a week or more for each child they take in, and the companies which employ many of them (almost invariably run by former social workers) are hugely profitable. Last year, Rothschilds organised the sale of the National Fostering Agency, the second largest such company, private equity and pension funds bid up the initial bid price of £80 million to £135 million.

According to a recent Policy Exchange report, the average cost of keeping each of the 65,000 children now in care in England is £37,000, an annual bill of £2.4 billlion. This is quite apart from the other costs of our “child care” system, such as the lavish fees paid to “experts” and the legal profession.

So “child protection” is very big business, one of its main benefciaries being Barnardo’s, the fostering and adoption agency, with an annual turnover of nearly quarter of a billion pounds. But whether this is likely to raise any questions in the mind of our children’s minister, Tim Loughton, is another matter. Last July he appointed, as his chief adviser on adoption, Martin Narey â€" who was CEO, from 2005 to 2011, of Barnardo’s. In December, Mr Narey did his best to disabuse MPs of the thought that any children were being taken from their families unnecessarily. But for many of us, not least the families involved, this thought has become rather pressing.