Apologies to Mark Lynas, George Monbiot, Ed Miliband and all my other green friends, but I have decided I no longer believe in man-made global warming. This is not because of fresh insight into the science, which I never understood in the first place. Nor is it because of the dodgy emails recently discovered at the University of East Anglia, which I don't understand either. It is because the deniers' theory is more attractive than that of the warmists. We are talking here of philosophical belief systems - as a judge recently ruled in the case of a man sacked for being too zealous a green - and I really want to share the deniers' beliefs.
Their theory goes like this. When the Berlin Wall fell, we lefties were in trouble. Our project to destroy capitalism and take world control had failed. So we invented global warming and, while it took nearly 70 years for the Communist Manifesto to be realised as the Russian Revolution, this time we got to the Copenhagen conference in a mere 20 years. We've got nearly all climate scientists onside, a high proportion of the world's politicians, including Tory leaders (who, let's face it, never used to be keen on a workers' dictatorship), and even some big oil companies. To the Copenhagen Airport, with Gordon Brown cast in the Lenin role, is already in press. This time, comrades, it really is world revolution, and no nonsense about carbon reductions in one country. The wicked capitalists, despite their money, have been thoroughly outwitted.
I feel immense excitement and pride. Far better to celebrate the coming of our socialist utopia than to continue fretting about polar bears and coral reefs.
Number crunching
Even before the latest league tables for primary schools were published, the Daily Telegraph announced that more than one in four pupils had "failed" to show "a decent grasp" of English and maths and to achieve "the standard expected for their age". I don't wish to make excuses for the schools - which could do better, I'm sure - but the Telegraph and other papers misreport these results every year.
The "more than one in four" refers to 11-year-olds who, in their Sats, didn't get to level 4 in both subjects. But the committee that designed the levels more than 20 years ago referred to level 4 not as a "standard", but as "the average expectation for an age 11 pupil", a subtle but important distinction. The committee wasn't very explicit about what it meant by "average", but it's reasonable to assume it intended level 4 to cover about 60 per cent of children in each subject, with 20 per cent falling below. And this year's results show that those below level 4 totalled 20 per cent in English and 21 per cent in maths.
Disappointing, perhaps, for a government that wants a dramatic pre-election success story. But hardly a scandal.
Ask a simple question
A couple of things about the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq invasion keep nagging at me. First, the committee, wanting to hear from "those mostaffected by the conflict", has held meetings in London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Bristol and Belfast with relatives of British soldiers killed or missing. The overwhelming majority of those "affected", however, live in Iraq, or used to until the invasion and its consequences sent them into exile. Will the committee be visiting the Middle East? If not, why not?
Second, I have not yet heard the committee ask one simple question: If Tony Blair and others were convinced Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, how did they weigh the risks of provoking immediate use against the benefits of invasion? And what measures were taken to protect against those risks? Unless London and Washington made some such assessment, it is hard to accept they seriously believed in the threat.
Blair on trial
Meanwhile, in the view I expressed on the inquiry last week, I find an unexpectedly militant ally in General Sir Michael Rose. The inquiry has no point, he writes in the Daily Mail, unless it apportions blame and becomes "the first step in a judicial process" which could lead to Blair'sindictment for war crimes.
Rose quotes the example of Admiral John Byng who, after losing Minorca to the French, was court-martialled and shot. The precedent seems a good one, since Byng was cleared of cowardice (just as Blair might be cleared of lying), but found guilty of not "doing his utmost". This seems the right charge against Blair for not checking the accuracy of the intelligence.
Unfortunately, capital punishment (like torture) is no longer on the UK statute book. Perhaps extraordinary rendition could be arranged and Blair transferred to, say, Uzbekistan, where the sentence could be carried out without fuss.
Reading matters
A friend was startled when, on applying to use his local lending library, he received a form asking for his ethnic origin. I suppose such monitoring is now routine and I accept that a check on whether all sections of the community use the services they're paying for has some value. But what worried my friend was a statement that "this information may be shared with the police" in the event of "defaulting", which presumably means failing to return borrowed books, which I hadn't previously realised was a police matter.
It is probably paranoid to think the information might be used for other purposes. Nevertheless, as my friend points out, one can't help wondering if a little bell tinkles at the anti-terrorism branch whenever somebody who has ticked the "Asian or British Asian" box borrows a book with "chemical fertiliser" or "Islam" in the title.
Peter Wilby was editor of the New Statesman from 1998-2005
