Paul Flynn - Read My Day

Friends across the water

As one of Wales greatest friends, Sean MacReamoinn, once said to spend St Patrick’s Day in a cemetery seems like the cruellest of Irish jokes!

For the last 8 years the Celtic Cross Memorial (made from Irish limestone and Welsh stone) at Cathays  Cemetery in Cardiff has been a focus point on St Patrick’s Day to remember those who died in the Irish Famine 1845-1849.

Over one million people died and over a million people emigrated from Ireland. Many of the immigrants flocked to Cardiff, the Valleys and Newport.

In April 1847 the Monmouthshire Merlin reported: “A poor Irish woman was this week begging from door to door with the corpse of an infant in her arms. Several cargoes of Irish people have been sent back to Ireland from this port during the week. Hundreds yet remain in a starving condition; and Hill Street, in which the Relieving Officer resides, is daily crowded by whole families, who present the appearance in general, of famished and diseased men, women and children.”

The Memorial is also a tribute to all Irish people and their descendants who have lived and died in Wales.

A St Patrick’s Day message from the Irish President was read out by the Irish Counsel General in Wales. David Burns, a son of Newtown, Cardiff’s former Little Ireland, sang an emotional rendition of Hard Times – a reminder of the hardship faced by Irish immigrants in America in the 19th Century.

Cor Cochion Caerdydd were impressive singing the Irish Anthem (in Gaelic!) as well as a rousing rendition of ‘Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau’ after the laying of the wreaths.

The commemoration was also an opportunity to reflect on the famines which are happening around the world today. Last year the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation warned that 11 million people in Somalia, Kenya, Djibouti and Ethiopia were in danger of starvation due to the combination of severe drought and military conflicts.

It was good to meet so many people keen to remember the terrible suffering of the victims of the famine and a chance to celebrate the close friendship between Wales and Ireland.

Hands Across the Sea

The gentle hand of

Understanding

Across the water

The story of our mission;

Two hands over two sands

Sharing a common kinship

Two hands clutching quietly

And two hands

Keeping two lands in safety,

The two holding the same truth

On the same horizon

Come what may.

Mererid Hopwood

Bully Brown or Feeding Frenzy?

So Chancellor Gordon Brown is Stalinist. Stalin murdered four million people. He was a foul, ignorant psychopath. In the 20 years that I have known Gordon this side of his personality has never been obvious. If mass murder is a major interest of his, I think he might have mentioned it.

He spoke at the private meeting of the Labour Party  Parliamentray group last  night. He was pugnacious and vastly optimistic. If I had known he is a Stalinist, I would have thought twice about asking him a challenging question. "It's great that the Old Labour policy of restoring the link between pensions and earnings is now New Labour policy, but as there will be £75 billion surplus in the National Insurance Fund (NIF)in 2012, a big increase on the £38billion now, isn't there a case for  bringing forward the date for restoring the link."

The answer was a bit vague and referred to future uncertainty and a mystery reference to a fall in the NIF fund. A fortnight ago I have a reply from one of his Treasury ministers confirming the healthy state of the NIF.

I slept well last night. There was no knock on my door in the small hours. No one dragged me off to a Gulag. Perhaps the Sir Humphrey who dubbed Brown a Stalinist was exaggerating a mite.

Does BB mean Barking Buckingham?

The ineffable Mike Buckingham is advocating that children should be taught how to use weapons – including revolvers. He chastised John Griffiths and me for allegedly campaigning to ban BB weapons. I have sent the following letter to the editor.

Dear Sir,
On the off chance that someone may believe the fantasises in Mike Buckingham's column, may I make clear that am not campaigning on BB guns. The Argus is.
After persistent calls from an Argus reporter I said your campaign sounded
sensible.  Rarely do I support newspaper campaigns because they are more about increasing circulation than seeking reforms. Newspapers exaggerate the influence of their campaigns, congratulating themselves excessively on ones that go right and forgetting those that fail. At a time of anxiety on guns, Buckingham’s plea for children to be trained to use revolvers is a contemptible and stupid piece of attention seeking. Ban BB guns on one page: use real guns on the next?  Get your act together, Argus.

How I saved Jamie Owen’s career.

Life is full of surprises. On Friday I had the pleasure of making a half an hour speech to a conference of Drug workers in Cardiff. The event celebrated the 21st anniversary of a practical scheme for aiding drugs addict run by the wonderful Alan Emlyn Jones and his daughters Rhoda and Lucy.
I was introduced by broadcaster Jamie Owen. He thanked for saving his career. Without me, he would never have reached the dizzy height of reading the television news nightly on BBC Wales. I was baffled.
Years ago he was trying to earn his spurs as a television reporter on BBC Wales. It was not going well. He was on a final warning that he had to turn in an interesting report on an assignment in Brecon or he was finished. His task was to find vox pop’s on Chlamydia. This was a formidable challenge. He got the ‘shove-off’ of blank incredulity from those that he asked for their opinions on the threat from this disease. One spark of hope was a spirited reaction from one pensioner. ‘Chlamydia ?  Do I know about Chlamydia? Of course I do. It’s a little village between Mardy and Porth.’
Desolate he rang the producer to confess that he has no ‘vox pops’ worth broadcasting. But his career was not over. ‘Don’t worry” said the producer "we’ve filled that slot. Paul Flynn is coming is to do an interview. He’ll have something interesting to say.”

My life has not been entirely in vain.

Wild Wayne Hits out

Well it was only an energetic forceful two-fingered prod - but it was violence.

The peace loving Caerphilly MP Wayne David had a spasm of Trident rage on live TV. It was only finger wagging when we had an exchange of views on the AM/PM programme on Wednesday. The thump came afterwards. For a fleeting moment, I contemplated reeling back in football style, rolling over squealing in pain, pathetically whimpering about assault on a PPC (poor pathetic cripple).

What enraged him was not his own below par defence of the decision to adorn Tony's legacy but his impression that I had ratted on a deal not to interrupt him.  In the seconds before the live interview, it was agreed I would answer the first questions and Wayne the second. 'I won't interrupt you, don't interrupt me" he suggested. I did not reply. This is probably the latest wheeze from the Uber-Blairite interview technique handbook.

My case was on the line of my Early Day Motion - a sinful waste of money. In a few years time , we will explain that there is no extra money left for schools and hospitals because we have squandered it on Trident and the Olympics...making the world a more dangerous place by inciting North Korea, Iran and other other small nations to beef up their nuclear plans.. a virility symbol to solve the threat of the past cold war and irrelevant for the problems of today and tomorrow, global warming, the divide  of the Muslim - Christian worlds and the likely conflicts between the  poor world where millions die of starvation and the  rich world where millions die  of  obesity.

Wayne exploded  into a personal tirade about my 'always been a unilateralist' 'a disgrace for voting against Labour party policy  This was a lunacy too far. By hook but mostly by crook, The Labour Party has denied any debate or vote on Trident.  Gordon Prentice MP has pleaded with the party to do this and powerfully expressed his anger later in the debate. Interrupting Wayne to expose this giant calumny was a positive duty. I said that most Labour members oppose Trident but they have been gagged. A little bird told me afterwards that only two members of Wayne's local party had favoured Trident. Strange Wayne did not mention this.

It made a lively bit of television. Dragon's Eye kindly replayed it on Friday. Perhaps they will do it again. Meanwhile, I will raise a glass this weekend to Welsh MPs Dai Harvard and Chris Rhuane  who voted for  their consciences, not their careers.Wild Wayne hits out

Apologise for Junk TV

An appalling Channel Four programme parading as scientific comment was dangerous propaganda. The following Early day Motion will appear of the Commons Order paper from 14th March. See George Monbiot article in the Guardian - below.

On an Early Day

Channel Four and Science

That this House scorns the junk science of Channel Four’s “Great Global Warming Swindle”, which presented previously discredited claims as facts; notes that the work of Dr Eigil Friis-Christenson has been repeatedly exposed as mistaken and incompetent and that the oceanographer Carl Wunsh has confirmed that the programme misrepresented his views: calls on Channel Four to apologise for misleading their viewers and urges them to act responsibly in future by presenting issues of prime importance in a balanced scientific manner which allow listeners to reach an intelligent judgement.

Don't let truth stand in the way of a red-hot debunking of climate change

The science might be bunkum, the research discredited. But all that counts for Channel 4 is generating controversy

George Monbiot Tuesday March 13, 2007 The Guardian

Were it not for dissent, science, like politics, would have stayed in the dark ages. All the great heroes of the discipline - Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein - took tremendous risks in confronting mainstream opinion. Today's crank has often proved to be tomorrow's visionary.

But the syllogism does not apply. Being a crank does not automatically make you a visionary. There is little prospect, for example, that Dr Mantombazana Tshabalala-Msimang, the South African health minister who has claimed Aids can be treated with garlic, lemon and beetroot, will be hailed as a genius. But the point is often confused. Professor David Bellamy, for example, while making the incorrect claim that wind farms do not have "any measurable effect" on total emissions of carbon dioxide, has compared himself to Galileo.

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The problem with The Great Global Warming Swindle, which caused a sensation when it was broadcast on Channel 4 last week, is that to make its case it relies not on future visionaries, but on people whose findings have already been proved wrong. The implications could not be graver. Just as the government launches its climate change bill and Gordon Brown and David Cameron start jostling to establish their green credentials, thousands have been misled into believing there is no problem to address.

The film's main contention is that the current increase in global temperatures is caused not by rising greenhouse gases, but by changes in the activity of the sun. It is built around the discovery in 1991 by the Danish atmospheric physicist Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen that recent temperature variations on Earth are in "strikingly good agreement" with the length of the cycle of sunspots.

Unfortunately, he found nothing of the kind. A paper published in the journal Eos in 2004 reveals that the "agreement" was the result of "incorrect handling of the physical data". The real data for recent years show the opposite: that the length of the sunspot cycle has declined, while temperatures have risen. When this error was exposed, Friis-Christensen and his co-author published a new paper, purporting to produce similar results. But this too turned out to be an artefact of mistakes - in this case in their arithmetic.

So Friis-Christensen and another author developed yet another means of demonstrating that the sun is responsible, claiming to have discovered a remarkable agreement between cosmic radiation influenced by the sun and global cloud cover. This is the mechanism the film proposes for global warming. But, yet again, the method was exposed as faulty. They had been using satellite data which did not in fact measure global cloud cover. A paper in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics shows that, when the right data are used, a correlation is not found.

So the hypothesis changed again. Without acknowledging that his previous paper was wrong, Friis-Christensen's co-author, Henrik Svensmark, declared there was a correlation - not with total cloud cover but with "low cloud cover". This, too, turned out to be incorrect. Then, last year, Svensmark published a paper purporting to show cosmic rays could form tiny particles in the atmosphere. Accompanying the paper was a press release which went way beyond the findings reported in the paper, claiming it showed that both past and current climate events are the result of cosmic rays.

As Dr Gavin Schmidt of Nasa has shown on www.realclimate.org, five missing steps would have to be taken to justify the wild claims in the press release. "We've often criticised press releases that we felt gave misleading impressions of the underlying work," Schmidt says, "but this example is by far the most blatant extrapolation beyond reasonableness that we have seen." None of this seems to have troubled the programme makers, who report the cosmic ray theory as if it trounces all competing explanations.

The film also maintains that manmade global warming is disproved by conflicting temperature data. Professor John Christy speaks about the discrepancy he discovered between temperatures at the Earth's surface and temperatures in the troposphere (or lower atmosphere). But the programme fails to mention that in 2005 his data were proved wrong, by three papers in Science magazine.

Christy himself admitted last year that he was mistaken. He was one of the authors of a paper which states the opposite of what he says in the film. "Previously reported discrepancies between the amount of warming near the surface and higher in the atmosphere have been used to challenge the reliability of climate models and the reality of human-induced global warming. Specifically, surface data showed substantial global-average warming, while early versions of satellite and radiosonde data showed little or no warming above the surface. This significant discrepancy no longer exists because errors in the satellite and radiosonde data have been identified and corrected."

Until recently, when found to be wrong, scientists went back to their labs to start again. Now, emboldened by the denial industry, some of them, like the film-makers, shriek "censorship!". This is the best example of manufactured victimhood I have come across. If you demonstrate someone is wrong, you are now deemed to be silencing him.

But there is one scientist in the film whose work has not been debunked: the oceanographer Carl Wunsch. He appears to support the idea that increasing carbon dioxide is not responsible for rising global temperatures. Wunsch says he was "completely misrepresented" by the programme, and "totally misled" by the people who made it.

This is a familiar story to those who have followed the career of the director Martin Durkin. In 1998, the Independent Television Commission found that, when making a similar series, he had "misled" his interviewees about "the content and purpose of the programmes". Their views had been "distorted through selective editing". Channel 4 had to make a prime-time apology.

Cherry-pick your results, choose work which is already discredited, and anything and everything becomes true. The twin towers were brought down by controlled explosions; MMR injections cause autism; homeopathy works; black people are less intelligent than white people; species came about through intelligent design. You can find lines of evidence which appear to support all these contentions, and, in most cases, professors who will speak up in their favour. But this does not mean that any of them are correct. You can sustain a belief in these propositions only by ignoring the overwhelming body of contradictory data. To form a balanced, scientific view, you have to consider all the evidence, on both sides of the question.

But for the film's commissioners, all that counts is the sensation. Channel 4 has always had a problem with science. No one in its science unit appears to understand the difference between a peer-reviewed paper and a clipping from the Daily Mail. It keeps commissioning people whose claims have been discredited - such as Durkin. But its failure to understand the scientific process just makes the job of whipping up a storm that much easier. The less true a programme is, the greater the controversy.

Dying Bird Becomes Phoenix

‘Dying’ English bird becomes Welsh Phoenix

Michael Fallon MP for Sevenoaks described the Office of National Statistics as a dying bird in Commons debate on the Statistics Bill in the Commons on Tuesday (13th March). The bill was supported by all parties and will give the National Statistician and the new Statistics Board more independence than ever before.

Michael Fallon I want to say a quick word about the Office for National Statistics. There is a danger that, while we have admired the plumage, we are forgetting the dying bird. It is clear to me—and it is certainly clear to the Statistics Commission—that the ONS is under huge pressure at the moment as a result of the reorganization required by the Bill, the imposition of efficiency targets, the relocation to Newport and the preparatory work for the 2011 census, including this year’s pilot schemes.

Paul Flynn (Newport, West) (Lab): May I try to expunge from the minds of Members the dreary picture created by the hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Mr. Fallon) of, for goodness’ sake, a dying bird? In Newport, we see the ONS as a phoenix with iridescent plumage that is about to soar to new heights of independence and success.

Like my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright), we have reservations about the Bill. I think that many of us would be persuaded by the arguments made by our own side and by the Opposition parties and would like to see the Bill improved. But this is the nature of Government. They have decided to give up some power. It is a rare event in politics for any Government to decide not to hang on to power. It is difficult to prise their hands off the lever of power. It has to be done finger by finger, but it is happening.

Andrew Dilnot said that this is the most important Bill in this Parliament and he is probably right. It is on a par with the independence of the Bank of England. I hark back to many years ago when some statisticians came to see me as their constituency MP in the late ’80s to complain because the then Conservative Government were transferring Government control of statistics from the Cabinet Office to the Treasury. The statisticians said that they were worried about what would happen to the quality of their work, given that the transfer was being made to the Department that had the greatest vested interest in fiddling the figures. It is wonderful to see that 10 years in opposition has radicalised the Conservative party to such an extent that it is pleading for more independence. ENDS

Tory Boy Exposed

Tory Boy Revealed

A Video of this exchange is on Newport TV.

Tory Welsh spokeswoman Cheryl Gillan came a cropper in the Commons St David's day debate when she chose a Newport Community Councillor as an example to emulate as 'a good man -in touch with the people.'. Parts of his 'MySpace " profile were read to the House.

Cheryl Gillan: We are working for a better future for everyone. As Chris Chapman, who at 19 is our youngest community councillor, in Rogerstone, put it:

“The more I read, the more I was drawn to the...Conservative party—freedom of enterprise, freedom of choice, and freedom of opportunity for all members of society, regardless of their background.”

That is the Conservative message—one of which I think that St. David would have approved.


Paul Flynn: I believe that Mr. Chapman achieved his high office on the community council having been co-opted on to it. I urge the hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan) to read the MySpace contribution by Mr. Chapman, as I did recently. Perhaps she could put it into her manifesto.
Mr. Murphy: Yes; perhaps it would be a good idea for the hon. Lady to choose another example next time.

Mrs. Gillan: This sounds like a case of young versus old. I think that it is just jealousy because he is so young at 19, and obviously very much in touch with people. He is a good man.

Paul Flynn (Newport, West) (Lab): Towards the end of her speech, the hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan) was unwise enough to mention a constituent of mine, whom she quoted as an exemplar of a politician in Wales, the young man whom all others should follow. She thought he was elected, but he is a nominated member of council. I think it is my duty to inform the House a little more about this person. I would not mention him normally. I know that his inspiration in politics is the hon. Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies), so there is a certain poverty of ambition there.

As the young man has been cited as typifying the brave new world that the Conservatives are offering, we should know a little more about him. He has been kind enough to inform us about himself on the splendid
MySpace website. He is remarkably frank. He gives a potted history of his life. He states:

“I’ve evolved from a little whining pussy to a thrill seeking wreckhead to a Conservative who still loves the wreckups.”

On 16 June 2006 he was asked whether he had taken drugs that month. He said yes. The next question was:

“Have you stolen anything this month?”

and he said yes. Asked why he wanted to go into politics, he said that he wanted it for the power, the flash suits and the money. —

David T.C. Davies rose—

Paul Flynn: I am delighted to give way to this young man’s hero.

David T.C. Davies: I have never seen the website and I do not really know the gentleman myself. I presume that there could be something ironic in what he says: if he is after power, money and flash suits, he will not want to follow me on to the Back Benches, as he will not see much of any of those from where I am sitting.

Paul Flynn: It is painful for me to recall my own experience when I was first elected. The first school I visited was Bassaleg school in my constituency. I was discussing politics in the sixth form and I recall one particularly difficult person—he might have something in common with the young man I have mentioned—who was a bit of a troublemaker in the class. I advised him, in my generous way of helping young people, that the best thing to do in life was to take up politics. That young member is in his place opposite as the hon. Member for Monmouth, so I regard that as the worst political mistake of my life.
In order to convey a somewhat brighter picture of Newport. I shall mention three other young people in my constituency—Richard Whittaker, Adam Brustad and James Sadler, who will be performing in the Meze Lounge tonight a newly written song called “Land of my Mothers”, which is part of their political agenda. They have wriiten song called, “Lebanon is Burning” and another one based on “Animal Farm”. Those are three splendid idealistic young men, marvellous examples of their generation, who believe in things other than what this gentleman I have quoted believes in—drugs, theft, wreck-ups, smart suits and making money. There is an optimistic side, and if people want an exemplar of what young people can achieve, they would be better off in the Meze Lounge in Newport tonight, listening to the first performance of “Land of my Mothers”.