Daily Mail, August 19 2002

When the GCSE results come out on Thursday it is highly likely that, once again, girls will have beaten the boys at the examination game.

For years now, girls have been taking the lion’s share of success in public examinations. Last week’s A and AS-level results were further evidence of the trend. Girls out-performed boys in almost every subject.

They took nearly 45,000 more subjects than boys at A-level, and nearly 90,000 more at AS level. And in both exams, they achieved a higher proportion than boys of A grades in almost every subject.

Of course, it is good news that girls are doing so well. But it is worrying that boys seem to be slipping further and further behind. For this trend isn’t confined to the high-fliers passing exams. At the bottom of the system, the drop-out rate among boys is causing serious concern.

The reason is nothing other than the wholesale feminisation of the education system. In GCSEs, A-levels and – increasingly -- degree courses too, coursework accounts for an ever greater proportion of the final marks. This in itself favours girls.

Boys tend to like ‘sudden death’ exams. They like taking risks, pitting their wits against the odds. Girls don’t. They prefer to work steadily and conscientiously without gambling against memory, the clock and questions from hell. Which is why at degree level boys have until now achieved more firsts and thirds than girls who tend to get safe, if dull, seconds.

Nor is it surprising that girls are taking more exams than boys. For the curriculum has expanded in ways that suit girls rather than boys, with a proliferation of discursive, ‘soft’ subjects like general studies, sociology or drama.

The evidence suggests that boys and girls learn in different ways. Research has found that girls gain more satisfaction than boys from understanding the work they are doing. Boys are more ‘ego-related’, gaining more satisfaction from competing with each other.

Nevertheless, education policy denies such differences and imposes instead an agenda of ‘equality’. For at least twenty years, feminist teachers have made a determined attempt to change a school system they held to be hostile to girls. The assumption was that since boys tended to opt for science, maths and technology and girls for languages, humanities and domestic science, this proved discrimination against girls.

It never occurred to them that this pattern had evolved because each sex naturally gravitated towards these subjects. The view was that boys and girls were identical, and these differences therefore had to be corrected.

The result was active discrimination against boys. As James Tooley comments in his book, the Miseducation of Women, girls began to be privileged over boys at school. Teachers gave priority to girls in classroom discussions, playground space and sporting fixtures.

The ‘masculine content and orientation’ of textbooks, topics and tests was obliterated in favour of female references; teachers were forbidden to use ‘sexist’ language; and male teachers’ bonding with boys through jokes or shared allusions to football had to be reprogrammed out of the system.

During the 1980s, moreover, one project followed another to get girls into studying maths, science and technology.

But it wasn’t sexism that was keeping girls away from such subjects – it was their choice. For time and again it has been shown that wherever they have the opportunity, boys gravitate naturally to mechanical sciences and girls to discursive or domestic subjects.

Clearly, if any prejudice existed it would be right to address it. But this was not prejudice. It was rather that boys and girls behaved in different ways. This was never an issue in single sex schools. But once co-educational schools became the norm, the differences became striking – and feminism assumed that to be different meant inferiority and discrimination.

This was not only wrong in itself. It was also disastrous for boys. For rather than men being masters of the universe as feminists contend, their sense of what they are is fragile. Unless their particular male characteristics are acknowledged and supported, they start sliding downhill and some go off the rails altogether.

In school, boys find girls intrinsically threatening, a fact generally masked at the top of the ability range but in often violent evidence at the bottom. Girls mature earlier than boys, so unless boys are exceptionally able they tend to be outclassed by girls. And if they don’t dominate, they tend to give up or drop out.

Because doing well in school involves no manual or physical activity but requires instead sitting quietly, reading and writing, the most vulnerable boys view learning as feminine and uncool. And being feminine is their deepest dread.

This is because men’s sense of their masculinity is far more vulnerable than women’s sense of their femininity. Biology reminds girls what they are every month. Boys, by contrast, need to prove their identity and role, particularly among those with poor prospects and few confidence-boosting attributes.

But rather than celebrating male characteristics, society tells boys at every turn that its values have turned female, and that if boys want any place in it they must do so too.

Thus, male characteristics are derided. Warfare is said to be obscene. Authority is oppressive. Chivalry is a joke. Competition creates losers – taboo in education, where everyone must be a winner. Stoicism is despised; instead, tears must flow and hearts be worn on sleeves at all times.

Men, however, define masculinity by being different from women. So this unisex culture has resulted in two things. More men are driven into stereotypical macho behaviour to prove their masculinity. And they simply withdraw from any sphere which becomes identified with women.

Because girls’ success is now such a regular feature of the league table carnival, disadvantaged boys identify school failure with being macho and worthwhile. So more give up or drop out.

It is not good for either sex to be placed at a disadvantage by the other. The aim must be to make opportunity as fair as possible. But that cannot be done by confusing equality of opportunity with identical experience, the fundamental error of our age.

Boys and girls are different. It would be far better if they were educated in single-sex schools. Neither sex is well served by co-education. Neither sex benefits from coercion by the educational gender police.

Many girls resent the pressure to do science subjects. Feminists fear that if girls don’t study science in the same number as boys, they won’t have the same career opportunities later on. But girls make different choices from boys because they have different impulses and interests and calculate their life prospects very differently.

This is not an argument against girls studying engineering, or women becoming train drivers or particle physicists. It is rather that the system has become unfair and discriminatory against boys – the outcome of a philosophy that, despite its feminist credentials, does not allow girls the freedom to make their own choices, for fear that the dogma of unisex behaviour will be exposed once and for all as a big lie.

Daily Mail, August 12 2002

Well, golly gosh and my oh my, it’s been raining a lot in Britain. So what’s new about the great British holiday washout?

Many of us have less than fond memories -- going back decades -- of shivering under umbrellas in August as the rain bucketed down in Broadstairs or the heavens opened in Hove.

Last week served up torrential rain, flash floods and the odd tornado. A Great British tradition, you might think. But oh no, not a bit of it for the Green lobby, for whom the summer downpours are instead further proof that the end is nigh for the planet.

Just as very hot summers are held to be evidence of global warming, so washed-out summers are held to be evidence of – yes, global warming. Indeed, every single meteorological or climatological deviation from what Greens claim to be the norm is said to furnish conclusive evidence that the planet is about to fry and western man is to blame.

But the truth is that these environmental doom-mongers generate more hot air than is to be found in the upper atmosphere. Their predictions are all demonstrable nonsense, and have much more to do with global politics than warming.

Take, for example, the claim that the Arctic is melting away before our very eyes, parroted by environment minister Michael Meacher. He has now been triumphantly restored to the vast British contingent attending this month’s Johannesburg Earth Summit on ‘sustainable development’ -- the notion that technological change must not harm the natural environment -- after the outcry over his summary removal.

Backing up his contention that ‘the glaciers are melting extraordinarily fast’ through climate change, Greenpeace released last week startling ‘before and after’ pictures showing the virtual disappearance of the Blomstrandbreen glacier off the coast of the Norwegian island of Svalbard in the Arctic. But Svalbard scientists say this is meaningless and misleading. Glaciers shrink and grow all the time as part of the natural cycle.

Indeed, on the other side of Svalbard the Friddjovbreen glacier -- like dozens of others -- has advanced by more than a mile in the past seven years. And far from warming, the temperature there has been stable and may even have started to drop.

Now look at what environmentalists are saying about the recent storms. They claim that such violent ‘monsoon’ conditions will become more prevalent as global warming takes hold. All because the first six months of this year were the warmest ever since -- well, since the last period that was the warmest ever since records began,143 years ago.

The ignorance behind all these assertions is simply staggering. Weather is not the same as climate. Monsoons are caused by an extreme series of events that occurs uniquely over the Tibetan high plateaux in which the jet stream reverses itself, a phenomenon which does not occur anywhere else.

Calling our downpours ‘monsoons’ is simply offensive to all those in Africa and Asia who suffer from the real thing. It is also absurd to suggest that anything extraordinary is happening to the world’s weather. Sure, there has been bad weather in parts of Europe, too. But other places, such as Denmark, have been enjoying a better summer than usual.

According to the Met Office, the explanation is simple. The jet stream, which normally drives bad weather away from Europe during the summer, happens to be further south than normal. And the rainfall this year has not been exceptional either. In other words, there are no long-term trends here at all.

What’s more, we have seen far worse storms in previous centuries. These were associated not with warming but -- on the contrary -- a catastrophic cooling of the atmosphere. In the latter part of the 16th century, in the middle of a cold period known as ‘the Little Ice Age’, storms increased by 85 per cent and severe storms by no less than 400 per cent.

As Brian Fagan records in his book, The Little Ice Age, the great storm of 1570 -- remembered for generations as the All Saints Flood -- left much of Rotterdam and other Dutch cities under water and drowned at least 100,000 people.

In 1588, the ships of the Spanish Armada were pulverised by a series of savage storms around the coasts of Scotland and Ireland, causing Sir Francis Drake to report – in the middle of August, no less – ‘a very great storm considering the time of year’. As Fagan remarks, the Armada lost more ships to this episode of bad weather than in any conflict with the English.

So the idea that our recent rains are either unusual or a harbinger of a heated-up apocalypse is simply barmy. It is no coincidence, though, that such prophecies of eco-doom are occurring ever more feverishly in the run up to Johannesburg.

For this summit is exposing the contradictions at the heart of ‘sustainable development’ in an argument which the Greens are losing. The poor peoples of the third world are saying that only development will rescue them from poverty, malnutrition and disease. This is, of course, an anathema to the Greens, whose ‘sustainability’ analysis rests on the premise that western development is killing the planet.

Having been forced onto the moral back foot, the Greens are even more desperate to prove that global warming and climate catastrophe are the fault of western man. There is no doubt that we need to clean the environment, and to do this we need to prevent pollution. But the fact remains that there is simply no credible evidence that global warming is happening, or if it is that man-made carbon dioxide is the culprit.

The climate change that has occurred is well within the bounds of the cyclical changes throughout history. In 1200, Europe was 2 degrees warmer than it is now, with vineyards as far north as Northumberland and Norse settlements in Greenland. Yes, the climate has warmed up by some 0.6 per cent over the past century; but thank goodness it has, since from 1400 to the late 19th century Europe endured the Little Ice Age, and if it hadn’t got warmer since then we really would be complaining.

The seas, in general, are not rising. The ice, in general, is not decreasing. The air overall has not warmed but has cooled. The earth’s natural resources are becoming more, not less, abundant.

And if the atmosphere was getting warmer, it is exceedingly unlikely that carbon dioxide would be the culprit since it accounts for only a fraction of the atmosphere. The computer models that have generated Green climate propaganda have failed to factor in the huge number of variables that influence climate change, such as water vapour, clouds, ocean currents and the effects of the sun.

Global warming is no more than an ideological scam being used to attack the west from within. The Green movement is deeply reactionary and anti-human, as the rows over the Earth Summit clearly show.

In the 16th century, the extreme hardships and destruction caused by global cooling prompted widespread pogroms against witches, who were blamed for the abnormal weather and the famine and epidemics brought in its train.

Five centuries on, a similar witch-hunt is on over climate change. This time, the targets are capitalism, western values and America; but the principal victims are the world’s poor -- and truth itself.

Daily Mail, August 5 2002

People may be forgiven for feeling bewildered, even repelled, by recent developments in assisted reproduction and the manipulation of embryos. The science of fertility is hurtling ahead at supersonic speed, leaving our ethical values torn to shreds in its slipstream.

Michelle and Jayson Whitaker have been refused permission by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) to create a ‘designer baby’ to produce a tissue match for their three year-old son, Charlie, who suffers from a rare and life-threatening form of anaemia. Yet six months earlier, the HFEA gave permission to Shahana and Raj Hashmi to create a similarly tissue-typed baby to provide cells for their three year-old son, Zain, who suffers from a potentially fatal genetic blood disorder.

The HFEA says the two cases are crucially different because unlike Zain Hashmi, Charlie Whitaker does not suffer from a hereditary genetic disease. So any new Whitaker baby would be unaffected.

The rules state that tissue-typing can only take place to prevent any future baby from suffering the same disease. It cannot be used solely to benefit an existing child. That’s why it was permitted with the Hashmis, to screen out any embryos that might be carrying the fatal disorder, but not with the Whitakers, whose future babies would be normal.

That’s all very well as far as it goes. But the HFEA’s distinction fails to address the central issue of using one child to benefit another, which surely applies to the Hashmis as well as to the Whitakers. The danger is that any such ‘designer’ children will think they have been chosen and others discarded principally to save a sibling’s life.

What if the attempt fails and the older child dies or remains seriously ill? And might the parents feel differently towards the child that needs to be saved and the baby they have brought into the world to provide that help? Children need to be valued for themselves. They should never be used as commodities.

But that’s precisely what they’ve become through all this mucking around with human embryos. Last week it was revealed that Natallie Evans of Trowbridge, Wiltshire, had 11 of her eggs fertilised with her lover’s sperm and stored before losing her ovaries to cancer. But after their relationship broke down her lover, Howard Johnston, asked for the embryos to be destroyed.

The reason he gives is revealingly tawdry: he is afraid that he might be chased for financial child support. He has shown no concern that he abandoned these embryos, nor that he wants all 11 of them to be destroyed. His ex-girlfriend is challenging the embryo destruction in court because all she wants, she says, is to have children. It doesn’t seem to occur to her that fatherlessness might not be in those children’s interests.

Indeed, the interests of these potential children are not in the frame at all. That is because embryos have been generally dehumanised: suspended in time and space, detached from their biological or genetic moorings, destroyed in vast number. And that is because the delivery of adult happiness simply drives out any other interests that may conflict.

Of course, it is all very well to say this if one is fortunate to be the parent of a healthy child. And of course it is a tragedy if people become infertile through cancer. Surely, it might be argued, one should rejoice if science permits them subsequently to have their own children? Surely it is heartless to deny the gift of healthy children to those whom nature has cruelly cheated?

But the belief that nothing should stand in the way of human happiness has driven medical science into ethical chaos, in which the fulfilment of adult desires has come to threaten the interests of children and of society as a whole. The same argument was used (against the HFEA’s judgment) to justify Diane Blood using her late husband’s sperm to produce two children, despite the obvious risks posed to the emotional well-being of posthumously created children and their relationship with their mother.

The architect of Britain’s fertility laws, Baroness Warnock, herself illustrates the prevailing confusion. She once thought that sperm donors should remain anonymous. Now she believes that children conceived by this method should be able to trace their parentage because of the acute distress caused by not knowing where they came from, so visible among such unfortunates.

And yet she supports other developments which pose an even greater threat to personal identity. Her 1984 report which formed the basis of our embryology law said that cloning should be proscribed. But in her new book, Making Babies, she says that if cloning should ever become physically safe, it should be allowed as a last resort in cases of male infertility.

She places her faith in governmental controls to prevent any mad dictator producing a Brave New World where human characteristics would be manipulated to exclude undesirable traits. But such an outlandish scenario is unnecessary; we are well on the way to screening out undesirable characteristics already. We don’t need an Aldous Huxley to anticipate an entirely humdrum nightmare: that if man clones himself to produce a ‘son’, the relationships that would arise from creating his ‘child’ out of his ‘twin’ would be simply abhorrent.

Cloning is utterly inimical to human flourishing. Yet it isn’t surprising that Lady Warnock has warmed to the idea, since her thinking conveniently manages to shift the ethical goalposts to satisfy the burgeoning demands of a society which has made a fetish of the self. Thanks to her, we have turned procreation into manufacture with barely a qualm.

For it was her committee in 1984 which first set us on the path into this swamp. It held that an embryo did not deserve protection until 14 days’ gestation, an utterly arbitrary benchmark created purely to open a window of opportunity for research to take place on unprotected embryos.

This was the crucial watershed. It meant that early human life was to be used to benefit others. Implicit in this was the understanding that there were no intrinsic or unalterable values any more. Instead, ‘ethics’ depended on a wholly subjective definition of what might be useful in making people happy. Morality, in other words, was to be made up as we went along.

Using life as a means to an end cannot be anything other than dehumanising. And indeed, children have been turned into artefacts. Artificial insemination by donor first bust the biological link between parents and children. In-vitro fertilisation turned it into a multi-million pound business -- in which the vast majority of infertile couples are, in fact, cruelly disappointed.

Surrogacy, genetic manipulation and cloning are further turning children into commodities to be created, frozen, or destroyed -- the instruments of adult desires, regardless of children’s need for genetic integrity or biological attachments.

The result is a quagmire in which the respect for human life on which freedom and security depend is now threatened, along with the essence of humanity itself.