November 22 2012
Heads you lose
Last week, the Western Telegraph carried extracts from a letter it had received from 19 head teachers in support of Cabinet member for education Cllr Huw George.
This was in response to my motion of no confidence in Cllr George that is due to come before the council in December.
I complained to the WT that I had not been given a right of reply so they sent me a copy of the letter and my response (heavily edited) appears in this week's newspaper.
The letter begins: "We feel compelled to reply to a recent article in the Western Telegraph regarding the Council's alleged "rallying support" for County Councillor Huw George. Individually we responded based on information we had gained from either the local newspaper or the council's website telling us of the motion of no confidence."
As pointed out previously (Men of straw) I have never claimed that the County Council orchestrated this letter-writing campaign, merely that, when every member of the council receives a letter from each of 23 head teachers within the space of little more than 24 hours, putting it down to to a spontaneous outburst is pushing credibility to its limits.
Anyway, this latest letter, denying that the original letters were part of a concerted campaign, contains the names of 19 heads (not signatures) so there is no doubt that it is a joint enterprise.
What is interesting is that, out of the 19, only seven are members of the original 23.
That makes twelve new supporters, though it appears that, when the Western Telegraph rang around to confirm their involvement with the letter, one of them withdrew.
It would be interesting to know why 16 of the originals haven't appended their names.
Close examination of this letter reveals that it was first sent to the paper on 25 October which was exactly one week after my notice of motion came before the council and one day after the story appeared in the WT ((Men of straw).
It would appear to have been a bit of a rushed job because at that point it was devoid of names and, understandably, the WT declined to publish it.
At the top it bears the words: "25.10.12. For the newsroom - updated on 5.11.12 with names of Head teachers."
Unfortunately, whoever was behind this letter failed to revise the words "individually we responded based on information etc (see above)" to reflect the fact that 12 of the names on the letter hadn't responded "individually, or at all.
There are very few clues as to who might have orchestrated this latest letter though some of the errors: Helen Leicester [Lester], Roach [Roch] and Damon McCarrie [McGarvie] would seem to indicate that it was someone who was either unfamiliar with the heads involved, or who shared a teacher for spelling lessons with Cllr Rob "Opersition" Lewis, cabinet member for Highways and Transportation.
For the record this is my unedited response:
"I have never doubted that the head teachers who signed this letter had the interests of children at heart.
"And so have I.
"I know from personal experience how important education is, both for earning a living and living a full life.
As an elected member, I have a duty to ensure all children get the best education possible.
The head teachers speak of Cllr George's "supportive leadership", so let us consider where it has led.
In August 2011 there were two reports by independent inspectors which severely criticised both the county council's child safeguarding practices and education performance in general.
As a result of those two reports, and their aftermath, the Directors of the two departments concerned: Jon Skone (Social Services) and Graham Longster (Education) took early retirement and Cllr George, who was Cabinet member with responsibility for both activities, was relieved of the child safeguarding aspect of his portfolio.
Earlier this year, alarmed by the lack of progress, Welsh Ministers gave the Pembrokeshire Ministerial Board the powers to direct the county council to take whatever actions the Board thought necessary.
The latest news is that Martin Lloyd, who just two months ago was promoted to Head of Education following the announcement of Mr Longster's impending retirement, has also decided to retire, citing a "challenging", but as yet unpublished, Estyn report which is understood to have concluded that the pace of improvement in the education service is unsatisfactory.
With three senior officers gone, my view is that it is high time that the elected politician who has presided over this sorry state of affairs should also be held to account."
Fair cop
There is some discussion over on that other website as to whether, given the public's national preference for independent Police and Crime Commissioners (PCC), Cllr John Davies might have been in with a shout had he decided to stand as an independent.
This is one of those wonderful subjects where, because there are no facts, everyone can have their own opinion.
Myself, I was rather disappointed that he bottled out because I was looking forward to revisiting some of my previous columns in an effort to show that he was not the ideal person for a job that demands the highest standards of integrity.
I could have mentioned his failure to inform the planning committee that he had sold the dairy cows on which his application for a 2,800 sq ft herdsman's cottage was predicated (No udder conclusion). His highly misleading explanation regarding the release of confidential Cabinet documents to Milford Haven Port Authority during the bidding process for the Mine Depot site (A likely tale). And his failure to inform the standards committee that he had appointed Cllr Brian Hall to be his representative at a BBC reception in St Davids when the capacity in which Cllr Hall had attended was a central issue in the case (It's official)
It would also have been fair to draw attention to his outright opposition to elected Police Commissioners when they were first proposed by the Labour Government in 2008 (August 12 Special pleading).
I fancy it might also been of interest to the electorate that the Welsh Government guidelines in force in 2005 when the planning consent was granted, required that consent for agricultural dwellings should only be given when there was a present as opposed to a future need and that seven years on the "essential" dwelling still hasn't been built, though I am told that some foundation work has been carried out to ensure the consent doesn't lapse.
I understand that that other website has an audio of an interview with the ex-leader about the Welsh Government's proposal to centralise education in Cardiff. Unfortunately, the audio facility on my computer is temporarily disabled but I understand he repeats the old canard that these adverse Estyn/CSSIW reports as some sort of manoeuvre designed to do down local authorities.
this is rather a clever strategy because the present leadership of the county council knows that if it dared to make such a suggestion it would have the Pembrokeshire Ministerial Board down on it like a flash.
But Cllr Davies, now an ordinary back bench member, can say it with impunity.
I suggest you listen in.
Hot topic
I am told that the county's school children have this week been treated to a talk on global warming/climate change by, as it was told to me, "someone from England".
So when my grandson came home from school on Monday and found me in the kitchen with all the lights on he promptly announced that I had been "busted" and stuck a preprinted sticker on my chest.
This was, apparently, part of the resources he had been given to assist in the fight against climate change.
This is a subject in which I have more than a passing interest, so I quizzed him about what he had learned and was amazed how much of the science he had taken in.
However, there were a couple of things which he had been told which made me wonder if he might have been subjected to a degree of propaganda.
The first was that there was a cloud of Carbon Dioxide which was making the earth warm up by trapping heat in the atmosphere.
While this cloud idea might be a useful way of conveying the information to young children, it suffers from the serious deficiency of being untrue.
Carbon dioxide does not exist in clouds - it is uniformly distributed through the atmosphere.
And there is very little of it, at that.
If Wales' 3 million people were molecules in the atmosphere, 2.1 million would be Nitrogen, 630,000 Oxygen, 27,900 Argon and just 1080 (less than the population of Johnston) would be CO2
These figures are for the dry atmosphere.
In practice, depending on the humidity, between 1-4% of the atmosphere is water vapour (not to be confused with clouds which are composed of water droplets or ice crystals) so it is not surprising that water vapour is by far the biggest contributor (70%) to the so-called greenhouse effect.
His other piece of dubious knowledge was that the icebergs in the Arctic were melting, causing sea levels to rise.
Although Archimedes, who lived in Syracuse on the Mediterranean, had never seen an iceberg, he would have pointed out that, as upthrust equals weight of water displaced, the volume of water in an iceberg is exactly equivalent to the submerged part, and that, when it melts, it simply fills the space in the mass of water that it previously occupied.
To prove this point, we filled a glass with water and added a few ice cubes which could be clearly seen sticking up above the rim.
We then dried off the outside of the glass and placed it on a piece of kitchen paper and noted that when the ice melted the expected overflow (increase in sea level) had not occurred.
Land-based ice is a different matter.
When it melts it does cause a rise in sea level which is why we should take comfort from the fact that, while the extent of Arctic sea ice reached a new low point this summer, the land-based Antarctic ice has been progressing in the opposite direction.
And I should point out that, while the amount of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere has continued to increase, the Met Office reports that global temperature has remained static for the past 15 years.
So, while nobody doubts that CO2 has the potential to warm the planet, there must be some other mechanism in play that is cancelling out its effect.
Whether or not this is just a temporary stay of execution, nobody can be sure.
However, what seems to be common ground between sceptics and alarmists is that a doubling of CO2 will lead to increase in global temperatures of about 1 degree C - roughly the equivalent of moving from Manchester to Cardiff.
Where the controversy arises is over what are known as the feedbacks, and whether they will be positive or negative.
This is a complex area but a simple example is that a 1 degree increase in temperature will lead to more water in the atmosphere.
Whether this extra water will manifest itself as clouds (negative feedback) or water vapour (positive feedback) is the subject of much debate.
And a final point worth remembering is that the greenhouse effect caused by increases in Carbon Dioxide is logarithmic i.e.each added molecule has less effect than its predecessor - a law of diminishing returns.
The best day to day example of this is insulating your loft where the first inch of rockwool traps more heat than the second. which in turn has more effect than the third until eventually the addition of further inches is a complete waste of time and money.