Society

I must admit that I despaired this morning when I heard that Nick Stern was arguing that meat eating should become socially unacceptable because of climate change. Those of us who think that climate change is happening and that human activity is a part of it have a big enough case to make without people thinking that they won’t be able to have a Sunday roast or a reviving steak if the green lobby gets its way. People are, understandably, not going to accept being told that they can’t fly, eat meat or have the heating on. The solutions to the problems posed by climate-change have to be technologically led.

John Rentoul rightly flags up the story in this morning’s FT that about 100,000 NHS patients have gone private and had the state pick up the tab, the private hospitals have had to agree to do the work at the NHS price. For those of us who would like to see the NHS move towards a model where the state pays for healthcare but it is provided by a whole panoply of providers, this is an encouraging step. This kind of consumer-focused reform is hard to reverse. The story, as John notes, hasn’t got as much coverage as it should. John blames this on the press’s lack of interest in

It is being hailed as a diplomatic triumph that Hamid Karzai has agreed to a run-off in Afghanistan’s presidential election. (Who is getting the credit for Karzai relenting is, as Daniel notes, fascinating). But as Dexter Filkins points out in The New York Times, the second round of the Afghan election could be as marred by fraud as the first one. It is hardly reassuring that the chairman of the supposedly independent election commission is already saying that “Karzai is going to win.” The question is how much Karzai is prepared to rein the levels of fraud in to try and maintain Western support. It has long been suggested that