Environment

SEN and sensibility Sir: As a former teacher and long-standing chair of governors in a local school, I share Rosie Lewis’s frustration at the parlous situation regarding special educational needs (‘Fare play’, 18 October). I also sit on a weekly area admissions committee and many schools in our area are full, often with long waiting lists. The main reason given why children are denied a place is the number of SEN pupils already in a year group, normally, incredibly, in excess of 30 per cent – sometimes 50 per cent. To admit another pupil with special needs or behavioural issues would be detrimental to the education of children already there.

It wasn’t that long ago when the fashionable gathering place for young couples was a meeting of the National Childbirth Trust. I remember, in the early months of 1995, sitting in our instructor’s front room as she passed around a plastic model of a female pelvis while she asked us: ‘So how do you think the baby gets out?’ Fast-forward three decades and there is a new way for middle-class would-be mothers to spend their evenings: attending sessions of a project entitled ‘Motherhood in a Climate Crisis’ put on by the University of Bristol’s Brigstow Institute. There is no better way to describe it than to quote the academics’ blurb.

Even if you’ve never heard of Michael Mann, you will have felt his baleful influence on your energy bills. He is the inventor of the hockey stick chart, which shows a sharp increase in late 20th century global temperatures, like the blade of an ice hockey stick. It put rocket boosters on the climate change scare and was used as an excuse by policymakers to send green taxes, tariffs and regulations soaring. Mann was an obscure academic who had just been given his PhD at the University of Massachusetts when his graph was published in the journal Nature in 1998. Within months – fêted everywhere from the New York Times

A parallel is being drawn between the Tories and the miners in the 1980s and Labour and the farmers today. On the left, there is an implied element of revenge: you screwed our people, so we’ll screw yours. It is true that the miners’ marches in London 40 years ago had much the same earthy atmosphere of ‘real people’ confronting authority as did the farmers’ rally this week. But in the end the comparison does not work. For the Conservatives, the miners themselves were not the enemy. The problem was the vast cost of uneconomic pits to the taxpayer and the declared determination of the NUM leader, Arthur Scargill, to

Who is to blame for the devastating floods that hit Valencia on 29 October? The mob that surrounded King Felipe at the weekend and drove Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez out of town with a hail of mud and stones was angry at the failure to forecast the flood and warn people to get out of its way. The BBC would like us to be angry at man-made climate change for causing the storm – putting out a headline the very next day: ‘Scientists say climate change made Spanish floods worse.’ Charts of rainfall in Spain show no trend towards a higher frequency of more extreme downpours Yet Valencia had a

As a travel writer, I used to joke about the so-called ‘downsides of the job’. The stupidly complex shower-fixture in the five-star Maldivian Paradise. The unexpected commission to go to Denmark in winter. The vague but real sting of disappointment upon realising that the free hotel pillow-chocolate is actually a mint. But in recent years a genuine and troubling downside has arisen. When I meet someone and tell them what I do, the listener often winces, perhaps with a hint of moral superiority, and says something like: ‘Don’t you feel guilty about your carbon footprint? You’re killing the planet!’ This query pains me because, while I may question a few

Mx Universe A transgender woman was named ‘Miss Netherlands’, and will now compete in the Miss Universe contest. British TV viewers might be surprised to learn there are still such things as beauty pageants, given they disappeared from the main TV channels in the 1980s. They might be even more surprised to learn who was responsible for lifting the ban on transgender women taking part in Miss Universe. – The decision was made in 2012 by Donald Trump, who then owned the franchise for the competition, after a Canadian trans woman, Jenna Talackova, had been banned from taking part and her cause had been taken up by the Gay and Lesbian