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Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cartoon/2011/nov/13/martin-rowson-vince-cable-occupy-london-cartoon

Richard Scott, who has died aged 97, held a series of senior editorial posts on the Guardian and was pivotal to its survival through its worst crisis. As chairman of the paper’s owners, the Scott Trust, he was party to all the main decisions about its commercial direction from 1956 until his retirement in 1984, the last of the family to hold senior office in the paper.

Scott was a grandson of CP Scott, whose long editorship, from 1871 to his death in 1932, established the Manchester Guardian’s national and international reputation. His father, Ted Scott, became editor of the family newspaper in succession. He and Richard, then aged 15, were sailing on Windermere, in the Lake District, in April of the same year when the boat capsized in a squall and Ted was drowned. The paper overcame this calamity under a new editor, WP Crozier. It was 15 years later that Richard himself joined the staff, having spent his time after Gresham’s school, Norfolk, and Christ’s College, Cambridge, working for the League of Nations Union, the Spectator, the British Council, and finally the news department of the Foreign Office, where his colleagues included Osbert Lancaster and Guy Burgess.

Scott became the paper’s diplomatic correspondent in 1947, during the first keen frosts of the cold war. Scott hesitated to accept the job offered by the then editor, AP Wadsworth, because he was conscious that such a post “is not usually used as a training ground”. Others from that time might also have found it hard to leap from being custodian of information to seeker after it, but Scott found no difficulty in demonstrating his independence.

That was especially so during the Suez adventure of 1956. His reporting for the paper, repeatedly quoted on the BBC World Service, and his own regular commentaries for the BBC so displeased Anthony Eden’s government that it tried to have the broadcasts stopped. It was, of course, unsuccessful.

In that same year, Scott became chairman of the trust; in 1959 the Manchester Guardian became the Guardian; in 1961 it also began printing in London; and in 1964 the editor and its major departments followed. Scott had left the capital in 1963 for the US, succeeding Max Freedman as Washington correspondent. He was thus in charge of diplomatic, White House and Congressional reporting there, with Alistair Cooke roaming the rest of the US, from which Scott was more or less excluded.

This strange division of labour could be irksome, as both men sometimes found, but they did not let it rankle. Cooke indeed was best man at Scott’s wedding to his second wife. Later, after Cooke’s retirement, Scott became the head of Guardian coverage in the US, working with young talent such as Adam Raphael and discovering another star of the future, Martin Walker.

It had been characteristic of Scott’s work in London that he took care never to grind an axe or promote a cause. He did not draw editorial conclusions. His predecessors before the war, Frederick Voigt and Max Wolf, had had a quite different interpretation of the role, which for them entailed exposing the inadequately known evils of Nazi Germany. Scott wrote for a readership that was already better informed, and that he judged capable of making its own assessments, once given the facts.

It was well said of him by David Ayerst, the writer of Guardian: Biography of a Newspaper (1971), that he was “a judge summing up to a jury of readers, not a judge trying a case alone and delivering judgment”. Scott maintained that attitude to his work throughout his time in Washington, during the worsening years of the Vietnam war, and later in Paris, from 1971 until he retired from editorial work on reaching 60 in 1974, continuing as trust chairman for another decade.

One of the reasons for his original appointment had been AP Wadsworth’s desire to have an editorial Scott on the paper. The other member of the dynasty, then in senior office, was Richard’s cousin Laurence, chairman of the newspaper company and, in Mancunian eyes at least, its personification. During Richard’s early tenure as chairman of the Scott Trust, he was content to defer to his cousin’s managerial primacy. In the early 1960s he was either travelling frequently or living in Washington, whereas Laurence was on the spot and had a closer knowledge of the company’s day-today affairs.

In 1964-65, however, Laurence began to rue his decision to take the Guardian to London and to despair, when looking at the figures, of making it a viable national newspaper. In the autumn of 1966 he led a consortium to try and outbid Lord (Roy) Thomson for control of The Times, with a view to merging the two papers and companies.

In working terms it was mainly Alastair Hetherington, the then editor, who put an end to any such proposition – implausible though it was – but it was Richard who, reconvening an emergency session of the Trust, delivered a powerful denunciation of such a deal. The new edifice being planned under Laurence’s guidance, he said, was “assuming more and more the character of a mausoleum in which the relics of the Guardian might be preserved with decorum and without loss of face to nourish and sustain a more thriving Times”. His intervention – it had to be from a Scott – proved decisive, and any prospect of merging the two papers was abandoned. He was cheered when he announced the decision to the staff.

Thereafter, the Scott Trust underwent a change of character. Its main purpose had been simply to exist in order to preserve continuity and keep the Inland Revenue at bay. Laurence had once observed that “the ideal trustee is one who is best pleased when the trust is not called on to do anything.” In future it was to take on a more active monitoring role.

The collapse of the merger plan thrust Richard into a more demanding chairmanship, and from then on it was agreed that he and his successors should attend meetings of the newspaper company board. The following year it fell to Richard to inform Laurence of a feeling among directors that a change of top management was needed, and Laurence, while remaining chairman, stepped down as chief executive. Richard may have disliked this and several similarly irksome – and diplomatic – tasks carried out on behalf of his colleagues, but he never shirked them. Long ago, on the day of his father’s death, it was he who insisted that he should break the news to his mother.

In both his capacities Scott was liked and admired on the paper. His editorial work was seen as well informed and perceptive, and as trust chairman he held the paper’s reputation high. He shared the family’s good looks but not its ancestral solemnity. He was keen-spirited and good company.

His marriage to his first wife, Ruth, ended in divorce, and their son, David predeceased him. Richard spent his long retirement in the Aude department of south-west France, where he at first cultivated a vineyard near Limoux. Then, after his divorce from his second wife, Anna, with whom he had a daughter, Tamara, he moved nearby to Lagrasse, Corbières, with his third wife, Christiane. He is survived by Christiane and Tamara.

Hella Pick writes: In early September 1961, Richard Scott and I met in Belgrade, at the launch of the Non-Aligned Movement. A fledgling journalist, I had a one-off commission to cover it with him: Yugoslavia’s President Tito was the host to President Nasser of Egypt, India’s Prime Minister Nehru, Ghana’s President Nkrumah and other leaders who believed they could distance themselves from the cold war and create a force for peace and progress.

Richard was supposed to be in New York for the autumn session of the UN General Assembly, but he urged Alastair Hetherington to send me in his place. A few months later I was offered a staff job, and spent the next 35 years working for the Guardian. For a while we worked in tandem: he in Washington, I in New York. Later, I often visited him in France. He was kind and loyal, unpretentious and generous, and he changed the course of my life.

Peter Preston writes: Richard Scott was, in the keenest sense of the word, a friend of the Guardian, and I believe he was essential to its survival in 1966. Alastair Hetherington might have fought the good fight against a merger that would certainly have led to the death of the paper, but Richard was the rock – the Scott family rock – he depended on to change the course of events.

Richard was not, on his own recognition, a journalist of the modern school. The tools of his trade were judgement and assessment rather than instant coverage. But he was always wise and kind, and a rare encourager of others.

His most important role, though, was as chairman of the Scott Trust: wry and self-effacing, he helped make the trust into a living organism that truly influenced the affairs of the growing company it owned. At its inception in 1936, the trust had been an act of huge generosity – the giving away to posterity of the Manchester Guardian and Manchester Evening News by the family that owned them – but also something of a device. It did not have its full independence. Richard gave it that freedom of reality and of spirit.

He oversaw the hiring, in the late 1960s, of Peter Gibbings and Gerry Taylor, the managers from outside who began to remake the Guardian’s future. He was a friend and, in a sense, company ombudsman for Guardian editors. He knew instinctively how to use his influence when there were difficulties in an expanding organisation that had no conventional hierarchy of authority. He was a friend to me when, callow in the politics of business, I succeeded Hetherington as editor in 1974, and remained a personal friend until the day he died.

Richard was not one of those journalists who sank every energy in his work. He enjoyed life and conversation and fine wine. He was always slim and handsome, with charm to spare. He took easily to his long retirement in France, slipping naturally into the role of master of a domaine and maker of Limoux’s famous Blanquette until his second marriage, to Anna, daughter of the novelist Leo Walmsley, foundered and he moved out to a lonely cottage in a village 10 miles away.

But Richard was never finished with life. One day, walking by a river, he saw two French women bathing and fell into conversation with them. That was how he met his third wife, Christiane, a teacher of Spanish who refused to learn English – but with whom he spent one of his happiest, most contented periods.

He received the Guardian daily in the fastnesses of rural France and read it from cover to cover. On occasional visits to London he kept up with old colleagues, and he spoke movingly about his years alongside Alastair Hetherington at Alastair’s funeral. He was delighted to see Laurence’s two sons, Martin and Jonathan, follow him as members of the trust.

Richard was the quiet, calm, essentially cultivated presence at the heart of the modern Guardian’s development. He was modest, claiming little credit, but he was wrong. His personality and his diplomatic skills helped make what often seemed impossible achievable. When he talked of that dreadful day on Windermere when his father, the new editor, told him to swim to the shore and then, looking back, Richard saw that Ted was lost – in a brutal tragedy which spurred the creation of the trust – he was also the embodiment of a turbulent, triumphant history.

• Richard Farquhar Scott, journalist, born 16 May 1914; died 11 November 2011

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/nov/13/richard-scott-obituary

Former Somerset cricket captain turned commentator Peter Roebuck has been found dead after apparently taking his own life.

The former opening batsman, 55, was staying in a hotel in Newlands, South Africa, on Saturday where he was covering Australia‘s Test series for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Police confirmed the incident was being treated as suicide, following reports that Roebuck fell from the sixth floor to his death at the Southern Sun hotel in Cape Town, near Newlands cricket ground.

Captain Frederick van Wyk of Cape Town police said: “An incident occurred last night at about 9.15pm at a hotel in Claremont where a 55-year-old British citizen, who worked as an Australian commentator, committed suicide.”

Roebuck, who was born in Oxford, captained Somerset and opened the batting for much of the 1980s and passed 1,000 runs nine times in 12 seasons.

He had spent the hours before his death with members of the Australian cricket team, who were beaten by South Africa by eight wickets in the first test on Friday.

Unconfirmed reports suggested he was being questioned by police over sexual assault allegations just moments before he plunged to his death. In 2001 Roebuck was given a suspended sentence for common assault against three 19-year-old cricketers who he was coaching.

ABC Grandstand manager Craig Norenbergs paid tribute to Roebuck, saying: “For us he could describe a game of cricket in such a way that, even if you didn’t like the game, you liked the way that he went about his business.”

The chief executive of Cricket Australia, James Sutherland, said Roebuck was a familiar face around the Australian team, adding: “He brought particular insight to his commentary based on his lengthy experience as a first-class cricketer and captain, and combined that with a singular flair for the written and spoken word.

“He spoke his mind frankly and while one didn’t necessarily always have to agree, you always respected what he had to say.”

Cricket South Africa’s chief executive Gerald Majola also paid his respects in a statement. “CSA has lost a good friend,” he said. “He was a fiercely independent critic but one who always endeavoured to serve the best interests of cricket and he set a new standard for cricket columnists around the world.

“We will all miss his contribution to the game.”

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2011/nov/14/peter-roebuck-dies-in-hotel-fall

The 10 finalists in the RSPCA’s Young Photographer of the Year Award. The winner will be announced on December 16

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2011/nov/13/photography-animals

If you were looking for economic hard-noses among our European national leaders, you wouldn’t have to look much further than Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron. Sarkozy telling an abject Greece there are macroeconomic “rules that have to be respected“; Cameron unrelenting on his deficit and debt agenda, in the face of the tyranny of the bond markets. Homo economicus, in full pomp.

Yet after the last crash – in Cameron’s case, before – both men were talking a different language of the market. Sarkozy launched a commission in 2009, chaired by the now-sainted Joseph Stiglitz, to explore alternatives to GDP as the primary measure of social progress.

Cameron’s stab at a “GWB” (general wellbeing), first essayed in the blithe and creditworthy days of 2005, has quietly proceeded through the machinery of coalition government. At the start of November, the Office for National Statistics announced its “10 indicators of wellbeing”, which will be used to guide attitudinal surveys in the future.

Snorts of derision over your rye-bread, no doubt, as job creation stalls, unemployment rolls rise and political parties sharpen their claws (and clauses) for contest. Yet, as I’ve found in helping to organise a conference on creative approaches to wellbeing, we should try to take a step or two back from the grim financial determinism of the moment.

Democracy only functions healthily if we believe we can imagine conditions other than they are. And wellbeing is an open enough concept, firmly at the heart of government, to allow our policy-brains to stop pressing the panic button.

One of our speakers, William Davies, wonders whether the UK government’s commitment to measuring, and then making policy on, the nation’s wellbeing is one of the biggest own-goals ever perpetrated by the administrative classes.

Take a method called “income-compensation technique” – derived from wellbeing studies and psychological damage assessments in legal cases. Using data on the correlation between happiness and wages, it claims to identify the amount of money it would take to compensate a person for losing access to a free public good (for example, arts events or sporting facilities). A Department of Culture, Media and Sport report in 2010 estimated that the psychological satisfaction derived from a person attending concerts regularly was worth £9,000 of extra income.

This method – putting a price on unhappiness – can be extended to other areas. A Young Foundation report calculated that the psychological injury of being made unemployed would require a compensatory income of £23,000 per month. If the wellbeing mandarins are serious about calculating the “psycho-economic return” on investment, they might be forced to admit that the best returns come from public spending and occupational security, not private spending and labour-market turbulence. As Davies quips, in a Marxian way, “a spectre is haunting liberal economics”.

So wellbeing indicators, taken seriously at government level, could justify a gentler, more Keynesian response to the national deficit and global economic crisis. But in these systemically shaky times, the charge of irrelevance and navel-gazing is easily raised.

Rather than angsting about general ill-being, shouldn’t we be firing up the raging energies of “mathletic” entrepreneurs – coding, designing and splicing new markets into being? In the face of Asia and South America, implacably ascending their development curves to middle-class prosperity, don’t we need more edgy dissatisfaction and nervy, competitive ambition on these islands – and indeed, this continent – not less?

For figures such as historian Niall Ferguson, the wellbeing agenda is an example of Europeans as “the idlers of the world”. We’ve wrapped ourselves in a wet blanket of psycho-socio-babble, recoiling from the creative destruction and disruptive innovation required to lift us out of a static economy.

Yet when you gather together the tribes of wellbeing, you hardly discover a lack of enterprise or innovation. The question is the nature of the “new” that’s being sought. The other spectre that haunts liberal economics – other than the lingering unhappiness that its happy-clappy consumerism generates – is the broaching of planetary boundaries for survival. This was forcibly restated in last week’s report from the International Energy Agency, which referred to the extreme climatic urgency of decarbonising our industries and economies.

Yes, let’s fund primary science to keep open the possibility of radical innovation around energy and efficiency. Let’s retain a Victorian-style ambition about constructing grand new infrastructures to answer our needs for mobility, housing, communication.

But what also needs to happen is precisely the kind of innovation around lifestyles, cultures and values pursued by those at the eco-minded end of the wellbeing agenda – seeing a low-carbon society as an opportunity for social excitement and behavioural novelty. For who else will build the mindsets, and communally forge the habits, that prepare us to cope with radical change – both the changes we invite, and the changes we’ll have to endure?

And in terms of leading people out of their consumerist echo-chambers and into engagement with these prospects, play’s the thing. Take architect Indy Johar, who founded HubWestminster in cavernous empty office space behind the Institute of Directors. It’s a new incarnation of the Institute for Contemporary Arts 1947 slogan, “a playground for the mind”. Go there any evening if you want to sample the nexus between Occupy St Paul‘s and the “big society”.

In this milieu, people with ideas are driven to create new practices, not just deliver papers. Writer Marek Kohn is a partner in the Sunshine Bank, which hopes to turn the desire for mutual recognition into an alternative currency system for communities and companies. Alice Taylor, ex-head of games at Channel 4, is building a new platform for toys that combines virtual play and local manufacture, aimed at fomenting craft values and ideas of non-disposability among kids. Tech entrepreneur Dougald Hine has a sideline deploying local bohemia to revive moribund retail outlets, such as the revitalised Brixton Arcade.

At our conference, we also have Buddhist neuroscientists, radical artists and improvisers – people who have always found a way (mostly internally) to maintain their mental and social resilience in the face of endemic change. The point is that a real diversity of input is essential to thinking and feeling our way beyond the cyclical hysterics of capitalism.

Wellbeing is the kerchief in the top-pocket of the suited men striding through the current economic drama. We should give it a good tug, and see what comes out.

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/13/wellbeing-agenda-navel-gazing-innovation-survival

Heavy drinking and growing obesity are contributing to an increase in oesophageal cancer, a new analysis has claimed, as the UK topped a European survey of the disease.

Cutting back on smoking and alcohol and eating healthier would help Britons reduce their risk of contracting the cancer, according to the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF). It rates the UK as joint 31st-worst in the world, alongside some of Africa and Asia’s poorest countries.

The figures, based on World Health Organisation estimates and adjusting them to take into account differing proportions of people in diferent age groups between countries, show 6.4 people per 100,000 in the UK developed oesophageal cancer in 2008, nearly double the European average (3.3). The charity said lifestyle changes could prevent most of the 7,600 deaths – more than 5,000 of them men.

Rachel Thompson, deputy head of science for WCRF, said: “The fact that the UK has the highest rate of oesophageal cancer in Europe is a real concern because it is a type of cancer that has a particularly low survival rate.

“It is also particularly preventable and most cases in the UK could be prevented through a healthy diet, limiting alcohol consumption, maintaining a healthy weight and not smoking. The problem is that we have the highest obesity rate in Europe and we drink more alcohol than the European average.

“The good news is that not smoking, maintaining a healthy weight, cutting down on alcohol and eating more of a variety of fruits and vegetables will not just reduce your risk of oesophageal cancer. It will also reduce your risk of other types of cancer, as well as being good for health generally.”

Jessica Harris, health information manager at Cancer Research UK, said: “When cancer is diagnosed at an early stage, treatment is more likely to be successful – so if you notice an unusual change in your body, and in the case of oesophageal cancer, difficulty in swallowing, hoarseness or heartburn, it’s a good idea to see your doctor.”

After years of debate on possible measures to cut alcohol abuse, the Scottish government is planning to introduce minimum pricing, but this is likely to opposed by the drinks industry. A plan to cut obesity in England by appealing to people to cut their calorie intake, was criticised by Jamie Oliver, who labelled it “worthless, regurgitated, patronising rubbish”.

Oesophageal cancer is unusual in that its rates are generally higher in low-income countries. There are two main types – squamous cell carcinoma, linked to smoking and drinking; and adenocarcinoma, which is becoming more common in the UK, and is particularly related to obesity.

Drinking burning hot drinks, such as ‘flaming’ sambuca, may be a factor in several countries, including the UK.In Iran and China, studies have identified opium use and nutritional deficiencies as possible risks too.

Rates of oesophageal cancer per 100,000 people

World

1 Mongolia 18.7

4 China 16.7

18 Afghanistan 9.3

27 Iran 6.8

31= UK and Rwanda 6.4

Europe

1 UK 6.4

2 Ireland 5.9

3 The Netherlands 5.8

4 Belgium 4.9

5 Luxembourg 4.2

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/14/oesophageal-cancer-uk-worst-in-europe

Health secretary Andrew Lansley is to announce that he is prepared to sack NHS bosses who attempt to save money by rationing treatment or making patients wait longer for operations.

The move, which comes amid unprecedented pressure on the health service to save £20bn, is a response to a damning July report by the Co-operation and Competition Panel (CCP), which accused primary care trusts (PCTs) of “reducing or delaying access to care”.

The panel warned that some patients could die because a majority of PCTs, the bodies that control health budgets, were forcing patients to wait a minimum of 15 weeks – a measure “likely to impose greater pain and inconvenience than is necessary”.

The watchdog claimed the move was designed to shorten waiting lists – and save money in the short term – as patients “die or pay for their own treatment”.

Since 2006, patients have been able to choose where they go for elective surgery, including private hospitals. Tactics employed by PCTs included setting minimum waiting times before patients were treated – even when private providers could treat them – and directing GPs to refer patients to keep cash flowing into a local NHS hospital.

The CCP claimed almost half of PCTs were unreasonably restricting patients’ choice. But critics say the panel is simply prising apart the NHS so that private companies can lure patients away from state hospitals.

The health secretary believes patients will benefit from more competition and is to order the end of minimum waiting times “as soon as possible”. An outright ban will be introduced from March next year. If the problem persists, Lansley said he would remove the chair of any PCT that acted in this way.

“For too long, Labour turned a blind eye to unfair practices within the NHS which harmed patients. No right-thinking person could possibly understand how anyone could delay a patient’s treatment unnecessarily. If patients need treatment, they should get it when they want it and where they want it,” Lansley will say.

Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, said that while waiting times were rising and treatments being cut to save money in the NHS, it was “ironic” that Lansley was having to “use the very powers that his own reckless health bill will abolish”.

“It’s an even greater irony that it’s needed to tackle a growing postcode lottery that his bill actively encourages. It is time for the government to listen to patients, NHS staff and the public and drop the bill.”

Christina McAnea, Unison’s head of health said: “No one wants patients to wait unnecessarily for an operation. However, the bottom line is, is there going to be any new money to fund these measures or will hospitals have to make cuts elsewhere?”

Lansley has long had the NHS trusts in his sights. Under his controversial health bill, PCTs will be abolished in 2013 and decisions about treatment will instead be made by GPs.

However the NHS Confederation, which represents the health service’s administration, pointed out that the CCP itself recognised that trusts had a legal obligation to balance their budgets each year, and “that the impact of reducing or delaying access to care can sometimes have offsetting benefits to the population as a whole … [That is why the] panel did not recommend blanket restrictions on any particular practices or actions, such as those the secretary of state announced”.

Elizabeth Wade, head of commissioning policy for the PCT Network, said GPs would find themselves facing the same problems of shrinking budgets and increasing demand. “Changing commissioning structures will not change the financial pressures on the NHS and these difficult decisions are not going to go away. Everyone needs to be clear about this.”• A pro-market thinktank chaired by a former Tory health minister has claimed the NHS has underestimated fraud in the health service by 1,800%. 2020health says that bogus doctors, fake expenses, overcharging and patient lying costs the NHS £3bn every year – not the £165m the health service counts as fraud.

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/nov/14/andrew-lansley-prepared-to-sack-pct-chiefs

The government’s £1.4bn skills training scheme, intended to ameliorate youth unemployment, has seen a near 900% increase in the number of apprenticeships begun by those aged 60 and over.

The news comes ahead of figures to be published on Wednesday which are expected to show the numbers of young people out of work hitting one million.

Analysis of data published at the end of October shows that over the last year there has been an increase of 18% for apprenticeships begun by 18-year-olds and a 22% rise in those begun by people aged 19-24.

But the rises for those not regarded to be in the apprenticeship age bracket are larger. For those aged between 25 and 34, there has been a 179% increase; a 283% increase for those between 35 and 44; and for those aged 45-59, a 396% increase, according to analysis by the specialist publication Further Education Weekly.

For those aged 60 and over, there has been an 878% increase – from 400 signing up in the year 2009-10, to 3,910 in the last year.

The October figures showed a huge jump, with 163,000 more apprenticeships beginning in the last academic year compared with the previous one. In May the scheme was placed central to government attempts to tackle youth unemployment.

A speech by deputy prime minister Nick Clegg on the subject scheduled for Monday has, however, been pushed back.

The Institute of Public Policy Research thinktank has joined the ranks of those concerned the policy is not sufficiently targeted, claiming employers are “using apprenticeship funding to subsidise training for workers over the age of 25″ and arguing for the apprenticeship “brand” to be reserved for young people.

The IPPR report says that over the last year 40% of apprenticeships went to over-25s and that out of the 126,000 apprenticeships created in that period, just 37,000 went to people aged 16-24. The report includes a chapter by the minister in charge of the policy, John Hayes.

The prime minister recently told the Commons: “We want to make sure that apprenticeship schemes are aimed at young people who need work and also aimed at the higher level – people going on to get degree-equivalent qualifications – so it is not seen as a second best.”

In a leaked Department for Business document, seen by the Guardian, officials acknowledged that the profusion of apprenticeships for different age groups could “undermine the brand”.

The chancellor, George Osborne, is thought to be anxious about the low numbers of 16- to 18-year-olds among the increased numbers of apprentices and that the largest increase has come in low skilled placements. The leaked document admits: “Older learners [are] a key reason why a much larger number of starts could be achieved in academic year 2010-11.”

The business secretary, Vince Cable, has let it be known he is not overly concerned with the current spread of age groups beginning apprenticeships.

IPPR director Nick Pearce said: “Apprenticeships can help young people break out of the unemployment trap by offering additional general education, the chance to learn the ‘soft skills’ that employers often demand and specific job-related training.

“But employers have become increasingly reluctant to hire school-leavers. Employers need more support to set up apprenticeship programmes, particularly when they are hiring apprentices for the first time.”

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/nov/14/apprenticeships-training-schemes-employment

Wild deer may be culled in much larger numbers across lowland and urban Scotland to limit their rapidly increasing population and reverse a steep rise in road accidents.

Wildlife experts have found that the growth in new lowland and urban forests and green spaces has led to a surge in deer numbers, which has increased the rate of crashes and collisions on motorways and major roads in heavily-populated areas.

One recent study for Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH), the government wildlife agency, estimated there are at least 7,000 collisions and crashes caused by deer and at least 65 injuries for motorists across Scotland a year, many more than in previous years.

Experts fear there is a much greater risk of driver fatalities and multiple-vehicle crashes after the study found that major roads and motorways in central and lowland Scotland, including the M9 near Stirling, the M90 near Dunfermline, the M8, the A1 north of Berwick, roads around Glasgow and its satellite towns, and Aberdeen had become hotspots for deer collisions.

In many of these areas, millions of pounds are being spent creating new green spaces and woodlands, often on former industrial areas, which are perfect environments for deer.

Richard Cooke, a leading deer expert, and an organiser of a conference to launch a new lowland deer network in Scotland, said: “The greening of lowland Scotland is creating new habitats which are ideal for the expansion of roe deer territories, and roe deer numbers are known to be increasing fairly rapidly.”

Local councils and agencies that run parks and new forestry projects will be warned on Monday they will need to introduce deer management policies and action plans, including culling, in areas where deer have never previously been a problem.

New wildlife legislation introduced by the Scottish parliament puts a duty on all councils to have wildlife policies. Until now, only the Highlands have seen routine and well-organised deer culling, to control numbers.

Robbie Kernahan, a deer specialist with SNH, said: “We’re actively encouraging, indeed funding, a lot of the green network because of the benefits they bring to biodiversity and so forth, but it has to be done in way which is mindful of the needs of all species.”

Although no comprehensive monitoring has been carried out, it is believed there could be around 500,000 roe and sika deer across lowland and upland Scotland, in addition to about 300,000 red deer in the Highlands.

“There are areas, particularly cities and towns, where deer numbers are increasing and the impact for the public, for example road traffic accidents but also damage to gardens and contact with dogs and cats, is rising all the time,” Cooke said.

“Our feeling is that we need a co-ordinated approach and a good level of communication to anticipate problems before they arise rather than be caught on the backfoot when they do arise.”

Cooke said there were still strong sensitivities about culling among city-dwellers, despite the perception that Scots were comfortable with shooting because Scotland’s long history of deer stalking. “I think there will be quite a lot of sensitivity among the more vociferous people who care about these things in our urban areas. These arguments will have to be dealt with: the ‘Bambi’ syndrome is quite a strong one,” he said.

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/14/scotland-deer-cull-road-accidents

He is known as one of the greatest and most dramatic painters of the elements, a revolutionary who was fascinated by the natural world. Now fresh research suggests JMW Turner’s work was also rooted in groundbreaking scientific theories.

A newly published book that will accompany a big exhibition of the artist’s work next year at Turner Contemporary, in Margate, examines in detail the artist’s treatment of fire, water, air and earth.

The Turner biographer James Hamilton has uncovered compelling evidence that the artist was far more interested in cutting-edge scientific theories than has been thought.

One painting in particular – The Festival of the Opening of the Vintage at Mâcon – holds, Hamilton believes, a fascinating secret.

The painting, executed in 1803 as Turner travelled through France, is dominated by a ferocious sun, and Hamilton argues that it is painted in an entirely new and revolutionary way, based on scientific theories expounded by the astronomer Sir William Herschel.

Herschel gave a groundbreaking lecture to the Royal Society in 1801, in which he revealed his discovery that the sun had a surface with “openings, shallows, ridges, nodules, corrugations, indentations and pores”.

At the same time, in the same building, members of the Royal Academy were arranging and discussing an exhibition that included Turner’s masterpiece Dutch Boats in a Gale, also known as The Bridgewater Sea Piece, which can now be seen in the National Gallery.

Herschel’s lecture was sensational stuff because the sun had always been something strangely unknowable.

Hamilton said Herschel examined the sun through his telescope near Slough, passing the light through watered ink, “and he saw the sun, for the first time, as an object. He saw it had a surface”.

Not long after the discovery, Turner was in France painting the Mâcon festivities and appears to have painted the sun as Herschel had described.

“In a sense you can’t really see it, you can’t focus on it, but if you look very, very closely there is a tiny little disc which is in three distinct parts,” said Hamilton. “They are painted in different ways – there’s a dab and a wipe and sort of flick of the brush. He is making it into something, he is giving it a surface and coming so close to Herschel’s lecture and his naming of parts, one has to see them as connected events.”

Hamilton said Turner’s sun was more than art – it was almost experimental science. It is a painting the academic knows well as he was for seven years keeper of the Sheffield gallery where, he says, the painting was “one of my pals”. But it is not the only evidence of Turner’s close relationship with science.

“He was fascinated by science and scientists and what they were achieving,” Hamilton said.

Turner was friends with Michael Faraday and the mathematician Mary Somerville, and knew the anatomist and palaeontologist Richard Owen and chemist Humphry Davy.

Because the RA was with the Royal Society in the same building – now the Courtauld Gallery – there was fluidity between the artists and scientists, with some, such as Thomas Lawrence, being members of both organisations. Faraday and Turner, in particular, could have been kindred spirits, sharing many common passions, not least an enormous interest in storms.

Harvey is convinced that Turner’s conversations with Faraday and his ideas directly affected the painter’s amazing landscapes.

“We do know they talked about pigments and Faraday gave him advice on how best to test the rate of discolouration and change of pigments in the very smoky London,” he said.

“They talked, but of course we’ll never know for sure about what. It can’t have been banalities.”

Turner’s fascination with science and the many discoveries being made came at a pivotal time in the histories of art and science – these were the years in which the gap was widening, and they were going their separate ways. “Science and art were becoming less of a brotherhood,” said Hamilton.

Hamilton said he had always been interested in the crossover between art and science and originally studied mechanical engineering before finishing up with a history of art degree.

“There is more to find, there are more congruences and combinations to uncover. It is a fascinating area to be working in and lots of clues are in his paintings – some heavily disguised and some in which he is feeling his way towards something and not necessarily finding it.”

The findings are detailed in one of several essays in the book Turner and the Elements, published by Hirmer.

The Turner and the Elements show is currently on display at the Muzeum Narodowe in Krakow and will open in Margate in January, the gallery’s first major show of the painter’s work since opening in its dramatic seaside location last April.

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/nov/13/turner-science-sun