Crazy Britain

So, you're an experienced fireman, called out to help someone who's in trouble in a freezing river and you dive in and drag her out, saving her life. A cause for congratulation perhaps? Nope, apparently the fireman is facing an investigation and possible punishment for breaching health and safety regulations. (Hat tip: UK Liberty).

NO2ID Comedy Gig in Glasgow

NO2ID, in conjunction with Ha Ha Comedy, are organising a comedy gig as part of the international comedy festival currently in progress in Glasgow, Scotland. It’s organised for the 24th March, 8pm, at the Old Fruitmarket. Tickets £10 or £8 for concessions.

See here for full details.

Update: Confirmed comedians for this event include: You owe me glue, Glen Wool, Patrick Monahan, Toby Hadoke, Des Maclean and Lucy Porter.

Britain's surreal "junk food" advertising ban

[Hat Tip: Tim Worstall]

Last year, the government decided to introduce new rules to ban the advertising of "junk food" to children. This of course requires the government to decide what is and is not junk food, and apparently this has now been done. The Telegraph provides examples of what can and cannot be advertised to children:

Marmite, Flora Lite, half-fat cheddar cheese, Dairylea triangles, bran flakes, camembert, sugar-coated puffed wheat, instant hot oat cereal, Jaffa cakes, reduced calorie mayonnaise, multi-grain hoop cereal, half-fat creme fraiche, takeaway chicken nuggets, potato waffles, Greek yoghurt (sheep), ham, sausages, bacon rashers, low-fat spreads, peanuts, cashew nuts, pistachio nuts, peanut butter, raisins, sultanas, currants, low-fat potato crisps, olive oil, butter, pizza, hamburgers, tomato ketchup, chocolate, brown sauce, cola, lemonade

Here's what can be advertised to children:

Plain fromage frais, fish fingers, lasagne ready meals, currant buns, malt loaf, frozen roast potatoes, chicken curry with rice ready meal, frozen oven chips, sliced white bread, cottage cheese, supermarket frozen chicken nuggets, milk, brazil nuts, canned strawberries in
syrup, diet cola, chocolate-flavoured milk.

Apparently, the regulations are based on how much fat, sugar or salt there is in 100g of the product and take no account of likely portion sizes. Take Marmite as an example. In a 4g serving (which would be about typical for spreading on toast) you'd only get 0.5g of salt (Recommended Daily Allowance[RDA]: 6g).

The trouble is that in 100g of Marmite you'll get 11g of salt, well over the RDA, hence the "junk food" status. However, no one in their right mind would ever eat that much Marmite in one serving (half of one of the new squeezy containers, or 80% of one of the traditional small glass jars), let alone do so on a regular basis!

Furthermore, the following companies (though not necessarily the products they sell) can be advertised to their brands to children:

McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Burger King, Cadbury's, Kellogg's

I.e. the main pushers of junk food are allowed to carry on advertising their restaurants to kids, whilst individual products can be advertised (or not) on a ridiculous basis that equates eating 100g of Marmite with eating 100g of pizza when Marmite simply is not eaten in such large portions, and pizza is often eaten in bigger portions.

What utter nonsense.

Happy New Year

Sorry for the lack of posts in December, I hope you've all had a good Xmas and I wish you a Happy 2007!

Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act

My take on this is now up at the Magna Carta Plus weblog.

Some news items

Here's a brief roundup to help catch up on recent developments in various areas:

• The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill is now The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006. I'll comment on this later at Magna Carta Plus, for now here is the response and discussion from some other campaigners against this bill.
  
• An e-petitions web page has been set up at the Prime Minister's web site, and one of the petitions subsequently created is an anti-ID cards petition, which has had thousands of signatures so far. These petitions will apparently be sent to the PM, once completed, and a response given to them.
  
• The Liberal Democrats are asking for nominations for legislation to be repealed in a "Freedom Bill", and have identified 10 pieces of legislation they think should be repealed, including the Identity Cards Act and the legislation that introduced control orders.
  

Anyway that's all for now.

New look

I've chosen a new look for the blog, in order to take advantage of some new features in Blogger. Unfortunately choosing a new template has meant losing some of the things from the old template, although only until I get round to pasting them in from my backup copy of that template.

However, one of the things I'd like to do is switch to using Blogger's own commenting system rather than the Haloscan provided comments I used to use, which predated Blogger's comments and were the only means of providing for comments that I originally had. I think this will probably mean losing the Haloscan comments however, but then there were only a few comments contained there. If anyone reading this can indicate a way of getting Blogger to display the old comments only in old articles and new comments only in new articles, I'd be most interested.