Radio Highlights

Sometimes it feels as if my year in London is turning out to be a year of doing the dishes while listening to BBC Four and sitting in my living room, writing. With Internet radio, I could have done the same in Oregon.

Today, as I washed yesterday's dishes, I heard an interview with Clare Short about her experiences in Parliament ever since she quit the Labour Party. Short was a cabinet minister who resigned over the Iraq invasion, and more recently decided to quit the party altogether and sit with the opposition. But the question then was where to sit. There is, as it turns out, an area where independents, rebels, and assorted Parliamentary oddballs sit together in oppositition, and one of these number invited Ms. Short to sit with them.

It strikes me that the U.S. equivalent would be to renounce the other popular kids in high school. But which table will you go to when you're in the cafeteria for lunch? Perhaps those pimply boys in the chess club will invite you to join them.

I can see on the Internet that Sir Nicholas Stern's report on the economic effects of global warming has made the news on both sides of the Atlantic. In the U.S., the consequence is predictable. The right lambasts the report as flawed, and the left embraces it as an urgent call to action. And nothing much happens.

I can't say that I like the response here in Britain much better. The Stern report deserves to be considered and weighed, which includes skeptical probing of its assumptions and conclusions. I've heard only one voice saying, quite reasonably, that the effects of global warming might contribute as much benefit as harm. (Globally, that is. Whole countries that end up underwater will likely disagree.) Discussion of how to adjust if dramatic global climate change proves inevitable ought to be part of the debate.

But in Britain, all three major political parties are falling over one another to demonstrate that they are taking the report and global warming most seriously. The Liberal Democrats were way ahead of Labour or the Conservatives in proposing tax structures to encourage carbon reductions, and on the radio show with MPs of all three parties, I heard the Lib-Dem MP trying to claim that only her party was truly serious about the issue. The Conservative was especially earnest in saying that his party would create deep social changes to discourage the burning of carbon fuels and energy generation by other means. The Lib-Dem doubted this.

Said the Conservative: "When Conservatives are in government, you're going to see a policy so radical that the Liberals will have to put their shoes on to get anywhere near it."

I laughed so hard that I alarmed the cats. Sadly, I don't think that my man John McCain will adopt that sentence for his 2008 Presidential campaign.