Not actually burning our money

According to Wat Tyler, the cost of NHS treatment for foreign born mothers is currently run at 350 million a year. This is apparently 25% of the overall cost of maternity services.

My response is, so what? This figure is completely meaningless with out a bit of context (for instance - what constitutes foreign born? In my parish church, there at least three kids under two who were born to foreign born parents - one Irish, one Malaysian and of course the darling wife who is from Singapore). Two of those children however "rejoice" in British born fathers.

More to the point, all three were born to working parents who pay their taxes (indeed, being in this area of the country the chances are those parents are paying a lot more into the exchequer than the value of the services they take out).

AS Dr Crippen points out - if this is health tourism, it does need to be stopped. If it's legal, tax paying immigrants , then so what?

One other thing. Wat Tyler makes the point that:

The average native British woman has 1.6 children. The average immigrant woman has 2.2. And the average Pakistani woman in Britain has 4.7 children.

So what? To maintain the population as is, we apparently need 2.2 children per woman. In the future, we'll need those young people to man and support our healthcare and pay for our pensions - there's no point even in private pensions if there's no one working to earn the money to pay into the funds. If British born women - for whatever reason - aren't having enough children, then it's not reasonable to complain that the immigrants are making up the numbers for them.

New Man United purchase.

Sir Alex Ferguson today announced a key new purchase ahead of next week's derby game against Man City.

He's off to Toys R Us to buy some balloons.

BBC, the Pope and Galileo

The BBC are reporting that

Lecturers and students at a prestigious university in Rome want a planned visit by the Pope to be cancelled as they object to his position on Galileo.

The protest is because

Pope Benedict was in charge of Roman Catholic doctrine in 1990 when, as Cardinal Ratzinger, he commented on the 17th-Century Galileo trial. He has been quoted as saying the trial was "reasonable and just".

Except he wasn't. As this posting by John Allen on the National Catholic Reporter's site makes clear, he was quoting another philosopher, Feyerabend. The article appears to be a review of the views of several philosophers about the Galileo case and an attempt to draw a conclusion from that - not about Galileo, but about 20th century views of science and truth.

This was easily discovered in about five minutes with google - it's rather disappointing that the BBC journalists couldn't be bothered finding out if the claim was true, but then perhaps it's not surprising given the ignorance bias shown in the last line of the report:

Fifteen years ago Pope John Paul II officially conceded that in fact the Earth was not stationary.

This almost has echoes of Regensberg.