The price of being in the EU is a price worth paying

Douglas Carswell recently wrote a short article entitled: “The price of being in the EU – can we afford it?” In it, he included a table of spending, which calculated expenditure on police pay, armed forces pay, and spending on special needs education (among other things) against the UK’s contribution to the EU budget. As well as the £9.2bn direct contribution, there are “all manner of hidden costs” such as “red tape, external tariffs, bad governance”. The “Eurosystem” demands more of “our money”, whereas spending in police pay, armed forces, and education has “largely” been frozen. Basically, Carswell asks: “Why don’t we just quit the EU?”

Carswell is stoking a fire which hardly needs encouragement.

On Religion and Science

At the end of this academic year, provided I spend a little more time in the library and a little less time on Facebook, I’ll receive a Bachelor of Arts degree in medical science.  This apparent discrepancy is no doubt a delicious throwback from an age when the dividing line between ‘art’ and ‘science’ was somewhat fuzzier; though the awkward juxtaposition does perhaps highlight a modern subject with some gravitas.