News from the New Party

A slight inconvenience

A New Party member from Kent, Stewart Dimmock, is seeking a judicial review of the decision by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) to send a copy of Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth to every secondary school in England.  Mr Dimmock stood as a candidate for the New Party in Dover in last week’s council elections and the New Party supports him in his legal action.

Our principal concern is the political nature of this film rather than the science which surrounds the Global Warming Debate.  Although climate change is clearly taking place, there remains great uncertainty about the extent to which human actions contribute and – critically – the most appropriate responses.  Mr Gore’s film seeks to influence important political decisions and this could have profound long-term implications for our children.

The film promotes a specific political viewpoint and fails to give a detached analysis of scientific fact.  As such it represents a blatant attempt by our government to foist its political agenda on to schoolchildren by sending out a film which is more about politics than science. This is plainly unacceptable.

The government claims that the debate on climate change is over but we (along with many others, including prominent scientists) believe that significant questions still remain, not least on the most appropriate policy measures to adopt in response.  The debate is not helped by the distribution of political material of this kind.