Saturday 17 December 2011

MPs' expenses: Margaret Moran 'not fit to stand trial', court told

 

File picture of former MP Margaret Moran in court over expense charges in September. Photograph: Rex Features

Margaret Moran, the former Labour MP accused of falsely claiming £80,000 in expenses, may not face trial after a court heard legal proceedings were a "threat to her life, not just to her liberty".

A Southwark crown court judge heard that three psychiatric experts all agree the ex-Luton South MP, who faces 21 charges, was unfit to plead.

Mr Justice Saunders will make a decision on whether the 56-year-old should be tried after hearing evidence from doctors. Jim Sturman QC, for Moran, urged a swift decision, saying: "These proceedings are a continual threat to her life, not just to her liberty, and the experts agree that she is unfit to plead."

He said he would ask the attorney general to apply for a "nolle", a rarely used power to allow the case to discontinue on exceptional grounds.

Describing Moran's mental state, Sturman referred to press reports of her previous appearance at Westminster magistrates court, describing her as a "broken woman" who was "sobbing uncontrollably" in the dock.

He had met Moran just once, he said. "She cried uncontrollably throughout the whole conference, so much so that I had to leave so she could be assured I was defending her, not prosecuting."

Louis Mably, prosecuting, said the experts were agreed "as things stand" that Moran, who did not attend Thursday's brief hearing, was unfit to plead.

If the court determines she is fit to plead, a trial of issue is set for 18 April. But Sturman said there was "no realistic prospect" of her condition improving by then.

Moran, who stood down at the last general election, faces 15 charges of false accounting and six of using a false instrument in relation to parliamentary expense claims totalling around £80,000 between November 2004 and August 2008.

It is alleged that she "flipped" her designated second home, claiming for properties in London, Luton and Southampton, and that she dishonestly claimed £22,500 to repair dry rot at the latter. She is also accused of falsely claiming for boiler repairs and work on her conservatory.

She is the last of five MPs and two peers to face criminal proceedings over the expenses scandal and was only charged in September, after the investigation was held up over claims of her ill health.

Saunders said he wanted the fitness to plead proceedings to be as "open as possible" as the case had attracted considerable public interest, and he wanted the full facts to be heard.

"It is obviously a matter which has considerable press interest. It seems to me that the more information the public have about why the decision was made the better," said Saunders.

He has asked to question in person at least one of the doctors who had examined Moran for the purposes of psychiatric reports to the court. She is said to have been assessed by three psychiatrists, for the defence and the prosecution, over a period of two years.

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Tory MP gets green light to sue Mail on Sunday

ory MP Dominic Raab worked as chief of staff to David Davis between 2006 and 2008. Photograph: Sutton-Hibbert / Rex Features

A Tory MP has been given the green light to sue the Daily Mail publisher Associated Newspapers for libel over allegations he bullied a female colleague.

Dominic Raab is suing the publisher over a Mail on Sunday article published on 30 January that alleged he bullied the colleague, referred to in court as "E", while he worked as chief of staff to David Davis between 2006 and 2008.

The article, headlined "Payout for woman who claimed workplace bullying under Raab", also claimed that the woman was paid £20,000 in "hush money" to keep the accusations of bullying and sexual discrimination a secret. Raab, who is also bound by the confidentiality agreement, denies the allegations.

The high court on Thursday refused to grant permission to Associated Newspapers' request for the action to be struck out, meaning Raab can sue the publisher for libel next year.

Raab claims the Mail on Sunday article alleged his behaviour was "so bad that it caused her, an extremely intelligent and accomplished young woman who had worked her way up from humble beginnings, to become traumatised, to feel worthless and to leave a job which she had otherwise enjoyed". He claims that the article inferred the woman was paid £20,000 in "hush money to keep [his] appalling behaviour secret".

The court heard how the woman entered into a confidentiality agreement with Davis and Raab in August 2007, prohibiting her from speaking publicly about the claims.

Associated Newspapers said the woman was willing to back up its claims if she was released from the confidentiality agreement or if the publisher could see a witness statement by her. However, Tugendhat refused to order that the witness statement should be released.

The judgment said there was no evidence the woman had been "gagged", as counsel for Associated Newspapers claimed, and noted she expressed a wish "not to have to talk about the subject".

"I accept that [Associated Newspapers] is not in terms seeking disclosure of documents, but to interview a witness. But the distinction is a narrow one, and may disappear if (as seems likely) 'E' has documents that are relevant to which she needs to refer," said Tugendhat in the written judgment.

"The application by the defendant that this libel action be struck out or stayed is dismissed."

Raab is expected to bring his claims to a libel trial in 2012.

• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".

Following note from Learning Quran online Blog

 

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Feltham and Heston byelection: don't break open the cava, Ed

Labour candidate Seema Malhotra makes a speech after winning the Feltham and Heston byelection. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

A learned professor whom we all see on the telly confided to a friend this week that Ukip might win yesterday's Feltham and Heston byelection. It's a useful reminder why learned professors should always be on tap, never on top. They so often lack the common sense with which we mere mortals are saddled.

Labour won easily with an evidently clever management consultant called Seema Malhotra for a candidate. She went to school in the area and would have had to have been caught behind a bush with Ed Miliband – no, make that David Cameron – to have lost the seat.

Admittedly, with low turnouts accidents occasionally happen. But after the coalition's bust-up in Brussels last Friday this wasn't going to be Ukip's night. Would-be Tory protest voters may have stayed put and the Conservatives are currently doing better in some polls despite the recession and the cuts. We'll come back to that.

It's usually better to win an election. But that's about it. Labour should be under no illusion about its prospects – and probably isn't. The overnight death of the contrarian-and-proud-of-it journalist Christopher Hitchens was higher up the Radio 4 news bulletin this morning than the byelection – and rightly so, though comparing Hitch to Voltaire (as MP Denis MacShane did) was over-cooking things a bit. An old drinking companion of mine, Hitchens came to believe his own press releases.

Back to Feltham and Heston, not a very Hitchens kind of place located under the Heathrow flight paths and solidly blue collar. I've always enjoyed byelections and try to visit most of them in my old age. Driving around the network of lookalike suburban roads in the constituency last week I managed to get lost, but have an excuse. It was the nearest byelection to my own west London home that I have attended in 30 years of this sort of thing. Complacently, I didn't bother to take my wife's new sat-nav. At least I called the right result.

So what does it tell us about the state of play in domestic Westminster politics? Not much, I fear, and certainly not much that will keep Cameron awake at night or prompt Miliband to open the cava. In her acceptance speech this morning Malhotra – canvassing again with Miliband on Friday, we are assured – called it a "wake-up call" to the coalition, which is what byelection winners say, always privately relieved they didn't blow it.

As Nick Watt's report makes clear there was an 8.5% swing from the Tories, whose candidate was a likable local councillor, Mark Bowen. That may reflect a restoration of the Labour vote damaged by the embarrassing treatment of expenses by the ex-MP, the late Alan Keen, in tandem with his ex-MP wife, Ann, who lost her neighbouring suburban seat in 2010.

But attempts to make this bread-and-butter event more interesting than it was ever likely to prove focused on Ukip's hope of pushing the Liberal Democrats' first-time contender, Roger Crouch, into third place. It failed, only narrowly by 88 votes, but we all know that one vote would have been enough either way. The BNP got 540 votes (since you ask) ahead of the Greens on 426 in a nine-candidate field where the Bus-Pass Elvis party garnered 93 votes.

All right, an 8.5% swing sounds fine and for an opposition party it's always better than a similar swing in the opposite direction. Much more important – and discouraging for all concerned – is the low turnout of 28.7%, half the 69% in the 2010 general election and apparently the lowest in a byelection for 11 years since David Lammy won Tottenham on a turnout of 25.4% and Adrian Bailey held West Bromwich West on 27.3%, both in 2000 when Tony Blair was in his prime.

As Mike Smithson notes on his smart Political Betting website there were 10,145 postal votes cast in Alan Keen's last win – 21% of the total – and could have been even more significant in Malhotra's win because nowadays people don't need an excuse to claim a postal vote. Like me, Smithson disapproves of this Labour "reform" because it encourages fraud and allows people to vote without being able to judge candidates.

I persist in believing that candidates matter, that a good or bad one can make a difference, especially in a byelection. Ukip's candidate, a colourful entrepreneurial character called Andrew Charalambous who was still sniffing after a Tory seat until quite recently, didn't strike me as the man to swing votes, though he was protectively supported by his party leader, the much more plausible Nigel Farage MEP, always a cheerful presence and looking a lot healthier than when I last saw him (before his 2010 election plane crash).

That's why parties take no chances, they ensure that "safe" candidates are picked, though byelections are no longer the TV three-ringed circus they were in the days when Newsnight's Vincent Hanna had such fun. The parties protect their candidates too closely – and in this instance Labour staged the ballot (the party holding the seat chooses the date) barely a month after Keen's death. Why? To save campaigning money it doesn't have, so I was told. MPs also tend to retire or move on to new pastures rather than die in harness: there are fewer byelections. Check the record with Wikipedia. Yet there have already been five – now six – in this parliament after 18 months, as many as in the whole 2001-5 parliament.

Belfast West's Gerry Adams, who became an Irish Sinn Féin TD and Sir Peter Soulsby (Leicester South) became elected mayor of Leicester; Inverclyde's David Cairns died; Barnsley Central's Eric Illsley went to jail for expenses fraud and Oldham's Phil Woolas was ejected by an election court, the first such verdict in 99 years.

No seat has changed hands in party terms, all the winners came in on the usual lower turnouts, 45.4% in Inverclyde, 36.5% in Barnsley Central where an ex-Para major, Dan Jarvis, held the seat for Labour and Ukip pushed its way into second place in this South Yorkshire ex-mining stronghold. In Leicester, Labour pushed up its vote by 12.2% (Jarvis did slightly better) and in Inverclyde, the rampant SNP took 15.5% more than in 2010 – in what is a Labour heartland area. Elwyn Watkins, the Lib Dem whose complaint of illegal campaign practice forced the Oldham byelection, did not prosper: Labour's new candidate, Debbie Abrahams, upped her vote by 10% and elbowed him aside.

Not much to glean from that lot. Labour defended five seats and held five, though not very excitingly. In Feltham and Heston Labour usually runs the local council – Hounslow – and clearly has both achievements and failures on its record. Being lost, I arrived too late to see Ed Miliband and his candidate visit the Sure Start project on the edge of the Beaver Estate, a tough 1960s high-rise neighbourhood close to the busy M4.

The Sure Start centre looked bright and cheerful – like its staff – but times are still tough for many people around here, relatively prosperous though it is compared with some of the other byelection constituencies I have visited lately. Youth unemployment has risen sharply and the price paid for many local jobs is noise and pollution from the airport.

On Comment is Free today the Guardian's Martin Kettle presents the challenge Labour faces here – and elsewhere – which is how to address issues of public spending and social justice, its core appeal, in times when there is no extra money and no prospect of there being any more for the forseeable future.

Voters remain more inclined to blame Labour for its share of the recession – borrowing too much to fund its ambitious anti-poverty plans and not reining in the boom-and-bust banks via effective regulation – for the state we're all in than they are to blame the coalition for trying to fix it. Self-defeating austerity, which simply piles on the debt, may change that. But when it does, Labour had better have created a more persuasive story to woo voters back – or something nastier may step into the vacuum.

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Children's heart treatment, high speed trains and coping with the cuts

As the year draws to a close many across the North will be reflecting on 2011 and what it meant for them as well as looking ahead to 2012. In the first in a three part series, Stuart Andrew gives a personal reflection on his year as Member of Parliament for Pudsey. Next week will be the turn of Rachel Reeves, Labour MP for Leeds West and the Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury.

For me there have been many ups and downs over the last year but what strikes me most is that, despite all the gloom and doom, we are so fortunate in this country that so many people do so many wonderful things for their communities, for charities and for our country. As a Member of Parliament I get a privileged insight into this work.

One local issue which I have been involved with and which exemplifies this commitment from so many has been the campaign to save the Children's Heart Unit at Leeds General Infirmary. As part of a national review there is a recommendation to reduce the number of centres to increase expertise in the field. This principle I wholly support but I am deeply concerned that the Leeds unit only appears in the least favoured of the four options, implying that it is likely to close.

In Parliament I was glad to secure two debates on the issue and it was a moment when I think Parliament was at its best. MPs from all parts of the country and all political parties united to express our concern about the impact the review would have. I only hope that those making the decision will listen to the thousands of voices from across the region.

Transport is an issue that has long vexed many in my constituency and the lack of investment in Yorkshire over the years is clearly evident. I have been keen at every opportunity to highlight our need and was delighted that in the Autumn Statement the Chancellor announced that funding will be provided to secure new rail stations at Apperley Bridge and Kirkstall Forge, which should contribute to reducing congestion on local roads. In addition, I have been elected as the co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on High Speed Rail, a project that, in my view, is crucial if we are serious about dealing with the problem of overcrowding on our main routes and bringing better links between our major cities.

Not long after being elected, I was contacted by a constituent who is suffering from ovarian cancer. She invited me to a reception in Parliament so that we could discuss the issues surrounding this disease and the serious lack of awareness of the symptoms that exists amongst women. It reminded me that I never knew my own grandmother due to this disease and I was pleased to secure a debate in Westminster Hall, following which a cross party delegation met with the Minister and pressed the need for a Government led awareness campaign.

Earlier this year, a number of parents of children with autism invited me to a meeting at which they were discussing taking advantage of the Government Free School. I managed to secure a meeting with the Minster for Schools and these inspirational parents, who presented a very compelling case. We were all delighted when the application was successful and we can look forward to this much needed school opening in Pudsey soon.

On a lighter note, a real high for me this year was to see businesses, schools, community groups and individuals in Pudsey coming together to raise thousands of pounds for Children in Need. What made the whole event even more enjoyable was that the BBC agreed to my request to hold the regional and part of the national coverage in Pudsey. It was truly wonderful to welcome Pudsey Bear home.

The low points during the year have been when we have been faced with making extremely difficult decisions in order to fix the terrible deficit which we inherited. Countries which have not dealt with their deficits have seen their interest rates rise, causing misery to mortgage holders and businesses, making it more crucial that we don't head in the same direction.

Another incredibly difficult decision came as Parliament debated a referendum on the EU. Prior to the election I had called on the previous government to honour its pledge to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. During the election I was asked at a hustings how I would vote if this issue arose in Westminster. I answered by saying that, as someone who believed in democracy, I would support it. It was therefore with a heavy heart that I had to vote against the Government, but I felt it was crucial that I honour the pledge I had made.

Looking to the future, I hope that we will be successful in our campaign to save Leeds Children's Heart Unit. It would be a wonderful result and a clear indication that the review team has listened to the consultation.

I will continue to support the plan to construct a high speed rail link and will be leading an inquiry on this very issue through the APPG. Looking at wider transport issues, I will continue to lobby the Government to ensure that our area receives its fair share of any funding that is available and will continue to stress the need for the Northern Hub project which will help to increase capacity on our rail network locally, and also improve journey times across the North of England.

2012 will be a very special year, with the Olympics and Paralympics coming to London. This will be a fantastic opportunity for the UK to showcase itself across the world and it is important that our region shares in the benefits that these games will no doubt bring.

Finally, and by no means least, 2012 will also be the Queen's diamond jubilee. It is incredible to believe that Her Majesty has been on the throne for 60 years. She has served our country with great dignity and I wish her a very happy year of celebration.

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Do lobbying firms change government policy?

One of the country's leading lobbying firms, Bell Pottinger, has been exposed in an undercover sting bragging about its access to the heart of government, even claiming that they had got Cameron to talk to the Chinese premier on behalf of a client. The undercover recordings, conducted by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and reported in the Independent today, claimed to expose the "dark arts" used by lobbying firms to influence the government.


The response

Downing Street vehemently denied the claims in the reports. The prime minister's official spokesman told reporters today:

10 Downing Street

It simply isn't true to say that Bell Pottinger or any other lobbying company has influenced government policy. If companies have issues then they can come and talk to the government. We have a department for Business and speak to people all the time people in the Treasury speak to businesses and businesses speak to people in Downing Street all the time... It is simply untrue to say that BP or any other lobbying company influences government. I am challenging this idea that this company or any other lobbying company have influenced policy.

Is this true? Is Number 10 right to claim that lobbying firms have not influenced government policy?

Analysis

The Number 10 denial related specifically to lobbying companies, not lobbying generally. Lobbying is a widespread, routine part of Parliament – charities, businesses, trade unions or even individual constituents will all lobby MPs to take up a cause or the government to change a law. The government openly facilitates such lobbying through consultations on its policies and meetings with groups with an interest in their policy areas.

But the scandals come thick and fast. I've been looking for recent examples where a link has been drawn between lobbying and a policy change. The first obvious one that sprang to mind is the chancellor's major decision at the Autumn statement to defer the increase in fuel duty at the autumn statement, following a major lobbying operation. On the face of this it was a grassroots drivers revolt in the form of a petition in parliament was signed by more than 100,000 people. That petition was started by FairFuelUK, a campaign group run by a lobbying firm which was in turn funded by the RAC, the Freight Transport Association and Road Haulage Association. Reality check has previously looked into FairFuelUK here.

Another was the private lobbying of ministers by the construction industry prior to its plans to relax the planning laws, which my colleague Robert Booth reported on here.

There are dozens of other examples dating back to cash for questions to the former Labour minister Stephen Byers who described himself as a "cab for hire" in his new lobbying firm.

Elizabeth France, chairman of the UK Public Affairs Council which "promotes and upholds effective self regulation for those professionally engaged in public affairs", told me that part of the problem is one of definition – what is above the board lobbying and what is clandestine.

It's difficult to know where lobbying begins and ends. I'm lobbying if I talk as an individual to my MP. The law needs a definition. If you just tot up the big consultancies you will get one idea of how big the lobbying industry is, but it's much broader than that. Trade unions and charities are lobbying just as professional lobbying companies are. It's vast and essential part of a democracy and leads to an informed debate. If it's done properly and openly it's crucial to the democratic process.

I've just been speaking with one long-standing Conservative MP with specific knowledge of the lobbying system – who asked not to be named. I think he gives a really interesting insight, describing how the influence of lobbying firms is often in fact indirect, rather than through direct contact with ministers. He said:

I think lobbying companies per se have no influence at all it's whether they enable their clients to have influence. A good lobbying company is someone in the background who advises the company on how to proceed - not pushing themselves forward. I tend not to respond to lobbyists who ring, if someone rings from a company chief executive's office I'll ask a few questions and usually find out they are working for a lobbying company. I'll see the chief executive directly, but not the lobbyist. They should draft letters, help with access, but not meet [with politicians] themselves. Companies that use lobbyists as their proxies are very stupid. Lobbying companies that operate like that are money for old rope - no value.

A long-standing Labour MP, also with a particular interest in this area, told me:

If I were in that business I wouldn't spend my time lobbying MPs – only government. If I wanted to influence the law I would do civil servants and ministers. Lobbying individual MPs makes the companies feel good, the clients feels good, even the MPs feel good, does it impact legislation? I would say that is very rare. But I'm sure it happens and it does work in government.

Helen Johnson, is chair of the Association of Professional Political Consultations, which represents lobbyists and has its own code of conduct. She runs Helen Johnson Consulting which has clients in the healthcare industries as well as charitable patient groups.

Unsurprisingly, she says that lobbying firms do indeed shape shape government policy - but it's difficult to prove it:

We can help shape government policy and direction on a whole range of things. What I would say is that it's not just lobbying firms that do that – anyone looking to lobby can make those changes in a transparent manner. We wouldn't be advocating an approach of boasting access to ministers or otherwise. We're not just working on behalf of big business but charities, voluntary groups and NGOs and so on. Many are looking for advice on how to contact ministers or politicians; how to make approaches. We won't necessarily go in and meet ministers ourselves but advise members. We wouldn't advocate being an intermediary.

There are plenty of examples that we would have that are confidential to our clients that are around projects or awareness. Whether it be access to particular treatments, concerns about what the NHS reforms might be doing to certain groups of patients. The environment for pharma companies operating in the UK. We've been involved in campaigns but it's not easy to make direct links – there are other people campaigning for the same thing. If a consultation paper comes out and you can see things your clients are concerned about and your client writes in with comments and the final decision addresses that comment you could argue your campaign has been successful but it's very difficult to pinpoint cause and affect. But we are not making claims that we can't substantiate... You can't claim cause and effect.

To give a different view, I spoke with Paul Flynn, the Labour MP for Newport West who is a member of the Public Administration Select Committee, which did the last inquiry into lobbying and recommended a statutory register. I asked him whether lobbying "worked". He said:


As the professional bullshitters lobbyists are very good at covering their tracks. You can look at government decisions on airports and so on you can see who gets the pass. We know the pressure they create, we know MPs and Lords are willing to put down amendments for money, if we put it on the amount of access they buy, certainly that's true. They certainly get into the higher reaches of government. There's also the revolving door thing – ministers go into lobbying. It's hard to say exactly why a minister changed their mind on something, but there's enough to be highly, highly suspicious. The industry wouldn't exist unless they worked.

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Government austerity cuts: are the rich or poor hit hardest?

David Cameron at PMQs. Photograph: PA

David Cameron and Ed Miliband clashed during prime minister's questions in the Commons today over the evidence about who loses the most from the government's tax and benefit changes. My colleague, Andrew Sparrow, reported the rapid exchange of conflicting statistics:


Ed Miliband asks Cameron to confirm that next year the poorest third of families will lose three times as much as the richest families, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies says.

Cameron says that's wrong. If you look at all government policies, the rich pay most - in real terms and proportionally.

Miliband says Cameron is wrong.

The Labour party press office reiterated the point in this tweet:

IFS: bottom 30% losing 3 times as much as richest 30% next year - slide 10 bit.ly/vMTYRI #PMQs

Who is right?

Analysis

Ed Miliband is referring to the following table from the Institute for Fiscal Studies' analysis of the Autumn statement. This clearly shows the impact of the changes taking effect in 2012-13 falling squarely on the poorest.

Distributional impact of autumn statement 2012-13 Distributional impact of autumn statement 2012-13. Source: IFS.

 

David Cameron is referring to the table below, which is from the Treasury's own distributional analysis of the impacts of the Autumn Statement (pdf) which assesses all the government's tax and benefit changes to date (not just those announced in the statement) and finds that the very richest do indeed pay the most. However, below the richest decile, the impact is almost entirely regressive with the poorest paying more than those in the upper deciles.

Autumn statement distributional analysis 1.B Autumn statement distributional analysis 1.B

 

Both politicians have found the figures that suit their argument. Miliband has opted to use the impact of the changes in 2012-13, which shows a clearly larger burden on the poorest whereas the prime minister uses the accumulated changes, to select the richest 10% and rightly say that they pay the most.

I've just asked Robert Joyce, the IFS economists who compiled Miliband's table, which are the fairest figures to use. He said that the figures cited by both sides are factually correct; which one you choose to use just depends on whether you want to assess the impact of the new changes in 2012-13 (as Miliband does) or the accumulated changes up to that point (as Cameron argued was fairer to do). Then he added this:

Regardless of which stats you use, the things that are driving the large losses for the top group in the Treasury's analysis are mostly things that were announced by Labour they came in during the coalition's reign. If you're specifically interested in measuring the coalition's policies, you don't want to be accounting for that.

Verdict

Cameron and Miliband are both technically right according to their selected statistics and Cameron has the upper hand in terms of citing the statistics that present the broadest picture, rather than the impact of one set of changes. But according to the IFS, he can only make his claim that the very richest pay the most because of Labour's legacy of policy changes that the coalition kept. Below the richest 10% of the population, the impact is regressive. Overall, the poorest will pay the most as a result of the tax and benefit reforms designed by the coalition, rather than the last government.

2.49pm update:

In an earlier assessment of the impacts of government policy, the IFS separated out the Labour and Conservative originating elements of tax and benefit changes and produced this graph, slide 7, here. It illustrates the point made above that the policies of the last government are largely responsible for the increased impacts on higher earners that Cameron referred to.

Distributional impact by government Distributional impact by government. Source: IFS

 

A couple of caveats: these don't include the most recent changes announced, but the IFS says that there would make little impact apart from perhaps to exacerbate the trend. This is also in cash terms only, rather than as a proportion of income. James Browne at the IFS has provided me with that data, which I'll add shortly.

Below the line, @TheIndyisBetter makes the point that even if they were Labour policies, the coalition chose to keep them so we shouldn't discount them. Do you agree? Is there a better way of calculating the impact?

Get in touch below the line, email me at polly.curtis@guardian.co.uk or tweet @pollycurtis.

Reading Quran and reflecting over the Quran Is our Duty

Read quran and it will guided us to the true teaching of The Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him) he summarized the religion of Islam with this statement: “The Religion is naseehah (sincerity)!” So then Tameem ibn Aws, may Allah be pleased with him, then said, “We asked, ‘To whom?’” He said: “To Allah, HIS BOOK holy quran, His Messenger, the leaders of the people, and their common folk.” [Muslim] so to study the religion people should go to the source of and source of Islam is the quran so learning quran and reading quran with the meaning the quran tafsir and then explore the words of wisdom. And for the Muslims the sincerity that is due to the Book of Allah includes doing the quran recitation, listening to quran along with learning the tajweed rules and reciting it beautifully, letting our kids learn quran learning holy quran tafseer and the reasons for its revelation, affirming that it is the Truth, the perfect Speech of Allah and not part of the creation, honoring it and defending it, abiding by the orders and prohibitions found in it and teaching quran to spread the word or truth and calling to it. So by learning quran education online and reflecting over the Quran online, one fulfills an obligation and is rewarded for that. Upon fulfilling this obligation, the Quran then becomes a proof for him on the Day of Judgment! And that is our second benefit we will take by embracing this Noble Book...

Is the City really under threat from Europe?

Photograph: Jeff Spielman/Getty Images

The City is under "continued regulatory" attacks from Europe David Cameron claimed yesterday promising to demand new safeguards when the European summit starts today. What are those regulations, why is Europe enacting them, do they constitute a threat and what part might they play in this week's negotiations?

The claim

My colleagues Nick Watt and Ian Traynor report today:

The prime minister, who faced a call from the right-winger Andrew Rosindell to show "some bulldog spirit in Brussels", told MPs that he would be seeking safeguards for the City of London.

Accusing Brussels of "continued regulatory" attacks on the City, he said: "I think there'll be an opportunity, particularly if there is a treaty at 27 [the summit meeting of all EU members], to ensure there are some safeguards – not just for the industry, but to give us greater power and control in terms of regulation here in the Commons. I think that that is in the interests of the entire country, and it is something that I will be fighting for on Friday."

The analysis

The thinktank Open Europe published a report this week called Safeguarding the UK's financial trade in a changing Europe, which you can find here. It includes a list of 49 financial regulations in the pipeline, which it says pose a threat to the UK finance sector (annex 1).

Open Europe describes itself as "in favour of cooperation with Europe, but campaigning for it to do less and better" and it declares on its website that it receives funding and support from the City and big business.

Not all of the 49 regulations listed are definitely being introduced, some are only being debated. The majority were responses to the last financial crisis to tackle irresponsibility in the financial sector, prevent risky banking practices and in some cases improve transparency and tackle tax evasion.

The chief ones include:

• Plans to introduce a Europe-wise financial transactions tax (FTT) known as a Robin Hood or Tobin tax and announced in August by Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel.

• Discussions over whether to force financial clearing houses to be based in the eurozone, which the report suggests could prompt a mass relocation from London.

• Reforms to short-selling, which has already been banned in some European countries.

• Hedge-fund reform.

On hedge-fund reform, for example, this would limit the amount of access non-EU hedge fund managers would have to the EU market. At the moment a fund manager can be based in a different country to the fund, with administrators or depositories in a third or even fourth country. The EU want these to be co-located, to improve regulation and make it easier to raise taxes. But Mats Persson of Open Europe told me:

Mats Persson

You've had in the past a certain level of abuse and these guys not paying a lot of taxes, so there is a point to these changes. But because capital is so incredibly mobile you can't do that. These guys will move elsewhere. The intention is good but the economic reality is different. You will still have the risks but lose what you have.

Persson said:

It's not that the threat is regulation per se; regulation is clearly needed in the wake of the crisis. There were clearly regulatory failures leading up to the crisis and that has to be addressed. It's the nature of that regulation and how it is designed and what it will achieve that we are concerned with.

We're not just anti-regulation, we want the best regulation while also making sure we have trade and growth. It's a clash in regulatory approaches rather than one of wanting more and one wanting less. We're saying for example Britain meeds to have stronger capital requirements for banks [the amount banks keep in reserve to buffer against market instability]. Britain is getting stick for too stiff regulations.

He stressed that the fact that they were concerned about the relatively weaker regulations around capital requirements showed that they were not purely concerned about European regulation in itself; but about getting that right regulation.

The Robin Hood tax

I've had a brief chat with the British Banker's Association, who also raise the financial transactions tax as a potential threat. A spokesman said it was "the one he [Cameron] might stand a reasonable chance of doing something about".

The Europe-wide Robin Hood tax is an issue that all three political parties broadly share concerns about. George Osborne has indicated that it could cost the country half a million jobs (a claim disputed by the EU and fact checked by FullFact.org); Vince Cable has called it a "tax on Britain" but is not against an international transactions tax on principle; and Labour only supports a financial transaction tax that's on a global basis.

However, there is of course another view to the political front-benches, the bankers themselves and the research put forward by Open Europe, which it's worth stressing again receives support and funding from the City.

The outspoken Lord Oakeshott, the Liberal Democrat peer and former treasury spokesman in the Lords, told me:

Lord Oakeshott

The idea that in the worst crisis in a generation our top priority for our prime minister today is to protect the fat cats in the City is extraordinary. There's not much of a threat. There's some perfectly sensible proposals about more transparency and better corporate government in hedge funds which are perfectly reasonable. You do need some supra-national regulation. British regulations on their own haven't proved a great success in the past. Cameron is banging the drum because it's a simple scare to do – and many of the Tory donors are in the city.

However, he did add that the current plans for a European-wide transaction tax would be a threat as it stands, confined to Europe.

The Tobin tax is in principle a good idea but most serious economists and people who understand the markets know you could only work it on a world wide basis. I can't see it working if the US is not involved. But the Tobin tax couldn't possibly be imposed by some of western Europe on its own. I do think it's a red herring at the moment.

Richard Murphy, who runs Tax Research UK and campaigns against poverty and for better regulation and tax collection, told me:

Richard Murphy

It's an extraordinary statement of priorities at the moment in itself the fact that the city is at the top of the agenda when there is so much concern about the impact of bankers. The very cause of the problems addressed by Europe is to some degree being defended by David Cameron as his number one priority. We might agree that the City has a role, to make it your priority is extremely odd.

But purely economically he is also wrong. The problems in Europe there is a balance of payments crisis. As Martin Wolf argued in the FT yesterday [£] the value of payments is wrong and we need to put that right. One of the major reasons that's happened is because of the free movement of capital which is the basis of the City of London. We need to slow it down. A financial transaction tax would help do that. It's one of the essential measures to bring capital back under control. We do need capital controls.

On the wider proposals, he added:

This is about accountability and transparency and making sure that people pay their taxes. It's about effective markets. Why are they trying to maintain the status quote which is so flawed? Demanding a hedge fund is run, regulated and taxed in the same place is right. This is not being anti-market; it's arguing for a good market.

Clearly, there's an ideological divide about whether you want the City to flourish free of certain regulations, or whether you believe it is right to impose restrictions to prevent a repeat of the last banking-based financial crisis. But it's not entirely straight-forward. The City isn't opposing all regulations - for example they are backing better higher capital requirements proposed in the UK against Europe's more lax plans. And even some of those who support European regulations and a crack-down on the banks are concerned about the potential impact of a European wide transaction tax. What is the right balance?

I'm going to look for more evidence of this and talk to some of the expert reporters the Guardian has in Brussels covering the summit today. I'll update this blog shortly. Do you have any evidence that might show whether there is a real threat to the City? Get in touch below the line, email me at polly.curtis@guardian.co.uk or tweet @pollycurtis.

1.17pm: Ian Traynor, the Guardian's European editor, has just sent me this from Brussels.

Ian Traynor

Financial regulation is not remotely on the agenda at this summit. They have much bigger fish to fry. Cameron is being disingenuous, trying to create a separate narrative to suit his needs in contrast to the real business in which he's a bystander. He does this consistently at EU summits. But while financial markets regulation is not directly on the agenda, it is of course the bond markets that are at the heart of the crisis and will of course be discussed as part of the crisis response, plus Cameron and others can say what they like and will no doubt raise the subject

But the UK City case is not an empty posture. The UK has around 50% of the EU's financial services and the single market is critical. The government argues that 20 pieces of financial regulation in the pipeline where the UK could be outvoted. The European Central Bank, London argues, pursues a policy of urging that euro-denominated transactions be conducted in the eurozone, not London, but Frankfurt or Paris. Franco-German papers issued last night commits inter alia to a eurozone Tobin tax on financial transactions, which the UK will not accept but also can't veto.

2.36pm: I've been looking at the academic evidence available on the efficacy of a financial transaction tax at both regulating markets and raising money.

Jon Slater from the Robin Hood Tax campaign sent me this research tinyurl.com/6atzewz in a tweet. It's an IMF summary conducted earlier this year of the academic assessments to date of a financial transaction tax. It includes a table of all the financial transaction taxes already in place around the world, proof the campaign argues that unilateral taxes can work. The research gives a mixed verdict on the taxes. The IMF is not neutral in this, but its academic research is supposed to inform dispassionately. It concludes that such a tax would raise huge amounts of money with even a very low rate. It says:

The potentially large base of an STT promises an opportunity to raise substantial revenue with a low-rate tax. Current estimates of the revenue potential of a low-rate (0.5–1 basis point) multilateral CTT on the four major trading currencies suggest that it could raise about $20–40 billion annually, or roughly 0.05 percent of world GDP

However, it also warns the the evidence so far suggests that it would be ineffective at regulating markets and preventing instability – although its final verdict is equivocal. It says:

An STT [securities transaction tax] is also an inefficient instrument for regulating financial markets and preventing bubbles. There is no convincing evidence that STTs lower short-term price volatility, and high transaction costs are likely to increase it. Current economic thought attributes asset bubbles to excessive leverage, not excessive transactions per se.

Tim Harford, an economist and FT columnist, makes a similar case to the IMF but in slightly more accessible terms. (Hat tip to Bloomberg's reporter in the Commons, @RobDotHutton, for pointing me towards this.) Harford writes:

An analogy: if I have to pay a charge whenever I use a cash machine, I make fewer, larger withdrawals and the amount of money in my wallet fluctuates more widely. Bear in mind, too, that the most bubble-prone asset market is for housing, which is bought in very lumpy, long-term chunks. There isn't much evidence as to whether transaction charges reduce volatility. What there is is mixed – but perhaps leaning against the Robin Hood tax. On the French stock market, coarser "tick sizes" raise spreads and act like a tax: they increase volatility. Transaction taxes on Swedish stocks in the 1980s reduced prices and turnover but left volatility unchanged.

Neil McCulloch, a research fellow at the Institute for Development Studies, who is conducting a major review of all the evidence about the Tobin tax, argues that although it isn't a panacea, the research shows it is effective. He argues the more broadly it is implemented, the more effect it would be. He writes:

A Tobin tax is implementable, both at a European and national level. It isn't a panacea and won't "calm the markets", but it might make a useful contribution to public finances and to generating resources for tackling global problems such as climate change and poverty. With increasing political support for such a tax among EU leaders, it is time for policymakers and the financial sector to take these proposals far more seriously.

I've just been speaking with Aditya Chakrabortty, our economics leader writer, who said something similar. He said that a Tobin tax would raise money and make the banks pay, but it won't regulate their behaviour. He said:

Aditya Chakrabortty

There are now three objectives placed upon a Tobin tax. The first is what its inventor, James Tobin, called 'throwing sand into the wheels of finance'. He wanted to slow the pace of financial transactions. Back then, his target was foreign exchange and he was influenced by the experience of small developing countries, which would suddenly get a rush of investment and just as suddenly lose it. I don't think that would affect London.

The second objective was to raise money. Will it raise money? Everyone from the IMF to Bill Gates thinks so. The third objective, which has gone right up the political agenda, is that banks need to be seen to be paying their share of the bill for the financial crisis. I fail to see on economic grounds – as opposed to vested interests – the arguments against it. It's hard to argue that such a small tax would deter trade. Nor would it replace the central bank or regulator; it just raises a bit more cash.

Verdict

Is the City really under threat from Europe?

Yes. The financial regulations being implemented and considered in Europe are largely a response to the last financial crisis and measures such as a financial transactions tax, the reform of short-selling and hedge-funds are all designed to create more responsible behaviour in all the major financial centres. The banks certainly see that as a threat to them; it is supposed to be.

Whether the response is proportional or not depends on the faith you have in the City and whether you want to protect, control or punish it. A Tobin tax, for example, would raise significant amounts of money (although it's not entirely clear where this would go), it would show the electorates across Europe that the bankers are paying for their past mistakes but the evidence suggests that it wouldn't regulate risky behaviour. If, as is the plan, it's only implemented in Europe, the markets could simply move elsewhere.

Cameron has come down clearly on the side of the City – which might be an irony for some, seeing as many of the problems that the euro summit in Brussels will be discussing were, one way or the other, born in the financial centres of the world. The issue isn't officially on the agenda at the summit and Cameron's promise to his eurosceptic backbenchers is already have ructions even before the summit begins.

Below the line, a journalist from Welt online, the German website, has posted a translation from the Liveblog they are running today ahead of the summit. His translation says:

... but the british don't just want to stop the Financial Transaction Tax that Merkel wants. They want to withdraw from already established European banking regulation and wouldn't even accept the new Basel-III rules for credit institutions. These plans would create nothing less than a british special zone in the EU, where precisely the unregulated speculation that Merkel wants to stop, would continue.

The British plan is so radical, that the chancellor's office didn't believe that Cameron would take it to the summit. Even when the Premier was in the chancellor's office in november and wouldn't budge from his plans, they doubted his determination.

The alarm bells only started ringing on tuesday night, when in a guest column in the London Times, Cameron made the protection of his finance sector a condition to his agreement to a treaty change.

Read quran its is the Word of Allah the sigh of guidance

Reading quran and exploring it is the true duty of a Muslim because it contains Allah’s message to all people and the quran teaching tells the people that how to act correctly. By learning quran you will find that it guides us to a correct way of life in this world. We as a practicing Muslim should teach our kids quran and let the kids learn quran recitation and do quran memorization and we also do quran memorization by heart and there is an other importing thing that learn quran with tajweed because the tajweed rules are very important regarding the pronunciation and way or read the holy quran and further more enhancing the quranic studies by learning quran tafseer and reading quran the translation with it listening to quran online with the quran recitation don by some of the top reciter also. It is the Book of Allah also talks about life after death. It tells us that Allah has prepared Paradise for good people and Hell for bad people. Wile reading Quran we see that it encourages the worship of only one God Who creates and provides for them. The Book forbids people from evil and condemns those who do wrong. It contains stories of the past Prophets and the examples of bad and good people. Find online quran courses 

 

Pink v blue - are children born with gender preferences?

Hamleys, the country's most famous toy store, has abandoned its traditional separate floors for boys and girls after a campaign on Twitter accused it of operating "gender apartheid". New signs in the store now state what type of toys are sold on each floor, rather than suggesting who should play with them.

The campaign was started by Laura Nelson, a political blogger who writes under the name "Delilah" and who trained as a neuroscientist. She believes that young children's development can be limited if they play with only one sort of toy. She was horrified by the "sea of pink" on the girls' floor at Hamleys, which had fluffy animals, cookery sets and hair and beauty-related toys including a beauty salon called "Tantrum".

The boys' department was all action and adventure, with cars, spaceships, science sets and construction toys. Hamleys did not admit that the dumping of the old signs had anything to do with the campaign, saying the move was entirely coincidental and designed to "improve customer flow".

When I tweeted the link to the story this morning the responses ranged from "hurrah!" to "ridiculous".

But what is the science behind gender and toys? Do boys really prefer blue and girls pink? Would girls always opt for Sylvanian Families over Power Rangers given the choice? Is there evidence for or against the "gender apartheid"?

Pink v blue

Kat Arney, a science journalist who works for Cancer Research UK, investigated the gender of colour in this Radio 4 documentary earlier this year, Fighting the Power of Pink. Her post for the Guardian here provides a brilliant summary of the scientific evidence.

Arney points us towards this 2007 research which showed that in general when asked women tend to identify redder colours as their favourite – a finding reported widely as proof that women prefer pink. In that study Professor Anya Hurlbert from Newcastle University suggested that women might prefer pink as a legacy of their fruit gathering days when the preference helped them identify the berries from the foliage – an idea thoroughly disputed by the Guardian columnist Ben Goldacre here.

Interestingly Goldacre quotes in the same piece newspaper articles from the earlier part of the 20th century in which mothers were encouraged to dress their boys in pink and girls in blue, proof he says that clothing tastes change over time. He writes:

Back in the days when ladies had a home journal (in 1918) the Ladies' Home Journal wrote: "There has been a great diversity of opinion on the subject, but the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger colour is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl."

The Sunday Sentinel in 1914 told American mothers: "If you like the colour note on the little one's garments, use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention."

The problem both Goldacre and Arney point out is that studies such as the Newcastle one don't settle the nature v nurture arguments because they ask adults. Are girls born liking pink or are they in some way told to?

The study that asked the youngest children, 120 aged under two, that Arney could identify was conducted by Professor Melissa Hines at Cambridge University and it concluded that if you ask children under the age of two, there is no colour preference, with both sexes preferring pinker tones and both also prefer rounder shapes. It concludes:

The sex similarities in infants' preferences for colours and shapes suggest that any subsequent sex differences in these preferences may arise from socialisation or cognitive gender development rather than inborn factors.

Dolls v cars

Hines's research, the most up to date, did however identify a gendered divide in the preference for toys. Although not a strict rule, boys were more likely to look at cars and girls at dolls. Previous studies have found that this not only relates to the gender of children but their exposure to androgen ("male" hormones) in the womb. This American research even showed that there is a similar gendered preference for toys in monkeys leading some to conclude that children are born with gendered tastes in toys.

However, Hines's research also identified that at the age of 12 months, boys and girls' preference for dolls was similar (57.2% of girls looked at the dolls compared with 56.4% of boys). By 24 months boys had shifted towards the car image (52.7% of girls and 47.9% of boys looked at the doll first). This, Hines suggests, adds evidence to the argument that part of toy taste is acquired rather innate. She writes:

The current study adds to growing evidence that infants younger than two years of age display sex-typed toy preferences, with boys showing more interest than girls do in cars, and girls showing more interest than boys do in dolls. Within sex analyses found that the female preference for dolls over cars begins as early as 12 months of age, whereas boys of this age also prefer dolls to cars. The male preference for cars over dolls, or avoidance of dolls, emerges later, suggesting that socialisation or cognitive development, rather than inborn factors, causes the male avoidance of feminine toys.

I think those figures from the Hines study are also interesting because they are not conclusive – at the age of two the gender divide is still not far off 50/50 - hardly figures to support an entire retail industry's marketing tactics.

I'm going to talk to some of the researchers in this area but does anyone have any other evidence to add to this? Get in touch below the line, email your me at polly.curtis@guardian.co.uk or tweet @pollycurtis.

12.23pm: Dr Qazi Rahman, a psychologist who runs the psychology programme at Queen Mary University of London (which he describes as "strongly biological in its analysis of all aspects of human nature"), has written in with what is a pretty neat summary of the evidence on colour and toy preference. He reaches a similar conclusion to Hines:

I think the literature is erring on the side of no robust sex differences in either adults or children (by "robust" I mean the same finding is replicable) ...  However, there are sex differences in other types of cognitive abilities and psychological behaviours like engaging in rough-and-tumble play, certain types of spatial skills (but not all), and play preferences for objects with moving parts versus those that indicate some kind of individual (eg crudely - trucks versus dolls).  Some say the earliest you can measure these abilities is in almost newly born infants, others say the tests only work at about two years of age and so on. So developing good psychological tests to use in youngsters might be a limitation in some of the science.

I think a good test of these preferences is to examine them in kids of are gender nonconforming at a young age compared to children who are gender conforming.  We know that gay men report have strong gender-nonconforming play interests as children.

Rahman says that while the evidence is pretty conclusive on colour preferences, he thinks it is more strongly weighted in favour of there being some kind of innate preference for certain toys and games amongst boys.

In this Rahman disagrees with the psychologist Cordelia Fine, who argues in her book that almost all aspects of gender is acquired. I've had several messages form readers below the line and by email recommending her book, Delusions of Gender. My colleague Amelia Hill summarised it very well here last year. I've emailed Fine (in Australia) and am hoping I'll be able to speak with her about our specific question later.

I've also been recommended Pink Brain, Blue Brain, by the American neuroscientist Lise Eliot. She argues that any small differences between girls and boys are amplified in their socialisation and hard-wired into their brains this way. This is from the summary on her website:

In the past decade, we've heard a lot about the innate differences between males and females. So we've come to accept that boys can't focus in a classroom and girls are obsessed with relationships: "That's just the way they're built." In Pink Brain, Blue Brain, neuroscientist Lise Eliot turns that thinking on its head. Calling on years of exhaustive research and her own work in the field of neuroplasticity, Eliot argues that infant brains are so malleable that small differences at birth become amplified over time, as parents, teachers, peers — and the culture at large — unwittingly reinforce gender stereotypes. Children themselves exacerbate the differences by playing to their modest strengths. They constantly exercise those "ball-throwing" or "doll-cuddling" circuits, rarely straying from their comfort zones.

There's a fantastic debate going on below the line with plenty of suggestions of good evidence for me to follow. There are two areas I want to follow and wonder if anyone can help find evidence of: have there been international comparisons that might prove, or not, that colour preferences are culturally determined?

Can anyone recommend people - academics of people who work in marketing - who can talk to me about how toy companies market to children?

1.35pm: In the nature v nurture argument about children's preferences for different toys, research in monkeys (mentioned above) has bolstered those who believe we're born with feminine or masculine preferences and mystified sceptics. American researchers in this paper (pdf), showed that monkeys have similar instincts to those observed in small children. The abstract of paper says:

We compared the interactions of 34 rhesus monkeys, living within a 135 monkey troop, with human wheeled toys and plush toys. Male monkeys, like boys, showed consistent and strong preferences for wheeled toys, while female monkeys, like girls, showed greater variability in preferences. Thus, the magnitude of preference for wheeled over plush toys differed significantly between males and females. The similarities to human findings demonstrate that such preferences can develop without explicit gendered socialisation. We offer the hypothesis that toy preferences reflect hormonally influenced behavioural and cognitive biases which are sculpted by social processes into the sex differences seen in monkeys and humans.

Dr Stuart Basten, from the department of social policy and intervention at the University of Oxford has just sent in his paper analysing toy preference and gender, which reaches a similar conclusion (pdf).

As in most of the working papers in the series, the over-riding conclusion of this piece is that both biological and social processes play a crucial role in shaping children's interactions with toys which, in turn, has been found to significantly impact upon an individual's gendered scheme and progression.

Basten also includes this picture from the monkey study, which I quite like.

Monkeys playing with toys Monkeys playing with toys in 2009 Hines study

 

2.16pm: I asked earlier whether anyone knew of any international evidence that different boys and girls in different cultures have different tastes in colours and toys. I was interested because I'm always struck when I visit my daughter's cousins in Sweden that children's clothing in particular is much less gendered than in England. Babies tend to wear more uni-sex bright patterns than pale pink and blues. Dr Rahman (see above) came back with this small study which showed differences between British born and Chinese born men and women. It says:

We find robust sex differences in hue preference: the average female strongly prefers pinks and lilacs, while the average male has less marked preferences; both 'dislike' yellow - greens. These differences are more marked for the UK-born sub-sample (36 females; 27 males) than for the China-born one (18 females; 19 males). UK males prefer darker and less saturated colours, while UK females prefer brighter and more saturated colours. In the China-born sub-sample, both sexes prefer brighter colours, and the males prefer more saturated colours.

(Unsaturated colours are "pure" colours; for example, an unsaturated red would be a stop sign and a saturated one might be a burgundy.)

The study is small, and the Chinese born cohort were actually students at British universities, so the study is perhaps a bit limited. But it does suggest that there are cultural differences between countries as well as over time (earlier we mentioned the fact that in the early 20th century the blue/pink trend was reversed).

2.53pm: I've not been able to make contact with Cordelia Fine, who wrote the book Delusions of Gender, which so many of you have recommended to me via Twitter, email and below the line.

From what I can see she didn't specifically look at the issues of colour and toy choice, but more broadly at arguments that men and women are hardwired to have different personality traits. According to the various reviews and interviews with her about the book, she systematically picks apart the existing science about the brain to dispel what she believes is a growing assumption that men and women are wired differently from birth. She argues that almost all of our characteristics are learnt. She said in an interview with the Guardian last year:

There are sex differences in the brain. There are also large sex differences in who does what and who achieves what. It would make sense if these facts were connected in some way, and perhaps they are. But when we follow the trail of contemporary science we discover a surprising number of gaps, assumptions, inconsistencies, poor methodologies and leaps of faith.

The article went on:

Fine agrees that there are differences between men and women's brains. The male brain is, on average, about 8% larger. A small group of cells in the hypothalamus is bigger in men. However, "it's not known what this little group of cells does," she says. "It may have a physiological rather than psychological function."

As for other claimed differences, she argues, there might be "engineering" reasons for larger brains to be arranged differently from smaller brains.

She also points out that, because of the brain's plasticity in responding to the world around it, differences in male and female brains can't just be chalked up to congenital biological differences. "The circuits of your brain are a product of your physical, social and cultural environment, your behaviour and your thoughts," she says. "Gender as a social phenomenon is part of our neural circuitry."

3.09pm:

Verdict

There is no scientific evidence that boys prefer blue and girls prefer pink. Up until the early 20th century the trend was the opposite and baby boys were dressed in pink and girls in blue. There are also some - small - studies suggesting that adults of different cultures have different tastes in colours. It's clear that colour preference is learnt rather than innate.

There is some evidence that boys are in some way hardwired to express an early interest in "rough and tumble" games and toys with moving parts and girls to prefer dolls and role-play games, but this is not conclusive because the studies are often in babies and small toddlers and therefore inevitably difficult to analyse. The differences that have been found are also often not very big. At two years, for example, 52.7% of girls in one study chose to look at a dolls face over a car, compared with 47.9%; not a huge variation.

Those who argue that there is some sort of genetic or hormonal trigger that sets a gender divide in toy preference cite studies that show that girls who are overexposed to male hormones in the womb are more likely to like "boys' toys" and others that show monkeys of different sexes following similar patterns to children. This area is fiercely contested. However, even those who argue that there are innate factors emphasis that these are small and amplified by the characteristics children acquire from birth, which in turn differentiate and shape children's brains so that boys' and girls' brains might well look different.

3.34pm: We haven't in this blog been able to question any of the marketing techniques that might exploit - or some suggest help create - social norms about colour and choices in toys. My colleague Jon Henley wrote a very good feature on this subject in 2009, in which he was able to look more at the marketing practices. It includes the first reference that I can find in this context to the "gender apartheid" in children's toys. It was adopted by Ed Mayo of Co-operatives UK, former head of the National Consumer Council and co-author of Consumer Kids: How Big Business Is Grooming Our Children for Profit. Mayo was quoted as saying:

It's staggering, the extent to which parents are now having to trade off their own values against the commercial interest of companies. Today's marketing assigns simple and very separate roles to boys and girls, and whips up peer pressure to police the difference.

The feature goes on:

All this happened, Mayo argues, "with the emergence of a children's market, and the need to differentiate between boys and girls: the need to make more money, basically. This isn't something that's genetically hard-wired, it's culturally created, and therefore it should be open to question." The children's market has now reached the stage, he says, where "it's no exaggeration to talk of a gender apartheid."

My colleague Jane Martinson, the Guardian's women's editor, has also blogged on this here pointing out the Early Learning Centre doctor's costume labelled as being for boys on the Ocado website.

Earlier this year the government's Bailey review of the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood looked briefly at the issue of gender stereotyping. The full report (pdf) says that gender stereotyping was raised regularly as a concern among parents. It draws on previous government research which found "no strong evidence that gender stereotyping in marketing or products influences children's behaviour significantly, relative to other factors" and concludes that retailers are simply responding to demand:

There is a popularly held view that girls and boys play with stereotypical toys because they learn to see this as appropriate for their sex. This is contested territory: others argue there is greater evidence now of there being innate gender differences so that a desire to play with one kind of toy over another is at least as much about biological drivers as with socialisation and has to do with a normal, healthy development of gender identity (Buckingham, Willett, Bragg and Russell, 2010). What is not in doubt is that the commercial world provides plenty of reinforcement of gender stereotypes and is likely to do so for as long as there is customer demand.

It's worth reading this blog (scroll down to the entry Sexualisation and Gender stereotyping? One response to the Bailey review) by Meg Barker, an Open University psychologist, in which she questions both this conclusion and the review's decision to prioritise the sexualisation of children's merchandising over the whole issue of gender despite both being raised as a concern of parents. Thanks to @AlisonAfra for recommending this blog via twitter.

Below the line @trefusis makes the case that the gender factor helps expand the children's market:

Live blog: Twitter

Of course, if we adhere to gender categories with toys and colour of accessories, then parents whose second child is a different gender from the first can be sold a whole new set of things. It makes business sense for shops to promote gender apartheid - in fact, the more difficult it is to find neutral things, the better. They don't want us to be able to hand things down.

I think the whole role of marketing to children, including the claims made in the Bailey report, might be a good subject for Reality check to return to.

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