It’s not only Vince Cable who’s been all over the papers – the Lib Dems’ science spokesman Evan Harris also has his say today on two very different issues.

First up, in today’s Independent, animal-human hybrid embryo research which, says Evan equires three things to prosper: legal permission, good scientists and more funding. Here’s an excerpt from his article:

Those of us involved in campaigning for human-animal embryo research to be legal during the passage of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill always knew that this was a controversial area of research. But we also knew it was a field of enquiry which was necessary to keep open if those suffering from serious degenerative disorders were to be confident that all potential avenues for increasing knowledge about their condition, and indeed for finding possible treatments or even cures, were to be kept open.

It is disappointing – at least on one level – that, a year after the Bill became law, none of the three teams that had a licence granted to conduct hybrid embryo research has received funding from the research councils to do the work. … Thanks to the HFE Bill and the scientists who spent their time arguing their case to the politicians, the UK will remain a leading player in this work in the years to come, as long as the funding to bioscience is maintained.

And then in today’s Times, Evan has an excellent letter pointing out just a few of the logical fallacies inherent within Labour’s declared desire to ban teachers who happen to be members of the BNP from the classroom. (A subject we’ve covered extensively here on LDV before).

It is obviously illiberal to declare that legal membership of a legal political party will be a bar to earning a living as a teacher, especially as what should be actually banned is behaviour — not thoughts, or unexpressed views.

The logic of a BNP ban is that all its members are racist, that all BNP members will seek to spread racism or to discriminate in the classroom, and that racist people are found only in the BNP. The evidence base for some or all of these assertions is weak, to say the least. Most racists, and therefore most racist teachers, are not members of the BNP. It would be far from a complete solution, given that there were only 15 teachers listed when the BNP membership list was published. How does that compare to the number of teachers who are racist but have never joined a party? Or the teachers who are members of religions that are homophobic or misogynistic? Ironically, the Government actually allows faith schools to discriminate in favour of such individuals when appointing teachers.

The proposals would add nothing to existing prohibitions on workplace discrimination and harassment in schools, or to professional codes of practice. Worst of all, it is fundamentally counterproductive, creating martyrs out of the BNP.

A comprehensive demolition job of a flimsy argument.