Sorry to disappoint my readers

Like most websites, a fair proportion of my visitors arrive having found me on Google. I'd love to be able to say that they were all searching for erudite liberal commentary, but sadly not.

Here are some of the searches visitors have typed in to reach the cafe - I doubt they found quite what they were looking for.

• naked in public shame
• cafe sex
• jacqui smith - naked (that's just wrong on so many levels)
• nipples car (the Cafe comes up number one on Google for this search - how cool is that?)
• free fully clothed porn to watch (fully clothed porn? what's the point? But I'm number one for this search too. Take that, Lib Dem Voice.)
• breast big and penis
• cheryl cole erotic stories (if I hear any, I'll be sure to let you know)
• do your bowels release when you die (answers on a postcard, please)

On a less amusing note, I also seem to be getting a steady trickle of people looking for child porn and finding this happily porn-free story. These visitors I'm only too happy to disappoint.

Sir Fred is pure misdirection - punish those really to blame

This is getting really annoying. If you don't like huge pensions and senior executives getting awarded for failure, why not have a go at the people in charge who encouraged it over more than a decade - principally "light touch" Gordon.

The nonsense over Sir Fred Goodwin is pure misdirection. Let's all shout at the nasty banker, taking the pension he's legally entitled to. What next? Shall we whip Sir Fred naked past the Bank of England? Boil him in oil? How about a nice lynching?

For someone who, as far as I can tell, hasn't even broken the law, he's getting the sort of treatment normally saved for murderers and paedophiles. For what? For being greedy.

Forget Sir Fred. Remember the people who made all the Sir Freds possible, who encouraged them, rewarded them, recommended them for knighthoods. Remember the people who elevated the money men to the status of minor gods, who were quite happy to see them take astonishing risks with our money and then bail them out with more of our money when it all went wrong.

Remember them, and then punish them at the ballot box. Brown and Darling. Cameron, Osborne and Ken Clark. Use your vote to tell them all what you think about the mess they made over the last 25 years.

Sometimes building that by-pass is the right thing to do

There's a line of green thought - or perhaps a green way of thinking - that sees CO2 emissions as a trump card. We can have discussions about what's right, but once the CO2 card's been played, it's game over. Want to build a new road? Drive a few more miles? Buy a new TV? Won't someone think of the carbon dioxide!

Which is nonsense. CO2 is not in itself a terrible thing. It's quite handy to have some of the stuff around. Even if we've got a bit too much at the moment, the odd tonne here and there really won't make much odds.

Whereas there are things that make really big differences to our lives. Traffic clogging up our towns and villages, for example, destroying communities and keeping children and the elderly shut in their houses.

Then there's food miles. Food shipped in from some far off country pumps more CO2 into the atmosphere than food grown locally. But on the other hand not only do we enjoy foods from far off places, it also provides much needed exports for many poorer nations. Does the CO2 trump that? How do we weigh up tonnes of CO2 against starving families?

One more example. On the occasions that I drive across the country, I want to do it fast. If I can go at 70 or 80mph, that's great. I save a lot of time over going at 50mph. With the Quistlets in the car, reducing my journey time by an hour or more is a big deal. I know that driving isn't super environmentally friendly. I also know that, if I'm going to drive, going at 50mph is better for the environment. But the environment damage my journey at 70mph does is utterly insignificant in the overall scheme whereas cutting my journey team is quite important - for me at least.

Not that going green is wrong. Global warming is a serious threat that the world needs to tackle. Large-scale action is needed to cut the millions of tonnes of COs being pumped out in India and China, for a start. It would be really nice if I could make a difference to global warming by driving a bit more slowly, but the reality is I can't.

There may be other reasons to go for the green option.

In the case of a new by-pass you might not want to lose the land, or the wildlife; you might think it will only improve the traffic situation in the short term or that, at tens of millions a mile, it just costs too much. You might get better value for money by spending it on something else - more buses or trains, for example.

But CO2 is not a trump card. In most cases, the amount of CO2 you'd save with the green option could make no conceivable different to anything, including global warming, whereas the other benefits to people's lives could be huge.

Answering the liberal philosophical challenge I: human rights

Over on Liberal England, Jonathan Calder identifies the key challenge for liberal philosophy.

"there are certain things we all want government to do. We want government, for instance, to select methods of education, to sponsor culture, and to do much else that looks, on the surface, like endorsing one set of personal values against another and therefore contradicting liberalism.

It is very important for liberals to develop a theory that would make a distinction here between enriching the choices available to people and enforcing a choice upon people."

I don't have an answer, but I do have a direction of travel. Whether it's useful, you decide.

When we talk about a political philosophy, we're really discussing rules of thumb. Human beings are complicated, society even more so. The idea that all that can be captured perfectly in a philosophy is crazy. So we start our journey recognising that we're not going to find "the answer" that explains everything in all places and all times. The best we're going to do is circle warily round it, getting a little closer than we were before.

I'm hoping to write a small number of pieces on this topic. This is the first.

Liberalism is about having human rights, whether you want them or not

"Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptable rights, rhetorical nonsense - nonsense upon stilts." Jeremy Bentham, 1843

Widespread human rights* are one of the great breakthroughs of the last century. In theory, and often in practice, varied societies around the world now sign up to a reasonably common set of these things we call human rights.

These rights are not some platonic ideal, floating around in the universe waiting for us to find and implement. They did not spring fully-formed from the toe of Vishnu.

These rights are the result of societies taking ethical decisions that certain things are acceptable and others are not and seeing how they work out over time.

Human rights are, at their core, simply a layer of law that's more difficult to change and that other laws must not contradict. Countries put legal barriers in place to protect them and the international community ideally makes your life difficult if you run a country that ignores them (OK, it doesn't always work out that way, but then who said the liberal battle was won).

Is it OK to stone a thirteen year old girl to death because she was raped and became pregnant (as happens in Saudi Arabia from time to time)? Liberals would say "no" and that would hold even if nearly everyone in Saudi Arabia thought it was OK.

For liberals, human rights is that level of law that every society should abide by whether a majority want to or not. Not because they come from God; just because they are the foundation upon which better, happier and freer societies are built.

So part of being a liberal is to admit that we do want to force something on people and that something is human rights. We want to say to people

"You should be stopped from beating up homosexuals. Even if you have a free and fair referendum in which 95% of people vote to be allowed to beat up homosexuals, you should still be stopped."

"Ah yes," the critics say "but where do these human rights come from and what gives you blasted liberals the right to force them on other people?"

Sorry, guys. If you're looking for an easy answer like "I found them written in this old book and that's good enough for me", you're not going to find it here. If it was that simple, we'd have cracked it by now and I wouldn't have to throw things at the radio whenever The Moral Maze comes on.

These human rights come from our collective experience of what works, what creates better and happier societies. And because we, as liberals, want everyone to have those benefits, we're going to carry on working to get that layer of "laws that are more difficult to change" applying to everyone in the world. Sometimes we'll get things a bit wrong. We'll change them and add to them over time in light of the evidence. But we pretty much know the core of it by now.

This liberalism rejects cultural relativism and cultural absolutism. It fights for the individual above the collective. And it says "This isn't some utopian vision. This is what works and we offer no apologies for positively taking it to the world."

Next time: expect more grey areas when we talk about liberalism and the limits of state action.

* there's clearly room for debate around which rights we feel it's important for people to have. I'm not suggesting that, simply because something is called a Human Rights Act or similar automatically means everything in it is a human right that all liberals should want to force on people.

Sir Fred Goodwin is not the bad guy here

So Sir Fred Goodwin, former chief of RBS, vows to keep his £650,000 a year pension, despite having been at the helm throughout the period when RBS was essentially destroyed and forced to beg money from us, the taxpayers, to get them out of the mess.

A lot of people will be painting Sir Fred as venal, grasping and wholly immoral. Quite possibly true, but isn't that what capitalism (or at least a common form of it) is meant to be all about? The guy got a deal where he gets over half a million a year from now until the day he dies in return for trashing the company - that's the way it goes.

Attacking Goodwin risks missing the real problem.

We have a system where senior executives have been able to name their price, awarding themselves fantastic pay deals. We've been told their rewards reflect the benefit they bring to their companies and the wider economy. We've been told that, unlike the public sector, these private companies can go bust and that extra risk means extra reward.

Both of these turn out to be totally untrue (not that they were ever especially believable, but now the evidence is about as clear as it can be).

So is the banking sector - not to mention all the other companies that are too big to fail - going to clean their game up?

Are Brown and Darling going to lead the way in devising a new economic system that avoids these pitfalls?

Hardly. The senior executives are making slightly contrite noises, in some cases keeping their heads down until the heat is off, but no-one can really doubt that they'll be signing up to the next round of excessive salaries, bonuses and pensions as soon as they can.

And after talk of saving the world and new economic systems, Brown is retreating too. The role of Brown and Darling seems to be limited to asking "how high?" when a big bank says "jump".

All a bit sad, really.

Defend British values, Ms Blears? Like liberty, perhaps?

Labour minister Hazel Blears has spoken out against over-sensitivity blunting the debate on certain things that conflict with our traditional British values (such as they are). Some people, Ms Blears worries, are so concerned about causing offence that they choose not to criticise, or act against, all manner of undesirable behaviours.

Ms Blears mentioned forced marriages (which are illegal), female genital mutilation (also illegal), homophobia and religious extremism. In a move sure to excite the Daily Mail, Ms Blears criticised those who hold back on the Christmas decorations for fear of offending other religions.

Some of this is largely myth. Just where have Christmas decorations been banned for fear of offending other religions? The old myths (Luton and Birmingham's 1998 Winterval) are dragged out like dusty old stockings by the tabloids each year, but real examples seem harder to come by.

And what of the others? If there is a problem, I do believe it's a Labour one. I don't see people in the street or in the pubs being shy talking about these issues. I don't see the Lib Dems or the Tories holding back from being critical of religious extremism.

Labour, if anyone, have been nervous about this at senior levels. By suggesting it's a general problem, Ms Blears tries to tar everyone with the same brush.

Here's the worrying truth. At senior Labour levels there has been nervousness about tackling some exceptionally nasty and totally unacceptable practices. Some of that has been overcome. Forced marriages are illegal and we're getting better at dealing with attempts to get round the law (by tricking brides to go to another country like Pakistan, for example).

Hazel obviously doesn't think this Labour problem is completely fixed, though.

But what of that other British (and wider) value: liberty? Ms Blears might have mentioned the way, through imposition of ID cards, the database state, clampdowns on protest, making it illegal to photograph policemen and all the rest of their nasty little laws, Labour has been systematically attacking and breaking down what many British people think is one of the most important values in our society.

Come on, Hazel. Let's hear about all the values Labour is trashing.

Small increase in teen pregnancy no big deal

In 2007, there was a 2.5% increase in teenage pregnancies compared to 2006.

Though still the highest in western Europe, the rate of teenage pregnancy has been falling gradually since 1998 and is now 13% lower than it was back then. It rose slightly in 2002 before resuming it's fall. There's no particular reason to think this 2007 figure is an end of the drop rather than a blip.

Unfortunately for the Government, they set themselves the wholly unrealistic target of a 50% cut in teen pregnancies by 2010. That sort of change doesn't happen through education programmes. Perhaps if there was, by law, a poster of a cabinet minister wearing only their underwear in every teenager's bedroom it might have done the trick.

Whether this 13% drop is due to better sex education, targetting help or general changes in poverty levels I have no idea at all. I'm sure much cleverer people than me are looking at it and, if they're really lucky, someone in government might even listen to them.

What I am sure about is that the tabloids will jump on this small rise as further evidence of liberal values leading to the collapse in modern Britain, despite oddly failing to hail liberal values as our saviour in all the years that pregnancies fell.

Study: teens who listen to explicit lyrics have sex earlier

The BBC breathlessly reports

Listening to music with degrading sexual lyrics could prompt teenagers to start having sex at an earlier age, a US study suggests.

I knew it. I've been saying this for years. That collapse in society we've all been told about, where feral teenagers roam the streets at night shagging, stabbing or shooting anyone they encounter. I blame those nasty rappers like Snoopy the Dog and M&M myself. I'm an expert, don't you know.

Except, as the BBC mentions briefly later on the article, the evidence suggests nothing of the sort.

It showed that 45% of 13-18 year olds who regularly listened to music with "explicit and aggressive sexual phrases" for more than 17.6 hours a week had lost their virginity whereas, of those who listened to such filth for less than 2.7 hours, just 21% had.

Ooh look - a correlation! As the researchers themselves point out, that doesn't mean that listening to the music is causing teenagers to have sex earlier.

Of course it doesn't. Even if the study is accurate (and it's of just 711 teenagers in one place in America, so obviously applicable to everyone in the world), there are all sorts of reasons why someone who spends 18 hours plus a day week listening to that sort of music might be more likely to have had sex than someone who doesn't.

And the advice from the lead researcher?

"[parents] should be talking to their children about sex and putting these sorts of lyrics in context."

Really? Parents should talk to their children about sex? Wow. No-one's ever thought of that idea before. Thank god someone's done this research so we've got that exciting idea.

This is just garbage. Not the study - it's what it is. But a BBC journalist thinking it was worth reporting.

My thoughts are with the Camerons

I've been saddened to hear the news of the death of Ivan Cameron at the age of six. Just thinking about my children dying young ties me up in knots inside.

My sincere and heartfelt condolences to David and Samantha Cameron.

Stop cancer screening dishonesty now

A couple of days ago I asked whether cancer screening does more harm than good. My conclusion was that the potential benefits of screening (especially cervical and breast cancer) are pushed hard to women but the downsides are barely mentioned, or acknowledged.

Women should be given the facts, as best as we know them, rather than being badgered into having screening.

Now JunkFoodScience has a more in-depth look at the evidence. As I mentioned in the last article, this isn't new: I was reading much the same information in a book published in 2002. But the latest research seems to back up, and enhance, the earlier data.

For example:

This study examined the data of nearly 2 million breast cancer screenings and found that of 2,000 women screened regularly for ten years, one will benefit and avoid dying from breast cancer, but ten healthy women will have needlessly undergone mastectomies, radiation and sometimes chemotherapy, and another 200 will have endured a false alarm and follow-up tests and biopsies.

The crazy thing is that a more honest approach would save money. If fewer women decided to undergo screening, or delayed the start of screening, the millions saved could be put into treatment that people actually want when they have the facts.

By doing the right thing, we'd be treating women like adults, rather than children who need to be lied to for their own good; we'd be about as effective at tackling breast cancer (maybe slightly better or slightly worse) and we'd have more money to spend on other good things.

Stop cancer screening dishonesty now!

Greenies wrong to tell us off

Surprise of the century - Posh (of Posh and Becks fame) has a simply enormous carbon footprint and the Guardian wants to tell her off. Nine flights, all first class, apparently means she emitted more CO2 in six weeks than an average person does in a year.

And that's all the Guardian needs to indulge in its finger-wagging exercise. Naughty Posh.

Except...

What grounds are there really for criticising the lass from Hertfordshire?

Is she damaging the environment? Not in any significant way. Add together the millions of people on all the flights from the UK across a whole year and you only get about 6% of the UK's CO2 output (industry and domestic homes are far bigger emitters of CO2). So Posh taking nine first class flights is utterly insignificant - a tiny fraction of a millionth of a percent of the world's CO2 output.

Is she a hypocrite? Possibly in lots of ways for all I know, but I'm not aware she's spent much time spouting off about the environment.

There's something very odd about all of this. Week after week newspapers like the Guardian and the Independent indulge in finger-wagging, telling us what we should or shouldn't be doing. It's called being ethical apparently. I can remember when ethics was about things like murder; now it's all about whether you leave your phone recharger plugged in.

Whatever else there's to say for these let-us-tell-you-how-you-should-live pieces, we can be sure that they won't - can't - make a blind bit of difference to global warming.

Switching away from coal-fired power stations would make a difference, especially in China and India. Turning off your TV instead of leaving it on standby, or even taking a couple of flights really isn't going to do anything one way or the other.

I've no objection at all to the State making it easier for me to save energy and be green: improved recycling facilities, grants for home insulation, improved public transport and cycle provision are all great. I've no objection to people

I've no objection to people being green if they want to it if they want. If you want to feel good about doing your bit, or you want to save some money on your electricity bill, or reduce the amount of rubbish going to landfill then go for it. There are lots of goods reasons to do all sorts of things, and I do many of them when they make sense to me and I'm not being too lazy. I like to cycle, take the train when I can and recycle, for example.

But this constant barrage of telling me how I should live my life, and that I'm unethical - a bad person - if I take the odd flight, drive at 70mph or leave the TV on standby is self-congratulatory twaddle.

We're given a couple of reasons for all this nannying. We're told that it all helps. Maybe it does - but not a lot. Sorry, but it's true. Even the likes of Posh and Becks don't have it in their gift to make any difference to global warming through their personal actions. We might get to feel superior, but the CO2 will still be being pumped into the atmosphere.

And we're urged that "if only everyone did this...". If everyone in the country turned off their TVs, we'd save enough power to fly Posh to the moon, or something like that. But even if everyone did do it, it wouldn't make any significant difference to global warming, and anyway I can't make other people do things, only myself, so whether or not I personally do this stuff doesn't affect other people doing it.

These exhortations for us all to do our bit aren't too successful anyway. I've seen a few of them. Pledge this, reduce that, do the other. They come and go with barely a murmur. We think it's a good idea, but most of us don't do it - not for long, anyway.

What really works is making it sufficiently in our interest to change our behaviour. Not you'll save 2p a month if you do this which, perhaps sadly, isn't enough to motivate me to change. But making it easier, or clearly in my financial interests, to do the right thing.

Perhaps if the green movement spent a bit less time being all holier-than-thou and a bit more time focusing on how the world can do something about the really big CO2 emitters it might both achieve something worthwhile and piss me off a bit less.

Playstation Palm to strike us down

It's been a bad couple of weeks for Internet users. Sure, millions of us use the Internet and computers for several hours a day. OK, so we've been doing that for well over a decade now. And society has notably failed to collapse, nor have the hospitals been full of people with Internet-related afflictions.

Last week we had a suggestion from a doctor that, where using the Internet replaced normal face-to-face interaction, it could be bad for us and lead to health problems. This is what's called a hypothesis. It's an idea someone's had. It's plausible and sounds reasonably, and may be true or may turn out to be complete nonsense. The next stage is to test the hypothesis to find out. Or, of course, if you're a journalist you can just miss out the whole testing stage and go straight from "interesting idea" to "we're all going to die".

Apparently there have also been scares over wii-itis, texting finger and children's bad backs, which I think passed me by and don't seem to have made a devastating impact on us yet.

Today the Daily Mail reports "Playstation Palm". Nothing to do with "Internet Palm" which turns out to be a condition affecting large numbers of men. This would appear to be something that happened once.

Yes, that's right. Out of all the hundreds of millions of people who use games consoles, one twelve-year old Swiss girl developed lesions on her hands which researchers believe is due to her playing on her Playstation for several hours a day and it becomes news around the world.

So my question is: since when did it become responsible medical behaviour to take an exceptionally rare medical condition (in this case seen only once in the world as far as we know) and publicise it in such a way as to scare people into thinking it might be common or something they should even vaguely worry about.

Here's another one for you. Is there any man-made object in the world that we'd still be using if we had a collective panic attack every time it injured someone somewhere in the world?

Where are all the stories about people being injured by toilets, saucepans, kitchen knives, books, chairs and all the rest of it?

We've been playing computer games for over thirty years, and getting addicted to them too. Yet life has gone on.

Perhaps a little more enjoying the modern world and a little less doom and gloom might be in order.

MPs should use the Internet, not fetishize it

The Hansard Society, reported on the Beeb, says that MPs are too passive in their use of the Internet. They talk a lot but don't listen enough, apparently.

Whilst most MPs have websites, fewer than a quarter are on Facebook and only one in ten blog.

Andy Williamson from Hansard said

"They use the internet as a tool for campaigning and for organising their supporters, rather than opening up two-way communications with constituents."

and, of course, wheels out the example of Obama's Internet campaigning.

All these studies seem to start from the idea that MPs doing more on the Internet is an unconditional good. An MP who blogs and uses Facebook is obviously better than an MP who merely has a website.

The reality isn't quite that way.

Yes, the Internet is a very valuable tool. Not only is it another way for an MP to get their message across (and one that doesn't need an army of deliverers), it also allows MPs to take soundings from constituents (such as running online polls), run campaigns (sign this petition!) and give people more of a sense that they know the MP as a person - something that can be handy if you're one of the 90% of MPs rarely in the news.

But take that too far, see that as an unconditional good, and I suggest MPs get into trouble.

A typical MP has an electorate of around 70,000 and over 100,000 people (voters and non-voters) in their constituency.

How many of those will read the blog? How many will join the Facebook group? How many will vote in your poll? If all those 70,000 sent you their opinions, you'd be flooded.

Just because most people have Internet access doesn't mean they're ever all going to visit their MP's blog or Facebook site.

So there are two big risks for an MP.

The first is that, not having the millions of dollars and the huge staff at Obama's disposal, they concentrate on the Internet instead of traditional campaigning and reach fewer people as a result. Blogs and websites are great, but I've yet to see one that matches the market penetration of sticking a leaflet, letter or newspaper through 40,000 doors.

The second is that MPs might follow the Hansard suggestion of listening a bit too much. Whether it's Facebook, an online poll or petition or reading the emails, MPs need to be aware that they are seeing the views of people who are willing and able to use those forms of communication, and that may not be representative of their constituents as a whole.

All these are very useful tools. Different MPs will find different ways to use them.

There's no excuse for not using email (as 8% of MPs apparently don't) or not having a website.

But we shouldn't fall into the trap of assuming the MP with a blog or Facebook page is automatically doing better at building a two-way conversation that the MP without. Perhaps the first MP is just listening to a few hundred people online, and the second is delivering leaflets to every household and talking to thousands of people across their constituency.

Cancer obesity scare and a very misleading graph

Professor Sir Michael Marmot warns of a cancer epidemic brought on by increased levels of obesity in the UK and across much of the world,splashed across page 9 of the Observer.

On page 27, the Observer's food critic Jay Rayner rails against fast food and sings the praises of the Government's Change4Life (a.k.a. "Official: it's OK to bully fat kids and sneer at their parents") programme.

Is this true? Will cancer, as a cause of death, double in the next 40 years? Is it true, as Professor Marmot suggests, that one third of all cancers are caused by obesity and lack of exercise?

If so, this is scary stuff.

But there are reasons to be cautious.

First, there is a very good reason for cancer deaths to be increasing. Cancer is a disease of the elderly. Younger people do get cancer and do tragically die from it sometimes, but the vast majority of people who get cancer are old - you're most at risk if you're over 80. More of us are dying of cancer because we're living longer. It's a result of our astonishing success in improving our diet and conquering a host of killer diseases like TB, dyptheria and smallpox that did for so many of our ancestors.

Second, figuring out what causes something like cancer is a tricky business and there simply hasn't been enough research to give us clear and definitive answers.

What do we even mean by saying "obesity causes cancer"? Do we mean that the obese person who gets cancer wouldn't have got it had they been slimmer? Or that they would have been slightly less likely to get cancer? How much slimmer do you have to get? Is there some magical chemical change in your body when your BMI passes through the overweight or obese thresholds? Sir Michael suggests we should be as lean as possible so even having a BMI of under 25 may not be enough to save us.

Take a look at the US National Cancer Institute factsheet on obesity and cancer. It gives rather different figures.

In 2002, about 41,000 new cases of cancer in the United States were estimated to be due to obesity. This means that about 3.2 percent of all new cancers are linked to obesity.

A recent report estimated that, in the United States, 14 percent of deaths from cancer in men and 20 percent of deaths in women were due to overweight and obesity.

The US page also suggests that, whatever the link between obesity and cancer, there's little evidence that losing weight is helpful anyway.

There is insufficient evidence that intentional weight loss will affect cancer risk for any cancer. A very limited number of observational studies have examined the effect of weight loss, and a few found some decreased risk for breast cancer among women who have lost weight. However, most of these studies have not been able to evaluate whether the weight loss was intentional or related to other health problems.

Over at JunkFoodScience there's a detailed examination of the 2007 report that also casts doubt on the whole hypothesis of a causal link between obesity and cancer. Sandy Szwarc is of the opinion that the report's authors started off with the assumption that there was a link and, from the selection of studies for the meta-analysis to the interpretation of data, incorrectly drew conclusions that supported the initial assumption. She goes through the evidence in some detail - take a look.

There's disagreement over both how much evidence we have and what that evidence shows. In short, a classic case for doing more research, not for declaring the question solved and launching a war against obesity.

A misleading graph

I probably wouldn't have blogged about this at all, were it not for the graph that accompanies the article in the print version of the Observer.

The graph annoyed me sufficiently to take action (yes, I really am sad enough to get annoyed by a graph).

I can't find it online, so I've scanned it in for your pleasure. It's a clear example of trying to twist the data to prove something that probably isn't there. The graph wants to make us believe there's a strong correlation between obesity and cancer. You are going to believe, whether you want to or not.

What the data actually shows is two vaguely upward lines. From the data you might as well correlate cancer to the sales of Nintendo Wiis, the amount of recycling we all do or visits to the cinema.

How does the graph try to fool us?

• It carefully matches up the two scales so the lines are close together. The cancer scale is "rates per 100,000 of the population" and the overweight/obese scale is a percentage. The two have nothing in common, but they're helpfully matched up as if 55% overweight and obese is obviously equivalent to 360 people per 100,000 getting cancer.
• Both scales start nowhere near zero. Again, the starting points (350 and 50%) are carefully chosen to give the impression of a strong correlation.
• Both scales only run a short distance (350-380 and 50-65%) so we have nice big, steep lines. If the cancer scale had been, say 0-400, the cancer line running from 356 to 373 per 100,000 would look more or less flat. By zooming in it makes the lines look steep and scary.
• Finally, the start and end years are carefully chosen to scare us more. The cancer data doesn't go beyond 2005, so you'd think it would make sense to stop the graph there. But look! If they'd done that, the last year would have shown obesity falling and cancer rising : definitely not on-message. By tacking on an extra year of obesity data, the graph looks better. Similarly, choosing 1996 or 1997 as the first year would have made the graph much less convincing.

The way I look at it, if Cancer Research UK is putting out such blatant propoganda, such utter misuse of statistics, to scare us into seeing a link, we should treat other pronouncements with a great deal of caution.

[ Update: Here's another example of a misleading graph, this time from a Sun opinion poll. ]

Final word
I don't want to give the impression that I'm rejecting a link between cancer and obesity. Sir Michael is an expert who, with his colleagues, has spent a lot of time looking at the evidence. I'm a layman who's done a bit of digging on Google. But I don't think it's nearly as clear-cut as the Observer article would have us believe; nor do I think that this evidence, even if true, supports Government action to force us to eat more healthily and get fit.

Darling should get his own house in order first

Alistair Darling has denounced Swiss banks. Their refusal to end centuries of secrecy is "intolerable".

Sounds very odd, coming from a Government that's been more than happy to oversee one of the world's largest secretive tax haven operations, from the Cayman Islands to Jersey and beyond.

Funny how, during the Brown Boom, Labour were more than happy with big banking bonuses, obscure financial instruments, 100%+ mortgages, and light-touch regulation.

Now we're in the Brown Bust, Labour are busy blaming the bankers for everything under the sun, but still don't seem too interested in tackling tax havens (or doing much more than paying lip service to regulating the banking sector, despite the public now owning a big chunk of it).

Does cancer screening do more harm than good?

You get a letter from your local NHS trust asking you to be screened for cancer (most likely you'll be a woman, being screened for cervical or breast cancer). If the test is 99% accurate, and you test positive, what are the chances you really have the cancer?

Oddly, they could be less than 50%. These cancers are pretty rare, especially in younger women. Let's suppose for the sake of argument that one in a hundred women in your age group get the cancer (not unreasonable, but just an example).

So your local NHS trust tests 100 women. Of those, one really has cancer and that gets picked up. Of the rest, 98 are given the all clear but one is wrongly diagnosed with cancer (the test's only 99% accurate, remember). So two people have been diagnosed with cancer and only one of them really has it. In this example, if you're one of the two diagnosed, your chances of really having cancer are fifty percent.

In reality, since most women will have multiple screenings for breast cancer in their lives, the chances of at least one false positive are surprisingly high. Half of all women who have ten or more mammograms in their lives will have at least one false positive.

Here's another question. When women in their 20s and 30s are invited for cervical screening, are the chances that they could be wrongly diagnosed with cancer - leading to a lot of stress and possibly unnecessary invasive surgery or treatment - clearly explained? Are women given the information they need to make a sensible decision, based on the evidence, of whether or not to get screened?

All this came to my attention a few years ago (an excellent book called Reckoning with Risk by Gerd Gigerenzer) but has been raised in the last couple of days by a number of senior academics.

In addition to the issue of false positives (diagnosing cancer where none exists), they also raise other problems (which, as it happens, Gigerenzer discusses in some detail). Not all cancers kill you. Some will never develop at all. Others will develop sufficiently slowly that you die of something else first.

If you've got these, you do have cancer, but had you never been diagnosed they would never have caused you any trouble and you would have gone to your grave in blissful ignorance.

The trouble is, modern screening often can't distinguish between cancer that's going to kill you and cancer that can be safely ignored. Since being treated for cancer is a big deal, physically and emotionally, for you and your family, that's a real problem. It's not like taking an aspirin to be on the safe side.

In fact, the study being reported found that for every one woman who's life was saved by screening for breast cancer, ten had unnecessary treatment, including mastectomies in some cases.

Finally, there is a small risk that screening will actually cause breast cancer in otherwise healthy women: between 2 and 4 women from every 10,000 will develop breast cancer as a result of being screened.

If the benefits of screening are so ambiguous, why don't we hear about it? Why are we sold screening as an unconditional good, something that it's massively irreponsible not to do, even?

Look at it from their point of view. Your local NHS Trust is measured on the number of lives it saves. It is not penalised for giving women unneeded, invasive treatment. In fact, it's probably rewarded for that: once someone screens positive for cancer, it's a good thing if they receive treatment and survive for a few years - who knows or cares that they would have survived that long anyway? The figures show another life saved.

In short, given that money is being thrown at the problem anyway, the NHS and the State lose nothing by inflicting treatment and stress on people who don't need it, but lose big time if more women die from breast cancer.

Rather than being sold as something everyone should do, screening of this sort should be offered as an option where the pros and cons are clearly explained and adults are allowed to make up their own minds about their own lives.

BNP gets 408 votes, Labour fills pants, BBC leads

How does a local by-election with a low turnout get to be the lead story on the PM programme?

It needs to be in the South: what those funny people in the Midlands and North get up to doesn't matter too much. Who cares that the BNP have got nine councillors in Stoke on Trent.

It needs to be won by the BNP. And Labour need to, depending on your opinion, either panic or cynically exploit it to get votes.

Duncan Borrowman is right to point out that this is evidence to support the ALDC mantra that Lib Dems must stand against the BNP - never be tempted to step aside in the name of anti-BNP unity (or ask your opponents to).

Mark Valladeres suggests that Peter Hain is overstating the threat from the BNP, that winning a low turnout local by-election is a totally different proposition from securing over 10% of the vote across a whole region like the South East with millions of voters.

I mostly agree with Mark.

If Hain and Labour genuinely want the BNP to do badly, talking up their chances is a very odd way to go about it.

You talk up the chances of your main opponent being victorious, to encourage your supporters to get out and vote. Why? They're going to get the publicity anyway, going to be putting out the leaflets and making the phone calls anyway, so you gain more than you lose.

But using that strategy with a poorly funded minor party is madness. Why do you think the Tories and Labour spend as much time as possible studiously ignoring the Lib Dems and pretending we don't exist?

What has Hain achieved other than to give the BNP a shed load of free publicity for a very minor electoral success and tell disaffected Labour voters across the country that a vote for the BNP isn't a wasted vote? Thanks to Hain's efforts, a sane-sounding BNP spokesman even got to give a little party political broadcast on the PM programme.

I don't think the BNP will do that well in the Euros. The far right is fractured, the BNP and UKIP clearly loath each other with a passion, and the Lib Dems and Tories are fairly strong. That, plus the reduced number of seats being fought for, makes the BNP's job a tough one.

But...funny things happen in Euro elections. In 2004, UKIP got over 16% of the votes and 12 seats, and I bet not many people had ever had a UKIP leaflet through their door before the campaign (or after).

The Lib Dem approach, by luck or design, seems better to me. The party does acknowledge the threat from the BNP. It trains activists to fight the BNP effectively and rallies the troops to the cause, but it does it internally and quietly. The party doesn't, as far as I know, line up senior politicians to publically big them up in the national media.

If Labour continue to build up the BNP, to validate their message and tell people that voting for the BNP is an effective way to give the Government a bloody nose, who knows what could happen.

Think how thrilled the Lib Dems would be if we had Labour ministers lining up to denounce us after our every local by-election victory. We'd love it.

Why Clegg needs to keep it vague

I had an interesting discussion with David Allen on Lib Dem Voice yesterday. David, I think it's safe to say, will not be joining the Nick Clegg Fan Club anytime soon. He accuses Nick of being vague and not stating his position on too many issues.

For example

"our leader has really not made it clear where he stands on a number of issues. He didn’t define his position properly when he got elected. He may or may not have decided to row back on some of his alarmingly right-wing thoughts, but it is difficult to tell."

More importantly, David suggests this has contributed to the Lib Dem's poor (he believes) poll ratings: he argues, with some justification, that we should be doing better, given Labour's collapse.

His position is sensible and well argued; but I think he's wrong and I'd like to expand on why a little more than I can in a comment on LDV.

The Liberal Democrats struggle to get serious media attention. When the media narrative revolves around who's going to be the next Prime Minister, we often get forgotten about. Our press releases lie unwanted and unloved in a dusty tray on the corner of some tabloid reporter's desk whilst they toil in search of jucier material.

The struggle for the Lib Dems has never been in saying things, it's in getting ourselves heard. It's arguably true that our recent poll increases (modest as they may be) have been down to a higher profile in the media.

So how does the third party get itself heard?

Not, I would suggest, by having its leader come out with a position on every issue imaginable. Hundreds of press releases, speeches and papers from Clegg, every one on something new, really wouldn't be helpful.

No. The way we ourselves in the media is by picking a small number of issues and banging on about them interminably until we're sick of the sound of them. Only then will some Daily Mail journalist hear a faint buzzing and vaguely realise that the Lib Dems might have something interesting to say.

On those few issues we need clarity.

On other issues, keeping it vague isn't a bad idea at all. It stops the media being distracted from our core message, and it makes it more difficult for our political opponents to attack us on non-core issues.

Comment on issues when they come about - the issues of the day - but otherwise don't take a position on your non-core issues unless you need to.

For Nick as party leader it's even more important. Since, nominally at least, policy is decided by our party conference, Nick can get into all sorts of problems if he signs himself up to positions that aren't party policy (though in practice there seem to be ways round that, or so I'm told).

David suggests that Ashdown and Kennedy had a crystal clarity on all the issues. I'd be interested to know what others think about that: my recollection is that, other than on their core issues, they were no more forthcoming than Nick until the election campaign arrived.

Personally, I was unsure about Nick in his early months but I think he's doing well now. I don't really want to know his opinions on every last issue. I want him to provide leadership and vision around the important issues of the day, get media coverage (taking risks where necessary) and lead us to success in the next General Election - and I'm starting to think that he will.

The curious tale of the Hindu fundies and 40,000 pairs of pink knickers

Those who remember the last days of the Raj may recall the tragedy that followed the partitioning of India. As millions of muslims migrated north to the new Pakistan, passing hindus heading south into the new India, many thousands died in religious violence.

Luckily those days are long gone (we only have to worry about the threat of a nuclear war between the two countries these days).

But in these times when we seem to have every reason to complain about Muslim and Christian extremists, it's worth remembering that Hindu fundamentalists are keeping themselves entertained too.

Reported in the Guardian today, self-appointed Hindu moral guardians have been attacking women in pubs and unmarried couples celebrating valentines day.

But the women of India have hit back against the killjoys, sending 40,000 pairs of pink knickers (many unwashed) to the headquarters of Lord Ram's Army. Whether the religious ones can replenish their coffers by selling them all on eBay remains to be seen.

Lord Ram's Army don't appear to have been completely won over by the unsolicited gifts, with their national secretary saying

"We say we use clinical violence which will have a healing effect on society,"

Ah yes, the well known healing effect of clinical violence - it never fails.

"God Hates Fags" pastor banned

Fred Phelps might claim to be a Christian, but few followers of Jesus would agree.

He leads a small church in America; most of the congregation are members of his family. He celebrates the murder of homosexuals. He believes that the deaths of soldiers in Iraq is God's just punishment for America's liberal attitudes.

Indeed, if the Westborough Baptist Church is to be believed, God spends so much time hating just about everything that he must hardly have a minute spare for anything else. God not only hates fags, he also hates America, England, Australia and, just in case anything's been missed, the world. Oh, and Obama's the antichrist and our own queen is a whore (where does she find the time?)

Examples of the signs Phelps and his family display at the funerals of soldiers, amongst other locations are: GOD HATES FAGS, AIDS CURES FAGS, FAGS BURN IN HELL, FAGS ARE NATURE FREAKS, THANK GOD FOR DEAD SOLDIERS, FAG TROOPS, GOD BLEW UP THE TROOPS, GOD HATES AMERICA, AMERICA IS DOOMED and THE WORLD IS DOOMED,

In short, Phelps is a grade A nut-job, disowned by even the American religious right, who sees God as the sort of loon who spends twenty-four hours a day posting bile on the BBC's Have Your Say comment boards.

And the Home Office has made it clear that he's not welcome in the UK. Like Geert Wilders last week, if Fred Phelps tries to enter the country, he'll be turned away.

So should he be banned?

Not for simply having exceptionally nasty opinons, for sure. Bring him over so we can laugh at him - Phelps won't mind and it'll give us some harmless entertainment. You never know - some of our home grown homophobes might even think twice when faced with their nasty views taken to their illogical conclusions.

But this is no quiet visit for a private meeting, as Wilders had in mind. Phelps is coming over to preach his hate. He's expressed a desire to picket a school play in Basingstoke - the play earns Phelp's ire with it's message of tolerance for gays.

In Wilders' case, the concern seemed to be not that he would preach hate, but that muslim extremists would use his visit as an excuse to cause trouble.

I don't think that's an issue here. I don't think the mass ranks of homosexuals are looking for an excuse to take to the streets (except possibly for a bollywood-style song-and-dance routine). If there's trouble being caused, it'll more than likely be Phelps causing it. On the other hand, objectionable as they are, all his protests (nearly 40,000 of them) have been peaceful as far as I can tell.

So I think the decision over Phelps is certainly more defensible than Wilders. Unlike Wilders, Phelps wants to come to the UK to preach hatred. He celebrates the death of homosexuals, revels in what he sees as God's punishment of mankind.

I won't say than blocking his entry to the UK is definitely the right decision, but I'm not going to criticise the Home Office for this one - it's definitely a reasonable position to take.

Biometrics cracked...again (ID cards still great, apparently)

The Register is reporting that researchers have found a way to bypass facial recognition systems on several laptops.

This should come as a surprise to no-one: IT security is an ongoing battle between the defenders and the attackers. Sometimes one side or the other briefly gains the upper hand, but it never lasts long.

Contrast that to Gordon Brown and his pals, who consistently see biometrics like fingerprints, and facial recognition as one hundred percent failsafe, making it impossible for a criminal or terrorist to pretend to be someone they're not - the whole justification behind spending billions on ID cards to eliminate identity fraud through multiple identities.

The whole ID card saga is on the verge of descending into farce anyway, as many of the poor saps Jacqui Smith had lined up as guinea pigs decide to put up a fight, and we find that whilst there are cards, there are no card readers or even any plans to get some.

Whatever next? Even the proud people of Manchester might drag themselves away from their terrorism propaganda videos to be in the vanguard of this brave new experiment.

So, just to recap: we've got biometric security that's never going to be secure, no card readers anyway so right now it's totally useless, early adopters threatening to go on strike rather than have the cards and falling public support.

But, of course, Labour can't back down now. Just look at the weasel words from Meg Hillier (Parliamentary Under-Secretary(Identity)) on the topic.

"...perhaps I can give the hon. Gentleman a little lesson in how the cost of identity cards will work. There is not a big pot of money sitting and waiting to be spent on identity cards; there will be money to spend on them only if the general population choose to take them up. It is clear from my conversations with the public and other stakeholders that there is demand for identity cards."

Where to start. The Government is spending hundreds of millions of pounds on ID cards right now. Planning, promoting, developing, manufacturing. Money is being spent. Contracts are being signed. It's a ludicrous fabrication to suggest the money will only be spent if people want them.

Then there's the frankly laughable suggestion that they're still voluntary. "If the general population choose to take them up". Yes, that would be "If you ever want to travel abroad" or perhaps "If you want to get a student loan" or "If you want to open a bank account".

Finally, the claim that people still want them. Not that Meg Hillier can even bring herself to say that. After all, if Gordon Brown alone wanted an ID card, she could still legitimately claim that there was "a demand for them".

ID cards are a salient example to future governments of how it's possible to get sucked so deeply into a policy that you can't back out even when it becomes obvious the whole thing's going to fail dismally. Thank god they won't be around long enough to roll them out.

Firefox forges ahead but Linux stalls

As news reaches me of Internet Explorer 8's problems (it doesn't render Microsoft's own site correctly, nor does it work with minor sites like BBC, Amazon, ITV and Tesco), I've been keeping an eye on the browser and OS preferences of visitors to the Cafe.

Turns out that, for my little blog, visitors using Internet Explorer are running neck-and-neck with those using Firefox. Overall, Firefox 3 seems to be the most popular browser, then IE7, IE6, FF2,with none of the rest (Safari, Chrome, iPhone...) having more than 2% share.

So Firefox is forging ahead, but the story for Linux on the desktop is less rosy. Despite huge strides in usability, only 2-3% of my visitors use Linux as their operating system. 85% use Windows (XP is the most popular, then Vista), 10% use Macs, 1% iPhones and a handful use something else.

Vista was a cock-up for Microsoft. Unloved and largely unwanted, it gave Linux a chance to break through on the desktop. Linux was ready too. It had big companies promoting it (Canonical with Ubuntu, along with the likes of Novell, Red Hat and even IBM for business users). It was pretty mature - perfectly usable for non-technical people. You could even buy Linux pre-installed on computers, both on netbooks like Acer Aspire One and PCs and laptops from WallMart, HP and Dell.

But it doesn't seem to have happened. We're now in the sixth or seventh "year of Linux on the desktop", Windows 7 is on the horizon and getting good reviews and Microsoft has shown itself willing to drop the price of Windows to the point where most users need a good reason not to buy it.

Linux has been around for nearly twenty years, but iPhone users are catching up fast: for every two people using Linux to visit my blog, there's one person using an iPhone.

Some say Linux will put in a late show, especially in these belt-tightening times. Netbooks, thin clients or mobile devices will swing things towards the open source operating system. Others say it doesn't really matter - all our data and apps will soon be on the Internet anyway so the operating system will be no more important on your computer than it is in your microwave.

I'm not so sure. I've a hunch that the versatile PC will be with us for quite a while longer, and that most of them will continue to run Windows.

Brits makes me ashamed to be British

I know we now live in a world were every sodding Z-list failed Big Brother contestant is considered superior to scientists, doctors, engineers and (whisper it) even politicians.

But surely the Brits goes too far.

At yesterday's Brits ceremony, the quite-good-if-you-like-that-sort-of-thing songstress Duffy was named "Best British Female".

Not "Best British Female singer" or "Best British Female pop star". Just "Best British Female".

Sorry for going into sad pedant without a life mode, but honestly. It's bad enough that we have to put up with these tedious, lifeless, interest-free awards ceremonies without being sold the idea that, from thirty-million odd to choose from, bloody Duffy is the best that British womanhood has to offer.

If that wasn't bad enough, it doesn't even sodding work on its own terms. On which planet is there a form of life that really thinks "The Promise" by Girls Aloud was the best single any British band or artist has made in the last year. Do Girls Aloud even think that?

Katy Perry the "Best International Female"? Have I missed something, or did they really give the award to a lightweight pop singer who's penned one catchy faux-lesbian single to go with her otherwise utterly mediocre output? Nothing against the girl, but we might as well chuck all the CDs and mp3s in the bin now and go back to sing-songs around the piano if that's really the best the world can manage.

I shall refrain from commenting on the other winners - at my age I can't afford the blood pressure to go too high.

Sex-ed 1960s style

Just a quick mention for this clip from a 1960s sex-ed film on the BBC website - sheer brilliance.

Watch out for the boy demonstrating his manliness at around 2m40s - not to be missed.

Tory tax referendums not so great after all

Following the Conservative announcement of their plans to give more power to local government (that's the spin, anyway - not everyone's buying it) and give lots more cities elected mayors, I haven't heard much comment on their referendum scheme.

The idea, as I understand it, is to scrap council tax capping. Instead, when a local authority increased council tax by more than the minister's allowed, it would trigger a situation where 5% of local voters can trigger a referendum.

Now, as my favourite nine-year-old blogger has noted, this rather misses the point that most local authority money already comes from central government, the precise amount depending on who bought the senior civil servants tickets for Wimbledon a clear, fair and robust formula.

If the Tories really wanted to give local authorities more power, they'd let them raise more of their revenue. (I seem to remember that, in Europe, only Malta has more central control of local authority budgets). After all, we all know that power follows the money and under these Tory plans it will still be following that money straight to Whitehall.

But there's another problem with the whole concept of referendums. Setting Council Tax levels is about taxing and spending. Councils have responsibilities to meet, priorities to target.

Unscrupulous opposition parties would be sorely tempted to use a referendum measure as a stick to beat ruling parties around the head with. First you campaign on the wasteful council and get your 5% of signatures to trigger a referendum. Then you campaign for lower council tax and win the referendum. Finally, when the ruling party or coalition has to find the cuts in services, you attack them for that too.

It's different from normal elections. A party might well campaign for lower council tax in an election. If they win, they might deliver on their promise. But it's then them that has to find the service cuts and justify them to the public.

I could be wrong. I've nothing against referendums in principle. But in this case, it just seems to me that it would encourage the worst sort of opportunism by opposition parties that can force changes in council policy without having to take responsibility for the consequences.

More reading on this topic: LibCync, Iain Dale, Anders Hanson, Len Gates, Norfolk Blogger, Wit and Wisdom,.

Facebook backs down as Café triumphs

The power of Himmelgarten Café has been brought to bear yet again, bringing the mighty Facebook to its knees. Yesterday I reported on a change to Facebook's Terms and Conditions meaning that they held wide rights over anything you post there forever (previously you could remove their rights by deleting the content from Facebook).

This morning, according to the BBC, Facebook head honcho Mark Zuckerberg has backed down. The Café isn't mentioned specifically in the article (outraged users, just a misunderstanding, new proposals to be developed with users, blah, blah, blah) but the subtext is pretty clear.

Yesterday the Café complains, today Facebook backs down. Correlation and causation, people - one and the same.

The adreneline rush that is "Reports to Conference"

Yesterday morning the postman brought my "Fun in Harrogate" pack in the post.

Not a guide to Harrogate's best lap-dancing clubs (rumour has it that's in the special MPs' conference guide) but lots of exciting information about the Lib Dem Federal Spring Conference somewhere up north in the delightful town of Harrogate.

Best of all is Reports to Conference, clearly a labour of love from all concerned.

The report from Federal Conference Committee reveals that we're going to have a conference, Federal Policy Committee's report tells us that we're going to discuss some policy there, the Federal Executive's done some dull stuff over the last few months, and the Federal Finance and Administration Committee continues to nurse the party's barely-existent finances (but perhaps not for much longer as the Chief Officers Group (the big COG in our little party machine) is taking over some aspects.

The more interesting reports are from the parliamentary parties in the Commons, Lords and Europe.

The Commons report falls a little flat. Not that our MPs haven't been doing some funky stuff, but we've heard it all before. Few Lib Dem activists are going to be too surprised at the account of our response to the economic crisis.

The Lords report is a bit more fun, going through party contributions on a bill-by-bill basis and name-checking as many peers as possible. Did you know that Celia Thomas used the procedures of the House to "draw attention to the shortening of the backdating of social security benefits". I didn't and, dull as it sounds, it's probably pretty important if you're one of the millions of families relying on those benefits.

But it's the Europe report that's the real cracker. Almost at the end of the booklet, it's easy to miss - but don't. Honestly, it's fun. Would I lie to you?

It looks like each MEP has been asked to send over a paragraph or two about themselves and what they've been doing, written in the third person.

So we learn that Andrew Duff is "writing another book" and Elspeth Attwooll is Vice-Chair of the Fisheries Committee (be still, my beating heart).

Chris Davies' fight over carbon capture has resulted in the EU's governments signing up to his proposal for a financial mechanism for carbon capture storage worth 9 billion euros. No idea what it means, but 9 billion is a big number, so it must be good, right?

Best of all is Bill Newton Dunn, our East Midlands MEP. He's worried about the "exponential" growth in international cross-border crime. He suggests the EU and national governments are not only ignoring the problem, but the political parties are staying silent and the statistics are being kept secret.

Bill wants to raise public awareness on the issue and for the Lib Dems to lead the charge, That's a cause I'm happy to contribute to in my own small way. Here it is - now you're aware.

If that wasn't enough, Bill is also "trying to copy President Obama's use of internet campaigning". Go Bill!

Who knew our MEPs got up to so many exciting things?

Labour talks police freedom but the reality falls short

Want to cut youth crime? You could do worse than getting coppers back doing school crossings, getting to know the kids, and be trusted by them, from the age of five or six (the kids, not the coppers, though thet do seem to get younger every year).

That's why PCSOs are good. It doesn't really matter that they don't have the full powers of police officers. It does matter that they're on bikes or on foot, talking to people and working in communities.

Labour's approach for the last decade has, in practice, worked against this. Central control. Targets to be fulfilled. Forms to be completed.

As we all know, the trouble with targets is you have to find something easy to measure; then you end up working to that. Arrests, convictions, stop-and-searches: all nice easy numbers to report to Jacqui. Building links with local communities, building up trust, working so the crimes never happen in the first place - you can't measure those so in the Labour world, you don't do them.

Sure, you'll say they're good ideas in speeches. You'll pay them lip-service. You'll have some neat little pilot projects and token efforts. But, when you follow the money, it's with the forms and the reports and the targets.

So Labour's latest attempt to cut red tape by scrapping the police timesheet is interesting. Will it make a real difference? Is Labour even capable of genuinely handing power back to local police forces and communities?

I'd like to think so, but I'm sceptical. The centralised control is in their DNA - you can't just walk away from that.

Both the Tories and the Lib Dems are critical of Labour and both call for more bobbies on the beat. Of course, the Conservatives weren't exactly decentralising when they were in power and the Lib Dems haven't had the chance to show what they'd do (unless you're going to examine Lloyd George's policy).

Putting it simply, the police forces are not fit for purpose. Where people are living in fear, the police are largely impotent. Where we need an emergency response, officers often turn up hours later, if at all. Where criminals engage in low-level crimes that leave us feeling scared and unsafe, the police don't want to know.

That's not the fault of the police. They're hard at work following the orders of their political masters.

If our police are to reduce fear and make our sink estates better places to live as well as solving crimes, it's going to take a lot more than scrapping the odd bit of paperwork.

Now Facebook owns all your stuff for ever

Remember how Facebook owns all the stuff you post on the site? The Terms and Conditions say that by

posting user content to any part of the site, you grant the company the right to use, copy, publicly display and distribute user content.

Until this month you could at least recover ownership by removing things you posted. Once you delete those photos from Facebook, they no longer had the right to use, copy and distribute them.

That changed on 4th February when the sentences

‘you may remove your user content from the site at any time. If you choose to remove your user content, the license granted above will automatically expire'.

were deleted from Facebook's Terms and Conditions.

Anyone signing up to Facebook now gives the company all those rights over anything written or uploaded forever.

Facebook founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg explains this as necessary for Facebook to function as users want. Mr Zuckerberg doesn't want to have to delete memos you've sent to your friends just because you delete your account,

He has a point - it's normal with Internet messaging (e.g. email) that the messages someone has sent you don't vanish when their account does.

But, in a very New Labour-esque move, Facebook have taken massively more rights over our data than they actually need and asked us to trust them not to misuse anything, either now or in thirty years time.

Zuckerberg says

“In reality, we wouldn't share your information in a way you wouldn't want. The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work.”

That might be true this year. But forever? What if Facebook - along with the rights over all our data - were sold to another company?

UPDATE: Victory is ours.

Mancunian terror propoganda plan makes us less safe

You'll have heard about Labour's plans to force women in Mancunian hair salons to watch anti-terrorist propoganda. You might have seen Alix's excellent post on the topic.

But there might be a sneaking feeling in the back of your mind that perhaps we should be doing more. Perhaps we do need to keep a look out for terrorists and report our suspicions to the police.

According to the Manchester Evening News story, the idea if this plan is

to encourage [women] to report suspicious behaviour on a special hotline

The sad thing is, it's not even a very good idea from a policing perspective.

There are two key facts. First, real terrorists are rare. Even if we take MI5's most optimistic, please increase our budget estimates, terrorism is exceptionally uncommon. The chance of someone stumbling across real terrorist activity are tiny.

Second, the public aren't very good at spotting real terrorist activity. How would we know? We might be OK at spotting Hollywood-style terrorists, but we've no particular skills or training in the real thing. For heaven's sake - just look at de Menezes. Even the so-called experts can be pretty useless.

So the whole idea of asking the public to be on our guard and report suspicious activity is flawed.

What you actually get is millions of amateurs reporting totally innocent people and events on the basis of racism, rumours and Hollywood movie plots. Since real terrorist activity is rare, they will nearly all be false alarms.

And yet, if you're going to get people to report this stuff, you've got to investigate it. Thousands of police hours wasted following up reports of people who look a bit shifty and backpacks full of dirty underwear left on station platforms.

To put the icing on the cake, it even does the terrorists work for them. It spreads terror and makes us all more afraid. The UK's seen one successful terrorist attack in the last eight years, but this tells us to be afraid all the time time, of every unattended bag, every muslim, everyone who looks out of place or nervous.

It doesn't make us any safer. It ties up the police following false leads. It keeps us scared, just like the terrorists want. And it encourages us to fear and suspect anyone who's different, sowing just that bit of racial discord and disharmony.

Good plan.

Rimington joins the civil liberties chorus

Dame Stella Rimington, former head of MI5, has joined the growing chorus against Labour's railroading of our civil liberties.

In a major scoop for the Telegraph, Rimington says

“It would be better that the Government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism: that we live in fear and under a police state,” she said.

In the past, Stella Rimington has criticised ID cards as "useless" and come out against 42 day detention without trial.

She's right, of course. These things do not make us any safer. They make us more scared, more fearful, more likely to see a terrorist lurking in every shadow. They make us more childlike, asking the big Government to save us from the nasty people.

We are not in a police state yet; but Labour seems determined to bring us as close as possible.

No-kissing zones in railway station

I genuinely can't decide if this is a feelgood story where the station makes a point in a light-hearted way or more intrusion into our lives.

Warrington Bank Quay Station has erected "no kissing" signs and has designated kissing zones. The idea is to avoid smooching couples getting in the way of commuters.

How long before this sign starts appearing in our stations, just to be on the safe side. Now that really would hold up commuters...

New Reefer Madness campaign launched

The latest Government ploy to persuade the kids that pot is much more dangerous than nice drugs like alcohol is underway and, not for the first time, the chosen battleground is mental health.

Haven't you heard? This new skunk is twenty times stronger than the stuff today's Labour politicians were smoking back in the '60s and '70s. It was OK for them to have the occasional toke back in the day but, if you do it, you'll end up in the funny farm.

The only slight flaw with this propoganda is it isn't actually true, as such.

Traditional weed is the same strength as it always was and modern skunk about twice as strong as that (not twenty times).

Then there's the mental health issue, and there are two problems with the Government line.

First, millions of people have tried pot and estimates suggest there are around three million regular cannabis users in the UK. So if the there was a strong causal link from smoking weed to mental health problems, we'd expect to see those people flooding GP's surgeries.

Second, is the issue of causality. Does smoking cannabis cause mental illness? It's a reasonable question to ask. After all, how many mentally ill people drink alcohol? Nearly all. Should we conclude, then, that alcohol causes mental illness and so ban it?

It could simply be that people who are mentally ill (or likely to become mentally ill) are more likely to take illicit substances than the population as a whole; and that for any one person smoking pot makes no difference at all to their risk of becoming mentally ill.

How to tell? A recent study looked at over 2 million people: everyone born in Denmark between 1955 and 1990. It looked at this specific issue: does cannabis use cause mental illness or are mentally ill people just more likely to use cannabis.

Unfortunately, I'd have to pay lots of money to read the actual report (PubMed? Never heard of it) but there seems to be reasonable consensus that the results favour the second interpretation.

Not that you'd know it from reading the Daily Mail, of course. That publication tells us that

A U.S. study found that smoking just half a cannabis joint could trigger schizophrenia-related symptoms.

(The Mail forgot to mention that this research found the symptoms to be limited and very short term, with no evidence that they lead to longer term problems).

This is an area where more research is needed. There have been a lot of studies, but many of them are small scale, inconclusive, or show a correlation between cannabis use and mental illness without demonstrating causation.

For the Government to be sending out the reefer madness message to young people isn't supported by the evidence; but we'd expect nothing more from Labour.

To finish off, as a reward for anyone who's made it this far, enjoy this film of a very average group of cannabis users from 1930s America...

Should alcoholics go to the back of the transplant queue?

You're a surgeon, faced with two patients in need of liver transplants, and you have one liver that's a match for both. Both need the liver equally badly, but one patient is an alcoholic and, whatever she says, you know she's unlikely to stay off the booze for long. Who gets the liver?

Or perhaps you just have one patient, who's an alcoholic. Do you you give them the liver, or do you save it in the hope that one of the other 300+ people on the list will be matched in time? Maybe you transplant the liver into the alcoholic patient only if he undertakes to attend AA meetings.

These are the sorts of dilemmas facing surgeons today. According to the Observer, the waiting list for liver transplants has soared from 180 in 1997 to 325 today, with one in four transplants going to alcoholics.

What should our approach be to dishing out livers for transplant?

I've made the point before that, far from costing us all money with their extra treatments, heavy smokers and drinkers are more likely to save the taxpayer cash: not only do they pay duty on those fags and booze; they're also likely to die relatively young, saving us a pile of cash in pensions and old age care.

But this isn't quite that simple. Organs suitable for transplant are a finite resource and there simply aren't enough to go round. Giving an organ to one person means not giving it to some others who could die as a result. Easier to blog about than to be the one telling a patient and her relatives that she's probably going to die because of a decision you've made.

I disagree with singling out a form of risky behaviour, labelling people bad or not worthy of saving. You always end up making judgements over which risky behaviours are OK. Would you deny someone treatment because they had a sporting injury, even though being involved in sport makes that injury much more likely? How about refusing to treat prostitutes who get STDs - it's their own fault, after all. Should you distinguish between someone driven to alcoholism by personal tragedy and someone who just enjoys drinking to excess?

But that doesn't mean you can't make any judgements.

It seems to me that there are three important factors:

1. How long has the person been waiting for a transplant (i.e. how long have they been ill enough to need a transplant).
2. How much longer will they live without a transplant.
3. How much longer will they live with a transplant.

I don't think there's any one right answer, but some sort of points system that takes account of these three, ignoring why the person needs a new liver, would be along the right lines.

Veteran Lib Dem MP Don Foster seems to have been the one to raise this issue. Don talks about saving Britain's health from a "binge-drinking culture" and calls for the price of alcohol to be raised.

Lib Dems can directly help the unemployed - and ourselves

Unemployment is soaring, job centres are having trouble coping. People used to feeling that they're doing something useful and providing for their families are cast adrift.

Unemployment is about more than loss of income. Particularly for the long-term unemployed and those on incapacity benefit, it's about a loss of self-worth, of not feeling useful. Stay like that for long enough and I'm not contributing becomes I can't contribute.

We can't magically create lots of new jobs, but for some people we can offer a way to give something, make a difference, and add new skills to their CV.

I'm talking about offering people who find themselves unemployed, or recent graduates having trouble finding work, the opportunity to help their communities and improve their CVs by helping the Lib Dems.

It needs a significant changes from us.

We're good at getting people to contribute in low-skilled activities: delivering leaflets and clerical work. We're not so good (but getting slightly better) at using the existing skills people have for things like fundraising and website development. We're pretty crap at giving people new skills.

Not that it never happens. The party is much better at training than ever in the past. Events like ALDC Kickstart and conference training sessions help us raise our game, and internships are valuable too.

But we're not as good as we could be either at delivering skills or selling it as a benefit of being involved in the party.

How often do we go out and say "become active in the Lib Dems and we'll train you up in DTP, marketing, managing meetings, fundraising, building websites, online campaigning... - all of which are useful skills to have on your CV when you're looking for work".

Which looks better to a prospective employer?

"For the last six months I sat around watching TV"

or

"For the last six months I've been active in the Liberal Demcrats. I learnt to run an online campaign (and then did it successfully). I learnt to fundraise (and then raised £3000 in three months). I learnt to chair meetings effectively. Here's a reference from our PPC."

We can do this, but it will involve a significant change.

The problem is that most of us are far too geared up for doing to devote lots of spare time to training. We need to be reasonably confident that it's going to be worthwhile to train people up - that they aren't going to get the free training and then just vanish. We also need to be more up-front about offering these sorts of skills: about telling people what they can get out of it.

If we can pull it off, we'll not only be helping people hit by the recession to get back on their feet - we'll also be building on the excellent but limited training offered by the party to improve our campaigning, and our electoral success, right across the country.

Thanks to John for this idea: it's his and I've merely fleshed it out a bit.

Lapdancing row reveals differing aims

When, last November, the Government announced plans to put restrictions on lapdancing clubs, I was in favour. The issue was one of local control. It seemed to me to be reasonable that local communities - via their elected representatives - should have more powers to decide whether or not a lapdancing club was right for their area, just as they do for sex shops and sex cinemas at the moment.

Now, according to the Guardian, the Fawcett Society is unhappy.

They have two concerns. First, the legislation doesn't prevent pubs from having occasional (less than monthly) lap dancing nights, so we could see troupes of lap dancers touring the country.

Second, it will be up to councils to decide whether to adopt the new powers. Some might not, leading to a migration of lapdancing clubs to those areas.

It seems to me that the Fawcett Society's concerns stem from having different aims. I suspect they see lap dancing as a bad thing in itself; something to be stopped for the good of womankind.

The arguments for and against things like lapdancing and prostitution are well rehearsed elsewhere: suffice to say that there are reasonable and deeply-held views on both sides.

But I think the Fawcett Society is really complaining that the proposals don't do something that they were never intended to do in the first place. Unusually for Labour, the proposals were not about controlling our lives and telling us what jobs we can and can't do, or how we can and can't spend our leisure time.

They were an attempt to fix an anomaly in planning rules that has seen "sexual encounter" establishments springing up across the country and local communities not having the ability to even make the case against (or for) them.

The Fawcett Society may want to campaign to get rid of strip clubs. They may want, depending on your point of view, to either strip women of the freedom to earn a living from stripping or lapdancing, or alternatively to protect exploited, powerless women from being forced into selling their bodies.

This legislation isn't the way to do it, though. If that's what they want, let's have that debate and let's treat it with the seriousness it deserves, not try to smuggle it in under the guise of planning regulations.

Edited to add: anyone interested to know my views on lapdancing can probably guess them from this piece I wrote a while back.

Labour reneges on NHS privacy promise

Back at the end of 2006 it became apparent that the Government not only wanted to upload our medical records to a national "spine" (i.e. a whopping great big database that hundreds of thousands of NHS employees would have access to, right across the country) but that it had no intention of allowing people to opt-out.

After dire threats from GPs, the Government relented. I wrote to our GP asking that the records for the entire Quist family be kept off the database, using a letter helpfully drafted for me. My GP wrote back to assure me that my wishes would be followed (and, as far as I know, they have been).

At the time, the Government went to great lengths to tell the campaigners they were talking nonsense. The usual stuff: safeguards, clinical need, no risk, checks and balances, strong security, blah, blah, blah. Needless to say, few with any insight into Government IT took the assurances very seriously.

What we didn't realise back then was that Labour was going to pass a law saying that, on the say so of a minister without recourse to parliament, our medical records could be given to any other branch of the State or handed to a private company.

That's exactly what the Coroners and Justice Bill says. If it furthers some Labour policy objective, all those safeguards we were told about a couple of years ago can be signed away with the flourish of a ministerial pen.

This pernicious legislation puts our most private data - mental health problems, STDs, life-threatening illnesses - at the mercy of every minister in this and all future governments.

And for what? Some possible future efficiency saving?

This isn't the first time that Labour have passed legislation that sells our privacy and liberty down the river, and said "it's OK, we've no plans to actually use it." Oh well, that's alright then. No need to worry at all.

Two years ago the Government wrote to people like me and gave assurances about the safety and security of records on the spine. If this bill is passed into law, I believe they should write again, explaining the possibility of a minister sharing our medical records with private companies at some time in the future and giving everyone another chance to opt out.

Irfan's dangerous position

Irfan Ahmed isn't afraid to take the unpopular or contrary position on an issue - and good for him. Unfortunately, that doesn't always make him right.

Irfan's comments on why he feels Jacqui Smith was right to ban Geert Wilders from entering the country raise an important liberal issue.

His reason is

"the Muslim community in Britain who I would have been among would have been up in arms that the British government has allowed such a thing to enter into the UK"

I'll assume Irfan didn't really meen to refer to Geert Wilders as a thing (i.e. something less than human), but even so, this is exceptionally dodgy.

This argument says to any illiberal group wishing to block someone's free speech "all you have to do is to make a noise, threaten to protest, ideally threaten violence, and we'll all run scared."

It rewards those willing to stoop to violence and rioting. It rewards those willing to hand out death threats. It punishes those who wish to stay within the law and have sensible debates.

From the police perspective, I can understand the dilemma. They have limited resources and practical decisions need to be made. Do they really want to protect Geert Wilders as opposed to solving crimes? There may be cases when, for pragmatic reasons, the police choose discretion.

But this must never be the assumption. It must never be the default position that we give in to violent thuggery and suppress freedom of speech just in case the person you upset is willing to get physical.

Since Geert Wilders entered the country with no problems a few weeks ago, and since he was here for a private meeting, not to address some huge rally or parade around the streets, the only way there would have been any threat to public order on this occasion is if people had deliberately used the visit as an excuse to stir things up (of course that would never happen in this country - just don't mention the Danish cartoons).

If, as Irfan suggests, we surrender free speech at the first sign of someone wielding a big stick, we are truly setting ourselves down a very slippery slope.

No problems with NHS computing, honest

As I was opening up the cafe this morning, little Sophie burst through the door with this morning's copy of the Internet under her arm. Flicking through the pages as I sipped my espresso, I spotted a couple of curious stories.

First Andrew Way, head of the Royal Free Hospital in London, complains that the Government's botched IT rollout has cost the hospital £10 million. That's £10 million that can't now be spent on medical equipment because it's gone into the coffers of IT companies.

I'm not one to serve up knee-jerk criticisms of health spending. It's easy to attack hospitals for spending money on works of art instead of patients, for example, and it makes for a cheap tabloid headling - as long as you ignore the strong evidence base that the environment, including art, can make a big difference to recovery times.

But the Government's £12 billion project to roll out a string of IT innovations to hospitals right across the country has been criticised for years. The criticisms are never addressed, we just get the same nonsense.

A Department of Health spokesman said: "Many elements of the programme are complete, and patients and clinicians are now beginning to see the benefits these systems bring to improve patient care.

The Connecting for Health project is going so badly, and is so many years behind schedule, that the Government have had to put up a whole website dedicated to desperately spinning it as some sort of success. Sorry, guys, but we're not fooled. We're not quite that stupid.

Connecting for Health, as the project is now called, has spent billions trying to force a one size fits all IT system across the whole country, with predictably disasterous consequences. Where elements are working (years behind schedule) it's because money has been thrown at them.

Connecting for Health is a case study in how not to do Government IT. That Labour are still saying everything is fine tells us a lot about them.

But what's this? In another story we find that big companies are spending thousands giving freebies to senior civil servants. Meals, outings to sporting events, the ballet, foreign trips. Hmmm. Surely there couldn't be a connection between billions of pounds of our money being thrown at failing IT development by big companies and senior civil servants being taken to Wimbledon. No, I thought not.

Show me a gesture, Johnny

Following research that toddlers who gesture more gain a larger vocabulary, experts are calling for "teachers to encourage more gesturing in schools".

Have they really thought that one through?

Geert Wilders: what on Earth is Huhne playing at?

Geert Wilders is a popular right-wing Dutch politician. He's sat in the Dutch parliament for a litte over a decade. Most famous for his hard-line anti-Islamic views, Wilders' political philosophy blends libertarianism (small state, less regulation, lower taxation, less state welfare) with a tough line on crime (three strikes and you're out) and on immigration.

And he's been banned from entering the UK because, according to the Home Office, his opinions "threaten community security and therefore public security".

He was due to show his short film on Islamic extremism, Fitna, in the House of Lords. Apparently their lordships will still watch the film, but presumably without Geert's personal commentary.

I can't quite figure out why the Home Office decided to block his entry; but then I don't often see eye to eye with the denizens of Jacqui Smith's fiefdom so that's not a big surprise. More curious is Chris Huhne's support for the Government line.

Leaving aside Wilders' religious views for a moment, the rest of his politics is nothing spectacular. Sure, I don't think we'd find too much to agree on, but none of his opinions seem especially bizarre: if he wrote a column for the Daily Mail, it wouldn't seem out of place.

On religion, Wilders is robust and stringent in his criticisms of Islam. He plays the game of finding verses in the Koran that paint Islam in a bad light (hands up any atheist who hasn't done that with the Bible - Numbers 31 is among my favourites).

He suggests fundamentalist Islam isn't the nicest religion in the world, whereas Richard Dawkins merely tells us that raising children in a religion is a form of child abuse.

For me, Wilders' biggest error is to lump together the Islamic extremists and moderates, tarring all with the same brush. Again, that's something Dawkins and his cohorts have been accused of, with some justification. Wilders also mixes up "Muslims trying to force others to follow their beliefs" (a bad thing) and "Muslims following their own beliefs when it harms no-one else" (not a bad thing).

As we know, Islam doesn't always score highly on the reasoned debate front either. Whilst the majority of muslims are lovely, moderate people; there are a significant number who are violently opposed to the liberal freedoms we enjoy. All religions have their intemperate moments, but fundamentalist Islam seems unique, in western Europe at least, in regularly calling for those who have displeased or offended them to be killed.

So what exactly is the problem. If Wilders' views aren't any more extreme than those of millions people already living here, why ban him?

Was he planning to openly incite violence against muslims? It seems unlikely - that doesn't seem to be something he's done in the past. Is he a criminal? Not that I know of.

So on what grounds, precisely, does Chris Huhne think Geert Wilders should be banned?

I don't know. I listened to Chris on the Today programme this morning and it left me none the wiser. He talked about there being a clear line between what's acceptable and what isn't in free speech (no there isn't - there's a staggeringly large grey area). He talked about Wilders crossing that line (how, exactly?) but he was very short on details.

This action by the Home Office is foolish, merely giving Wilders more publicity. Huhne's cheer-leading is bizarre and misguided.

Conned into collectivism: liberalism works better

Charlotte Gore (fluffy or icy? you decide) bemoans the death of liberalism in the Liberal Democrats. She makes some good points - and it's worth reading - but I don't agree with it all.

It got me thinking into why so many people, both inside and outside the Liberal Democrats, are so keen to help people "improve" themselves by telling people what they should be doing (Change4Life) or forcing them to do it (seat belts, drugs).

Why are people so keen for the State to spend billions of pounds of our money interfering in people's lives, saving us from ourselves and making us better human beings?

Why do we accept the State telling us that we must smoke less, drink less, exercise more, not take drugs, wear seatbelts, not look at certain types of pornography and all the rest of it? Even those of us who resist some of these probably accept others.

We accept it because we think it works. Of course we do. That's what we've been told for years, and it's obvious.

Motorcycling is obviously more dangerous without a helmet, so making it the law to wear one must save lives. Driving is obviously more dangerous without a seatbelt, so forcing everyone in the car to belt up saves lives. Being an overweight, heavy drinking smoker is obviously worse than being slim and clean-living so it must be right to cajole and encourage people to be better, to achieve their potential as we might say these days.

Our hearts might say "leave us alone" but our heads admit that, imperfect as we all are, we need the State to help us do what we should. And if the State doesn't need to help us, it certainly needs to help those dreadful poor people with their too-numerous chubby children destined for criminality. I've seen the programmes on BBC3 - I know these things!

Except, when I look at the evidence, it turns out time and again to be wrong. Either the draconian laws turn out not to make us safer at all or the campaigns to persuade us to be better people don't work.

The compulsory seat belt laws are often taken as a cast-iron example of where saving us from ourselves is a good thing. Thousands of lives saved, we're told. Except the evidence doesn't support that conclusion at all. It turns out that, when someone who normally wouldn't wear a seatbelt is forced to wear one, they take more risks and have more accidents (they're safer but the pedestrians and cyclists they hit certainly aren't).

After the UK made child car seats compulsory for young children, child deaths on the roads increased. Drivers knew their kids were secure so took more risks on the road.

Consistently around the world, making motorcyclists wear helmets by law saw more accidents and more deaths*.

We all know that the war on drugs has failed around the world. Making drugs illegal, punishing the growers, punishing the dealers, punishing the users, telling us ecstasy is horribly dangerous - nice idea, guys, but it just hasn't worked.

Similarly, campaigns like Change4Life have consistently failed to make us slimmer, fitter and healthier and can do more harm than good, encouraging bullying and telling people they're bad despite the evidence showing being overweight can extend your life.

This isn't to say that society's behaviour can't change. Obviously it does. As a society, our values, morals and habits change over time. We become more or less sexually liberated. We recycle more. We have moral panics. We're obviously not autonomous individuals capable of leading our lives without reference to the rest of society.

And I can understand how it happens. When bad things happen, we the people want the Government to make it all better - it's what they're there for. The Prime Minister isn't going to win plaudits for shrugging his shoulders and admitting defeat (as Brown's current poll rating ably demonstrates).

But the evidence is very clear: attempts by Government to save us from ourselves, to stop us behaving in a way that they believe harms us, simply do not work. They don't make our roads safer, make us slimmer, healthier, or drug free. The evidence shows the liberal approach simply works better.

---

* In some cases this was a slowing in the rate of decline rather than an absolute increase.

How many opinions does the NHS want from me?

This morning I receive through the post "The GP Patient Survey", asking for my views on local NHS services. It's an 8-page survey, barcoded for automated reading.

Which is fine. Doubtless a good use of a pound or two of taxpayers' money. Except...I received the same survey a few weeks ago, which I promptly filled in and returned.

The covering letter refers to the previous survey saying

"If you have already sent back your completed questionnaire in the last few weeks, thank you for doing this and please accept my apologies for sending you this reminder - you need do nothing more."

Wouldn't it have been better, and wasted less of my time and money, if they'd actually recorded the people who returned the survey and not send them out the whole thing again? If this is how IT works in the new, joined up Health Service, I'm unimpressed.

Fanny
On another matter, I'm enjoying listening to Mansfield Park on the radio. It's a good story, made infinitely better by one of the main characters being called Fanny. This leads to endless fnarr fnarr moments with lines like "My fanny was happy". Eat your heart out, Mrs Slocum.

Lib Dems soaring in the North

Thanks to John at Liberal Revolution and to The Wilted Rose for spotting some interesting figures in the details of the latest Sunday Telegraph ICM poll, will polling conducted on 4th-5th February 2009.

The headline voting intention figures has the Tories on 42%, Labour on 27% and the Lib Dems on 21%.

But there seems to be an intriguing regional variation.

In the South, the split is 49/28/18. In the Midlands, 45/25/18 (Midlands includes Wales and has Plaid Cymru on 5%).

But in the North (including Scotland), the Tories are on 30%, Labour 30% and the Lib Dems on 26% (SNP are on 9%).

There are all sorts of problems with this. Lumping together Scotland and Northern England could give figures that are no-where near correct for either and, when you drill down to regional levels, the sample size starts getting too small to be useful.

But still, this is very interesting. I'd love to see polling with decent sample sizes in cities like Newcastle, Sheffield, Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool to see where the Labour vote is going to.

People in many of those cities are used to the Lib Dems running things and used to the Tories being absent. Good local campaigns could see more seats than we might expect going gold.

Now child porn includes drawings of fully clothed 17-year-olds

The Coroners and Justice Bill has come under heavy criticism for its attempt to smuggle through massively increased data sharing powers, giving ministers the right to take information you've given the State for any purpose and hand it over to anyone at all in the public or private sector as long as it furthers a policy objective.

Lee Griffin has been keeping an eye on this aspect over at Liberal Conspiracy.

Less commented on is Part Two, Chapter Two of the bill which deals with pornographic images of children. Quite rightly, of course, both creating and possessing child porn is currently illegal.

This goes further. This makes it illegal to possess pornographic images even when no child was involved in making them - drawings, for example.

Possession of images depicting any of the following could land you with a prison sentence of up to three years:

• a depiction of two adults having sex where a fully clothed 17 year old, not involved in the sex, also appears in the picture.
• A depiction of an adult having sex with an animal when a child is also in the picture.
• A picture of two 17 year-olds having sex.
  
• A drawing of someone where the court considers the predominant impression is of a child even if the figure has some adult features, so a drawing of someone who looks seventeen, for example.
  

Does the law cover images made to look like photographs, or any drawings at all? The Bill just defines an image as "a moving or still image (produced by any means)" - or a computer file that can be converted into such an image. It excludes photographs and "pseudo-photographs" which are covered by other legislation.

Actually, it's not even that clear. The legislation itself says

“Image” includes—
a moving or still image (produced by any means),...
“Image” does not include an indecent photograph, or indecent pseudo-photograph, of a child.

But the explanatory notes to the legislation say

351. Subsection (2) sets out the definition of an image. It states that for the purposes of this offence, “an image” includes still images such as photographs, or moving images such as those in a film...
352. Subsection (3) provides that “image” does not include an indecent photograph or indecent pseudo-photograph of a child, as these are subject to other controls...

So there seems to be a type of photograph which isn't indecent but could still see you sent to prison for three years just for possessing. If anyone can enlighten me as to what that really means, I'd be grateful.

We can legally read accounts of children having sex. Many best-sellers feature all sorts of consensual and non-consensual under-age sex. The classic novel Lolita (distributed free with the Independent a year or so back) will still be entirely legal. Lolita in comic book form...who knows. Huge swathes of Japanese manga comics could fall foul of the law.

Films would be excluded (as with the violent porn laws) so you'll still be able to watch underage sex at your local multiplex. Don't try to grab a screenshot though - that could see you locked up.

This is a Government that seriously believes the citizens of the UK should be sent to prison for up to three years for owning a drawing of a fully clothed seventeen year-old watching two adults having sex.

This legislation, well intentioned as it no doubt is, has been poorly thought out and poorly drafted (very rare for bills from this government, I know). Thousands of websites and books which are totally legal today will suddenly be classed as carrying child porn. It has the potential to define a significant proportion of the population as paedophiles, despite them having never abused a child, never seen an image of a child being abused and posing absolutely no risk to children whatsoever.

Of course, the Government may tell us that the legislation won't be used excessively; that the courts will find the right level. All very well, but that's really saying "you can carry on as you are now and we'll decide if you're a paedophile later. No pressure at all, but bear in mind that if we decide you are a paedophile, it'll destroy your life."

More reading: James Graham, the bill and explanatory notes.

Bankers bonuses: why Clegg is right

Banks offer bonuses to their staff. The more senior the person the bigger the bonus, which also reflects both their personal performance and the overall success of the company.

In good times, banks find they've got lots of money to spare and a big chunk goes on bonuses. Different banks, looking to attract the best and brightest financial stars, compete to offer bigger bonuses. And it probably doesn't hurt that the senior executives fixing the size of the bonus are the ones who stand to benefit the most.

The result is a bidding war with bonuses getting bigger and bigger, out of all proportion to the actual benefits their recipients bring, and the gap between the poorest and richest in society grows ever wider.

The Cleggster and St Vince of Cable both think the bonuses are too high; that the Government should take action to cap them, or ban them altogether.

The Times disagrees, arguing that bonuses, set by the market, help banks to fairly reward success and retain staff in a competitive market.

Others haven't been shy about sharing their opinions. I'm nearer to Nick and Vince than to the Times on this one, but there's more to the issue than fairness and revenge.

There's nothing wrong with companies paying competitive wages and offering bonuses, along with other benefits, to attract and retain good staff. The important thing to understand is that it's all relative. What motivates isn't the absolute amount of cash being chucked your way, it's how much it looks when we compare ourselves to our peers and competitors.

A premiership footballer doesn't sit back looking smug because he earns shedloads more than normal mortals. He feels hard done by because he's on £20,000 a week and someone else who he considers no better than him is on £35,000. If footballers wages were similar to other sports like cricket and rugby, people would still play the game.

Similarly, city bonuses could be slashed and, once the memory of the unfairness of it all had faded, the effect on motivation and staff retention would be just as strong.

There are three challenges (apart from the technical bit of how you do it).

First, it only works if the scale of bonuses are similar across the industry. It's no good Chelsea deciding to pay everyone's weekly wage as an annual salary (even if that's what they seem to deserve at the moment) if all the other teams stay as they are now. The likes of Terry and Lampard would be pulling in over £100k a year, but they'd still be mighty miffed.

Second, there's the issue of international comparisons. If British bonuses are cut, will all the best bankers decamp to countries where they can get paid more? Not as much as some people think, but it's something to consider.

Finally, are the bonuses incentivising the right things? What if they just encourage the short term, make-lots-of-money-quick-and-sod-the-consequences approach? What if the wunderkind you want to retain at all costs has just got lucky and might get spectacularly unlucky next year?

So Nick is right - in principle there's no problem cutting city bonuses and it might even help avert the next banking meltdown. That's the principle. Finding a sensible way to do it may be another matter entirely.

That Islamic terrorist threat in full

It isn't that there aren't Islamic extremists who want to bring down the west. It's just that most of them appear to be complete idiots who couldn't plan a shopping trip, let alone a successful terrorist attack, as this picture shows.

Are the Lib Dems the Chelsea of British politics?

No-one could fail to see the parallels between Chelsea FC and the Liberal Democrats*. Both have received millions in funding from dodgy businessmen. Both have done well in their chosen competitions but not quite met the high expectations set for them. Both have jettisoned leaders and held out the hope that the next boss will be the one to keep the primadonnas in the team in check and make that final breakthrough.

Whilst Man Utd stuck with their leader in the disappointing early days of Ferguson's reign, Chelsea, under the weight of sky-high expectations, have been ruthless in kicking out world-class managers who've done well but not quite well enough.

And Chelsea's problem this season hasn't been that they've done badly, so much as Liverpool and Man Utd doing even better. United's superb run has been largely out of Chelsea's control.

In the Lib Dems too, there are always rumblings among the fan base. It's not that Clegg's performing badly, but is he doing well enough? Is our message being heard loudly enough in the media? Is he substantial enough? Does he have the necessary character? Is the entertainment we get from the Lib Dems worth the extortionate season-ticket price those emails from Chria Rennard ask us to pay?

OK, I'm struggling with the analogy now, but there is a serious point.

The act of changing leadership takes a lot of effort. Choosing a new manager or party leader is a tough task that can distract from the day-to-day business of winning games or votes. When a manager changes, he brings in a whole new leadership team. New relationships and ways of working must be forged. And the idea of a new manager who'll walk in and turn everything around invariably turns out to be illusory.

I've been very impressed with Nick Clegg over the last few months. He's been saying and doing the right things, and with a real passion. The Lib Dem's poll revival this month isn't down to a change of direction in the party, but may well be because the media are starting to report what Nick's saying.

When you're a third party, unlikely to form the next government and without the money to throw at PR, that's no mean achievement.

At the time of the leadership election, I was undecided. Both Clegg and Huhne had many good qualities. Over the past few months I've become increasingly satisfied with the decision the party made. Nick has the character and he has the vision. The party is starting to turn that promise into reality and Nick is starting to become a real electoral asset.

So let's not be the Chelsea of British politics. Let's not put all our hopes on a succession of managers who get sacked when they can't produce the desired quick wins against strong opposition. Let's spend the time, years if needed, to build the team we need to win the long game.

edited to add: Suggestions that, like the Chelsea faithful seeking the return of Mourinho, we need to bring back our last-but-one leader, would be taking the analogy much too far.

* work with me, people.

Is Berlusconi angling for baby farms?

Reports reach the Café of fun and games in Italy as Prime Minister and media magnate Berlusconi teams up with the Vatican to prevent a 38 year old woman, who's been in a persistent vegetative state for 17 years, from being allowed to die. Her father has been campaigning to let her die for 12 years and finally the top court in the land has ruled in his favour.

You can read a good summary on New Humanist blog and a more in-depth report in the Observer.

I can't be bothered to go over the bizarre contradictions in the Vatican's idea of who should be allowed to die and who shouldn't yet again. But I was enthralled by a comment from Berlusconi that the lady in question is physically "in the condition to have babies" and so should not have her life ended.

Why would that be important?

Well, Italy has a low birthrate, something that's of concern (how are they going to support their aging population? Inviting in lots of tax-paying immigrants might be the only solution).

But perhaps Berlusconi has another plan in mind. What if the Italian state were to impregnate unconscious Italian women who could then carry babies safely to term in hospital? With the help of IVF, and the sperm of their great leader, fewer then 30 women could soon be churning out hundreds of "Berlusconi Babies" every year, to be raised by the State to be good Italians, just like their dear old dad.

An army of little Berlusconis to save Italy from itself...you heard it here first.

Smoke a joint and lose your balls

More bad science on the BBC today, with the report that

"those who smoked it regularly, or had smoked from an early age, had twice the risk compared to those who had never smoked it."

Reporting relative risk (such as "twice the risk", "100% more risk" or "double the risk") is totally meaningless unless you also know the baseline chance. Buying ten lottery tickets increases your chance of winning the jackpot by a whopping 900%. Should we all invest in ten tickets and book that luxury holiday now? No, because the original chance of winning the lottery is so tiny that, even after a 900% increase, the odds of winning the fortune are still vanishingly small.

So here we have one small study which disagrees with previous studies (which, we're told, showed no link between smoking marijuana and testicular cancer). This study, unlike the others, suggests that smoking any marijuana increases your chances of getting testicular cancer by 70% and being a frequent or long-term user sees your risk double.

If true, what does that really mean?

Testicular cancer is unusual among cancers: the young are more likely to get it. Cancer is normally a disease of the elderly but you're most likely to be diagnosed with testicular cancer between the ages of 20 and 44. That should make the average toker sit up and take notice.

Testicular cancer also has a high survival rate. Of people who are diagnosed, 95% are still alive five years later (where the cancer is diagnosed early, before it spreads, only one in two hundred people have died five years later).

So what's the all-important baseline rate? According to data from the States, 1 in 280 men will be diagnosed with testicular cancer at some time during their lives, or 0.36%.

If we assume this latest study is accurate, a regular or long term marijuana smoker will see their lifetime risk soar to 1 in 140 or 0.71%. An occasional smoker would see their risk increase to 0.61%, or 1 in 164.

So, before you pick up that spliff, consider that, although the weight of evidence suggests it will not increase your risk of testicular cancer at all, there is one study that says your risk of contracting testicular cancer at some point in your life will increase from 0.36% to 0.71% (from 1 in 280 to 1 in 140).

Whether you want to take that risk is a decision for you, but hopefully this gives you a slightly more rational evidence base than some BBC journalist shouting that your risk of getting testicular cancer will double.

Note: the information I've given here is based on US data. As far as I know, the situation in the UK is similar. I'll check it if I can, but please correct me if you spot any errors. I'm not a medical professional - if in doubt, please see your doctor.

People are losing their liberty and we are failing them

A little while back I met up with some residents suffering from the attentions of local youths. Nothing too serious. Nothing to make the police charge to the rescue. But enough. Fences kicked in. Newspapers left burning on the step. Shouts and insults.

The yesterday I read an account in the Guardian of Nicholas Blincoe, harassed and finally beaten up by a small gang of kids.

David Cameron and the Daily Mail would have us believe that every child is a feral youth, that millions are roaming our streets every night throwing abuse and punches, drawing a blade or gun at the slightest provocation.

Luckily, that's not true. The vast majority of young people are perfectly fine (as much as teenagers ever are). They might be sullen, uncommunicative and often unaware of the effects their actions have on others, but they aren't knifing people in the streets.

But that just makes it all the more important to take action against the tiny minority of those who do.

Back in January, I wrote a piece for the first carnival on modern liberty about the corrosive effects of fear. I was talking about the false fears that cause most of us to worry far more than we need to; fears for the safety of ourselves and our families as we imagine murderers, rapists and paedophiles down every street.

For a small minority of people, though, the fears are very real. The feeling of being under siege, of being trapped in your own home, perhaps not safe even there. The fear in the pit of your stomach as you walk a gauntlet of taunts and abuse just to go to work or to the shops. And the worry that even worse will be in store for you and your family should you dare to complain to the police.

To create this fear, this suffering, there is no need for actual violence. Verbal abuse and minor damage to property are quite enough to make someone's life a misery.

If you're unlucky enough to be in that position, privacy concerns about ID cards, DNA databases and CCTV probably won't even make it onto your radar. You just want it to stop, to get your life back and go about your normal day-to-day business without the constant abuse, the constant fear.

And right now we are failing these people.

Someone steals a chocolate bar from the newsagent and they've committed a crime. They can be arrested and even sent to prison.

Someone stands near your door and shouts abuse at you every day and the law does little. The police may ask you to keep a diary detailing your experiences and, if you're very lucky, may take action after a few months or when the taunts escalate into violence.

There's something deeply wrong with a society that takes shoplifting more seriously than this sort of ongoing harassment. Sure, the victims might want to see justice. They might want stiff sentences, and we can talk about all sorts of ways to deal with the problem. But most of all they just want it to stop.

Surely we can manage that? Surely, as a society, we can come up with a fair way to protect people from this sort of harassment, from this sort of fear? It is not acceptable to leave it for months or years before action is taken.

ID cards certainly won't help. Nor will a DNA database. CCTV won't do much good without the ability to back it up with officers to take action.

What will help is more police officers in problem areas, getting to know local people over time, getting to know the youngsters and families not just when they start getting into trouble but through their primary school years. Not just turning up to talk to 300 school children once a year, but seeing them around day-in, day-out. I suggested a while back that the school crossing duties performed by the police back in the '50s provided just such an opportunity, long since lost.

What will help is the police, the CPS and local authorities having the will to use the powers they have to take action, to invest time and people to get a result, not treating it as a low priority or something to avoid because it doesn't help them meet their targets.

So, as we discuss liberty and we talk about ID cards, databases and oppressive laws, let's not forget the people who's liberty is being stolen every day, who are living in fear, and who society is failing.

Let's watch the watchers

A sensible request over at Liberal Bureaucracy: since Labour are so keen to keep tabs on us, insisting that the innocent have nothing to fear from being monitored , it's only fair to return the compliment.

Mark suggests

If you see a Labour MP, MEP, MSP, AM or councillor, use your blog, or Facebook, or Twitter, or whatever, to publish the location of that person and, if possible, what they are doing. Be accurate, and there is nothing to fear.

Sounds good to me.

And a new entry in at number 91...

Finally got round to registering Himmelgarten Cafe with Wikio a month or two back, then got it assigned to the political blogs last month (it somehow got marooned in General) so I'm happy to see it fly into the charts at number 91, snuggling next to Liberal Bureaucracy (who could ask for more convivial company?)

Charlotte Gore, Jennie Rigg and James Graham are amongst the 90 political bloggers deservedly well ahead of the Cafe in the Wikio popularity stakes.

I've really no idea if any of this means anything in the real world, but we must take our comforts where we can, so congratulations one and all - virtual pints all round.

A scary moment in Back to the Future

Watching Back to the Future today, I had a scary realisation.

You'll remember that, in Back to the Future, our hero goes back in time thirty years and finds 1950s America a different world, just waiting to be wowed by his guitar-playing and skateboarding prowess.

The scary bit was realising that we're nearly as far from the "modern" BttF time as they were from 1955: it's now 24 years since Back to the Future hit our screens.

Is the gap between now and the early '80s as great as between then and the '50s?

My instinct is not. We have the world wide web, cheap international travel, hundreds of TV stations and no manufacturing base to speak of. But I don't think the world has changed nearly as much in the last three decades as in the three before that.

But I could be fooling myself. Perhaps the Marty McFly of today, sent back to the late '70s or early '80s, would find it just as alien as Marty found 1955 in the movie. And that thought makes me feel very old.

Clarkson insults Gordon, but am I bovvered?

Perhaps this week was designated "Right-wingers employed by the BBC insult people week" and I just didn't notice.

Just as the furore around Carol Thatcher and her comment about a tennis player started to die down, up steps the delightful Jeremy Clarkson to the wicket.

Clarkson is, of course, no fan of liberals and their causes. His BBC Top Gear show isn't beyond a little re-organising of the facts when they don't quite fit the petrol-head agenda. Despite that, he's an entertaining and popular presenter and author.

So when, in Australia, Clarkson referred to our very own Prime Minister Gordon Brown as saying

"[In the UK] we've got this one-eyed Scottish idiot.

"He keeps telling us everything's fine and he's saved the world and we know he's lying, but he's smooth at telling us."

Should we be outraged at Clarkson appearing to insult Scots, not to mention one-eyed people and idiots?

There's certainly a temptation. After all, Clarkson is an unashamedly pro-car, anti-public transport climate-change denier so he's not exactly got the sympathies of liberals.

But it would be a little inconsistent, unless we've also been outraged, at more directly insulting things said about the French on BBC Radio 4's News Quiz, or by insults to the English made by our northern cousins. And we certainly shouldn't get upset by someone publically attacking our Prime Minister - that happens all the time, not least from Messrs Clegg and Cameron.

No, this is a rather silly story about people choosing to get offended by a controversial figure who'll doubtless be loving every minute of it. Clarkson isn't a diplomat, he's an entertainer who courts controversy. This sort of thing can be safely ignored.

Thatcher racism issue has nothing to do with causing offence

The last couple of days have made interesting reading on CarolThatchergate. But there's still a little more for me to say, as I don't think my previous post on the topic or the others that I've seen have quite got to the bottom of what's really going on. This is my attempt to do that.

Having racist beliefs or thoughts is never a reason to ban or sack anyone
Neither society nor the state should create thought crimes. If we sanction someone merely for having racist thoughts, that's exactly what we're doing. I might disapprove of that person's opinions. I might disagree with them. I might argue against them. But taking action against someone because I disagree with their thoughts or beliefs is going too far (not to mention being totally illiberal).

Offending people is OK
Just causing offence is OK. Life of Brian and Jerry Springer the Musical offended millions of people very deeply, but few liberals suggest banning them as a result. That's not to say the BBC, or any other employer, can't have rules against racist comments. But as we discuss what's right in this case it seems to me that saying "it's absolutely fine to offend millions of people by disparaging their deepest religious beliefs, but terrible to offend twelve people by comparing a tennis player to a golliwog" lacks a certain sense of perspective.

But this isn't really about offending people
I don't believe for a moment that Jo Brand or anyone else was seriously upset or hurt by the comment. They might have thought it was wrong and unacceptable, but that's different. If we sacked someone whenever anyone decided they were offended by them, unemployment would be in the tens of millions.

This was never about causing offence.

This is simply about society (and, in this case, the BBC as an employer) for better or worse, deciding that any comment that can reasonably be interpreted as racist is unacceptable. It doesn't matter whether or not anyone was offended, or any real harm was done. It's the racism that's not acceptable.

As a society, is it OK to ban comments (regardless of whether they actually do any harm to anyone at all) just because they're racist? To some extent, yes, but I think it can be taken too far.

Making overt racism unacceptable makes for a more harmonious society. It doesn't stop anyone from thinking racist thoughts or having racist attitudes, but it does make it easier for everyone to get along day to day and genuinely improve the lives of ethnic minorities.

And the question is...
It has nothing to do with offending people. The real question is:

In our efforts to built a harmonious society in which people with different skin colours and cultural and religious backgrounds can all rub along together, how censorious should we be about racist comments?

And that is an interesting debate to have.

Clegg impresses on Today

Nick Clegg was on the Today programme this morning (the something-past-seven slot when most sensible people are still asleep). He talked about the launch of the Lib Dem policy to reduce class sizes for nursery school children, additional school funding for disadvantaged children and also about the current controversy on torture evidence.

He did very well. He sounded assured, with a good grip on the facts. He showed that the proposals were costed and explained where the money was coming from and why it was better to spend it on the Lib Dems than Labour's scheme to give a bit of money to 18 year olds.

And there was passion - a real feeling that he cares about getting this right, about giving children from all backgrounds the best start in life.

So well done, Nick - keep it up. Maybe one day they'll let you speak to the nation at a time the nation's actually awake.

Change4Life is harmful and should be scrapped

It's frequently taken for granted that public health campaigns are a good thing. Who could argue with the government educating and encouraging us to drink less alcohol, smoke less, eat more healthily, exercise more, inject less heroin. All noble and worthy ways for the State to spend our money.

And all the more reason for me to disagree (I don't write this stuff just to be difficult, honest).

Yesterday found me having a good old moan about a call for more nannying from the President of the UK Faculty of Public Health.

I wrote the piece in a bit of a hurry and it was only as I neared the end that I realised what my main concern was; but it was too late to go back and re-write the whole thing.

What if many public health campaigns, far from being beneficial, actually do more harm than good?

Let's take the current campaign to get us all eating healthily and exercising more: change4life.

Fun adverts giving a good mix of dire warnings (your children will die young if you don't do this) along with sensible advice and a general sense that this being healthy business is enjoyable. What could be wrong with that?

The advice could be wrong, for a start. What if the premise (thin is healthy, fat is unhealthy) turns out not to quite reflect the evidence? That's what suggested on the Junkfood Science blog, with evidence to back it up. Sandy Szwarc presents a fair bit of evidence that suggests being fatter has health benefits and can extend life.

Even if the advice is right, people might not follow it. There's not much point spending millions on a campaign that doesn't manage to change behaviour. But, again from Junkfood Science, there's a pile of evidence that these get healthy campaigns don't work. Huge campaigns have been run, for example in the US and Scotland, trying all sorts of different techniques over many years, and they don't appear to have achieved much at all.

Worst of all, the message these campaigns send out can cause pain and suffering in itself. Change4life casts parents of unfit kids as little better than child abusers. There's a message the Government is peddling which is getting through. That message is

You see those parents over there with the tubby kids? They are bad parents and bad people. They don't care about their kids. They deserve your scornful disapproval.

The Change4life campaign has already had to be modified. Adverts suggested that obesity caused diabetes. Reports started coming in that children with type-1 diabetes were being singled out at school or even bullied (after all, it was obviously their own fault they had diabetes, the little gluttons).

The problem was that type-1 diabetes isn't caused by obesity at all (it is a contributory factor for type-2 diabetes). The adverts have been modified, so now hopefully it's just the type-2 kids being bullied which is fine because they deserve it.

So we have a campaign based on dubious evidence, that's likely to work, and with the wonderful side-effect of singling out a group of people, making them feel guilty and bad about themselves and persuading other people to look down on them and bully them.

Why was Change4life a good idea, again?

No Dr Maryon-Davis, I do not want to be nannied

In an article for the BBC entitled "Why we need more nannying" the president of the UK Faculty of Public Health argues that

I see an increasing acceptance that we, all of us, need not only more information and guidance from government, but also more legislation to save us from ourselves.

Alan Maryon-Davis goes on to say

I would like to see a ban on smoking in cars with a child on board and a ban on displays of cigarettes in shops. I would like to see a real hike in tax on alcohol and a ban on deep price-cuts for booze. I would like to see a wider ban on junk-food adverts around TV programmes watched largely by children.

I would like to see... Oh, a whole raft of other legislation for health.

This is not 'nannying'. This is responsible government acting on behalf of a consenting public.

The Faculty of Public Health is the "standard setting body for specialists in public health in the UK". But Dr Maryon-Davis (who claims to be "a libertarian by nature") and the public health experts he represents, are on shaky ground.

There are so many problems.

In an interview on the Today programme, he falls straight into the trap of claiming that if I get ill it effects others because of the cost to the state (yes, but when I die young, it saves the state much more so you should be encouraging my bad habits).

He talks about obesity epidemics, despite the lack of evidence that obesity's particularly harmful or much evidence that there's really an epidemic at all.

And, at the end of the Today interview he wimps out completely on what he said in the article and tamely suggests standardised labelling for food and alcohol.

Finally, he misses the whole issue of the majority forcing their will on a minority. Even if most of us consent to a law banning us from smoking, why does that mean the rest should have their freedom curtailed.

I've no problem with education and information. I've no problem putting limits on how companies can advertise - restricting advertising to children and ensuring adverts don't lie, for example. I also have no issue with proportionate restrictions on my freedom when my actions can harm others.

But we need to be careful. It's very easy for health information to turn into the State telling people they're bad people for being fat or smoking or drinking too much - that certainly seems to be what's happening at the moment with obesity, and there's little justification for it.

In the light of reports telling us how unhappy children are and how much strain modern families are under, might it not do more harm than good to turn people with "unhealthy" lifestyles into social pariahs on never-ending guilt trips?

Dr Maryon-Davis is wrong. We don't need more nannying. It might have good intentions, but it often doesn't have good outcomes. The State needs to take a step back, let us get on with our lives a little more and live with many of us choosing to be less healthy than they'd like.

Liberals should be supporting Carol Thatcher

Carol Thatcher will not be having her contract renewed at the BBC, where she's a roving reporter with the One Show. The BBC is entirely wrong and liberals should be calling for her reinstatement.

Her offence was to refer to a player in the Australian Open tennis tournament as a "golliwog" - a word that's typically used in a racist context and many people find offensive. The remark was made off-air in the green room.

The show's host Adrian Chiles was offended and outraged. Jo Brand was also offended, as were members of the production team who heard about the incident later.

I know that many liberals will feel her treatment is appropriate (and the sins of her mother don't help), so first let's look at what she didn't do. Carol Thatcher did not make any racist remark on air. She did not go up to a black person and shout "golliwog" at them. She did not discriminate against a black person, for example by refusing to interview someone because of their skin colour. She didn't harass anyone.

She caused offence to the two people who heard the remark, but beyond that she didn't do any harm.

As a liberal, I've always been pretty clear that merely offending someone isn't too bad. In fact, it's often unavoidable. If I spout off about the evils, and failings, of the more extreme forms of Islam, Judaism and Christianity, I'll offend people. Millions, were they to happen across my blog, would find my views on abortion, homosexuality and pornography offensive.

Jo Brand, one of the offendees in this case, has built her successful career around comedy that's frequently offended people.

I don't see how I can have it both ways. I don't see how I can demand the right to offend others and yet expect those who offend my liberal sensibilities to be harshly punished.

Had Thatcher's crime gone beyond offending, it would be different. Just as it wouldn't be acceptable for me to shout abuse at muslims or to discriminate against someone because of their religion; I would have no sympathy if she had shouted abuse at a black person.

But she didn't. She made a comment that many people would consider racist and which offended the two white people she was with. I might disagree with her but I don't think she should be sacked any more than David Attenborough should be sacked for offending the religious folks when he fails to give due credit to God.

Yesterday's snow did not cost £1.2 billion, whatever the FSB claims

How to get an easy mention in the media if you're a business organisation: dream up a big number that says how much the UK economy has lost due to snow/strikes/staff illness/piracy/having Darling as Chancellor.

The BBC subserviantly reported an FSB estimate that yesterday's snow cost the economy £1.2 billion. The FSB suggest this is a low estimate.

Let's look at how they might have come up with it.

The total value of the UK economy (the GDP) is around £1.48 trillion. Divide that by 250 working days and we get £5.92 billion.

The FSB estimate that one in five people didn't make it into work, so we divide 5.92 billion by five and get £1.184 billion - or £1.2 billion when we round it up.

Let's assume the one-in-five people not working is accurate. No idea how they got the number. A proper survey of a cross-section of businesses across the country? Or a quick straw poll of a few member companies? Since they got the answer within a few hours, I think we can guess.

But we'll give the FSB the benefit of the doubt.

The question is: if I miss a day off work, does my chunk of productivity and wealth generation for that day just vanish? And the answer, obviously, is "no".

We don't work at 100% capacity. If I don't make it in today, more than likely someone else will pick up my work, or I'll catch up over the next few days. If a customer can't place an order today, they'll probably place it tomorrow. They might place the order with someone else, which is bad for my company but makes no difference to the GDP figures.

There may be cases where value is genuinely lost. I can think of a production line working at capacity that has to be shut down because not enough workers make it in. Or a consultant being charged out by the day and booked up to capacity for the coming weeks.

Most businesses are not in that situation and these huge numbers from the likes of the FSB have a lot more to do with getting a bit of cheap publicity than conveying information that's accurate, true or has any connection with reality.

Stop the health guilt-trips please

Mrs Quist and I are in agreement that, in the event of one of us getting dementia in our old age and losing our mind, there's no point in the person's life continuing.

I have a bit of a fear of my mind going completely - becoming little more than a husk being cared for, at great financial and emotional expense, by my loved ones, or whoever they pay to take on the task. Once my mind has gone, I struggle to see the value in my life continuing .

Dementia, like cancer, is a disease of the old. Some younger people do get it, but they're the exception. The group most at risk of dementia and cancer is the over 80s.

And the reason both are on the increase is our success in conquering diseases of the young. In years gone by, few people lasted long enough to suffer from dementia.

So why is the Government so keen on having us live ever longer? Why are we castigated for smoking, drinking and eating too much? Why are we exhorted to take more exercise, whether we want to or not?

It isn't saving the State money. Even if we agree that all these things shorten our lives (there's little evidence that obesity does), the expensive bit for the State is old age. Any money spent on medical care in our middle years is hugely outweighed by the cost to the public purse in taking us from retirement to death.

Perhaps it's for the children. The spectre of little Johnny or little Kylie growing up without a mum or dad is sometimes raised. Think of the little ones, all alone! And yet there's a balance. Yes, you might die young and leave the kids in the lurch. But on the other hand, you might hang on forever, sucking up their lives and savings in caring for you as they see any inheritance vanish into care homes.

My point is that there isn't an obvious right or wrong answer.

The big assumption at the heart of all the healthy messages we get thrown at us is that being unhealthy is morally bad. If you're unhealthy, your a bad person. If you allow your children to be unhealthy, you're even worse. You're a burden on society, a bad parent, a bad person.

That assumption is weak at best. It simply isn't supported by the evidence.

Thanks to modern medicine, most of us will have the opportunity to live long and relatively healthy lives. As a result, we know the nation will have far more elderly people than young, more retired people being supported by a proportionally smaller group of taxpayers.

There's no justification for this whole nationally-inspired guilt-trip. No justification for making us all feel bad if we do less exercise, drink a few beers, eat those chips or smoke a few fags.

It really is our choice. Sure, help people to make that choice an informed one, but hold back on the whole guilt trip thing.

After all, if I die young, there'll be more money to spend on everyone else.

Consolidate your loans with the Tories

The Conservatives have announced that Carol Vorderman will be heading up a commission to look into improving maths teaching.

Congratulations for getting the big name celeb, but is Vorderman a good person to have?

Carol Vorderman, lest we forget, has recently been earning lots of money by conning the poor and desperate into consolidating their loans, tricking people into thinking that loan consolidation will somehow leave them owing less or be an end to their problems.

Vorderman was happy to be paid to sell financial snake-oil when she could have promoted better options, for example by encouraging people in debt to visit their local Citizens Advice Bureau, which can help with debt restructuring.

What does it say about the Tories' attitude to those suffering at the sharp end of the recession that they feel Vorderman is the right person for the job? It says to me that they care rather more about celebrity and headlines than about really helping those in need.

Govt IT overruns top £18 billion

The Times is reporting that costs on Government IT projects are overrunning by a staggering £18 billion. Over £100 billion is due to be spent on IT projects over the next five years.

But there's no real oversight on this huge amount of money (over £1,500 for every man, woman and child in the United Kingdom). Contracts are shrouded in secrecy with commercial confidentiality often being given as the excuse, and the Government does its best to spin the worst failure as a stunning success.

I wrote about this just a few days ago and suggested an approach to start sorting out this mess.

My suggestions were that the State regain its lost in-house IT expertise (so it doesn't always find itself at the mercy of vendors), concentrate on smaller projects and stop rewarding failure by inviting companies that screw up to take on more work.

I also suggested that Open Source Software could make a big difference, not so much by using Linux, OpenOffice.org and Firefox but by exploiting open source licensing so software developed for one public sector body can be used, amended and improved by others around the UK and the world.

Let's see some leadership from the Lib Dems on this issue. Or is £100 billion too much like small change for the Lib Dem leadership to bother about?

What's the black police association playing at?

The National Black Police Association feels so strongly that Sir Paul Stephenson should not be the new Metropolitan Police Commissioner that they are threatening to step up their campaign to actively dissuade people from ethnic minorities from joining the police.

That's according to the Observer. The NBPA's own website hasn't been updated since last October so I assume the Observer story is accurate.

Paul Stephenson's crime, as far as I can tell, isn't to encourage racism in the force, or to be a soft touch on tackling racist crime, but to have disagreed with the race discrimination claim launched by Tarique Ghaffur.

So what is the black police association really trying to achieve? Because, looking in from the outside it looks more like being vindictive than really having the interests of ethnic minorities at heart.

Is Sir Paul's Met really so terrible that people from ethnic minorities would do better to be unemployed than be police officers? Are the interests of London's ethnic minorities really best served by having fewer BME police officers? Or does the association believe they should be choosing a police commissioner for the whole of London?

There are times to play hardball; but this looks more like petulance. Surely a bit of constructive diplomacy is worth a try.

Killingholme Conundrum

Some of my more vivid memories of the '90s are the occasional trips I made to the delightful village of Killingholme. Having driven along the M180 - surely one of the dullest motorways in the country - and hit the A180, I'd turn off to the left and pass a row of cottages.

These cottages would be under a constant pall, as the cooling towers and burn-offs of Killingholme and Immingham poured out their assorted, often noxious, vapours.

So I can understand people being aggrieved when work at an American-owned refinery in North Killingholme went to an Italian contractor who brought in foreign workers to do the jobs locals could have filled. If you live in Killingholme or Immingham, or even in the delightful nearby towns of Grimbsy and Cleethorpes, you're probably not their to soak up the culture.

The case for the strikers

John Cruddas, writing in yesterday's Guardian, talks about a "race to the bottom" where a combination of weak employment protection in the UK, cheaper labour abroad and the ability, in some cases, for people to work in the UK but under the rules of a different country has created an environment where our home-grown workers are treated unfairly.

There are certainly issues with the international jobs market and the lack of a level playing field, even within the EU - it would be foolish to pretend otherwise.

All the main party leaders have played up to this to some extent, whether it's "Buy British" or "British jobs for British people" or some other variation.

And, whilst it's easy to talk about an international jobs market, it's a little glib to suggest that someone settled with his or her family, perhaps caring for an elderly relative or with children approaching exams, can just up sticks and pop over to Italy or Germany for a job. Their reality is of being stuck where they are, for better or worse, powerless to act as they see cheap foreign labour taking jobs that could have been theirs.

The case against the strikers

But at the same time, we know that protectionism is horrendously damaging. A protectionist approach sounds nice and has immediate voter appeal; but everything we know tells us that it will lead to the recession being longer and harder.

Maintaining a healthy flow of goods, capital and labour across international borders is critical to beating the recession and ending the soaring unemployment.

The way forwards

There are occasions when I've claimed to have the answer to something (needless to say, I'm always right, but like every prophet in his own time, find myself largely ignored). This isn't one of those.

But it seems clear to me that we need an approach that understands the reality that most people aren't able to move around all over the world chasing jobs (or that, if they were, it would be at the expense of their and their families' happiness and quality of life) and that local people must at least be able to compete on a level playing field against foreign workers. That approach need not be protectionist, but it must be fair and it must recognise the reality that most people just want a decent job.