Have BBC been lying in their TV licence ads

The BBC TV licence adverts have taken on a rather Orwellian quality in recent times. Here's one of their latest offerings. The message is "We have this big database. You're in it. Pay up or you'll be caught."

So far, so scary, but is it true?

I listened to an interesting discussion on PM this evening. The main thrust was about the BBC harassing people who don't have TVs to pay the licence fee, with threats of court appearances; not to mention a reversal of the burden of proof: you have to proove you don't have a TV if you want to avoid paying.

And then one of those little snippets of information squeezed its way in: seven pounds from each and every one of us honest TV licence-payers should be paid by evaders.

By my calculations, that means the BBC believes one in twenty of us are successfully evading the TV licence. Sounds like a plausible number, but pretty much blows the propoganda out of the water.

The database that's helping Big Brother keep an eye on us all (at least our TV ownership and licensing status) so successfully that there's little chance of escape is, in reality, allowing a million or more to slip through its little silicon fingers.

Tory Broken Britain claims hit home

David Cameron has told us many times about "Broken Britain" with disrespect, bad manners and downright thuggery rife.

Yesterday we saw a terrible example of just what Mr Cameron has been talking about, the Independent (amongst many others) reported:

Police used CS spray to break up a scuffle in the Houses of Parliament last night, arresting a man who was a guest at a drinks reception hosted by Conservative Party chairman Eric Pickles.

The men involved were, we're told, journalists (though surely not the reptiles who live by making a profit from the misery of others, exposing people's private lives for a quick buck).

The media seems strangely coy about revealing the identities of the journalists - hopefully Private Eye will be more revealing.

The reason for the fight also remains a mystery. My theory is someone dissed Eric Pickles' Question Time performance.

I've always said that most places in Britain are perfectly nice to live in. There are small areas that have huge problems with anti-social behaviour and violence.

I'll admit that I had some of the poorer estates in mind rather than the Houses of Parliament, but you've got to follow the evidence and if that means a targetted crack-down on journalists, with mandatory stop-and-search outside every newspaper office, so be it.

Mr Jacqui Smith's real shame

We all know that the furore over Jacqui Smith's movie bill isn't really about the twenty quid spent on four on-demand films. It's the prurient sniggering over two of them being films for the discerning gentleman.

That's why a tiny expenses issue has been the top news headline for 24 hours and why the usual suspects have called for Wor Jacqui to resign.

As Alix wrote yesterday, we can all enjoy a chuckle when the woman who sees it as her business to keep an eye on almost every aspect of our lives, not least what we get up to the bedroom, gets a taste of her own medicine.

But we live in a country that specialises in rubbish pornography. From the Confessions... series back in the '70s to Nuts, Zoo, FHM, not to mention Mr Opik's organ of choice, the Sunday Sport, today, we love it all.

There's something slightly surreal about tabloid journalists, after an evening spent drunkenly groping lap dancers, frothing at the mouth about the husband of a senior politicians participating in a traditional passtime as British as cold days at the beach, tea with clotted cream and morris dancing.

Which brings me onto Richard Timney's real shame. Not watching a couple of soft porn flicks. But paying for them.

Has this man never heard of the Internet? Redtube? Paying for quality or specialist skin flicks I can understand, but not for the rubbish you get on the adult channel on cable. There's following tradition and then there's just being plain daft.

Grumpily trying twitter

I have a rule about only using technology when it's useful to me, not buying or using something just 'cos it seems cool or everyone's talking about it.

Anyone who's seen my collection of virtually unused electronic gadgetry will know it's not a rule I'm completely successful in keeping. My normal technique is to buy something on the basis that I'll probably need it soon; then by the time I do need it, it's available at a tenth of the price and I can't find the one I bought anyway.

My failure on the rule front might go some way to explaining why I've given in and decided to give Twitter a shot.

Here's how I convinced myself it was a good idea.

Every now and again I come across posts and sites to link to, or think of some one-liner and convince myself the world is just desperate to hear it. They aren't really suitable for blog posts, but I can use Twitter (and you'll see I've added a feed for my bon mots on the right) and, in theory, it should all work more smoothly.

Signing on seems to have gone smoothly enough, though finding I was following 20 people I've no interest in at all was a bit annoying (all are now ex-followees).

So I'm now on twitter at himmelgarten.

Let the crashing and burning commence. Dr Pack will be so proud.

Lay off Jacqui

I appreciate the dilemma. MPs' expenses are the news story de jour, with allegations a-plenty about certain MPs taking tens of thousands of taxpayers' money and a juicy story pops up about a senior government minister's hubby watching skin flicks on the taxpayer's dime.

Yes, it's all good knock-about fun, but lets be serious for the moment.

Unless pay-per-view porn has got an aweful lot more expensive than I remember it being, we're talking about less than ten pounds.

Not exactly in the same league as ex-Conservative MEP Den Dover, kicked out of the party after being asked to repay over half a million pounds of taxpayers money and waiting to find out if he'll face criminal charges.

Not even up there with fellow minister Tom McNulty, who's £60,000 for a second home may be within the letter of the rules but seems rather out of step with their spirit.

Jacqui Smith has been getting TV paid for at the taxpayer's expense, she says as an oversight as her Internet connection is on the same bill.

It's against the rules and she should repay it, but it's hardly a scandal.

We have a reasonable expectation that our elected representatives won't rip us off for huge amounts. But it makes little sense to expect them to be completely perfect and never make a single mistake.

Do we really want our MPs and ministers to be living in fear of being dragged through the tabloids and thrown into the stocks for claiming £3.49 too much?

How many people outside politics face such a burden ? How many can say they've never claimed a few pounds in expenses that they shouldn't strictly have done? How many of the journalists running this story can honestly make that claim?

Is date rape always just rape?

In today's Observer, Barbara Ellen adds her opinion to the never-ending debate about the classification of rape.

Barbara says

I'm an old-fashioned girl and I happen to think that rape is just rape. It's the crime of forcing someone to have sex against their will, whether this occurs in a dark alleyway or on your sofa.

Why, then, when rape is the most black and white of crimes, does society continue to insist on greying (blurring, over-complicating) the issue with a nonsensical concept such as date rape?

Yes and no.

Whatever we call it, it seems to me absurd to claim that the man who stalks the streets and forces women to have sex at knifepoint is morally equivalent to the man who's being masturbated by his naked girlfriend and then penetrates her against her will.

Yes, both are wrong. Yes, both are crimes. If you want to call both of them rape, that's fine by me. But don't tell me the first crime is no worse than the second.

[This italic section below added as clarification. Note that comments 1-13 were made before this section was added. Thank you to those both here and on Jennie's site who's comments made it clear to me that clarification was needed.]

When we judge someone's actions morally, we generally focus on the person committing the actions - their motivations, their intentions and the choices they made. So we see a Nazi SS officer who murdered twenty people as morally worse than the company director who, through failing to implement proper safety measures, caused twenty people to die, even though in both cases the people are equally dead and both may deserve punishment.

In a typical "stranger rape" situation, a man makes a conscious decision in advance that he's going to go out, grab a women, threaten her and rape her.

In the "date rape" situation, the man may not have made that decision in at all. He's still made the decision to rape, but possibly on the spur of the moment and without the other elements. (Of course, date-rape might be pre-planned, in which case it would be morally worse).

The effect on the victim may be the same or even worse in date-rape, but should the moral culpability of the rapist be based purely on the effect on the victim?

Why would rape be an exception to the normal rule? Why, in the case of rape, would we want to pass moral judgement on the perpetrator based primarily on the effect on the victim, when we generally avoid that elsewhere?

I'm not suggesting that women are ever to blame for being raped - definitely not. I'm also not suggesting that women suffer less as a result of date-rape than stranger rape.

My suggestion is that, in the way we normally judge moral culpability, the rapist who pre-plans and sets out the commit rape in advance is morally worse than the rapist for whom it's a spur-of-the-moment act. Both are morally wrong and deserving of punishment, but the first is worse.

Then alcohol enters the scene. Our legal system is currently feeling its way forward on the issue of whether rape has been committed when a women is too drunk to have given consent.

It would be nice if it were as clear-cut as Barbara thinks. But real life rarely fits itself into the neat little boxes we create for it.

Most people will agree that it's clearly rape if a man plys a woman with drink, or drugs, with the express intention of getting her to a point where she can't resist his advances.

Similarly, if a man comes across a woman who's blind drunk and has sex with her, few would disagree that it's rape.

But what about when a woman freely gets herself drunk and has the idea in mind that she's going to have sex at the end of the night. Is it still rape, even though she was too drunk to give consent?

And what if the man is drunk too? Two drunk people have sex. Are we really to assume, in every case, that the man is an agressor who committed a crime and the poor little lady is the victim? Wouldn't that be accepting that heterosexual intercourse is something that a man does to a woman? Where is the equality? Where is the sense that, if two people get drunk and have sex, maybe they both had some input.

If we take the view that a drunk woman can never give consent, we have a situation where a woman can go out, get drunk, have sex and then decide after the event whether it was rape or not. I don't think that's a very satisfactory place to be.

I don't have the answer. I don't have the nice, neat definition that tells us with complete certainty whether any particular coupling was rape or consensual sex. But I don't think that pretending it's all simple is very helpful.

Committed a crime in the '80s? Boris thinks you should be let off

The Mayor of London has opened up a new line of defence for criminals. If the crime was committed a few years back, Boris thinks criminals should be able to plead innocence on the grounds that it's just a colourful tale from the past.

That's the defence the mayor seems to be offering to accusations (backed up with a tape of a conversation) that, as a Torygraph journalist in 1990, BoJo agrees to help his mate Darius Guppy to get another journalist beaten up.

As advanced DNA techniques raise the prospect of progress on unsolved rapes and murders from decades ago, the murderers and rapists who have so far evaded the police must be rejoicing that they have such a friend in Boris.

Will the BoJo defence become more common? Is Boris proposing all criminals be immune from prosecution if they can get away with it for 18 years, or it this new statute of limitations a perk reserved for old-Etonian London mayors. I think we should be told.

Thousands march for motherhood - apple pie good too

Police estimate that 35,000 people marched through London today. If history is anything to go by, we can expect event organisers to go for around ten million and we'll just shrug and split the difference.

If we go on police estimates, the 35,000 is a little under one tenth of the numbers who made it out to the Countryside Alliance march in 2002.

Hopefully the G20 leaders will listen to the voice of the people and act accordingly.

"OK, people. We need to sort out this international banking crisis, end poverty and build a better future but first, let's kill some woodland animals. Pass me the twelve-bore Barack."

As you'll guess, I haven't made it over to London for the festivities, but it does seem that the protestors are calling for just about anything and everything.

At some protests, the police have their work cut out stopping opposing sides from clashing. The BNP march and the Anti-Nazi League come out to shout abuse. The pro-hunting people March and pro-cuddly-animals lot protest. Gay Pride marches and the Gay Embarrasment groups try to shout them down (or would if they weren't too ashamed).

But I don't think many people would be opposing this.

The "Screw the people, give the bankers bigger bonuses and stuff the poor" groups had obviously missed their train.

And perhaps that's the problem. The march coalition was so broad that only the most hard-nosed evil fat cat could fail to find something to agree with.

ActionAid wants to reform tax havens, so those big multi-nationals pay more tax, especially to developing countries. The TUC want world leaders to fight recession and make a fairer and greener world.

Other groups want a bigger voice for developing countries, serious action to tackle climate change, listen to young people more, work for a more peaceful world, free Gaza, Iraq and Afghanistan, opposing the use of carbon markets to tackle climate change, end climate change and usher in an era of democratic world government.

Unless you've serious psychological problems, you won't agree with all that. But I'll bet you agree with some of it. How many people are going to spurn the TUC line and say "no, we shouldn't bother fighting recession. Let's just see the world go to hell".

How we fight recession is another matter, but no need to trouble our heads about that.

On the bright side, such as wide coalition ("our group represents all the people who are neither mad nor James Bond villains") gets the punters in. Maybe 35,000 isn't quite the Countryside Alliance or the Anti-war coalition, but it got shed-loads of publicity (ably assisted by police suggestions of mass violence) and not a few celebrity endorsements.

But beyond a few headlines, can such a broad alliance really achieve anything? Every single politician at the summit will be able to honestly say they agree with many of the protestors' aims and are working to achieve them, whilst safely ignoring all the bits they don't agree with. There's no way all the protestors themselves could agree on anything worthwhile, so what chance the rest of us being able to?

Without a coherent message that the protestors agree on and moves the debate forwards, the protests can't hope to achieve any more than a brief spurt of publicity for the act of protesting.

BBC goes quotation mark crazy

Does a BBC sub-editor have one of the keys on their keyboard jammed down?

I only ask because the BBC is going a bit mad on single quotes.

Three reasons to use quotes: it's reported speech, you're quoting someone else and want to distance yourself from their words or you don't think it's really true.

So let's have a look at this morning's BBC website.

PM and palace 'discussed reform'
Is the BBC not convinced that the discussion really took place -and their reporters couldn't be bothered to find out - so they put it in quotes just in case it never happened? Or is this a nod and a wink. 'Discussed reform'. Eh, eh, know what I mean? 'Discussed Uganda', more like.

Pay-out due in 'toxic sofa' claim
Either the claim's over a toxic sofa or it isn't. If you don't know and don't want to find out, don't run the story. Unless you're suggesting it isn't really about a 'toxic sofa' at all. Perhaps it's really about midgets being trafficked into the country from Canada and forced into sex slavery and the whole toxic sofa business is just a cover.

Or how about the wonderful

'Super hangar' cost public £113m
'Super hangar' is what they told the BBC but, between us, it's just a lock-up in Lewisham.

Or

Japan to 'destroy' N Korea rocket
We say 'destroy', we mean talk harshly to. They're going to destroy the rocket's confidence, leaving it too ashamed to leave the bunker.

Or

'DNA bungle' haunts German police
The facts say the police spent 15 years looking for someone who doesn't exist - the swabs probably got contaminated in the factory. Is that a bungle? The BBC's not sure. Maybe it's just very good, slow, methodical policing, so best put it in quotes.

Or

Science GCSE standards 'lowered'
If the Government regulator finds that the the exam's got easier and takes action, it's not impossible that intelligent journalists could check out the story and report it as fact. No, best cover ourselves seeing as how we haven't got a clue.

Or

Mars domes may be 'mud volcanoes'
Most people would think that the phrase "may be" should have already covered the BBC, but apparently not. Unless 'mud volcanoes' is meant to suggest 'alien scuptures of breasts with inverted nipples' of course.

Get a backbone, guys. If you genuinely can't think of a better way to do the headline that by reporting someone's opinion (e.g. BBC sub-editors 'can't find arse with both hands' claims anonymous blogger) fair enough.

But throwing in quotation marks all over the place to cover up poor journalism or because you can't be bothered not to is just a bit shit.

There's a nice site dedicated to collecting the worst examples of quotation mark abuse worldwide.

We can cure gay

One in six mental health professionals have tried to help clients curb homosexual feelings, and 4% say they would help one of those homosexualists change sexual orientation, to allow them to become normal.

That's a (slightly paraphrased) finding from a survey of 1,400 therapists published in the journal BMC Psychiatry.

There's no evidence that sexual orientation is something that can be changed, and attempting to do so can do a great deal of harm.

But the whole field of mental health care is still a long way from having the strong evidence base that standard medicine does.

That's why it's still overly open to fads and fashions, to the latest trendy treatment. It's why some therapists can view sexual fetishes as mental illness whilst others can see them as entirely healthy and positive.

It's why the outcome for anyone who's mentally ill is still a lottery (not a postcode one).

It isn't that therapists are poorly educated, trained, ignorant or foolish. None of those are true. Psychiatry is simply a few decades behind regular medicine in research to know what works and what doesn't - and what research we do have has been skewed towards drugs (think prozac) since that's where the big money is.

This is a timely reminder that the gap between mental health and physical health funding isn't just in the numbers of institutions, nurses, doctors and therapists. It's also about research and training. Until we crack that one, surveys will continue to throw up these sorts of results.

More on this issue: Linlithgow Journal

RIPA and the Great Christmas Tree Light theft

When the Government brings in some ill thought out and badly worded piece of legislation, opponents often mention, just in passing, that perhaps the law ought to be worded to restrict it to the thing it's intended to tackle.

So, for example, perhaps laws brought in to protect children ought not to be drafted so it is, today, illegal for two fifteen year olds to kiss.

"Ah, yes" ministers say, "the letter of the law might say that, but it won't be used in that way. There are guidelines. Guidelines, I tell you."

Needless to say, this answers all our concerns so we slope off, tails between our legs, apologising for having been so rude as to doubt Labour's wisdom.

No. That's not what the Lib Dems do. Our parliamentarians have a nasty little habit of going away and digging to find out if Government claims of guidelines and safeguards stand up to scrutiny.

Today, Julia Goldsworthy has released Lib Dem research on how local authorities are actually using the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which the Government always assured us was designed to fight organised crime and would never be misused.

It turns out that, from the 180 local authorities we have data from (about half the total), RIPA has been used over 10,000 time over the last five years. Over a fifth of the council staff with the power to authorise using RIPA are not senior.

RIPA is being used to investigate dog fouling and, in two cases, the theft of christmas tree lights.

And disturbingly, in only 9% of cases has a RIPA investigation led to a conviction or fixed penalty.

Back in 2000, when RIPA was first introduced, it was really about tackling serious crime on the Internet. If you go back and read the debates, most of the talk was of the issues around monitoring emails and the burdens on ISPs.

RIPA was massively extended in 2003, with a huge number of additional organisations, including local councils, being able to work under it.

And so we have yet another example (if another were really needed): whatever Labour may claim, whatever nice words they give us about safeguards and guidelines, these laws almost always end up being used in totally different ways to those first envisioned and agreed by Parliament.

Porter, Doner and LDYS - you can't go back

Porter, Doner and LDYS - the three faithful friends that saw me through my first year at university.

Paying a 2am trip to our local kebab shop, I can remember suggesting that doner kebab was the food Jesus would eat, were he to return to save humanity (needless to say, Jesus would demand lashings of the finest chili sauce and all the limp green stuff that in some parallel universe might actually qualify for the word salad).

We were blessed with a 24 hour kebab shop and, even I with the relaxed attitude to healthy eating appropriate to a male first year student couldn't help feeling there was something very wrong about the people buying a kebab or a portion of chips on their way to work at eight o'clock in the morning.

(Or perhaps I imagined that - as someone who switched courses simply because the lectures for my first choice course were at 9am, I'm not sure when I would have seen early morning kebab munching in action).

Porter, for those uninitiated in the world of really dodgy beer, was around when stout was barely a gleam in a leprechaun's eye. I didn't think porter was the greatest beer ever. But it was the cheapest beer - a full 30 pence a pint less than bitter or lager in my student bar, and I don't think they even watered it down that much.

Those student days are long behind me and, as happens with sad aging men from time to time, I had a rush of blood to the head and decided to have a go at regaining just a little bit of my lost youth.

The first thing I discovered is doner kebabs are really foul. I didn't just try eating one sober (an obvious mistake). I tried after a few pints too, for the authentic experience and it was still disgusting. But back then Kwik Save No Frills was my brand of choice for food, so my standards might have been a little lower all round.

The second thing I discovered is that porter is even worse. I'd procured some Hickory Switch Porter from the Fallen Angel Brewery (itself a lesson on the perils of buying beer based on the label - one I'm sure I won't learn).

Nice bottle, shame about the beer. I managed about a third of a pint, trying to convince myself that I would at any moment regain my taste for the tipple, but it was not to be.


And so it was that my experiment officially came to an end this evening, when I emptied my remaining bottles of porter into the sink.

As you can see from my memorial photograph of the sink, porter has a great deal in common with industrial waste, something that may be worth remembering should you ever be tempted.

I can't go back. My attempt to regain just a small flavour of my lost student days has failed.

I shall resign myself to sitting in the corner of the bar ("Don't sit there - it's old man Costigan's chair - he better not find you on it when he comes in"). I'll sup my ale and reminisce about how LDYS was so much better in my day.

The days when giants bestrode the stage of youth and student polics. Alex Wilcock. Neil Fawcett. Rob Banks. Hywel Morgan. Kiron Reid. Richard Clein. We basked in their glory and thought ourselves lucky just to be near.

And no, I'm not re-writing history, it really was like that. No petty infighting. No silly cliques. No spending whole conferences raising futile points of order on meaningless motions. No backstabbing or bitching. I was there, it must be true.

Let me tell you all about it, over a delicious doner kebab and a tasty pint of porter.

First they came for your emails, then they came for your Facebook

Printing off the whole of Wikipedia doesn't make you wise or knowledgeable . Visiting every football ground in the country doesn't make you a top professional player. And, if you're the Government, gathering data on every Facebook, Myspace and Bebo communication doesn't mean you've suddenly got all those terrorists and criminals banged to rights.

But let's not be too negative. Let's start by looking at the plus side of new Government plans to monitor the contacts people make on social networking sites.

It could work proactively: a computer system could start off with a known list of suspects, churn through the data and spit out (if it was clever) not only a longer list of other possible suspects but a reasonably good guess of how senior different people might be in their terrorist or criminal organisations.

And it could be used after the event: after a major crime or terrorist attack, the security services sift through the data, already on their own computer systems, and try to work backwards to see how it was planned, who was involved and so on.

So there are the benefits. But there might be some downsides too (who'd think it).

Let's look at a few of them.

• Cost. These computer systems aren't cheap. We're talking about billions of pounds, and remember that's money not being spent to get more police on the beat or more detectives doing traditional intelligence-led policing, or to cut our taxes a little.
• Needle in a haystack. There are millions and millions of people on these social networking sites. Many have "friends" they don't know or have little connection with and communicate with all of those people on a regular basis. Fortunately for us, there are very few terrorists. Even if we believe the MI5 estimates, it's no more than 3,000 people even vaguely involved. Any automated system trying to play "guess the terrorist" is going to churn out hundreds of suspects for every real terrorist.
• Abuse of power. At the moment, the police and security services can already take a look at all the communication information for emails, telephone calls and social networking sites, but there's a barrier. It needs the authorisation of a senior officer or a judge, and it's hassle. Although imperfect, that helps deter people from digging up information they shouldn't. Putting it all on a big in-house database makes it much easier for police officers, the security services, and anyone who succeeds in bribing or blackmailing them, to get that information they shouldn't have.
• The clever ones will just move. The Internet provides lots of ways to communicate. It's fairly trivial for someone with a reasonable technical skill level to create your own, encrypted and private instant messaging network or email server. Or you can hop around the thousands of less mainstream ones out there. Spending billions to slightly inconvenience criminals doesn't sound like the best use of funds.

The fundamental problem affects the Government's whole approach to tackling terrorism: it simply doesn't work to look at a group of sixty million people and try to identify a few thousand potential terrorists based on secondary characteristics.

It doesn't work to have a points system where you mark someone down if they're a vegetarian, trainspotter, look at CCTV cameras, miss tube trains, look a bit funny, leave odd things in their bins, photograph police officers or drain covers, protest around Parliament Square and then drag them in.

You end up with a huge crowd of people who fit some preconceived notion of what a terrorist is like but, almost to a man and woman, aren't terrorists.

Should I take relationship advice from the Pink Panther?

Here's the plot of one of those wonderful old Pink Panther cartoons (watching today on the Boomerang channel with young Jezebel Quist, who's poorly today - everyone say "aahhhh").

In this one, from 1968, a gent wins the favour of the Pink Panther by pulling a nail from his paw (all very biblical so far). After an evening at his club, the chap goes home to face the music from his rolling-pin wielding wife, but up steps the panther and scares the wife so much that she scurries around doing all the housework and cleaning up hubby's cigar ash.

Sadly this scene of domestic bliss (in which the wife is cowed into obedient servitude under fear of being savaged by a wild cat) is short-lived. She, in turn, pulls a tack from the Pink Panther's foot and, in gratitude, the Panther chooses not to intervene as she brutally beats her husband over the head with a succession of glass bottles.

Those more au fait with 1960s culture can perhaps tell me how far the view of marriage as a battle is in tune with the times.

But it's funny.

What are the cartoons everyone looks back on with pity? The anodyne rubbish from the '70s and '80s, such as the period where Tom and Jerry had to be friends, or where every American cartoon had to finish with a crappy bit of wisdom (think He-Man and She-Ra: "He-Man learnt that sodomising sheep was wrong - he promises to respect the sheep's feelings more in future").

Sure they were worthy, but by god they got dull.

One of my favorite modern cartoons is The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, which carries the tag-line "It's not enough for me to succeed - others must fail".

It seems to me that cartoons and comic books perform an important function in allowing us to experience all these different things in a clear, unequivocal imaginary world. Small children do not think that this stuff is real.

We've always found it interesting that the Quistlets have no problem with cartoon violence, but react totally differently to violence and injuries in normal films and programmes, even when they're very clearly fictional.

And we all have dark sides, those nasty little thoughts and interests we'd rather not speak about in polite company (or, in some cases, even impolite company).

Cartoons and comic books provide a relatively benign outlet for the darker, less socially acceptable, aspects of our personalities. I've no idea if they're beneficial (there are arguments on both sides - some people point to the lower levels of sex crimes in Japan, where violent sexual comic porn is freely available), but I'm not aware of any evidence they're harmful.

So whether it's the Pink Panther egging on the war of the sexes, Mandy expressing her contempt for humanity, Walter Kovacs' rather unique take on life in Watchmen or tentacle rape hentai, let it all out: it's just part of being human.

Why are we still believing Jacqui's terrorist propoganda?

Imagine you're a six year old child. You haven't seen your daddy in a couple of years (something to do with mid-life crisis and that floozy from work, according to mummy, but you don't understand all that of course).

One morning, you get out of bed ready for a fun day at school and mummy tells you that daddy is highly likely to be visiting today. Your little face lights up (seeing daddy will be nice, and more importantly he's bound to bring you a whopping great present).

Home-time comes and no daddy. Teatime - still no daddy. Bedtime - no daddy. You're disappointed.

The next morning, mummy tells you the same thing: daddy's highly likely to visit today. Again, you're excited and again it's a no show.

Being six, and full of boundless optimism, you try not to get too upset. Surely mummy isn't lying to you.

Days turn into weeks, weeks into months. Every morning, mummy tells you that daddy's highly likely to visit and every evening you go to bed disappointed.

I wasn't the brightest kid in the world, but had this gone on with me for a few months, I've a hunch I'd think that either mummy's understanding of the phrase highly likely wasn't quite the same as mine, or mummy was a lying bitch.

And yet, every day for nearly two years, we've woken up to the Government telling us that an international terrorist attack on the UK is highly likely. Every bloody day.

So how stupid must we be, or how duplicitous must the Government be, to carry on with the charade? Really?

The really bizarre bit is it doesn't even mean anything. It's just some words to scare us. There's nothing different that we're being asked to do because the threat level is rated as severe instead of low, moderate or substantial.

If the threat level was lowered to substantial tomorrow, or raised to critical is there anything we'd do differently? Perhaps beat up a few extra muslims just to cut down the odds a bit. Phone the terrorist hotline to report a few more vegetarians, or Lady Baronesses perhaps.

So much of the Government's so-called anti-terrorist activity is just theatre. It does nothing to make us any safer, it makes us feel less safe and it sees more law-abiding people under suspicion and more people being grassed up just for standing out, looking a bit different or ticking some box.

Gordon and Jacqui can look like they're doing something, we can see billions more of our money pissed up the wall on some useless database or the latest heavy-handed police crackdown on protestors; see our liberties gradually draining away.

It's not all a joke. Good, intelligence led policing works. Training up key workers to deal with the aftermath of a terrorist attack probably isn't a bad idea either. But far too much of the Government response is grandstanding nonsense we can little afford.

The myth of a childhood diabetes epidemic

"There is increasing concern about the number of children with type 2 diabetes. This has risen tenfold in the past five years, according to Bristol University research published in 2006." (National Heart Forum).

"Over the last 20 years, Type 2 diabetes has increased approximately tenfold among children and adolescents." (Defeat Diabetes Foundation, 2002)

"...with the rise of childhood obesity, the rate of type 2 diabetes among children has increased more than tenfold in the last two decades, from 3% to nearly half of all new pediatric diabetes" cases. (WebMD, 2008)

Dangerous stuff indeed. Our obese children are falling to the scourge of type 2 diabetes as never before.

You just know there's going to be a "but".

Here are three reasons why childhood diabetes may not be a huge problem

One. the numbers are tiny. The Bristol University study referenced above found that, of every million children, only 13 would be diagnosed with any sort of diabetes in a year. Just looking at type 2 diabetes, only five or six children from every million will be diagnosed in a year.

For reasons not fully understood, ethnic minorities in the UK seem to be more at risk.

Two: As the Bristol study says, of the children diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, 84% had a family history of the illness. Across the whole country, looking at all children under 17 in a twelve month period from 2004 to 2005, only about eleven children with no family history of type 2 diabetes were diagnosed.

Three: Just because a disease is diagnosed more often doesn't mean more people are getting it. It could be that doctors are just better at spotting it, for example. In the case of diabetes, there's a grey area between type 1 and type 2: some variants of diabetes can be classed as either. Sandy Swarc makes that point that

"just ten or fifteen years ago, no one even realized children got adult-type diabetes and weren’t watching for it. There is no population-based data on type 2 diabetes in young people available prior to 1988"

Does obesity cause type 2 diabetes at all?
Is there even a causal link between obesity and diabetes? In other words, are you more likely to get type 2 diabetes if you're overweight or obese? Because the numbers (for children) are so tiny, it's difficult to tell. We know there's a strong genetic component to both, so it could simply be that if you're genetically predisposed to get type 2 diabetes, you're genes have also got you lined up to be on the tubby side.

This 2008 study published in the Lancet found no link between obesity and diabetes:

"in the Lee study an association between obesity and diabetes was absent in people with low concentrations of [Persistent Organic Pollutants] in their blood. In other words, individuals were more at risk of diabetes if they were thin with high levels of POPs in their blood than if they were overweight but with low levels of POPs."

Afterword
Having read the Junkfood Science report "The phantom epidemic of child diabetes", I wanted to do a little digging to see if Sandy's conclusions held up in the UK. I found very little research on the topic (which may have been my failure to look in the right places), the Bristol University study being about the best. UK figures seem to be in line with other western countries.

I am not a doctor, just an interested blogger doing a bit of digging. If you have concerns about the health of yourself or your children, please see your GP and don't rely on stuff you read on the Internet.

Clegg on MPs' expenses: 8/10

A good performance from Nick on today's PM programme as the main interviewee on the MPs expenses row.

Here's why. He didn't get caught up in details or parliamentary jargon. He kept it simple and, crucially, related to the experiences of ordinary people.

Clegg's main point was that millions of people commute into London daily; if they can manage it, why shouldn't Greater London MPs be able to do it too?

He also came out against rolling the money into MPs, basic salaries - rightly pointing out that the public would be less than impressed if MPs awarded themselves a pay rise right now.

There is a good case for MPs to get more money, but Nick's right that now isn't the time. (Unfortunately, if you're an MP looking for a pay rise, the time never does seem to arrive in boom or bust, these days.)

So why only eight out of ten? Nick was nearly hoisted on his own petard (which always sounds excessively painful). It seems his shadow cabinet have been naughty boys and girls, failing to fully itemize their expenses as Nick had asked them to. I guess Mr Clegg will be getting out the cane to instill some discipline.

Guardian ethical living the perfect sticking plaster for lazy greenies

The great Tom Lehrer famously said that Kissinger receiving the Nobel Peace prize in the aftermath of the Vietnam war made satire obsolete.

The Guardian appears to be doing it's best to make taking the piss out of greenies obsolete in a similar way. "Look how stupid we're making ourselves appear," it cries out "You evil multinationals might as well give up now; there's no way you can make us seem any more foolish."

I can think of few other explanations for today's Ethical Living column, where Ed Gillespie tries to make a serious case for shaving being bad for the environment and, in some way, unethical.

Let's just take a moment for that to sink in. Across the world, huge debates are raging. To what extent is global warming man-made? How much can we do about it? How are we going to stop China and India chucking out millions of tonnes of pullutants every day? Is nuclear energy the greenest we can manage,;or can wind, solar, water or clean coal really meet our needs and save the world from global warming?

These are serious issues.

Shaving is not a serious ethical or environmental issue. It's a joke. It sends out a nice strong message saying those greenies are a bunch of fruit loops, they can be safely ignored.

Ed's message is clear. Beards are manly. Beards are cool. Shaving costs money. Every man should sport a beard. Gillette should be ruthlessly driven out of business and all its employees forced to root through bins for scraps of food to survive on.

The piece suggests that, if you must shave, olive oil is a perfectly good replacement for all the foams and lotions, but fails to mention the notable flaw: you spend the rest of the day smelling like a Greek salad, with young urchins throwing little cubes of feta cheese as you pass by, chanting "look, it's the lettuce man".

I'll admit that the piece is probably a little tongue in (hairy) cheek but it's the sort of nonsense that the Guardian's Ethical Living column seems to specialise in, week after soul-destroying week.

For those of us who take environmental issues seriously, their latest pronouncement on green burials, making nettle soup and the like as if they had anything at all to do with either being ethical or saving the environment is just an embarrassment.

I'm sure there's a place for this sort of stuff. A nice niche website perhaps. Or rename the column "pointless stuff you can do if it makes you happy".

But right now it's just masturbatory feel-good material for people who want to save the environment but can't be arsed to do anything that might make a real difference.

Horne and Cordon, Plus One

This is a tale of two comedies. One I expected to like and didn't, the other I'd no idea about and loved.

First up, you can't have failed to miss the news that lovable duo Horne and Cordon have a new comedy sketch show on BBC3.

If only I had missed that news. I wouldn't have been suckered into watching something pretty poor and I could have held onto the high opinion I have of the duo from shows like Gavin and Stacey.

But I had to sit through a bizarre opening to the show with James Cordon bouncing around like Tigger on acid (I've seen him doing it before, yes it's a trademark, no it really isn't funny unless you're in the audience and you've been warmed up to the point of wetting yourself).

The sketches seemed a little better, but only really worked when they were doing the "Cordon and Horne" double-act we've come to know and love. As soon as they strayed away from that, they suddenly seemed uncomfortable and the whole thing got a bit clunky.

Sometimes you only spot someone's real influence when they aren't there and I think the real missing element from Horne and Cordon was the wonderful Ruth Jones, who co-wrote Gavin and Stacey as well as playing Nessa. You might also remember her as Myfanwy in Little Britain and possibly even as Linda in the superbly dark (to the point of being almost unwatchable in some places) Nighty Night.

Perhaps we need a little more Ruth Jones, a bit more Rob Brydon (of course - Marion and Geoff was a masterclass in bittersweet comedy, the man can do no wrong) and a bit less Horne and Cordon.

Where Auntie let me down, Channel Four came to the rescue. The new comedy Plus One was broadcast earlier this year but, for various reasons, Mrs Quist and I only caught one episode. We've just caught up with a serious (by our standards) DVD session.

Plus One has our hero, a normal lad, see his ex-girlfriend engaged to Duncan from Blue. He's been invited to the wedding and becomes fixated on the idea of getting his revenge by turning up to the wedding with an incredibly gorgeous girl on his arm (the "plus one" of the title).

The format of the show is a fairly traditional one: each episode leads up to an ending of high farce that sees our hero humiliated, on occasion in front of millions of people.

It's a format that can be tricky to pull off - lots of sitcoms fail.

But some writers have cracked it (Graham Linehan does it especially well in Father Ted and the IT Crowd).

In this case, the writing and the strong cast carry it. Daniel Mays in the lead (the main change from the pilot) is an incredibly strong actor (see him in Funland and the recent Red Riding for some contrasting performances).

The supporting cast work well too: the spunky single-mum "gay-maker" sister, the P.E. teache brother with a penchant for 18 year old girls, the slightly odd photographer best friend (he fantasises about having sex with his mum and with midgets, possibly not at the same time) and the worryingly sane girl-he-obviously-ought-to-get-off-with-but-won't work colleague.

Then we have Duncan from Blue - Duncan James - playing an over-the-top version of himself (not only adored by women, but a virtual saint who likes nothing more than spending his spare time teaching children about the evils of racism and performing CPR to save the life of a passing jogger).

You'll be surprised to know that I'm not a massive fan of Blue (something tells me I was never their target market), but give him credit - Duncan does pretty well, as does Miranda Raison as the worryingly nice ex-girlfriend, soon to be Mrs Duncan from Blue.

The strong production values, fresh script and excellent cast is more than enough to carry off the traditional farce structure - let's hope they can manage more than just five episodes.

Why does nobody tell me these things?

I admit it - I do get Total Politics magazine but, for reasons I won't go into (though the phrase "gnat's chuff" may feature) my copies wend their relaxed way to my door a month or two late.

So why did nobody tell me that I was in the February issue, with a nice quote from the Cafe (the same one Stephen was kind enough to put in Lib Dem News, I think)?

Why did the fan mail not flood in? Not a single pair of virtual knickers were thrown my way.

Come on, folks - I spend quite enough time feeling like an idiot so let me have my little moments of glory.

And while we're on the idiot bit, I'd rather like people to be finding my blog by searching on terms like "witty liberal" or perhaps "genius political commentator". Yep, that's what I like, but there are probably quite a few reasons why it isn't going to happen anytime in the next century or so*.

Instead, what's consistently been by far the most popular search term from people visiting the Cafe? "big book of breasts". And the second? "porn drawings". I'm so proud, I could almost burst.

Finally, other Lib Dem bloggers who've featured on the Total Politics Best of the Blogs feature in the last few months include James Graham, Martin Land, Jonathan Calder, Mark Pack, Graham Watson MEP and (just to show that women are allowed onto Total Politics occasionally) Charlotte Gore. Enjoy them all.

* Now they're in this blog post, it might at least show up in Google under those searches - how crap would that be - engineering my own Google entries. Tell you what, let's add in "Costigan Quist sad wanker" just to even things up a bit.

UPDATE 22nd March, 6.10pm : Damn, Google's good. Less than two hours since I made this post and already a Google search on Costigan Quist sad wanker brings this posting as the top result. Amusingly (or depressingly, depending on how you look at it) I'm now in the top ten results for witty liberal. Obviously the competition for genius political commentator is tougher: I come up second if it's in quotes, but nowhere in sight without. Probably for the best.

Tory tax split shows deeper divisions

The Tory internal row on taxing the rich has spilled over into the blogosphere and the mainstream media.

In the red corner, we have Cameron and Osborne, who say they'll go along with Labour plans for a new 45p tax rate for top earners (£150k or more).

In the true blue corner, BoJo is leading the charge on behalf of the super-wealthy.

Actually, not the super-wealthy at all. They're all taking advantage of the stupidly complex tax system Brown created, along with Government's long-standing relaxed approach to tax havens and avoiding paying much tax at any rate.

But it will hit the very comfortably off thank you bunch and make them very slightly less comfortably off.

I'll leave it to the Tories to have the debate: the Lib Dems are, as usual, well ahead of the game and went round this one last year.

What's really interesting is how happy they are to have it in public.

I've very little time for people who criticise political parties just because they're split (a negative way of saying there are people with different opinions in your party). Well, duh! A variety of opinions is a good thing, big debates are a good thing and under our electoral system only a broad church party is ever going to succeed.

No - nothing wrong with that.

But when you're months away from a General Election and your lead in the polls is falling, it does help your chances if you can portray an image of cohesion to the public. Like it or not, long experience tells us that people are more likely to vote for parties they perceive to be united.

So what are the Tories playing at? Why are they having this battle in public? Why is Boris openly briefing against Cameron and Osborne at such a critical time? Boris is one of a very small number of senior Tories, and the one with the most real power.

If this incident were happening in the Lib Dems, it would be like Clegg and Cable having a big public bust-up with Ming and Chris Huhne, and you can bet the Tory bloggers would be all over us like a nasty rash.

Senior politicians in a party on the verge of taking power after 12 years in the political wilderness simply don't fight these battles in public. Not normally, anyway.

The only answer that makes sense to me is that there are deeper and darker splits in the Tory party, real unhappiness with the leadership and this argument sees it breaking through the surface.

A ComRes poll in today's Independent on Sunday has the Tory lead dropping from 16% to 11% with the Lib Dems holding steady.

McNulty in denial as more Labour sleaze revealed

In the month when unemployment has hit two million for the first time since 1997, you might have hoped the Employment Minister would be hard at work figuring out how to get more people back into employment.

It turns out that Tony McNulty has been hard at work but, as the Mail on Sunday has revealed in a scoop today, it may have been extracting more money from taxpayers and moving it into his own bank account that's Tony's been keener on.

According to the MoS, Tom McNulty and his wife have a combined income of a third of a million pounds and own two London homes, but he's still been claiming £14,000 a year for a third home, one belonging to his parents. He only stopped in January of this year - because the interest rates had fallen so low it wasn't worth claiming.

Here's the deal.

The couple own a house in Tom's Harrow constituency. That's house number one. They normally live in another house just three miles from Westminster. That's house number two. Then, on top of that, they claim fourteen thousand pounds a year towards Tom's parents' house, also in Harrow.

So they live three miles from Westminster and see nothing wrong with claiming for a home eleven miles from the Commons, despite the whole idea of the allowance being to allow MPs from outside Inner London to have a pad near to work without being out of pocket.

Technically it may be within the rules, but just how out of touch do you have to be to think it's acceptable? To assume you'll get away with it? To presume that, when millions are signing on, no-one's going to mind if the millionaire Employment Minister finds loopholes in the rules that enable him to extract an extra £14,000 a year from taxpayers? That shows an arrogance impressive even by Labour standards.

This is a party that has been in power too long. Like the Tories in the 1990's, Labour ministers seem to think they are above mere mortals. They run the country - grabbing a few tens of thousands of our money is just a perk of the job.

The hardest decision

Mrs Justice Parker, sitting in the High Court, made the decision to allow a nine-month old child to die a few days ago. I feel for everyone involved - the parents understandably wanted their little baby to live and I very much doubt the judge saw deciding who should live and die as part of the job when she signed up.

And in one of life's little coincidences, just after reading about it, I saw Jennie talking about holding a wake for a nine month old baby in her pub.

I'm in no position at all to comment on the rights and wrongs of the case, and I certainly don't envy any judge having to make a legal ruling. Following the law is little consolation when you're deciding whether or not to end a life in this way.

In most areas of law we have custom and precedent stretching back centuries.

But not only did we not have the ability to keep babies alive in this sort of situation until recently, infant mortality was common enough that it wouldn't have entered people's heads to really try.

We humans have been around for tens of thousands a years pretty much as we are today. For all that time in most of the world, high infant mortality has been a fact of life and attitudes to children have been built around it.

Even in our country, in 1901 there were 150 infant deaths per 1000 live births. That's staggeringly high by modern standards: of every seven children born alive, one didn't live long enough to make it to primary school. And that's the norm - that's how things have always been.

Only in the last eighty years, and only in the wealthier countries of the world, has infant mortality fallen to such an extent that we can go through a good proportion of our lives and never directly encounter it.

Losing a child was always painful, never easy, as novels like Mary Barton show us.

It's one of the great triumphs of modern, western, medicine that it is now so rare. It doesn't lessen the pain of those parents tragically unlucky enough to suffer an infant death; but we can be thankful that millions more parents who would have lost their child a century ago can look forward to their happy, healthy offspring outliving them.

Yet again cancer screening fails, journalists fail

Having spent the last few weeks blogging about whether cancer screening is worth it, I do of course get scooped by Ben Goldacre over at Bad Science.

Ben writes about two recent studies into screening for prostate cancer. Remember how I was saying the downsides for screening can outweigh the benefits?

Ben reports that one study suggested

1410 men would need to be screened to prevent one death. For each death prevented, 48 people would need to be treated: and prostate cancer treatment has a high risk of very serious side effects like impotence and incontinence.

Think about that for a moment. You're a man between 55 and 69, being screened. You're told the screening has picked up an abnormality and you need to be treated. You're scared and worried. It's the big C. The treatment has nasty side effects: impotence and incontinence for example.

And yet, there's only a 1 in 49 chance that it's going to save your life. Would you go through all of that for such a small chance of getting any benefit at all?

Ben also notes that two studies were published side by side, but British journalists only reported one. The reported study showed that screening reduced deaths by 20% (note the relative risk given by journalists - it doesn't tell us anything useful), The other study, just as impressive, showed no significant difference in deaths at all. After all the screening, the stress, the invasive treatment, it didn't actually make any real difference.

This story seems to be a nice summary of lots of the things I've been writing about: don't believe just one study on its own, recognise that screening, even for high risk groups, has downsides and isn't just a simple invest more money and save more lives equation, and never believe journalists, especially British ones, when they write about health.

Lembit keeping good company

OK, so it's a Friday afternoon. I've heard that Lembit Opik now has a column (fnarr, fnarr) in the Daily Sport, which bills him as "Britain's most outspoken MP".

So, for your amusement dear reader, I make my way over to that organ to investigate the bedfellows that our might-have-been-president is keeping.

Here's what we get on today's Daily Sport website front page:

See Sport babe Gabrielle Saint fully NUDE!
Don't miss the new Adult Sport, with the pix you've all been waiting for: big boob babe Gabrielle Saint is NAKED!

Fact: Blokes prefer thick babes to clever plain Janes
MEN would rather date a dumb beauty than a plain Jane brainbox, a new study revealed yesterday. But women go for brains ahead of looks in a fella. The study found that 73 per cent of men are more likely to opt for a girl like Celebrity Big Brother b ...

Painting by Wumbas!
THE Daily Sport nipple-o-meter is in meltdown today as we unveil our breathtaking new poster boasting ONE HUNDRED topless stunnas!

Tommie Jo: I had to have sex right after this shoot!
THIS photoshoot was so raunchy that our Tommie Jo had to hotfoot it home for a seeing-to as soon as it was over! The 22-year-old, got so turned on during the session — which included playing with a huge Johnson-shaped bedknob—that she couldn’t even ...

Veronika Zemanova lezzes it up ... big style!
Hungarian honey Veronika Zemanova makes our pee-pees point up so imagine what it did to us when we found this video of her doing lesbianistics with some equally fit friends of hers.

Darryl Hanah has a climax on screen...for real!
Dishy Daryl is one of the hottest babes on the planet so we were delighted to find this clip of her sitting in the corner of a film set bringing herself off with fingers and a vibe! Enjoy!

Black eye babes: Big boobies unleashed!
Just big tits doing what we we wanna see em do...bouncing up

Cathy talks cobblers! Mrs Barry's presenting master class
We LOVE Cathy Barry. She's one of the worlds hottest porn stars but in this hilarious clip she shows why Jeremy Paxman won't be losing sleep!

Blonde babe flicking her bean!
Mmmmm...she's naked and alone in her apartment...watch her flicking it!

All good clean fun, of course, and just the sort of place where you might come across your favorite Lib Dem MP.

Maggots and miracle cures

A timely reminder that, just because you read about some seeming miracle cure in the media, doesn't mean it really works.

Sometimes they're just made up. Remember this story about magic dust regrowing fingers? It was reported seriously by the BBC and many other media outlets around the world as fact last year, a great medical breakthrough. The only problem was that it was nonsense. There was no science behind it, no published research, just some dodgy photos and an upbeat press release.

But sometimes the original story is based on legitimate, published research that just happens to be wrong. It happens a lot more than you might think: individual medical trials frequently come out telling us something that isn't true. Sometimes the trials are poorly designed, but often it's just chance. Rolling a die once and getting a six doesn't prove that you'll get a six every time you roll it, or that the die is biased towards high numbers.

A story appearing today is an excellent example.

For years, when someone had a gash, the media stories have suggested that popping in a few maggots would sort things out. Stories like this one, from 2002, when the BBC breathlessly reported:

Maggots are fast becoming the treatment by choice for healing wounds in British hospitals. And for good reason too.

They are currently one of the most effective means of treating wounds that are infected by the superbug methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), which can cause life-threatening illness in hospital patients.

Er...no.

Here's what the BBC's reporting today, seven years later:

In the latest study, 270 patients with leg ulcers from around the UK were treated either with maggots or hydrogel and progress followed for up to a year.

There was no significant difference in the time it took the ulcer to heal between the two treatments or in quality of life.

Maggots were not more effective than hydrogel treatment at reducing the amount of bacteria present or in getting rid of MRSA and were, on average, associated with more pain.

The only benefit seemed to be that the dead tissue in the wound was cleaned out more quickly

A separate study looking at cost-effectiveness estimated there was little to choose between the two therapies.

What are the lessons? I guess we could say "never trust the media", and probably with a great deal of justification on science and medical issues, where the average journalist does little more than do a Churchill dog impression whilst cut-and-pasting the press release.

But it's more than that. Even medical studies that are well conducted can, through chance, come out with the wrong answer now and again - and frequently do.

In fact, the standard way we test these things is to assume that good tests get it wrong one time in every twenty. That's what a 95% confidence level is. It means "we're going to run this test and, even if everything is right with it, the test is going to give us the wrong answer by chance five percent of the time".

That's why any sensible approach looks at several different studies, ideally conducted by different people, and sees where the balance of evidence is pointing. It's still not certain, but it's a much better bet.

Don't say sorry, just stand down

Is there any chance of people not getting hung up on whether Gordon Brown, David Cameron or, for all I know, our newest national politician Peggy Mitchell, have apologised for fucking up in failing to spot the impending economic crisis.

I don't care. I really couldn't give a toss.

When I'm deciding which people, and which party, is best suited to run the country, I'm really not interested in who screwed up and managed to say sorry. Because, when the next problem hits us, I want the people running the country to spot it ahead of time and do something about it.

But what do we get?

David Cameron tells us: yes, the Tories might be incompetent, but at least we apologise for it.

Gordon Brown tells us: yes, Labour might be incompetent, but I'll be damned if I'm going to apologise for it.

The Labour line up to now has been that the whole thing was so unexpected that absolutely no-one spotted it ahead of time so they really can't be blamed for failing to rein in the banks and failing to take any action at all to mitigate the impact when the crunch came.

Well, we know St. Vince spotted it and a few other people did too, but not many people.

It's a nice idea from Mr Brown and Mr Darling, but the edifice is starting to crumble. Today a National Audit Office report reveals that

The Treasury was warned three years before Northern Rock nearly went bust that it needed to set up emergency plans to handle a banking crisis but did nothing about it.

This is not a government which couldn't have known about the problems. This is a government that should have known, had much of the information in their ministerial red boxes, and chose to ignore it.

Why?

Perhaps Labour really believed its own rhetoric. Maybe Brown and Blair (as it was three years ago) were so convinced of their own economic genius, their own conquering of boom and bust, that they just couldn't conceive a banking crisis was possible.

Perhaps Brown mentioned it to his city pals over a meal and was told not to worry. Despite his attempts to rewrite history, we all know that Brown has been the bankers' friend for the last decade, keen to promote light touch regulation in the city.

Come on Gordon: we don't want you to say sorry; we just want someone who knows what they're doing in charge.

Wrong-headed Sun campaign should be stopped

You're a national tabloid newspaper. You've a big story - Jade Goody's dying of cervical cancer aged just 27. Having spent most of the last few years hating and abusing her, you've now decided she's virtually a saint (albeit with a shady hubby - after all, your readers still need someone to hate).

So whilst we're selling thousands of extra copies, let's start a totally irresponsible health campaign based on zero evidence.

Let's ask all our readers to sign a petition calling for women to have routine cervical smears from the age of 20, instead of 25, as it is now.

But we have a very low opinion of our readers' intelligence, so no need to trouble them with silly little details.

No need to explain that such testing might well do more harm than good. That a cervical smear is not a nice thing. That, for a young women, the chance of actually having cervical cancer is very low indeed. That anyone undergoing such screening has a chance of being wrongly diagnosed and having all the stress and pain of totally unneeded treatment. That money spent on screening the entire female population in that age group is money not available for other treatments.

No, no need to mention any of that because Jade Goody is dying. Surely that fact alone is enough to base public health policy on?

As I wrote a few days ago, and earlier, mass screening is a complex issue and it's by no means clear that it's beneficial even for higher risk groups such as screening middle-aged women for breast cancer.

This health campaign from the Sun is irresponsible, insulting to its readers and, if successful, has the potential to do a great deal of harm. It should be stopped.

Government in Second Life: indulgence or smart idea?

Last November I wrote an article titled "Second Life: death would be more fun". You can probably guess that I was then, and still remain today, not exactly the biggest fan of the virtual world. By and large it's an overblown, over-hyped and over-marketed waste of time, promising much and delivering a rather limp experience.

I was taken to task by a number of Second Life fans (see the comments) - clearly it was working for them, but my opinion remains.

So you might expect that I'd be fully behind Tory MP Nick Hurd. He's attacked the Government for setting up an "Innovations Centre" in Second Life at a cost of £20,000, and annual running costs of £12,000.

Mr Hurd, according to the BBC, said it showed the Government is "living in a fantasy world". Not a bad little pun as these things go.

The private area of Second Life has been set up by the Department of Work and Pensions. They're seeing whether it can be used for virtual meetings, supplier demos and that sort of thing. It's just a pilot at the moment.

Is Nick Hurd right to be critical? I don't think so.

Sure, I'm sceptical. If someone were to ask me, I'd suggest it would be more hassle than it's worth and that, to avoid travel, more traditional video conferencing and phone conferencing would work better.

But what would I know? Really, I could be wrong. Nick could be wrong. Perhaps it'll work really well, for some reason I've not thought of or due to some technology advance I'm not aware of. Perhaps I'm just talking crap (hard to imagine, I realise).

This seems like the sort of idea that's worth a shot if it doesn't cost too much. And, let's be honest, it doesn't. £12,000 a year is not a huge amount of money - for any Government department, it's a rounding error, a single part time member of staff.

Realistically, if ten projects like this are tried, for that sort of cost, and only one of them really works, it's still worthwhile.

As for Nick Hurd's comment that "I just don't necessarily think, in these times, that taxpayers money, in terms of government expenditure, should be spent on things like this. It looks like an indulgence.", I'd have thought these times are exactly when Government should be experimenting.

When there's lots of money floating around, there's little incentive to cut back. Now, when money's tight, is exactly the time when innovation can flourish.

So let's not criticise the public sector, whether it's schools, Government departments, local councils, or any other body, for trying something a bit different. That's what we want them to do.

We should realise in advance that, just as with private companies research and development, there will be more failures than successes. But the prize of those successes is great enough to make it worthwhile, and no-one yet's figured out a good way to tell in advance what's going to work and what's not.

Labour will lock you up if you imagine the wrong thing

Interesting developments in Parliament as the Government appears to be coming clean. After working for years to make pretty much everything else illegal, they've now admitted they're turning their attention to criminalising our imaginations.

In particular, the Government is keen to make it illegal for anyone to imagine sexual activity either involving or watched by under-18s. When your mind wanders to stray thoughts of a sixteen year old watching two eighteen-year-olds making the beast with two backs, or those schoolgirl fantasies so beloved of tabloids, you're clearly endangering children.

Sadly, the technology doesn't yet exist to vet our thoughts (though that doesn't stop the Government trying) so they're having to pursue the second best option and just arrest people who create or possess drawings or computer images created from their imagination.

George Howarth (Lab)
I thank my hon. Friend for that answer. Does she agree that not only are images based on real children unacceptable, but so too are images that people use for these purposes that they have generated either from their own imagination or electronically? Will she give the House an assurance that her Department will not be going down the route of believing that those sorts of images are a matter for the individual concerned and their own conscience?

Bridget Prentice (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Ministry of Justice; Lewisham East, Labour)
I can absolutely give my right hon. Friend that assurance. He will have been as surprised as I was when in the Coroners and Justice Public Bill Committee the Opposition spokesman, Mr. Garnier, said that he felt that our clause was, perhaps, over-egging the pudding. I do not for one minute think that taking action against these people in this way is over-egging the pudding. We need to protect our children.

You might feel that, even if Labour plans to criminalise our imaginations, at least they're being consistent about it. But no. It's perfectly OK for a paedophile to write down his fantasies in prose for personal use. Lolita isn't about to be made illegal, though publishing your obscene porn fantasies can still land you in trouble.

If you want to make a film featuring child abuse, that's fine too: as long as it's classified by the BBFC, the law won't touch you, no matter how much it turns you on and inflames your desire to interfere with children.

But whip out a pencil and put a few lines of drawing on paper and it's the slammer for you. Reading Lost Girls by Alan "Watchmen" Moore and Melinda Gebbie, which explores adolescent sexuality and can be bought today from Amazon, Waterstones and other good bookshops, is defintely borderline.

Needless to say, no evidence has been presented to support the theory that clamping down on this sort of thought crime will protect a single child.

Thanks to The Register for the tip-off.

More reading
My previous posts on this topic. The bill and notes. Commentary from James Graham. The Comic Book Alliance.

Four murders in one day - proof of Broken Britain?

"FOUR teenagers lost their lives as three more days of violence swept Broken Britain." The Sun, 16th March 2009.

"Fatal stabbings have reached a record high of five every week, preliminary police figures have shown." Daily Express, 29th December 2008.

‘GANG STABBINGS FILLING HOSPITALS’ Daily Express, 26th November 2008.

On 10th July 2008, four people were murdered in separate incidents around London.

We all know the general story. Broken Britain . Stabbings and shootings everywhere. Collapse of society. Much worse than it used to be. Everyone from David Cameron to Noel Edmonds sounding off about it (you might have thought Mr Edmonds had already inflicted enough on the nation).

It makes great tabloid stories. Crime, Labour useless (which they are, but not for this reason), everything's going down the pan, not like it was in the '50s, need a return to the traditional values and routine child abuse of decades past.

OK, very few of us see it around us. Few of us ever see a murder or have someone we know murdered. But it's all going on around the corner and, now you mention it, those teenagers at the bus stop do look quite scary and I'm sure all teenagers were polite and hard working when I was younger.

So is it really true? As I pointed out a few days back, a modern tabloid transported to the 1950s could have played the same game, with a homicide for every working day of the year.

Now The Register has drawn my attention to some new research looking at homicides in London over the last five years. You can take a look and even download the 8-page paper for free (it's perfectly readable).

The conclusion? despite making good tabloid headlines, the homicide rate in London has remained stable over the last five years and actually fell in 2008.

If we assume murders are fairly random, we'd expect several on one day every now and again and we'd expect the odd week without any at all. That's pretty much exactly what happens.

Another trick journalists have been known to pull is to focus on one method of murder. Fatal stabbings may well have reached an all time high as the Daily Express claimed, but if other murder methods have fallen, it could well be that there are the same number, or fewer, murders than before (as was indeed the case).

And if a big clamp-down on knives achieves nothing more than having more murders by other means, it's achieved precisely nothing.

Other than avoiding it being too slow and painful, I don't think people are too concerned about the way they're killed - it's the dying business we're not to keen on.

Of course "Fatal shootings falling" isn't nearly such a fun headline and probably doesn't shift as many papers either - far better to mislead and scare people if it increases your profit.

Finally - Lib Dem Voice makes it into the Eye

Joy of joys - our very own Liberal Democrat Voice has made it into the latest issue of Private Eye - well done guys, you've arrived.

OK, it's only nine words, in the Obamaballs column (for the LDV headline "MPs Expenses: Yes we can!").

Even more annoying for us wannabe bloggers, its a headline from the excellent Orwell prize nominee Alix Mortimer.

Maybe one day the Cafe will get there.

Stay thin and buy yourself 3 years, but why would we bother?

The BBC is reporting a study, reported in the Lancet, claiming to show that having a BMI of between 30 and 39 reduces your life expectancy by three years.

It may or may not be true. The reported conclusions from these studies often seem at odds with the evidence in the papers themselves. I haven't read the full study, so we'll wait and see.

But let's assume it is true. Let's work on the basis that a moderately obese person will, on average, die three years earlier than they would have had they been at their optimum weight.

So what?

Or to put it another way, if I'm moderately obese, it's a fairly safe bet that getting my BMI down to the "optimal" 20-25 range, and then keeping it there, will be bloody hard work. It will involve me dieting, exercising, possibly taking more extreme action like having a gastric band.

Losing weight is hard. Keeping it off is even harder. If your natural body weight tends towards obesity, it pretty much means you've got to work against nature for the rest of your life.

As Sandy Szwarc has said over on JunkFood Science, all the evidence we have is that most overweight people don't eat massively more than people in the normal weight range, they just naturally weight more on the same diet. (Why? Here's one possibility).

So, if I'm one of the normal overweight people who's naturally a bit on the heavy side, why is the medical establishment and the Government so keen that I should struggle against it year after year, eating less than my body wants, always feeling hungry and doing exercise I don't enjoy, just so I can die in my mid seventies instead of my late seventies (or, if I'm female, in my late seventies instead of my early eighties)?

It makes no sense. What's the big deal? It doesn't even save taxpayers money: caring for the elderly (pensions, medical care, social services) day in, day out for several years is far more of a drain on the State coffers than treating a heart attack or stroke.

If people want to lose weight, then go for it - you know it's going to be hard work, especially as you get older. It's your choice and best of luck to you.

But if this latest study is accurate (and I'm dubious as the conclusions being reported differ from previous studies and we need to look at the whole body of evidence), surely the message should be something like:

"Here's the information to allow you to make a reasoned decision. If you want to put in the work to lose weight and keep it off for the rest of your life, you'll probably add three years onto your life. Or, if you prefer, enjoy life a bit more, keep the weight and you might die three years earlier."

But instead we get this harmful and useless Change4Life nonsense along with medics pretty much telling us we all have a moral duty to be slim, even if it makes us utterly miserable.

Exams are getting easier, here's why it doesn't matter

I was chatting to a middle-aged lady who complained about the state of education being much worse than it used to be. She cited how easy exams are these days.

We hear a lot about how students entering university and the world of work simply don't have the basic skills they used to. The right wing press in particular often moan about how young people today simply aren't up to scratch and yearn for the olden days when teachers could beat knowledge into their young charges with impunity.

And yet we're also told that standards are improving, schools are better than ever - with evidence to back it up.

How to square the circle? What's really going on?

Let's start with an anecdote - ironic since I was warning against that just yesterday, so take the warning I gave then: an anecdote isn't wrong, but it's just one experience among millions so don't give it too much weight.

The Quistlets are at a pretty good primary school. I also went to fairly good primary back in the day. They, and their friends, seem to enjoy school and get a lot out of it. Like me at that age, they learn to read, learn basic grammar, practice times tables and mental arithmetic and study things like history and geography.

In some areas they seem well ahead of where I was at that age. For example, the science they learn in Juniors, aged 8 is, I'm sure, material I first encountered at secondary school aged 11 or 12.

So my personal experience is of a primary education that's as good or better today than it was a generation ago.

Perhaps my personal experience is unrepresentative; or perhaps primary schools are good but something goes horribly wrong at high school and it all falls apart.

Neither of those seems true from the other people I speak to, but that's still anecdote rather than study, so maybe.

Because, come the age of fifteen and sixteen and there seems little doubt that the youngsters are taking much easier G.C.S.E. exams than I did (which, in turn, were probably easier than those taken by my elders and betters); and universities claim that new students are entering their hallowed halls with less knowledge and ability than in the past, requiring many to set up booster classes to get the young scallywags up to speed.

But there's something important we have to remember.

The education system of the past chucked out large numbers of people before they got anywhere near taking academic exams, never mind going to university or getting a white-collar job where someone might even vaguely care about their mental arithmetic or spelling.

It could well be that exams are getting easier. Partly it's because they have to be easier at the lower end so students who wouldn't have got within a mile of the exam room in the olden days can find their level. And partly, whether on purpose or not, it probably is so the Government can point to the pass rates improving year on year.

Try this little thought experiment. Take a hundred random twenty-year-olds from the 1970s and line then all up in order, from the highest educational achievers to lowest. Now do the same with a hundred twenty-year-olds from today.

In 1970, you'd be lucky if the first ten had gone to university (only 4% of school leavers went to university in the early '60s, rising to 14% in the '70s). In today's group, almost the first fifty go. There are young people going to university today for whom further education wouldn't have even been on their radar, not even the faintest possibility, forty years ago.

Looking at our hundred modern people, around seventy of them will have done some sort of post-16 education. In the 1970s group, around 20 would have done.

So the number of people going to university today is more than double the number even starting A level courses in 1970. No wonder some of them aren't at the same educational level as the privileged few making it to university in the past.

So it seems to me that the evidence isn't as inconsistent as it seems at first.

Yes, exams are probably easier and yes, the ever-growing pass rate isn't all down to children being cleverer and, yes, the average university entrant today might be less well educated than the average entrant four decades ago.

But that doesn't mean children are getting more stupid or less well educated - the evidence suggests the opposite is true.

We need to understand that our education system is trying to do a totally different job today to the one it did in the '50s, '60s and '70s.

Back then, the idea was to separate those in need of education from those who didn't need it (because they were going to be manual workers or housewives). The majority not needing much education would be jettisoned fairly quickly, perhaps with a woodwork or home economics CSE. The lucky minority would go through A levels and perhaps university.

Today, the aim has changed fundamentally. We want to raise everyone up to the highest level they can reasonably achieve. The political parties might disagree on the details and the mechanisms, but we're all pretty much in accord on the basic principle.

The conclusion? The ongoing debate about how difficult exams are completely misses the point. It doesn't matter. What matters is how well educated our children are, which is an entirely different question.

Learn the lessons from WWII or watch the Lib Dems wither

The year was 1941 and, despite a herculean mobilisation, Britain was losing the war. German bombers made nightly raids. You might have thought that anyone paying attention to other issues would have been ignored or derided - that politicians couldn't have afforded to spend time on anything but the war.

You'd be wrong.

In January 1941, Picture Post had a special issue. They looked back to 1918: few preparations had been made for the end of the First World War and Lloyd-George's "land fit for heroes" had been little more than rhetoric.

Writers in the Post didn't want another opportunity to be lost. Articles with titles like "Work for all", "A Plan for Education" and "Health for All" called for action; for the work to start now in 1941 so the country could reap the benefits if and when Hitler was finally defeated.

The Beveridge Report came out in December 1942 and sold over half a million copies, in the dark depths of wartime.

In 1944, the Conservatives committed themselves to full employment as their top economic objective. Labour, of course, had their own plans for what would become the welfare state and much more besides.

All good stuff, and well known to most Liberals.


The debate about how, not whether, to centrally control Britain
But what's interesting to me, and where I see the parallels to today, is how the tone of the debate shaped Britain for years to come.

That tone was was about centralisation, planning, nationalisation, Whitehall knows best. Hardly surprising. The inter-war years had seen a number of high profile nationalised industries working pretty well, and the war itself with it's enforced, and successful, centralisation just reinforced the message.

Yes, there was debate about the right answer, but there was no doubt it involved a command economy, nationalised industries and lots of central control.

Learning the lessons of World War II
Today we have another historic opportunity to shape our future. There is a mood for change. A feeling that the way we've been doing things for the last few decades is no longer right for Britain.

We're in a period, unthinkable even a year ago, when all major parties speak approvingly of more regulation, of clamping down on tax havens.

History tells us that now, at what may be the start of a long economic recession or even depression, is exactly the right time to be talking about the Britain and world we build at the end of it.

So Nick Clegg is absolutely right to be engaging in that debate, and initiatives like the Social Liberal Forum are right to be adding ideas to the mix.

Good ideas are not enough
But it isn't enough to throw out ideas, no matter how great they are. In the mid '40s the celebrated economist Hayek gave his ideas to the world in his book "The Road to Serfdom". He was largely ignored and disparaged: his ideas simply didn't match the mood of the time.

We must frame the debate
If we are to secure a liberal future for our nation, we must fight tooth and nail to set the tone of the debate today.

The tone for the post-war years was summed up by one of those 1941 Picture Post articles: The new Britain must be planned.

Do we want Britain to be run solely from Whitehall for the next few decades? Do we want ever-more State intrusion into our private lives in the name of efficiency? Do we want the energy, enthusiasm, ingenuity and creativity of ordinary people to be crushed under an overbearing state?

If the answer is "no", as I believe it is for most Liberal Democrats, we need to work hard to frame the debate now.

It will be far too easy for the national discussion to slip into one of which form of central control is best - essentially the debate Labour and the Conservatives have been having for the last eighty years.

The cost of failure
If we do not frame the debate, be sure that our opponents will. We'll be left hammering impotently on the doors of the debating chamber whilst others split hairs about the finer details of which liberties to strip from us and how to do it.

That is the challenge. It's a greater one than having the ideas, and a much harder one too, but the rewards for Britain and for us as a party, are potentially great.

Daily Mail reveals life's secret, men too busy watching TV to notice

Remember the film "What women want". It turned out they wanted Mel Gibson, but only when he could read their minds. Kind of tough to compete against that.

On the same day that the Mail revealed to a thrilled nation that Gibson (possibly without the mentalist skills) was snapped frolicking in the sea with a bikini-clad women who apparently isn't his wife, but doubtless shares his conservative Christian and anti-semitic beliefs, we're also treated to a wonderful bit of sexist clap-trap from Lucy Cavendish, plugging her new book in the progress.

Lucy, bless her, has had a revelation. It's completely original and really not something that every single bloody person in the country and in history figured out for themselves.

Apparently - wait for it - no matter how much women have, how wealthy they are, how many foreign holidays they have, they always feel there's something missing...something more they need. If only they could figure out what it was.

Well done, Lucy, you've identified the human condition. Let me know when you realise that women need to use the toilet too.

Except she hasn't even managed that, sad as it seems. Yes, women are unfulfilled but, according to Ms Cavendish, it isn't a problem men have.

...women themselves never seem to know what they want either. We are on an endless search to find fulfilment. I don't think men are programmed this way. If their needs are met and life doesn't get too complicated, they are happy.

In our household it is always me, and not my husband, who thinks we should move house/live abroad/ have another child. It is always me who sees problems in our relationship and then finds solutions.

Then I find more problems and solutions. Left to his own devices, my husband would probably feel content. Sometimes I feel it's an affliction - this restlessness in the core of me.

Right. Men are such simple creatures, always happy to settle down and go uncomplaining through life's tedious routines. Women want something more. And you've come to this conclusion about half the population of the world from a sample of one.

It's Harry Enfield's Women know your limits in reverse, but Lucy shows every indication of been cloyingly serious.

Men - know your limits. Settle down for a life of dull routine. You'll be happy. Sure, the little lady will be miserable, but hey, you're only a man so there's nothing you can do about that. If she's lucky, she'll figure out how to find fulfillment and leave your sorry arse planted on the sofa whilst she goes off to shag every workman in town and hike across Africa .

Good to know ignorant sexism is alive and well.

Paedo warning scheme - is the balance right?

Attacks by adult strangers on children are thankfully rare. For example, in 2002/3 just 68 children were successfully abducted by strangers - the chance of your child being successfully abducted by a stranger is similar to your chance of winning the Lottery jackpot.

There are many other forms of crime committed against children. Overall, our kids are probably safer than we think they are but not as safe as we'd like them to be.

So there's been an ongoing debate for several years about whether the names of sex offenders should be made public, so parents can protect their children.

It all started with "Megan's law" in the US. Those convicted of sex offenders had their details made public . The idea was that parents would be aware of a sex offender living nearby and take appropriate action.

The concern many of us had, was that appropriate action might involve beating the offender (who may have served his sentence) to a pulp or driving him underground so no-one knows where he is. It also makes rehabilitation almost impossible. If everyone who looks at you sees sex offender rather than person, the chances are that you're going to see yourself in that way.

Which all comes down to whether having a Megan's Law actually makes our children any safer at all. I always thought it didn't.

The British Government came to the same conclusion and did not push ahead with a UK equivalent.

However, what they have done as a pilot is a more limited scheme.

Under this new plan, a parent or guardian can make an enquiry about a specific person if they have concerns. Maybe a mother has a new boyfriend and wants to check he isn't a danger to her children.

It's been trialled in Warwickshire, the police feel it's been successful, so it's being expanded to several more counties.

I think this does get the balance about right. Rather than just throwing out information to everyone, the police will release details only if the offender is in a risky position, and only to the parent or guardian.

True, it could lead to sex offenders being driven underground or beaten up, but I suspect that would be pretty rare under this scheme and worth the risk to protect children from sexual predators.

It also allows the police to take into account the offence committed. After all, there's a very big difference between someone on the register because he raped a four-year-old and someone there because, aged 16, he had consensual sex with his 15-year-old boyfriend.

I've often criticised the Home Office for getting things wrong. In this case, Jacqui Smith's department has got the balance about right and, to allow fine tuning, are sensibly rolling the scheme out gradually.

This is a sensible and proportionate scheme that should help protect children and stop re-offenders whilst not putting reformed sex offenders at undue risk.

I feel my anecdotage approaching

Arguments about education are a real pain. We all went to school, many of us have children at school now or in the recent past and we all know, or quite possibly are, school teachers or governors.

So, from our own years of personal experience, we think we know best. And perhaps we do. Our own experience isn't wrong, but each of us is just one person among millions.

There's one education debate (I won't say which) that I never get involved in, simply because my own personal experience is so strong, it colours my views completely and it's sufficiently unique that I know I'd be wrong to generalise it. I just can't escape it myself.

Now, at this point some people might think I'm suggesting that all those personal anecdotes about faith schools should be ignored (we heard quite a few in the debate at Harrogate and more since). Actually, no.

They may not be as good as a decent study, but if you feel your personal experiences are representative of the wider issue, I say go for it. (Obviously, you can't expect others to give them the same weight as proper studies, but they're worth something).

Here's a case in point.

An expert has warned that children are being praised to much in today's schools.

According to the BBC:

[Dr Carol Craig] said an obsession with boosting children's self-esteem was encouraging a narcissistic generation who focussed on themselves and felt "entitled". "Narcissists make terrible relationship partners, parents and employees. It's not a positive characteristic. We are in danger of encouraging this," she said.

"And we are kidding ourselves if we think that we aren't going to undermine learning if we restrict criticism.

"Parents no longer want to hear if their children have done anything wrong. This is the downside of the self-esteem agenda."

Who could fail to have an opinion on that? Anyone involved with education today will have come across pushy parents for whom their little darling could do no wrong, not to mention some little sod who thought they always knew best with their massive 12 years of life experience. OK, so little Jeremy crucified the school cat, but it wasn't his fault - the other boys must have driven him to it.

Perhaps things have gone too far.

On the other hand, anyone who's school experience was from the '80s or earlier will most likely remember certain teachers who saw it as their life's work to humiliate, embarrass, hurt and generally make life miserable for any child they took a dislike to.

I don't think many people on the receiving end of that sort of treatment feel that it was a positive experience that helped them grow as rounded human beings.

And we know there were always parents who thought their child was perfect, that the teachers and school were never good enough and failed to recognise their little one's needs and special abilities.

So here's the problem.

How do we know if Dr Craig is really onto something, or if she's talking nonsense?

Are we really bringing up a generation of totally self-centred young people who think the world revolves around them? Did we ever manage to breed teenagers who didn't think the world revolved around them, or at least that the world was totally against them? Surely that's what teenagers have always been like.

Anecdote won't help us on this one. Sure, we can ask around. Do you think kids are more narcissistic these days? Should schools be doing all the feelings stuff? On a scale of one to ten, just how much do you want to slap those kids at the back of the bus? Tell me your misty-eyed recollections of how things were in the '60s, '70s, '80s or '90s.

No. For this one we need evidence. We need properly designed studies to help us figure out what's happening with our kids. Which is a bit of a pain as I don't think narcissism is that easy to measure, but there you go - no-one said this stuff was simple.

I've really no idea if Dr Craig is right. I don't know if she's got evidence to support her suggestions, or if it's really just her anecdotes (which I'm sure are much better than mine, but still no substitute for decent evidence).

Beyond nodding sagely and bringing our own experiences to bear, how do we know if the people leaving school today really, as Dr Craig claims, make worse parents, employees and partners than those who left school ten, twenty or thirty years ago?

What do you think? How would you go about figuring out if Dr Craig is right?

Is it because I is black?

Thanks to Norfolk Blogger for picking up on this story about the police stopping two young black men in the leafy Cheshire town of Knutsford (at the heart of George Osborne's Tatton constituency) and cuffing one, for the exceptionally dubious behaviour of looking in a jeweller's window.

One of these men, 20 year old Victor Anichebe, happened to be both a Premiership striker, playing for Everton, and on crutches at the time. His companion was cuffed by police, apparently for failing to admit his guilt (a bit of a catch 22, you might think).

What struck me about this is the police who, whilst admitting their reaction might have been a little disproportionate, still maintained that it "was most certainly not related to race".

So what I'd like to know about this is: if it wasn't related to race, just what was it about the two men that drew police attention? Do all young men in Knutsford find themselves questioned by police if they look in a jeweller's shop window? Or perhaps the two had absent-mindedly come out with big bags saying "swag". Perhaps it was the crutches that did it - do Cheshire police have a thing about disabled people maybe?

Because I somehow have trouble believing that every person who looks in a Knutsford jeweller's shop window is equally likely to be stopped by police and these two just happened to be unlucky.

What was the reason? I think Victor Anichebe and his handcuffed friend deserve to know; and I wouldn't mind myself.

Brown sees bandwagon, jumps right on

I'm sure that Gordon Brown has made many speeches denouncing tax havens since he became Chancellor in 1997. I've no doubt he's spoken out against the way the world's wealthiest people and companies squirrel their money away in places like Switzerland, Jersey, the Cayman Islands and Belize.

I've no problem with the way Gordon has spent the last twelve years working to ensure that the UK's poor, as well as those in the developing world, get their fair share of that money.

The only problem is that I must have missed all those speeches and all that hard work because, as far as I can see, Gordon, and the Labour Government as a whole, have done bugger all to tackle tax havens in the last 12 years.

So it's a little sad to see Gordon jumping on the bandwagon now, thrilled that a number of tax havens, including Switzerland, have bowed to US pressure and abandoned the banking secrecy that's seen millions die or live in extreme poverty so the wealthy can be a bit wealthier.

Labour's approach has been pathetic, to put it bluntly. A huge amount of energy and money has been poured into tackling benefit fraud and HMRC (formerly Inland Revenue) has never shirked from going after the easy targets, but when it came to tackling the serious tax evaders, the big guys, I guess Gordon didn't want the hassle and definitely didn't want to upset his friends in the City.

Let's see what bandwagon Gordon jumps on next: I suspect following Obama's policy announcements might give us a pretty good clue.

Don't base health policy on Jade Goody

There are hundreds of young women in the public eye and, tragically for her and her family, Jade Goody has drawn the short straw and become one of the few women under 35 to contract cervical cancer.

It's all over the papers and the TV. Women are, very understandably, worried and we're told that more are going to their doctors.

That's what we'd expect: we all worry more about the things in front of our noses. We worry about the crimes and diseases that we read about in the papers, or that happen to affect our friends and family, far more than about others which might actually be more likely to impact on or lives.

For example, we parents worry far more about "stranger danger" than the risks of people we know abusing our children, even though the latter is far more likely.

So, onto cervical cancer.

Women under the age of 25 are very unlikely to get cervical cancer and even the under-35s are hardly at great risk, with just four women from every hundred thousand in their early thirties dying from it.

Remember, too, that cervical screening has its own risks. Not only is it a deeply unpleasant and fairly stressful experience in its own right; there's a significant risk of being wrongly diagnosed with cancer and being put through all sorts of painful, stressful and invasive procedures

So I'm concerned about plans to consider offering smear tests to women aged 20-24.

We need to be very clear: this is not a case of doing it if we can afford it. Smear tests for young women really could do a lot more harm than good to their health. And once they're offered, it seems that Health Authorities feel the need to put pressure on women to have the screening, and little need to point out the risks and downsides.

I'm sorry for Jade Goody, just as I am for all cancer victims, especially young ones. But one celebrity case doesn't make a good foundation for public health policy, with all its complexities.

I can only hope that the expert review, and the politicians and civil servants who act on it, will pay proper attention to the evidence of both good and bad effects of screening and won't get carried away by one celebrity case.

Unfortunately, The Sun has a petition calling for the screening age to be lowered. It's hugely irresponsible. They don't mention the pros and cons (they may not even be aware of them for all I know). The Sun treats screening as a simple equation: Jade Goody died young of cervical cancer, therefore if all young women are screened, lives will be saved.

Well meant, I'm sure.

Why atheist Quist will live with faith schools

Over on Lib Dem Voice (what do you mean you've never heard of it?), Laurence Boyce delivers a trademark rant against faith schools, and against the Lib Dems for (as he sees it) fudging the issue at conference. James Graham is concerned that atheists will still have to pretend to be religious to get their kids into the local faith school, whilst Jennie has the opposite concern: she'd love to send her daughter to a secular school but doesn't have the choice.

Not a bad place to be
In the conference hall, I voted against faith schools, but for the motion as a whole including the "Farron fudge". As a whole, conference seemed to grasp the important detail that, whilst faith schools are difficult issue for the party, it isn't one worth having a huge row about when the country as a whole is so desperately in need of a liberal alternative across so many issues.

Like it or not, conferences are about more than giving the activists a chance to have a good punch up: especially for the Lib Dems, they offer a rare chance for the party to showcase ourselves.

We're a democratic party, so we can have the big public fight if we really want to, but we're mature enough to understand the consequences.

Yes, our current policy is a bit of a fudge (totally unique for any political party's policy, I know) and yes, it isn't perfect, but it's heading in the right direction.

Won't someone think of the children
Of the objections to faith schools, I'm least concerned about Jennie's - I'm not to bothered about the Quistlets being taught religion as truth in school. I think we give children too little credit if we get worked up about it.

As children grow up, they're perfectly capable of realising that all the religious stuff we were fed at school isn't the whole truth - lots of us did. (And didn't we think were so bloody clever and the first people ever to spot all those flaws - I can remember writing a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, aged 11, thinking my brilliant and original insights would bring the Christian faith crashing down as they read my epistle and realised the contradictions of their faith).

It works even better when the young ones have an intelligent non-believer like Jennie at home: they get the introduction to religion (an important part of our culture) from school, and learn to question it and be sceptical at home.

Rather than me indoctrinating Gabriel and Jezebel Quist in the true atheist path, we get to have discussions about what they've been told at school and how they might go about figuring out if it's true or not. We have discussions about why they're not baptised when many of their friends are (oddly, with frequent references to a Simpson's episode where Ned Flanders tries to baptise Bart and Maggie - they brought that one up, not me).

I think the outcome for the Quistlets will probably be better than if they'd just grown up thinking that atheism was obviously the only right and sensible way and then suddenly encountered religion as teenagers.

So I say to Jennie - don't worry too much: have faith in your child and yourself as a parent.

If someone mentions Northern Ireland one more time...
Sorry guys, but Northern Ireland is not a reason to scrap faith schools. It's an outlier, an oddity. Using Northern Ireland as an argument against faith schools is saying "look what happened there. If we don't get rid of faith schools, the same will happen here".

And the evidence for that suggestion is...?

Your kids are going to pick up values, whether you like it or not
Sometimes people talk about faith schools as if the alternative was a value-neutral environment. It isn't. Right now, kids in most schools are being taught in no uncertain terms that being eco-friendly is a good thing, that giving to Comic Relief is a good thing. Many children are learning about obedience to authority. These are all values, and not ones universally shared.

Again, trust your children. They'll mostly figure it out in time and come to their own conclusions.

State schools selecting on religion
A school with a religious ethos is one thing. A school, funded by taxpayers' money, that requires the parents to follow a particular faith for the children to gain entry is something else. I agree with Mr Graham on this one: in reality, our policy hasn't yet cracked that nut.

I've no real problem with selective religious schools, just not in the state sector and not when there are no good local alternatives.

It would be nice for a future conference to get that policy changed and clarified. I've added it to the sizeable pile of Lib Dem policies I don't quite agree with but I've no intention of laying it on that area of carpet reserved for Lib Dem policies I'm going to resign over.

That Quist faith schools policy in full
Provide a good, local, state-funded education to children regardless of their parents' religious beliefs and trust in the kids to take all the values and dogma thrown at them over the years and figure it out for themselves in the end.

Let's remember that DNA profiling is a great tool

Those of us opposed to the database state and the world's largest DNA database (as we have the UK: a million of the entries are held illegally) shouldn't lose sight of the power and value of DNA profiling as a tool to catch the guilty and free the innocent.

Where the police have a suspect and other evidence*, DNA evidence can prove the case.

It isn't perfect. Mistakes are made. Partial matches can confuse things. It's open to abuse (just because my DNA was at the scene, that doesn't always prove I was the criminal, or even that I was at the scene).

But it's good.

A DNA database full of unconvicted people doesn't help much. Yes, you'll catch a few criminals who woud otherwise have got away, but that has to be weighed against people being less willing to give samples to be eliminated from enquiries, the greater cost of maintaining that database, more mistakes in the database and more false positives (where innocent people are wrongly identified as suspects due to a partial DNA match).

And that's before we've even talked about the implications for liberty.

But it's important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

A DNA database of those convicted of a crime is a good thing: the benefits almost certainly outweigh the problems.

And who could disagree with using DNA evidence to convict more guilty people and free more innocent people.

The BBC is reporting today that Sean Hodgson is likely to be freed next week after serving 27 years for a murder committed in 1979. DNA evidence has proved his innocence. Had the DNA test been available back in '79, Sean Hodgson would never have been convicted.

The family and friends of the victim, Teresa De Simone, must now come to terms with the reality that the man they've probably hated for three decades was innocent all along and the real murderer was free - perhaps someone they've passed in the street a hundred times.

No to a DNA database of unconvicted people; but Yes to intelligent use of DNA profiling to convict the guilty and free the innocent.


* that's important, otherwise you can fall into the "prosecutor's fallacy". To explain this simply (since the Wikipedia entry is a bit confusing):

Suppose the police have a big DNA database. They find a degraded DNA sample at the crime scene which matches only one in a million people. A name pops out of the database, plod dashes round and makes a swift arrest. If there is no other evidence what is the chance of chummy being guilty?

The prosecutor's fallacy is to say it's 99.999% - there's only a one in a million chance that the DNA sample got the wrong man.

In reality, if the sample matches one in every million people, it must match around 60 people in the UK alone so, if we know no more than the criminal is probably from the UK, the chance of chummy being guilty is 1 in 60, or 1.67%.

Why ending fuel poverty is a great example of Internet campaigning

I'm something of a sceptic when it comes to using the Internet for political campaigning. Not that it's a bad idea, but it isn't the panacea some people would like to think. Creating a Facebook group or putting a petition on the Number 10 site may make you feel like you're doing something, but on its own it's just for show.

It can even be counter-productive, sucking up people who could otherwise be convinced to do something worthwhile but think they're doing their bit by signing that petition.

As Howard Dean said at our Harrogate conference, the Internet is a tool: it's the medium, not the message. As with any political campaign, think about what you want to achieve and who you need to persuade to achieve it.

So I was interested to see an email pop up from Lib Dem MP David Heath. He's done well in the private members' ballot, coming second, and he's putting forward a bill aiming to lift millions of people out of fuel poverty.

David writes:

What will that do? It will make a direct difference to millions of people, both in cities and rural areas, who struggle to heat their homes. It will mean fewer people face illness or death from cold and damp. It means we will help to reduce the wastage of energy which contributes to climate change. And it will produce work for thousands of builders and insulators at a time when they desperately need it.

My Bill has the support of a wide range of organisations, those working for the elderly, for the disabled, for the environment and against poverty. It is picking up support from local councils and groups across the country.

Please do anything you can to campaign on what I think is a crucial issue, and one which we must get right.

I don't want a single extra person to die of cold in their homes in years to come in a supposedly affluent country like Britain. I hope you feel that way too.

This is a great example of using the Internet as a tool. Private members bills have little chance of success, but if they can get good cross-party support, something similar will often find its way into a Government sponsored bill.

So there's a nice, clear and realistic path mapped out to getting Government action on fuel poverty - David just needs a few thousand people to lobby their MPs and get a good show of support for the bill.

And that, of course, is where the Internet is a fantastic tool for political campaigning: mobilising large numbers of people to do something specific, with a plan in place to make the change happen.

So, please lobby your MP, asking them to support David's bill. It'll take you about two minutes, even if you've no idea who your MP is or how to contact them. Just visit They Work for You, put in your postcode and fill in the form to email your MP.

And after you've done that, get active in the political party you like the best and help gets lots more things changed. It's more effective than just joining a Facebook group and more fun too.

Less is more on the roads

An article on the BBC website touches on a subject I've written about before: road safety and the bad effects of trying too hard to separate motor traffic from other road users.

It's well worth a read. It starts off talking about the proposals in London to have countdown timers on pedestrian crossings (they have some in Dublin too).

Then it talks about the problem of designing safe crossings.

"But sometimes drivers become so inured to this street "furniture" they forget to look for people crossing - they forget what it's there for. And a 1970 study by the Institute of Transportation Engineers Journal looking at San Diego accidents found incidents were twice as likely at "marked crossings" as unmarked crossings.

Why? Pedestrians lose a sense of personal responsibility - they think that because they are at an official crossing, they don't need to look where they are going. And then they step out into oncoming traffic.

The best-designed crossing...[is] a zebra crossing like those first designed in the 1940s - where pedestrians and drivers have to make eye contact.

This, Mr Page says, is often the answer. "If you encourage them [drivers and pedestrians] to mix you are asking them to take more notice of each other."

Yes! Overdesign our roads and everyone looks to the rules, the lines and the street furniture instead of each other. Under-design and we have to interact again.

Have you noticed how most people, when we have rude driver moments, avoid looking at the other driver or pedestrian we've cut up or not let out. Inconsiderate and bad driving is much easier to pull off if you don't have to make eye contact with other drivers.

Especially in urban areas, where we want motor vehicles, bicycles and pedestrians to mix safely, we need to be making our roads more ambiguous. We need to be making sure that, in those areas, people can't just think "all I need to do is follow the rules and keep my head down".

If we can repeal compulsory seatbelt laws and compulsory helmets for bikers, we'll really be making progress.

So easy, a man can do it

Thanks to the array of digital TV stations, I can relive the programmes of my younger days. In particular, Mrs Quist and I enjoy watching those shows that originally went out in the Sunday evening comedy-drama slot (and their spiritual brethren): Ballykissangel, Monarch of the Glen, Pie in the Sky; not to mention a nice bit of Poirot.

And if you switch over to ITV3, where you'll find all these gems, you get the added pleasure of crappy, cheap adverts.

My favourite at the moment is for a product called Oven Pride. The product itself is simple: take the shelves out of the oven, put them in a big plastic bag, squirt in some Oven Pride, leave overnight, wash off in the morning and all is clean.

The advert, though, is a classic of the genre. A husband and wife together in their kitchen. The wife is mightily pissed off - presumably because she didn't realise hubby was severely mentally retarded before she married him.

Hubby is ordered in no uncertain terms to clean the oven (a bit of domestic violence helps things along as the Oven Pride gets slammed into our hero's chest, perhaps the only way to get the message to his brain that action is required).

With all this plastic bag fun to be had, nice-but-dim husband is as happy as a hamster in a wheel as he lets the bag take the strain.

Finally we get the tag line "So easy a man can do it" followed by an annoyingly girly giggle.

Now, I've no huge problem with the premise. OK, so the reverse idea "So easy, a women can do it." would rightly be booted off the screen within seconds, but that's no big deal. To be fair, we men have been known to put on a pretense of being no good at housework from time to time, just as a lot of women play up to the ditzy shopaholic role when it suits them.

But it's just so bad. Evil wife playing the dominatrix without managing to be at all sexy; stupid hen-pecked husband; some impressively bad acting and a tag-line to groan for.

It's as if the advert's creators have been in suspended animation since the 1970s. I kept on expecting the hilarious black family from next door to turn up and explain that Oven Pride was easy enough for them to use too.

Watch and enjoy - whether you buy the product is up to you.

Tax chocolate to save us from ourselves

The British Medical Association can normally be relied on to demand people be banned from doing something they want to when it might improve their health. As far as the BMA is concerned, health trumps happiness every time.

At their impending Scottish conference, a Lanarkshire GP, Dr David Walker, will be calling for chocolate to be taxed to get us eating less of the stuff and so become fit and healthy.

As JunkFoodScience points out, the evidence to support the claim in any way seems somewhat...non existent.

Is there evidence that people will become healthier if they eat less chocolate? If so, Dr Walker doesn't mention it. Does he have evidence that our diets would otherwise remain the same, and we wouldn't just compensate by eating more of some other unhealthy food?

Does he have evidence that increasing the tax on chocolate will result in us eating less, and not just paying more?

Pah. This is the BMA. They don't need evidence. They know what's best for us. They've called for bans on boxing, advertising alcohol, ultimate fighting, drinking whilst pregnant (there's no evidence that drinking small amounts of alcohol is dangerous, as the BMA admit), cigarette machines and GM food.

Here's a clue: something may be bad for my health, but that doesn't mean either my life or society in general will be improved by preventing me from doing, drinking, eating or smoking it.

UPDATE 12/03/09: credit where it's due - it seems I was a little hasty in attacking the BMA over this particular issue. The BBC is reporting that Scottish GPs have voted down the tax-on-chocolate proposal, and mentions the BMA rejected a similar proposal in 2003.

UPDATE 13/03/09: But I now see that the proposal was only defeated by two votes, and it wasn't voted down on the basis that there's no evidence it would either work or do any good, but rather than it would be too expensive or bureaucratic to implement.

A note on the German shooting and gun control

Amongst the millions of people who sadly meet their ends before their time each year (most from disease but significant numbers in wars, car crashes and the rest of it), a tiny number are killed in school shootings.

Just such a tragedy happened this morning, when a seventeen year old boy armed with a gun killed fifteen people in a school in south-west Germany.

I've no idea as to the background of this particular incident - you can read the media speculation as well as I can.

But I will make a brief point on gun control.

If this had happened in the US, lots of people would be saying how it proves the case for stronger gun control (in the UK, we even try knife control, which always seems a little odd: getting hold of a knife capable of killing someone is hardly a challenge).

The evidence, though, seems to show little connection between gun control and murder rates. Yes, the US has a relatively relaxed attitude to guns and also has a relatively high murder rate, but Canada and Switzerland also have a heavily armed population and don't have anything like the level of gun crime or murder the US enjoys.

UK gun crime levels don't seem to correlate with gun control legislation either.

Much as it seems intuitively obvious that restricting gun ownership reduces gun crime, the real world doesn't appear to work that way. Other factors seem to be more important.

The lesson of the evidence would seem to be that legal gun controls aren't a very effective way of reducing either gun crime or overall crime levels: if our aim is to reduce violent crime, we might do better to concentrate our efforts elsewhere.

Observer tells us lap-dancing is bad and wrong

Is the debate over planning permission for lap-dancing clubs being used by some groups to have a totally different debate: whether they should exist at all?

That's what I suggested a month ago when the Fawcett Society expressed concern that the new rules wouldn't do enough to stamp out these clubs. The problem? Local councils (shock! horror!) will actually being allowed to decide for themselves whether to impose the tougher rules and answer to the electorate for the decision they come to.

They're also worried the new rules will allow pubs (2,000 of which have closed down since the 2008 budget) to have occasional lap-dancing evening. Clearly this is so terrible that it's preferable to see struggling pubs close and the people who work there unemployed than to allow a bit of stripping every month or so.

Now journalist Rachel Cooke has an article in Observer Woman ("there can be only one") and, in essence, says that lap-dancing isn't the wonderfully fulfilling career that the bosses claim and so is a bad thing.

In doing so, the stories of those who claim bad experiences are promoted, with those who say they're happy disparaged (being the Observer, they are at least mentioned).

So we start off with over a thousand words on "Lucy", a former lap-dancer who's obviously had a bad experience, and later see fewer than five hundred words devoted to the more positive stories of three current lap-dancers (though even here, Ms Cooke can't help chucking in a bit of innuendo to imply all is not as it seems, saying:

"their pride in their work does not extend to allowing me to use their real names. All three insist that I use their dance names. Two of them tell me that this is to avoid upsetting their parents. The family of the third knows full well what she does, but still: she would rather not tell me her real name."

Clearly Rachel Cooke can't imagine why someone would be doing a job they're happy with and still want to keep their identity secret - oddly enough, I can.

There's a telling part later in the article when Cooke is talking to a female former city analyst. Apparently

Her male colleagues often used to disappear to [lap-dancing] clubs at lunch and in the evenings.

The implication here was men carrying the lap-dancing culture back onto the trading floor. Sounds to me like the age-old excuse for men's bad behaviour - it's all the fault of loose women. Women should cover up because the poor men can't possibly control themselves. A woman not covering up has only herself to blame when she gets unwanted attention, or worse.

In this case, their sexist behaviour isn't the fault of the poor male city traders, it's all those nasty lap-dancing clubs and the women who work in them. Far better for those women to be unemployed so the highly paid traders can be protected from their own male insecurities.

Sorry, but that's bollocks. If a man can't treat women appropriately, that's his problem. If action needs to be taken, it should be against him, not against some poor girl already having trouble making a living.

I'll finish where the article starts. The very first paragraph sets up the strawman that Cooke spends the rest of the article knocking down.

The lap-dancing industry will tell you that its 10,000 (their estimate) female employees are all as happy as Larry: that its "performers" are decently paid and well looked after, and enjoy some of the most flexible working in Britain.

Things aren't that great for the women working as lap-dancers, therefore it shouldn't be allowed. When you get past the evidence-free innuendo, that's all the article can really claim: for lots of people it's a shitty job they don't enjoy that doesn't pay as much as they'd like.

Sorry, Rachel, but there are a lot of crappy jobs out there and, in these troubled times, more and more of us find ourselves having to do them, at least for a short while.

No woman should be forced to be a lap-dancer, and the amendments to the planning regulations are a good thing.

But unless someone can come up with good evidence to support the implications Rachel Cooke and others make, it shouldn't be banned, any more than all the other crappy jobs should be.

Lib Dem MP misleads on copyright

John Barrett, Lib Dem MP for Edinburgh West, is leading the fight against illegal copyright violation. He recently led a Westminster Hall debate on the subject and has written about it on Epolitix (the fairly relaxed approach to the use of spaces in the article may not be his fault).

The problem is, I'm not convinced John has done his research well enough. It sounds like he's bought the industry line and looked no further.

For example, he writes

What many might think as a relatively harmless purchase of a film forthe children could in fact be funding other illegal activity such asthe import of hard drugs, which might later be on the streets andavailable to those same children.

"Could" is the key word - there's not a shred of evidence that money from knock-off DVDs fund the importing of hard drugs, or anything else the industry has claimed from time to time (you might remember those ads at the beginning of DVDs seriously suggesting they were funding terrorism - ho ho).

I think you'll find that it's the sale of hard drugs that funds the importing of hard drugs. I know times are hard, but heroin isn't being sold at a loss just yet.

John writes:

Those who work in the creative industries should be rewarded for their work and this should be protected in law.

It is already protected, of course. Selling pirate DVDs is illegal and people do get prosecuted, convicted and sent to prison.

He finishes off:

Unless we ensure the creative industries are protected from copyright theft, we will all be losers.

Not really, no. Where someone who would otherwise have bought the original film or gone to to see it at the cinema buys a pirate DVD as an alternative, that's clearly lost revenue to the film makers. It's unclear to what extent that happens, with the evidence being mixed. Some studies suggest, for example, that people who illegally download music end up buying more than they would otherwise have done, though I'm not convinced.

It does seem clear that piracy is not crippling the film industry, never mind the rest of us. DVD sales are increasing, more people are going to the cinema, online DVD rental services are booming.

So yes, film piracy is a crime and, yes, the police should pursue it. But let's not make claims about it funding the drugs trade without evidence, let's not suggest the creative industries are being brought to their knees and lets not make more things illegal just for the sake of it.

Give your DNA now, grass on a relative in 20 years.

There's been a nasty crime - a murder or rape. The police decide to ask people to volunteer a DNA sample to eliminate suspects. Not a bad idea when there are no other leads: the criminal might give him (or her) self away by refusing to participate; or the police might take a sample from a relative of the attacker, pointing them in the right direction.

Would I help? Would I willingly offer a DNA sample from myself or other members of my family? Sure, why not. I'm a good citizen; it's a nasty crime; I want to help.

But how about if that DNA sample is going to not just be used for this investigation, but kept on file forever?

That's a bit different. Who knows what's going to happen. Perhaps I'll become a suspect for a crime in the future when a poor quality sample from the crime scene partially matches mine. Perhaps I'll be fingered due to an error on the computer system, or the labs (yes, it does happen). Maybe someone could use my record to frame me. Perhaps I'll want to disappear at some point in the future - just vanish like Reggie Perrin.

Or maybe I'll find myself in a decade involuntarily grassing on my own children, siblings or parents for some relatively minor crime I didn't even know they committed.

You might say I should help the police catch my relatives for any crime they might ever commit, but I think it should be my decision for me to make at the time and for me to live with the consequences.

Right now, the Government is illegally holding the DNA of a million unconvicted people on their database and has no immediate plans to remove the records of anyone over the age of ten.

But having the world's biggest DNA database must be making a real difference to our success in tackling crime - especially crimes like rape where forensic evidence is so important and witnesses often hard to come by. Except that the conviction rate for rape has continued to fall and now stands at just 6%.

Good to know we're giving up our liberties for such great benefit.

Is Libertas the European wing of the Lib Dems?

Those who want to vote against the European Union are set to have an unprecedented choice of three parties who believe they're in with a chance of winning a few seats.

Despite their vicious internal warfare and the general incompetence of their MEPs, UKIP will still be hoping to pick up the lion's share of the euro-sceptic vote. You'll remember that they beat the Lib Dems into fourth place, securing over 16% of the vote, last time round.

The BNP are poised to take over the country, at least if you believe the shrill noises of panic emanating from the Labour Party; though more measured observers aren't quite as concerned. Still, they fancy their chances of picking up seats in a couple of regions, targeting the North West in particular.

And now we have Libertas, which originated in Ireland campaigning successfully for a "no" vote in their referendum on the EU constitution. Libertas pledged to stand candidates in every EU country and has announced that they will be standing candidates right across the UK.

Here's the funny thing. You might assume Libertas are anti-EU but they claim not.

Libertas is offering a bold new future for Britain and Europe. We want a brand new kind of European Union, based on democracy, transparency and willing cooperation between sovereign nations. We want to return powers to Britain and take back control of our own destiny. We want to end the corruption and mismanagement of our tax money and ensure that we get value for money. We want to build a new European Union that our children can be proud to be a part of.

Not much for me to disagree with there.

Two reasons to pause, though. First, there doesn't appear to be any substance behind the rhetoric as yet. Which powers do they want to return to Britain? How will they end corruption and mismanagement? What will this new EU look like in reality?

Second, although the words talk about a new EU, the tone is some way from the critical friend position that Lib Dems tend to instinctively take.

For example, they say:

Are you sick of Britain handing over power to Brussels?
Are you angry at being denied a vote on the EU Constitution?
Are you fed up with your tax money being wasted on crazy EU schemes?
Are you horrified by the Brussels gravy train excesses?
Are you seeking an end to Brussels bureaucracy hampering British businesses?
In June this year you will have the opportunity to change all of that.

The tone sounds closer to UKIP than the Lib Dems.

My hunch is that, if Libertas make an impact at all, they'll be taking more votes from UKIP and the BNP than from the main parties, and that's got to be a good thing for us.

But we should be wary: there are a lot of people who feel being in the EU is better than being out but feel it's undemocratic, corrupt and opaque.

With MEPs like Chris Davies leading the charge, the Lib Dems have an excellent story to tell on tackling all those problems and it's one based on real action, not just warm words - but it only works for us if we bother to tell people we're doing it.

Interview with a Lib Dem President, part two

For those who missed part one and can't be bothered to click on this link to read it, I had found myself in a small room with our president Ros Scott and fellow bloggers Mary Reid, Jennie Rigg, Helen Duffett and Millenium Elephant. The sticky buns were on the table and Ros was explaining how she's going to lead an armed insurrection against the party leadership, installing herself as leader for life work consensually to solve some of the thornier issues the party faces on our road to eventual victory.

COG: good or evil?
We turned next to the Chief Officers Group. Depending on who you believe, this is an undemocratic kitchen cabinet or a necessary streamlining of the somewhat clunky committee system.

As President, Ros is now a member of the COG, so which way would she swing, I wondered?

It turns out that the noble Baroness is firmly in the pro-COG camp. Ros pointed out that the Federal Executive, as wonderful as it might be, is far too large and meets far too rarely to possibly perform the day-to-day running of the party. The line Ros takes is that the COG existed before Bones but in a less formal way. The Bones report has formalised the arrangement with the Chief Officers Group taking delegated powers from the committees.

Ros told us that, as head of the Federal Executive Committee, she was keen to uphold its integrity (so no FE members taking huge bribes to influence Mr Clegg, I guess) and make it a useful committee that people want to serve on, but more for strategic oversight than the everyday business.

As an example, Ros mentioned a report commissioned on the attrition rate for parliamentary candidates, based on proper research including exit interviews (not always easy when the former candidate is locked in a secure institution, under medication and repeating the phrase "just a few more rounds to deliver" over and over again, 24 hours a day as a stream of saliva trails down to the floor).

Shouting at members
Jennie asked how Ros could improve (or maintain, as we're being generous) the sense of transparency and continue to keep in touch with members.

Ros was concerned not to raise expectations too high: she has no office or staff, not even anywhere to sit an intern, so there's a risk she could spend so much time communicating that she misses the chance for doing.

However, in the ongoing quest to make members feel loved but not bombarded, Ros has a monthly column in Lib Dem News, a monthly report on Lib Dem Voice, her blog and the formal FE report.

At this point Ros significantly raised the ante, setting down a tough marker for future presidents to meet. She boasted of personally answering over a thousand emails in the five days after her election (little did she know that I sent over 900 of those under fake names).

Ros Scott, D-list celebrity?
Mary asked whether Ros could improve her media presence, perhaps appearing on TV more often (I don't think we've had a well known Lib Dem on Gladiators yet). Ros felt it was important to think about what we wanted to achieve. Yes, she could see the benefit of getting more Lib Dem women on TV (the Cheeky Girls don't count).

But with limited airtime coming the party's way, it makes more sense for our excellent female MPs, soon to face ordeal by ballot box, to get the coverage rather than Ros.

The Party needs all your money
An age-old complaint in the Lib Dems is the way our members get bombarded with appeals for money. People get fed up with it and some even leave the party to escape Lord Rennard's missives.

Ros responded that, right now, we don't have a choice. The party gets by on a shoestring compared to what the other lot spend, but when the big donors we attract turn out to be bloody criminals, we still need lots of money from ordinary members.

Our President did have some ideas, though. A taskforce will be set up to develop fundraising and gather the experience of our more expert members, along the lines of the technology taskforce.

We need to find ways to reach out beyond the 0.1% of the population who are Lib Dem members and raise funds from supporters, perhaps inspiring people to give to the cause rather than to the party and doing better at identifying wealthy (non-criminal) donors.

Wrapping up
After some discussion of the Obama campaign, something impossible to avoid anywhere this weekend, Ros had to dash to her next appointment.

I must apologise for my questioning not being especially tough and Paxman-esque. In my defence I can offer that it was my first attempt at this sort of thing and, annoyingly, I like Ros too much and think she's too good to do a decent hatchet job. I'll be very interested to read what my fellow bloggers have to say, and see what I missed.

Greenpeace, clean bottoms and virgin confusion

Wiping your bottom does more damage to the environment than driving a Hummer. That's the claim Greenpeace are making and they've a nice big campaign attacking evil Kimberly-Clark, owner of such brands as Kleenex and Andrex.

Noble Greenpeace trying to save the planet up against an evil multinational happy to destroy it in the name of making a quick profit. What could be more clear-cut?

Except I'm not convinced Greenpeace is calling this one right.

When is a virgin not a virgin?
I first read about this in the Guardian. It says

Making toilet paper from virgin wood is a lot worse than driving Hummers in terms of global warming pollution." Making toilet paper has a significant impact because of chemicals used in pulp manufacture and cutting down forests.

My first question was what exactly "virgin wood" is. 98% of American toilet paper comes from it, compared to around 60% of European bum-roll.

Perhaps virgin wood is what comes from virgin forests (seems to make sense). A virgin forest is an old one, either untouched by man or old enough that it might as well have been. Does the wood for toilet paper come from this? If so, it would be pretty damning.

Although it isn't clear at all from any of the Greenpeace campaign information, "virgin wood" in this case simply means "wood from a tree".

The trees being cut down for Kimberly-Clark are not ancient forests. They are managed forests of the sort that cover much of Canada and Scandinavia. Trees are chopped down every decade or two, with as many or more new trees planted in their place. The loggers move around so, by the time they return to the spot again, years have passed and their newly planted trees are mature.

Greenpeace talks about saving trees. Their campaign, Kleercut, says

Americans could save more than 400,000 trees if each family bought a roll of recycled toilet paper—just once.

Well yes. And Americans could save millions of straws of wheat if every family just ate one fewer loaf of bread. Perhaps it would be slightly more honest to say

Americans could have 400,000 older trees instead of 400,000 younger ones if each family bought a roll of recycled toilet paper - just once.

The damage of logging
So, at the end of the process, there are no fewer trees than at the start. Forests are not disappearing - not through the manufacture of loo paper, anyway. But maybe there are other environmental problems caused by chopping down all those trees.

That's what Greenpeace is claiming. They say

Logging in Canada's Boreal Forest is exacerbating global warming by releasing greenhouse gases and reducing carbon storage, says a new Greenpeace report released today. It also makes the forest more susceptible to global warming impacts like wildfires and insect outbreaks, which in turn release more greenhouse gases. If this vicious circle is left unchecked, it could culminate in a massive and sudden release of greenhouse gases referred to as "the carbon bomb," the report warns.

Let's look at each of these.

First, logging itself is making global warming worse. The full report claims that, despite growing trees absorbing more CO2 than mature ones, there's still a net output of 36 million tonnes of carbon released into the atmosphere each year due to logging.

Were the US to reduce the proportion of "virgin wood" down to European levels, it looks like 14 million tonnes of carbon would be saved. In comparison, the UK emits 671 million tonnes a year, so that 14 million tonnes would equate to about 2% of the UK's emissions (this is in Canada, but I can't find the total figures for them right now). So significant but not earth-saving - it's a tiny fraction of one percent of the world's output.

Second, logging makes fires and insect infestations more likely in forests . This one isn't about the forests causing global warming; it's saying that as the temperature increases, the impact on the forests is greater. Maybe, but is it really that significant? We know that some forest fires are a positive thing in forests, so it's a question of how much is too much.

Finally, we have this "carbon bomb" claim. I haven't heard it before, but Greenpeace have apparently been touting it around since the mid '90s. It's a worst-case theory of something that they think might happen, there's no evidence that it will happen but it does sound very scary - especially mentioning the word "bomb". Is there any good evidence that fires could rip through all the Canadian forests, releasing huge amounts of carbon, in the near future, or is this just there to scare us?

The damage of recycling
In calling for more use of recycled paper, Greenpeace totally fails to compare the damage done by logging to that of recycling. If you read the Greenpeace report, you might well come away thinking recycling causes no emissions.

That isn't true.

I don't have the time right now to research the environmental impact of paper recycling, but you can think about the CO2 emissions caused by all the vehicles collecting paper and card from homes and taking them to recycling centres. You can then consider the not-inconsiderable environmental impact in energy use and chemical treatments used to turn old paper into pulp (and not all paper can be recycled).

Any honest approach to the question of whether these managed forests are damaging the environment would compare the environmental damage of the different options, not just talk about one option, leaving the implication that the other is perfect.

What happens to paper that's not recycled
The other question is what happens to all the paper and cardboard that isn't recycled. Whatever the different environmental impacts of sustainable logging versus recycling, we might want to recycle more if the alternative is millions of tonnes of old paper going to landfill.

In Europe, material not recycled normally goes to landfill or the incinerator - neither are brilliant for the environment.

In the US, as I understand it, far more of the unrecycled paper is composted (perhaps because they've more land to do it).

I haven't been able to track down all the details yet, but at the very least we shouldn't assume that unrecycled paper has the same impact in the US as in the UK.

A dodgy campaign
For all I know, Kimberly-Clark may be a truly evil company plotting to destroy the world. Perhaps their CEO has a private rocket and a plan to escape to the moon after the carbon bomb explodes.

But Greenpeace's campaign has a lot of holes and doesn't seem completely honest to me. It does everything to make the damage of logging sound as high as possible without even mentioning the environmental damage caused by the recycling process. It takes common natural phenomena (insect infestations and forest fires) and paints them as tremendously damaging without really having the evidence to back it up. And it throws out the carbon bomb theory with very little evidence that it's a realistic possibility.

I'm not surprised - Greenpeace has a long track record of touting its scientific credentials whilst having a fairly relaxed attitude to getting the facts right. Let the environmentalist beware - all may not be quite as it seems.

Conference report 4: Clegg finds his feet

After Saturday's raucous debate on faith schools, Sunday morning saw a worrying outbreak of general agreement as policy was passed with barely a murmur of dissent. Anyone hoping the delegates were saving up their anger for the leader's speech was to be sadly disappointed.

After Ros had done her bit and we'd chucked money into buckets (the MP's pension fund was getting low, apparently), we were treated to a short film showing some of the highlights of Nick's activities over the last few months. We saw Nick with fishermen. Nick with firemen. Nick with school children (lots and lots of school children). Nick with nurses. Nick with nice elderly people. Nick with lapdancers from Spearmint Rhinos. Oh sorry - that last one was left out of the final edit.

Then we got the man himself, new haircut and all.

Nick's speech was probably the best I've heard from him. It was light on generalities and heavy on policy, but never got bogged down. He didn't spend too much time attacking the other parties but concentrated on the positive approach the Lib Dems are taking.

Unsurprisingly, the bulk of the speech focused on the economy and the Lib Dem plans to get us out of recession, and Nick managed to press few other Lib Dem buttons (education could hardly be missed, given the theme for the conference).

But you don't want a rundown of Nick's speech - or at least you don't want to read it here. Alix has a rundown plus a link to the full text over on Lib Dem Voice.

What does the speech really tell us?

I think it shows a new-found confidence. Nick could have played safe and fallen back on all the standard buzzwords, avoided anything that might upset anyone. He didn't.

He called for the rich to pay more tax. He called for those banks mostly owned by the taxpayer to be properly nationalised now, and then privatised when possible. He told us the Lib Dems will lay down the law to banks: either you can be a low risk, highly regulated high street bank or a risky investment bank, but if you want to take the risks, don't expect the taxpayer to bail you out when it goes wrong.

Nick even made very positive noises about Europe, criticising Brown for sucking up to the US Congress instead of working as an equal with our European partners. No-one listening to Nick could have been in doubt that, though we might be critical of the EU at times, we're a pro-European party.

None of this was new (I'm glad to say - we don't need our leaders making up policy in their conference speeches) but talking about it in the leader's speech draws attention to it in a way that policy documents and even speeches by other MPs don't.

In short, if the press want to find something readers might not like, Clegg gave them the ammunition. He didn't try to please everyone. He set out our stall as the real alternative to the Labour/Tory duopoly not with vague slogans and warm words but with solid policies not everyone is going to like.

Another sign of confidence was the use of the word "will". Time and again, Nick said the Liberal Democrats will... . We won't, of course. We'll talk about it and write policy about it, but we're not going to be forming the next government.

But the fact that Nick could speak in that way and not have it sound too odd is part of the way the party has been leading the debate and, more often than not, calling it right.

It was an assured performance that showed great promise - let's see more.

Conference report 3: The night the beer ran out (a horror story)

In my first major mistake of the conference, I managed to pick two fringe events that were both packed and not handing out free food or drink. Luckily, I'd had the foresight to avail myself of a tasty chicken kebab (a traditional Yorkshire recipe, I believe).

The Social Liberal Forum fringe saw self-styled bruiser James Graham on camera duty. If I may, I'll summarise the first hour (the bit before I left to get a kebab).

Social Liberalism is a good thing. There are lots of nasty things happening in the world where a social liberal perspective is needed. The forum aims to get people involved in developing solutions: coming up with ideas, bouncing them around, improving them. There are several ways to get involved, so keep an eye on the website for more information.

I've missed out the rabble rousing, life stories and dodgy jokes, but I think that about covers it.

Next up was the inaugural Lib Dem Voice fringe event with Alex Foster and Alix Mortimer on duty. They had to double the size of the room and still we were packed around the edges and flowing out into the corridor.

What followed was perhaps not quite what everyone was expecting. Billed as how the Obama campaign used the Internet to secure victory, that was about the one thing we didn't hear about. The Obama campaign speakers stressed the importance of training an army of volunteers, of helpers telling their story to voters ("I'm voting for Obama because..."), making sure helpers are properly thanked and keeping the message simple and consistent.

Mark Pack, the Web Doctor and ever the contrarian, spoke about what Obama got wrong in the campaign and three lucky people won a copy of the Tangerine Book, containing many words of wisdom. Their lives will be transformed; the rest of us will just have to shell out a fiver.

Next onto the Glee Club where Richard Clein led proceedings. The Clein dynasty seems to be Liverpool's answer to the Kennedys. Despite narrowly missing out on a place on the Federal Executive, I've no doubt Richard will be back stronger than ever, perhaps even gracing the green benches before long.

At some point during the evening we discovered the horrifying news that the Lib Dems had drunk all the ale, despite the Black Sheep Brewery laying on a special bar for the evening (both the Black Sheep beers were most pleasant).

Luckily, the assembled masses coped well and seemed to find other ways, or other places, to imbibe alcohol and a good time was had by all (as if running out of beer wasn't bad enough, one of the conference cafes managed to run out of coffee on the Sunday morning - whether the two are related, I couldn't possibly say, but my double espresso got me through to Nick's speech).

Interview with a Lib Dem President, part one

In the classic children's story "Five children and It", the "it" (a sand fairy, or Psammead) pops its head up from the sand slightly grumpily to grant wishes. Secretly we'd quite like a president in that vein. "I wish our membership would double" Charlie might have said; and Simon would have looked about, scrunched up his eyes in concentration and, with a bit of magic, the job's done.

As we all know, magically granted wishes rarely go according to plan, so perhaps it was for the best our President, Ros Scott, was not in wish granting mood. All our desires for the party would not be fulfilled. That wish for membership doubling might have ended up with (gasp!) 60,000 libertarians joining the party (and they can't all be as nice as Charlotte and Jock).

Our gathering was "Five bloggers and Ros" (technically six bloggers, as Ros does the deed too, but stick with me). The highly respected wordsmiths Mary Reid, Jennie Rigg and Helen Duffett joined Ros and myself making polite smalltalk as we waited for a certain blogging elephant (I won't say which, to save his blushes) to arrive. Eventually, he stomped up with a stash of cream buns under his trunk. It was all Vince's fault for talking too long, apparently (this excuse can't be true: St Vince has no faults).

Finally underway, we got a pretty honest appraisal of some of the challenges (or "problems" as we used to say in the old days) the party faces and where we're at right now.

Despite Labour's poll rating heading south at a rate of knots, Jennie has a hunch we'll see a General Election before June is out. So, will we be ready if it comes?

Ros told us that a lot of the preparation had been done for a possible election last year and, like a fearsome tiger waiting to leap on its prey (or possibly a gerbil waiting to jump onto its exercise wheel), the party will spring into action the moment Gordon's kind enough to let us know.

Mary was interested in whether we should tie people to constituencies. The local party you're in is normally based on where you live. Someone who would have been highly motivated in a winnable seat might give up after a year or two being ground down as the lone activist in a derelict area - it's one of those nasty postcode lotteries I keep hearing about.

But on the other hand, if we take activists out of those weaker areas how are they going to get stronger? That's a real problem as we get more PR elections with large constituencies (like the Euros and the London mayoral contest) where targeting the vote is much less effective and we need to win votes everywhere.

Lesser presidents might have quailed before such a knotty challenge and thrown out some nice soundbites. Ros, to her credit, had a number of practical ideas up her sleeve, though none quite crack the problem.

Use the Internet and more regional meetings to get members more involved in policy making. Use the skills of our supporters more effectively (a technology board has been launched in which many of us now find ourselves, under Lynne Featherstone). Make it easier for people to get information about the party and to engage.

That's all well and good (really, it is), but doesn't really solve this issue. Ros's next suggestion did seem to be heading in the right direction though: building the capacity of less active local parties between elections (perhaps stronger parties helping with membership drives or building up delivery networks). Ros felt it could be tackled at a regional level (which I'm sure will cheer up the regions no end - they're sitting around with nothing to do at the moment).

Finally, like nearly everyone (possibly excluding the very grumpiest members of the Liberator collective), Ros wants to see more streamlining and less duplication within the party organisation. Easy to say; a bugger to deliver. Ros had a practical suggestion: we should streamline candidate selection so constituencies where we've no realistic chance of winning (there are some, apparently - hope you're not too shocked) don't need to go through quite so much bureaucracy, and PPCs standing in them don't need to put in quite so much work just to get to the point of being selected.

That was a bit worrying - the party has a long tradition of becoming PPC being punishment for past sins. It's the Lib Dem's version of atonement. You get to fill in hugely long forms on everything under the sun, go to interviews and training before finally being selected by a group of octogenarians who expect you to turn the 8% share of the vote they secured last time into a stunning victory based purely on your own legwork and money. And if you complain, you're ungrateful - they didn't have to select you, you know. They could have gone with that slightly mad chap who seemed to have political tourettes.

That's all for today. In part two, has Ros gone over to the dark side, shouting at members and how our president is going to make us all immensely rich.

Conference report 2: a rallying call

Fifteen minutes queueing in the warm Harrogate air was followed by a brisk bag search (I could have smuggled in something down my trousers, but the lady declined to check even when I suggested it, going to show something about security, though I'm not sure what - probably that they're a bit more grown up than me).

I had just launched myself at a glass of cheap but drinkable wine kindly donated by the FSB, when it became apparent I was one of several hundred Lib Dems trapped in a corridor with the sort of space that would make a battery chicken decide it really wasn't the right career for her and trundle along to the abattoir instead.

Since we were unable to move, never mind escape, our esteemed president felt she was safe grabbing a microphone and our attention. After a few worthy words from the head of Federation of Small Businesses (he paid for the wine, we listened politely - another fair trade, I think), we were free to make our way into the hall.

I should say that the FSB chappie did very well: despite having apparently spent most of the day hob-nobbing with the likes of Brown and Mandelson (sans green custard), he almost managed to convince us that being jammed in a corridor drinking cheap plonk with several hundred Lib Dems was really the high point of his day.

In the main hall we enjoyed the assembled swingers (musical, honest) before things got rolling at half past six.

A succession of speakers strutted their stuff with varying degrees of success. A bit of video footage and Tim Farron's compère skills stopped the speakers getting too monotonous. What did they all say? Do you really care? Probably not. It was all good rallying stuff without anyone making a serious bid for entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

The achievements of Liberal Youth were talked up nicely. Quite right too - not much point making a rousing speech to conference about how everyone's spent the last few months bitching, so well done Elaine.

An excellent new speaker, who's name I forget but I suspect we'll all know before too long, paved the way for nice Mr Clegg by telling us about growing up as a British born Asian.

Nick was on fine form, though looking more like Cameron every day (or is Cameron looking more like Clegg? Luckily the substance is different). Didn't spot any baby vomit on his suit but did feel reasonably enthused - job done.

I've no intention of dissecting Nick's speech, partly because I can't really remember it and partly because it was clearly meant to be mood music - the meat comes on Sunday (hopefully).

Thanks to sterling work from the stewards, we were all out on the pavement within a few minutes of the applause dying down and so ended the fun and games for Friday.

Conference report 1: Friday exhibition fun

Having been chauffeured to Harrogate and even managed to escape from the car before getting stuck in the ever-growing queue of conference traffic, the venue itself proved pleasantly quiet when I first arrived, mid-afternoon on Friday.

My first port of call was a sedate stroll around the exhibition hall, reminding me how wonderful it is to be a Lib Dem.

Within minutes I'd had a free glass plastic cup of wine pressed into my hand in exchange for a quick chat about building new sports facilities - seemed like a fair trade.

ALDES (the Association of Liberal Democrat Engineers and Scientist, obviously) hadn't quite managed to get any posters, literature or indeed anything beyond a bare table out by 3pm - perhaps an engineering challenge to be met at a future conference.

DELGA, easily my favourite group in the party, were as wonderfully dotty as ever. Their attempt to rename themelves LGBT Liberal Democrats failed to get the required two-thirds majority by just a couple of votes (much to their Executive's distress). It sounds like it's going to be the Irish Euro-referendum all over again: keep voting until you get the answer right, damn you. And barely less important too.

So many more stalls to visit - some of them even looked mildly interesting - but it had to wait for another day. Sorry Mr Riso, sorry Mr EARS - your time will come.

Thanks to the hard work of Messrs Brown, Darling and Mandelson, a quick call to my bank was all it took to arrange the second mortgage I needed to afford a coffee and muffin before dashing off to my next appointment.

Alliance opposes porn drawings ban

Thanks to Mr Graham for blogging about the Comic Book Alliance (not to mention doing his bit to bring it about).

I've written before about the dangerous and misguided Coroners and Justice Bill and this issue. For no particular reason, other than making life slightly easier for the police, this bill will make it illegal to own a drawing of a fully-clothed 17 year old watching two adults having sex.

Bizarrely, this bill will make you a paedophile for owning a drawing, when exactly the same scene described in prose or appearing on a movie or TV programme would be completely legal.

Lolita remains legal, but swathes of manga and other comic art suddenly gets banned, without a shred of evidence of harm.

James mentions the concern that a campaign against the law will just draw attention to these comics, and if everyone keeps quiet, the powers-that-be may never notice.

Like James, I think that's a concern worth considering. But I agree with him that it's a risk we have to take.

Breaking this law isn't like speeding or trespass. You don't risk getting a fine and a slap on the wrist if the authorities do decide to take action. You risk being branded a paedo, put on the sex offenders register and possibly sent to prison.

Are people really going to ignore it? Or will we play safe and self-censor? Are we really going to accept that someone should be branded a paedophile for having a drawing of a scene shown totally legally to millions on Skins? Are we going to let Jack Straw get away with that?

Breaking the Broken Britain meme

Who says being a tabloid editor is hard. Any time there's a murder or a major crime, you say it's yet another example of "broken Britain". No-one talked about "Broken Britain" twenty years ago, and it was never mentioned back in the halcyon days of the 1950s so everything must be getting much worse, right?

We convince ourselves that the country is in crisis. Desperate times need desperate measures; the firm hand of strong government. So let's have some nice authoritarians in charge to give all those chavs, hoodies and dodgy foreigners a good slap to bring them into line.

Let's look at homicide. That includes murder, manslaughter and infanticide. If you add those three together (as the statistics do), you find that the number of homicides, measured against the number of people, doubled from 1967 to 2007. (Actually it doubled from 1967 to 2000 and, having peaked in 2000-2003* has fallen slightly since).

That's a cause for concern, though there are reasons to think the increase might not be quite as much as it appears. For example, infanticide was easier to cover up in the past and, if you're female, you're far more likely to be a victim of homicide before your first birthday than at any other age.

But here's the thing to think about. Let's suppose the figures from the 1950s are as accurate as they are now: no more homicides were covered up, left unreported or "missed" off the figures by the police.

Even back in 1955, the papers could still have run a homicide story every week day of the year and claimed it was an example of broken Britain.

If you were living in the '50s, and the papers were telling you every day about another murder, manslaughter or infanticide victim, you'd have been concluding that 1955 was a terrible time to live, with thugs and killers lurking in every Palais and dance hall.

Maybe a big two-page spread "the month of murders that shame Churchill" with twenty victims' photos.

That's something to think about: even at the time now considered a golden period, the papers could have made a good case for Broken Britain and, if repeated often enough, lots of people would have believed it, and been afraid.

There are real problems that need to be tackled. Certain areas of our country, some estates, are very unpleasant places to live. People live there in fear. These are the challenges we need to face.

At the same time, the vast majority of people are not going to be mugged, raped or murdered this year. Most of us live in relatively safe areas and don't need to be fearful whenever we step outside our houses.

We need to be very careful not to be taken in by the meme. There's always crime to report, always was, probably always will be. But where are the real problems? Where do we need to focus our efforts? Where are people living in fear? Where do the police fear to go? Where are the loopholes allowing criminals to escape? That's harder, but necessary.

Reject the meme, follow the evidence, form policy to make a difference.

* The peak remains even if you exclude the Shipman murders which were conducted over many years but appear in the figures in the one year they were reported.

A weekend of tea and cakes

A pleasant weekend of tea and cakes in the genteel Yorkshire town of Harrogate beckons - only the second federal conference I've attended in the last 15 years, so it had better be damn good or I'll be demanding my money back.

What's the plan? Drink. Food. Fringey fun. Training. Hopefully meeting some old friends and paying homage to some of my favourite bloggers. If I get really desperate, I might even have to listen to a policy debate, but let's hope not. Do say hello if you see me (the horns are a dead giveaway).

I'm hoping to manage some blogging from conference but I've really no idea if I'll have either the time or the technology.

Giving up liberalism for Lent

In a triumph of optimism over reality, the Archbishop of Modena in Italy has urged youngsters to give up texting, social networks and computer games for Lent.

Monsignor Benito Cocchi hopes it will help the young folk "cleanse themselves from the virtual world and get back into touch with themselves". I thought it was the getting in touch with themselves that was half the problem to be honest.

At least it shows a bit of imagination over the usual admonitions for us to give up booze, fags, excess calories and acts of self-abuse.

Although I'll hold off until after conference (in deference to my fellow party members), I thought I'd give up liberalism for Lent this year.

A month to get in touch with my inner Daily Mail reader could be very cleansing. I could get to that state of tabloid nirvana where I disbelieve and distrust everything emenating from the Government whilst, at the same time, asking the State to protect me from all the nasty things in the world and living by the credo "if you've done nothing wrong, you've nothing to fear".

Yes, that should see me up to our annual celebration of rebirth and chocolate quite nicely.

February statporn - it's the girth that matters

OK, let's get this done quickly. I'm told that I'm meant to do this, but until I find a way to make it even vaguely interesting, it's going to be quick.

In February, my fifth month of blogging, I had 2,891 unique visitors to the Cafe. Several were drunk when they arrived, but I can't afford decent bouncers yet.

This is up from January, my previous high, when I had 1,957 unique visitors.

I can't say how excited I am to have nearly one seventh the number of visitors as Lib Dem Voice.

Thanks to all my guests. I love you all. I'd just like to ramble on incoherently for a few minutes about the inspiration of my mother, father, wife, mistress, boyfriend and that bloke I met in the gents last summer.

Daily Mail turns on itself, quotes Lishman

As an early morning listener to the Today programme, I occasionally worry that I'm still dreaming and, instead of hearing the real news, the words seemingly coming from Humphrys, Naughtie et. al. are being conjured up by my own twisted imagination.

This was one such morning, as I decended the stairs and turned on the radio to hear the Daily Mail, no less, railing against doctors who over-prescribe pills to older patients not really in need of medication.

The article is pretty sensible.

It raises the issue of people being prescribed pills when there's no good evidence that they need treatment, and would probably be absolutely fine without medication. Medicine can have nasty side effects, is a hassle to take (and stressful if you forget) and, of course, costs us all money through our taxes, so it's absolutely right to question if all those pills are actually of benefit to patients when many appear to prescribed to be on the safe side.

Community politics
The article even has a quote from Gordon Lishman, co-author of the Liberal modern classic "The theory and practise of community politics", though in this case it's in his role as boss of Age Concern rather than his expertise in banishing dog mess from our pavements.

What does absolute risk mean again, Jenny?
The article mentions the problem of relative versus absolute risk though, to restore some of my faith in the Mail, it does get the explanation totally wrong.

"Busy family doctors appear to assume that because a pill cuts the relative risk of a disease by 25 per cent compared with other or no treatments, it must be prescribed.

"Yet the reduction in absolute risk to the individual - the chances of a medical emergency or death - may be only one or two per cent."

No, the absolute risk is not the chance of a medical emergency or death, quaint as the idea is. I'll briefly explain it (again - obviously Jenny Hope should visit the Cafe more often).

Suppose you have an illness that affects 8 people from every 100. After taking the medicine, only 6 out of 100 get the illness. The relative risk reduction is 25% (from 8 to 6 is a 25% drop). The absolute risk reduction is 2%: of every 100 people, two who would otherwise have become ill will be well because they took the medicine.

There you go, Jenny - hope that helps.

Mail eats itself
The whole piece knocked me for six as I sipped my morning brew because the Daily Mail is one of the organs principally responsible for the very pill culture it complains about.

Doctors over-prescribe partly because patients expect them to. Patients expect there to be a pill for everything. Many expect to be given antibiotics to tackle their viral infection (it won't do any good, you know) and feel hard done by if they get told to just go home and lay up in bed.

Let's look at some recent stories by the same journalist*, Jenny Hope.

• Our lifestyles are killing us: Poor diets, drinking and lack of exercise blamed for 78,000 cancer cases a year
• Good news for tea lovers: Drinking two cups a day can 'help ward off ovarian cancer'
• Hayfever hope for children as daily immunotherapy pill is made available on the NHS
• Computer games players warned of 'PlayStation palm' after doctors identify new medical condition

If there's a health-scare to peddle or a magic pill to make it all better, you can bet that Jenny Hope will be there, plugging it in the Daily Mail. Ms Hope works tirelessly to convince us that almost everything is either a medical problem requiring treatment or a magic cure.

Famously, the Mail appears to have an ongoing project to divide all the inanimate objects in the world into those that cause or cure cancer.

If this is really a Damascene moment for the Daily Mail and Jenny Hope, I'm thrilled to have been there when it happened. I'll look forward to seeing far fewer stories peddling magic pills, alternative remedies and dodgy studies; not to mention identifying everything from games consoles to wine as deadly risks to our health.

We'll see.


* I use the word in its loosest sense.

Inflating the figures to win support isn't always a good thing

It's a common tactic and one we're all familiar with (and, quite possibly, guilty of). You want to make a case for something. You don't want to invent figures, but you certainly want the best gloss to support your case. So when there's a choice, you present the statistics in a way that best supports your case, and perhaps you aren't too fastidious in setting out the assumptions you've made, even in the small print.

So we turn to Amnesty International's "One in Ten" campaign. According to Amnesty

"Each year, around 1 in 10 women in Britain experience rape or other violence"

No source or explanation is given for this scary number. By talking about "rape or other violence" rather than just "violence" it steers our expectations towards serious assaults.

This figure is wildly at odds with the British Crime Survey. The BCS doesn't rely on recorded crime (i.e. just the things people tell the police about). It goes out and questions tens of thousands of adults about their own personal experiences of crime.

Here's what the BCS says about criminal violence:

“The risk of being a victim of violent crime in the 2007/08 BCS was 3.2 per cent. Men (4.1%) were almost twice as likely as women (2.3%) to have experienced some sort of violence in the year prior to interview. The risk for men aged 16 to 24 was highest at 13.4 per cent.
• Not only did men have the highest risk of violent crime victimisation, but 87 per cent of violent incidents involved male offenders.”

You’ll find the quote above on page 59 of the Crime in England and Wales 2007/08, Home Office Statistical Bulletin 07/08.

Of course, we can get whatever figure we want by changing the definition of "violence". If I were to define violence as any time someone was pushed, shoved or knocked against their will, we'd get a figure of around 100% - who hasn't experienced that when out shopping on a busy Saturday afternoon?

That was the debate over on Liberal Conspiracy. On one side, matgb argues that having undefined or simply wrong statistics is a bad thing. But Sunny Hundal disagrees.

The nub of Sunny's argument, I think, is that whatever the exact number, violence against women is clearly a bad thing and should be lower, so if we can use "1 in 10" to get people fired up and it's not actually a lie then go with it. After all, Sunny argues, the simple folk aren't like us sophisticated, cynical bloggers.

Sunny does have a case and I won't say that it's always a bad thing to do; but I think it generally is and here are three reasons why.

You lose credibility
You might get away with dodgy statistics once or twice, but sooner or later you'll get caught out just because there are quite a few of us anally retentive people around. And it will hurt you.

Doomsday scenarios that simply weren't backed up by the science might have got more people on the eco-warrior bandwagon in the short term, but as time's gone on it's led to an increase in public scepticism.

When the H5N1 strain of bird flu was first identified, we were warned (ludicrously) about millions of people dying across the world. Governments panicked and spent millions on developing vaccines. The real number? 62 people in six years. Insignificantly small.

How many people will take the next big scare as seriously?

You lose support
People like a good cause, but we don't like being taken for fools. I'm a supporter of Amnesty (give them money and stuff), but more campaigns like this would see me reconsider that support - which would be a shame since violence to women is a serious and real problem; I just don't like being lied to.

Perhaps Sunny is right that cynical, world-weary bloggers aren't like everyone else, but I somehow don't think so. Just look at how people feel about the Government at the moment.

You might be campaigning for the wrong thing
This is the big one for me. There's a temptation to turn a small problem into a huge one for political gain.

Cameron talks about "broken Britain" as if all our towns and villages across the country were in chaos. In reality there are certain areas that have big problems and most of us are doing OK (when we're not being scared witless by all the tabloid crime stories).

Let's say Cameron prevailed. The wrong policies would be passed. What we actually need is lots of effort being pumped in to deal with problems in specific places. What we'd get is blanket efforts that waste money and tackle the wrong problem: more CCTV in quiet villages, needless curfews on young people, that sort of thing.

In this case, if the number of women experiencing serious violence each year was really 1 in 10, money might be sensibly be spent on large scale awareness campaigns and the sort of solutions that might possibly make a difference to millions of battered and raped women.

If the real number is 1 in 40, resources might be better spent on solutions that effectively target the women affected.

When is inflating the statistics an effective tactic?

Leaving aside morality, I would say that pumping out dodgy stats is effective when you can get away with it. There are three cases when you can.

1. You have big enough media outlets on your side that their support drowns out opposition.

2. No-one cares. For example, you put out a local leaflet and no-one's sufficiently interested to challenge it.

3. Your target audience wants you to be right, so their confirmation bias sees you through.

Tory U-turn on political donations

April 2006. A fresh-faced David Cameron, leader of the Conservative party, has talks with Prime Minister Blair about political donations. Cameron "demands" a cap of £50,000 in donations from any one source in a year.

Mr Cameron says

"I think it's the right way forward to get rid of the impression that somehow rich people or big organisations or trade unions can buy influence or even get a seat in the legislature."

Fast forward to Monday 2nd March 2009. David Howarth MP (Lib Dem, Cambridge) proposes a cap in donations of £50,000 from any one source in a year. Sound familiar?

Thrilled at having Lib Dem support for something that their leader "demanded" less than three years ago, Tory MPs leapt up in support of the idea, leaving the Government isolated.

Oh. Sorry, I must have misread Hansard. Looking again, I see that isn't what they did at all. Actually, the Tories poured cold water on the idea.

Shadow minister Jonathan Djanogly said the proposal "is unacceptable without at the same time putting in place provisions for dealing with trade unions"

Philip Davies (Conservative, Shipley) said " I believe that anybody, including trade unions, should be able to give whatever money they have freely."

Odd how something that the Tories were telling us they'd got all figured out back in 2006 is now very complicated...needs further discussion...not the right time. It sounded almost as if Sir Humphrey himself was perched on the Tory benches.

Must be great to have such strong political principles.

Jack Straw telling porkies in the Commons

From a debate in the Commons yesterday on a cap on donations:

"...people will still be able to buy political influence by donating to political parties. It will be back to cash for honours and people giving £1 million to the Labour party so that they end up in the other place." Pete Wishart MP (SNP)

"...the hon. Gentleman knows very well that there is not a shred of evidence in those allegations." Jack Straw MP (Lab)

Sorry, Mr Straw, but as you know perfectly well, although the allegations have never been proven, there is certainly evidence to support them.

How about this evidence, reported widely at the time and sent to the police.

A peerage costs an average of £1 million in donations or loans to the Labour Party, but a contribution of just £50,000 brings a 50-50 chance of receiving an honour, according to a study published today.

More than half the individuals who have given more than £50,000 to the Labour Party have received an honour.

The study, published by the Bow Group, a centre-Right think-tank, shows that large Labour donors are more than 1,000 times more likely to receive an honour than a non-donor, and nearly 7,000 times more likely to get a peerage.

The detailed analysis of the link between donations to Labour and the award of honours has been sent to John Yates, the Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner, who is in charge of Scotland Yard's "cash for peerages" investigation.

That sort of evidence is bread and butter to investigations of serious organised crime, insider dealing, fraud and the like.

No evidence? Sorry, Jack, you'll have to try harder if you want to fool us.

BMA attacks on Labour bill don't go nearly far enough

Just listened to Hamish Meldrum, Chair of the British Medical Association attacking the Government's plans to allow, at a minister's say-so, any of your private data the State has got its grubby hands on to be shared with any other part of government or any private company.

This is the appalling Coroners and Justice Bill, a piece of legislation so bad that I can only assume it was left to the kid doing work exeperience in the Department of Justice to draft the thing.

In additional to allowing ministers to give your data away, this wonderful piece of legislaton will make you a paedophile if you look at a drawing of a fully clothed 17-year-old watching two 18 year olds having sex.

This bill stomps all over any idea we might have had that the government is our servant. We the people, remember, are not allowed to see how ministers reached the decision to go to war in Iraq (a decision that resulted in hundreds of thousands of lives lost). But Jack Straw wants to be able to pass everything the Government knows about me over to private companies as long as it furthers some Labour policy objective.

So I found listening to Dr Meldrum more than a little frustrating. Yes, he was against the data sharing elements of the bill, but only sharing medical records. According to Dr Meldrum, it those are excluded, he'll be happy.

Not good enough. Not good enough at all.

Thanks to Labour's liberty-bashing-lawfest, there's little information the Government can't get about us if it puts its mind to it. Remember, this is the Government that seriously wants to build up huge databases containing every email we send, every phone call we make, every web page we visit. Then they want to wade in through all that data and play hunt the terrorist or, more likely these days, hunt the person that's annoying us a bit with plans like this.

We are entering a time when the Government of the day will have access to all our communications, all our private data, every website visit, every piece of information given to any branch of Government for any purpose and will grant itself the power to pass all that around both within the State and to private companies as it sees fit.

I'm glad the BMA have taken a position, but they're wrong. It isn't enough just to exclude medical records from the data sharing. That won't protect us. Whole sections of this noxious bill need to be scrapped. This legislation is too badly drafted but, more importantly, too badly conceived.

This must not be smuggled through in the depths of a bill about Coroners. It must not be tweaked. It must not be toned down a little. It must not have a safeguard or two tacked on.

The provisions in this bill for data sharing and over pornographic drawings must be scrapped.

If Jack Straw is convinced we can't manage without them, he should introduce separate legislation where MPs and Lords can properly scrutinise every line and the public can have a full debate.

This bill is just one more example of the contempt Labour holds us in.

They must know everything about us;but we're not worthy to know anything about them. We can't see cabinet minutes on Iraq or a breakdown of MP's expenses but they can read all my emails and hand them over to whoever takes their fancy.

When we complain, we get the old excuses. Of course the Government would never misuse this. Sure, the legislation gives ministers the power to do all this stuff, but they'll always use it responsibly. And so will all ministers in all future governments.

This is a ludicrous position. We're losing any idea of checks and balances, any idea that the power of the state needs to be restrained. When Labour brings forward legislation, their assumption is that the State can be trusted. Anyone who says otherwise is a loony liberal or a conspiracy theorist. Ministers will do the right thing and won't abuse the power they've been given.

That's what the Labour Government claims to believe. Does anyone at all outside the ministerial ranks believe it too?

The truth about the childhood obesity epidemic

It's an unquestioned truth that we're in the middle of a terrible childhood obesity epidemic. Children spend all their time sitting in front of the TV or playing on their games consoles and their getting fat. You can read it in every newspaper from the Guardian to the Sun, the Independent to the Daily Mail. Childhood obesity is growing at an exponential rate. Jamie Oliver is trying to save a generation. The Government is investing millions in it's Change4Life programme. The stakes couldn't be higher: if we fail, our children will live short, unhealthy lives.

Like all unquestioned truths, a bit of digging never hurts.

How do we measure childhood obesity?
What does obese mean? For adults we've an easy, if imprecise, answer: if your BMI is over 30, you're obese. It's more complicated for children. Because children's bodies change so much as they grow, we can't use BMI in the same way.

The traditional approach in the UK is based on percentiles. Parents will know them from the baby books you took to your children's regular weighing. There was a chart showing a spread of expected weights for children. Children who are in the 95th percentile (i.e. the heaviest 5% when the charts were first compiled) are classed as obese.

Using this measure, around 10% of children were obese in 1995, rising to a little over 13% in 2003 - a significant increase. But there's a complication. The percentile charts measure height or weight, not both combined. Although children are heavier today, they're also taller, so this measure probably overstates the level of childhood obesity.

But there is another measure, an international standard set by the International Obesity Task Force. By this measure, the proportion of obese children in 2003 was not 13% but just under 7%. That's a huge difference just on which measurement you use.

Needless to say, those seeking to scare us about obesity levels nearly always use the higher figure and often lump together obese and overweight children to make it even scarier.

Is childhood obesity increasing?
The short answer is "yes, but not as much as you might think".

Between 1995 and 2003 there was no significant change in average BMIs for different age groups. In other words, the average BMI for, say, eight-year-old boys remained pretty stable from 1995 to 2003. That doesn't suggest an epidemic of obesity.

The proportion of children classed as obese did increase over that period, as mentioned above. Whichever measure you use, the increase was significant and perhaps worrying, but hardly an epidemic that should inspire a national panic.

So all our kids are going to die young?
There's no reason to think so. Our children might be a little heavier than in the past, but they also seem to be healthier.

From 1995 to 2003, the number of children suffering from long-term illnesses, including type-2 diabetes, slightly fell. When children and their parents were asked to assess the child's overall health, the responses were more positive in 2003 than 1995 (though this measure is subjective so shouldn't be given too much weight).

Even better, 16-24 year-olds have the fewest weight problems of all. If there was a serious problem of childhood obesity, we'd expect to see it feeding into young adults, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

It's also worth noting that, when young people who exercise a lot are compared to youngsters who just sit around, there's very little difference. From 2002 data of 2-10 year olds, 17% of sedentary children were obese compared to 15% of active kids: a difference, but not a big one.

Is there an obesity problem at all?
Possibly, but it isn't children, it's older people.

I should qualify that by saying that there's very little evidence suggesting being overweight or obese is damaging to your health: heavier people tend to live longer and have better survival rates for a range of medical conditions, for example. Whilst some illnesses are triggered or made worse by being overweight, others seem to have less impact on heavier people.

Among men in the 65-74 age range, 15% were obese in 1993 rising to 29% in 2003 - a far greater increase than for children. This, of course, is a group who grew up playing outside . Similar increases can be seen for most over-35s, both men and women.

What does that mean for public policy?
The Government (ably assisted by the media and all sorts of other bodies) is targeting children as the big at-risk group. You'll have seen the dire warnings on the Change4Life adverts, Jamie Oliver's TV programmes and the rest of it. You'll know of calls to get children to eat more healthily and exercise more.

The evidence we have is that these policies not only don't work, but there's little need for them: children are continuing to get healthier and childhood obesity is seeing at most a gradual increase. As far as I can tell, whether or not we advertise junk food to kids or kick them outside to play in the street more will make little difference to obesity or overall health.

The Government might reasonably want to target older people, but if obesity among that age group is such a huge problem, it would be useful for someone to explain why life expectancy continues to rise.

References
You might wonder why I refer to 2003 - six years ago - for my data. I haven't been able to find good, detailed, data from more recently. Occasionally some new average number pops up in the media, but without a breakdown by age group and sex, it doesn't tell us anything useful.

I've made use of the Department of Health report into obesity in the under-11s and an analysis of that report and other Department of Health data from the Social Institute Research Centre, also published in 2005. This report from the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh is more negative about childhood obesity, but notes that there's almost no evidence about what works in reducing obesity.

Being Human vamp police on extra duty

Being Human, the wonderful vampire/werewolf/ghost in a house show has been showing the rest how it should be done for a few weeks now. It kicked the piss-poor Demons into touch from the first episode but the darker turn of the last few weeks have taken the show to a whole new level.

The paedophile episode (where our friendly vampire unwittingly lends a vamp snuff movie to a twelve-year, with hilarious consequences) was genuinely disturbing and marked the show's move to a darker level.

Yesterday's finale saw the battle between our three heroes and the evil vamps get serious, as ghostie got serious Sylar-style super-powers and the werewolf got into the killing business (cue wonderful comment from head evil-vamp Adrian Lester Jason Watkins comparing a werewolf-vampire smack-down to Top Trumps). Good choice of music, too - hadn't heard that Elvis Costello track for years ("Baby plays around" on the album Spike).

It works not just because it's a good story, funny and scary, but we care about the characters and we want to find out what's going to happen to them, in the tradition of the best Sci Fi.

Talking of which, did anyone spot head vampire Adrian Lester Jason Watkins turning up in the mid-19th century? Just before Being Human on BBC3, there he was on BBC1 in Larkrise to Candleford. It turns out he was a policeman back then too - I guess he must have moved around a bit to throw people off the scent (hang around in one place for thirty years without aging and folks might get a little suspicious). No obvious vampire killings in Larkrise yet, but there's a few people I'll vote to be first up if the BBC hold a phone-in.

Seriously, though, Lester's Watkins' vampire is in a different league to the cardboard cut-out baddies we're used to in shows like Demons and Torchwood. Tragically, he seems to have been eviscerated - I can only hope that there's life after life after death for just one more vamp.

Community sentences are right, but need backing up

Over the last few years, Labour have been sending more and more people to prison, and for longer, compared to the sentences handed out ten, twenty or thirty years ago. The idea that the modern justice system is a soft touch is a tabloid myth.

Across the western world, nearly all nations have seen crime dropping over the last 10-18 years regardless of their penal and crime policies, which strongly suggests that whatever does cause crime levels to vary, the number of people you send to prison doesn't have much effect.

Now, though, comes the claim that community penalties are failing to act as a serious deterrent. According to a small study being reported today on the BBC, it isn't the community sentences themselves that are the problem, it's the lack of punishment if the orders are breached.

It's true of course: a community punishment isn't as bad as being locked in prison (which, in turn, isn't as bad as being tortured to death). Yes, you would feel relieved if you thought you were going to prison and then you got one.

But community sentences - doing unpaid work or undergoing rehabilitation - have the advantage of being much cheaper that sending someone to prison, making the convicted person give something back to the community and improving rehabilitation.

There are two points to make.

Right now, more people than ever are being sent to prison so, apart from the odd case here and there, it's simply wrong to suggest that people are getting a soft option who would have been banged up in previous decades. Rather, we send a huge number of people to prison (especially women) for relatively minor offences where locking them up probably isn't the best option for society.

But, if you are going to have an element of requiring a convicted person to act in a particular way - to turn up for work or rehab at a certain time every day, for example - you must have a realistic sanction when they don't do that and you must enforce it consistently.

Lib Dems bringing up the rear on IT

Despite warnings, the Lib Dem policy on public sector IT is falling behind the other parties. Not that our party's policy is bad, just that no-one's bothering to write one.

Last month I made some suggestions on how the Government should improve the way the public sector procures IT.

Among my proposals were that the public sector buys new software with an Open Source license so an application bought for one part of the public sector can be used elsewhere. Aaron Trevana complained that the Lib Dem hierarchy seemed to have little interest in the topic, a comment I agree with, sadly.

The Tories have been calling for more use of Open Source Software in the public sector, suggesting it could save hundred of millions of pounds. They've stopped short of calling it policy, but at least they're actively promoting the ideas.

Now the Government is getting in on the game. Their latest policy on Open Source Software is a great improvement over the rather limp attempts they had before.

Critically, the latest Government policy includes two of my key recommendations: that new software be licensed for re-use where possible and open standards be strongly encouraged.

It's definitely in the right direction - and important too. Not only does the public sector spend over £12 billion a year on IT, it's also critical to the success of new policies. You want to implement Local Income Tax? If the IT systems won't support it, and getting ones that do will take five years, it isn't going to happen anytime soon.

So both Tories and Labour are talking seriously about this issue and the Government is making policy decisions on it.

What about the Lib Dems? Good question. It isn't that the party's against reforming public sector IT, using more Open Source Software or enforcing open standards. It just doesn't seem to be on the party's radar right now.

People are vaguely aware of it. I recently completed a questionnaire from Lynne Featherstone asking about how I could use my IT skills to help the party and it had a clear focus on Open Source. The party's internal systems use it extensively too (though EARS pretty much requires you to run Windows, Word and Outlook if you want to get the most of out it).

But using Open Source and open standards to make public sector IT more competitive, more open, more flexible and save a few hundred million in the process? The Lib Dems seem to be a bit slow there.

Neither Labour nor the Tories have said everything they should on public sector IT. It's still very important to bring expertise back in-house to the civil service and get a more balanced relationship with suppliers, for a start. There's still an opportunity for the Lib Dems to show some leadership, but can the party grasp the bull by it's nettled horns?

Polyclinics offer no benefits - and where's the money coming from?

Dr Hendrik Beerstecher has looked at GPs surgeries in Kent to see if the Government's favoured option of polyclinics is really the way to go.

Reported on the BBC, Dr Beerstecher has found that, other than small GP's surgeries (fewer than 6,300 patients) , there's no difference between the range of services offered by surgeries of all sizes from medium right up to the big polyclinics.

That appears to challenge the Government's rationale for the new super-clinics: that they will offer services otherwise unavailable to people without a possible long journey to a hospital.

Where's the money coming from?
According to the BBC article

The Department of Health said it was investing £250 million in new services to improve access to GP services.

"This includes 152 GP health centres, open 8am-8pm, seven days a week, which can be used by any member of the public on top of, not instead of, their existing GP surgery," a spokeswoman said.

"We are not imposing super surgeries or replacing existing services.

Do the maths: assuming all the £250 million is going on these new GP health centres (polyclinics), that's just £1.6 million for each one. Doesn't seem like very much, does it? This one in Hounslow cost £18 million to build, and that's before the running costs. At that price, £250 million would buy us not 152, but just 13 polyclinics - nice shiny buildings sitting empty, waiting for funding for ongoing costs.

So are these really new centres? Surely not for that money. Existing facilities being converted? Perhaps, but the Government claims that existing services aren't being replaced.

Three possibilities spring to mind.

It could be that the money isn't there. This 152 is an aspiration based on assumptions about increasing budgets that will gently dissolve in these times of belt-tightening.

Or perhaps there's some complex PFI-type deal going on, so the Government plan is to spend £250 million up front and keep the rest off the books, having it being paid back over the coming years and decades.

Finally, the Government could be expecting the money to come from existing health budgets: money that would otherwise be spent on drugs and treatment to be diverted into bricks and mortar.

Does anyone know the answer?