Free to watch sexy forest animals

Driving to pick up young Gabriel Quist from his music lesson yesterday, I found myself behind a pumber's van with a big photo of a rather attractive naked woman going into a shower. I could see her (pert) bottom and everything.

I was so horrified, I had to follow the van for the next eight miles to recover.

Reading the list of the most-complained-about ads from 2008 was a surprisingly pleasant experience (not quite up with the van, but getting there).

The number one most complained about advert (the domestic violence one for Bernado's) had 840 complaints - I'd guess fewer than one person in every 30,000 who saw the advert complained. Fewer than a hundred complaints were received for the number ten advert.

So good news - surprisingly few people felt the urge to complain about adverts.

And more good news: the ASA didn't uphold the complaints for any of the top ten adverts. One of them (a Walker's Crisps advert where a bus goes under a low bridge and has the top torn off) was withdrawn voluntarily by the company.

It's encouraging that the ASA isn't just giving in to pressure: lots of complaints, so we've got to do something. Plenty would.

Thanks to the ASA, my freedom to watch singing dogs, sexually provocative forest animals, men kissing and Edith Piaf singing has been upheld. Long may it continue.

What we should be doing about swine flu

I've made a few posts in recent days suggesting, in my own very subtle way, that perhaps the media and the Government are over-reacting just very slightly to the news of Swine Flu.

In the normal course of events around half a million people die from flu every year, and a million die from malaria. Given that confirmed deaths from swine flu are in the tens and people seem to be annoyingly recovering, the level of panic in the media is out of all proportion to any immediate or likely risk.

But I'm not saying there's no risk at all. I'm not suggesting that, because bird flu didn't do much, swine flu will be the same - we just can't know that. And just because there have only been a few deaths so far doesn't mean there won't be a lot more in months to come - especially as we get to Autumn and Winter.

And I'm certainly not suggesting, as some are, that it's a beta test by the New World Order intent on killing off a large proportion of the world's population.

No. Swine flu is serious and, as a nasty, virulent and highly infectious flu variant, has the potential to briefly join the significant number of diseases that kill large numbers of people, especially in poorer countries where less medical help is available.

"Potential" is the key. In terms of number of infections and deaths, it's barely on the radar and may never be. It could fizzle out, leaving other strains of flu to kill 1300 people or so every day, as they have done up to now and will doubtless continue to do.

The cynical and hysterical media circus, on the other hand, appears all about scaring people witless to gain readers, listeners, viewers and advertising revenue.

As if to demonstrate it, there was a bizarre segment on yesterday's Today programme. A reporter went to Mexico and found a couple of students who hadn't really heard about swine flu and weren't bothered by it. He proceded to spin the media line, scaring the crap out of them in the process. He ended by asking if they were scared (they were, thanks to him) and leaving a couple of those useless face masks. Job done.

Doubtless manufacturers of those silly masks along with more sensible tissues and medicines will be rubbing their hands in anticipation of soaring profits.

And, to be fair to politicians, they don't have a lot of choice. Faced with blanket coverage, they have to act.

What should they all be doing?

The media could try reporting it sensibly and at least giving a nod to the evidence. I won't hold my breath though - the scary monster is already out of control.

The Government is right to build up stocks of anti-viral medicine like Tamiflu and to work with our international partners to develop a vaccine. They're also right to keep a close eye on developments and make sure hospitals and doctors' surgeries have their plans in place. That's all good, sensible stuff that's appropriate to the risk and doesn't spread panic.

The idea of delivering a leaflet to every home in the country is probably fairly pointless - especially if it just adds to sense of malaise. But perhaps it can be done sensibly.

I could say it's a waste of money, but I'm aware that everyone's going to get a UKIP election communication through their door in the next few weeks and I can't honestly say information about swine flu would be more worthless than that.

Don't close schools or offices, unless you'd do it for a normal flu outbreak.

And of course, as I may have mentioned before, Don't Panic.

Swine flu - feed my porky panic

Apparently illnesses can spread between humans. I had no idea, but this devastating news has left me shocked and worried.

I'm horrified by the 159 people who may have died of swine flu in poverty-stricken, overcrowded Mexico - a nation with a population of 100 million where around 1,300 people die every single day.

Even more disturbing is the idea that I might get flu and then recover a week later. This is something totally new in our society. It's a horrific fate that's befallen literally several people in the UK.

I'm used to living in a world where no-one gets ill, where nobody dies, where viruses are totally unable to pass between humans. Damn right I'm panicking.

Here's what I need.

First, it's essential that the media keep me informed not only of every swine flu death in Mexico, but of every single person in the world who feels a bit ill and might possibly have swine flu.

I don't want to know about deaths from anything else. I really couldn't give a monkeys about the 30,000 or so people who die from normal flu in the USA annually (that's over 80 a day). That's old, boring news.

But if someone gets a mild cough in Spain and it might be swine flu, you'd better make damn sure it's in my morning paper.

Second, I need the Government to spent lots of money on totally ineffectual measures that won't do anything to make me healthier but will keep my sense of panic bubbling along nicely.

I want a phone number I can call every time I cough or blow my nose.

I want some of those face masks. Sure, they don't actually do anything to stop flu spreading but it just looks so cool and scary when everyone's wearing them. You show me a town where everyone's wearing blue masks, I'll show you a town ready to bend over and be sodomised with a splintering broom handle if that nice man from the Government tells them it'll save them.

I want a glossy leaflet through my door telling me how scared I need to be and giving me some obvious advice.

Third, I want to be protected from the facts. I don't want to be told that our massively improved healthcare, medicine and standard of living in the West makes talk of a 1918-style pandemic pure fantasy.

I don't want anyone to let me know that swine flu has been around for at least 35 years, that there have been a number of outbreaks over the years and that it's really just another sort of flu, not hugely different from any other.

I don't want to be told that, even if swine flu does end up killing lots of people (entirely possible - it's a nasty and highly infectious strain of the virus) it's just going to be local peak in the normal run of flu deaths and that if 10,000 people die from swine flu in the UK in one year, it'll barely propel it into the top ten causes of death.

There we are - not to much to ask is it? In fact, I'd say that the media and the Government are doing rather well on all three at the moment. Keep this up and I might even vote for Gordon.

Blunkett: ID card database is a myth

David Blunkett wants an end to ID cards. No, the great man hasn't had a change of heart. He still believes we need to be traced and tracked. He just thinks he's found a cut-price way to do it: merge ID cards fully with passports and make having a passport mandatory.

Futhermore, Blunkett believes concerns over the database state can be put to rest if we just use the existing Passport Agency databases.

Using existing databases to hold the same information already gathered to issue passports could be a way of allaying fears over a new "database of information", one of the key criticisms of the ID scheme.

"People don't worry about the Passport Agency but they do worry about some mythical identity database," he said.

I don't understand what Blunkett could possibly mean by "mythical identity database". Surely he isn't suggesting the whole database is a myth - something that might come as rather a surprise to the small army of civil servants who have been working on the project for the last few years. Perhaps he means that the problems the NO2ID brigade have drummed up are somewhat removed from reality.

Blunkett's confused thinking doesn't end there, though.

His idea that merging an ID card with something very different - a passport - is going to either save money or reduce security and privacy concerns is fanciful.

First you've got the way the database is being changed. If it were to be used for an ID card as well as a passport, it would have to contain new information on millions of people. Tacking on new elements to an existing database is fraught with problems, especially when your database has tens of millions of records.

Second, have a think about access. Remember the point of biometric ID cards is that someone can check it's really you (or, at least, that you aren't using multiple identities). This is going to stamp out terrorism, crime and benefit fraud (no, really, it is: Jacqui says so, it must be true).

If you have your ID checked - say when you open a new bank account or you're stopped by the police - the biometrics are completely useless unless there's something that connects to the database and checks you are really you. Otherwise, you can just get round it the old fashioned way and forge a card with your photo and someone else's name.

But the passport system isn't geared for that. It needs to be accessed by a relatively small number of people. To do what the Government want, every bank official, police officer, hospital worker, benefits office official and sports stadium attendant needs to be able to swipe your card, check your biometrics and confirm they match those stored in the database.

That means taking the passport agency database, with all its legacy cruft, totally re-working the security design around it and then trying to retro-fit whatever you come up with. The result will not be pretty, but it will be expensive.

Then you've got the problem of running a dual system. Are you going to give foreign workers and students UK passports? Didn't think so. You'll need something for them which still has all the checks but very clearly isn't a UK passport.

I can understand where Blunkett, as a fairly non-technical person, is coming from. We need an ID card database, there's a passport database that looks sort of similar and does a vaguely similar job, so why not use that and save lots of money.

It's just a shame the real world doesn't work that way.

Tory troubles and women's problems

All the main political parties, at least at senior levels, would genuinely like to have more women strutting their stuff on the political stage, more ethnic minorities too.

I've no doubt that Cameron would love to have more women in his frontbench team. As the Times mentions today, Cameron would love to have any women in his frontbench team, but it appears can't find any who he feels would be the best person for the job. The Conservative front bench is a female-free zone.

The Conservative approach to increasing the number of female and ethnic minority MPs has been one typical of the party (not necessarily a criticism, if it works, but not an approach the Lib Dems would ever take).

On the surface the party has opposed preferential treatment for women and ethnic minority candidates - everyone on their merits and all that. But behind the scenes, approaches are made, arms twisted, decent seats secured (unlike the Lib Dems, the Conservatives have a good-sized pile of safe seats to drop candidates into - it helps).

Labour's dalliance with all-women shortlists resulted in a healthy number of female MPs entering parliament in 1997 ("Blair's babes"). Unfortunately, many seem to have taken the babe label to heart. To be fair to Labour, quite a few women have emerged who, whilst I might disagree with them politically, are clearly perfectly competent to hold high political office. By my count there are currently seven women in Brown's cabinet.

The Lib Dems have just two women in our frontbench team, and not many more than that in parliament. The party has studiously avoided positive discrimination and all-women shortlists. Even women-only training sessions at conference have attracted some controversy. The work within the party has been about training and enabling.

However, I have the impression that the women we do have are pretty sharp - I'd say that our female parliamentarians are better than those of the other parties, perhaps because the few that have made it have done so with less of a helping hand.

We all want more female and ethnic minority MPs, so what's the answer? Quotas in parliament? All female shortlists? Extra help and training for women? Working behind the scenes to install the right candidates?

If we're being honest, none of those solutions are nearly as successful as any of the parties would like. We know there are plenty of women and people from ethnic minorities who would make excellent MPs and frontbenchers; and we know that there's no shortage of white male parliamentarians who wouldn't be greatly missed.

Everyone seems to have their pet theories on the cause of the problem. Is it down to low expectations - "people like me don't become MPs"? Natural conservatism amongst members in all parties? A belief that the public won't vote for a female or asian candidate, so selecting someone with dark skin could cost your party the seat? Less ability for women to devote the time and money needed to win a parliamentary seat? Women and ethnic minorities lacking the confidence to put themselves forward and elbow their way to the front of the queue?

Getting from knowing they're out there to getting them into Westminster has proven difficult - the parties will do well to learn from the successes and failures of all.

Lib Dems expose Govt's utter distain for our privacy

Phorm is a controversial online advertising service. It monitors your web browsing history - all the different sites you visit - saves the information and uses it to generate advertising that hopefully chime with your interests.

Given the time I spent browsing the Times, Daily Mail, Express and Sun websites, I could be in for some interesting targetting.

Understandably, people were a little concerned on this being forced on users, especially when it was discovered that BT had been running secret trials, collecting the web browsing habits of customers without their knowledge or permission.

The UK Information Commissioners Office has expressed concern. The European Commission has gone further and started legal action.

So what has our lovely Government done. You remember - the people who absolutely aren't riding roughshod over our liberties but are just doing their best to protect us.

Lib Dem Baroness Sue Miller has discovered exactly what they did.

When asked to rule on whether Phorm breached our freedoms, the Home Office asked...Phorm. That's right. Over several months they had discussions with Phorm about it, including sending the company a draft of the Government proposals and accepting amendments they made.

Amongst other emails, a Home Office official wrote to Phorm saying

"If we agree this, and this becomes our position do you think your clients and their prospective partners will be comforted."

Does that sound like a government putting our interests first? Doesn't sound like it to me.

UPDATE: See comments - it's been pointed out that I got the story slightly wrong. The FOI requests that have revealed these emails were made by a member of the public. Baroness Miller has been campaigning on Phorm but did not expose these emails. Apologies for the error.

Now they want to teach our kids to be gay

One of the sweet things about the Daily Mail is that it still clings onto some vestiges of journalistic integrity - sometimes it seems the paper can mislead but can't quite bring itself to lie outright.

A nice example yesterday.

"Pupils as young as four to be given sex education"

the headline starts, immediately conjuring visions of tiny tots being schooled in the mysteries of the Karma Sutra. Reading further down the article, though, it explains that four and five years olds are only going to be taught about different parts of the body. Not exactly radical stuff, though even that was too much for R Page from Scunthorpe:

"CHILDREN as young as 4? Which pervert dreamed this on up?"

If a little boy has a sister or a little girl has a brother, they've probably spotted the whole body part thing already - it really isn't that terrible.

But it isn't really the little ones that's getting the Daily Mail frothing. It's the risk that all this education is going to turn our children gay.

Simon Calvert, of the Christian Institute, said that 'pressing the virtues of homosexuality' could lead to more experimentation which could be 'harmful' to children.

He said: 'What we don't want to see is vulnerable young people being exploited by outside groups which want to normalise homosexuality.'

Norman Wells, of the Family Education Trust, said: 'There are grounds for concern that making PSHE a statutory part of the national curriculum could be used as a vehicle to promote positive images of homosexual relationships in the classroom.

I won't insult you, dear reader, by explaining why this is utter bollocks. You're not stupid; you already know.

What I will say is that, as a school governor, I've seen a lot of the material being taught to our primary school kids and had discussions with teachers and this sort of article, whilst not actually lying, massively mispresents what the kids are being taught.

Personal, social and health education (PSHE) for primary school kids is nearly all about relationships - mostly children's relationships. It's about understanding emotions, how you relate to others and all that sort of thing.

There's a small part of it that covers sex and sexuality, that builds up gradually over the years. In the video I saw, which would be seen and discussed by 10 and 11 year-old children, I think, there's a brief section where, in a cartoon, a couple have sex.

To be honest, that did make me a little uncomfortable; but then I thought it probably should do. If parents stayed completely within their comfort zones, kids wouldn't find out the facts until they were in their 30s.

But thinking back to my childhood, which I can't imagine was greatly different to anyone elses, that age was when we were all starting to think and talk about sex. It wasn't that we were in some idyllic childhood, we were just ignorant.

The new PSHE guidelines seem very sensible to me. Through a mixture of classroom teaching, videos and group discussion children learn about relationships and eventually (not aged four) about sex. If parents really disagree, they can withdraw their kids, though in my school I don't think a single parent has done (all parents had the opportunity to see the material and discuss it with teachers before the lessons).

So, although the Mail story isn't actually wrong, it happily includes nonsense quotes and paints a picture of PHSE in primary schools that I barely recognise.

UPDATE: The Guardian is reporting on another aspect to the changes - that faith schools will be able to preach against homosexuality in certain circumstances.

Malaria v Swine Flu: the smackdown

Yesterday around 2,700 people died from malaria. Around ten people died from swine flu.

The last major flu pandemic, in 1968, killed around a million people. Malaria kills a million people each and every year.

Even after a successful flu jab programme, over a thousand people die from ordinary flu every year in the UK. Not a single person has yet died from swine flu in the UK.

Outside Mexico a number of people are believed to have caught swine flu, in New Zealand, the US, Canada and Spain. They can be treated. All appear to have recovered or be recovering; none has died.

It's true that swine flu is highly infectious and that there's currently no vaccine. But, when you take away the hype, you've got a handful of deaths in one country from a variant of flu that's neither untreatable nor deadly.

Don't panic.

Observer's bizarre campaign against legal highs

The Observer yesterday ran a big piece against drugs that elicit a so-called legal high. Just when more and more people are recognising that the war on drugs has been a complete failure, the newspaper seems keen to compound the problems by making these herbal highs illegal too.

Just making someone happy hopefully isn't a sufficiently good reason to ban something (Gordon's working on it), so where's the evidence of harm?

It's all rather vague.

The toxicologist talks about unknown risks, tablets possibly interfering with medication or contraception and unpleasant side-effects.

The main article mentions one teenaged boy in the US who committed suicide - the drug Salvia may have been a contributory factor. (As an aside, there is a strong and consistent link between media coverage of high-profile celebrity suicides and a general increase in the suicide rate: banning anything that has led to one person committing suicide may not be a sensible approach).

It also shocks us with the salutary tale of regular drug-taking student Jo Puddle, who says of one experiment with salvia

"I thought all my arms and legs had turned into tubes. I really wouldn't recommend it to anyone."

That certainly settles the debate for me - ban them all!

There may well be a case for better regulation of these drugs, just as there is for alternative medicines for which there's often a similar lack of research, lack of consistency and potential danger of side-effects and interaction with other drugs.

But to make them illegal? Ludicrous.

Evil poor, or just very naughty boys?

The story so far. Orwell award-winning blogging policeman Nightjack attacks the "evil poor" - the lager swilling lads swaggering around our council estates, tooled up and demanding "respect" which, for them, means little more than fear.

Feminist blogger Penny Laurie attacks Nightjack on Liberal Conspiracy. Penny says the so-called evil poor are, in reality, victims of poverty. Penny refers to Nightjack's writings as "the barely-literate frothings of the paranoid authorities".

Then Charlotte Gore weighs in (at 3am! I can barely spell my name at 3am, never mind write decent blog posts). Charlotte signs up to team-Nightjack, recalling her seven years living on a council estate and attacking Penny for being out of touch with reality.

Watch the nice middle class people argue about poverty.

As a nice middle class person, I feel duty bound to hold forth with my opinions. Admit it - you're desperate to know what I think.

Whether the people Nightjack refers to are evil, or just victims, doesn't really matter. Not in the immediate sense. Go round to some council estates where these young people and their gangs hold sway. Talk to the vast majority of people who, whilst no angels to be sure, are essentially decent folks just wanting to get by.

You might tell them these young hooligans are evil, or you might stress how society has let them down, left them without hope. So what? Neither answer makes life on the estate any better. Neither answer stops the fear, the crime, the intimidation, the decay of those communities.

These people are causing a great deal of misery - and know they are. It needs tough and concerted action and I've no hesitation in saying that locking them up will often be the answer. In one large local council estate, a fourteen year old boy - cautioned numerous times - was responsible for a staggering one quarter of all burglaries. I'd love it if he could be brought to see the error of his ways in some other way; but locking him up saw the burglary rate plummet and improved the lives of many people.

So by all means tackle the underlying causes - of course we should. But don't let some little scrote off the hook - and leave hundreds of decent people to suffer - because you don't think it's all his fault.

There's one point where I disagree with Nightjack. He notes that this sort of behaviour by the poor has been apparent throughout history, but then buys into the myth that society is collapsing now in some new way. Those relying on their misty-eyed rose-tinted memories of the '60s, '70s and '80s might come to that conclusion. But no serious student of social history who looks at the evidence of life back then should do.

Nightjack then goes onto reject "Dixon of Dock Green" solutions.

"We, the Police are currently responding with the Dock Greenism of Neighbourhood Policing and Community Focus as if turning back our policing methods 50 years will return society to the state of the 1950’s with us. That isn’t going to happen because we are not a big enough lever to move society and we have never been a catalyst. We can only help by keeping the peace, enforcing the law and protecting life and property."

True, it isn't something the police can do alone. But Nightjack underestimates the effect of genuine community policing. I don't mean having a couple of coppers who go into schools. I mean having police embedded day in, day out, playing a part in the life of those communities, so the thirteen-year-old who might go off the rails has known his local coppers for years.

To give a concrete example (and not one the police will like, I'm sure) - how about school crossings? Police used to see children across the roads on their way to and from school, but a few decades back this role was taken over by lollipop men and women (of whom there is a shortage).

Our local lollilop lady knows all the kids' names, from the four-year-olds to the teenagers.

If it were policemen and women who built up that relationship, got to know the kids well (or, at least, made sure the kids thought they did), wouldn't that make a huge difference to stopping kids going off the rails, spotting it early when they did, and taking effective action?

There are other ways - I wrote about some of them here.

To conclude, a small number of people are a blight on our communities, especially in poorer areas. Our number one priority is to improve life for the majority of decent people and if that means tough action and locking people up, so be it.

Although coppers like Nightjack might not approve, there are ways that police (and other agencies) can engage with communities to improve them, and the lives of everyone who lives there.

Finally, we do of course need to tackle poverty, but if that was our only answer to the problems of poor estates we'd be condemning their residents to a lot of suffering in the meantime.

Some early thoughts on Twitter

Having resisted the tempation to Twitter for some time, I finally gave in a few weeks ago. I subscribed to around a hundred people, and have just over fifty subscribing to me.

Here's what I've found

It's handy to pick up information, or be pointed towards fun sites on occasion. Not, to be fair, to the extent that I'd really miss it if it vanished tomorrow.

I might have come across a few bits of news an hour or two earlier than I'd otherwise have managed, or seen the odd video or website I'd otherwise have missed, but that's about it.

I've tried being interested in people's personal lives but without success - even more so for people I don't know personally. I unsubscribed yesterday from Neil Gaiman, Mitch Benn and three or four other well known people I like but really couldn't be bothered with their tweets.

For me as a blogger, sending tweets has been handy, without earth shattering. All my blog posts get automatically tweeted, along with the occasional thought I have that's too short for a full post but I feel like forcing on an unwelcome world. Around 2% of visitors to my blog arrive from Twitter.

As a tool, I think Twitter is probably reaching that first peak of a new technology where everything thinks it's really cool and jumps on the bandwagon (as I've done).

Sometime soon, I think a lot of people will think that the benefit they get from reading all those tweets really isn't worth the time it takes and it'll level off.

But then we'll get better at finding useful things to do with it: seeing it more as a tool than just cool tech. There's a definite value to being able to send short messages from almost anywhere and have them go out to almost anywhere: to the world, subscribers, groups and searchable tags. New add-ons like twibes will expand on this.

For me, Twitter has far too much noise to be really useful at the moment, and the conventions that are building up seem to push us towards receiving lots of tweets we really don't care about.

I'll stick it out for now, but I think I'm going to be taking a more hard-line position on who I subscribe to. If that results in me not having as many people reading my tweets, so be it.

Coalition is Gay

It's that time of year again. Lambs frolic in the fields, birds build their nests and Lib Dems wring their hands over the coalition question. Going into a General Election, should we rule it out completely, or with one party or the other, or perhaps maintain a dignified silence and not be drawn on the question at all.

Writing on Lib Dem Voice, Andrew Lewin suggests that we should make clear up front that any coalition would be dependent on a bill for electoral and constitutional reform.

Charlotte Gore takes a slightly different tack, suggesting we rule out coalition with Labour and use the resulting what about the Tories questions to advance the party's cause.

Here's my take. Coalitions are a bad idea in the Westminster. Don't do them. Don't even think about them.

Why not?

Our parliamentary system has built up rules and conventions over the last two centuries. Ways of doing things, of what can and can't be done. All are based on the idea that single party is in power.

Our media work on the same assumptions, as do the voters more often than not.

That's why coalitions are a bad idea outside times of national emergency. Nothing wrong with them in principle. Plenty of countries work just fine with nothing else. But you've got to have a system that allows them to work, that doesn't fight against them every step of the way.

Just reforming the electoral system isn't enough. To make coalition government work effectively and fairly, we'll need a cross-party commitment to changing the way both government and parliament operates.

And since there's no way anyone's going to get it right from the start, the commitment will need to be for ongoing reform, with an acknowledgement that we'll try some things that won't work very well.

So, if we want a situation that's good for the country and good for the party, don't touch coalitions. It'll end in tears, I guarantee.

What should we do?

Obviously rule out any coalitions with anyone. No cabinet seats. No cosy deals. No agreed programmes.

In the event of a hung parliament, we would work to implement our manifesto as best we can, co-operating with whichever party the electorate had voted for where we can find agreement, opposing where not.

Needless to say, part of that would be to work to put into place the electoral and constitutional changes needed to create an electoral and governmental system that fairly reflects the wishes of the people.

Not perfect, of course, for media management; but then what is? If the media really want to portray you negatively, they'll find a way to do it.

But it has the major benefits of being both a good approach politically, allowing us to talk about policies rather than parties, and being right.

Swine flu - a touch of reality

Number of suspected deaths from swine flu in Mexico since 13th April: 81

Number of deaths from heart disease in Mexico since 13th April (estimate): 2,500

Number of suspected deaths from swine flu in the USA, which was the BBC news headline this morning: 0

Number of people who have died from bird flu worldwide over the last few years (bird flu was predicted by many experts to be a global pandemic that would kill millions): 243

Let's not panic.

UPDATE: a variety of blogger opinion on this one from Norfolk Blogger, Susan Watts on Newsnight and The Lay Scientist. Go and read them, damn you.

Child trafficking up 50%? Maybe not

The Guardian is reporting that the rate of child trafficking has increased by 50% in two years.

Read the actual report and you get a slightly different story.

The study identified 325 potential victims of trafficking, up around 50% on a similar study a couple of years ago.

But

• The numbers are low. If you're talking about something that affects a few hundred people from a population of millions, talking about jumps of 50% isn't helpful.
• They are potential victims. That means they fit a profile where the agencies involved believe that they're likely to be victims. The study rated how likely each of those 325 children are to be genuine victims of trafficking. Slightly over half were rated high or very high probability, but nearly half were low, medium or likely.
  
• The study was done by writing to different agencies (police forces, childrens' services, NGOs). Many did not respond and the quality of data from different sources may be variable. It just isn't sensible to directly compare figures from two years ago to these.
  

This is not a criticism of the study, which explains most of this in detail and does a good job of explaining the limitations and methodology of the study.

It's a criticism of lazy journalism that ignores all of this and plucks out the nice 50% headline figure, when the reality is that child trafficking seems thankfully rare in this country and, from this study, may well have risen, fallen or stayed about the same over the last two years.

Why not treatment to turn straights gay?

Doctors are criticising plans to promote make me straight style treatment at religious conferences. The claim is that psychological treatment can cure two out of three gayers of their evil afflication and, in the process, bring them closer to God and salvation.

This isn't something most mainstream Christians would have anything to do with, but confusingly a group called Anglican Mainstream (which seems to be pretty hardline anti-gay) is promoting it.

It's all very well saving the gays from themselves, but what about straight men.

Whilst our gay compatriots need only turn up to a club or log onto a site like gaydar to guarantee themselves a night (or at least 20 minutes) of hot action, heterosexuals have no end of problems getting laid.

Wouldn't life be simpler if only there was an easy way to turn gay, if only temporarily?

Think of the scene. You're a single man, out for the night with a couple of mates and on the pull. Unfortunately, your luck's out (all the drunk women are taken and all the sober women are, well, sober and won't touch you with a bargepole).

How much easier would it be if you and your mates could pop a pill that turns you all gay for the night and get down to business? Sure, there might be some minor issues the next day, but no more than you'd get with a lady.

Or maybe you're a heterosexual women fed up with all insensitive, crap in bed, bad mannered men. Just pop a pill for a night of drinking from the furry cup and all's well.

That would be something worth promoting.

Run, little child. Run for your life.

"Most children do not exercise enough to keep themselves healthy and prevent obesity, a government survey shows."

So says a report published by Change4Life today. The Government has said that children should do an hour of moderate or high intensity physical activity outside school each day. You get the feeling they're just a step away from adding "...and that hour shall run from 7.30am to 8.30am, when children shall report to their neighbourhood fitness trainer for daily instruction."

One teensy weensy problem. The Government's own research tells us it's rubbish: forcing children to exercise more would have very little effect on obesity (which, as we've discussed before, is not an epidemic or is it making children less healthy).

This report from the Department of Health looked specifically at obesity rates in children who exercise a little and a lot. It turned out that "no significantly significant differences were observed".

I'll explain what that means. The figures showed that children who exercise for the recommended 60 minutes a day were slightly less likely to be obese than those who did little or no activity. But the gap was so small that it could just have been chance and not reflect reality.

Even if it is real, it's still small. The actual figures show that 17.4% of children who do little or no exercise were obese, compared to 14.8% of kids who do the hour a day.

What does that mean for the Change4Life campaign?

Let's suppose you took a thousand children who don't do much exercise and dragged them away from their TVs, Nintendo DSs and toy cars and dolls. Through a mixture of bribes and threats you get them to exercise for an hour a day. How many would stop being obese?

The Government's own evidence suggests just 26 of those thousand children would benefit. 148 were obese before and are still obese afterwards, and 826 weren't obese anyway.

But who needs evidence when you're having a go at kids?

Who's the sickest?

Who's the sickest one?

The twelve year old girl, branded the "sickest girl in Britain" by the Sun after being filmed kicking, hitting and stamping on a dog (thankfully, the dog doesn't appear to have needed to see the vet, though a neighbour did say he thought the dog "must be bruised all over").

Or perhaps the Sun newspaper, inviting us to "Click on the slideshow to see more pics of the horrific attack".

Pictures of a girl hitting a dog - now that's what I call entertainment.

Tory MEPs' expenses rip-off tops £1 million

In 2005, then-Tory North West MEP Den Dover* sued the Sun over allegations he was abusing his expenses. He won. The Sun apologised and handed over some money.

Perhaps The Sun's defence team should have dug a little deeper.

Last summer, Dover was removed from his position as Tory Chief Whip in the European parliament following allegations that he had ripped taxpayers off to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds.

At first, the suggestion was that he'd not technically broken the rules. Sure, he'd chanelled over £760,000 to his wife and daughter. OK, so it was done through a family business. And it was true that his daugher, Amanda, worked a four-day week for a Hertfordshire travel agent which you might have thought made it tricky for her to work full time for her dad too. But even Lib Dem attack dog MEP Chris Davies thought it was a case of moral, rather than technical, wrong-doing.

That changed last November. Den Dover, having been investigated by the powers-that-be at the European Parliament, was found guilty of expenses abuses and ordered to repay over half a million pounds.

As The Times reported at the time

It found that Mr Dover had a conflict of interest in using M P Holdings as a “service provider” for secretarial and parliamentary assistant work. He had declared “no financial interest” in the family-owned company that employs his wife, Kathleen, as secretary and daughter, Amanda, as part-time parliamentary assistant. His wife and daughter are also company directors.

Harald Romer, the Parliament's secretary-general, also informed Mr Dover that the expenses investigation had found that there was “unaccountable expenditure” of more than £500,000.

Mr Dover paid £758,146 over seven years in allowances to the company run by his wife and daughter. The company is understood to have bought two BMWs and paid for repairs on two houses used by the Dovers, as well as making a donation to the Conservative Party last year of £1,200.

That was too much even for Cameron. Dover was kicked out of the party. I don't know whether the £1,200 donation was returned.

Mr Dover had been found guilty, both morally and technically. So he repaid the money, right? Wrong.

Lib Dem MEP Chris Davies again, writing earlier this month:

Rumours are flying that not only has the money not been paid but that the Parliament may not be able to recover it. Trying to deduct it from his allowances won't be sufficient given that his term as an MEP is coming to an end.

Why on earth have the authorities not brought in the police if money has been misused? We should get it back, and Dover should face criminal investigations.

Chris Davies has now spoken in the European Parliament, calling Dover "no better than a thief" (not something you expect to hear from one MEP talking about another in the chamber, but accurate).

Mr Dover is keen to hold onto his ill-gotten gains. Those BMWs don't grow on trees, you know, and as he's standing down as an MEP, his future expenses-abusing potential is presumably more limited.

He's going to court to keep the money. Who knows? Maybe his lawyers will find a technicality to get him off the hook, or maybe Mr Dover (not a young man) will string the process out long enough that it stops being an issue.

Who comes out well from this whole sorry affair?

Tory MEPs seem to be making a habit of ripping off the taxpayer. Giles Chichester, former leader of the Tories in Europe, was also forced to resign last June over a similar situation (the best part of half a million chanelled into a company of which he was a paid director, according to the Times).

That's over a million pounds between Den and Giles - leader and chief whip of the Tories when the money was being taken. Puts bath plugs and porn videos in the shade.

Gordon Brown seems to think the system that's allowed these abuses is so great that we should be emulating it in the Commons - he wants MPs to sign in each day and get a big receipt-free daily allowance just as MEPs are able to do (having signed the paper, several bugger off for the day).

Only Lib Dem MEP Chris Davies seems to really come out of this positively. He's incurred the wrath of his fellow MEPs on more than one occasion by speaking out. Not only against these more flagrant abuses but also the day-to-day abuses perpetrated by far too many MEPs. He's not made himself popular, but he's said things that needed to be said.

UPDATE: Happy to note that the Lib Dem North West number two candidate, Helen Foster-Grime (the one who might be stopping Nick Griffin getting into Europe) is also campaigning on this issue.

* No. You're thinking of Ben Dover. He's someone different.

"Save the Fat Cat" campaign a warning to Lib Dems

The right wing newspapers aren't impressed. Not impressed at all. Unsurprisingly, they think Darling's budget isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread. But the tack they take is worth paying attention to - especially if you're a Lib Dem.

The Daily Mail says:

"Alistair Darling has gambled Britain's future on a 1970s-style tax raid against the rich and a wildly-optimistic forecast of economic recovery.

The Chancellor drove a stake through the heart of New Labour yesterday by stinging top earners with a new 50p tax rate."

The Daily Express warns:

"LABOUR’S punitive 50 per cent income tax raid on top earners could drive high-flyers overseas"

The Times leads with:

"Alistair Darling saddles highest earners with a 50 per cent tax rate"

And the Sun says

"CHERYL COLE’s bid for solo stardom is getting a helping hand from the songwriters behind legendary soul diva WHITNEY HOUSTON."

Let's leave aside the Sun's wise insights for a moment.

The right wing press seem curiously pre-occupied with the impact on the very wealthy. Sure, they wrap it up with talk of rich people fleeing the country, but that's just the line they're selling. At heart, although their readers might not be affected by the top tax rate change, newspaper editors, owners and star columnists will be.

There are valid criticisms of Darling's plan to tax the rich. How much money will it really bring in? Will it help ordinary people? And there's a point the Lib Dems make: closing the loopholes used by those rich people, not to mention large companies, is more important than simply raising their tax rate.

But the idea that millionaires will flee the country en masse is just ludicrous. If you're wealthy enough to be able to flit around the world and not worry about where you live for your job or where your family are, your tax advisors already have things in hand.

There are many things to criticise about the budget, and Labour's stewardship of the economy over the last decade, but driving all the rich people out of the country isn't one of them.

It's a warning for the Lib Dems, though. Our party, too, has just announced plans to have people earning over £100k paying more tax. Should the right-wing press ever care enough about us to notice, we should be under no illusion that we'll face similar attacks, whatever the reality of our plans.

It shows their true colours. Whilst painting themselves as the friend of the common man, it's clear the Mail and Express are more interested in making sure the very rich become even richer.

The "save the fat cat" campaign has started; the Lib Dem plans to put £700 in the pockets of low and middle income earners may be lost in the noise.

The bits of the budget you missed

As is the way with the budget, opposition politicians have little option but to give their instant pre-recorded response to a budget speech that itself is a summary of several hundred pages spread across numerous documents.

To relive all the excitement of yesterday, you can read Darling's speech here. The more gruelling in-depth stuff (defined as "the bits I didn't really understand") are here.

I guess I could have weighed in with my opinion on the budget but since I'm not very good at the economics stuff and certainly don't understand the detail, I can't imagine that would add a great deal to the sum of human knowledge.

Instead, here are some nuggets from the full budget report, some of them tweets from yesterday, some not.

We start with a rosy perspective on the Government's achievements with the welfare state:

"Over the last 11 years the Government has transformed a largely passive welfare state into an active one, based on a clear framework of rights and responsibilities."

Not sure that's quite how it went down. The report's kind enough to flag up the intention to make sure everyone gets help, whether they want it or not.

"the next stage of reform ... will require nearly everyone to take up the employment support available to them."

Next a change to the Local Housing Allowance. Introduced last year, the aim was to help poorer people pay rent to private landlords. The big deal, as I understand it, was that everyone who claimed it got the same amount of money. If you chose to rent a cheap room, you might have a bit spare. If you wanted somewhere plusher, you'd have to put in some extra money to cover the gap. It was meant to be fairer.

Unfortunately, that fairness seems to have been a bit pricier than anticipated.

"The Local Housing Allowance (LHA) was introduced in April 2008, and costs have exceeded the planned expenditure for this policy. To bring the cost into line with what is affordable, whilst still ensuring all recipients can afford their rent, the Budget announces that from April 2010 there will no longer be scope for anyone to receive more LHA than they have to pay in rent. Existing claimants will move onto the new arrangements on the anniversary of their claim."

Although being portrayed as a cost-saving tweak, this seems to negate the whole reason for introducing the LHA in the first place: admitting that the new policy is a failure after just a year.

Building Schools for the Future (BSF) is the huge, and controversial, capital building programme to refresh the country's secondary schools. Until now, local authorities have been assigned a wave which dictates when they're due to get their shiny new schools from those nice building companies and their partners. It's running well behind schedule (surprise, surprise) so local authorities will be interested to see that the wave scheme is being scrapped.

"the Government has decided to move from the “wave” based model used to date, so that local authorities who are currently discussing new BSF projects with Partnerships for Schools can join the programme on a rolling basis, in line with available resources and only if Partnership for Schools assesses that they are ready."

Whether that results in BSF running more smoothly remains to be seen. It has lots of problems and I can't see a little timetable juggling fixing them all.

Local authorities will doubtless also be thrilled to learn that they're to make even more efficiency savings over and above what's already been agreed, plus whatever they've had to do to make ends meet as spending settlements have tightened.

"As a sign of their commitment to improving efficiency, local government and the police will both deliver a further 1 per cent of efficiency savings beyond the level of savings committed to at the 2007 CSR, with all savings recycled back to front-line services."

Town Hall Trebles all round.

Finally, some good news: we're all going to have really slow broadband by 2012.

"the Government will pursue Universal Service in broadband, at a speed of 2 Megabits per second, by no later than 2012"

I can hardly wait.

That's all - see you again next year.

Darling may force young adults into training

In today's budget announcement, Darling announced

"a guaranteed job, training or work placement for all 18-24 year olds who
reach 12 months unemployed to ensure no young people are left behind due
to long-term unemployment;"

Sounds good. I thought I'd find out some details so, after some hunting around, I came to section 5.26 of the main budget report.

Here's what it says

"guaranteeing everyone aged between 18 and 24 who has been claiming JSA for 12 months a job, work placement or work-related skills training for at least six months."

Jobseekers' Allowance is not normally available to 16 and 17-year olds. There are exceptions, apparently: if you're forced to live away from your parents or have a child, you might qualify for a short time.

But very few people who turn 18 will have been able to claim JSA for 12 months, so in reality this is not a pledge about 18-24 year olds, it's 19-24 year olds. There you go, we've just reduced the number of young people who'll benefit by 14%.

How will it be paid for? To be honest, I'm still trying to track that one down. In his speech, Darling mentioned "over £260m of new money" but it's not entirely clear what that covers, or over what timescale. Frustratingly, I haven't found reference to the £260 million in the main budget report.

Will the money really encourage the private sector to create enough training places? With the best will in the world, taking on a young trainee in most companies is a burden: in six months they're just not going to learn enough to be productive and the more menial jobs I used to do decades ago simply don't exist now.

Darling suggests that if the private sector isn't up to the job, the public sector will just have to take whoever's left over. Lucky them.

But here's the really good bit, from the full budget report

"If it becomes necessary to do so, the Government will work with local authorities and other delivery partners to determine how participation in one of these options could be made mandatory;"

Yay. Not only is Darling considering forcing adults to do six months of training, but he's got it in mind to have local authorities do his dirty work for him.

So you're a local authority, already stretched. Darling is suggesting that some 19 year old who's never had a job is going to be forced to "train" with you for little or no pay for six months. Sounds like a recipe for success to me.

No terror evidence but kick them out anyway

Remember the students arrested in the North West a couple of weeks ago, after Bob Quick flashed his secret information to the media?

As I predicted at the time*, no evidence has been found.

But because the operation was so high profile, with the most senior politicians in the land speaking out on how terrible these people are and how we need to clamp down on foreign students, something must be done. In this case, that something is to kick most of students out of the country on the grounds of national security.

Joe Otten has suggested that there's nothing wrong with arresting these people, even if the chance of a terrorist attack was small. He's right. Unfortunate as it is to disrupt people's lives, it's a price that has to be paid to keep everyone safe.

But if you or I were wrongly arrested and, after two weeks, no evidence against us had been found, we'd expect to be released and allowed to get on with our lives.

Not here.

The State has labelled these men as terrorists. They made sure their photographs were across the media. And now most of them are being thrown out of the country.

If this country still works on the basis of innocent until proven guilty, this seems like a high price to pay for innocence. I can understand the police might feel that the guys are still up to something, even though no evidence has been found. Fair enough - keep them under surveillance and continue the investigation.

This smacks of being a face-saving exercise. Lots of publicity. Lots of money spent. Unwise words from senior politicians. Kicking nine of them out of the country at least allows the Government to imply they're guilty of something, and let's not worry about evidence or proof.

This cock-up has not made us any safer. It may have served to radicalise a few more muslims. It may have given the public a false view of terrorism. But it's done nothing to avert any terrorist attacks.

Would the error have been avoided without Quick's unfortunate flashing incident? Jacqui Smith claims not, saying it delayed the swoop only by a matter of hours.

We've seen it with these arrests. We've seen it with the ludicrous and much-lampooned "inform on a neighbour" poster campaign. Jacqui Smith's approach to tackling terrorism is the big gesture, the huge neon sign saying "WE'RE DOING SOMETHING", the theatre.

Does the Government have any clue about how to actually protect us from terrorism? Who knows.

(* all gloating rights reserved)

What if "fat" was "disabled"?

Writing in Monday's Guardian, Leo Hickman delivers an eco-friendly finger-wagging to overweight people

"But for me the most interesting aspect of the study is that it shows how the obesity debate is now starting to be analogous to how the smoking debate ended up playing out. At first, being overweight – like smoking - was labelled as being something that was damaging to just you. The attitude was: if you want to eat or smoke yourself to an early grave then be my guest. But now being overweight is increasingly being seen as a selfish act in which – as with the effects of passive smoking - you are not just having a negative impact on yourself but also those around you, be it through increased healthcare costs (both through overall taxation and rising insurance premiums) or, as is now being claimed, increased environmental costs.

Will this now mean that future carbon taxes and regulations place a disproportionate burden on the overweight and obese? And, by extension, will those who remain underweight benefit from the much-predicted "polluter pays" society where the carbon cost is embedded into everything we do or buy? It's something to chew on."

So here's my question about this nasty little attack, wrapped as it is in oh-so-reasonable sounding Guardian language.

What if we were talking about disabled people? They cost us far more money than us non-disabled folks, with all those extra health bills, not to mention all the changes we're forced to make to public buildings so they can get in. All those ramps, handles, automatic doors and disabled toilets cost a fortune.

From the logic of the paper published yesterday, many disabled people will be damaging the environment too. If being a bit fatter means cars and planes pollute more to transport you, think how much worse being in a wheelchair would be - not to mention the medication and additional equipment that many disabled people need to live their lives.

Ah yes, you say, but there's a big difference: disabled people are victims, whereas we all know fatties are to blame for their condition.

Which is a perfectly reasonable position to take, as long as we're not going to worry about little details like evidence.

Because we need to avoid the huge amount of evidence that your size and shape has far more to do with your genetic make-up than the amount you eat and exercise.

Obvious when you think about it. If weight was linked just to calorie intake and excercise, people would find it as easy to lose weight as to put it on. But we know that isn't the case. People on low calorie diets often struggle to shift the weight, then put it back on in a shot.

What do we mean by "overweight" anyway?

We have a nice rule of thumb that "normal" weight is a BMI of between 20 and 25. Higher than 25 and you're overweight.

But is that any more than a convenient label? Why not say a BMI of over 19 is overweight? Or a BMI of over 35?

Do the cream-bun-muchers die sooner? Perhaps that's what we mean by "overweight" - above the optimum weight to live the longest life you can.

Unfortunately, that definition doesn't work. A large body of evidence tells us that moderately overweight people live longer than those in the "low normal" range BMI 20-22.5. When you hear that list of all the diseases and cancers you're more at risk of if you're overweight or obese, they always miss off the substantial list that you're less at risk from.

We are in dangerous territory. The scientific evidence is out there: study after study. And yet our society, our media, and much of the medical profession believe dangerous untruths. Believe that overweight people have only themselves to blame, that they are unhealthy, a drain on the State and now responsible for global warming too.

So I ask again - what if it were disabled people?

Overweight? You're to blame for global warming

The Sun is one of a number of media outlets giving a somewhat hysterical reaction to some research from Dr Phil Edwards and Ian Roberts at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Apparently overweight people (or "murderers" as it appears they should now be known) are responsible for all the floods, fires, storms, droughts and shrinking ice caps caused by global warming.

The actual research paper hasn't yet been published (and reading the full paper will cost money)*, so I assume the media are basing their reporting on the press release, as usual. The press release may or may not accurately reflect the research which itself may or may not be any good.

I'll be very interested how the study proves that overweight people drive and fly more than the slim beautiful non-planet-killers. I'll look forward to seeing the evidence that overweight people eat a lot more, when study after study has shown that your body size and shape has a lot more to do with genetics than either what you eat or how much you exercise (just one reason why losing weight is very difficult and putting it on is easy).

But let's assume, just for fun and against all the odds, that the basic story is true.

The claim is that the carbon footprint for overweight people averages 11 tonnes of CO2 per year, compared to 10 tonnes for someone who doesn't kill a polar bear with every slice of cake they eat.

That, we're told, adds up to a staggering one billion extra tonnes of CO2 worldwide because, you know, there are one billion overweight people in the world.

Ooops. First schoolboy blooper. Is every overweight person in the year churning out an extra tonne of CO2? That would mean an overweight person in China, India or Africa used not ten percent more CO2 than her slim compatriate but several times more.

But why pick on overweight people? Yes, I know, they're all weak-willed fools killing themselves and their children, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

But if we're going to scream at people for behaviour that increases their CO2 emissions by less than ten percent, surely there's a long queue of folks we should be hurling abuse at long before we get to overweight folks.

How about frequent fliers? Commercial drivers? People who like to keep their houses warmer than normal? Those annoying slim people who can eat whatever they like and never put on any weight?

This story is nothing more than another chapter in the ongoing and evidence-free stigmatising of overweight people. For all the talk of being responsible, the glee with which the media launch these baseless attacks smacks of a witch-hunt.

* Update: thanks to the anonymous commenter who found the published paper here.

Three cheers on tax cuts, but the devil's in the detail

Nick and Vince are clearly on the right track with their announcement today of a £700 tax cut for low and middle-income earners, to be paid for by those with piles of cash.

True, there are a fun bunch of philosophical debates we could have about it (and perhaps we should - libertarians and social liberals seem to be getting on worryingly well at the moment and it can't be healthy), but it looks good to me.

If ever there was a time for the wealthiest to pay a little more tax to help out those at the bottom, now must surely be it.

So a good idea, and a great campaigning tag. I can see the Focus leaflets, and perhaps the mocked-up cheques going through letter boxes (probably not worth delivering anywhere with a drive too long to walk up).

Will it really work, though? How confident are we that all the wealthy folk will pay up nicely and won't find some other way to avoid paying tax? A challenge for another day, perhaps.

£15 billion savings: how will we tell if it's real?

I'm sure I'm not the only one for whom alarm bells were ringing this morning when I heard of Darling's plan to cut public spending by £15 billion over the next few years.

It's always the easy option politicians turn to (the Lib Dems too). What's not to like about getting rid of a few civil servants, cutting some waste and making the system leaner and more efficient?

All worthy aims, and great if they can really be done. But there are reasons to be suspicious of all such plans, especially when they come from this Government, who's track record isn't, to put it mildly, all it could be.

Here are the questions I'd ask of any party proposing such cuts:

• Has this been announced before? Labour has a bad habit of announcing the same spending plans several times over, in slightly different ways, to give the impression it's new money being spent or saved.
• Real savings or shuffling money around? Another Labour trick has been to proudly announce cuts in one area, but not mention that thy're more than cancelled out by increases elsewhere. Civil servants are sacked, and replaced by more expensive consultants (paid for from a different part of the budget). Work is taken away from a Government department and given to a private contractor.
• What's the impact on service? HMRC, the department that collects our taxes, has seen big cuts. The result is more mistakes, more delays and more wealthy people successfully evading tax.
  
• What's the plan? Talking about civil service cuts and efficiencies makes a great soundbite, but where's the detailed plan? Throwing a vague requirement over the fence to the civil service is asking for it to be worked around. If you want to really achieve anything, you need a bit more detail about where and how the cuts are going to be made.
• What's the timescale? Vague aspirations don't need timescales - that saving's always going to arrive next year. If it's a serious commitment, there'll be a clear timescale for the whole £15 billion, or at the very least a statement of when we'll have one.
  

We've been burnt by this Government before - Labour are the masters of the annoucement that isn't really an announcement at all, so let's be cautious. This proposed saving might be a tiny fraction of the debt Labour have run up, but that's never stopped them playing these games before.

Defending liberty since 1945

As Labour have steadily eroded our liberties over the last decade, it's fallen to the Liberal Demcrats to take on the role of protector. From steadfast opposition to ID cards to Chris Huhne's Freedom Bill and the Lib Dem MPs acting as observers on the ground at t G20 protests, the party has shown itself to be committed to the task.

Looking back at past election manifestos, I see the hard evidence that it's nothing new.

Here's what the Liberal Party's 1945 manifesto says

It is always the task of Liberals to exercise that eternal vigilance which is the price of freedom. Before the war our Members of Parliament challenged every encroachment upon the liberty of the subject. When we joined the Coalition in 1940, Sir Archibald Sinclair obtained a promise from the Prime Minister that it was the Government's intention to preserve in all essentials a free Parliament and a free Press, and that the Emergency Powers (such as preventive arrest under Regulation 18b and the power to suppress newspapers) would disappear with the passing of the emergency.

In the next Parliament, whether in or out of office, we shall continue to do our utmost to safeguard and enlarge civil liberties. Power must exist in any modern State. But it need not be arbitrary power. In this country the citizen has two essential safeguards against in justice and oppression, namely: democratic control, through Parliament and elected local authorities, over all those in official positions, and the right to appeal to the ordinary Courts of Law whenever a Minister or an official exceeds his authority. Both these safeguards we shall strenuously maintain.

The Liberal Party might have been on the right moral track in 1945, but the electorate weren't persuaded and they came out with just 12 seats (a number the party wouldn't improve on for nearly thirty years).

(Apologies for the retro 24 hours of blogging - something to do with the sun, I expect. Normal service will resume shortly).

Politics, morality, sex: it was better in the old days

Is participation in politics really declining? Membership of political parties certainly is - much to the regret of all of us activists.

Turnout in General Elections is down too, though that's less clear-cut. The last election where there was serious doubt over the result was in 1992, which had a pretty respectable turnout. (Political statistics geeks will know that Major's Conservatives secured substantially more votes in 1992 than Blair managed in any of his three "landslide" victories).

But does any of that prove people are less interested in politics than the olden days. I'm talking about party politics here - I'm not about to fly off into some fantasy about the rise of pressure groups (always dubious at best when you consider the decline in trades union membership).

Could it be that people are no less interested in politics than they ever were - perhaps more so? Might the decline in political party membership have more to do with parties losing their 20th century role as social clubs than a drop in political interest? Might the fall in voter turnout be a combination of a lack of a real contest and, perhaps, fewer people voting because it's just what we do rather than because they've any real interest in politics?

The 1940s are often seen as a political high-point: Labour thrashed Churchill's Conservatives in 1945 with grand plans for the welfare state, a command economy and much of the trappings of socialism. There was real choice and a real sense of change being in the air.

But did that filter down to the ordinary people, the ones we'd love to see getting more active in politics today? There's some evidence not. In a survey of 200 working class soldiers and their wives, conducted between 1943 and 1946, only 21 of the men and 7 women said they "took an active interest in politics".

Just like today (and pretty much every other period in history), most thought that politics wasn't for them, they didn't understand it, saw all politicians as rogues and political parties as self-serving. (In the midst of whatever the latest scandal might be, it's always worth remembering that there really was no golden age when the people loved their good, honest politicians - live with it).

What did people want back in the 1940s? Not to sit around the dinner table discussing socialist theory, or the great questions of state. They wanted much the same things we do today: a decent home of their own with privacy and mod cons, a good steady job, to live around people like them and away from rougher areas.

One 1940s headmaster, concerned about the perils of youth clubs wrote "The world is sex mad and they are the outcome of the sex urge, the war, the cinema, evil books, a debased art and music and an uneducated parentage." What modern Daily Mail journalist could have put it better?

Although many women found themselves trapped in loveless marriages where sex was just one more household chore, not all the men were so hard done by. Far more men used prostitutes back then, and there were other entertainments. I especially like this rather charming diary entry from a visitor to London's famous Windmill theatre.

"The first scene included a sideways view of a nude and a front view of a woman who's breasts were bare. I delayed masturbation until another para-nude appeared..."

Too kind, I'm sure.

Where does this all leave us? To me the main message is that things are rarely as simple as they seem. It's very easy to jump onto an idea of how things were better in the olden days, whether it's morality, political participation or whatever else. And things do change over time, so that can't be rejected.

But those assumptions should always be challenged. It could well be that the real differences aren't what we expect at all.

(Hat tip to the book "Austerity Britain" by David Kynaston for the 1940s social research and diary entries).

BBC Radio 7 strikes a blow for feminism

Half the fun of listening to classic comedy on radio 7 is the social commentary. What was and wasn't acceptable material for comedy in the 1950s?

As we all know, the writers had to use all their skills to squeeze filth and depravity past the BBC censors; but it was the days before feminism and the attitudes to women weren't quite as they are these days.

Take It From Here was written by Frank Muir and Denis Norden and, these days, is probably most fondly remembered for a sexy young actress by the name of June Whitfield who made Eth her own in The Glums. In today's episode, Eth has her heart set on honeymooning in Paris until Mr Glum, being too mean to pick up the tab, persuades her that hubby-to-be Ron will have his head turned by all those Parisian women.

My favourite is the song, though. A little-known number called "I got a wife", just the fact that it's sung as light entertainment says volumes about the norms of the time.

Here's the original on YouTube.


I prefer the Keynotes own version from TIFH which, until 24th April, you can listen to here (it's three hours long, so you might want to zip along to 2h42m unless you've far too much time on your hands).

There's a PhD thesis in there somewhere.

Kids told cupcakes and consoles as bad as smoking

Today's children are healthier than ever before, and predicted to live longer than any previous generation. Surely reason to celebrate.

Not if you're the Government, Cancer Research UK, Diabetes UK or the British Heart Foundation.

If you're one of those groups, you see only an opportunity to pile more stigma and fear onto our young people.

Over the years we've become used to the increasingly dire warnings on cigarette packets. Fair enough, perhaps: the evidence supports them and it's targetted at adults.

But I'm genuinely shocked at this new campaign that effectively puts those "Smoking can kill" style messages in front of children. Not for smoking, but for eating cupcakes and playing games on a PS2 - neither activities for which there's a shred of evidence of harm.

Let's just remind ourselves of some of the facts.

Type 2 diabetes is incredibly rare, with fewer than 20 children from every million being diagnosed each year, and most of those coming from families with a history of the disease.

Evidence is conflicting on whether being overweight or obese reduces life expectancy at all, but the evidence that it does suggests the reduction isn't great. A recent study in the Lancet found that being obese reduced your life expectancy by three years. Do these adverts really say to you "carry on like this and you might die at 69 instead of 72"?

Finally, the childhood obesity epidemic is simply a myth. Our young people are, on average, slightly heavier than they were a decade or two ago, but it's not a lot.

Cancer Research UK are starting to make a habit of promoting scare stories that aren't backed up by the evidence, as I noted here and here. The charity seems perfectly happy to play fast and loose with the facts if it means they get a story in the papers.

This whole campaign stinks. I can understand concern about obesity and inaction, though I don't think the evidence really supports it (for children, at least).

But to be putting out this sort of scary, alarmist and downright nasty advertising you ought to have a damn good reason and they simply don't. The message is a lie.

The Government is spending millions of pounds stigmatising our young people. They're fat, lazy, unhealthy, anti-social and criminal. I don't believe that's the intention of Labour ministers; but it's the result.

We owe our children more than scary lies.

(Hat tip to JunkFood Science).

Congratulations Prince Philip

Congratulations to Prince Philip who is now our nation's longest ever serving royal consort. At 57 years and 70 days, he beats Queen Caroline, wife of every American's favourite king, George III.

Americans should, of course, be praising George III for being the spark that lit the fire of independence and started them on the road to where they are today - where would the USA be today if Britain's rulers had been more conciliatary?

Prince Philip also gets a pretty raw deal. He's made the occasional, often exaggerated, faux pas but who wouldn't? Which of us could really say that we could be going around the world for sixty years, a time when there have been huge changes in societies everywhere, and not say the wrong thing from time to time. The Queen....and who else?

Yet comedians who claim to pride themselves on their up-to-date humour still really can't get past the slitty-eyed comment. He said it in 1986, for heaven's sake. I'm fairly sure I spent that whole year talking complete bollocks.

So congratulations Prince Philip. You've shown yourself to be human and flawed from time to time. I doubt we'd find much we had in common if were to sit down for a chat, but you've spent well over sixty years serving our country and for that I salute you.

Family breakdown? Blame the Tories

The 2009 Social Trends survey has been released, giving journalists everywhere the opportunity to cherry-pick data for a quick story supporting whatever editorial line they want to push, safe in the knowledge that few people are going to plough through the 283 page document to see if they're right.

Far be it from me to buck the trend - over the next few days I'll be reading the survey and blithely cherry-picking.

Today it's Chaper 2 of the report: Households and families.

What interests me here is how much hasn't changed, at least in the last twenty years. I had the distinct impression from some of the media reports that it was revealing some collapse in society.

For example, The Sun picks out that, for the first time, more young women are having children than getting married. True, but mainly because people are putting off getting married until slightly later - there' no big change. The Daily Mail actually gives a better overview, still focussing on the family breakdown stuff.

Here's what I haven't seen reported anywhere.

Most of the social changes the right wing press are so concerned about really happened in the Thatcher years, the 1980s. The main story of the last twenty years is of things staying roughly the same.

Take marriage. It's true that fewer people are getting married today than at any time since the 1890s, but look at when the change happened. It was when Thatcher was in Number 10 that the numbers getting married really crashed. Marriage got a little more popular at the start of the new millenium and has dropped off again in the last few years.

The drop in the popularity of marriage was huge during Thatcher's reign - the biggest peacetime drop on record. The last decade has seen the situation remain roughly the same.

We sometimes hear of an increase in divorce (another "broken Britain" theme). In fact, these figures show that divorce rates have fallen slightly since the Tories left power in 1997, with the biggest drops being amongst people married for less than a decade.

About the same number of people are getting married now as in the early '90s, but fewer of those new couples are divorcing - surely something for the right wing press to celebrate.

There's been a lot of mention, too, of the number of thirty-somethings still living with their parents. What I haven't heard is that the number has fallen since 2001. Unsurprisingly, though, the main reason young people give for not flying the family home is not being able to afford it.

Another trend talked up by journalists is the increase in people living alone.

The Mail leads on it, saying

"The share of the population that lives alone has doubled since the 1970s, the annual official portrait of Britain said."

What the Daily Mail didn't mention is that most of that change happened prior to 1991, and there's been almost no change at all since 2001.

The big move towards more people living alone was in the '70s and '80s, much of it under the Conservatives.

I'd suggest you read it yourself rather than take my word for it.

But if you want my summary, it's that the biggest changes away from marriage and families happened under Thatcher in the 1980s, and the story since then has been gradual stabilisation. There was less change in the '90s and less still in the 2000s.

One more item caught my eye. I don't think it will be a surprise to anyone, but it's worth mentioning that the evidence backs up what's been generally accepted for a while. People who identify themselves as black or mixed race are far less likely to be married and far more likely to be lone parents than other ethnic groups.

I said I was cherry-picking and I meant it. There's plenty more in the chapter, but I didn't think it was very interesting. You might disagree, or spot some nugget I've missed.

Next time, chapter 3 - education and training. Try to contain your excitement.

What Daily Mail readers said about Amazon

Over the last few days something of a scandal has brewed as books with a gay theme were removed from the bestseller lists, even when they contained no sexual content. Similar books featuring heterosexual sex were not affected. It's unclear whether this was a deliberate policy from Amazon or, as the company now claims, some sort of glitch.

Whichever, the company has 'fessed up and corrected the issue.

But what's going on with the Daily Mail's online comment section on the story? There are the usual range of knee-jerk homophobic comments, but they're all voted down. The comments voted up are generally anti-Amazon and vaguely intelligent.

So on the comedy side we have such gems as

"I do not believe in censorship in general. However, the gay/lesbian lobby has been able to extend their influence way beyond their numbers in society. One only has to look at TV, and understand "that every programme must have one". And, to government to understand why this is permitted."

"Homosexuality IS an adult subject. The age of consent is 16 so children should not be subjected to this kind of material."

"It's good to hear of a company supporting traditional values, perhaps there is hope yet."

"A return to morality is long overdue, well done."

"About time we were stopped being force fed the gay/lesbian agenda."

"Soon homosexuality will be compulsory."

"Good for Amazon. About time fought back against all the PC idiots."

But then one of the more-voted-for comments is

"This is ridiculous. Just because a book is written by a LBGT author does not automatically mean it is 'sexually explicit' and unsuitable for a "family" audience (irrespective of the fact that under 18s can't buy from Amazon anyway). And this crazy system means that Stephen Fry's autobiography is unrated but Lolita is rated. I know which I'd give to a family.

Not to mention the fact that even if the principle is to make it 'family-friendly' what then happens to the gay children who are looking for books about/by other LBGT people?!? Anything which can be accessed by walking into Waterstones' gay/lesbian section should be equally accessible online; Amazon have no right to set themselves up as the thought police.

Thank goodness they're correcting this. One can only hope that it does Amazon more damage than the authors in the long run."

All very curious. Is our sane commenter a mole from Stonewall, swiching "LGBT" for "LBGT" to fool people? Or is the Daily Mail genuinely attracting refugees from the Guardian?

The Lilith lap dancing report is not evidence

Eaves is a London charity providing housing and support to vulnerable women.

Back in 2003, the Lilith Project, an Eaves offshoot, produced some research suggesting that the existence of lap dancing clubs leads to more rape and sexual assault.

This is in danger of becoming one of those pieces of research that starts to take on a life of its own, with the conclusions being quoted as fact when the actual paper is long forgotten.

I'd quite like to put a stop to that. Whatever your opinions on lap dancing clubs might be, quoting this report as fact does you no good.

Libby Brooks did it in the Guardian and I see Caron has referenced the same statistics too.

So let's take a look at the report, which you can see here.

The first thing to say is that, although it's a perfectly decent little paper from a local charity, it isn't proper research. Statements are made throughout with no effort to present supporting evidence.

The first line is wrong, which probably isn't the greatest start:

"Lap dance arrived in Britain in 1997"

No, lap dancing venues have existed in Britain since at least 1995.

To get a flavour of how rigorous the research was, take this passage from page 7:

"Between April 2000 and March 2001 Camden recorded 2730 noise complaints within the borough. A quarter of these complaints related to commercial noise coming from pubs, clubs and bars at night. It can be no coincidence that Bloomsbury and Holborn, the areas that had the most complaints, also have the greatest number of striptease and lap dancing clubs in the borough,"

That's not research, it's just invention. Were the complaints actually related to the striptease and lapdancing clubs? Were the differences between Bloomsbury, Holborn and the other areas statistically significant, or could they have just been chance?

No attempt is made to show a real link. Vague assertions are made around the "it can be no coincidence that..." phrase. Of course it could be coincidence - unless you've made the effort to show otherwise.

So lets turn to these figures.

The paper claims

"Comparing the rape and indecent assault figures for 1999, before the establishment of Spearmint Rhino and Secrets Holborn, Finchley Road and Euston, and 2002

Since 1999 rape of women in Camden has increased by 50%
Since 1999 indecent assault of women in Camden has increased by 57%"

The Guardian has published a correction: since quoting these figures its been told that they're wrong: the correct figures are a 33% increase in rape and a 55% increase in indecent assault.

We all know that rape an indecent assault is a complex issue. Reported, unreported; by stranger or someone known to the victim and the causes endlessly debated.

Here's what the report implicitly claims. In a London borough with the population of over 200,000, there were 72 reported rapes and 161 reported indecent assaults in the year 1998-1999. In 2002 there were 24 more rapes and 89 more indecent assaults.

Without any analysis, further research or justification, the Lilith report simply assumes that those 113 additional rapes and indecent assaults can be explained by the higher number of lap-dancing clubs in the borough. Clearly no other explanation is possible; certainly nothing else is worth investigating or ruling out.

A first year university student would be embarassed.

So please, please stop quoting the report. It provides an opinion, nothing more. It isn't research and it certainly isn't evidence of anything at all.

If anyone does come across decent research into the effects of lap-dancing clubs on their local communities, I'll be interested. But just picking a random bunch of facts and retro-fitting them onto whatever point you wanted to prove isn't it.

UPDATE: Caron has posted a good response.

Hughes slams nuclear power, but is he right?

Ignoring the "smeargate" furore over the weekend, the Lib Dem press team clearly took a doubtless well-deserved break over Easter before returning to the fray with a few press releases on Tuesday.

Yesterday Simon Hughes joined this swathe of media activity, slamming Government plans for new nuclear power stations. A big mistake, says Simon. We need more renewables, not expensive, dangerous and slow-to-build nuclear.

Getting a proper handle on the evidence around energy production is on my to-do list. Right now, far too many people seem to think they have the answer without really understanding the issues. If I were to pronounce, I'd certainly be one of them.

Here's why it doesn't seem simple to me.

Nuclear power is expensive; but claims that it's dangerous are certainly open to question. Estimates of deaths from Chernobyl, which happened in the dying days of the Soviet empire over two decades ago, vary from 4,000 to half a million. If the estimates are at the lower end, deaths in coal production over the same period are higher.

Since then, no accidents in nearly a quarter of a century. Those who work in the industry will say that this isn't luck; it's that Chernobyl was a freak accident where the safety systems were turned off on an inherently older, less safe power station.

And yet concerns remain over not just nuclear accidents but possible increases in lukemia around nuclear power stations (studies give conflicting evidence at the moment) and nuclear waste.

Renewable energy has its own problems, of course. Many people dislike the look of wind turbines and there's no doubting they're expensive, inefficient, need a lot of maintenance and spend much of their lives doing nothing. Offshore wind farms might improve the aesthetics, but hugely increase the cost of maintenance and getting the electricity onto to grid. Solar power has obvious issues in the UK and other technologies like wave and tidal power all have their issues and tend to be pricy.

Coal is cheap and we still have lots of it (if we can get to it now), but it's dirty and polluting. If we could reliably scrub the pollution, coal would be an excellent option, at least for the next few decades.

Gas is cheap too. It's polluting but not as bad as coal. But we don't have much gas, so relying on it would see us depending on some other countries we'd perhaps prefer not to.

Then there's some practical issues.

For the most part, we need to generate electricity at the time it's used. That means having the capacity to ramp up generation at peak times - over winter, during Corrie's ad break and half time in the FA Cup final, for example. Nuclear power is reliable but less variable. Wind is neither reliable nor very variable (in a controllable way, at least). Coal and gas are much better for that.

And it works better if we can generate power near to where it's used. Power transmission is inefficient. If you generate electricity in the middle of the Irish Sea and then use it in Kent, you lose a lot before it gets there.

That's my starting point - now for the research.

Advert banned for telling the truth

Perhaps it's a sign of the level of nannyism we've reached that an advert has been banned, not for misleading the public, but for making a claim that pretty much everyone would agree is completely true.

According to the BBC report,

A poster showing a nervous man alongside the slogan "Take Courage my friend" has been banned for suggesting the beer could boost confidence.

Outrageous. The lie that drinking alcohol can boost confidence. But isn't that true? Has the entire world just been mistaken about the whole dutch courage business for the whole of history?

This is about a rule that says "You're not allowed to say something true about your legal product because the State has decided it's bad".

The atheist bulldog's dilemma

My personal religious journey is by no means unusual. Attending a Church of England primary school, where Christianity was presented as fact, left me pretty much non-religious by my teenage years. I caught religion again, briefly, before swinging back to a more militant atheism. Like the heavy smoker who quits, I was intolerant and combative with those of my former faith.

Although I've mellowed a fair bit in the last few years, I have a good deal of sympathy for Laurence Boyce, the Lib Dem's blogosphere's atheist attack dog. Laurence knows the truth and won't rest until everyone else knows it too. His good news must be spread across the world for the benefit of all.

Laurence also has a nice habit of implying that I'm less of a man for not sharing his hard-line approach - I quite like that.

I don't think Laurence and I really disagree on our assessment of the facts. We've both looked at the evidence, had the discussions and debates and reached the conclusion that no gods exist, homeopathy is rubbish and supernatural stuff like ghosts and telepathy are bunk.

Laurence says

"In my world, belief - ALL belief - will have to be backed up with reasoning and evidence."

I'm not convinced that Laurence's world would be a very nice place to live.

Might it be that human beings function better with some beliefs that aren't backed up by evidence and, indeed, are probably false?

How about our perception of the world. Science tells us that the world around us, that we think of as solid, isn't - it's more gap than not. When I sit on a chair, I never actually touch the chair. Instead, my electrons repel the chair's electrons and I rest very close to it (I think that's right).

It's great that scientists know this stuff; but is it bad if I carry on believing the world around me is solid?

What about colour. The real world isn't red or green. Electromagnetic radiation of all sorts of wavelengths bounce off objects and into our eyes. It so happens that we can see visible light, and our brain interprets it as the colours we see. But all the x-rays, microwaves, radio waves, gamma radiation and the rest still enters our eyes, is still just as real - it's simply that we don't have the machinery to detect them so as far as our brains are concerned, they don't exist.

Again, it's good that science understands this; but would we really be better off if we all had a set of goggles that allowed us to see all electro-magnetic radiation? Would we be better off walking around seeing the world as it really is?

Or we can look at our interaction with other people. As playwrites have pointed out for millenia, we all wear our masks. We all portray and version of ourselves that isn't true - hiding some parts and changing others. Would it be better if we all saw others as they really are and they could see us in the same way?

Truth is important, of course. The computer I'm typing on only works because we understand the predictions made by quantum mechanics, even though we don't really have a grip on the nature of reality at that level yet.

The truths science reveals about the world we live in are far more wonderful and beautiful than anything religion has conjured. Pursuit of the truth is important and noble, and I've no time for any relativist nonsense.

No. My question is should we all live our lives only with belief backed up with evidence?

Poor animals that we are, it seems to me that, in our everyday lives, we need to work with certain fictions simply to get by. These are the ways our brains simplify the world so we can make sense of it (computer models do the same thing, only more so).

We need our fictions about colour and solidity. We need to hide our true selves and for others to hide theirs. Without them, our lives would be much poorer: to paraphrase Jack Nicholson, we can't handle the truth. The machine that is my brain simply doesn't work that way.

So I disagree with Laurence. I'm happy for people to learn what science has taught us about colour and solidity; but I don't for a moment think the world would be a better place if I lived my life based on the truth. If I knew the truth about what other people really thought, it would almost certainly make me a lot less happy and less able to function in society.

It gets interesting when we consider whether religion falls into that category or not.

Plainly there are millions of people who live their lives perfectly happily without what they see as the fictions of religion - I would say I'm one of them.

I feel no sense of loss at not having a god looking over me, or judging me. I don't sit around questioning why I should behave morally without the threat of divine retribution. I don't have a problem with the idea that either my life or anyone else's will end with death. The universe seems to have managed perfectly well without me for the 15 billion years before I was born; I've a hunch it'll hang on in there after I'm gone too.

But just because it works for me, does that mean it works for everyone? Our brains are complex beasts with all those shortcuts, rules of thumb and the rest of it.

Might many people - perhaps even more - find functioning without belief in a god almost as difficult as functioning without all our colour filtering, or without the mask we all wear?

Perhaps Laurence and I have genuinely superior brains. Or perhaps we're just as flawed, but in different ways. (No, don't vote on that).

As we all try to rub along together in our societies, is it really better to force the truth on everyone? About religion? About our relationships and friendships? Might it not be that we all genuinely function better when we believe certain fictions, and it just so happens that, for many people, religion is one of those fictions?

I'm not suggesting for a moment that we keep people in ignorance for their own good. As I wrote yesterday, I'm all in favour of making sure everyone has the freedom, education and access to information to make their own informed decisions as they see fit and not be punished for the conclusion they come to.

It's the agenda of converting everyone to atheism that I question. Like evangelical Christians, atheists have found the truth and seen the light. If only everyone else could see it too, the world would be such a wonderful place, they say.

But when I read Dawkins and others, I don't really see the evidence to support that claim. I see anecdotes and I see selective evidence about the nasty things done in the name of religion. Would fewer nasty things have happened without religion?

Show me the evidence that it will make the world a better place.

The green wave of failure

The BBC reported yesterday that we could soon be seeing more "green wave" sets of traffic lights. This, apparently, is where cars driving along a road at on or just under the speed limit trigger lights to turn green in turn so they don't get held up.

Seems sensible. Faster journeys, less fuel used and lower emissions.

What really got me was not the new initiative, but the reason it hasn't happened before.

According to the BBC report

Previously the Department for Transport (DfT) had discouraged the systems which reduce fuel use, resulting in less tax being paid to the Treasury.

But now, rather than seeing green wave systems as a "cost" to the public purse, the DfT views them as a "benefit".

So, if this is to be believed, we've had a government for the last twelve years which has been making all the green noises, not to mention telling us they want to free up the roads (and spending the odd billion on road widening and the rest of it), but has told local authorities they can't implement these green wave systems because it would reduce the tax take by reducing the amount of petrol and diesel we burn up.

In the boom years, when the British economy was firing on all cylinders, a decision had to be made: shall we help the environment and make people's car journeys quicker and easier; or shall we bring a bit more cash into the Treasury.

And they decided to grab the money.

I guess we should be grateful for them being so kind as to think of motorists and the environment now but what does it tell us about Labour's real priorities that it's taken this long?

Where else are eco-friendly schemes to save us money being blocked so the Treasury can boost its coffers?

Terrorism theatre bad for us, good for big brother

The days have gone by, the media spotlight has moved on but we've still heard nothing to suggest the twelve people arrested in the north west were actually planning a terrorist attack, never mind on the verge of blowing up a bomb.

I wrote on Friday that I didn't think evidence would be found. My gut feeling is that these guys, if they had any notions of being terrorists at all, were at the talking-about-it phase and may never have got any further.

Joe Otten, whom I have great deal of time for, commented that the police did the right thing: even if only one plot in ten turns out to be real, it still keeps us safe.

I disagree. Not with the idea of the police investigating lots of could-be-terrorists and detaining them if there's evidence. No problem with that.

But look at the way this was done. Lots of publicity. A big show about our brave boys in blue possibly averting disaster. That's not a quiet arrest to keep us safe. That's showboating.

Look what effect it has. It makes us all a bit more scared; further promoting the police's "Shop your neighbour for looking a bit funny" campaign. It caused diplomatic tensions between the UK and Pakistan over students. It looks likely to usher in lots more bureaucracy and many more checks around foreign students studying in the UK (or, at least, ones from muslim countries).

It tells the police that they can arrest people and lock the up for weeks on the flimsiest of evidence. No need to make a case - a few photos of Manchester and some word that the group are doing something at Easter (egg hunt?) is enough. I think we can all guess the skin colour and religion of those most likely to be locked up just to be on the safe side.

Finally, people remember the threat and not the final reality. People remember the ricin terrorism scare. Far fewer people recall that it was utter nonsense from start to finish.

Making the terrorist threat seem bigger than it is by having us remember false alarms as real threats is good for the terrorists and for those parts of the State keen to usher in big brother. It's bad for the rest of us.

New atheism: peaceful co-existence is not relativism

Jehovah's Witnesses are a national joke. We all have our ways of getting shot of them and our amusing stories about how we heard of them being scared off when they came a-knocking.

Few of us want to be berated into conversion (though presumably it works enough for the JWs, or they'd have either died out or switched strategy).

We don't deny for a moment that the Witnesses honestly believe they're right; genuinely see themselves as doing God's work and saving our very souls from eternal torment. And yet we don't want them doing it.

If saving our eternal souls isn't a good enough excuse, why should it be different if the door knockers simply want us to stop believing something they think isn't true. Will converts to atheism be happier? Probably not. Will converts become better, more moral people? I doubt it.

And yet many of the so-called "New Atheists" seem to be of the opinion that if we aren't out attacking religious beliefs, we're in some sort of wishy-washy relativist place where atheism, Christianity and Islam are all valid.

Rubbish.

Where else do we do that? Is my failure to take to the streets actively converting philosophical Conservatives mean I think it's as valid as my view? Of course not. Are they admitting that Liberalism is equal right when they don't try to convert me? No.

Most of the things we believe about the world are wrong. Sometimes in a big way. Sometimes in the detail. And yet life goes on.

The amazing thing is, believing stuff that's not actually true is OK. There are exceptions, of course. Believing AIDS can be cured by vitamin pills is a pretty deadly mistake to make; but believing the shaken water that makes up your homeopathic remedy has more than a placebo effect probably isn't.

And there is a price to pay.

More often than not, it's not people living together with different beliefs that causes the problem. It's the tension and problems created when one group decide to attempt conversion of another.

There's nothing wrong with atheists, humanists and agnostics developing and discussing our philosophies, the basis for our beliefs and the practical, scientific, moral and philosophical implications.

Saying to people "atheists are alright" is good too. Far too many people in the world still believe that atheists are immoral or amoral, or that there's something wrong with being an atheist. Those rejecting religion can suffer as a result. Pushing a positive view of atheism and humanism across the world is good.

What's not right is becoming an atheist version of the Jehovah's Witnesses. There's nothing intellectually wrong with debating religion. I believe that there is no god. In my view, anyone who believes in the existence of any god or gods is simply wrong. I'm right; they're wrong.

I agree with Dawkins on a lot, but not when he claims that raising children in a religion is akin to child abuse, and I disagree that moderate religion is to blame for creating a space in which extremism is acceptable. (I'll post another time on exactly why I disagree, and there will be evidence - honest).

The atheists who stomp around the place trying to convert, embarrass or humiliate anyone who holds religious faith simply do more harm than good, both to atheism and the world at large. They create barriers and animosities that need not exist.

Let's end with something positive.

I support a strong, vibrant, intellectually powerful atheism. I want to live in a world where someone can be an atheist and not suffer because of it, where anyone of any religion has easy access to atheist material. I'd be very happy if more religious people looked at the evidence and decided for themselves that atheism was correct.

Most importantly, I want to live happily and peacefully, side by side with people who I think are simply wrong in their religious, political and other views.

The battle we need to fight isn't atheism vs. religion; it's moderation vs. extremism.

Hat tip to Andy, also take a look at Madeleine Bunting's condemnation of New Atheism and Juliam Baggini's response, both in the Guardian's Comment is Free.

Gordon's guilty, even if he knew nothing

Many people mistakenly think that newpaper owners like Murdoch control the choice of stories and the editorial line, calling up their editors to lay down the law.

That probably doesn't happen much, mostly because they don't need to. Any half-decent editors knows perfectly well what the master wants.

When Gordon Brown became Prime Minister, he made clear in public that he was ending the culture of spin in favour of good, honest government.

Had Brown been serious, that would have been made clear in private, too. Had it been for real, no-one working for Brown could have doubted that the sort of behaviour we've seen from Damian McBride and Derek Draper was unacceptable and not what Brown wanted.

That's not what happened. Damian McBride who, we must remember, was fully aware of Gordon's public stance and worked closely with the Prime Minister on a daily basis.

It's simply not believable that Gordon genuinely wanted to end the spin and McBride failed to realise.

Brown's Government is spending more money on communications than anyone in the past, despite the Internet offering opportunities to make communication cheaper.

A parliamentary report in January noted that the number of special advisers had nearly doubled since 1995 and there are 72% more Government press officers today than in 1998.

Whatever's said in public, there is no way that McBride could have been in the position he was and done what he did if Gordon Brown didn't at least tacitly approve of that sort of activity.

Whether or not he knew what McBride and Draper were cooking up on this occasion, he created the environment where they obviously thought it was not only acceptable but something they should be doing.

Gordon Brown is responsible. He has presided over a government that said "no spin" in public whilst ramping up the spin machine in private. A leader who genuinely wanted an end to spin could not have failed to communicate that to the people he worked with on daily basis, and yet that didn't happen.

Brown has been more than happy to preside over a Government obsessed with spin and deceit. His biggest regret is being caught.

NUT pay demand: comedy alive and well in Cardiff

Another year, another ludicrously self-serving and unrealistic demand from the teachers' militant wing, the NUT.

This year, as the world enters the worst recession for decades, thousands lose their jobs and nearly everyone tightens their belts, the boys and girls at the National Union of Teachers are demanding a ten percent pay rise, and at least £3,000.

According to the BBC, one teacher complained that "after four years in the profession she was earning just £26,000".

I can feel my tears welling up.

Like many people, I come from a family with no shortage of teachers. I have relatives who curently teach, who are head teachers, who have taught and left the profession and who would like to become teachers. I have a great deal of respect for the teaching profession and I'm well aware of the hard work and stress involved in teaching.

I'm supportive of a generally upward-move in teachers' salaries, not to mention a reduction in bureaucracy, scrapping SATs and smaller class sizes.

But for teachers who, presumably, were aware of pay scales when they joined the profession, to be demanding a 10% pay increase at this time is ludicrously insensitive and self-serving. It just makes them look silly and does nothing to increase public respect for teaching.

Labour will rightly not give teachers a 10% pay increase. The Tories wouldn't if they were in power; nor would the Lib Dems. The NUT are being daft. Again.

Twitter, You Tube...what happens when the money runs out?

How to make lots of money on the Internet? The received wisdom, thanks to Google, is to get a pile of money to start up, build a great service, get everyone using it and then make your fortune from online advertising.

It works for Google's search engine arm, but is it working elsewhere? The Register has reported that Google-owned You Tube stands to lose half a billion dollars this year. They've built the great service. They've got everyone using it. But the advertising revenue isn't there.

It turns out that, whereas adverts on a search engine are quite handy because the link into what you actually went there to do (i.e. to visit another website related to what you searched on), making money from You Tube is a much tougher proposition.

And what of Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, Last.fm and the rest of them?

Great as they are for us, the punters, do they only exist because venture capitalists and multinationals have a totally unrealistic idea that they'll magically discover a way to make them profitable?

And if not, will we see them all ground down the way the once-ubiquitous Friends Reunited seemed destined to drift gently off into the sunset?

In a decade, we'll look back at this as an odd period in Internet history. We'll wonder how all these services got funding, or justified their huge sale prices. There'll be few similar things hanging around, but most will be gone, or will be smaller, niche services.

Twitter as a pay service doesn't work: Twitter is successful because everyone can join easily. When the money runs out, it might find a niche as a secure communication service for business. The social networking sites have the same problem: you're only on them because everyone else is.

So what will be there instead? Probably open source alternatives, because people will still want to do all this stuff and other people will be able to write the code.

It won't be quite as slick as the proprietary alternatives. The end user experience won't be quite as good. But it will do the job.

Easter and Christmas are atheist festivals too

Easter is fun for the Quistlets: easter egg hunts, making cards, a nice long weekend (hopefully not too much of it spent stationary on the M25), seeing relatives.

Those of us who aren't practising Christians don't get much out of the Christian bits, whereas almost everyone enjoys at least some of the pagan and secular stuff.

It's the same with Christmas. Every year some religious folk wring their hands in dismay as the nation at large misses the true meaning of Christmas.

Except I don't think we do. For me the true meaning of our mid-winter festival really is eating, drinking, exchanging presents, seeing friends and relatives and having a good time.

And the true meaning of our Spring fertility/rebirth festival is....well, eggs and chocolate probably feature somewhere, and we have fun.

There's often a feeling that these festivals are the preserve of the religious. When us secular folk get involved we're hijacking it, subverting it or destroying its true meaning in an orgy of base consumerism.

I don't agree. These festivals are about being a human being living in our society. The Christians have taken them and turned them into events for their religion, which is fine. Other religions do similar things, and that's great too.

But that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with celebrating our humanity by having a good time, taking a break from our everyday lives, and we shouldn't be coy or ashamed about it.

Easter and Christmas are just as much festivals for us atheists as for Christians. We might celebrate them slightly differently, but they're ours nonetheless. Time to party.


* Matthew 27:24-25 "..."I am innocent of this man's blood, " [Pilate] said, "It is your responsibility!" All the people answered "Let his blood be on us and our children!". This rather bizarre passage is believed by many to be a later insertion into the text, helpfully justifying claims that Jews down the ages carry the guilt of Jesus' death; even though he had to die to save us from our sins. No, I never understood that bit either.

Is the latest terror case starting to fall apart?

Hearing the latest news about the twelve people, mostly Pakistanis, arrested across the North West of England on suspicion of being terrorists, I'm reminded of the fruitless hunt for WMDs in Iraq.

I could be completely wrong on this one. It's early days and, for all I know, cast iron evidence of an imminent attack will emerge within hours and I'll apologise for ever doubting.

But right now something doesn't seem to be adding up.

We know there was a big police operation before Quick had to resign. We know these people had been under surveillance for a while and, as they were all swiftly arrested with few problems, it seems reasonable to suppose they didn't know they were under surveillance.

Are we to believe that these people were able, under the watchful gaze of the anti-terrorist boys and girls, to make bombs ready for an Easter offensive, as the police are currently suggesting, without the anti-terrorist forces either having any idea where the bomb factory is or being able to find it now?

Right now, the police are spinning this one as an imminent attack averted. We've seen that before and, under examination, the attack vanished.

I predict that's what will happen this time. Lots of shouting in the media about terrorists, about how Manchester narrowly escaped a second devastating terror attack.

Then, once it's all calmed down, we'll see some of the people released and, if any are charged, the evidence will come down to them planning a terrorist attack at some unspecified time in the future, with no evidence they had the ability or capacity to ever carry out such an attack.

I'm not saying these people are innocent. It could well be that they honestly wanted to launch a terror attack in the same way that Nick Clegg honestly wants to be Prime Minister. Wanting something to happen, talking about it and taking a few photos is a very long way from actually achieving your objective.

Spending billions of pounds and clamping down on our liberties to protect ourselves from people who can't hurt us, but might quite like to, would be a spectacular own goal.

Again, I could be completely wrong. This is my hunch, based on past cases and the evidence that's come out so far.

Old oral sex scare doing the rounds again

I was fooled for a minute by that BBC "most shared" panel and a story "Oral sex linked to throat cancer" at number two. The story itself is nearly two years old, but very quick note to put at mind the rest of anyone who might be worried.

Whether or not oral sex is linked to throat cancer (and we don't know), the cancer is rare and there's no reason at all for anyone to avoid oral sex on the basis of this story*.

Throat cancer, or cancer of the pharynx, is very rare. It affects about one in forty thousand men and even fewer women - well into the category of things not worth worrying about for yourself.

If you were to make a list of risks to your life, in order of likelihood, and changed your behaviour accordingly, you'd have locked yourself in your bedroom, never again to emerge blinking into the daylight, long before you considered this particular risk.


* if you were looking for an excuse, sorry - I can only suggest you avoid showing this post to your partner or client.

Express: EU gives rapists, killers & paedos the vote

I admire the Daily Express. It takes real talent to pack so much hatred, venom and misinformation into just a few words.

"THOUSANDS of rapists, killers and ­paedophiles will get the right to vote after ministers caved in to pressure from Europe, it emerged last night."

...the paper screeches, alongside a picture of the European Union flag.

Were you to glance over that lead paragraph, you'd walk away from the newstand with the firm belief that barmy Brussels bureaucrats are telling us to give the likes of prostitute killer Steve Wright the vote and NuLiarBore Brown is cravenly caving in.

Except, as the article sort of admits later on, it's nothing to do with the EU (there was a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights five years ago) and it only applies to prisoners serving a sentence of under four years, which you'd think would exclude most people convicted of murder.

And before we get too excited about the whole business, let's remember that nearly all rapists and paedophiles can vote today. The vast majority are never convicted to continue to vote and a fair few more have served their sentences.

So to get massively upset about a tiny handful more having the vote, and suggesting it's somehow going to bring democracy to its knees, is just ludicrous.

I can't get too excited about this either way. Clearly the Daily Express is spouting rubbish - no surprise there.

But I've no strong feelings about prisoners convicted of less serious crimes having the vote either. If we want to buy into that being a human right, that's fine; no problem if not.

I do feel strongly about having a justice system that actually works.

That keeps the worst criminals locked up for life. That not only punishes less serious convicts but rehabilitates them effectively as well. That doesn't waste millions of pounds of our money locking up relatively minor criminals in bursting prisons so they can learn to be better at crime on release. That doesn't criminalise all those drugs and then spend billions cleaning up the mess caused by the drugs being illegal.

You know, the sorts of things that would see us being safer and wealthier without letting criminals off the hook.

Will the Express be screaming about that any time soon? I won't be holding my breath.

Why the Best Value MP rating got it wrong

There was much publicity a few days ago when the Telegraph tried to work out which MPs gave the best and worse value for money.

They compared the total cost for each MP and their office against measures of how hard working they were "as measured by their voting attendance, how often they speak in debates, and the number of written questions they put to ministers".

I can understand why: all those things are not only measurable but the information's freely available online, so a journalist can get the answers to pop out pretty easily.

But when you start off with what's easy to measure instead of what's right to measure, you're always going to end up with an approximation that get's it wrong a lot of the time.

In this case, there's a long list of MPs activities that were understandably not practical to measure but are at least as important to an MPs performance as voting, speaking in debates and written questions.

Casework is a huge one. Knowing how busy many MP's offices are, I wonder how much casework the top-scoring MP, Phillip Hollobone, really deals with. If it's half as much as some of the Lib Dem MPs, the guy's a genius to find hours in the day to do it all and, for the good of the country, he should be sharing his secrets.

Then there's committee work. In many ways scrutinising legislation and holding ministers to account in committees is far more valuable work than jumping up to make your speech in the Chamber.

So the Telegraph research is interesting - it's got us thinking.

It tells us which MPs give us the most votes in the Commons, speeches in the Chamber and written questions for our money (assuming you agree with the weighting given to each, which you probably don't since someone just made it up).

But it tells us nothing about how much value for money we're getting from our MPs.

Skin cancer not such a big risk after all

From the BBC to the front page of the Express, women in their twenties are being warned of an "alarming rise" in skin cancer caused, it's believed by all those trips to tanning salons (you know, the ones the Express promotes in its general ethos that skinny and tanned is good, overweight and pasty is terrible).

We're told, to be fair, that 340 women in their 20s are diagnosed with malignant melanoma in 2005 - a big rise from 2003.

So time to panic, yet again.

There are 3.7 million twenty-something females in the UK (as of the 2001 census so presumably even more now). So, if you're a woman in your twenties, the chance of you getting one of these malignant melanomas in any one year is a pretty tiny one in eleven thousand (0.009%).

Apparently, using a tanning sunbed can increase your chance of getting cancer by 75% - so that would be around 0.016%, or one in 6000.

Yet again, Cancer Research UK and a compliant media seeks to scare young people about cancer well beyond any real risk.

According to the BBC:

"Cancer Research UK said people of all ages should stay away from sunbeds and use a high factor sun lotion in the sun."

Because the evidence just support that so completely.

Footnote: regular readers might remember a post from February when I attacked the Observer for publishing a graph that used every devious trick in the book to mislead people into thinking there was a strong link between obesity and cancer when the data showed nothing of the sort. Where did the graph come from? Step forward Cancer Research UK.

What if it were a dead policeman?

If, as it increasingly appears, a policeman at the G20 summit got carried away, hit and pushed over 47-year-old newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson and so contributed to his death, justice must take its course.

Part of me has sympathy for the challenge faced by the police in this sort of situation.

Officers on the ground couldn't have known whether they'd face peaceful protestors or serious violence. They're all tooled up, in their gang and ready to face the enemy. With adrenelin coursing through their veins and the opposition in their sights, it's not surprising that something like this happened somewhere.

And, once it had happened, it wouldn't be a great shock if the group of coppers had quickly decided on their version of what took place, hoping it would just be their word against some inconsistent and vague reports from protestors.

The authorities shouldn't be surprised if they set up this sort of combative us against them situations and something like this happens.

What if the situation was reversed? What if a protestor had run up to a policeman minding his own business, knocked him to the ground and the policeman had later died?

I think we all know that such a protestor would unquestionably (and rightly) be subjected to the full force of the law. We also know that not only the person involved but his or her organisation and probably the G20 protestors as a whole would be villified.

If the evidence supports it, the policeman who attacked Ian Tomlinson must be prosecuted, as must any other police who colluded in covering up the truth and peverting the course of justice.

But the wider question should also be addressed - is it possible to effectively police these situations without creating the sort of crowd mentality on either side that makes this sort of tragedy so much more likely?

The old attacks are the worst

We all enjoy a good bit of knock-about party political attacks. What conference speech from Brown, Cameron or Clegg would be complete without a dig at the other parties?

But it helps when the attack has some sort of basis in reality - when it touches a nerve. Just talking bollocks makes you look a bit daft.

It's a bit late to bang on about how our Labour Government are a bunch of dodgy socialists; and attacks on the Tories as as a bunch of racists fall flat.

Gordon's habit of calling the Lib Dems the "Liberal Party" once seemed like a worthwhile dig (when the merger wounds were still raw) but today it just makes him sound like an old man living in the past ("No, dear. Mr Wilson isn't Prime Minister any more. You are. Have you taken your tablets?")

And it seemed a bit sad to read Obnoxio the Clown, who yesterday suggested Mark Park lacked self-awareness in criticising other parties for barely making an impression on the political scene.

There are lots of things you can criticise the Lib Dems for. I may not agree with you, but go ahead and have some fun.

That one's just a bit crap, though. Less than two decades since the newly formed Social and Liberal Democrats were at 1% in the polls and looking certain to fold, one in ten MPs are now Lib Dems, the party controls several major cities, has shared power in Scotland and Wales, attracts the support of around one in five voters and consistently gets the votes of several million people, not to mention over a quarter of votes across the country in local elections.

Come on; I'm sure you can do better. Hopefully the Lib Dems can too.

Redwood goes gaga on public spending

John Redwood writes:

To all those who say cutting public spending means tough choices and services “decimated” I say just two words: “MPs expenses” - and four more words “public sector fat cats” - and two more words “RBS losses”.

Although I rarely agree with John Redwood, I've never thought he was a fool. Now I'm wondering.

Redwood talks about MPs taking a ten percent cut in expenses. Sure, no problem, and very nice gesture too, but not exactly an effective way of cutting public spending of around half a trillion pounds a year.

He talks about cutting RBS bonuses and salaries, as if that had anything to do with cutting public spending.

Finally, he suggests that:

armed with the modest moral authority that would bring, the government should demand a 10% cut in all the other administrative overheads of the public sector.

Ah yes. That's what successive governments have failed to realise. It isn't that cutting public sector spending is difficult. It isn't that you get unexpected effects, like a cut in headcount leading to an increase in expensive contractors and consultants.

No, all you need is modest moral authority and public spending can be slashed at a stroke.

Hopefully the Tory manifesto will be a little more grounded in reality.

More poster fun

With thanks to James Holden for the neat build-a-poster page along with Millenium and Helen for pointing me towards it.

How I became an agent of the State

You may have seen the news that Government now requires all ISPs to record details of their customers' web browsing and emailing habits so the police and security services to take a look, should they feel the urge.

Oddly, reaction amongst liberal minded people has not been wholly positive.

As luck would have it, I do some work for a small email provider (we don't provide Internet access, just email) and it fell to me to find out about this and implement it, so I thought I'd share the love and tell you all about it.

The first I knew about this was reading an article online a couple of months ago. At no stage were we contacted by any official body (or anyone at all) to let us know we needed to be doing this.

The information in the article was a little vague, so I called the Home Office to ask what we needed to do.

To be fair, the Home Office staff were friendly and helpful. No-one actually knew anything about it at first, but they managed to track down a nice lady who did and she gave me a call back a few hours later.

We are being asked to record the time, source and destination of every email and hold onto the information for two years. We are not being asked to record email headers, subject or content.

We retain the information. I wasn't told how the authorities might get their hands on it, but today's BBC article above suggests a warrant would be needed.

Those who have experience of running email servers will know that the information being asked for is recorded anyway. You'd normally save it for a few days or weeks as it's a huge help diagnosing problems when something goes wrong.

So, for email, implementing the change just meant keeping the information for longer: two years instead of a week or two.

No help is being offered on paying for the additional storage space. In our case, none is needed. Compared to the capacity of modern disks, the space that information takes up turns out to be pretty small. I guess it would be a bigger issue for larger ISPs and web browsing logs would take a bit more space.

Could we have declined to implement the rule? We're probably small enough to not be on the Government's radar, so the odds are that we would have got away with it but, had plod come knocking, I suspect we'd find ourselves out of business and a lot poorer. We certainly don't have the money for legal battles.

Is it as terrible as is being suggested?

Assuming what we've been told applies to all ISPs, I would say no.

The key is that the ISPs retain the data and the police or MI5 need a warrant to see it. As long as that remains true, we aren't quite in 1984 territory.

Critically, this law seems to fall short of allowing the State to go on fishing trips, trawling through data on the offchance of finding evidence of dodgy behaviour. It allows the information to be grabbed only when the person granting the warrant has been persuaded that there's cause to issue it.

And it's a matter of degree rather than something totally new. Right now, all ISPs will retain this information for a while and police can demand it with a warrant - as they've always been able to. This law ensures that there's two years' information rather than just a week or two.

This is a move in the wrong direction, damaging civil liberties, removing our privacy and opening more of our affairs to the State.

And since we know the Government is interested in a big centralised database they could mine for suspects, we should have no doubt that the intention is to continue down the road and remove our privacy further.

So, not quite 1984; perhaps somewhere around 1981.

Tax office meets targets, craps on taxpayers

Metro reports how, according to a whistleblower, the tax office is providing appalling customer service in the name of meeting Government targets on the number of calls handled each day.

The claims include:

• hundreds of people who ring in are simply cut off to meet targets on answering calls.
• if staff spot a mistake on someone's tax record, they're instructed to ignore it unless the person specifically mentions it.
• letters sent to HMRC are being ignored or binned

What a shock - tough targets combined with staffing cuts lead to HMRC concentrating on meeting the letter of the targets, not providing a good service. The "customer" HMRC really cares about is the senior civil servants setting and evaluating the targets, not the likes of you and me struggling with Gordon's labyrinthine tax system.

HMRC disputes the claims, so perhaps all's well after all.

Teachers v Parents: anecdotes and pop psychology at dawn

A huge piece in the Observer today: teachers are complaining that children (not just those from poorer families) start school unable to take turns, share, dress themselves or eat at a table.

If that wasn't bad enough, some parents are dissing the teachers, challenging their authority, blaming them for just about everything from daughters getting pregnant (I assume this wasn't literally down to the teachers) to sons smoking pot.

Justine Roberts, apparently a co-founder of mumsnet.com, hits back saying that parents are being put under a lot more pressure to feed their children lots of fruit and veg, read to them more, allow them to watch TV less, and that's on top of all the other pressures we face these days.

So who's right? Are parents failing and then expecting teachers to raise their kids as well as educate them? Or are parents under more pressure than ever to bring up their kids in the Government-approved way and buckling under the strain?

What worries me about the debate is just how subjective it is. There are millions of children attending school in the UK, but the whole issue is being debated with anecdotes and pop psychology.

To back up the theory of poorer parenting, we're given a few little stories about a mum who came to drag her child out of detention and reception children (four year olds) unable to dress themselves. Fair enough, but stories aren't very good evidence.

Are things really worse than in the past? We're all rather talented at seeing the past through rose-tinted spectacles and being absolutely sure that the youth of today are much worse than they were in our day.

Were four-year-olds in the 1970s, 80s and 90s better at sharing, waiting in turn and eating nicely than today's kids?

Were there more stern parents in the past? How do you know?

Were the parents of decades gone past really better at supporting teachers? Did no parents in the 1980s and '90s encourage their kids to fight? Were there no parents who thought the sun shined out of their kids' backsides, and thought little Jonny or little Katie could do no wrong, despite copious evidence to the contrary?

William Brown, of the Just William stories, was a lovable young scamp but with his gang of outlaws roaming the locality, lying, stealing, house-breaking and fighting the rival gang, wouldn't he be held up as a prime example of thuggish youth today? And wouldn't Violet Elizabeth Bott, who would "thcream and thcream 'till I'm thick" be held up as a prime example of the product of poor parenting?

Maybe there are real changes, but it would be nice to have evidence beyond the anecdotes.

Looking at all the bad things the teaching unions are complaining about, Mrs Quist and I have personal memories of similar things from the '80s and '90s.

Children who had their parents wrapped round their little finger. Parents who thought their kids were perfect and all the teachers were out to get them. Children starting school not even potty trained, or who would wet themselves to get attention. Parents encouraging their kids to fight as a solution to problems. We remember them all.

All these things happened in the past and doubtless they all happen now. The question we need to ask is whether they happen more now, and anecdotes alone are never going to tell you that.

More atheist jokes, please

The Rabbi of a small town died.

His widow, the Rebbetzin, was so disconsolate that the people of the town decided that she ought to get married again. But the town was so small that the only eligible bachelor was the town butcher.

The poor Rebbetzin was somewhat dismayed because she had been wed to a scholar, and the butcher had no great formal education. However, she was lonely, so she agreed, and they were married.

After the marriage, Friday came. She went to the mikvah (a Jewish ritual bath to get rid of impurities). Then, she went home to prepare to light the candles.

The butcher leaned over to her and said, "My mother, Hana, told me that after the mikvah and before lighting the candles, it's good to have sex." So they did.

She lit the candles. He leaned over again and said, "My father, Shmuel, told me that after lighting the candles it's good to have sex." So they did. They went to bed after saying their prayers.

When they awoke, he said to her, "My grandmother, Rivka, said that before you go to the synagogue it's good to have sex." So they did.

After praying all morning, they came home to rest. Again he whispers in her ear, "My grandfather, Moishe, says after praying it's good to have sex." So they did.

On Sunday she went out to shop for food and met a friend who asked, "So how is the new husband?"

She replied, "Well, a scholar he isn't, but he comes from a wonderful family..."

Radio 4's Feedback last week had a number of complaints that Christianity was being singled out for attack by comedians - why weren't Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and atheism getting the same treatment?

Partly it's because the best jokes are about things we know. Most British comedians grew up in a Christian environment. Whether or not they're religious, it was Christianity with its centuries of history and tradition they encountered.

When it's The Now Show having a dig at the Pope; Catholics may feel a little under seige, but nearly all my Christian friends enjoy a laugh at their own faith from time to time. Jewish humour is ledgendary, of course, and most other faiths have the ability not to take themselves too seriously.

Indeed, not being able to laugh at yourself and your religion is a warning sign in my book: those humourless extremists always sound warning bells, don't they? When politics gets too serious, a review of some of those old Glee Club favourites brings things down to earth.

Most atheists and humanists are not, by nature, extremists; but the lack of jokes to laugh at ourselves sometimes makes us a little too humourless, a little too lacking in perspective, when it comes to religion (or lack of it).

How often have I heard atheists complaining about the religious evangelists who want to jam their religion down our throats whether we like it or not, and then being so rude as to bang on about the evils of religion at some otherwise pleasant social event with religious people? More than I feel comfortable with.

If you're an atheist, do you want to be able to have your position accepted as reasonable and valid, raise your children in a way you're comfortable with, not be harrassed by religious people and not face discrimination? (The last, luckily, is rarely a problem in the UK, though it is in many other countries, including the US.)

Or do you have an evangelical zeal to convert the world to atheism, force it down their throats whether they like it or not, save them from themselves?

I don't think the second approach is good (and I've found myself swinging towards it on occasion). The world doesn't need more battles between extremists; it needs more moderates living together and accepting each others' differences.

If atheists and humanists had the tools to make fun of ourselves as moderate religious folks do, it would work out a lot better.

The problem is that atheism and humanism are pretty barren deserts for humour. There's little shared history, no shared culture, few shared beliefs, no power structure, no rituals, no easily recognisable atheist or humanist situations to create humour from.

Most Jewish humour has nothing to do with God and little to do with religious beliefs. Similarly with Christian humour.

So come on fellow humanists and atheists; look out for the humour, for the opportunities for us to laugh at ourselves as people of no religion, just as I can laugh at myself as a Lib Dem, a political geek and someone of vaguely jewish heritage.

More jokes and less extremism please.

Jury Team is wrong to oppose whipping

Jury Team is a political vehicle to get independent candidates elected to the UK and European parliaments. It's been kicked off in the last few weeks by Sir Paul Judge, a millionaire Tory donor.

The general idea is free-thinking, committed independent MPs and MEPs good, party drones ripping off the taxpayer bad.

James Graham is one of the few people to have written seriously about Jury Team and it's worth reading what he's said here and here.

Jury Team has eleven policy proposals, all around reforming the democratic system. As James notes, electoral reform is notable by its absence but we have thing like capping donations to political parties, electing select committees and term limits for MPs and MEPs.

Some I agree with, some I don't, others I think are totally irrelevant, but the most important one is the opposition to the whipping system. James has a fair amount to say on this, which I'd like to add to.

The case against party whips is that it reduces MPs to sheep, trudging mindlessly through whichever lobby their party leader has ordered. Most MPs don't attend the debates or even understand the issues - they just do as they're told. Having more unwhipped Independent MPs would, Jury Team argues, lead to legislation being better examined and more robustly challenged.

The whipping system is far from perfect, but the alternative is much worse.

The benefit of whipped MPs is that parties can implement their programmes. When you vote for a party at the election, you don't need to rely on voting for the person (though you can if you wish). You can vote for a party with a general philosophy and a manifesto.

Electing independent MPs is incredibly paternalistic. As a voter, you aren't saying "this is what I want to see happen in the country" - that's not a decision you can make with an independent. Even if the candidate puts forward a programme of what they'd like to do, they're just one of over six hundred MPs.

Instead you're saying "I'll leave it up to you, Mr or Ms MP. I'll elect you and you do whatever you think is best."

The idea that independent MPs will attend every debate, listen attentively and become experts on every issue is entertaining, but as fictional today as it was back in the corrupt days of 18th century politics. Where's the evidence?

Jury Team holds up the US Senate with lighter party discipline as an improvement on our system, but when you look at the US, you find that party control is simply replaced by special interest control - the famed pork barrel politics.

As James also notes, our current system is far from perfect. There's certainly a case for less whipping . But not too little.

In fact, Jury Team miss the real issue (something they seem to manage on several issues, judging from their website). I don't really want my MPs to make the decisions on laws by listening to a few speeches from other MPs and making up their minds. I want the issues to be carefully considered, taking evidence from experts and interested members of public. Then I want bills to be scrutinised, throroughly and line by line. Both those areas could do with being beefed up, to prevent governments pushing through poorly draftly and ill-considered legislation.

It would be quite nice if the decision to pass it into law wasn't just based on a few hundred well meaning independent MPs, but had some sort of democratic legitimacy, such as a reference to a party policy that had been debated and voted on by party members.

And, as anyone who's worked with an MP will know, attending debates in the chamber is just one part of the job. On top of that you've little things like holding the government to account (or serving on it), helping constituents, committee work and a few more bits and pieces besides.

Political parties have lots of faults, and independent MPs have their place, but I fail to see how electing a bunch of independents with either no manifesto or some poorly thought out personal wish-list they've no chance of ever implementing could possibly be an improvement. It's not that independent MPs are any worse than the party people - quite possibly the opposite. Doesn't stop it being anti-democratic though.

Anti-terrorism propoganda: lies or incompetence?

I'm really not a big one for conspiracy theories. Given the choice, I'll go for cock-up nine times out of ten. But an advertising campaign has got me wondering just what's going on.

It's this "Report anything or anyone looking a bit funny or suspicious" campaign, for which you can find some nice spoofs here.

Even if the worst-case terrorism scenario being sold to us by the security services is true, it's still complete bollocks.

We're told there could be up to 3,000 people actively planning terrorist attacks in the UK. In reality, most of those will be sad cases fantasising about turning Britain into an Islamic state in crappy online chatrooms, but for the sake of argument let's suppose the whole damn lot are stalking the streets, working out where to plant hundreds of bombs (which, in turn, means the police and MI5 are bloody fantastic at foiling all those plots).

Sixty million people in the UK; three thousand terrorists. So have a little think about how likely that person you see looking at a CCTV camera, photographing a policeman, hanging around on a railway platform, putting empty cleaning bottles in the bin or unaccountably looking a little dark-skinned is one of those three thousand.

There are two big messages the campaign is selling.

1. Be afraid. Be very afraid. There are terrorists everywhere. You know how there's been one successful terrorist attack in the last eight years? Time to crap yourself.

2. You personally can do some good. If you phone in anything suspicious, you could be saving lives.

The first, by any objective measure, is nonsense. Terrorism kills far fewer people than almost any other cause of death and any individual is staggeringly unlikely to die in a terrorist attack. It does the terrorists' job rather well for them, but going around in a state of perpetual fear about terrorist attacks makes as much sense as being permanently terrified that the building you're in is going to burn down or the car behind you is going to ram into you at high speed.

The second is equally silly. For every report of a real terrorist there will be literally thousands of false alarms. If the police genuinely investigated just a fraction of the calls that came in, they'd have no time for anything else at all. And if they don't investigate them, there's no point making the call.

It could be that the people who make these decisions genuinely haven't realised what half the country's bloggers seem have spotted in about five seconds - that it's a really daft idea.

I'd like to think that. I'd really like to think this is just incompetence. Because the alternative is quite disturbing for someone like me who thinks the police screw up from time to time like the rest of us, but are essentially the good guys.

The alternative is that the people who run, and approved, this campaign genuinely want us to be scared, on edge and suspicious of everyone - and think that's more important than catching real terrorists.

Why scare us? Electoral benefit? Perhaps, but that's a very dangerous game to play. The police or security services angling for extra funding? Maybe. I'd really like to find out who's paying for this campaign and who wanted it to happen.

It isn't the illuminati, but there's something going on here, something more than stupidity or venality. I'd just be a bit happier if I knew what.

The police adverts: what happens when you text them

You know those 1940s style police adverts? The ones that sound really threatening with slogans along the lines of

"We're going to come to your house and beat the shit out of you."

Despite the sinister, threatening sounding messages on the poster, you can look carefully and see some tiny small print at the bottom that's all nice and fluffy - about how you can send a text message to get information about how the police are fighting crime in your area.

You text PLEDGE and your postcode to 66101.

I thought I'd give it a try. I'm not sure quite what I expected, but maybe a text with some actual information on crime and policing in my area. Or perhaps something inviting me to sign up to an email bulletin.

What I actually got was two text messages of such staggering banality, I wondered what the point was.

Text message one read

"Free Msg: Your neighbourhood policing team & non-emergency no. will follow. Always dial 999 in emergency. Text charged at standard rate. Privacy: adiq.info"

Text message two read

"For info about action on local crime contact your neighbourhood policing team on xxxxx or call your local force non-emergency no. yyyyyy."

OK, the xxxxx and yyyyy were real numbers in the text, but really, what's the point.

Tell me if I'm wrong, but the first text message seems a little redundant. I've been racking my brains trying to think how asking me to send a text to request information and then having something replying telling me to dial 999 in case of emergencies (at the cost of two text messages) is better than just saying on the poster "Dial 999 in emergencies".

Perhaps I'm someone who keeps on forgetting the emergency number (it's a real pain to remember) and when the burglars are prowling around my home at two in the morning, I'll just have to go through my text message inbox for the last few months, track down that text, think "aha, that's it - 999" and call the police.

Having a number to call your neighbourhood police team makes slightly more sense (I'll call it sometime and see what they have to say). Maybe I just have a very large neighbourhood, but the number I was given relates to "local " police covering my whole parliamentary constituency and a bit more besides: over 40,000 houses. That's not a neighbourhood in my book - it's a decent-sized town.

But what a waste. A huge poster campaign, a neat text-and-reply setup (they aren't cheap) just to hand out a local phone number - and you can only get that if you get close and spend time reading the small print. Otherwise it's just a disturbing message.

Sexually reckless over 45s: what are the risks?

Over 45s are ignoring the risks of catching a Sexually Transmitted Infection (STI), according to a story on the BBC.

"Nearly a fifth of those polled aged 45 to 54 said they had had unprotected sex with someone other than a long-term partner in the past five years."

Apparently, these naughty middle-aged people, freed from the risk of unwanted pregnancy are playing hide the sausage with gay abandon (so to speak) and not using a condom.

The experts chide this irreponsible group, many of whom think the risk of catching an STI is "next to nothing". The fools. The idiots.

So what is the risk of catching an STI through unprotected sex if you're over 45? Since the whole article is telling people off for ignoring the risks, you might have thought it would make some reference to what they are.

But no. Apart from a vague mention that "Sexually transmitted infections have doubled in under a decade in people over 45", there's nothing. And, as we know, just saying a risk has doubled isn't helpful. Doubled from one in a million to two in a million; or from three in ten to six in ten? I don't care about the first, I'll be queueing at the chemist if it's the second.

Let's look at the 45-64 age group. (I could include people over 64 but it turns out that STIs are much rarer in pensioners so that would skew the figures).

There are around 18 million people in the UK aged 45-64. In 2000*, there were 914 new cases of gonorrhoea diagnosed in that age group. So, in that year only one in every twenty thousand people in that age group were diagnosed with gonorrhoea. That's a risk that could reasonably be described as "next to nothing".

Ah, but not all of those 18 million people have risky behaviour. Let's suppose that only the one in five who have had recent unprotected sex with someone other than their long term partner are at risk**.

In that case, we have 914 cases of gonorrhoea spread between 3.5 million people, still a risk of only one in four thousand.

But there's more than one STI and I don't have the figures for all of them. There were 1051 cases of genital chlamydia diagnosed in 2000 for this age group, so again a risk of around one in four thousand.

Syphillis? About 300 cases across all ages.

Maybe there are other STIs that pose a much greater risk. The article doesn't say. Neither does the press release it's largely copied from.

It may be that the overall risk of catching an STI is higher - perhaps one I've missed out is running rife. This data (not split by age) suggests not: on these figures, both herpes (as an STI) and genital warts are less common than chlamydia.

So my guess, based on this evidence, would be that our at-risk group of 45-64 year olds who sleep around without the protection of a rubber friend have somewhere around a one in one thousand (or 0.1%) risk of being diagnosed with an STI in any one year. It might be as high as one in 500 (0.2%).

Is that a risk worth taking to have sex without a condom? That's a decision for you to make - there's no right or wrong answer.

We're told to use condoms, but given no evidence to support the claim that older people who don't are behaving recklessly.

Presumably the experts feel that we should be shielded from things like facts and just told what to do. For our own good of course.


My standard disclaimer: I am not a doctor, just an interested blogger. If you have concerns about the health of yourself or a relative, please see your GP and don't rely on stuff you read on the Internet.


* The most recent breakdown of figures by age I could find was from 2000. You may want to double all the risks to be on the safe side.

** The one-in-five figure is only for 45-54 year olds, but the article suggests 55-64 year olds have a similarly relaxed view to using condoms, so for the purposes of my back-of-an-envelope calculations I'm assuming the numbers are roughly the same. They might be lower.

TV licensing is just absurd

Whether or not you think the BBC should be state-funded, surely it's time to scrap the increasingly sinister and absurd licence fee.

Just to remind ourselves: the BBC is funded by a pseudo-tax called the licence fee. It should be paid by everyone with the ability to watch or record live TV (most likely you either have a television or a TV tuner card on your PC).

Normally there's one per household but if you're in student accomodation or you lodge in someone else's house, you almost certainly need one for yourself.

A huge database covers the whole country. The TV licensing people work on the assumption that everyone has a TV or PC tuner unless they can show otherwise, and sends out increasingly threatening letters accordingly.

The database is backed up by teams of enquiry officers who can knock on your door and ask for (but not demand) entry to your property to verify whether or not you watch live TV.

And they're backed up by a fleet of TV detector vans, the workings of which are a state secret.

The ways of the TV licence are curious to say the least. For example, you only need one licence if you share a joint tenancy on a house but, if you don't have one,

"whoever is found watching TV when an Enforcement Officer comes to visit is the one who risks prosecution and a fine of up to £1,000. It could be you, whether you own the TV or not."

Finally, the message is rammed home with increasingly Orwellian adverts to convince us that there is no escape - Auntie is watching our every move.

Let's remember that this is not only a tax, it's a poll tax too. With a few exceptions, everyone from the poorest single mum to the multi-millionaire pays £142.50 a year.

Ah yes, you might say, but it's like a TV subscription. Sky and Virgin Media don't vary their charges on ability to pay, so why would the BBC?

True...except you pay to watch television, not to watch the BBC. And you can watch iPlayer, listen to the radio and use the BBC's Internet services without coughing up a penny.

This is just daft.

This post isn't about whether or not the BBC should be state funded - I'll leave that for another day (which normally means I won't get round to writing about it, but there's a first time for everything).

It's about how crazy it is to maintain this expensive, draconian system for collecting a poll-tax style licence fee.

True, there are probably a few households out there who don't watch BBC TV programmes, look at the BBC Internet site or listen to BBC radio. But I bet it's far fewer than don't use almost any other state service you can think of. What proportion of people use libraries, schools, hospitals or parks? We've no problems funding those through tax.

So let's make a decision. Either fund the BBC through general taxation, linked to ability to pay, or find a subscription model (and live with a much slimmed-down corporation). But don't stick with what we have now.

And remember - if you're watching TV, Big Brother is watching you.

Anti-smoking ads: misleading or just scary?

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has ruled that a Government anti-smoking advert can only be shown after 7.30pm. You probably know the one - children saying they aren't scared of lots of normal scary things, but they are scared their parent might die from smoking.

Over fifty complaints were received. The ASA ruled that the advert could be very scary for young children, especially if seen without an adult around and not understanding the context (could my mum die tomorrow? Tonight?).

The ASA ruled that the advert was OK when likely to be heard in the company of adults, such as on the radio or in the evening.

Government health advertising is a tricky business. Just like any advert, it needs emotional impact to really be effective.

But we also expect it to be accurate and honest, not misleading. And to work: this is our money being spent on the advert, so does it really get more people quitting the cancer-sticks and then staying off?

This advert is borderline on accuracy and honesty. Being a long-term smoker does reduce life expectancy, and quitting at any age reverses that (quitting before you're thirty is as good as never having smoked at all).

But the reduction in life expectancy is around ten years for a long-term smoker. That's significant, but does it justify children worrying that their (relatively youthful) parents will die? Both the average smoker and non-smoker will die when their children have grown up.

Maybe lots more smokers really do die before their children reach adulthood - hopefully the Department of Health made sure they'd checked that before putting out the advert so I might ask them.

(I had a bit of a search and found a couple of articles, one in the BMJ, talking about increased risks of death for "middle aged" people. But the age range was too wide - 40-70 or 35-65 - to answer my question).

I mentioned the need to be effective, too. Is it really working: are more people quitting, and staying as non-smokers, as a result of the advertising.

The Department of Health say:

"The 'Scared' campaign was very effective at targeting our core, harder to reach, smoking audience - NHS smoking services were contacted by three times more people than expected."

That's a start. But what happens to them next? Do all those people successfully quit and then stay off? I hope some longer term studies have been done to see how effective different anti-smoking advertising really is. A good start might be to take the people who've contacted the NHS after seeing the advert and see how they get on kicking the habit. Compare it to a group who aren't trying to give up as a result of the advert.

Are these adverts telling the truth, do they work, and has the Department of Health actually done the research to know the answer to either question? Doesn't seem like too much to ask.