If you want a royal family, don't moan when they spend loads of cash

The last time the royal family was under such pressure, Princess Diana had died, Prince Phillip had killed her and the Queen was dancing on the grave*.

For the Sun has revealed that taxpayers coughed up £250,000 to renovate a four-bedroom apartment at St. James' Palace (or as the Sun puts it, Princess Bea's university digs).

Truly investigative journalism at its finest: the Royal Family cost money and renovating royal palaces costs even more. Who'd have thought it.

Perhaps I'm being a little slow, but isn't that what the monarchy is all about? We get a posh family for the Americans to coo over, Prince Phillip to act as an ambassador abroad, Charles to sort out our architectural failings, a whole bunch of nice palaces and stately homes. Of course it's going to cost money.

Think ours is expensive? The Royal family cost us a touch over £40 million quid a year (roughly equivalent to three of the smaller rivets around the cap of nuclear missile to replace Trident).

The Dutch royals, often considered a low-cost monarchy, are claimed to cost the cloggy ones more than twice as much - over £95 million.

I'm not a huge fan of the Royals. I wouldn't shed too many tears if we kicked them out and went all republican.

But if we are going to have a royal family, we really need to let them be royal. There's honestly no point in having the royals and expecting them to live in a council flat and drive an old Fiesta to Lidl for the shopping.

If you want royalty (and I don't recall the Sun being especially strong in it's republican leanings), let them act like royalty: nice palaces, expensive transport and all the rest of it.


* What do you mean Al Fayed isn't a reliable witness? How dare you.

Weight loss surgeons say "give us money or you'll die"

Anyone under the impression that promoting dodgy medical treatments by scaring people with even dodgier "evidence" was the preserve of the alternative medicine injury is in for a nasty shock.

The private Nuffield Health Hospitals make a good chunk of their money from weight loss surgery, and they're obviously concerned that some overweight people aren't yet considering suicide in despair.

As the Telegraph (along with others) reports:

... a fifth of obese people say they are not planning to lose weight and one in eight claim that they are "not bothered" about their body shape.

Researchers say that the increasing failure to tackle the problem means that the nation is "eating itself to death".

Showbusiness celebrities like Corden, Gavin and Stacey co-star Ruth Jones, Ditto, and TV presenter Eamonn Holmes are said to be contributing to the problem by providing dangerous role models.

Their success causes the public to accept being overweight as normal and ignore the dangers of carrying too many pounds, the researchers say.

This is pretty low stuff.

As study after study after study has shown, being overweight or obese does not shorten your life. If anything, the opposite: those in the so-called "normal" weight band have a lower life expectancy than obese people, even after other variables (e.g. smoking) are taken into account.

There is no obesity crisis. Older people (especially those in the 50+ age group) are certainly heavier than previous generations, but they're also healthier - living longer and staying in good health for more years. Young people aren't even much heavier than in the past, and they too are healthier.

It's brilliant news that a fifth of obese people aren't bothered about their body shape. It's great that there are successful large people who are positive role models. This is a good news story.

But good news doesn't sell operations.

The Nuffield - and all the media outlets who have helpfully cut-and-pasted their give us all your money press release - are saying that having successful fatties in the public eye is a really bad thing. If you're going to be popular, you should be slim.

Now I'm more than happy to agree that your body image is your own business. If you want to be slimmer, good luck to you. If you decide that surgery is the way to go, don't let me stand in your way.

But lying to people, telling them they're endangering their health, just to make a quick buck, is disgraceful behaviour from the medical profession.

This is a story of lies, attacks on celebrities and creating worry and stress where none should exist, all the name of making money so a few more doctors can buy a few more Mercs and Porches.

It's just the sort of thing our media should be exposing; instead we have the all-too-familiar process where the press release goes into the paper without a journalist apparently engaging whatever passes for a brain in any meaningful way at all.

In mitigation, I suppose journalists can point out that the rubbish they're peddling is also being pushed by the Government, eager to waste millions of pounds on making us feel a bit more guilty and stressed than we already are.

Not much though, is it. Journalists gullibly printing nonsense isn't traditionally made OK if the Government's doing it too.

UPDATE: See also this excellent piece by Caron and this one by James Graham.

Of rodents, front bottoms and a family shamed

The other parents at the Quistlets' school will more than likely soon be picturing the Quist household as a cross between Orwell's 1984 and Fritzl's dungeon. I wouldn't mind, but it's not completely true. We don't live at house number 101, for example.

How did this sorry state of affairs come about?

It all started a while back when, like most parents of a daughter, we were pondering how to refer to her lady-parts and failing to come up with a satisfactory answer. It wasn't something we could ignore and referring to it as down there, front bottom, rose, fifi, choo choo or any of the other many so-called child-friendly names didn't sound right.

Since we had not the slightest problem teaching Gabriel that the proper name for his apparatus was penis in addition to the variety of other names it went by amongst his peer group, we decided to go for vagina. (Technically, vulva is probably more correct, but I don't much like the word vulva for some reason, so vagina it was).

That would have been fine, but young Jezebel took to the word with aplomb, eagerly telling all and sundry the latest news about her vagina. And for some reason, it still makes me feel a little uncomfortable to hear her say the word - especially to strangers (my problem rather than her's, but even so...).

But it's OK. It was the right decision for us and I've no regrets. Vagina it is.

We own a pair of rats - cute, friendly little things that Jezebel and Gabriel both enjoy playing with. It so happened recently that, as one of the rats ran across Jezebel's lap, it was scrabbling at her skirt.

In Jezebel's mind, as the story was later related to her friends from down the road, "The rat was trying to burrow into my vagina." The next day we have young Jezebel telling the rat "You're not going into my vagina like you did yesterday".

Perhaps "You're not going near my fully-clothed crotch, like you did yesterday." would be more accurate and less likely to get me arrested.

By the time the story gets passed onto other doting parents, it will more than likely come across as us having some sort of medieval torture-chamber set up to keep the Quistlets in line.

So if you hear of us being driven out of the area with pitchforks and burning torches, or social services turning up en masse, convinced we're at the centre of some bizarre paedophilia/bestiality ring, you'll know why.

When was the Lib Dems most successful by-election period

My second post of the day on by-elections, since no-one in the world of politics seems to want to do anything interesting this weekend.

A common complaint amongst the Lib Dem party faithful is how we don't seem to win as many by-elections as we used to. After every Crewe and Nantwich, every Henley, sore activists emerge to gripe that it isn't like it was in the good old days when the mere sight of a by-election was a sure sign of another Liberal or Lib Dem victory.

Sorry, guys, your memory's playing tricks on you. You're recalling our great victories and forgetting the many losses.

This graph shows the number of by-elections in each post-war parliament and how many the Lib Dems gained. (over the 60 year period we also held two and lost one - not shown).


Not exactly a picture of unbridled Liberal domination, is it. In Ashdown's glory days of '92-'97, for example, we won five by-elections but lost thirteen.

Onto the big question: when were we most successful.

There are two parliaments when we've managed to win five by-elections ('70-'74 and '92-'97).

But, you can only fight the by-elections that come up and, if we look at the proportion of by-elections won, it's the 2001-2005 parliament that wins the prize. There were only six by-elections and we won two of them.


So, contrary to the misty-eyed beliefs of some, we've never been in a situation where we could expect to win any by-election, or even half of them. We've always lost many more than we've won.

But, as the graph shows, although there are huge variations between parliaments (often due to reasons outside our control), the trend is an upwards one. With fewer by-elections to fight and a crack team more able than ever to rise to the challenge, we're really not doing too badly at all.

How modern healthcare saved the Lib Dems

By-elections. Meat and drink to Liberal, Alliance and Liberal Democrat activists for decades. Money and effort is poured (with some circumspection) into all but the most hopeless.

And yet we have so few these days. In the 2001-05 parliament there was just six by-elections. In each of 92-97 and 97-2001 there were fewer than 20.

Compare that to the 40s, 50s and 60s. Atlee's 45-50 parliament: 52 by-elections. In the 50-51 parliament alone there were 16. 51-55 saw 49 by-elections. In the second half of the 1950s there were 52. In 59-64 there were 62.

If you want a really scary number, look at the 1935-45 parliament. 219 parliamentary by-elections. On average, one every two or three weeks for the whole decade (though many were uncontested). More than one in three MPs elected in 1935 didn't make it to the next General Election.

Our poor campaigns department would be on medication. You wouldn't be getting emails begging for another donation; you'd have thugs turning up on your doorstep. It would be pointed out that, whilst you've no obligation to donate to the Lib Dem by-election fund, it would be a real shame if little tiddles were to be run over. After all, the roads are very busy and accidents can happen.

(Graph shows the number of by-elections in each parliament and the number that were due to the death of the sitting MP rather than some other reason, like he just got bored and fancied a change*).


So why the change? How did we get from averaging ten by-elections a year before 1970 to little over one a year in the first few years of this century?

Partly modern healthcare and improvements in life expectancy. Before 1970, around five MPs would die in office every year. In the 2001-05 parliament it averaged just one a year.

Improved road safety has paid dividends too. In the 1945-50 parliament, four MPs were killed in road accidents.

Perhaps mental healthcare has improved too. There's been some comment recently on whether or not someone should be allowed to hold office as an MP if they've ever been sectioned under the mental health act. Back in Clem's day the reality was a little starker: four Labour MPs committed suicide in the 1945-50 parliament.

Another reason for the higher number of by-elections is the odd habit, now pretty much dead in the water, of elevating sitting MPs to the Lords. In the 55-59 parliament, no fewer than 14 MPs were kicked over to the red leather benches.

Curiously, MPs seemed able to bugger off even when their party held the tightest of majorities. With Labour clinging onto power by its fingernails in the late '70s, they lost three seats to the Tories due to MPs simply taking other jobs.

One more was lost when an MP resigned after being found guilty of insurance fraud (the good old days - brings a tear to the eye, doesn't it).

So better healthcare, an end to sitting MPs suddenly being booted upstairs and fewer sitting MPs wandering off to run Cable and Wireless or British Rail all goes to make the Lib Dem Campaigns Department the relaxed and happy place it is today.


* Yes, I'm pretty sure it happened on a regular basis. Labour MP (and Baron) Francis Douglas swapped his North Battersea constituency for the Governorship of Malta in 1946. You're not going to tell me that was purely from a desire to better serve the nation.

Suspicion falls on Time Lord in Jackson death

Today's Guardian has the scoop...

Democracy stinks if Charlotte can't contribute

Over the last couple of months I've devoted considerable effort to singing the praises of a democracy where there are no safe seats, where the public can vote anyone out.

I've criticised First Past the Post for all the safe seats it creates - several hundred. The MP is, in reality, decided by local Conservative and Labour parties (and, in a very small number of cases, by the local Lib Dems). The voters are incidental.

To illustrate the power of safe seats, remember Neil Hamilton in Tatton. Such was the safety of the seat that, even with the sitting MP found guilty of corruption, we needed an independent candidate with Labour and Lib Dem support to unseat him.

(It's worth noting, too, that although Tatton was once again safe for the Tories in 2001, fewer people voted for Osborne than voted against him in that year - you can have a safe seat even if the majority oppose you).

I've also attacked the list system, as used in the European elections, that allows parties to install candidates at the top of the list with a similar certainty. The European vote in the North East would have required a catacylsm to avoid electing the three candidates the main parties had chosen to top their lists. Again, voting was a formality.

In the back of my mind there's always been an "ah but", and it was brought to the fore by a very interesting post from fellow Lib Dem blogger Charlotte Gore.

Charlotte, who sits on the libertarian wing of the Lib Dems, doesn't think she could win a seat where she wasn't already a shoe-in.

"any campaign run by me could be derailed very quickly by finding a few choice quotes. Charlotte Gore wants to axe the welfare state! Charlotte Gore wants to cut spending! Charlotte Gore is pro Business and anti Union! Charlotte Gore wants to legalise drugs! Charlotte Gore thinks the BNP should be allowed on television! That’s just the start of it. There’s enough in this blog to kill any political career one hundred times over."

"In another world, weirdos like me would get plonked into a safe seat somewhere and told to keep my gob shut for the duration. That’s how democracy works."

There is, of course, the point about making our lives open on the Internet. Unless, like me, you take the coward's option and remain anonymous, you're just bound to give opponents ammunition. Sensible, safe candidates (and there are several who blog) will tone things down a bit and hope that the benefit outweighs the cost.

Charlotte, who throws caution to the wind and tells us what she really thinks, has a similar problem to those people caught out on Facebook. We aren't used to knowing the intimate details of others' personal lives, whether it's Charlotte's opinions shared with the world or Prince Harry's "paki" moment.

It isn't that other people don't have interesting opinions or make stupid mistakes. It's that we don't know about them and discovering the gory details comes as a bit of a shock, even if there's really nothing very shocking at all.

But there's another, wider, issue - democracy itself.

I'm of the firm belief that the benefits of strong democracy - including getting rid of safe seats - outweigh the downsides. But that doesn't mean we should ignore those problems and pretend they don't exist.

One downside is that it encourages safe and homogenous candidates. If you are trying win a seat; if you need a dedicated team of volunteers to support your campaign; if you need people to donate thousands of pounds to support you; if you can't afford to piss off big chunks of your constituency - then there is a benefit to playing it safe.

There are exceptions. Through force of personality, some candidates can carry off the oddball thing. Recall, though, that even Obama - hardly a shrinking violet - had to play it safe and appeal to the widest constituency to win his election. For most of us, safe and mainstream is the way to success if we have to win the voters over.

So let's take away two lessons.

First, democracy is the best system but it isn't perfect. There are people who think that the democratic decision must be the right or the best decision. No. Democracy is a safeguard. Giving the people the ability to kick out, or vote in, politicians has proven in many countries over many decades to be an impressively strong and successful way of running things. It's better than the alternatives, but it doesn't always get it right.

Second, whatever reforms you make to the system, however wonderful your democracy becomes; even, dare I say it, if Clegg's Take Back Power campaign was fully implemented, there would still be very able people who for all sorts of reasons would never win an election. A sensible democratic system allows the nation to harness the abilities of these people.

We're often keen to attack the unelected political advisors and quangocracy. Sometimes with justification. But both have positive elements, and we would be very foolish indeed to say that only those who have won the electoral popularity contest should hold any sort of power in our nation at all.

Disgraceful Mail lambasts size 16 MP

Proving that there's no depth to which the Daily Mail won't stoop, it today attacks an MP for small food purchases.

What's the big deal, you might ask. MPs were permitted to claim back money spent on food - and some spent rather more than others. Why attack this particular MP. Was it, perhaps, an especially high claim? Were taxpayer footing the bill for caviar and champagne, or luxury truffles?

No.

The crime in this case was that the snacks weren't healthy and the MP in question is female and, according to the Daily Mail in a revalation sure to rock the nation to its very foundation, is "believed to be a size 16".

In a fairly desperate attempt to pretend it isn't just laying into a perfectly normal-sized middle aged MP for eating perfectly normal snack food, the Mail tries to get a charge of hypocrisy to stick.

Apparently, the MP in question (Rosie Cooper, Labour MP for West Lancashire) campaigned for healthy eating and backed the British Heart Foundation's Food4Thought campaign.

Quite why that would make it hypocritical to buy the odd donut, bag of crisps or chocolate bar is anyone's guess. I wasn't aware that any sensible definition of healthy eating involved cutting out all treats or never snacking.

Rosie Cooper says the snacks were for an intern. I don't think it makes the slightest difference whether they were or not.

This is a nasty little story from the Mail, dishonest, horribly sexist, just nasty. They should be ashamed of themselves; but they won't be.

If overweight is healthier, what's "normal" about normal weight?

A new study of nearly 12,000 Canadian adults over a twelve year period was published in the Obesity journal a few days ago. As media reports are saying, the study has found that being overweight leads to a longer life than being in the "normal" weight range.

The riskiest weights are to be underweight (BMI less than 18.5) or morbidly obese (BMI over 35).

The healthiest weight turns out to be what doctors currently class as being overweight - BMI 25-30.

If your weight falls into the "normal" range of 18.5-25 or obese (30-35), you're likely to live longer than the underweight or morbidly obese but not as long as the moderately overweight.

It isn't a new finding - existing research backs it up. It also makes sense in the context of a population in which the adults are both getting fatter and living longer than ever before.

Which rather leads us to ask what we mean by "normal" weight anyway.

It doesn't mean the weight most people fall into. It isn't even the most common weight category. Two out of five people in the UK (including myself) fall into the healthy "overweight" category and a further one in five are obese.

If being "normal" weight is both less common and less healthy that being "overweight", wouldn't it make sense to re-work the classifications.

Currently a lot of effort - millions of pounds in the UK alone - is invested into encouraging overweight people to get down into the normal category. Are we spending that money to shorten people's lives?

If we're going to stick with Body Mass Index (BMI) as a measure (and that's a whole other debate), might it not make more sense to have something like:

• BMI less than 18.5: morbidly underweight
• BMI 18.5-24.9: underweight
• BMI 25-29.9: normal
• BMI 30-34.9: overweight
• BMI 35-39.9: obese
• BMI 40+: morbidly obese
  

That would better reflect both the real distribution of weight and the health impact.

The researchers are saying this isn't a reason for people who weigh less to suddenly decide to splurge a hundred quid at their local Burger King. That sounds right to me: other evidence points to our natural weight as being largely genetic so forcing your weight up by over-eating may not be beneficial.

You can (for a price) access the full study here.

Here's the abstract in full, copied from the Obesity journal website:

Although a clear risk of mortality is associated with obesity, the risk of mortality associated with overweight is equivocal. The objective of this study is to estimate the relationship between BMI and all-cause mortality in a nationally representative sample of Canadian adults. A sample of 11,326 respondents aged 25 in the 1994/1995 National Population Health Survey (Canada) was studied using Cox proportional hazards models. A significant increased risk of mortality over the 12 years of follow-up was observed for underweight (BMI <18.5;>35; RR = 1.36, P <0.05). rr =" 0.83," rr =" 0.95,">0.05). Our results are similar to those from other recent studies, confirming that underweight and obesity class II+ are clear risk factors for mortality, and showing that when compared to the acceptable BMI category, overweight appears to be protective against mortality. Obesity class I was not associated with an increased risk of mortality.

Should we ban GBL or not?

One death of a young person is one too many. So when Hester Stewart, a 21-year-old medican student, died - apparently from taking the recreational drug GBL along with alcohol - the calls for GBL to be banned forthwith were both understandble and predictable.

GBL is widely used in industrial chemistry for all sorts of good things, but when ingested it quickly turns into GHB. You may rememeber that GHB, in addition to naturally occuring in small quantities in our bodies and in wine and beef, is also one of the so-called date-rape drugs.

So should GBL be banned as a recreational drug?

Let's assume we're happy about banning drugs and not get into the whole legalisation issue. Why might we want to ban GBL?

Media reports suggest that taking GBL with even a small amount of alcohol means automatic death and that the drug has all sorts of nasty side-effects.

The science, as is so often the case, is a little more ambivalent. The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) issued a detailed report on the risks around GBL a couple of years ago.

The report points to 47 cases of deaths where GBL or GHB was implicated over a 12 year period in the UK - four or five a year. In quite a few of these, alcohol was also involved.

47 isn't very many. The report is able to list every single known UK death involving GBL or GHB over that twelve year period, giving the cocktail of drugs involved for each (in one case, the person had ten different drugs - that shows some dedication to the task of killing yourself).

This leads the report's authors to say that

"There is some evidence that concomitant alcohol use may be a risk factor"

Some evidence...risk factor. Not quite the picture of certain death the Telegraph paints, is it.

Let's look at the number of deaths a year. Four or five seems pretty low. Over 100,000 people every year are estimated to die from smoking, several thousand from alcohol, over a hundred from cocaine and over 50 a year from esctasy (one of the safer drugs).

As this page explains, measuring the deaths from drugs is difficult (especially so with alcohol, it would seem), but even so, it seems clear that GBL is relatively benign.

Two caveats to that claim: it depends how many people take it and how good the detection methods are. If only ten people a year take GBL, five of them dying is pretty bad. If the lab methods for detecting GBL after death only pick it up one time in ten, the figures will be higher than they appear.

However, GBL appears to be reasonably widely used and the lab tests passably accurate, so in all likelihood we're looking a drug that's hundreds, if not thousands of times less dangerous than tobacco.

The evidence suggest that people do get ill, injured and killed as a direct result of taking GBL. That's not in question. The challenge is to decide whether the risk is high enough to warrant banning it.

As a society, we're quite into banning drugs that are fun and carry a small risk of death or other bad things. We let alcohol and tobacco go, but many other, perhaps safer, drugs are illegal.

Even on that basis, I would be cautious about banning GBL. The number of deaths it causes - even taking into account the possible causes of error - seems very low in the overall scheme of things.

One death is a tragedy, but if we banned everything that had ever caused a death there wouldn't be much left.

We're left with the traditional excuse - that people only use it for pleasure. This, apparently, is sufficient to make the decision.

You might argue that sport - a far more dangerous passtime than taking recreational drugs, is fun. You might suggest that a rational approach would most certainly ban extreme sports, mountaineering, hill walking, swimming, rugby and all sorts of other activities far more dangerous that GBL.

I think we all know how much of a hearing you'd get if you tried, though.

Brown: biggest reform in the history of the universe...ever

Like Moses descending from the mountain with the stone tablets, Gordon Brown today graced the nation's media with his presence, promising a parliamentary shake-up the like of which we've never seen before.

Magna Carta? A footnote. The English Civil War? A schoolboy conker fight. This is the real deal.

So how is Gordon planning to shake our democracy to its very foundations and remake it in his own reforming image?

Three earth-shattering changes. ( It helps at this point if you imagine them spoken in an action movie trailer voice).

ONE. AN INDEPENDENT COMMISSION TO REGULATE MPs

TWO. A CODE OF CONDUCT FOR FINANCIAL STANDARDS

THREE. SOME THINGS NOW AGAINST THE RULES WILL STILL BE AGAINST THE RULES, BUT WILL ALSO BE CRIMINAL OFFENCES.

That sound you can hear is the ghost of Asquith leaving, shamefaced, a broken man bested by Reforming Gordon.

How does this measure up against, say, Nick Clegg's 100 days plan. Let's go through Nick's seven headline points and see.

1. Commitment to accept Kelly expenses reform in full
I'll give Gordon a YES on this one - he does tackle the expenses issue.

2. Recall power for MPs suspended for misconduct
NO

3. House of Lords reform
MAYBE. Gordon has spoken about reforming the Lords. He'll want to keep an appointed element. He'll claim it'll be to ensure the country benefits from the experience, wisdom and free thinking of the people appointed. Everyone will know it's really because he can't afford to piss off the Blairites promised peerages - they know too much.

4. Party funding reform
NO

5. Fixed term Parliaments
NO

6. Enabling legislation for a referendum on AV+
Hahahahahaha. No. He might talk about it though. Briefly. In 2017.

7. Changes to House of Commons procedure to reduce executive power
MAYBE. It remains to be seen how willing the Government really is to give up its control of the parliamentary timetable, appointment of committee chairs and the other powers that ensure it retains the upper hand over backbench MPs.

Sorry Gordon, you're going to have to try harder if you want us to buy the whole reformer spiel.

South Africa - a culture of rape

"Save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man" [Moses told his army officers]...The plunder that the soldiers took was...32,000 women.
(Numbers ch 31)

Rape has a long history. Everyone reading this almost certainly has many ancestors who committed rape and thought little of it. God smiled upon it, soldiers often saw it as just reward for hardships endured laying siege to a city or conducting a war.

No-one can be under the illusion that rape as a crime has been beaten; but I was still shocked by the extent to which it's not just common but accepted in South Africa.

No matter how harsh your penalties, if a social group see a crime as something that's OK to do, it's very difficult to stop it. That's true for punishment beatings in the bad old days in Northern Ireland, for a whole range of petty crimes in most countries and, it would seem, for rape in South Africa.

A recent survey of South African men has revealed that one-in-four admit to having committed rape. Around half of those said they had raped more than once and the majority committed their first rape whilst still in their teens.

Three percent of respondents admitted raping another male, whilst one in ten men had themselves been raped.

The general scale of the problem is backed up by another survey conducted a decade ago.

That survey, of 4,000 South African women, found that one-in-three said they had been raped in the last year.

Some will claim the lack of will on the part of the authorities to tackle the problem is to blame. The punishments aren't harsh enough, or aren't firmly applied.

Sadly, though, that isn't enough.

As I argued back in January (the content's good, but I still wonder what I was smoking when I settled on that title), rape must become socially unacceptable amongst those peer groups. Someone who commits rape must be seen to have lower social status, to be a bad person. (Saying it should happen is rather different from suggesting how it can happen, of course, and I won't claim to have any great ideas on that one).

The social aspect of rape in South Africa is clear. As the BBC reported a decade ago:

"In a related survey conducted among 1,500 schoolchildren in the Soweto township, a quarter of all the boys interviewed said that 'jackrolling' - a South African term for recreational gang rape - was fun. "

This is not about South African men being evil, sub-human or morally deficient. Numerous studies over the last few decades have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that, given the right situation and the right social pressures, nearly all of us would do things to others that, in the cold light of day, we would wonder how the hell we did that, and probably feel sick at the thought.

Think of Milgram's famous experiments where ordinary people were induced to deliver painful electric shocks to others.

Think of the Stanford Prison experiment, where students were randomly assigned to be guards or prisoners. The experiment had to be terminated early after the "guards" repeatedly overstepped acceptable behaviour in dealing with "prisoners". These were well-adjusted, intelligent people.

As long as rape is seen as socially acceptable and a "fun" thing to do amongst young South African men, no legal crackdown will be successful.

We want democracy, and we want it for free

We the voters want our MPs to be good servants of the people. We want them to be in parliament making good laws and holding the Government to account. At the same time, they must be good constituency MPs, helping thousands of local people every year.

We want MPs we can get rid of, so we expect them to have to work for their seats. MPs and candidates should slog it out on the doorsteps and in village hall meetings to prove their worth. Even if we know there are 40,000 houses in our constituency, we sometimes feel a candidate isn't up to much if he or she hasn't knocked on our door this year.

And we think it's dreadfully unfair that they get such long holidays when parliament isn't sitting.

We want MPs to be good people. Morally better than the rest of us, wise and intelligent. We want them to be the sort of high flier who could easily get a decent executive job with a great deal more security; but we'd like to pay them a fraction of what they could earn in the private sector.

We reserve the right to complain like hell whenever they get even the smallest pay rise. It doesn't matter whether they've voted for it themselves, or whether it's been decided by a totally independent body - it's our money, damn it.

We'd rather like it if our MPs were able to do everything we expect of them, in Westminter and the constituency, without staff (and no, we don't want to pay any more tax for their medical treatment after the nervous breakdown).

If they absolutely must have staff, we expect those people to be selfless, expert and absolutely dedicated to their jobs but we begrudge them being paid more than minimum wage and definitely don't approve of them getting any training.

We accept that MPs need to live in London part of the time, but do they really need a flat? Aren't there shelters for the homeless that the MPs could use - then they'd know how real people lived too. If they must own or rent property, it should be furnished with packing crates. If it was last decorated in 1935 and the walls are filled with asbestos, that's hardly our problem.

And what about that travelling? Just because we all expect our employers to pay our travel expenses, that doesn't mean MPs should get the same. It's our money. They can pay for their own train tickets. Or they can hitch-hike. Or offer sexual favours in return for transport.

We want a good democracy where its the people who have the power. We certainly don't want to be in a country where the richest candidate always wins, or the most corrupt buys the election regardless of the votes cast. The poorest man or women should have just the same opportunity to become an MP as the wealthiest landowner.

But at the same time, we don't want to pay a penny for it. That poor candidate should raise all the money they need to beat their millionaire opponent themselves, with no limit on what each candidate can spend.

Though we want minor parties to have a chance, we certainly don't want to fund political parties from taxes, and we don't want a party to need multi-millionaire backers before it has any chance of success.

We complain that we never hear from our MPs and MEPs, but think a media officer or media training is a waste of money.

We want our MPs to be completely honest, not to engage in negative politics and to work constructively with other parties. Then we vote for the guy who told loads of lies, spent the whole campaign attacking his opponents and sees constructive politics as anathema.

I think we may be a little confused.

Gordon's Twitter twaddle

Gordon Brown, speaking to the Guardian, launched into a nice bit of Web 2.0 utopianism last week.

He may be trying to score points over Blair who, famously, barely knew what a computer was. (That could go some way to explaining how IT snake-oil salesmen managed to persuade him that every problem from the NHS to terrorism, collecting taxes to educating children, could be miraculously solved by spending a few billion quid on a super-duper new computer system from Capita, EDS or some similar bunch of cowboys).

"People have now got the ability to speak to each other across continents, to join with each other in communities that are not based simply on territory, streets, but networks; and you've got the possibility of people building alliances right across the world."

Brown happily burbled

"That flow of information means that foreign policy can never be the same again.

"You cannot have Rwanda again because information would come out far more quickly about what is actually going on and the public opinion would grow to the point where action would need to be taken.

"Foreign policy can no longer be the province of just a few elites."

Ooh, how lovely. The Internet as saviour of the world with bloggers and tweeters saving millions of lives. Just leave the Nobel Peace Prize on the doorstep.

Except that Gordon, as so often, has missed the point. Yes, through Twitter, blogs and other Internet tools, we're able (should we wish) to get more information about the trouble in Iran from ordinary people on the ground than ever before.

But does that stop it happening? Does the sheer force of all those tweets and posts knock the Iranian authorities back and force them into submission?

No, of course not. In recent decades, we've always known a good deal about what's happening on the ground. Even in places like Burma, the authorities haven't managed to stop information getting out. We know huge amounts about Zimbabwe, the Sudan, Tibet, Pakistan, Syria and Saudi Arabia.

As we've known through history and seen countless times, it's one thing to know what's happening in a country, and something else entirely to have the political and military will and ability to do something about it.

Are we clueless about the suffering of the Zimbabwean people? No. There's just not a great deal we can do about it. (Or, perhaps, there's something we could do but, when it comes down it it, we're really more concerned with how many wheelie bins are outside our houses and making sure that, however much those foreigners might be suffering, they don't come over here).

Is all that twittering going to lead to international action against Iran? No. The calculations about intervening directly will be much the same as they have been since 1979 when Iran's pro-western government was overthrown and the religious extremists took power.

I guess it's not completely impossible that all this information will bring about a popular groundswell of opinion bringing huge political pressure on Western governments to somehow intervene more directly (though whether that's a good idea is another matter entirely, given the massive success of recent attempts by the West to give other countries a helping hand).

Not impossible, but unlikely.

It's also possible - and this is the most likely benefit - that because Iranian democrats are able to see the massive support from people around the world, they are inspired to endure more and work harder to overthrow the regime.

That could happen. But it doesn't have much to do with foreign policy.

Sorry, Prime Minister, you may have learnt how to spout the web 2.0 words, but what they mean appears to elude you.

MPs vote to replace First Past the Post with AV

What could be more pleasant than a gentle stroll down memory lane on a Sunday morning (and Father's Day, the longest day of the year and the official start of summer, no less).

Yes, our wonderful MPs have voted to replace the tired, discredited First Past the Post system for general elections with the very-slightly-less-bad Alternative Vote (AV).

They haven't just done it once, the buggers did it twice. First in 1918 (when we came within a whisker of having the Single Transferable Vote - STV) and then again in 1931. Sadly, the Lords kicked it into touch (yes, I blame you personally, Baroness Scott - don't come to me with those silly "but I hadn't been born then" type excuses. The Lords defeated it, you sit in the Lords, your fault).

Here's another one to pass the time - and you can check it easily enough. In 2005, Labour won an overall majority in the Commons with just 35% of the vote. But when did Labour get over 48% of the vote and still lose?

Answer: 1951. Labour managed 48.8% of the vote to the Tories' 48.0%, but fewer seats. Churchill was back in power and the Liberal Party had it's worst election ever, fielding 109 candidates and winning just six seats on 2.5%.

Daily Mail journalists might need a cold shower to calm down after remembering the 1950s, but across four general elections, the Liberals never topped nine MPs.

MacShane calls for electoral fixing to block BNP

The BNP, bless their little cotton socks, have shown an ability to win the occasional local council seat under the First Past the Post electoral system. A couple of weeks ago, they also won two seats in the European Parliament for the first time.

According to a story on the epolitix site, this has been enough for an ill-informed and foolish comment from Rotherham Labour MP Denis MacShane. Denis is keen to find a way to fix the system to exclude extremists - to brush them under the carpet and deny them representation so we can all happily pretend they don't exist.

MacShane rightly points out that the BNP wouldn't have succeeded had the Euro elections been held under First Past the Post (the party simply doesn't have the capacity to win the popular vote across the sort of area that a single-member Euro constituency would cover).

Denis might also have mentioned that the European list system is a crap voting system, giving far too much power to political parties and too little to voters, but he doesn't.

Instead, if the epolitix story is accurate, MacShane wanders off into a fantasy world.

In the 2004 election in the Yorkshire region, he said, the BNP had received a smaller proportion of the votes in the all-postal ballot where "nearly twice as many people voted".

Well let's hold on a minute there, Denis. Firstly, nothing like twice as many people voted in 2004 compared to 2009 (in the Yorkshire and Humber region, 159,000 in 2004, compared to 123,000 in 2009).

And secondly, did Denis not notice that the BNP's vote increased from 1.2% in 1999 to 8% in 2004. Yep, that's right. The use of all-postal voting saw the biggest increase in the BNP's vote ever. And this is MacShane's great idea to defeat the BNP.

MacShane does, however, seem to represent (however badly) an opinion held by many: that the way to defeat the BNP is to tweak the electoral system so everyone who supports them is denied a voice. No need to deal with the problem of the far right. No need to meet the challenge. No need to address the concerns of all those people. Just fiddle the voting system and make it all go away.

There are excellent reasons for dumping the list system for Euro elections, but engineering the voting system to exclude a specific party you don't like isn't one of them, and not having the faintest idea how many people actually voted in your own region probably isn't the best start when it comes to convincing anyone otherwise.

(Hat tip to Mole45 at Swinton South Liberal Democrats)

Muddle and confusion over Lib Dem donation

It would have been wonderful if the party hadn't received a £2.4 million donation from Michael Brown in 2005. Few in the party can be happy that the 2005 General Election campaign was largely funded by money from someone later convicted of fraud - I'm certainly not.

Ever since, though, the party has come under pressure for something a little different - to find £2.4 million and pay it to the victims of Michael Brown's fraud.

American lawyer Robert Mann certainly wants that to happen. He was duped by Michael Brown and clearly hopes the Liberal Democrats can be persuaded, through the legal system if needed, to pay him some of the money he lost.

To add to the confusion, some of the party's political opponents see the opportunity to embarass and seriously damage the party - fair enough, that's part of the game - but nothing to do with what's morally or legally right.

Is Robert Mann serious in his claims, or does he just see the party as the softest touch to help him get back some of the money he was conned out of?

Is the money Robert Mann gave to Michael Brown the same money Brown gave to the party anyway? Brown approached the Lib Dems months before he had Mann's money.

If the Lib Dems did every check they were required to do, and that's been confirmed by the relevant authorities, is it reasonable, as Mann suggests, that the Lib Dems should have gone further and somehow done a full investigation on their donor? Is that something any other political party in any country does?

If you receive some money from a company and then find the company has stolen something from someone, do you feel morally obliged to make it good? Are there examples of other political parties (or others) doing that?

It is down to the police and, potentially the courts.

The problem I have with the whole business is how people with a clear agenda (political advantage or getting a lot of money they were conned out of) seem to be suggesting the Lib Dems are somehow wrong for not doing something that no-one else does.

The party is absolutely right to stand up to these people, and to follow the rulings of the relevant authorities and, should it come to that, the courts. Mann's latest attempt, presumably having decided that the party can't be got on the rules over political donations, is to invoke the 2002 Proceeds of Crimes Act.

Having had a brief glance through, I can't quite spot which part of the act might possibly apply, but we shall see. The party must be open and transparent on this issue and comply fully with the law.

UPDATE: See also the piece on Liberal Vision looking at this issue. Good stuff from Mark Littlewood.

A Mug for Ms Gore

Charlotte Gore has gone all meme-y in an attempt to break her writer's block (seems to be working, thank heavens) and given us a run-down of her best and worst mugs.

Mine are mostly very boring, so I won't subject you to them, but there's one of Mrs Quist's that I've often thought might, in the nicest possible way, suit both Charlotte and another one of my favourite bloggers, the cute little bundle of fluffiness that isn't Jennie Rigg (dear me, that wasn't a quote was it?)

Ros has answers for Local Government

Lib Dem party president Ros Scott has written a very interesting pamphlet for Unlock Democracy - all about local government.

I know what you're thinking - mmm, local democracy, sounds fascinating...just let me watch this paint dry first.

But you're wrong. Very wrong. As Ros points out, it's local councils that deal with the things that really matter to people day-to-day. If you knock on doors - for any party - you'll find far more people complaining about the local school that's scheduled to close, or the state of the roads and pavements, or the rubbish collection, than you will about the Government's policy towards Turkey or even the global economy.

The problem, Ros claims, is that local government is neutered. Over 75% of their money comes from central government, which then wants to control what they do. The relationship between the tiers is sufficiently complex and opaque that almost no-one can really figure out who's in control - and so to blame when things go wrong. Everyone can plausibly blame someone else.

Almost uniquely in Europe, our local government can only do what Whitehall specifically allows it to. Elsewhere, the default position is that local government has much more power.

Without local newspapers and radio stations holding councils to account, it falls to opposition parties to do the job, but if they don't have the resources ruling parties might find they can get away with rather a lot and the electorate need never know.

There's more too - on local democracy, local strategic partnerships (what do you mean you've never heard of them?) and how we can move past this centralised control to give genuine power and democratic legitimacy to our local authorities.

So don't watch that paint dry, read this instead.

Want to learn bridge but don't have a penis? Here's the answer

Browsing in my local second-hand bookshop I came across this wonderful 1960s book: Bridge for Women.


I'm not convinced though. OK, I'll admit that most women can probably learn complex things like bridge. And quite possibly a woman can be trained to play bridge like a man; and even play with a man, without embarassing herself too much.


But play better than a man? Come on now, girls, let's not get silly about this. At least they got a male editor for the book - otherwise who knows what it would have ended up like. Probably little heart signs over all the "i"s.

Goodbye to ID cards - the battle is won

The Register is reporting that the Home Office yesterday delayed awarding the contract for making ID cards until after the next General Election.

While contracts for the Manchester Airport trial and the database have been awarded, the critical contract to actually produce the millions of ID cards needed for any sort of national rollout has not.

This contract will now not be awarded until Autumn 2010, which means it won't happen at all unless Labour hold onto power at the General Election.

With Tories and Lib Dems implacably opposed to this whitest of New Labour white elephants and even the new Home Secretary dubious about the whole business, this looks very much like that particular battle is won.

MPs' expenses: what's blacked out?

So MPs' expenses have been properly published here.

First point: if I go to a website I've never visited before and get prompted to answer a "How are we doing?" questionnaire within the first few seconds, the answer is going to be that you'd do better to stop annoying me and let me get on with what I want to do.

OK, onto the MPs' expenses. The first thing you'll notice is just now much is blacked out - seemingly for no good reason.

Here's some of the things we're not permitted to see:

• Catalog numbers on a stationary invoice
  
• The MP's signature
• The MP's constituency office address
• Account numbers and references on an invoice
• Areas of pages that you'd expect to be empty - was there a comment written there?

Just bizarre.



Even the first names of MP's staff appears to be top secret.



Dell - keeper of national secrets.



I have it in good authority from a bloke I met in the pub that if terrorists could just get hold of a few Post Office terminal IDs, they could launch a full-scale nuclear attack on Britain.

Liberal Youth and the hunt for something to do

Like most people, I've been involved in a fair number of organisations over the years, from companies that I've worked for to sports clubs, social organisations and, of course, the Liberal Democrats.

I well remember what a thorn in the side of Prime Minister Asquith we Young Liberals were (OK, not quite - it was Lloyd-George).

Some organisations have a clear objective. Companies want to make profits and build the business. Local political parties aim to win elections. Charities raise money and spend it. Sports clubs play a decent programme of fixtures and hopefully win a few. There's a clear, obvious and fairly unambiguous link between the objective and what they do.

Local Lib Dem parties don't have to sit around agonising about how they're going to promote the cause of Liberal Democracy. Build a strong local party, gain support, win votes, make a difference in your community.

For some, though, it's harder. For some, there's a big gap between the objectives of the organisation and what it should be doing day-to-day, and people consistently under-estimate how tough it is to fill it.

A typical example is a pressure group set up to promote a particular cause - the environment, anti-abortion, pro- or anti-Europe, for example. It's not obvious at all what practical actions these groups should take to advance their cause, and members will often have very different ideas. Build membership? Direct action? Political lobbying?

Liberal Youth (and the other Lib Dem special interest groups) fall within that category. Sure, there should be an organisation for young people within the party; but it's far from obvious what it should be doing.

In a recent article in the Independent, former LDYS Chair Mark Gettleson gave his thoughts on what the various political youth organisations are for these days:

"Conservative Future tends to train people to be researchers and Tory candidates and acts as a social network – it was one big Tory dating agency, and to some extent still is; Young Labour has become a vehicle for winning control of the National Union of Students without any other specific purpose; and Liberal Youth is about getting votes into ballot boxes and getting Liberal Democrats elected."

Others remember the glory days (in some cases, the memories appear to be through spectacles so rose-tinted I'm surprised they can see anything at all). They recall the Young Liberals and LDYS as a thorn in the side of the leadership - the radical conscience of all those middle-aged men in suits.

The reality is that organisations like Liberal Youth - not just Lib Dem, not even just political, but one's supporting a group or a cause - can very easily spend huge amounts of time just getting to the point where they decide what practical things they're going to do.

I've been involved in organisations that took three or four years to get to that point. People will always have different opinions and it's entirely possible to spend most of the year coming to agreement, only to have elections and see a new Executive start all over again.

So how can organisations like Liberal Youth break through that and find an achievement that tops even Elaine's big pub crawl?

I would suggest two things.

First, each new Executive should accept that it's more important (and more beneficial for their future political careers) that Liberal Youth achieve some worthwhile things during the year than that it does exactly what that particular member wants. By all means fight your corner, but with a view to compromise and to getting behind the final decision.

Second, Liberal Youth might well benefit from the services of an external facilitator. Have an Executive weekend away, at which someone from outside the organisation (perhaps a former senior person) worked with everyone to reach agreement, draw up an achievable plan for the year and then made sure everyone accepted their responsibilities.

The reality - and this isn't a criticism of Liberal Youth - is that bridging that gap is genuinely difficult and constantly under-estimated as a problem. All too often, the result is years going by when, looked at in the cold light of day, very little has really been achieved.

I suspect that's true today, and it was certainly true in the past - whatever the drink-fuelled recollections of old hacks might be.

(More comment on Lib Dem Voice)

Digital Britain, poll tax and the great FM turn-off

The Government has released a 245 page report on how we're going to move Britain into the ditigal age, accelerate down the fast lane of the information superhighway and any other trite tech-goodness you might want to mention.

No, I haven't read the whole thing, but I'm going to pontificate anyway from my glance through the executive summary (over 80 paragraphs, so I'm not completely slacking).

There's some fun-but-meaningless jargon to keep the web 2.0 crowd happy.

"We are at an inflection point in technology, in capability and in demand."

"We are at a tipping point in relation to the online world. It is moving from conferring advantage on those who are in it to conferring active disadvantage on those who are without,"

Yeah! Tell it like it is, Brother!

Now, clearly giving everyone the opportunity to have broadband at a decent speed is a Good Thing ^(TM). Let's take that as read.

Three issues struck me, though: how to raise the money, tackling piracy and the move to close down national FM radio.

The phone line poll tax
The proposal is an additional tax of fifty pence a month, payable by everyone with a landline, to pay for broadband to be extended to the harder-to-reach rural parts of the country.

I don't want to overstate this. Even for most poorer households, fifty pence a month is not a huge deal.

But there's a principle. This is a straightforward tax: most people who pay their £6 a year won't get any benefit from it. So why not base it on ability to pay? Why make poor families and pensioners contribute a larger proportion of their income than millionaires?

Tackling piracy
It's notable that this report buys the creative industries' line on file sharing and piracy hook, line and sinker. The paper quotes industry body estimates of the cost of piracy uncritically (p109). Every industry estimate I've ever seen has been exceptionally dodgy, based on all sorts of unsubstantiated assumptions.

The strong line the paper proposes on tackling file sharing and online piracy (using both legal and technical fixes to hunt down and get file sharers) is based on one-sided dodgy evidence and so probably shouldn't be taken too seriously.

As usual, the serious pirates will find a way round any countermeasures (encrypted networks, for example) so only the casual file sharer, who almost certainly costs the creative industries next to nothing, is likely to be banged to rights.

Digital radio
Unfortunately, Britain has managed to go digital with a technology (DAB) that was several years out of date when we first introduced it. Newer and better technologies like DAB+ won't work with our 9 million DAB radios, so we're pretty much stuck with the old stuff.

The report proposes, roughly speaking, moving stations currently on FM to digital and stations currently on Medium Wave to FM. This apparently is for the benefit of the listener. But here's where it gets a bit weird.

Most FM stations are already on Digital too, so this isn't really about moving FM to Digital, it's about turning off the existing FM stations.

Is that really a good idea? FM radios are tiny and cost as little as a pound. We have millions of them in our cars and homes. Digital radios cost £30 or more (the report talks about getting the price down to below £20 for a cheap digital radio before switchover).

So in 2015, to continue listening to radio as they do today, most people are going to have to pay well over a hundred pounds to buy new digital radios for their cars and home for a start.

"Ah yes", says the report "but the FM infrastructure is getting old and it'll cost £200 million to keep it going for another twenty years."

All very well, except that £200 million is a tiny fraction of what we'll be forced to spend on replacing our radios, and they're going to have to spend most of that anyway as they want to continue using the FM band for stations currently on Medium Wave.

With the exception of digital radio manufacturers, and perhaps smaller local radio stations who'll get a coveted FM slot, I really struggle to see who benefits from this FM turn-off.

Check every tree in the country? I don't think so.

The Daily Express reports today that a lady is suing the Environment Agency for £300,000 after a branch fell on her head.

According to the Express, 58 year-old Doreen Prior has been unable to work since the accident and believes a proper check would have spotted that the branch was dead.

This is, of course, utterly moronic. Is anyone seriously suggesting that the Environment Agency should check every tree on every footpath - thousands of miles worth - on some sort of regular basis just in case a branch falls on someone? That would clearly cost millions - probably hundreds of millions - of pounds.

That's time and money the public sector could be spending on doing something that would make a real difference to the lives of thousands of people. How many could be lifted out of poverty with those millions? How many lives saved? How many children better educated?

Spending that amount of money in the (uncertain) hope of stopping a handful of injuries is daft beyond belief.

Good luck to Doreen Prior - there's certainly an argument that if she genuinely can't work as a result of the injury, she should be compensated. (There's a counter-argument too, that sometimes shitty things happen and we shouldn't always expect to be compensated). Any compensation paid to victims of this sort of injury would cost the taxpayer a tiny fraction of the expense of checking all the trees.

(For a more detailed discussion of the issue of risk around dangerous trees, take a look at this piece (pdf, 1MB) from statistician John Adams).

Sun comes clean

The Sun reveals its new strapline...

What's going on at the NHS?

A little while ago, my daughter - young Jezebel Quist - found herself in hospital for a few days (nothing too bad, all better now).

As a parent stuck in there with her for much of that time, I was interested to see how the NHS fared.

Remember that the National Health Service has received a massive three-fold increase from £35 billion in 1997 to £110 billion planned for 2010/11. To be fair, the population is also aging and old people cost the NHS a lot more. Then there's the increased cost of all the exciting whizzy new drugs and treatments - things like MRI scanners. So the increase isn't quite all it seems.

Let's not forget too that, despite what's sometimes claimed, the reduction in smoking is costing the NHS money. Not only are tax revenues from fags falling, but all those people who would have died from some smoking-related illness aged 60 or 70 after a couple of years in and out of hospital are now hanging around for an extra decade or so, requiring far more care in their old age.

Back to my little anecdote.

As with previous visits to my local hospital, the initial care was excellent. We have a habit of turning up in a weekend or evening and this time was no exception, but we're always seen and treated pretty quickly - no hanging around for hours on end.

I was also impressed with the cleanliness: anti-bacterial gel was everywhere, lots of signs about washing hands. I wasn't quite clear how having water that wasn't fit for drinking (but with no sign to tell you that) in the rooms fitted in, but top marks otherwise.

Once that initial treatment phase passed, and Jezebel was on a ward, everything slowed down. The nursing staff were still around and doing a good job, but doctors weren't quite so interested. We saw a consultant once a day and a more junior doctor probably once a day too.

On one occasion, Jezebel was prepped for a test and then...nothing. No-one told us what was going on, we were just left. It turned out things had become busy elsewhere (as a nurse told me with a "how dare you have the temerity to question the doctors' actions" sound in her voice).

Now onto risk. The doctors were very keen on playing it safe - running every test they could. But I got the impression that it sometimes had more to do with covering the hospital's back than doing what was best for the patient.

Hospitals are risky places - full of sick people. Being in hospital is also fairly stressful, and disruptive, for the patient and family. So I did wonder about the logic of suggesting a very painful test which would have given them quite a small amount of additional information.

Was that really in the patient's best interests? Might it not have been better to live with that uncertainty? Or find an alternative? In the end, we went against the doctor's recommendation and decided not to have the test - and a different, far less painful test, resolved the issue.

We were in hospital for three days. After one day pumped full of drugs, Jezebel was pretty much OK. Not feeling that hospital was the ideal place for a child who's feeling perfectly well, I was keen to take her home and have her treated as an outpatient.

As it turned out, that would have been absolutely fine for her, but we were persuaded not to do it - not on the basis of evidence but anecdotes from nurses about a child who was taken home and then swiftly became more ill.

The tick-box, low risk for the hospital approach was in evidence in another way too. Several times a day a junior doctor would come round with a little sheet, asking what Jezebel had eaten and drunk and how often she'd been to the toilet. Bizarrely, this even had to be done after we'd been told we could leave and were just waiting for medicine to come up from the pharmacy. At that time, giving the information had no possible medical benefit for the patient, but we were there so the form had to be completed.

Ah yes, the discharge. We knew Jezebel was OK - the drugs had done their job. After waiting a few hours for a doctor to confirm that, we had to wait a few more hours for pharmacy to prepare a simple, everyday, bottle of medicine.

I can only assume that, although there are many targets to be met and boxes to be ticked, the time from telling us we could go to actually getting us out of the door, medicine in hand, isn't one of them. Hence, despite it being a big deal to us (the family stuck in a hospital ward for half a day, unable to earn money or just get on with life), no-one really gave a toss.

What's going on? This is an anecdote - one visit to one hospital - so don't read too much into it.

But the impression I get from this and other visits is of an NHS that claims to be looking out for patients first, really wants to be looking out for patients first, but is completely shafted by targets, forms, tick-boxes and minimising risk for the doctors and hospitals.

If a doctor misdiagnoses and, as a result, a child gets worse, they would be in trouble. If a doctor runs a battery of tests, causes the child a great deal of extra pain and suffering in the progress it's a job well done, even if those tests have minimal diagnostic value.

A good deal of the time, of course, the targets coincided with what we wanted. I was keen for Jezebel seen and treated quickly when we first went in, and she was. But when they didn't - when we were asked to allow painful tests to be done for little benefit and kept hanging around with a well child for hours on end - I was less impressed.

To be fair, the problem is a tough one. If we want to get more-or-less the same standard of treatment in any hospital in the country, this sort of thing is needed. When that doesn't happen, people complain of a postcode lottery.

It is possible to have a system with good, patient-centred treatment. To achieve it requires genuine devolution within the health service, giving power back to doctors and nurses and taking it away from Whitehall. That, in turn, means that some hospitals will do better than others, some will screw up from time to time, and different hospitals will do some things differently.

If we can live with that without screaming about postcode lotteries and demanding centralisation so everything's the same level of OK-ish, the experiences young Jezebel and millions like her could be greatly improved.

We want justice, not lessons

So Gordon Brown proposes a secret enquiry into the Iraq war. He doesn't want to find out if anyone did anything wrong or apportion blame, just to learn the lessons from the Iraq conflict. Oh - and just to be on the safe side, it won't report until the General Election is safely out of the way.

This is garbage.

How are we going to benefit from those lessons? Is Gordon planning to invade another country on some flimsy pretext? Does anyone seriously think for a moment that lessons from a war against Iraq fought in 2003 will be in any way applicable to whatever future situation we find ourselves in?

Let's suppose we find ourselves liberating Zimbabwe in 2015. Are we going to open up the report, pull out all those lessons and make sure it goes brilliantly? Of course not - whatever conflict we find ourselves in next will be completely different. They always are.

And what of justice? Did we just learn the lessons after the Second World War? No. People paid for their crimes, in many cases with their lives.

So what about the civilians who have died in the conflict and aftermath? Some say the number is over 100,000. That's over thirty 9/11s.

It may be that, when all the facts are on the table, an independent enquiry would decide there was no culpability - that no international laws were breeched. Some might disagree with that, but at least it would have been looked at.

No. That's not enough for Gordon. He's already decided that this enquiry will have nothing to do with apportioning blame, just about learning lessons.

It's feeble. A secret enquiry, reporting after the next election and merely learning lessons, with no-one blamed.

For political expediency, Brown denies justice to thousands of soldiers and civilians dead, injured and impoverished as a result of the conflict.

Just pathetic.

Don't give crime victims a special status

At about 7.40 this morning, Radio 4's Today programme had an interview with the parents of murdered teenager Ben Kinsella.

Ben was stabbed to death nearly a year ago in a seemingly motiveless London stabbing. His killers were quickly identified by the police, arrested and have now been convicted of murder.

We can all be desperately sad for Ben and his parents, family and friends. But should we also accord victims some special status - a seat at the top table when it comes to debating how to cut crime?

I don't believe so.

My brushes with crime have been mercifully few. I was mugged at knife-point by a young man in Brixton in the early '90s and I've had a few bikes stolen over the last few years.

Sadly, neither of these gave me any insight into how to cut mugging or minor theft (except for shed bars being a good idea and Victim Support should have more money). Had my opinion been asked, I wouldn't have had anything better to say than anyone else.

The one thing it did do is give me a few Daily Mail moments. In the immediate aftermath of some little sod pinching the third bike in a year from my garden, I was seriously feeling that I could make good use of half an hour in the room with the thief and a cheese-grater.

So, in this case, for example, Ben's parents have spoken in the past about an epidemic of knife crime and a knife culture. They said that knife crime was spiralling.

The reality, as they agreed when questioned, is that knife crime is actually falling. Ben's dad thought that young people didn't carry knives in the past - sadly they did, and a lot more besides.

One problem with asking victims is that they're nearly always going to be biased towards feeling things are worse now because for them, they are.

Ben's parents lost a son in 2008. That's not something that ever happened to them in any previous year. When I was mugged, I'd never been mugged before. For them, things were worse - much worse - than in the past, because their son was unlucky enough to be a victim. For them personally, knife crime is spiralling, but for the country as a whole the story is different.

We might also think of Leah Betts, the 18 year old girl who died in 1995. She died from water intoxication after taking an ecstasy tablet. Although ecstasy is a relatively safe drug (certainly far safer than alcohol), her parents understandably campaigned hard for a crackdown on ecstasy, but most people looking seriously at the evidence would conclude that it's really no big deal in the overall scheme of things.

There are ways we can and should involve the victims of crime in the system. Had any of the people who mugged me or pinched my bikes been caught, I would have welcomed the opportunity to have some input into their punishment.

Not, perhaps, the chance to stand up in court and in my best retired colonel voice say "I demand they be chemically castrated. It's the only language these petty thieves understand." but some opporunity to have my say, perhaps within a system of restorative justice or community courts where appropriate.

And everyone is welcome to campaign on whatever they like, of course. There was nothing wrong at all with Leah Bett's parents campaigning for a clampdown in escasy. The problem was when their views were awarded a special status because their daugher had lost her life after taking the drug.

Giving victims of crime (or their relatives) some sort of special status in debates on crime, as if I somehow know more about the issues around mugging than someone who's never been mugged, might make for good stories in the media, but has a habit of leading to bad laws and making things worse for everyone else.

So should I run a B&B or not?

Observer Business: "Hotels hit by worst trading conditions for decades".

Observer Cash: "Could this be the summer to open that dream B&B?"

Despite their best efforts to persuade me otherwise, I think I'm going to say "no".

Replacing Labour at LDV

The lovely people at Lib Dem Voice have published an article I've written: Replacing Labour in four easy Steps.

Knife crime: if it's in the news, don't worry

Security guru Bruce Schneier has a rule of thumb: if there's something risky reported in the newspapers or on TV, you probably don't have to worry about it. It's the things that aren't reported you might need to be concerned about.

It's news you see, the clue's in the name. If it's not new it doesn't go in.

Up and down the country, thousands of women are victims of domestic violence every single day. Simply because it's so common, it rarely gets reported by the media, unless a particularly nasty incident comes up.

Aeroplane crashes are very rare, so always get reported in great detail, with a huge number of column-inches-per-death. You're likely to hear about most of the people in the world who die in an aeroplane accident.

Deaths from car accidents are common and, as we all know, far more likely. Hence, a smash has to be especially nasty to make it into the national news and loss of life outside the UK is almost never reported.

So when you hear of particular crimes in the media, alarm bells should always start ringing if they talk about the situation spiralling out of control, or an epidemic of crime or anything like that. If there were really an epidemic, we'd be seeing many cases every day and it would no longer be news.

Today's example: knife crime.

Justice was done in the tragic case of 16 year-old Ben Kinsella, stabbed to death almost a year ago in North London. Ben's three killers have been convicted of his murder. The victim's family are still, of course, distraught. I can only imagine what it must be like to lose a son, a brother, in such circumstances.

But is the Daily Mail right to talk about a "knife crime epidemic sweeping Britain"? Or is it that newspaper, rather than the criminals, that's creating the fear?

Sadly, people are murdered every year, and some of them are stabbed. That's true in 2009 and it was true in the past. Did you know, for example, that the number of policemen and women killed on duty was the same in the 1950s as the 1990s (16 in each decade by my count) and there may be fewer killed in this first decade of the new century.

So are more people becoming victims of knife crime now than in the past, and is it something we all need to be worried and scared about as we go about our everyday lives?

The British Crime Survey (which asks people about their experiences of crime, rather than just going on what's reported to the police) suggests violent crime peaked in 1995 and is a good deal lower today than then. Some types of violent crime have increased, as others have fallen, but I don't see anything spiralling out of control.

Let's look at murder. In 2007/8, 270 people were murdered with a sharp object - the most common method. That's one higher than the previous year - not exactly spiralling. But even that's higher than the real figure for people killed by "feral" youths.

Only 36% of men and 13% of women murder victims were killed by a stranger (and, in this case, stranger includes business associates and prison officers killed by prisoners).

That means the chances of being stabbed by a stranger in any one year are not too different to your chances of winning the Lotto jackpot.

Do we need to fear for our children? In 2007/8 there were 69 homicide victims aged 16 or less (the same as in the previous year). Most were killed by their parents, with just ten known to have been killed by strangers.

That makes your child's chance of being killed by a stranger a lot lower then the chance of a regular Lotto player winning the jackpot in a year.

A BBC article from last December shows a much greater concern for reality.

Because these events are rare, they make the news. By talking up the risks, using words like spiralling and epidemic, the media is good at making us afraid of very small risks, like the risk of our children being killed by a stranger whenever they leave the house. Some of the things we perhaps should be worried about barely get a mention simply because they're too common to be news.

Guardian hoodwinked by Last.fm

On 4th June, the Guardian ran a nice article about Last.FM. Where was it going next, journalist Jemima Kiss asked.

"Stiksel says Last.fm will be doing more to make the most of its comprehensive artist information pages and picture libraries: "When there's a bit of competition around it makes you aware of your core strengths." There will be more development of Last.fm's trial desktop app for organising your offline music collection, and another major project is to expand the radio service to consoles including the Xbox. Support for more devices is always high on the list of demands from users, who don't want to miss scrobbling music from wherever they are listening, says Jones."

Oops.

A small part of their future plans Jemima would doubtless liked to have spotted was that the three founders of Last.FM are all leaving: a story the Guardian is now reporting by recycling the same photo and a good deal of material from last week's puff piece.

Better luck next time, Jemima.

Browns underwhelming reforms better than nothing

What to Brown's proposed reforms of our political system amount to?

MPs' expenses was the easy bit. Of course Gordon, along with the other leaders, are going to support greater openness along with an independent body to run the whole thing - they could hardly do otherwise.

Next Brown proposed a written code of conduct for MPs, with offences and sanctions. Another sensible idea and one that Brown seems keen to see on the statute books quickly (before the summer recess, he suggests).

Then we have a subtle movement of power from the Executive to MPs: nothing huge, but some decent enough stuff: making select committees more democratic (which I assume means giving control of their membership to MPs rather than Government whips), more time for non-Government business to be debated in the House and even the opportunity for the public to trigger a debate in the House (quite how that would work without being open to abuse remains to be seen).

It's hardly revolutionary, but then what ever is with our grand old democracy.

Brown then mentions extending Freedom of Information to more official bodies. All well and good if you know what to ask for, but it'll be more interesting to see how quickly calls by Information Commissioner Richard Thomas for all information to be routinely made public unless there's a good reason not to are kicked into the long grass.

I was pleased to see Gordon (or his speech-writers, anyway) correctly said that Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web - not the Internet, which was created some twenty years earlier in the States and Berners-Lee is frequently incorrectly crdited with. Brown has, it appears, asked Sir Tim to drive getting more Government data onto the web, whatever that might mean.

We have a proposal to move towards a fully or mostly elected House of Lords, only a century after it first became a serious option (we do like to mull things over in this country).

Gordon wants to set out not only our rights as British citizens but also our responsibilities. Hmm, should be interesting. Beyond being law-abiding (or facing the consequences), what responsibilities would Labour like me to have, I wonder.

Then we get to the really woolly stuff. Engaging young people in politics (something everyone's been trying to do for years, without a great deal of success), talking a bit more about electoral reform without actually doing anything and perhaps some more devolution.

I may be being a little harsh, but it seems to me that Brown is pretty much doing the minimum he can.

The expenses stuff obviously had to happen. The changes to select committees and Commons business are hopefully positive but fairly minor. The Freedom of Information expansion is very much a slow evolutionary creep.

Whether Gordon has the will or motivation to turn the Lords into an elected chamber, and whether Cameron can really stomach it, remains to be seen. If so, that's probably the most significant change.

First because we would probably get an Upper House that actually does the job: where people do the little things you expect of your legislators like turning up and voting occasionally.

And second because there's no good reason not to have it elected by some sort of fair voting system which, over time, would put more pressure on the Commons to follow suit.

Where has Gordon failed? Electoral reform for the Commons, that we got all excited about for a few days, is clearly very much on the back-burner: another broken Labour manifesto promise. Talk of devolution is all very well, but hollow unless local authorities are allowed to raise a greater proportion of their income and get more freedom on how they spend it.

And finally, this involving the people bit. Here's what Gordon says:

"democratic reform can not be led in Westminster alone. Rather it must principally be led by our engagement with the public. It cannot be top down. That is part of the lesson of the last month. The public want to be, and should be, part of the solution. So we must build a process that engages citizens themselves, people of all parties and none; of all faiths and no faith; from every background and every part of the country."

Fine words, but what exactly does it really mean? Public engagement is a tricky thing. Do you go with whoever shouts loudest? Have a show of hands? Does an informed opinion count for more than an uninformed one?

It doesn't sound like Gordon's going to do anything like electoral reform where we might want a referendum; so what it really comes down to is that, yes, we want a public debate and, yes, we want ideas to come from the public and, yes, we want MPs to have the opportunity to vote on those rather than the Government throwing them all out before anything gets as far as the Commons.

But it's MPs who are going to have to make these decisions.

A public consultation should be fairly short and sharp: a month or two at most. All these ideas have been around for decades, if not centuries, so engage, listen and learn, but don't use that as an excuse for inaction.

Tory bar chart takes the biscuit

There are occasions where Lib Dems take some stick for their creative use of bar charts and statistics to suggest they're in with a chance of winning.

Sometimes, sad to say, those charges are justified. Although less common these days, I've seen some impressive abuses of statistics in Lib Dem literature over the years.

But I can't recall anything to match this effort from the Tories, which appeared in a leaflet in just the last couple of days (I've seen the full leaflet).

Three bars of equal size. One showing the Tories increasing their number of councillors by 285, the second showing "Greens & Others" increasing by 37 and the third, for no adequately explained reason, lumping together Labour and the Lib Dems and showing their combined loss of two-hundred-and-something seats.

Sounds like a great idea: just lump together random parties and add their seats, poll ratings or whatever to give you the anwer you want.

So next time a Conservative feels the need to have a dig at the Lib Dems over dodgy bar charts, feel free to send them this way.

(p.s. sorry for the poor quality - will contact my supplier and arrange for an improved shipment).

Do feminist attacks on the objectification of women stand up?

I followed with interest an attack by feminist blogger Laurie Penny on the evil that is burlesque.

What's the problem with burlesque, you might ask. It's certainly something Mrs Quist might ask as she returns from her burlesque and pole dancing class to hear yet another feminist complaining that she shouldn't be doing it and she's letting down womankind.

So what is the problem?

Laurie's own experience wasn't great (that's OK - not everything suits everyone) and she's concerned that, when it comes down to it, modern burlesque is just stripping with a bit more class. Laurie, apparently, knows what burlesque should be like and today's women are doing it all wrong.

I know a few women who perform burlesque professionally and semi-professionally, with different amounts of sexual content in their acts, in addition to those for whom it's a fun all-women dance class - if any of them have shared Penny's negative experience, they've pretended otherwise.

As far as I can understand, the problem with burlesque, not to mention lap dancing, pole dancing, prostitution, lads mags and pornography in general is that it objectifies women. It encourages men to see all women as nothing more than a sexy body (or, if they haven't got a sexy body, as nothing). In doing so, it is claimed, it leads to more sexual violence against women and harms the struggle for sexual equality.

That's the claim. Does it hold up to scrutiny?

Don't tell me what to do
Although there are plenty of illiberal feminists, I would hope that no liberal feminist would tell a woman she shouldn't be a porn star or perform burlesque if it was just her that became objectified.

If I were to go on the game and become a rent boy (you couldn't afford me, so don't even bother making an offer), it might well be that my clients saw me as just a sexual partner and failed to fully appreciate my sparkling wit, towering intellect and nice table manners. O poor me! But that really would be my business and no-one else's.

Likewise, whatever a woman chooses to do, it's neither my business nor yours to complain that her eager clients, viewers or whatever don't appreciate the finer points of her character.

Of course, the other side to that coin is that no one should be pressured into becoming a stripper, porn star or prostititute if they don't want to. They might make the decision that, even though it's not a nice job, it's worth it for the money. That's up to them - lots of people make that decision about all sorts of crappy jobs. But being forced into it, or trapped there once in, is something very different.

Aren't we all objectified?
I don't see how objectification in itself is an issue - it's surely the bad effects claimed for it. It's easy to see why: we objectify others, and are objectified, many times every day.

As a parent, the Quistlets don't see me as a fully rounded person. They see me as "dad" - a label that misses out large chunks of my personality. Many of my business clients just see me as the guy who does their IT, certainly not as someone with all the interests and experiences I have.

Similarly, I objectify other people. I put them into little boxes that captures only a small part of who they are. Sure it's unfair, but my poor brain really couldn't cope with treating everyone I meet as a fully-rounded human being. So I meet a teacher, a salesman, a Tory canvasser, a grumpy old lady, a woman having trouble controlling her children in the supermarket. All are labelled, objectified, boxed.

Just as it's the pushy religiosity of the Jehovah's Witness that goes on the label, it's the substantial assets of the ladies in the copy of Big Jugs Monthly that hits my doormat in the traditional plain brown wrapper (OK, not really - it's a green wrapper these days).

Whether businesswoman or porn star, teacher or lapdancer (or teacher who lapdances), I'm going to objectify you when we first meet and only if I got to know you better would I appreciate you as a fully rounded person.

(The assumption, I presume, is that there's no problem with expressing female sexuality within a relationship as your partner will see you as that rounded person - though that doesn't seem to stop some feminists disliking female submissives).

Does sexual objectification have bad effects?
So everyone's objectified, and it's really no-one's business but their own.

But what if it did have bad effects on society as a whole. What if the widespread acceptance of pornography, lapdancing clubs and burlesque led to more violence against women and harmed the drive to equality in the workplace and elsewhere.

It's an entirely fair and reasonable question to ask. At the very least, if such a link did exist, there would be a serious debate we should have, instead of our seeming rush towards an ever-more sexualised society.

The problem, as far as I can see, is that the evidence is weak to non-existent.

A while back I wrote about the Lilith Report. This was a study that claimed to show a link between lap-dancing clubs and sexual violence on the streets; but when I read it, I saw it did nothing of the sort.

One interesting piece of research I noticed a little while ago (and can't lay my hands on right now), claimed to find that men who were high users of pornography were less satisfied with the bodies of their real-life partners than those who didn't. That makes sense: we all work out what's normal by comparison. If half the women I see are silicon-enhanced bronzed beauties having multiple orgasms at the drop of a hat, that's bound to tilt the balance.

It would be interesting to see if men who looked at lots of normal pornography, then an equal amount of obese granny porn (I'm sure it must exist) had their expectations pulled back the other way.

Even if this research were true, I'm not sure what it would tell us. Finding your girlfriend a bit less attractive is hardly of the same order as committing rape, or even failing to promote able women in the workplace.

The bigger picture
One way we can make a judgement is to look at the bigger picture.

Over the past few decades we've seen a huge increase in the availability of pornography and sexual encounter clubs.

Twenty years ago, a pornography collection would be a few well-thumbed magazines and over-watched, rather disappointing, videos. Today we have lads mags, not just off the top shelf, but often by the counter in the newsagent. We have literally millions of pornographic images and videos just a Google search away. We have easy access to a staggering variety of pornography. Whether you're into pony girls, shoe fetishism, watersports or nude lesbian wrestling, the Internet has something for you.

Lap-dancing clubs arrived in the UK around 1995. Prior to that, there were the clubs in Soho and the occasional stripper at the local Working Men's Club. Today, most people need not travel more than a few miles from home to experience a lap-dance or pole-dance in a legal, clean, inviting and well-run club.

Were the feminist critique correct, I would expect to see some correlation. The increase in pornography and sexual encounter clubs is so great, I find it hard to believe that we wouldn't see an effect if one existed.

So have we?

The short answer is "no".

Over the last 15 years there has been a small increase in sexual crimes, but nothing to even vaguely match the increase in porn and lap-dancing clubs. There's simply no evidence of any sort of correlation between the two, never mind causation.

Similarly, whilst women still lag behind men on both pay and opportunities for promotion, there's no doubt that the last few decades have seen consistent movement in the right direction. No sign at all that all this extra porn has led to women suffering in the workplace.

Conclusion
The "objectifying women" claim has been used for years in attacks on everything from catwalk models to porn stars, burlesque dancers to prostitutes. As far as I can see, the claims simply don't add up. There's no evidence that womankind is being significantly harmed by any of these.

That's not to say there's nothing wrong at all with the over-sexualisation of society. There are still strong arguments for not forcing sexual images down people's throats, or removing parental choice by having them in places young children can't avoid.

As always, there's a balance to be struck that society as a whole feels comfortable with: is it really fine to display Nuts magazine, or the Sunday Sport for that matter, where parents can't easily stop children from seeing them? How discrete should sexual encounter establishments be? Should a woman (or man) be able to go around without being confronted with overtly sexual images in the street?

I'm certainly not arguing for a free-for-all. But I am suggesting that the feminist critique of these things objectifying women, damaging women's fight for equality and increasing violence against women, doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

You can read more from Laurie Penny at her Penny Red blog.

The Brown fudge: no PR, no timetable

If the BBC reports are correct, we'll see a typically worthless and indecisive fudge from Gordon Brown on electoral reform tomorrow.

"BBC political editor Nick Robinson said the prime minister's statement will not endorse a change of voting system nor any particular system but it will call for a debate on whether the electoral system should be changed and which new system could be adopted. It will not set out a timetable for any change.

Our correspondent said Mr Brown chaired a meeting of the new Democratic Renewal Council - a group of ministers - which agreed to consider moving towards the so-called alternative vote or AV system in which voters could list their preferences rather than simply voting for one candidate as now."

Leaving aside the oddly-Stalinist sounding "Democratic Renewal Council" (you can just imagine them calling for "one person, one vote" before revealing that the person with the vote will be Gordon Brown), a weaker approach is hard to imagine.

The Alternative Vote is not a proportional system. It's sole benefit is that it may confer some additional legitimacy on the winner of each seat. (In Alternative Vote, the winner must be judged to not be the worst candidate by over 50% of voters).

It does not get rid of safe seats. It does not empower voters. It does not allow voters to continue to support their party whilst rejecting a specific candidate. It does not result in a parliament that reflects the wishes of the people.

If that wasn't bad enough, Brown isn't even proposing a timetable (that nice Mr Clegg has one he could easily use). With substantial proportions of both Labour and Tory parties opposed to any sort of electoral reform, no timetable is an excellent way to ensure the debate drifts on until everyone gets bored, we have a General Election and Cameron drops the whole thing.

All sounds like typical Brown, doesn't it: come up with a solution that totally fails to fix the problem, then go about implementing it in a completely half-arsed way.

More on this from just about everyone but, for starters, how about Wouldn't it be scarier, Mark Reckons, Jennie Rigg, Liberal Vision, Anthony Hook, Duncan Borrowman.

Can the Lib Dems replace Labour?

Whenever one of the big two parties crashes, there's talk of the Lib Dems replacing them as the main progressive party of UK politics, just as the Liberals were usurped by the Labour Party in the 1920s.

After Blair was swept to power (with fewer votes than Major gained in the previous election), the Tories looked to be in trouble. There were those hoping that the Lib Dems would replace the Conservatives as the main party of the centre-right. Since it didn't happen some people have criticised the party, and Charles Kennedy as leader, for failing.

Now there's talk of the Liberal Democrats replacing Labour. Could Clegg's party really consign Labour to the realm of the minor parties?

At least it's something the party could live with. I never thought the Lib Dems could take on the role of a centre-right party even if it wanted to - we just aren't very good at it. Centre-left is more where our heart is and, importantly, where the majority of our members and activists can live with being.

But to be honest any talk of replacing Labour or the Tories is fanciful, and criticism of the party for failing to do it is laughable.

Back in Lloyd-George's day, Labour's rise was driven by the massive expansion of the franchise. From the first tentative steps in the 1832 Great Reform Act to the point where nearly everyone over 21 could vote by the end of the 1920s the electorate changed beyond recognition. The trades unions already had the support of millions of workers and turning that into support in the ballot box was perfectly achievable.

The important point is that Labour did not have to convert huge numbers of Liberal voters. To replace the Liberals as the main party of the left, Keir Hardy's doughty band merely had to capture the votes of people who hadn't voted before and were inclined towards Labour anyway.

The challenge for the Lib Dems today would be wholly different.

There are few new voters to capture. The party would need to convert millions of people who have voted Labour all their lives and, in all likelihood, people who's parents and grandparents also voted Labour.

Now, you might tell me that those people are leaving Labour in droves, as proven by their poll rating in last week's Euros.

Don't be so silly, I'll say. There is a world of difference between voters staying at home or casting a protest vote in a Euro election at the depth of Labour's troubles and making a permanent switch. Getting those voters to support the Lib Dems in local and General elections, not just once but in perpetuity is a very different proposition indeed.

It would take more than a few speeches and a nice Party Political Broadcast or two. It would need Labour to collapse over a period of time and stay down. Then the Lib Dems would have to pour money into those traditional Labour areas (money the party doesn't have and has no prospect of getting). Organisations would have to be built up, leaflets delivered, doors knocked on, and much of that work be done in areas where the Lib Dems barely register today. Political messages would have to be honed to appeal to traditional Labour voters.

Even then it would be an uphill struggle. Look across Europe. In how many countries is the centrist liberal party one of the big two? That would be none.

For the Lib Dems to replace Labour, that party would have to self-destruct in a way that makes the last few weeks look like a garden party, and then a huge amount of work would have to be done over at least a decade.

More realistically, perhaps, we could get a sensible, fair voting system. Once the party had learned how to fight elections under PR (and, to be fair, these Euro elections were our best attempt to date by a long way), we would have the opportunity to establish the party on an equal footing with the other two. After that, who knows...

Also take a look at Stephen Tall's opinion on this issue, from a month ago.

European elections - cataclysm my arse

In reporting the European election results, the Guardian has the headline "A cataclysm ushers in eight-party politics".

So lets see how cataclysmic this result was.

Fewer people voted Conservative than in 2004
Yes, you read that right. In 2004 Michael Howard's Conservatives were heading to a clear defeat in the General Election. And yet they secured 200,000 more votes than in 2009. True, that's on a lower turnout, so their percentage of the vote rose very slightly, but there was clearly no great shift to Cameron. Indeed, the party's share of the vote is still 8% down on 1999.

Fewer people voted UKIP than in 2004
Yes, UKIP did very well, considering they've got little or no local organisation across the country and have spent most of the last five years squabbling, but their achievement was to hold onto what they had, not to surge ahead. 2.5 million people voted for UKIP last Thursday, compared to 2.65 million in 2004.

Apart from Labour crashing, there were no great shifts in the vote
The Lib Dems, UKIP and Conservatives all had fewer votes (the Lib Dems also had a slightly lower percentage of the vote). The BNP picked up an extra 130,000 votes across the UK. The Greens gained around 275,000 additional votes.

The only big shift in votes that I can spot is Labour's continuing collapse, with their voters either staying at home or moving to the Tories, BNP and Greens.

Actually, there is one other. In Scotland it was the SNP and not UKIP or the BNP that benefitted from disaffection with Labour - their vote increased by an impressive 9.4%.

The also-rans flopped - again
The other parties swapped trivially small numbers, with Jury Team and Libertas doing especially poorly (both got under 80,000 votes across the whole country, Esther's support clearly not as decisive as Jury Team might have hoped . The Christan Party, which we never heard from, got considerably more than both combined).

The non-traditional parties increased their vote...a little
In 2004 parties outside the traditional big three increased their share of the vote by an impressive 12%. Minor parties have always done reasonably well in European elections, but that was the real breakthrough.

In 2009, in the midst of the MPs' expenses scandal, the share of the minor party vote increased by a further 7% - though that had more to do with Labour voters staying at home. In all, candidates not standing for Labour, Conservatives or Lib Dems secured nearly 700,000 extra votes this time round, significant but hardly earth-shattering.

The ten-year view
It's worth comparing these results to 1999, the tail end of Labour's honeymoon period.

Compared to 1999, Labour are down 12.3%. The Conservatives are down 8%. The Lib Dems are up 1.1%. UKIP are up 9.5%, BNP up 5.2% and Greens up 2.4%.

Over ten years, we've seen a shift - in European elections - from Labour and the Conservatives to the far-right minority parties and, to a lesser extent, the Greens.

But it's important to note that the bulk of this shift happened in 2004. 2009 was no catalclysm, it was merely an entrenchment of a change in the political landscape, for European elections, that happened between 1999 and 2004.

Isn't this what we'd expect?
Democrats take note: this change is not about people suddenly become less pro-European or more fascist. It's about people who had those opinions all along finding a party that better reflects their views.

True, the list system (a form of PR that I dislike) has allowed this, but maybe it's no bad thing. Until the Lib Dems broke through in the 1990s we had a two-party system where all of these divisions were hidden in smoke-filled rooms and battled out with no reference to the public at all. Now, with the Lib Dems, Greens, UKIP and BNP all polling well in European elections, and the Lib Dems strong in local and general elections too, those differences are far more out in the open.

For European elections, held under PR, we're seeing just what we'd expect: the old Labour and Tory broad churches, where people of widely differing political opinions group together simply to win elections under First Past the Post, start to break down with support moving to other parties.

The ministerial merry-go-round harms Britain

An organisation where people were promoted purely on the basis of office politics, playing off different factions within the company against each other, rather than choosing the best person for the job, would be dysfunctional (many, if not most, British companies were like this pre-1960s and quite a few still are).

A company where senior managers were flown in for a few months, a year or two at most, and then moved on just as they were starting to properly get to grips with their role would be having serious problems. (Sometimes called "seagull managers", they swoop in, crap over everything, then fly away).

In such a company, the power of those managers would be very limited. It takes months to understand a large department, years even, so such a manager would rely on their underlings to a great extent for most of their tenure. And with the threat of being moved, or sacked, at any minute hanging over them, their management would have far greater power over the department if they so chose.

And so it is in the bizarre world of Westminster politics, and has been for decades. Ministers put in place, not because they're the best person for the job of being Home Secretary or whatever, but to meet the political needs of the Prime Minister. Short term appointments where a minister has little chance of getting to grips with their department. And a system where it's trivial for a Prime Minister, should she or he choose, to make ministerial policy decisions from the centre.

Surely the country would be better served by ministers approved by MPs and appointed to serve for the full term, barring resignations and malpractice. Then we might actually get the right people to do the job, and give them the time to do it.

How to fix a problem like the European Parliament

The problem has been stated in many ways: with each treaty the European Parliament gains more power and importance. Yet time after time, the people of Europe vote on national issues, and the proportion of people bothering to vote at all falls.

In the UK, at least half the MEPs are chosen by the national parties: those in the top one or two places on the lists of the Lib Dems, Labour, Tories and UKIP are for the most part a shoe-in. The fate of the other half relies not on whether they'd make good MEPs, nor on what their party's European manifesto (should it have such a thing) might say, but on whatever national issue takes the public's fancy.

Not that it matters too much anyway: the voters have little opportunity to judge what their European parliamentarians are doing. It rarely makes the news (no matter how hard some MEPs try to change that) and few MEPs make much effort to communicate with their constituents.

Nor can voters place their cross for a particular manifesto to be carried through. The Liberal Democrat MEPs will be just one small part of the ALDE grouping and there's no agreed programme or anything remotely like it.

Uniquely in European elections, I can't vote for any sort of legislative programme I want to be carried through, nor for who I want to lead Europe.

No wonder people rarely vote on European issues: they're so far removed from the ability to have a substantive say on anything real. No surprise that UKIP with its simple (not to mention simplistic and somewhat dishonest) message wins support. People feel they're voting for something real. Not for a bunch of people to go to Brussels and Strasbourg for five years, never to be heard of again, but for the UK to leave the European parliament.

I could talk about lots of little improvements. Ways to make the European Parliament more interesting, more relevant, more exciting. But that wouldn't address the real underlying problem.

That problem goes to the heart of the European project: what it is all for? Which direction should Europe move in?

If we want to move towards a European superstate, it makes sense to increase the power of the European parliament and elect some form of democratic European government with a clear manifesto.

If, on the other hand, we want more effective collaboration between nation states, is the current setup with the Council of Ministers setting the agenda, the Commission developing proposals and the elected European parliament as a confirmation and revising chamber really the best, most democratic and transparent way?

I'm not convinced we really have an answer for that even within the pro-European Liberal Democrats. Most party activists will say they're pro-Europe, but which Europe do they favour?

There are people whom this vagueness suits very nicely, but they aren't democrats. They're the folks, both at the centre of Europe and in national governments, who quite like getting on with the job (as Gordon might put it) without worrying the pretty little heads of the voters.

Because, when you look at it, even those of us with an interest can't hold anyone to account. I don't know what the Council of Ministers gets up to. I don't have any say over the European Commission. And I have no way to hold MEPs accountable for their roles.

The Lib Dems could do a lot worse that to have a frank debate about the sort of Europe we want (I'm a fan of devolution and I don't think a European superstate is even vaguely sensible or viable, so I'd be in the "Europe of nation states" camp).

Having had that discussion, we need to have a think about how to amend the existing institutions to better achieve that.

For example, a move to a European superstate would surely mean an elected European president and government, whereas a Europe of Nation States might see the European institutions greatly slimmed down and more powers handed back to national assemblies.

Finally, the people of Europe need to be given a say. Not on obscure treaties or constitutions, whatever the difference might be, but on the much simpler and more important question of the sort of Europe we want to see.

It sounds almost simple, but it's anything but. Twenty seven countries all trying to reach agreement, and what would happen if some wanted a superstate and others wanted something else?

Still, Europe has changed over the years and it will change again. Our job as Liberal Democrats is to understand what we want that change to really achieve, make sure the people get to make the decision and then argue the case. Let's get that first part sorted.

What's the secret to UKIP's success?

UKIP will do well at the polls tonight. Like the rest of the nation, I don't know how well, but their votes will be pouring in and they may even achieve second place.

It's a long way from the way I saw things going a couple of months ago. Then, with UKIP divided, squabbling and still recovering from a couple of corrupt MEPs, I thought they and the BNP would both be coming in around the 8% mark.

That isn't going to happen. The BNP and the Green Party will each poll 7-10%, with UKIP up around 20%.

So what's happened? Of course the expenses scandal has given the minor parties a boost (though not as much as you might think - remember the minor parties got over 35% of the vote in the last Euro elections - more people voted for a minor party than for the Conservatives last time round).

But the expenses scandal doesn't explain everything. Why do the votes appear to have gone to UKIP in preference to the Greens or BNP, or indeed Jury Team, No2EU, Libertas or any of the many other parties?

Three reasons:

1. UKIP had a simple, clear message and was very successful at getting it across.
As a receipient of protest votes, UKIP did well to keep it simple. The party has nothing to say on the wider issues facing the country. You won't hear the UKIP line on solving the banking crisis, improving our schools and health service or cutting crime, but they didn't need to offer one.

For this set of elections, the message that the EU costs us £40 million a day, and that we need to cut immigration and leave the European Union, is quite enough to attract one in five voters.

And the posters. I'm not normally a big fan of poster campaigns - I don't think they do much more than give the faithful a warm feeling. But that's for the main parties who are in the media every day. UKIP's poster campaign must have cost them a fortune, but was very effective at putting their message out there and giving people that constant reminder that the party exists and stands for one simple thing.

2. The main parties screwed up
An important part of any political campaign is pointing out to the electorate what your opponents have done wrong (normally with as much pushing of the facts as you can get away with). The exception is when your opponents are sufficiently insignficant that mentioning them at all just gives them extra publicity and distracts you from your key messages.

The main parties, for some unknown reason, seem to have decided in this election that UKIP was in that "insignificant" category. None of the Conservative or Labour election communications I saw mentioned UKIP even once. On TV, I saw politicians from the main parties time and again let UKIP off the hook, failing to point out how their £40 million figure is a lie, how they simply can't be trusted based on their past performance.

It was always a crazy approach to the party that came third in 2004 - in the current atmosphere is was madness. Bloggers were happy to attack UKIP for the corrupt, useless, lying opportunists they are, but that message didn't make it to the voters.

3. The other minor parties were muddled and under-funded
It seems likely the minor party vote will be as high as in 2004, or even a little higher. Last time 24 parties fielded candidates in all (plus nine independents). Why did the others perform relatively poorly? Why did Scottish Wind Watch and the Christian Democratic Party each get less than 0.1% of the popular vote?

Money and message. UKIP appear to have outspent the other minor parties by some margin, and had a clear and simple message.

The BNP have found themselves in a more complex situation (something that must be more than a little scary for the average BNP activist) and have struggled to get a clear message across. They've also suffered from the racist and fascist tags - rightly, despite their feeble efforts to pretend otherwise.

The Green Party haven't done badly with little money, but struggle to get across a message beyond "won't somebody please think of the children".

The others have been a bit rubbish. Jury Team asks us to vote for a bunch of independents - all very well when we know them, but rubbish when they're just names on a ballot paper, and they're at the sensible end of the spectrum.

There's more of this to come
UKIP will come out of this with a healthy number of MEPs - perhaps even more than last time. Much as I dislike the party, we need to get used to this. If we win PR for Westminster elections, it will inevitably mean smaller parties trying their hand more seriously.

UKIP have proven themselves as a protest party. They had the money, they had the message, the other parties - large and small - blew it.

They've never managed to be more than that yet, but time will tell. We'd better get used to extremist parties as a regular part of the electoral landscape.

Why did the Manchester Guardian oppose the Welfare State?

Back in the 1940s there was general approval for the welfare state - not universal by any means, but it was pretty popular. Oddly, the Manchester Guardian was one of the voices sounding a note of opposition.

Why?

Probably not for any of the reasons you might think of. The concern at the Guardian was that, instead of being safely removed from the gene pool, the lazy and malformed would flourish. Rather than dying young, the feckless poor would not only live to a ripe old state-funded age, but would breed too.

Instead of a population enhanced over time by the fit, healthy and intelligent out-breeding the stupid and slovenly, we could be over-run by our less able brethren.

Although fewer people saw things that way by the late 1940s, that view expressed in the Guardian would have been pretty mainstream amongst left-wing thinkers up to the Second World War.

Radical socialist author and staunch Darwinian H.G. Wells wrote in 1902,

"And how will the new republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal with the black? how will it deal with the yellow man? how will it tackle that alleged termite in the civilized woodwork, the Jew? Certainly not as races at all.

It will aim to establish, and it will at last, though probably only after a second century has passed, establish a world state with a common language and a common rule. All over the world its roads, its standards, its laws, and its apparatus of control will run. It will, I have said, make the multiplication of those who fall behind a certain standard of social efficiency unpleasant and difficult…

The Jew will probably lose much of his particularism, intermarry with Gentiles, and cease to be a physically distinct element in human affairs in a century or so. But much of his moral tradition will, I hope, never die. …

And for the rest, those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency?

Well, the world is a world, not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go.The whole tenor and meaning of the world, as I see it, is that they have to go. So far as they fail to develop sane, vigorous, and distinctive personalities for the great world of the future, it is their portion to die out and disappear.

The world has a greater purpose than happiness; our lives are to serve God's purpose, and that purpose aims not at man as an end, but works through him to greater issues. "

This isn't to have a dig at my left wing friends, none of whom were big fans of selective breeding in humans last time I checked.

But whilst society may not change as much as we sometimes think (and worry) that it does, ideas do change more than we think. In this case we have that nice Mr Hitler to thank, at least in part. Adolph's legacy was to make eugenics - the selective breeding out of bad traits from humans - unacceptable, and to turn the tide against an anti-semitism that was quite normal and acceptable before the war.

As the Guardian's post-war opinion on the newborn Welfare State suggests, it was more a gradual decline than an immediate "Look at what those nasty Nazis got up to - we must change our opinions right now."

Similarly, we sometimes forget that thirty years after the Russian Revolution, and after Stalin's brutal treatment of the country, there was still no shortage of people praising the USSR to the skies (though as the cold war kicked in, this number dwindled and the stout ministers of Atlee's government were in no doubt that our future lay with America and Europe, not Russia).

Britain's post-war Communist Party had 50,000 members (the Lib Dems today have around 60,000 - but a lot more MPs). Kingsley Amis and Iris Murdoch were amongst their number.

Sometimes it's amusing to smile at the strange things our forebears came up with. Who today, beyond a lunatic fringe, would seriously advocate selective breeding to weed out the poor and stupid? Who would think it quite reasonable that a jew be blocked from a particular job or club? Or that Stalin's Russia was a jolly nice place Britain should seek to emulate?

And sometimes I wonder which of today's mainstream political opinions will seem similarly outlandish in fifty years time. Perhaps our failure to give moral equivalence to animals and humans; or man-made global warming (both of which I side with the current orthodoxy on) will seem similarly odd in half a century.

Three measures of electoral success: which is best?

With the Euro election results not coming out until Sunday evening, those of us who gaze into the tea-leaves have had to make do with the local council elections. Imperfect to say the least: not a single local council vote was cast in Scotland or Wales, nor across large swathes of England, not least cities like London, Manchester and Liverpool.

Three measures have been used by the pundits to judge the parties: seats gained or lost, estimated national percentage of the vote and total seats won.

What, if anything, do they really tell us?

National share of the vote
What we've seen so far has, by and large, been the verdict of rural England both on their local councils and national masters. Eager for indications of how the main parties would fare in a General Election, not to mention Gordon's popularity, the clever men and women who figure this stuff out have said "If everyone had voted across the whole country, here's how they would have voted".

That's how we get the notional national figures of voting preferences. Not quite real votes in real ballot boxes, but educated guesses of how everyone would have voted based on those who did.

The figure needs to come with a health warning: assumptions can be wrong. Just because there was a swing to the Tories across the shires, it isn't certain that there would also be one in London, Newcastle, Cardiff and Aberdeen. The experts can get a good idea: they have real data to go on from previous elections. But it's just an educated guess.

Supposing the guess is pretty much on the nose, what does it tell us? Votes in local elections are not the same as in General Elections, so faithfully plugging in a Lib Dem share of 28% into an election calculator is fun but irrelevant.

This national vote share is best viewed as a super opinion poll, and compared to previous local elections.

On that basis, the Lib Dems have the most to be pleased about this time round. At 28%, and 5% ahead of Labour, the Lib Dems are the only main party to be improving. For Labour it's a disaster.

The Tories will take mixed messages from their poll rating. Being on 38%, they're 10 points ahead of the Lib Dems and 15 ahead of Labour. That puts them clearly out in front and it would be churlish to deny them credit for that.

And yet it really isn't that high. Remember that elections to the Commons currently have a built-in bias towards Labour. A poll rating in the high 30s, that gave Labour a nice solid majority in 2005, would be much tighter for the Tories.

This tells us that Cameron is on course to form the next government, but he certainly isn't yet anywhere near a Blair-style super-majority.

Total seats won
These are local elections for real councillors who will spent the next four years serving their constituents with greater or lesser degrees of effectiveness. The total seats won by the parties, though, is the least useful measure as a clue to the parties' national prospects. After all, these are the elections for rural England and seats won contains no adjustment for anyone else.

So, for example, the Lib Dems winning three times more seats than Labour is good news for all those Lib Dem councillors, but no indication at all as to how the country will vote in a General Election - nor is the Tories winning three times as many seats as the Lib Dems.

Change in seats
The most common measure we hear is the change in each party's number of seats. It's not a bad way to look at things, but needs to come with a serious health warning.

We compare the number of seats won this time to the number won the last time the same seats were fought - normally four years ago (so, in this case, 2005 - on the same day as the General Election).

So the headline figures have Labour on -268, Lib Dems on -4 and the Tories on +230.

Although it need not be, it's probably a pretty fair indication of the state of the parties since 2005. If the Tories weren't doing a lot better than then (when, of course, they were easily defeated by Labour), they'd be very worried indeed.

The Lib Dems look to be running similar to their 2005 performance, which is actually good news for the party, which typically sees its poll ratings drop in this pre-election period (the media is normally getting excited about who's going to be the next Prime Minister and, outside the actual election period, the TV channels have no obligation to give the Lib Dems any sort of fair coverage).

How well have the parties done?
The Lib Dems can be very pleased that they've held their own relative to 2005. Four years ago they'd had three weeks of fair coverage on the TV and people were voting for their MPs on the same day. This time round we're in the pre-election period, no fair coverage and, to make matters even worse, the Euro elections bringing a sceptical public out to vote.

The Conservatives can also be pleased at their share of the vote and the way they've moved forwards since 2005.

For both parties, though, there's a note of caution. Some people will ask why the Lib Dems aren't doing even better in the face of Labour's collapse, and the Tories really aren't doing as well as they'd like at this stage: a big majority is far from certain.

Which performance measure is better?
As usual, we need to remember that there are no good and bad measures, just ones that show different things. They show what they show - if you decide to interpret them as "Lib Dems do well" or "Tories do well", remember your interepretation will always take the statistics further than they should really go.

With that in mind, both the notional share of the vote and the seats lost/gained gives insights into how the parties are faring.

Both need to be taken in context - in this case that the 2005 elections were at the end of a General Election campaign and the 2009 elections were on the same day as Euro elections. The seats measure in particular may be affected by local issues.

If you want a guide to the national state of the parties, the share of the vote is probably your best bet (compared to previous estimates of the national vote share, not to General Election results or opinion polls).

They steal your light....

Breakdown in society...not like it was when I was a lad...broken Britain...no manners or respect...
I'm just relieved it's not like that today, either.

Handy tips ahoy for World Environment Day

So it turns out that the US has a National Masturbation Day. It was in May and I missed it, so my date with Madame Palm and her five lovely daughters will just have to wait until 2010.

As a consolation prize, I get World Environment Day. Does that sound like as much fun to you? No, me neither.

"Worthy" is the word that comes to mind. But worthy can be good. Really, it can.

Look, there are lots of tips you can follow and they range from the banal and obvious right through to the silly and pointless. You want to save the world? Well, why not use a washable mug instead of that plastic cup and wear your jeans more than once. Global warming will soon be a distant memory.

World Environment Day, every 5th June since 1972. This year it's being hosted by Mexico, whatever that really means, and they're trying to get eight billion new trees planted in the world, for whatever reason.

I'd quite like to know more, but their website doesn't work properly with Firefox and most of the drop-down menus get hidden behind a graphic.

So plant those trees, drink from those mugs, cycle to work....save the world. Maybe.

Pity the poor politicians with a hypocritical public

Yes, politicians can be frustrating. They refuse to give straight yes or no answers. But the reason politicians across the world behave that way is because of this annoying thing called democracy.

You see, politicians who give honest answers are immediately jumped on by the media who says they've gaffed.

Political parties with visible internal divisions do worse in democratic elections than those that, whatever the reality, manage to appear united.

Negative campaigning frequently proves very effective in winning elections. Dishonest campaigning can also work well.

We the public tell our politicians we want them to work together. We don't like the ding-dong politics. When they do work together, we punish them. Opposition parties which support the Government almost always suffer in the polls and we start complaining that "they're all the same" and "it doesn't matter who you vote for".

Whenever you see a politician or party doing something evasive or dishonest, consider that they're doing it because they think more people will vote for them if they do, and the evidence tells us they're probably right.

Dolly's Imagination Library, synthetic phonics and muddy waters

Country singer legend Dolly Parton is famed for a larger-than-average part of her body. I refer, of course, to her heart which is so big she wants to help the whole world to read - a laudable aim if ever there was one.

So she launched Dolly's Imagination Library with the simple aim of giving every pre-school child a library of books. The USA loves it. Canada is going for it too. But her first UK foray - to Rotherham - looks set to end in abject failure and a hefty bill for the taxpayer.

As the Daily Express reported a few days back:

The 61-year-old American singing legend launched her first UK children’s Imagination Library in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, in November 2007.

The library posts a new book every month to every child from birth to the age of five to encourage them to read. But the scheme – a huge hit in 45 US states – has so far attracted only £1,378 from charities to run it. And in the last year donations were just £215.

Local campaigner Don Buxton said: “What concerns me as a ratepayer is who is going to stump up the running costs for the scheme and why are people not supporting it.”

So are the people of Rotherham just must meaner than their counterparts in the good ol' US of A?

Perhaps, but there's something that bothers me about all these reading schemes, whether it's something like this, synthetic phonics or anything else that's been fashionable over the years.

The normal way to measure the success of such schemes is "reading age" - a rough-and-ready way of telling whether a child is ahead or behind of where the average child of that age would be expected to be.

Rotherham folk would be wise to be wary of the Imagination Library scheme: there doesn't seem to be much evidence to suggest it does any good. Sending books to kids is great (especially children from poorer families - nice middle class kids probably don't need any extra). But does it really work? What are the outcomes?

The evidence I've been able to track down seems a little weak, to say the least. This piece from Tennessee is the nearest I've been able to find.

Responding kindergarten and pre-K teachers collectively affirmed that children who had participated in the Imagination Library were “better prepared” than students who had not participated in the program.

On average, Imagination Library participants also exceeded teacher expectations: Forty-eight percent of kindergarten teachers and 64 percent of pre-K teachers stated that Imagination Library participants performed “better than expected” or “much better than expected” than students from previous classes.

A couple of problems with this. First, it's very subjective. 48% of kindergarten teachers thought the kids with books did better. Did 52% think they did worse? How did the teachers make the judgement? Gut feeling? It really isn't good enough just to ask teachers in that sort of vague way. You need to measure reading ability properly.

But the second problem is the more significant, because it applies to synthetic phonics and other ways of learning to read too.

What are the outcomes at the end of schooling?

Let's imagine there are two ways to teach reading at school (just for this example - humour me).

Method 1 sees six year olds reading much better than average and method 2 sees the same age group reading worse than average.

Method 1 is clearly the best, right?

But what if you came back and measured achievment at age 16 and found that those who learnt under method 2 are now clearly ahead? Surely it's how the kids end up that matters, not whether they're a little ahead or behind their classmates in Infant school.

This example isn't as far-fetched as it might seem. Plenty of countries start formal education a lot later than we do. In the UK, children begin formal education at age four and are first tested in Infant school. Many other countries don't start formal education until age six or seven, and yet outcomes in those are as good or better than ours. Denmark, Sweden and Finland aren't renowned for turning out thickies into the workplace.

One of the claimed benefits for synthetic phonics is that not only do younger children learn to read faster but kids are still well ahead when they get to age 10 or 11. If true, that would set it apart from others I've come across.

But there's reason to be cautious there too. When a school takes on a new scheme, teachers and children are naturally more enthusiatic about it. They get more help from the scheme's providers, better funding and simply put more effort into making it work.

It seems that it's this additional money, expertise, effort and enthusiasm that can make the difference, rather than any inherent educational benefits of the scheme, whatever it might be.

Schemes that look fantastic when piloted frequently seem a great deal less impressive after they're rolled out more widely.

And, to return to where I started, Dolly's Imagination Library doesn't even appear to have got that far - we've simply no good evidence to show it improves reading at any age.

So I wouldn't be too hard on Rotherham. Although it sounds like a great idea for communities to raise money to post books to young children, it may be an expensive way to achieve very little when all the evidence is in.

Are we less neighbourly than in the good old days?

"There seems to be far less kind and neighbourly co-operation than there was a few years ago...People are harder, more selfish, more intent upon looking after Number One. They are more likely to snatch, grab, lose their temper...Now why is this? What has gone wrong?"

Ah yes, the Daily Mail's at it again, harking back to the happier times of the 1940s and 50s, before all this liberalism stuff broke society.

Er...no. Actually it's socialist presenter and author J.B. Priestley speaking on the radio in 1947.

The funny thing is that, when we look at what people said at the time instead of relying on old movies and dusty memories, the modern breakdown in society seems rather less clear-cut.

A survey in Willesden in 1947 found 75% of housewives were not on visiting terms with their neighbours. On an estate in Edgeware around the same time fewer than a third of people said they were a member of any clubs or associations connected to leisure activities, including politics and religion.

In Fulham, three fifths of the 500 people surveyed did not belong to any sort of organisation. Favourite activities were the cinema and pub.

But everyone went to church, right? Again, the evidence tells a different story. A report by the Church of England itself in the 1940s opined that 90% of people seldom or never attended church.

A survey of the time said that two thirds of men and four fifths of women "believed more or less" in God, though only 61% of those who believed in God also believed in the divinity of Christ. (Curiously, quarter of those who said they didn't believe in God claimed that they did believe in the divinity of Christ - figure that one out if you can).

In Fulham, only 10% attended church regularly, and they were more likely to be elderly and well educated.

And let's not even talk about the Bishop of Birmingham's 1947 book denying the Virgin Birth, Miracles and Resurrection of Christ (plenty of people agreed with him).

Working men, then as now, were more interested in sport than politics or religion and didn't wanted to be preached at.

So when the usual suspects decry the evils of modern society and hark back to the good old days when everyone trooped faithfully to church every Sunday and there was real community spirit, remember that all may not quite be as it seems.

(Evidence taken from the book Austerity Britain, by David Kynaston).

Why we shouldn't cut the number of MPs

All main parties seem to be making positive noises about reducing the size of the House of Commons. Too many MPs, it's argued. We could save money if we had a lot fewer.

I disagree. In money-saving terms it's a drop in the ocean, completely symbolic.

Let's look at what MPs actually do.

1. Debate and vote in the Chamber
That's what most of us think of when we consider MPs. All those men (and the occasional woman) sitting on the green benches, making long, tedious speeches before they file through whichever lobby the whips have decreed. And sure, this bit wouldn't be hurt by having a fewer MPs. Lop off a couple of hundred and we'd barely notice.

2. Committee work
I reckon the committee work MPs do is probably more important than debating in the Chamber. There are the committees that hold the Government to account, committees that look at particular issues (think of all those bankers trooping in to account for themselves) and committees going through legislation line-by-line.

This last one is especially important. In recent years, as Labour has passed ever-more laws onto the statute books, MPs simply haven't had enough time to go through every line of legislation.

Add onto that the Government's habit of lumping together totally different issues in the same bill (especially in the area of criminal justice) and you find whole chunks passed into law without most MPs ever seeing them.

3. Constituency work
The average MP has over 90,000 constituents, any of whom can see their MP and get help from them. MPs will lend their support to worthy causes in the constituency, help their constituents with all sorts of problems and take up political causes on their behalf.

Good MPs, with efficient offices can find their constituents easily keep three or four staff very busy, and they do a lot of good too.

Funnily enough, it's not a role legislators play in most countries around the world. Elsewhere, MPs (or the equivalent) mostly make the law and individuals have other routes, such as ombusmen, to help sort out their problems.

If there were fewer MPs, they'd either need much larger staff (and so you wouldn't save any money) or they'd provide a poorer service to constituents.

4. Providing a pool of talent for Government
In recent decades, the number of Government ministers has steadily grown. Ministers come from the pool of MPs in the governing party, or coalition should such a thing exist.

For any governing party, some of its MPs are people you wouldn't let within a mile of a ministerial limo, some are simply too inexperienced, incompetent or insane. If you cut the number of MPs, you cut the pool of talent and risk getting government even worse than the current lot.

Is you MP good?
If you've got a rubbish MP, vote them out (much easier with an electoral system like Single Transferable Vote - STV - and fewer marginal constituencies).

But if you've got a good MP, expenses aside, you've someone who's working hard both in Westminister and their constituency, to do right by over 90,000 people and, of course, to get themselves re-elected.

It's easy to slag them off but, if we're being honest, isn't that worth paying for?