Why Facebook polling isn't about to take over

This from today. Somehow, I don't think ICM, YouGov et. al. have too much to worry about.

Miller's graphical car crash

I hesitate to offer a review of a graphic novel. This one's seven years old and, if that wasn't bad enough, I'm not even an expert. I read comics from time to time but I don't have the breadth or depth of knowledge of the genre of someone like James Graham, so the chances of me making a fool of myself are high.

In my younger days I read 2000AD. Later on I enjoyed a lot of Gaiman's work - Sandman and the like - and Moore, of course, but the whole DC/Marvel superhero thing pretty much passed me by.

Until The Dark Knight Returns. Published in 1986, every Batman film in the last couple of decades have attempted to capture its spirit (the latest attempts have come closest).

As with most great books, the narrative is important but what really grabs you is getting inside the heads of the characters. A superhero story where there isn't a neat little disctinction between good and evil, where the heroes can sometimes do more harm than good, where everything is shades of grey and motives are far from clear. In short, along with Moore's Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns saw the superhero comic genre grow up.

So when I saw "Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again" on a shelf in my local Waterstones, I have to say I did a double-take. OK, I hardly follow comics religiously, but even so - how could the sequel to one of the greatest graphic novels ever have been published seven years ago without me having heard of it?

With my wallet a little lighter and the book in my bag, I headed home.

Onto the plot (very slight spoilers, but I really wouldn't worry too much). Three years after the end of Returns, the USA seems to be doing swimmingly. No idea what's going on in the rest of the world, but as usual that doesn't seem to matter too much. Behind the scenes, though, the once-great nation is being ruled by super-villains, the super-heroes have been blackmailed into subservience and the American people are little more than slaves, though they don't realise it.

Not the most original plot ever: the dystopian totalitarian future. 1984, V for Vendetta, even The Matrix, did it rather better.

But perhaps we're saved by great characterisation? Sadly not. Instead of getting into the minds and souls of the characters, we're given bland two-dimensional sketches.

Far from the tortured soul of the past, Batman becomes oddly omnipotent, omnicient and morally certain.

Superman isn't conflicted any more, he's just dumb - a foolish pawn to be shuffled around the board by whichever grand-master controls him at the time.

We have a comedy communism vs. libertarianism routine between Green Arrow and The Question. Don't expect any deep revelations.

At the end, the whole business is finished by the arrival of a god-like figure. It's as if you'd read a spy novel where covert groups maneuvere against each other and then, on the last page, one side just nukes the other and you think "well, OK, but what was the point of the rest of the book then." Only this isn't quite that subtle. (And if the moon was really as close to the earth as pictured, we'd all be dead in hours).

Oh - and the bizarre insertion of former-Robin Dick Grayson, who has no connection with the plot whatsoever and is clearly there just to give Batman a final battle-against-the-odds to compare to his duel with Superman in Returns.

I could go on.

The artwork is all over the place. Sometimes a mish-mash of artistic styles can be justified, such as when each identifies a different strand of the narrative. In this case there seems no such consistency.

A strand throughout the novel is "News in the Nude". Presumably meant to symbolise the way the totalitarian regime distracts people from the realities of their lives with sex and entertainment. The impact is reduced both because that sort of thing has been done in real life several times, and the way Miller coyly makes sure every single naked breast and crotch is covered by a speech bubble - the comic equivalent of the well-placed vase or fruit bowl - is absurd when it detracts from the very point being made.

So now I know why I hadn't heard of The Dark Knight Strikes Again after seven years. It's a shamful secret that one of the architects of the graphic novel revolution created something this poor.

The annoying thing is I really wanted to like it. I didn't expect it to be as good as The Dark Knight Returns - that would be unfair. At first I thought it was just an average comic book maybe suffering from the comparison but, to my frustration, it became obvious it really was just rubbish by almost any standard. And so another hero is revealed as having feet of clay. Maybe worth thinking twice before posting the next installment to the publishers, Frank.

The secret shame of the tabloids

I could so easily by offended by this. I'll admit that I am by much in the Daily Mail and its fellow tabloids, though years of exposure does inevitably dull the sensation.

The article is about the atheist summer camp. The headline gets off to a bad start. "Camp faithless: Is Britain's first atheist summer camp harmless fun or should we be worried?"

Or perhaps neither. Perhaps those pesky atheists are doing something a little more than harmless fun, but there's no need to be worried either.

Then we have a reference to The God Delusion as 'the atheists Bible'. Really? I thought it was just a book. I quite liked it and I even agreed with quite a lot of it. But a bible? Come on now.

Not to mention the shocking revelation of the camp organiser admitting part of the process involves 'encouraging the children to ask questions about beliefs'. Oh no!

My personal atheism is pretty relaxed - wishy-washy, some of my more hard-line friends would say. I don't believe there's a God (I'm not an agnostic), but I'm aware there's a tonne of other stuff I believe - and psychologically rely on - without much evidence, like the people who claim to be my friends actually liking me and not attacking me all over the place behind my back.

I'll debate religion with someone who wants to, but I don't agree it does nearly as much harm as people like Dawkins claim and I've no desire to evangelise atheism.

But even I get a little pissed off at this stuff from the Mail. We can't just encourage critical thinking it appears; it has to be an attack on religion or an attempt at indoctrination, and atheism has to be painted as a religion with its own bible and high priest, regardless of reality.

Our tabloids, of course, are no strangers to offending people. They thrive on it. The right wing tabloids joyously seek to offend homosexuals and feminists. If some right-on liberal isn't upset over a story, there's something wrong and the journalist needs to try harder.

Which makes it all the more curious that the Mail - and the Pope (Paul Dacre's representative on Earth) should take such a dislike to a Glasgow exhibition encouraging people to deface the Bible.

The advisor to the Pope quoted in the article is quite probably right that it's "disgusting and offensive" to many Christians; but disgusting and offending people is the Mail's stock-in-trade. Not their loyal readers of course - and I assume no-one was forced to attend the Glasgow exhibition either - but many people who wouldn't buy the Mail but might stumble across some of its nasty little stories from time to time.

The big complaint is that no-one would do the same to the Koran and risk offending muslims.

True - and there lies an interesting debate about when it's OK to offend people and why we offend some and not others. Not a debate the tabloids are well equipped to have, sadly.

For what it's worth, I think there are two big reasons we tend to avoid offending muslims.

First, Christianity is part of our family. We've grown up with it for centuries. Even for those of us who aren't religious, Christianity is like a sibling, and family fights are more acceptable than brawling with strangers.

Second, there are a small number of muslims rather more extreme than our home-grown christians and most of us will think twice before doing something likely to have a bunch of extremists coming down on us.

But for all their whinging, the likes of the Daily Mail are in a poor position to criticise. The number of lives ruined, lies told, injustices done, all in the pursuit of a story to sell papers doesn't exactly give them the moral high ground.

The shame of the tabloids is that they can attack things like this Glasgow exhibition and ignore the way they do the same thing, every day, every week, every year.

Today's Daily Mail highlights

I'll read this stuff so you don't have to.

If you try to have a successful career and be a mum, you'll kill yourself
That's the message from this sad story about a the inquest into a mum and successful lawyer who threw herself into the Thames. OK, the story does mention post-natal depression briefly, later on, but we all know what it's really trying to say.

How does Lembit get off with attractive women?
The Mail doesn't know and is frustrated that no simple stereotypes can be applied. I couldn't give a toss. His latest young lady (or,at least, female he was seen with in public) is Katie Green - an underwear model, apparently. Or, as the Mail calls her, "Bra Girl". Tasteful.

This wasn't even news twenty years ago
A City "High Flier" takes a sabbatical and gives the simple life a try for six months. And we're meant to give a shit why, exactly? He was in Channel 4's Shipwrecked last year, so he's a celebrity - at least 20 people must remember him. We get some deep wisdom too. 'I'm shocked by the amount of money I used to spend on nothing,' Wise words indeed, my friend. Wise words.

It's a book!
The Pope condemns a Glasgow exhibition inviting people to write comments on a bible. When he says that it wouldn't happen to the Koran, he has a point; but it's not that its the Bible that's the problem - it's people's feelings about it. It's not the book, but the people. Understand that and you've got the start of an interesting discussion.

Needless to say, the Daily Mail doesn't - the paper isn't renowed for trying to avoid hurt feelings over its reporting, so to criticise others for the same thing is just a teeny bit hypocritical.

The secret to winning: work hard, then work harder

If, like me, you spend a significant amount of your life pushing leaflets through letterboxes (and, yes, a lot of them do get read), you may - as you tramp up some long driveway or blag your way into another block of flats - briefly fantasize about some way to get leaflets delivered without spending lots of money and without all that tramping around.

Sadly, email, Facebook and Twitter really aren't up to the job so back the streets it is. Damn the lack of a constituency-wide email directory.

Except that's a load of crap. People talk about switching to email, about blogging, as some sort of alternative that would make us more successful, but it won't.

The reason is very simple: if we can do it, so can the other guys.

If we can do cool stuff with email, blogs, Facebook and twitter, so can they. As Jonathan Calder rightly says, if we can use Rennardism to win elections, so can they. If we can use community politics, so can they.

Ah, yes, you say - but we have our unique philosophy, messages and policies, and if we can just find that mythical narrative, the punters will flock our way.

Up to a point, Lord Copper. At certain times, different parties find the public responsive to their message. The lesson of a century or more of democracy across many countries is surely that it doesn't - can't - work all the time.

You can tweak things to get more people on your side, and you can take advantage of those periods where people are more receptive to what you have to say, but the political cycle grinds relentlessly on and there's no magic wand, no perfect arrangement of words, to get all the people all of the time.

So it has to be either hard work, or expensive.

Because the other parties can do the same as you, the way to get ahead is to either out-work or out-spend them (or both). In general, the second isn't an option for the Lib Dems so hard work it is.

We have to deliver more leaflets, knock on more doors, address more issues and do it better, attend more meetings, build up a better local profile.

There are no short cuts because, if there were, our opponents would do them too and they wouldn't be short-cuts any more.

True, we can also out-innovate the opposition for temporary advantage, but if they're any good it won't last for more than one or two elections. If we can have blogs and use email, so can they, and the difference again is going to be in the hard work: how much effort do we put into updating our blogs, keeping them interesting and relevant? How much time do we spend collecting email addresses?

By-elections are the toughest challenge because helpers typically flood in from all over the place so, to work harder, you need to attract more people (as the Tories did very successfully in Henley, Neil Fawcett tells us).

In normal local elections, your fate is far more in your own hands. Put in the work and reap the rewards. Maybe not right away, but in time. If the opposition are complacent and lazy, you may find you can win just by doing a bit more than them.

So here's my campaigning message. We need to get the message right, and we need to innovate - both of which are damn hard work themselves. We need to be better trained in all the best practice techniques. But on top of that the Lib Dems are going to win elections by working harder than the other guys. There are no short-cuts, no magic solutions, no secret campaign messages waiting to be discovered, that will change that.

A strategy to achieve fair votes

Rumours abound that Gordon Brown is considering holding a referendum on the voting system, to be held on the same day as the General Election, and that his preferred option is First Past the Post (our current system) against Alternative Vote (AV).

Alternative Vote is the system used to elect the London mayor - it's defining characteristic is that the person elected is the least favourite candidate of under half the people who bother to vote.

Neither AV nor FPTP are fair or proportional voting systems. Neither results in the make-up of parliament reflecting the way people vote.

Just as importantly, neither gives more power to voters. Under both, the majority of seats remain "safe" for one party, with voters getting what they're given. Under both, elections are decided by a small number of floating voters in marginal constituencies.

Which tells you exactly why it's the option Brown wants to put to us, if he has to do one. It's the voting reform that opponents of PR could live with, because it isn't PR.

For the Lib Dems, there's an obvious goal: get STV (the Single Trasferable Vote) onto the ballot paper. Many politicians don't like STV, because it gives the voters more power, especially the power to support a party and still reject a candidate from that party.

So how do we achieve it?

Not by trying to persuade Brown of the benefits of STV. He's well aware of them, sees several as downsides, and would doubtless oppose an STV option in a referendum.

But maybe by understanding what Brown's trying to achieve.

He's staring near-certain defeat in the face and sees this as a way to unsettle the Tories and perhaps move a General Election campaign a little further away from a judgement on his record and towards who's the great reformer. He doesn't really care which way the referendum goes - it won't make much difference.

What are the reasons for Brown not to have STV as an option?

First, there's the risk it might win. Second, it would leave Labour opposing the most reforming option on the table.

Both are excellent reasons for Brown to resist calls for there to be a proportional system put to voters. So the question to ask ourselves is - how do we make it even more painful for Brown to resist STV than to go for it.

Do you remember the election that never was? Of course you do - it was probably the single most defining moment in Brown's premiership. Having leaked election rumours to unsettle the Tories for short-term gain, Brown failed to call it and looked weak and indecisive.

We need to do the same here. That's the first part of strategy. Now the idea of a referendum has been floated, voters need to see Brown as weak if he backs down on the plan - as I've no doubt he'll be under pressure to do from several cabinet colleagues. We need to ensure that Brown has to give voters something - he can't just call the whole thing off.

The second string to this approach is for everyone who wants reform to speak with one voice that the Alternative Vote is a bad system: it isn't acceptable, it doesn't deliver reform and it short-changes the people. AV for Westminster elections needs to be painted as it really is - a terrible system with nearly all the bad points of FPTP.

The public must be in no doubt that having a referendum without a fair voting system on the ballot paper would be a con, political sleight of hand, no reform at all.

"We the people must be given the choice."

Holding a referendum on reform that was opposed loudly and clearly by every pro-reform body in the country would be a disaster for Brown. It would allow Cameron to portray him as a political opportunist, and allow the Tories to safely support FPTP. Scrapping the idea altogether would make him look weak, especially when there was a perfectly good option open to him.

What would Brown be left with? Some feeble excuses about how putting three options to the public would be too confusing, or how it isn't clear exactly how STV would look.

Brown's weakness gives us a real chance to get voting reform; but we have to be hard-nosed about it. Giving in and supporting AV at any point would be a disaster for reform and for any attempts to get a fair voting system for Westminster.

(In case anyone thinks that, although it's a crappy system, at least AV would deliver some political benefit to the Lib Dems, take a look at this post at Mark Reckons).

The Lib Dem blogosphere - I can tell you what it isn't

Over on Lib Dem Voice, Stephen Tall asks about the state of the Liberal Democrat blogosphere. Answers so far have come from James, Darrell on Moments of Clarity, Paul on Liberal Burblings and Stephen Glenn plus some comments to the LDV post (anyone I've missed?).

I haven't read their responses yet, in a poor attempt to marshall my own thoughts (will do that later and see just how daft my comments seem in comparison).

Down to business.

Stephen asks:

What are the greatest successes of the Lib Dem blogosphere?

What are we, collectively as bloggers, failing to achieve?

How does the Lib Dem blogosphere compare with those of the Labour, Tories and other parties’?

How helpful is blogging as a campaigning tool (are there examples of it making a real impact)?

What do you think the next year holds in store for the Lib Dem blogosphere?

Which is frustrating as I don't think I've a good answer for any of them.

I don't believe general political blogging of the sort I do has any significant impact on the wider political debate, certainly in the country as a whole and probably within the party too.

I'm just too insignificant. I write a blog that gets between 5,000 and 10,000 visitors a month. When you take out those reaching here because they've searched on "nice tits", "big book of breasts" or something like that, it's a little fewer who might be genuinely interested in anything I've got to say.

That's fine. Other bloggers I rather like and admire such as Mark Thompson and Charlotte Gore probably get more visitors than me, but in the same ballpark last I checked. LDV don't do statporn, but if they did, they'd tell you about their 35,000-40,000 monthly unique visitors and I believe people like Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes over on the right get around 100,000.

All very well, but it's just pissing in the ocean compared to the traditional media websites. In April the Guardian website attracted over 27 million unique visitors. The Telegraph, Times and Sun each pulled in over 20 million.

So for every one person who visited my blog last month, 8 dropped by LDV, 20 read Mr Dale's words of wisdom and a whopping 4,000 visited that nice Mr Murdoch's Times website.

I wonder which has more impact on the national debate?

No surprise, then, that we get excited about our little successes. In my case, getting a link from Bad Science a couple of months ago and seeing two thousands visitors cram into the Cafe in the space of a few hours.

Others have done better. Mark Thompson picked up a few links from the Guardian and even got on Radio Four as a result of his analysis of how MPs' expenses related to the safety of their seats, James Graham and Alix Mortimer pop up on the Guardian's Comment is Free slot, and so on.

But we're hardly shaping the debate in pubs up and down the land, or for that matter winning over sufficient floating voters in marginal constituencies to make a difference to election results in the wonderful system we have. We're all (and I mean no disrespect to any of my fellow bloggers at all) getting excited at the prospect of Z-list political commentator status.

As a campaigning tool, good local blogs addressing local communities are, I am absolutely sure, better and more effective - especially if you follow the advice of folks like ALDC and experts such as Dr Pack.

What use are blogs like mine, apart from being the modern form of vanity publishing since no-one's yet suggested they might like to hand over hard cash in return for use of my dubious writing skills?

They can help inform the debate within parties, encourage a wider discussion, reaching out past the great and the good, all year round and give supporters of different parties an insight into their opposition (for good or bad).

So, to attempt to answer Stephen's questions, (badly):

• Our greatest successes have been internal, that people with something to say and the time and skill to write it down in a readable way have gained some small influence in the party and some small ability to hold the party to account and question it.
• We're failing to reach beyond our own small blogging world
• Really couldn't say how Lib Dem bloggers compare to those of other parties - I just don't have time to read enough blogs to form a judgement.
• Blogging is helpful as a campaign tool, but nearly always just local blogs within a constituency or ward. Blogging can play its part in promoting national campaigns (both politican and other) but I'm not going to get too excited about how effective it is.
• The next year holds more of the same. The first General Election with a mature blogosphere (yes, I know a few people were blogging back in 2005) will be fun for the bloggers but won't affect the result.
  

Voters for change get their tactics wrong

A couple of months ago there was, if I remember correectly, a small political spat about MPs' expenses. Voters up and down the country quite rightly demanded change and polls suggested there was enthusiam not just for fixing the expenses issue but also wider reform of the system.

So how might voters actually achieve that?

One way would be to leave it to the politicians. Sure, they're the problem and of course we moan about them all the time, but they know what they're doing - they'll sort it all out.

Or voters could turn to a party like the Lib Dems that went beyond just talking about reform and came up with a radical, robust plan and timetable for achieving it.

A third option would be to support minor parties - not so much because any of them have a well-thought-out reform agenda, but simply to send a clear message to the bigger guys that they're going to be in trouble unless they act.

A fourth way is to abstain from the system. Don't vote. A plague on all your houses. I'm staying at home until you buggers sort yourselves out.

Two of those options seem reasonable to me, and two don't.

Picked your choices? Fine, we'll continue.

The first option is rubbish. We've seen what's happened: warm words about reform from the two biggest parties, a few tweaks to the system and everything stays as before. No fair votes. No real reform of the Lords. No serious change in the power balance between the executive and legislative parts of the system. No written constitution. No attempt to involve the people in a new system. Just some minor changes cooked up by the politicians.

But the last option doesn't work either.

As a supporter of a particular party, you can make your displeasure felt by staying at home. You're a Labour supporter who wants to send Labour a message? Sit on your hands and, if others do too, they'll see their vote drop. Seats will be lost, a message will be sent.

Unfortunately, what works well in punishing one party is rubbish if you want to punish them all. As a politician fighting an election, I'm really not too bothered about my vote falling as long as the other guy's vote falls too. Sure it's nice to have high turnouts, but it's nicer to win.

If you want to send a politician a clear message and force change, you need to use your vote.

As a Lib Dem, I'd obviously like you to go for my second option. But option three would work as well: a continued growth in support for minor parties would force real change, as long as it was carried through to the General Election.

As an aside, I'm hearing people say that voters did go for that fourth option in Norwich North and stayed at home, fed up with all politicians. The turnout was just 45%. I'm not so sure.

Looking back at by-elections in Blair's first term, when the Government was popular, sees a similar level of turnout.

Leeds Central, a safe Labour seat, had a turnout of 19.6% in 1999. Wigan managed 25% that August and Kensington & Chelsea got 29.7%.

Eddisbury, a close fight between Labour and the Tories, had a 51.4% turnout, and in Romsey - a famous Lib Dem victory in 2000 - the turnout was 55%.

So the turnout in Norwich North is at the low end for by-elections where there was a real fight and high compared to those where the result wasn't in question. Perhaps about what we'd expect, given that a Tory victory seemed utterly certain for the whole campaign.

If the British people really want to change the political system, they can do it by casting their votes for parties other than Labour and Conservatives both in by-elections and the General Election.

If we carry on as before, perhaps we really will get the political system we deserve.

(For those interested, you can see the turnout figures for the 1997-2001 parliament here. 45% is above average).

Lessons from Norwich (sorry, Irfan - again)

Despite their vote falling compared to 2005, the Tories won a good by-election victory in Norwich North. For Cameron, the result is very much in line with national opinion polls: it's good, and it's probably enough, but it isn't 1990s New Labour. Winning less than 40% of the vote suggests that the Conservatives aren't yet sweeping all before them. Where the minor party votes go to in the General Election could yet be critical in deciding the next government.

Whatever people may say, the result really doesn't say much about Labour's General Election prospects. Governments have in the past lost by-elections left, right and centre and gone on to win the General Election. There may be good reasons to think Brown is doomed, but this result isn't one of them.

Turning to the Lib Dem performance, there are - as after every parliamentary by-election, people queueing up to say that anything less than a storming victory is a failure for the party and it isn't like the good old days, when we swept all before us.

Unfortunately, that analysis suffers from the major flaw that there were no good old days. We've always, without exception, lost far more by-elections than we've won.

Irfan Ahmed gives a good example of this thinking, as he proposes throwing out "Rennardism" (whatever that might be).

Irfan says

"I call on the party to see Norwich North as a wake up call and start socialising with voters, more soap box politics and Q&A’s and we need to start doing this now."

Now, Irfan is absolutely right in one respect. If you have the choice between delivering leaflets to someone and taking the time to socialise with them, talk to them, work with them through public meetings, it's certainly my experience that the latter option is a more effective way to win them over. There are good councillors doing this all over the country and reaping the benefits.

But a parliamentary by-election campaign is run over three weeks and there are typically around 70,000 voters. In Norwich North it's over 75,000. That means - to reach all of them - "socialising" with 25,000 people a week. Over 3,700 a day. 300 an hour, if you socialise twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Five a minute. One person every 12 seconds.

Join the long, winding queue to have your 12 seconds being convinced that April Pond is the best person for the job.

"Ah yes", I hope Irfan would say "but that isn't how you do it. You have big public meetings, you make speeches on street corners". Well, yes, you can do that stuff. But you only reach people who are willing and able to come to those meetings and - trust me - that ain't going to be 75,000.

Let's say you organised two meetings a day and had an average of a hundred people coming to each. OK, probably a bit optimistic, but possible. You've just managed to reach 4,200 people over the campaign, and you haven't made any contact with the other 70,800.

There is a way that public meetings and soap-box speeches can make a difference, and it's how they made a difference for John Major in 1992. It wasn't that millions of people physically saw Major getting on his soapbox; but the media reported it and millions saw the media reports.

Well, as we all know, the media don't give the Lib Dems quite the coverage the other two big parties get, so how might we spread the word about Nick Clegg doing Q&A sessions or giving street-corner speeches. Hey, I've got a great idea. Why don't we put it on a leaflet?

Let's look at the election campaign and test Irfan's theory. The Tories put out a load of leaflets and their vote held up. The Lib Dems put out a load of leaflets and our vote held up. Labour and the Greens both put out fewer leaflets and their votes both fell sharply.

UKIP is the one party that doesn't quite fit the mould. They've got a single, strong message that plays well with 10-20% of the electorate and seem able to pick up those votes (but no more) really just by making sure everyone knows they're there and against the EU.

Finally, and moving away from the Lib Dems, I must spare a mention for the Libertarian Party. Sorry guys, but there's just no way to make winning 36 votes from an electorate of 75,000 look good.

Thanks to Nich Starling for his by-election coverage. Jonathan Calder also has a nice post-election write-up.

Screwed over by thetrainline.com

Having decided to get down to Bournemouth for the Lib Dem conference in September, I set about booking a train home (I'm sure I can get a lift across to Bournemouth, but I'll be heading out on the Monday).

My first port of call is thetrainline.com ("your first stop for train tickets"). Quite happy to see an advance ticket for well under £20 (but then I am buying two months in advance, so I'd hope so).

I go through the ordering process and get to the end, just before paying. It comes up with an error and gives me a phone number to call.

Being a good chap, I call the number and hit "1" on the keypad. I'm met with a recorded voice/voice recognition system. Painfully slow, but to be fair it only took two attempts to get my stations right. All seems well and after a mere five or ten minutes of pain I find myself speaking to a nice lady in an Indian call centre.

The lady goes through the details again. Right at the end she breaks the bad news. Turns out their system isn't always entirely up to date and the sub-£20 ticket wasn't available.

So what was available? £25? £30?

No, the actual available ticket, two months in advance, was nearly a hundred pounds.

Thanks, but no thanks.

I then asked for a customer services number - not the lady's fault if their systems are crap, but I was wholly unimpressed having to wade through the website, recorded system and real person for over 20 minutes just to be told that the actual ticket price was some five times higher than the one that had lured me in.

If I'd gone into a shop advertising "TV £20" and, after half an hour of sales patter, been told that the advertised model was actually available for £100, I'd be onto trading standards. For train tickets, it's apparently absolutely fine.

Sadly, my customer services quest failed. I had to ask her about five times and eventually, rather than just saying that's how it was, she gave me a number. Little did I know it was just an alternate number to take me to their standard options, not something for customer services at all. I've filled in their "contact" form but I won't be holding my breath.

Meanwhile, faced with not being able to afford to get to conference, I decided to take a punt on another site: National Rail Enquiries.

Here I was able to buy the same ticket, via Virgin Trains, for under £25 - a few quid more than I was originally quoted but £75 less than the final trainline price.

So it looks like I'll be making it to conference after all - for the weekend - no thanks to Thetrainline.com. Seems like they'll be my last stop for train tickets from now on.

Cut NHS spending, not tuition fees

Writing yesterday about the Lib Dems "A fresh start" document, I suggested that most activists would be supportive overall but there could be a real fight over specific proposals. And so it seems.

So far, the one spending pledge that's been singled out is tuition fees. Clegg wants it to become an aspiration. Bloggers like James Graham and Alex Wilcock disagree.

I'll leave the debate over tuition fees to others (for now), but I was struck by Nick's dismissal of cutting NHS funding. The Independent article says:

Mr Clegg admitted, he found it "almost impossible" to think his party would not maintain health spending.

Why? For the last decade, Labour has poured money on the NHS, massively increasing its funding. And for the last decade, opposition politicians have rightly pointed out that we simply haven't seen improvements to match the extra cash.

So if those increases didn't give us value for money, why can't we consider cut-backs?

I'm not suggesting we would - or could - cut spending back to 1997 levels. An ageing population along with new, expensive, diagnostic tools (e.g. MRI scanners) and treatments make healthcare pricier now than it was then.

But if adding billions of pounds has seen little improvment, surely it must be possible to cut billions of pounds with little negative effect.

We all know that the NHS is still top-heavy, weighed down by centralised targets and abysmal, absurdly expensive IT systems. To say we can't cut any of that is ludicrous.

There are areas of NHS spending just crying out to be cut. As with any cuts, it won't be easy and there will be strong vested interests resisting change; but it seems a much better bet than dropping our pledge on tuition fees.

Key Lib Dem spending commitments to be dropped

In an interview with the Independent, Nick Clegg has promised to slash the number of spending commitments the party will take into the next General Election.

"The circumstances are utterly different from anything in the last 15 years. Our shopping list of commitments will be far, far, far, far, far shorter," he said. "We will have to ask ourselves some immensely difficult questions about what we as a party can afford. A lot of cherished Lib Dem policies will have to go on the back burner. They will remain our aspirations. They will remain our policies. But we are not going to kid the British people into thinking we could deliver the full list of commitments we have put to them at the last three or four elections."

Commitments to be downgraded to "aspirations" include free university tuition for first year undergrads, personal care for the elderly, an increase in personal pensions, a pledge to use taxpayers money to keep rural post offices open and a £200 a year winter fuel payment for the disabled.

This, we're told, will be put to conference in September.

I'll be reading the detailed proposals with interest. My first feelings are broadly supportive of Clegg's line. Were there to be a Lib Dem government, cuts like these would have to happen anyway. This way, the party gets to have its (albeit limited) say and the public know in advance. The alternative would be pretending we can do everything and then cutting behind the scenes.

My guess is that the party's activists will broadly go along with that, although I expect some bust-ups over specific policies. Most people will agree that big cuts need to be made; few will agree on exactly what those cuts should be.

Oh Jack, how disappointing

My plan for this morning was to write something about the latest knife crime figures. Unfortunately, I haven't had the time to track down the data I'd need to draw conclusions.

There's no shortage of problems in interpreting what's gone on. What do we mean by knife-related violence? Is a small increase in deaths just down to random variation? What's the split between domestic and non-domestic attacks? What's the geographic spread? Are any of the changes statistically significant? How reliable is the data from hospital admissions?

The only general comment I'll make is that, when you look at changes in crime over time, and you look at a range of different countries; the link between crime levels and specific changes in the law or police tactics always seems very weak.

So I'll leave that to one side and turn to a very odd comment from our Justice Secretary, Jack Straw.

Justice Secretary Jack Straw said: "We have introduced tougher penalties and have made it clear that anyone aged 16 or over should be prosecuted at their first offence.

"This tough stance is already having a positive impact - latest figures show that more people are going to jail, and for longer, when caught carrying a knife."

Ok, Jack, so you've made it more likely that anyone caught carrying a knife will go to prison and, to prove the success of your policy, you've found that people found carrying knives are now more likely to go to prison.

That's like saying "We've introduced the death penalty for murder and we can prove the policy works: more murderers are now being executed."

Great if your objective is to have as many people as possible locked up or executed. Ten out of ten for that one.

But I was under the impression the aim was to cut knife crime, make our streets safer and cut the number of people living in fear. Jack's not given us anything to say whether the changes have, or will, do any of that.

Maybe CCTV is a good idea

New research for the BBC has revealed we have a million fewer CCTV cameras that previously estimated.

Not a huge surprise: if I remember correctly, the previous estimate was based on a count of CCTV cameras of one street in one London borough, around 2002, with the numbers being extrapolated to cover the whole country.

But at 3.2 million, the number is still much higher than other countries.

The BBC notes that

"The borough of Wandsworth has the highest number of CCTV cameras in London, with just under four cameras per 1,000 people. Its total number of cameras - 1,113 - is more than the police departments of Boston [USA], Johannesburg and Dublin City Council combined."

I could, at this point, kick into a rant about how CCTV cameras don't work, how they kill our privacy and they're generally a tool of Big Brother, with Labour's next plan most likely to put them in our bedrooms.

There's some truth in that (not the bedroom thing - I just made that up). But there's more to it.

CCTV doesn't seem to work - yet
As a crime-fighting tool, CCTV doesn't appear to work very well. The evidence shows that areas with lots of CCTV cameras are no better at tackling crime than those with just a few.

But you can't dismiss CCTV on that basis alone. Maybe we just aren't doing it right. As a senior police officer points out, a lot of CCTV cameras have been put in on the basis that merely having them there would at as a deterrent.

CCTV has been very poor as a crime-solving tool. It doesn't tend to produce images that can be used to help solve the vast majority of street crimes, or that prove useful in court to secure a conviction.

That could change. There are a whole bunch of technologies that, whilst slightly scary, could make CCTV more effective. Higher resolution colour pictures, automatic face recognition (pretty rubbish at the moment, but it'll get there).

Plus, the police admit little money was put into what you do with the CCTV images after a crime has happened - that could change.

So, privacy concerns aside, it's possible that CCTV could become a better tool for solving crimes and convicting criminals.

Deterrent effect
Although there's little evidence that CCTV acts as a deterrent, there seems to be a strong belief that it works among the public.

My anecdotal evidence is from discussions raised by local residents in my area. People have told me that, with CCTV cameras installed, youths will be frightened off getting up to no good in the area; and that one shopping centre experienced higher crime than others locally because it had fewer cameras.

The placebo effect
A much-commented-on crime trend over the last 15 years is how, whilst crime has fallen back to 1980 levels (a fall that's been repeated across most western countries), fear of crime has failed to drop as far.

A surprising number of people* believe crime is rising nationally, with slightly fewer believing it's up locally.

It would be easy to dismiss this, but we shouldn't. Our fear of crime can have a massive effect on our lives. The old lady who traps herself in her house, fearing to venture out into her relatively safe neighbourhood. The people who see every young person as a likely thug or hooligan. The family spending hundreds or thousands of pounds they can't really afford on security products they'll problably never need.

Perhaps CCTV cameras, even if useless for spying on people, deterring criminals or solving crimes, might make people feel safer and perhaps that alone would be a good enough reason to have them.

The privacy conundrum
Some of the opposition to CCTV cameras reminds me of the "primitive" peoples who, we were told, believed a camera could capture their soul. People seem to think that merely having your image captured by a CCTV camera attacks our privacy, even if no-one is ever likely to see the images, they're too grainy to recognise and there's no money to do anything with them even if someone did take a look.

But as technology improves and newer systems come online, exactly those features that start making CCTV useful in solving crimes also make it potentially damaging to our privacy.

Imagine having a properly joined-up system with working face recognition. I want to find out if my wife is cheating on me, so I supply a photo and a few hundred quid in a plain envelope and back comes the answer. A tabloid journalist wants to track a celebrity, or that paedophile just released from prison - easy. A crime boss wants to find and kill the grass - no problem.

To CCTV or not?
So here's the really weird thing. The best use of CCTV cameras may be to have lots of them all over the place, make them very visible, but have them not work very well. That way, our privacy is protected and, though crime is unaffected, people may feel safer.

Beyond some anecdotes, I've no evidence to support that. I would need to see a proper study into whether there's a correlation between number of CCTV cameras and low fear of crime before I'd have any confidence it was really true.

Even if that turns out to be true, it would be a brave local council who said "we're not going to upgrade our CCTV network because, if we did, it might actually start working."

There are many other complications we could talk about. In any one location, crime often rises and falls over time. Naturally, you're more likely to put in crime-fighting measures when it rises. As it falls again, whatever you did tends to get the credit. But what if it would have fallen anyway? What if you could have hung a dreamcatcher instead of installing a CCTV camera and crime would still have dropped at the location?

Solid evidence is surprisingly thin on the ground. We've spent hundreds of millions on CCTV and, as more expensive technology comes along, we'll probably spend even more in future.

Perhaps it wouldn't be a bad idea to find out what works, what doesn't and what the implications are for our society before we decide to continue with CCTV rather than, for example, more bobbies on the beat or better forensics.


* perhaps not so surprising if you read the tabloids on a regular basis.

Do we want to be nannied after all?

It's sometimes easy to come out against the nanny state, to rail against those politicians and civil servants telling us what to do, how to live our lives. Telling us to drink less, smoke less, exercise more, eat our five-a-day and the rest of it.

On occasion, our lovely tabloids are rather good at it.

But sometimes we can see the limits to that approach; the time when the Mail - amongst others - just want nanny to tell us what to do, even if nanny really isn't sure herself.

Swine flu has presented a wonderful example. The Daily Mail describes it as a farce when a charity, the National Childbirth Trust, advises women to consider delaying pregnancy to minimise the risks to themselves and their baby and the Department of Health say that's excessive.

The Mail (and they're far from alone), feels Government isn't doing its job unless we receive a single, unambigious message on the risks of swine flu and what we should do about it.

They're asking Government to nanny us. Because giving us one message, one set of advice on swine flu, is saying something that isn't true.

The truth is that there are genuine differences of opinion between experts. The truth is that they just don't know. There are many unknowns and the difference in advice has more to do with which guesses people are making about them than anything else.

If we were to be treated honestly, we would be told clearly that there are all these unknown elements, that experts disagree and that it's all about balancing different risks, none of which are very clear.

My question is whether honesty leads to a better outcome. What makes us less scared? What makes us panic less? What leads to deaths being minimised?

So, when it comes to health matters, do we want to be nannied - to be told things that aren't really true, the ladybird version - for our own good? Or do we want the "farce" of knowing that medical science doesn't have all the answers and experts have different opinions.

The moon landings in hi-tech 3D

Here's a little picture that gives some idea of how far men travelled in the era of moon landings, and how far we've managed since. Manned space travel since 1973 has been little more than sticking our heads out of the earth's sunroof and having a quick peek around.

The real CRB issue (and it isn't famous authors)

The latest spat about CRB checks shows every sign of missing the point.

Famous authors complain at the indignity of having to pay the government £64 to get a piece of paper saying they're not a paedophile. They suggest they'd rather not bother than go through the hassle.

After all, it's not as if these authors are ever left alone with children and, as they point out, a classroom with thirty kids and a teacher isn't exactly a very likely location for child abuse to take place.

Others, though, say these authors should go through the process; and the Government says they might not need to anyway - those with only occasional contact are exempt.

What the whole debate misses is a simple and fundamental question: does it work?

All these tests - hundreds of thousands of forms completed, details checked, payments made - have they actually protected children? How many kids who would have been abused, or worse, are happy and safe today because of the checks?

That number would need to be balanced against the children who have lost opportunities. Not just from famous authors either.

Some time ago Mrs Quist volunteered to work with children for a local charity. She had the skills and experience. But by the time her CRB check form had arrived, been filled in, returned and checked, more than six months had passed and Mrs Quist had other commitments.

The calculations aren't easy to do. The checking regime was introduced after the murders of Jessica Chapman and Wells by school caretaker Ian Huntley. Had Huntley been subject to these checks, Jessica and Holly would probably be alive today.

But, thankfully, Huntleys are not common. In fact they're very rare.

So we have to weigh up the risk of a terrible-but-rare event (children being seriously abused or murdered by adults working in their schools, youth clubs or sports teams) against the certainty of a bad-but-common one (children missing opportunities and experiences because there aren't enough checked adults, or adults refuse to be checked).

We also need to bear in mind that the checks are far from conclusive. Even if we assume they always work (i.e. they correctly pick up paedophiles 100% of the time and never wrongly identify innocent people as a risk), it doesn't - can't - catch all the bad guys.

The check identifies those who, at the time it was made, had been caught. If someone's evaded the law, it won't flag them up no matter what they've got up to.

So the real issue isn't about big-name authors. It's about the ordinary people working in schools, helping charities, running all sorts of youth organisations. It's about whether the checks are really resulting in fewer abused children and the price kids are paying in lost opportunities.

It's not an easy balance to get right, but it is a balance. It isn't all one-way: it isn't the case that more checks and more thorough checks are automatically better.

That's the debate we need to be having.

So when do we get our money back?

Last year, with the global banking system in crisis, we taxpayers lent hundreds of billions of pounds to financial institutions clinging on by their fingernails.

Loans and mortgages to the likes of us are still hard to come by, but one by one the investment banks are reporting much improved figures and, we're told, the big bonus City culture is well and truly back.

Now, it could be that the institutions doing well are all ones that didn't take public money; but if that's not the case - if there are companies that accepted our cash and are now back on the champagne - I think I'd rather like my money back.

The Lords won't be leaping on Monday

So now we know what Gordon Brown means when he talks about radical reform, about needing to remake parliament fit for the 21st century.

The exciting news is that Labour plans to give life peers the ability to resign their peerage.

Please excuse me if I'm a little underwhelmed. I'd thought that the party of the common man, the party opposed to privilege, the party of democracy might, with a healthy majority in the Commons and twelve years in power behind them, find the time to do a little more.

But no.

To be fair to Gordon, he has made some noises in the right direction. Apparently "MPs voted in 2007 for an 80% or 100% elected upper house - something that Gordon Brown has indicated will feature in Labour's general election manifesto."

And so another opportunity to give us a second chamber chosen democratically by the people - something pretty much every other democratic country seems to manage - is passed by. The Lords will be staying put for a while yet.

What Brown won't admit, of course, is the real reason for putting off serious Lords reform year after year, decade after decade. Simply jobs for the boys. It's politically expedient. It allows Brown to install unelected ministers on a whim and to pay off his friends (and, in some cases enemies) with a nice peerage.

So that's Labour. Tinker a bit around the edges, don't do anything that might address the real problems, shout "we're reforming!!!" as loudly as possible and hope not too many people notice that it's business as usual.

Everyone loves a good party

Those nice people at Lib Dem Voice published another piece by me yesterday, this one looking at how the way our laws treat political parties is at some distance from the reality of the role parties play in our modern democracy (which is, despite some issues, a far more positive one than many people are willing to give credit for).

I look at whether our current approaches to elected politicians switching parties, MPs' communications allowances and councillors "tithing" part of their allowances are correct.

Now is not the time to abandon pavement politics

James Graham's early morning blog post shows why he's still one of the Lib Dem's top bloggers.

Starting with the defection of Chamali and Chandila Fernando, James goes on to look at the problems the Lib Dems have getting more BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) candidates.

He then discusses the drains parliamentary candidates have on their time and money, in a party with little cash to support them further; the tendency to treat ethnic minorities (especially asian communities) as a bloc vote; and the emphasis on localism where the number of years a candidate has lived in the area all-too-often becomes a key issue.

James' solution is a make-or-break switch in emphasis from the ground war to the air war. Break away from the cycle of ever-more-local, of endlessly tramping the streets and gamble the future of the party on stronger national campaigning.

I have a lot of sympathy with James' analysis - there's much I agree with. The emphasis on localism probably does harm the chances of BAME candidates and may well be taking us down a road where everyone's so busy worrying about their little patch that they miss the bigger picture.

If we move to more PR elections with larger constituencies, using traditional pavement politics to win elections becomes less tenable anyway. As we saw in the Euros, building up islands of hectic activity in a sea of barely-functioning local parties leads to the Lib Dems getting very low votes in a lot of areas and under-performing nationally.

Although there are big differences, the Lib Dems could do worse than look the UKIP's two successful Euro campaigns to see how it might be done.

The problem for the Lib Dems is we would be moving from our strength to our weakness.

The party is relatively poor, but has for many years had a big advantage: hundreds of thousands of people willing to give their time for free, whether by delivering leaflets, canvassing or standing as a candidate. That's the ground war and we're pretty good at it.

And, of course, we've tried the air war approach in the past - 1983, to be specific. It certainly won us the votes, but...

I don't believe the Lib Dems can successfully switch away from pavement politics without some change in the rules of the game.

What might that change be? Perhaps removing the social worker/ombudsman role that MPs currently perform and asking them to concentrate on law-making. Or the adoption of a form of proportional representation for Westminster with larger constituencies. That would change the dynamics .

And let's not forget that pavement politics has many positives. It gives us politicians who actually communicate with their electorate on a regular basis, listen to them, work for them. Switching to the air war isn't going to make people less interested in their local environment: traffic, parking, pot-holes, dodgy pavements and the rest of it.

They might be cliches, but as we go about our everyday lives these things do matter, they make a difference. If politicians are going to spend less time fixing these everyday issues, we need to know who's going to step into the gap.

I agree with James that our current path will see at best glacially slow, incremental improvement. I made the point in an article on Lib Dem Voice that, as things currently stand, doubling our seats needs a lot more than the right message and a nice party political broadcast.

I also agree that pavement politics has its downsides, not least that it sets the bar too high for many potential candidates and puts localism on a rather higher pedestal than perhaps it should be.

But, as things stand now, for the Lib Dems to switch away from pavement politics would be catastrophic for the party. There's just no reason to think we could win the air war - we even get hammered by UKIP, for heaven's sake! Until that changes, we have to play to our strengths, even as we work to improve our weaknesses.

Shower your number ones on me

Total Politics is running its best blog of 2009 poll and, shallow person that I am, I'll measure my success not from the wisdom I impart or the good that I do, but instead on how well I rank on a series of fairly random polls, competitions and link counts.

So please consider sending in a vote and ranking the Cafe highly, and you might like to consider some of my favourite blogs - on the right somewhere - for your other votes.

Here are the rules:

1. You must vote for your ten favourite blogs and ranks them from 1 (your favourite) to 10 (your tenth favourite).
2. Your votes must be ranked from 1 to 10. Any votes which do not have rankings will not be counted.
3. You MUST include ten blogs. If you include fewer than ten your vote will not count.
4. Email your vote to toptenblogs@totalpolitics.com
5. Only vote once.
6. Only blogs based in the UK, run by UK residents are eligible or based on UK politics are eligible.
7. Anonymous votes left in the comments will not count. You must give a name
8. All votes must be received by midnight on 31 July 2009. Any votes received after that date will not count.

Has a nice liberal scheme gone tits-up?

Here's a nice story to challenge liberal assumptions.

In the past, private landlords of tenants on housing benefit were paid directly by the local authority.

Last year the Government changed the rules so the housing benefit went to the tenants, who then paid the landlords.

Sounds like a good, liberal, move: giving people more power and responsibility over their own lives and moving them away from a child-like reliance on the State to sort everything out.

The new LHA is ment to give more freedom to tenants. You can rent a bigger property and pay the difference yourself, or rent a smaller one and keep up to £15 a week of the excess*.

I can well imagine it's the sort of scheme Lib Dem policy makers might have smiled upon, and the party was supportive when the legislation passed through parliament in 2006-7.

All good, except many landlords are now complaining that rents simply aren't being paid and they're losing stacks of money in the process.

"I've lost more than £56,000 and already had four houses repossessed because I've not been able to keep up with repayments." says Shazli Ahmed.

She rents properties to tenants who claim housing benefit and is finding it increasingly difficult to collect rent that's owed to her since a new system was introduced.

Everything's OK, says the Department of Work and Pensions. "If a customer cannot manage their rent payments, the local authority pays the landlord directly."

Not only does that not account for the problems collecting money (some landlords say they've been beaten up) but I can imagine isn't quite as simple as it sounds. What does "cannot manage" mean? Does that include a tenant spending their rent money on fags and booze? How easy is it to get rent that way and does that mean taxpayers end up paying double?

There's a caveat on the story - it's mostly based on anecdote. Reporters have found a few landlords who have a problem. No matter how perfect you make your system, there'll always be a few people who have a problem. There concerns might be completely legitimate, but shouldn't automatically be taken as proof the whole system is failing.

There's one poll mentioned - that 52% of landlords won't rent to Local Housing Allowance tenants - but it doesn't give a figure prior to the changes so for all we know, that could have gone down.

And the whole scheme was piloted from 2003, so did the pilots not pick up these issues?

But if there is a real problem, it needs to be taken seriously, not just fobbed off with weasel words about getting money repaid by local authorities and reviewing in two years time.

Although the BBC reported this story just yesterday, Lib Dem MP Willie Rennie raised it over two months ago.

(I wonder how much the LHA website cost, too - not to mention why the whole site is over https and why the link to the landlords FAQ doesn't work.)

* The ability to keep up to £15 a week excess by renting a cheaper property will disappear next April. As I noted a few months back, it turned out to be too expensive.

Mail swings at swingers

One of those lovely "we're shocked...no really, we are...aren't you?" stories in the Daily Mail today.

It would appear that a large swingers' party was held at a stately home, with an Eyes Wide Shut theme.

So far, so outrageous. People having sex with other people at a private party and...get this...sometimes they weren't even married to their all-too-brief sexual partners. It's the end of civilisation, I tell you. Carry on like this and we become no better than tabloid journalists animals.

Unfortunately, the house's owner doesn't seem to have had advance notice of the sausage-hiding antics planned for the midnight hour and wasn't too impressed. The police, quite rightly, pointed out that nothing illegal was happening and a couple of 19-year-old waitresses went home to avoid becoming forever corrupted.

What I love about this sort of story is how the dear old Mail just can't make its mind up about the story.

Is it that "a masked ball degenerated in to a mass orgy" (as if a group of decent people suddenly lost control, rather than getting stuck into the real business of the night)? A failure of the law to make sex in private parties illegal? That the company organising the event hadn't been honest about what it involved?

Or perhaps an excuse to show pictures with lots of exposed flesh?

Ah yes, those pictures. Here's the problem. The Daily Mail claims they were taken at the party. Which is a shame, since they're all stills from a video promoting the party including information on how to buy your ticket. Sorry, "Daily Mail Reporter", you've been rumbled. You've no photos of the party at all, have you? You've just run the whole story as an excuse to show some pictures you've ripped off from someone else's promotional video.

Now...what was that website again?

Put "research" in your press release, BBC falls at your feet

When it comes to technology, the BBC frequently gives up any idea of journalism in favour of simply promoting the latest product from private companies.

The latest example is a piece of pseudo-news about children accessing naughty pictures at school.

According to the article, there are lots of images getting through traditional child-safe Internet filters, where the filtering is on key words or known dodgy sites.

The problem is that the whole piece is just a promotion for a particular company, E-Safe Education.

Had the good people of E-Safe gone to the BBC and said, honestly "We've got this good product for blocking inappropriate content from school computers. We think it's better than the other products; please print a nice article saying how great we are.", they would have been told to piss off*.

But say exactly the same thing under the guise of "research" and it gets lapped up.

Reading between the lines, I would guess the research that's been done is to monitor all the dodgy stuff their system picks up in different schools where it's already installed and take a guess as to what would have evaded competitor systems.

Or, in other words, the shocking news that a company claims its product is better than those of its competitors. and has issued a press release to say so, plus the magic word research has BBC journos running round like rats in a sewer.

* Unless they changed the company name to Microsoft. The it's fine.

ICM poll concerns for Labour

The latest ICM poll in the Guardian shows an entirely predictable drop in support for others and an increase in support for the big three parties, as memories of the Euro elections fade. So far, so expected.

What might make Gordon Brown a little nervous is Labour's apparent failure to benefit. As voters drift away from UKIP, the BNP and the Greens, it's the Lib Dems and Tories who are seeing the benefits.

Conservatives: 41% (+2)
Labour: 27% (no change)
Lib Dem: 20% (+2)
Others: 12% (-3)

Just one poll, so we'll see if a trend develops. Gordon is considering an Autumn election (memories of 1979 no doubt playing large in his mind). Labour can probably come out of an election as the largest party if they poll within 4% of the Tories, but that still requires a hefty 5% swing - a big challenge as things currently stand.

The limits of free will

No one who's spent any time around children could come away thinking that a three-year-old could suddenly decide to act like a six-year-old (though it happens the other way round more often than I'd like).

Nor can an eight year old child sit up and decide she's going to behave like a twelve year old; or a child with concentration problems simply make the decision to concentrate much harder and solve everything.

We rightly understand and accept that children's brains are wired in certain ways. That's why seven-year-olds pretty much behave like seven-year-olds. They do today, they did a decade ago and a century ago too.

So why, I wonder, do we tend to assume some magical change happens to our brains when we reach adulthood? Why do we think, against all the evidence, that unlike children, adults suddenly gain the ability to change the way they are.

I'm not talking about hard determinism here*. Most children can stop themselves misbehaving or stealing - if they get suitable support, or are beaten enough to terrify them out of it. Most children and adults can steer themselves away from specific actions and towards others.

But changing our personality, changing the way we are, the way our brains have become wired through out lives - all those neural pathways - that's a tough one.


* No, I'm not talking about hard, philosophical, free will vs. determinism, fun as that debate is.

Funding political parties: the councillor tithe

This evening, I hear fromToday, there's a programme looking at the number of paid politicians and political advisors. They've come up with a number around 29,000, many of whom are local councillors. Others are MPs, MEPs, MSP, Welsh Assembly members and all their staff and political advisors. The total cost comes in at around £500 million.

The number doesn't surprise me. If anything, it's probably falling at the moment as many county, district and borough councils are abolished, to be replaced by unitaries.

It's noted, though, how the councillors' allowances system is used to fund political parties on the sly (actually, not very sly at all, since there's no secret about it). In all three main parties, councillors are under pressure to donate a percentage of their allowance to the political parties that got them elected.

In the Lib Dems and Labour it's an explicit tithe. Put simply, the parties see their party machines as an absolutely essential element of the way councillors communicate with their constituents and get elected, so require councillors to contribute. The Conservatives, we're told, have no such formal requirement but councillors have a similar moral pressure and the result is much the same.

Taxpayers funding parties via the back door? Perhaps.

There are two issues that often get glossed over in this sort of debate, though.

The first is the result of not allowing it. What would happen if councillors' allowances were slashed, or the councillor tithe was outlawed? If no other changes were made to compensate it would mean firstly that the parties would have to spend even more time fundraising and that wealthy donors would gain even more power. Local politics could once again be the preserve of the wealthy and retired.

The second is the increasingly artificial distinction we make between the politician and the party.

Take MPs. They currently get a pot of up to £10,000 a year to spend on communicating with constituents. I don't think it's a great way to do it, but there needs to be something. But there are absurdly obscure (and ever-changing) rules all trying to ensure that, whilst an MP can promote themselves, they can't promote their party.

As if there was some neat dividing line between the two. As if an MP can put out taxpayer-funded leaflets saying what a great job they're doing and not be promoting their party, even if they don't mention it.

It's as if we'd all been transported back to the 18th century, where wealthy voters raised their hands in the air to decide which wealthy gentleman to send to Westminster, without worrying too much about the loose coalitions of whigs and tories.

Here's the newsflash. Modern politics doesn't work that way. Modern politics is a contest between political parties and politicians represent their parties as much as their constituents, governments and executives. When politicians try to do it differently, the voters normally give their verdict in the ballot box (remind me - how well did Jury Team do in the European elections?).

Across the country, thousands of councillors give a great deal of their time at what, were the allowance to be a salary, would be in many cases not far off the minimum wage (some are lazy buggers, but nothing's perfect).

When I compare the UK to other countries, I'm struck by how cheap our democracy is, and how relatively free from corruption. In many countries there's a natural assumption that politicians will take bribes and backhanders, will play the system for personal financial gain. We shouldn't forget just how important it is that we don't have those presumptions here in the UK, that we still see that as wrong and that politicians caught out are normally punished.

Instead of complaining that it should be completely free, let's recognise the realities of modern politics, the benefits that spending a relatively small amount of taxpayers' money (you pay less than £1 a month for the entire political system on the BBC figures) brings, and have a grown-up discussion about how a degree of party political funding benefits not just the parties but the people and democracy as a whole.

What had I done politically by 17

I've been tagged by controversial* 17-year-old Lib Dem blogger Irfan Ahmed to say what I'd done politically by 17.

Irfan says "At 17 I have canvassed at election time, delivered leaflets, blogged and blogging, wrote press releases and wrote leaflets."

Surprisingly enough, I hadn't been blogging when I was 17 as blogs hadn't been invented back then. Babbage's Difference Machine was just being built and Ada Lovelace had her stellar programming career still ahead of her.

I don't think my record of youth activity is very impressive - certainly less so than the following list might suggest.

Anyhow, by the time I was 17 I'd worked on a Lib Dem campaign in school elections, been membership secretary of my local party (very badly, I might add), delivered rather a lot of leaflets and done a little canvassing. I'd attended one party conference and run an Amnesty International campaign in my school (sadly, despite my best efforts, the Burmese junta did not crumble under the weight of schoolboy letters).

I'm pretty sure I'd helped writing leaflets (again, very badly, but those were the days of dodgy clip-art and Pritt-Stick) and I'm also more or less certain I hadn't written a proper leaflet on my own.

Away from politics, I'd decided to write a great novel, slogged my way through fifty pages of derivative, unimaginative bilge and chucked the whole lot to hide my shame; not to mention expressed a number of opinions I was entirely certain of at the time and am now greatly embarrassed ever to have contemplated.

Anyone else want to have a go? Sara? Caron? Jennie? Anyone called Alex? Anyone else?

* By which I mean frequently very wrong, but I don't hold it against him.

Brown, Thatcher, Blair - who's the most decisive?

As we now know, Margaret Thatcher was anything but decisive over the fateful decision to defend the Falklands in 1982. Her first instinct was to let it go and she then ummed and ahhed before finally deciding to send in the troops - a decision which almost certainly saved her premiership and may well have been responsible for the SDP/Liberal Alliance failing to win the 1983 General Election.

But as portrayed to the public at the time, and fixed in the minds of many for ever more, Thatcher was icily decisive, never wavering from the conviction that we must defend our people - and sheep - wherever they might be in the world.

The Blair Government we saw on our TVs and read about in our newspapers was, with the occasional cracks in the visage, for the most part cohesive and united. We now know it was anything but - titanic struggles were being fought out just below the surface, not least between the old adversaries Blair and Brown.

Writing in the Parliamentary House Magazine, Austin Mitchell says

"Gordon needs a press secretary of genius.

"Bernard Ingham created Margaret Thatcher and Alastair Campbell made Tony Blair.

"They did it by joining the dots, filling in the blanks, building the image and turning fragile humans into decisive Supermen."

"Gordon has no one like that. So his frailties are not concealed and his indecisiveness gets out."

Could that be right? We laugh at Gordon's indecisiveness - the election that never was and all the rest of it - but could it be that he's no worse that Thatcher or Blair.

Take that election. Why do we see Gordon as indecisive? Because word leaked out and the media was full of speculation for weeks beforehand. What if Gordon's media people had been able to keep a lid on the deliberations? Then we'd never have known. Gordon would have been through just the same process, considered the same issues, reached the same decision, and in our eyes he'd be Mr Decisive.

So maybe there's something to it. Maybe, as we pass our judgements on this leader or that, on a whole range of politicians, we under-estimate just how much we're really not judging them at all, but their spin doctors.

I knew wild-man Vince was on the edge...

And now the story's broken in the tabloids:



And he's got something to say about Quangos too, apparently.

Those crazy Saudis are at it again

I wonder how many people are having a laugh at those primitive Saudis, where a family is taking a genie to court; just before they turn to their horoscopes, take their homeopathic remedies, visit a medium and watch (and believe) Most Haunted.

Their particular variety of superstition might be a little different to ours, but hardly any stranger.

I would, however, take issue with the Saudis over their appalling treatment of women and immigrant workers, not to mention theocratic state dishing out absurdly harsh punishments for minor offences. And their supreme achievement of making Man City the world's wealthiest football club whilst still being cack.

(As an aside, the lack of power and rights for women, foreign workers and the poor is something Saudi shares with Ancient Greece in its democratic glory).

Torchwood - what would you do?

Something I rather like about this Torchwood story arc is the moral ambiguity.

Of course we can sit back and say how nasty the Government is to lie to the people, ship off ten percent of the little buggers to the alien drug factories and save their own kids into the bargain. And of course we know, in the context of the programme, that the goodies will win and the baddies be vanquished, so fighting the good fight is worthwhile.

But it's interesting to think about what you would do as Prime Minister, or a member of the cabinet.

Suppose you weren't in a Sci-Fi story where boldness is the way and the good guys snatch victory from the jaws of defeat at the last minute.

Suppose it was real life, where a powerful alien force, clearly superior to us and able to give us a good kicking, turned up and demanded ten percent of the kids.

What would you do? Give in and hand them over? Or fight the futile fight? Tell the public the truth and deal with the complete chaos? Or tell lies to keep everyone calm?

I don't know what I would do, and I'm thankful that it isn't the sort of moral dilemma most of us are ever likely to encounter.

Phone hacking scandal - two key questions

Thousands of public figures, it appears had their phones hacked. Not by the shadowy secret services or the police, but by private investigators in the pay of the News of the World newspaper. Implicated is Andy Coulson - then editor of the News of the World, now a key aide to David Cameron and the Conservatives.

I have two questions.

First, why are the police not investigating further?

I'm thoroughly confused as to what's going on here. On the one hand, the police say there's no new evidence. But a large basis for the Guardian's story is, they say, from people inside the police investigation. Is the Guardian just making it all up? Seems unlikely. What about the secret payouts from News International - £700,000 to Gordon Taylor (Chief Exec of the Professional Footballers' Association).

So how it is even remotely possible that News International are paying out over a million to keep the story quiet, sources from inside the police are saying that investigations have revealed all these people's phones being hacked and yet the police have no evidence.

Yates of the Yard, it would seem, is either very confused about what's going on or (I suspect more likely) desperate to avoid finding himself in the middle of a political row and hiding under the nearest rock.

Might it be that John Yates has seen the problems over recent police interventions with politicians, is aware that Cameron is likely to be Prime Minister within a year and is going for the easy option.

Second, where did the buck stop?

The Guardian has no hard evidence that Andy Coulson knew what was going on. But it does have an awful lot of soft evidence. Multiple and varied sources appear to confirm that the behaviour was rife, that the senior management team took a close and active interest in the details of the stories and evidence and that payments of private investigators had to be signed off by management.

Is it really credible that Coulson could have allowed the investigators to be paid off, could have sat in meetings going through these stories, and never have known about illegal phone tapping? Coulson, who wrote in 2005 "we spend a lot of time talking about stories, thinking them through and trying to second-guess any problems".

News of the World sources are now saying that it was a few bad apples, that it doesn't happen any more. As if that makes it OK. As if we should drop it. It all happened back in the dark days up to 2007 - things aren't like that now.

Perhaps they aren't - though I find it hard to believe. But even it that were true, it would be no reason not to take action. If we let it go, how long before another media outlet decides that illegally invading people's privacy is a legitimate way to gather information?

I would give you lots of links to other bloggers' take on this, but since Lib Dem Voice has already done an excellent job, I'll just link to them.

Dark-skinned life is cheap for the BNP

In the European elections, we saw the nice face of the BNP. They aren't racist, just patriotic. They've nothing against people with brown, black or yellow skin - they just think the world would be a better place if they stayed put in their countries and we stayed put in ours.

Although, now I come to think of it, I don't recall the BNP opposing Brits moving abroad. The "force our expats to come back from Spain/Australia/US/Canada" campaign that would see millions more people settling in the UK has been conspicious by its absence.

You might almost think that the BNP isn't really about one big global happy family, all living it up in their own countries with their own cultures.

You might start to suspect it's just good old-fashioned racism.

Surely not. When BNP leader and North West MEP Nick Griffin yesterday called for migrants' boats to be sunk, surely he wasn't suggesting that the life of someone with brown skin was worth less than a Brit? That people who's only crime is to start in grinding poverty and risk everything to make a better life for themselves and their families should be executed without trial to protect our standard of living?

Ah, no. Because, after sinking their boats, Griffin would throw them a life raft.

And, of course, every immigrant on the crowded, sinking ship would be able to get onto the life raft and that raft would be able to get all the way to Libya, but mysteriously wouldn't get them to Europe (would would Griffin do if they tried, I wonder. Sink it again and throw them a slightly smaller life raft?).

No. Nick Griffin, that old-style racist with a populist veneer, has no problem killing foreigners for no other reason than they might slightly reduce our quality of life.

At last - decent atheist jokes

A few months back, I bemoaned the lack of decent atheist jokes. I'm pleased to say Richard Dawkins' summer camp has spawned quite a few and several of them are even funny.

Here's a nice example from Private Eye.



More, please.

Six million on teen pregnancy failure was money well spent

The Young People's Development Programme (YPDP) was a pilot project running from 2003 to 2007 aimed at increasing the self-esteem of vulnerable young people aged 13-15 and reducing truanting, drug and alcohol abuse and teenage pregancy.

YPDP was based on similar schemes in the US which, it is claimed, have had some success.

However, YPDP, which cost the taxpayer nearly £6 million, has been evaluated and it turns out it didn't work. Researchers* looked at how those who had been on the scheme had done compared to other young people in similar situations but not on the scheme.

"Those engaged in YPDP were no more likely than those from comparison sites to report on their questionnaires positive outcomes related to self-esteem and mental wellbeing, substance misuse, or contact with police. For young women attending YPDP the statistical comparisons suggested that they had significantly less positive outcomes than the comparison group relating to truanting, temporary exclusion, expectation of teenage parenthood, sexual activity and teenage pregnancy."

So overall the programme seems to have made little difference to boys and may have been harmful to girls - at least on those measurements.

Let the attacks commence. What a waste of money. Six million quid down the drain and nothing to show for it. Worse that nothing: as the BBC reports girls were even more likely to get pregnant doing YPDP than not (though the BBC is wrong to say it was a project to cut teenage pregnancies - that was just one of several objectives for boys and girls).

We the taxpayer coughed up all this cash for disadvantaged kids to get additional help with their education, be mentored, gain life skills, go skiing, canoeing, white-water rafting and climbing. It's an outrage.

Except that it wasn't a waste of money at all. It was six million pounds well spent.

How else are you going to discover if something like this works, other than try it? The pilot project was a decent size over a three year period. (Some, doubtless, will argue that it would have had better outcomes had it been longer, better funded or implemented differently - perhaps so). It was evaluated by a team of academics independent from the project. And their evaluation has been taken on board - the project is no more.

Which is good. Six million pounds is a drop in the ocean. If we try ten, twenty or thirty projects costing that much and just one of them works, we'll be quids in.

Governments of all colours can take this work, learn from it and try something else. There's no shame in intelligent failure.

Mind you, there is surely some shame in the project write-up on the The National Youth Agency site, which simply doesn't reflect the full report, instead preferring to spin the project as a big success.

The write-up starts

...the three-year Young People's Development Programme pilot to work with disadvantaged young people has reduced the numbers of temporary exclusions, contacts with the police and aspirations to be a teenage parent in participants.The research also found that young people said the pilot made them more confident, helped them stay out of trouble, increased their ambitions and made them recognise the importance of education.

OK guys, but cherrypicking your data to paint the project as a success and mentioning as a minor aside half way down that " the evaluation findings were not universally positive" does start to look pretty daft as soon as someone bothers to read the report, or your funding gets cut.

There's no shame in trying something, doing it well and properly, and finding it doesn't work.


* link to PDF

Sorry Irfan, you and the Tories got online health records wrong

Under a Conservative government, the good people of Britain would have the option of storing their medical records with companies like Microsoft and Google.

This is an alternative to Labour's National Broken Spine plan, which was a brilliant scheme throw billions of pounds at a huge NHS database on which everyone would be forced to put their health records whether they wanted to or not.

Irfan Ahmed argues that the Conservatives are right and the Lib Dems (who criticised it) wrong, and he has a few arguments why.

First, Irfan argues Google is a cool company and it runs the nice Blogspot platform. If we tried to stop them getting even bigger, they might close down Blogspot and then those of us who use it would stop blogging, harming the Lib Dems electorally.

Second, technology is a good and cool. Putting medical records on Google or Microsoft platforms is using more technology, therefore it's a good idea.

Finally, Irfan points out that it's very convenient for us to have control over our medical records and be able to access them from anywhere. Irfan gives the example of being in the States and giving an American doctor instant access to your health records.

Having looked at what Google Health actually is, I have to say the plan scares the hell out of me.

There are two totally separate issues. One is whether I choose to create a Google Health account for myself (or, as they say, for my children or elderly parents. Nothing especially wrong with that - it's my data, or data I've got authority over. I can't imagine I would, for security reasons, but I wouldn't forbid people from doing it.

But when the Conservatives tout it as an alternative to the NHS patient record database, things start getting scary. Because, despite a superficial similarity, the two are totally different. The Conservatives are talking about using it, not as a neat tool for us, but as a serious data repository for medical use.

Let's look at just a few of the problems.

Security
A huge problem for all IT systems. Doubly so for medical systems holding confidential information. How happy would you be for everyone to know about that STD you contracted a couple of years ago, the child you had when you were fifteen, the treatment for depression or any one of a thousand others. There's a reason so much emphasis is put on confidentiality in the field of medicine.

Under Google Health, you're responsible for the security of your own medical records (and presumably those of your children). But it turns out we're all really bad at security. We pick easy-to-guess passwords, we use the same password for multiple sites, we tell people our password if they ask nicely and tell us they're researchers. We write it on a post-it note. Our browser remembers all our passwords, so the when someone else gets their hands on our computer, it's already there.

For most of things we do on the Internet, that's not a big deal. For medical records, it is.

Many people will set up these records, believe they're secure and get a very nasty surprise.

What to hide
Google Health allows users to decide which information is hidden from whom. Let's say you're going into Holby City with a minor operation. The chances are you're going to die, as the staff are too busy shagging and attempting suicide to bother to do a good job, but never mind.

Since it's a minor op, you only reveal the information you think's relevant. Why on earth should staff there be gossiping about that nasty skin condition that's nothing to do with what you're there for?

But you don't have medical training. You haven't slogged it out through five years of medical school, a couple as a junior doctor and then working your way up through the ranks. Whether you hide something that turns out to be important for doctors to know is pretty much down to chance.

Children
Parents have control over their children's medical records. That means the parents of the next Baby P could simply choose not to reveal those hospital visits for bruises and broken bones. Similarly, an abusive husband could gain control of his wife's record and hide the records of those black eyes and burns.

What happens if you're not conscious?
What's the protocol if you're rushed into hospital unconscious, or for that matter if you can't remember your password. Do staff just manage without your record, or is their some protocol for overriding all your privacy settings and allowing staff to get into your account?

If there is such an override protocol, what's to stop someone abusing it and getting hold of your information for some dodgy reason?

How does it stay up to date?
If you control your record, you need to keep it up-to-date. You can allow someone else to do it automatically (in which case those feeds need to be in place from every medical centre you go to) but that opens up the risk of someone adding false information and getting unauthorised access to your notes.

Alternatively, you could make it a semi-manual process you, the patient, need to authorise or kick off. In that case, most people's records are going to be out of date pretty quickly.

Bear in mind that there isn't a separate national system. This is the national system. Every GP, hospital, pharmacist and clinic you visit will have their own local records and they will all have to separately transfer that onto your health record system of choice.

Where next?
I haven't exhausted the reasons why using Google Health as an alternative to the proposed national database is a really bad idea, but you've got a flavour.

The Lib Dem argument (that it gives Google an unfair advantage in the marketplace) is one to bear in mind: a wholly disproportionate amount of UK public sector IT spending goes to a small number of very large companies. Small and Medium companies miss out and, in case anyone missed it, those large companies don't always deliver top-notch applications for bargain basement prices.

Handing over yet more money to an American IT giant isn't necessarily the best approach (OK, it's a really bad approach - I suggested a better one here).

The public sector may not be perfect, but it isn't stupid. The issues I've raised with Google Health would be picked up pretty quickly. Then the work would start, funded by the taxpayer, to come up with a new version of Google Health that met all these issues.

If there were more companies involved (e.g. Microsoft) to give us punters a choice, they'd all have to amended appropriately.

That would cost a lot of money - especially as we'd be locked into those vendors. You couldn't exactly go to someone else and say "You take over the development of this Google product" - Google own the product and would tell them to piss off.

I wonder how much change we'd get from £12 billion when it was all sorted.


(p.s. the more eagle eyed amongst you will have noticed that I haven't addressed Irfan's first two arguments. I leave that as an exercise for the reader).

You Kant be serious

Back in the day, when I was a student, I never really got on with textbooks. Most were just too painful to drag through, so I got pretty good at reading pretty much the minimum I needed for whatever essay I was working on (we all had to write our essays in Latin in those days, which probably didn't help).

I suspected I was pretty dumb for not enjoying reading these classics from cover to cover.

Perhaps I was...am. But a sneaking suspicion started to grow that it might not be wholly my failing.

Take the philosopher Kant. Picking a passage from his classic Critique of Pure Reason pretty much at random:

General logic is either pure or applied. In the former we abstract from all empirical conditions under which our understanding is exercised, i.e. from the influence of the senses, the play of imagination, the laws of memory, the force of habit, inclination, etc. , and so from all sources of prejudice, indeed from all causes from which this or that knowledge may arise or seem to arise. For they concern the understanding only in so far as it is being employed under certain circumstances,and to become acquainted with these circumstances experience is required. Pure general logic has to do, therefore, only with principles a priori, and is a canon of understanding and of reason, but only in respect of what is formal in their employment, be the content what it may, empirical or transcendental. General logic is called applied, when it is directed to the rules of the employment of understanding under the subjective empirical conditions dealt with by psychology. Applied logic has therefore empirical principles, although it is still indeed in so far general that it refers to the employment of the understanding without regard to difference in the objects. Consequently it is neither a canon of the understanding in general nor an organon of special sciences, but merely a cathartic of the common understanding.

I'm not saying it can't be understood. I did, once. But I'd have thought it takes real effort to write so obscurely - to be that poor at getting your meaning across.

Some academics deliberately made their work obscure - the idea being that you should have to work at understanding their cherished ideas, that slogging through the dank recesses of their prose is a badge of honour. All very elitist.

Others, I'm sure, were just fantastically bad at getting their ideas across. It probably helped their careers. As fans of obscure song lyrics will know, a lack of clarity can often hide incredibly banal and pointless ideas. (As a case in point, the lyrics to the 1967 classic A Whiter Shade of Pale have spawned a whole subgenre of those eager to divine their meaning; sadly there isn't any - like Hotel California, it's just a pretty random bunch of lines stuck together).

Things do seem to have improved in recent years (witness the flourishing of popular science), but there does still seem to be a rule in some areas of academia that it isn't a proper academic work if the ideas are expressed clearly and concisely.

I may not be able to explain every detail of a concept, especially in maths and the sciences, but if I can't express it so an adult of average intelligence can understand, it's probably a clue that I don't know what I'm on about nearly as much as I think I do.

Influence? Could have fooled me.

So this is the 41st most influential blog in the land. Yeah, right. Nice as it seems, the whole Wikio thing has a growing air of unreality about it.

Still, gift horses, mouths and all that, so congratulations and well done to Charlotte and Mark who have shot up the rankings and to everyone else who's gone up a lot or down just a bit.

Now the plebs can be sexual deviants too

It's Sunday morning, so another tough decision. Shall I go to church, or shall I write about sex fantasy stories on the Internet?

OK, not that tough. And the day after Pride London (not London Pride - a beer I've never rated) seems an ideal time to write about sexual deviancy.

Back in the good old days, only the rich and powerful were allowed to be sexual deviants. Lord such-and-such might have a taste for young boys, but he was decent enough to keep it private and, in so many other ways, he was a fine and upstanding chap so it could be overlooked.

But the hoi-polloi were a different matter. As we all know from the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial (it's the only thing we do all know from it), the prosecuting barrister rather blew his case by suggesting that, whilst the book might not corrupt a gentleman, his wife and servants were another matter.

Mervyn Griffiths-Jones may have been behind the times, but not that much.

The last eighty years has seen the democratisation of pornography. From the tijuana bibles - erotic cartoon strips popular in the first half of the 20th century through to the growth of Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler and their ilk to the massive boom of the Internet age that's made all sorts of specialist material available with a few clicks of a mouse.

And the curious thing, as I noted a few days ago, is that men haven't been turned into wild beasts as a result. Men aren't all treating their wives and girlfriends as mere objects, or committing more sexual assaults than in the past. If anything, we've gone the other way - western societies where we have access to all this stuff are also those which have seen the rise of feminism, greater equality for women and the growth of the idea that the husband/wife relationship is one of partnership, not to mention the shocking arrival on the scene of the considerate lover.

So, joy of joys, it turns out that the authors of sex stories on the Internet aren't to be prosecuted for obsenity.

This, you may have seen, all came about when the decision was made to prosecute 35-year-old civil servant Darryn Walker who had written a little story about the members of Girls Aloud (who, I'm told, are a popular music group, similar to the Supremes), being kidnapped, sexually tortured and finally killed.

Darryn's story is just one of thousands - millions probably - exploring every imaginable dark recess of our sexuality (and probably a few we'd never imagine). They come from men and women of all ages, all nationalities. Few have any great literary merit, being written to be read one-handed.

There's a rather good article on the issues around these stories in yesterday's Guardian which is definitely worth a read.

Although attempting to ban this stuff in the Internet age is obviously futile, it seems to me that there are a couple of reasons why we might want to if we could.

If there was a link between the material and crime, that could give us justification. Perhaps people who read the stories are more likely to treat women badly, or to commit rape or sexual assault, or maybe the act of writing a story - putting a mental fantasy onto the page - makes the author more likely to do something nasty.

Unfortunately for the would-be censors, there's no evidence of any of that.

We might also want to censor these stories simply on the yuk factor. No matter how cosmopolitan your sexuality, there's bound to be things out there that disgust you. I can understand wanting to ban stories on that basis, although I disagree with it.

But that battle's long been lost - we could clog up every court in the land for years with obscenity trials and it really wouldn't make any difference.

The truth seems to be something more interesting.

It turns out, despite what many of our ancestors thought, that you can enjoy all sorts of kinky, unusual and downright bizarre sexual practices, have all sorts of frankly disturbing sexual fantasies, not be posh and still be a normal person. You can be into S&M or any number of other fetishes and not be mentally ill, unstable or even damaged.

Who'd have thought you could get your rocks off fantasing about torturing and killing people and still be a perfectly decent, normal person who's no danger to anyone - but that's what the evidence tells us.

Life's rich tapestry, eh.

Everything for Free? The brave new world is flawed

An exciting new book has hit the stands - it contains the next big idea and we should all buy it. "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" isn't free at all. It's the latest wheeze from Chris Anderson, who came up with the now largely discredited "long tail" theory.

(The idea behind the long tail is that since a virtual shop, unrestrained by shelf space, can sell millions of titles, suddenly people will be able to make real money by selling a few copies of each of the vast array of books, albums or whatever else is out there. It turned out not to really work, but why let a little thing like reality get in the way of a good evangelistic Internet theory).

This latest work argues that, as more and more things can be produced pretty much for free, we're going to have to get used to it and change the way we work. More people will work for non-financial benefits (e.g. the adulation awarded to bloggers - in their fantasies at least). Think of online newspapers, of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Last.FM, Spotify.

It's an issue I looked at a few months ago. My conclusion (and I'm far from alone) differs from Anderson's. I don't see the free model as sustainable beyond cottage industries like blogging. It's all very well talking about the marketplace driving costs down and people being motivated by rewards other than money, such as peer recognition, but we all need to earn money somewhere down the line.

There are two ways it can go.

Some services will work as loss-leaders or advertising-generators for the big boys, but the smaller fish will be driven out of business. That's what happened with email: Hotmail and now Google Mail destroyed any idea that a company could charge money for consumer email accounts.

Others will stop being free when the money runs out: they'll either find a business model that works, or they'll vanish when it becomes apparent no-one's willing to pay for them.

Those of you who are clued up on such things will have noticed that this debate has been going on for twenty years or more, not about information and media, but computer software.

Free and open source software doesn't have to be given away (it's free as in freedom, not free as in beer) but it normally is. Its creators either seek non-financial rewards, such as the approval of their peers and users, or make money elsewhere (IBM pays programmers to work on open source projects, believing it allows them to make more money on hardware and services).

But the funny thing is that it turns out to be quite hard to get that model to work. Sure - there's loads of free and open source software out there. A lot of it's even quite good (I use it myself almost exclusively). But there are very few examples where the best open source option is as good or better than it's proprietary equivalent.

Ever compared OpenOffice.org to Microsoft Office? Sure, OpenOffice is good enough for most of our needs, but it's a long way from being the superior product. Gimp vs Photoshop? Scribus vs Quark Express? Ubuntu vs Mac OS X?

Amongst the thousands of software packages out there, in just a handful might a free/open source variant be truly superior. Perhaps Firefox (funded by Google to tune of several million pounds) and some others you may not have heard of but use every day (Apache, BIND, Sendmail...).

The result is that, commercially, there are thousands of companies continuing to do well selling proprietary software, because for all the talk of revolution and zero pricing, people prefer it. How many are making serious money from creating free and open source software? A handful. Red Hat and Novell, maybe. You could have fifty Red Hats and their combined market capitalization still wouldn't match Microsoft.

What does that tell us?

Open Source Software is in a similar position to the likes of Facebook and Twitter, only without the venture capital and speculative funding. If you want to see Anderson's future world of free information, see it today in open source.

You have organisations creating software and giving it away. Their programmers, designers, artists, documeters and the rest are mostly volunteers who need day jobs to survive. They don't have big marketing budgets - they mostly rely on word of mouth and (frequently very poor) websites.

And we can see how this zero-cost-to-consumer model stacks up. It does OK. It survives. It grows. But it doesn't eclipse its paid-for alternative. OpenOffice.org is a struggling project (now owned by Oracle, its future is uncertain). Microsoft Office charges on.

So there won't be a revolution where information is all free and we have to find new ways of motivating everyone to work for nothing.

What's more likely is a day of reckoning, when the venture capital and financial reserves run out. Some services will continue as loss-leaders for Google, Microsoft, News International or some other huge beast. Others that are free today will become paid for - and will survive on that basis, just as proprietary software has survived and flourished in the face of open source. And many will fold.

Back in April when I last wrote about this, I looked at loss-making services like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook and wondered would would happen to them. I thought then than they might be replaced by open source alternatives that, whilst perhaps not as good, would be financially viable.

I've changed my mind on that one now - I think I was wrong. The problem is that the biggest cost by far for these modern cloud applications isn't the software, it's the hardware. Server room upon server room filled with computers, disks and wires. That isn't suddenly going to become free.

Our conservative Government is failing us again

In the last year, two of the biggest political issues in decades have hit. First the credit crunch and the world economic slump, then the whole issue around MPs' expenses.

On both, radical and decisive action is needed.

Whether or not you agree with specific elements of any plan to reform the banking system or revitalise our democracy, few claim there's no need for change. Few are honestly suggesting that sitting around talking about it for a few years before doing nothing very much is the correct response.

So why is our Government doing exactly that on both issues?

Is Gordon tackling the city bonus culture? Is he tackling the problem where safe savings banks are used to bail out riskier investment arms (or, worse, dragged down with them)? Is he addressing the need for tougher, cleverer regulation?

Is Gordon reforming our political system? Beyond a few cosmetic changes, has he shown the slightest will to really tackle the democratic defecit?

No. Brown and his Government are fundamentally and deeply conservative and risk averse.

I'm reminded of John Major's last few years in office. Reforms were desperately needed in all sorts of areas, but they just didn't happen. Instead we had constant infighting, "Back to Basics" and the cones hotline.

Brown's always been a conservative at heart. He stuck with most of the Tory's economic policies inherited in 1997. The costly PFI, talisman of the right, was taken to heart. And his timidity, most clearly demonstrated when he decided not to call a General Election a few months after becoming PM (and will opinion poll ratings over 10% higher than they are today).

This is a time of change. Change in the world, in the economy, in politics. We need a government capable of keeping up.

Back in the 1950s it was another time of great change as nations rebuilt themselves in the wake of the Second World War. British industry stagnated, firm in the belief that the old ways were the best and johnny foreigner would never match us Brits when it came to manufacturing.

Let's not make the same mistake again. Let's not delude ourselves into thinking we can get through this and come out stronger by sticking to conservatism, prudence and the same old ways.

Now is the time for radical action and Gordon simply can't deliver.

Direct action: ask "what would the BNP do?"

Should we be able to break the law with impunity for a cause we genuinely and sincerely believe in?

Yesterday, 22 climate change protestors were found guilty of obstructing a train carrying coal bound for the Drax power station - they will likely find themselves thousands of pounds out of pocket (had they won, the taxpayer would presumably have picked up the bill).

There have been other examples. A few years ago, anti-GM crop protestors destroyed crop trials in farms around the UK. Last year, protestors who defaced a chimney at Kingsnorth power station in Kent were acquitted by a jury.

In the US, abortion doctor George Tiller was shot dead by someone who, it seems, honestly believed that by taking that one life, he was saving thousands of others.

And there's the problem. It's very easy to approve of direct action and complain about the heavy handed approach of the law when it's a cause you agree with. Less so when it's one you don't.

After all, other than our feelings about the cause, what's the difference between anti-globalisation protestors smashing the windows of MacDonalds and Burger King and a bunch of neo-Nazis doing the same to corner shops run by Asians? In both cases the protestors sincerely believe they're right. In both cases, many others disagree.

So it isn't as easy as saying "Direct action good". But nor is it always bad. Sometimes it's a powerful and effective way to protest, where lives aren't put at risk and a message is more effectively conveyed than by a petition or meeting with the minister.

Where's the compromise?

It makes sense that, whatever the cause, there should be legal and free ways to stage a protest or demo - that's one of the prices we should be happy to pay for living in a free society. It's entirely right that anyone should be able to stage a peaceful demonstration, have it sensibly policed, and not be faced with a huge bill or legal action.

But protestors shouldn't assume that the taxpayer, or private companies, will always pick up the tab for their actions when they go further. It may be on occasion (as with Kingsnorth and the road-building protests of the '90s) that they do, but it can't be taken for granted.

Realistically, the more sympathy the public has for a protest, the more likely the protestors are to avoid repercussions.

Perhaps those of us on the more progressive side of politics should just ask ourselves "If this action were being taken by the BNP to promote a cause they sincerely believe in, what would I think and how would I like the police to behave?"

The Mail isn't homophobic but...

The typical Daily Mail reader, were they to believe all they read, would huddle at home in constant fear that a gang of obese, drunk, illiterate, drugged up and tooled up eight year olds would drag themselves away from killing prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto just long enough to smash the door down and stab them to death, before defecating on the dog.

So no surprise that the Daily Mail is concerned that our youngsters are being taught how to be gay. This is, let me stress, absolutely not that Mail journos are a bunch of homophobes stuck in the 19th century.

David Cameron might have recanted and, like the prodigal - if slightly camp - son, apologised for having opposed the scrapping of Section 28 (which prohibited Councils from promoting homosexuality in schools) but the Mail is having none of it.

After all, Jesus wasn't gay. No really, he wasn't. What do you mean surrounded himself with fit young men? He was playing hide the sausage with Mary. No, not his mum. Mary Magdalene. It must be true - I read it in a history book by a Professor Daniel Brown.

Sorry, where was I?

Ah yes, local authorities dedicating millions of pounds to convert decent heterosexual eleven-year-olds, happily rutting behind the bike sheds, into gays and lesbians. Not the Katy Perry type of lesbian either. Real lesbians. Crew cuts and dungarees.

This outrage must be stopped.

Such a shame, then, that reporter Harry Phibbs barely has time to get going before he arses it up.

Because, to maintain the pretence that he doesn't want all the gays put in a pit and stoned to death, Harry has to claim that it's not about queers, it's about all sex.

The argument is not, or should not be, about the moral argument over whether or not there is anything wrong with homosexuality.

It is just not an issue that councils should be involved with.

Sex should be a private matter. What goes on in our bedrooms is not a matter for Town Hall bureaucrats.

We expect councils to empty our dustbins - not to express preferences on the relative merits of different forms of sexual intercourse.

Still less do we expect them to tell our children about sex.

I rather think we do expect exactly that, Harry. Unless you're suggesting that every state school in the country should independently develop its sex education programme from scratch.

My local authority, like pretty much every other, works with its schools to develop sex & relationship education materials.

The Mail is horrified about

... books as Jenny lives with Eric and Martin.

It included photographs of Eric and Martin naked in bed.

Rimming, no doubt.

Sorry, Harry, but sex ed includes photos of adults in bed. In fact, these days it can include cartoons of couples having sex. Shown to primary school children. And I've seen them.

Most parents do expect schools - and the councils that support them - to tell children about sex. Go to any school and ask how many parents have opted their children out from sex-ed - the number will almost always be few or none.

At my local primary, where a significant proportion of the children are muslim, not a single child has been opted out.

Let's hear for councils and schools not just pretending to approve of gayers, like the Mail does, but actually giving children the opportunity to see that being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender isn't something bad, to be hidden away, kept secret, be ashamed of and be mercilessly teased and bullied about if discovered.

How Tories conned the Telegraph and bloggers on crime

I'm not the biggest fan of Labour, but I like misleading statistics even less.

A story wandered its merry way around the blogosphere yesterday, claiming that under Labour violent crime had increased by 77%.

The report in the Telegraph has been picked up on The Last Ditch, Patently Rubbish, Marmalade Sandwich and Sharpe's Opinion. In each case the figure has been repeated without question. But questions should have been asked, because the Tory claims turn out to be a bit of a scam.

What's really going on?

Here's what the Telegraph says about the figures:

The figures were sourced from Eurostat, the European Commission's database of statistics. They are gathered using official sources in the countries concerned such as the national statistics office, the national prison administration, ministries of the interior or justice, and police.

A breakdown of the statistics, which were compiled into league tables by the Conservatives, revealed that violent crime in the UK had increased from 652,974 offences in 1998 to more than 1.15 million crimes in 2007.

So what did the Conservative researchers actually do to earn their money? Well, they went to this page on the Internet where you can find lots of crime statistics for the whole of Europe, based on crimes reported to the police.

They probably checked through a few of the stats before settling on the violent crime ones.

Here are the numbers. The left column is 1998, then you count through the years and get to 2007 at the end.

Sorry it's a bit small, but the numbers add up.

But look! What's this! According to these statistics, violent crime has been falling for the last few years. I can't think why the Tories and the Telegraph didn't mention that one.

Here's the graph.
So that's what the official figures for reported crime show - yes, a 77% increase in violent crime since 1998, but also violent crime falling since 2005.

But is that the whole story? After all, the police figures only show the crimes reported and definitions can change too. Perhaps real crime is higher and the figures only look like it's been falling for the last few years.

For this, we turn to the British Crime Survey. The BCS is generally considered the most reliable guide to crime (with the exception of murder and crimes against children and commercial properties, which it doesn't measure). Instead of waiting for victims to turn up at the police station, the BCS asks around 50,000 people each year about their own experiences of crime.

Here's what the BCS says about violent crime.
According to the BCS, violent crime rose through the '80s, peaking around 1995 and then falling. The small increase from 2005 to 2007 that might be real or might be a statistical fluke (there's no way to tell from the BCS data).

But there's something odd here. The BCS has violent crime peaking in 1995 and then falling but the recorded crime figures rise rapidly from 1998 to a peak in 2005. How can they tell such different stories?

Part of the explanation is changes in the way the stats were recorded - changes that for the most part in the late '90s increased the number of recorded violent crimes.

For example, a pub fight between four people would have counted as one crime under the old system. In the new system, it could be up to 12 crimes (if each person had assaulted the other three). Definitions of what count as a violent crime also change - most significantly to include pushing and shoving where no-one gets hurt. (The BCS definitions have remained more consistent - under the BCS around half of all "violent" crimes don't involve anyone actually being hurt).

There's something else interesting too*, if you can get past the headline-grabbing stuff.
According to people's own experiences of crime, as reported to researchers, mugging and violence by strangers has remained pretty steady since the mid-90s but violence by someone you know and domestic violence are both way down (in both cases, the drop happened mostly when Major was in power, but whether Government policies have much effect on any of this is open to question).

Might it be that the official police figures under-record domestics and crimes by acquaintances? Perhaps we're less likely to go to the police with those than when a stranger mugs us in the street. There should be an answer somewhere - I might track it down sometime.

44% of victims of violent crime believed their attacker was under the influence of alcohol.

There's no perfect measure of crime. The British Crime Survey is almost certainly the best for what it measures, but it doesn't measure everything, and it isn't very good at spotting trends in rare crimes.

Reported crime is not only affected by the reporting rate, but also by changes in definitions and procedures.

What's absolutely clear though, is that the Conservative researchers deliberately misled.

Even if they took the EU data at face value and didn't know about the other issues around the stats, it's clearly nonsense to talk about a 77% increase without mentioning that, according to those figures, violent crime is currently on the way down (although not on the Eurostat figures, recorded violent crime in England & Wales fell by a further 8%* in 2007/8).

When you take into account the British Crime Survey and changes in the way the police record and define violent crime, it's even more obvious that looking at the recorded crime figures in isolation is an utter nonsense, unless you're trying to score political points rather than get at the truth.

(And whilst I'm on the subject, what else have the Tories done? Compiled the figures into a league table. And what's the first thing the Eurostat people advise that it's not valid to do, because data from different countries can't be directly compared? Compile the figures into a league table. D'oh).

* Link is to a pdf.

Has PoliticsHome grasped the idea of an unelected chamber?

Seven out of ten voters asked thought former Speaker Michael Martin shouldn't get a peerage.

That's OK - everyone's entitled to their opinion.

But the whole point of the Lords is to be an unelected chamber. You don't get there through a popularity contest. You get there because you're a CofE Bishop, a long-serving public servant or a large donor to the Labour party. It doesn't matter one jot whether everyone hates you or not. That's what unelected means.

Or have we entered some twilight world where people think it's actually a sensible way to run politics that people being appointed, for life, to the upper chamber should have to pass the test of public approval by opinion poll?

Over the years, democracies have developed quite a good way of getting round this problem. It's called voting. It's a really clever idea where candidates stand for election, the people vote and the winners get elected.

Perhaps we should give it a try.

Labour's real digital tax: over £250 for every family

Last week I wrote about the Digital Britain report. Proposals included broadband for all (funded by a small flat tax on phone lines), tackling internet piracy in some ineffective way and switching off the FM broadcasts for the bigger national and local radio stations.

It looks like the media has finally spotted the real issue: all the FM radios that won't be usable any more. Have they appreciated the scope, though?

Commentators and interviewees have spoken about the cost of expanding the DAB network (itself outdated) compared to maintaining the FM network.

That's a bit odd since, according to the Digital Britain report, we'll need to do both. The report says that stations currently on Medium Wave, plus small local start-ups, will be put onto FM. A bit tricky to do that if you're not maintaining your FM network.

So it's not a choice between FM and DAB. It's both.

But the real cost - the real tax for almost every household in the country - will be replacing their cheap FM radios with more expensive DAB radios.

Today, DAB radios cost upwards of £30. In-car DAB radios start at £100, plus £20 for a DAB aerial. Pocket DAB radios start at around £70.

A typical family with two cars, a couple of portable radios and four FM radios around the house could expect to pay £500 to replace them with bottom-of-the-range DAB radios.

But that's unfair. We're told that the switch-off won't happen until less than 50% of radio listening is via analogue. Not quite sure what that means. It certainly doesn't mean 50% DAB, since you've also got radio via the Internet along with cable and satellite TV.

Would listening to Spotify or Last.fm count towards the total? How about podcasts? iPlayer? Who knows.

But let's be optimistic and suppose that, when less than half listening is analogue, our typical family has switched half its radios to DAB through choice. We can be even more generous to the Government and assume that the more expensive car and pocket DAB radios have their fair share of that half.

Even if all those generous assumptions are true, the typical British family will still have to pay an additional £250 to continue listening to their radio stations of choice.

In a few years time, that £250 might buy you middle-of-the-range radios instead of the bargain basement options, but it isn't going to end up being a lot less than that.

Rushing forwards into the digital age does sound cool, and I must be a dreadful luddite not to be supporting it with all my heart and soul, but are we sure it's really what's best for the people?

(Disclosure: I've personally long been a fan of DAB radio. Got my first one about five years ago and now have four in the house, plus a pocket DAB radio (which won't work again until I spend £25 on a new battery). I don't have any DAB car radios.)

Labour and Tory Internet strategies compared

Even more than many other fields, web campaigning is open to spin. The same strategy can seem drab and old-fashioned or upbeat and exciting - just depends how you describe it.

The Guardian believes the two big parties are "poles apart" on their web strategies, but are they really?

So the Conservatives tell us about their super election strategy

"it's going to be something pretty amazing from the Conservative party. It's not only about the top-down messaging but the relaxed nature in which we will let community activists ... respond on local news sites, mabe taking video footage of events. We're speaking directly to individual voters and potentially individual donors. " The party already has the lead in the grassroots party blogosphere and has previously converted supporters to virally spread messages by "donating" their Facebook statuses. That's either exciting stuff or fashionable bluster…

You might have thought that one of the jobs of being a journalist for a national newspaper would be to reach some sort of opinion on whether it was exciting or bluster and let us know.

Let's see what's going on here.

The Conservatives are going to allow their activists to post comments on local news sites and take videos to upload to YouTube (or similar). OK. Not quite so radical. I'm pretty sure everyone's been doing that for a few years now.

They're speaking directly to individual voters and donors. Blimey - quite a breakthrough. Shame the breakthrough happened in the 19th century. Anyone heard of canvassing? The telephone? Email? Yes, you too can speak directly to the unwashed (but hopefully minted) masses and solicit their vote and cash.

Finally, The Guardian notes the Conservative blogs are - in terms of popularity - ahead of Labour's. True, but I've yet to see much evidence of that transferring into votes.

The single biggest UK blogging splash was almost certainly the Draper affair, where Paul Staines (a Tory-leaning blogger with a long history of spreading unsubstantiated rumours and muck about opponents) succeeded in toppling Derek Draper (a Labour blogger with a long history of spreading unsubstantiated rumours and muck about opponents).

For those of you who knock on doors, how many have come across a member of the public mentioning the Draper affair? I haven't met a single one. Everyone talks about the expenses scandal. The Draper affair might have got the blogosphere all hot and bothered but it passed the general public by.

And there's the Facebook thing. On Facebook, you get a little picture by your name. Both the Tories and Lib Dems got many supporters to replace their photo with a little "vote for us" 1cm x 1cm poster. It's a neat little idea.

The BNP had their slogan "People like you are voting for the BNP" in the Euro elections. It's like that really. "People you know on Facebook are voting Conservative/Lib Dem". Not a breakthrough in web campaigning, but perhaps worth a few votes if you can build up a critical mass and maybe even do something more with it.

What of Labour?

"What you'll get from all the parties is a refined broadcast model with a bit of glossy twittering so it looks 'honest'. I don't think we've got the space where, all of a sudden we're going to start listening to the electorate with these tools. There'll definitely be audio and videdo [sic] (in our strategy) - but to get to the granularity where the Obama campaign got to… that's probably the election after next"

The Guardian described the Labour and Tory strategies as "starkly different outlooks", but the two sound remarkably similar to me, when you get down to what they're actually doing.

Part of the problem is that the Guardian wants to hear about the cool tools. Facebook, blogs, Twitter, Web 2.0, YouTube. Web evangelists castigate the parties for not using them enough.

But political parties (if they've got any sense) need to focus on what brings the votes in - and the evidence is pretty shaky. It's possible to spent a lot of time, effort and money preaching to the converted, but does that win elections?

How successful have UK parties really been in raising donations via the Internet?

What about the voters? We all know perfectly well that UK General Elections are decided by 100,000 or so floating voters in marginal constituencies. How well does all this technology target those key people?

I would humbly suggest that it's very difficult indeed for national videos, websites, Facebook campaigns and all the rest of it to target specific voters in certain constituencies.

It can be done, though. You can have excellent local websites in those constituencies. You can use the Internet as an additional tool to engage people locally. You can knock on people's doors, get their email addresses and mobile phone numbers and then communicate with them quickly and easily. You can use local Facebook groups to reach a younger bunch of people.

That's almost certainly the stuff that really works. It isn't massively expensive, but it's hard work and - whisper it - actually involves meeting people face to face and not just coming up with something really cool in your bedroom or office.

Update: Alix Mortimer has some very interesting things to say in response to this piece.

Statporn and a hard decision

I made fewer blog posts in June than any month since January. Partly because I was away and unable to blog for a week or so (I did have a few posts I scheduled to pop up, just to keep things rolling along) and partly as a conscious "fewer but better" approach where I try to take a bit more time over some of my posts and not always chuck out any old rubbish (you may not have noticed, but my sudden splurge of LibDigs in the last week or two hopefully suggests I'm doing something right).

Like most bloggers, I suspect, mostly it's just fumbling around and seeing what works better for me.

For those of you who care about the figures, my unique visitors for the last three months are:

April: 4,349
May: 9,280
June: 5,411

The May jump was a statistical outlier, wholly due to one of my articles being linked to in Ben Goldacre's Bad Science blog.

June resumed my gradual growth: in each month since January I've picked up between 500 and 1000 additional readers.

Now for the hard choice. My blog currently carries a quote from Alex Wilcock who in my early blogging days (which he, more than anyone else, inspired and encouraged me to start) was kind enough to call me "Liberal, witty and occasionally smutty".

There's another quote from Alex that I'm tempted to use - "gorgeous and titillating" - especially as the comment roughly doubles the number of people who have ever said that about me. Watch this space.

Today girl-on-girl action, tomorrow apocalypse

Thanks to (Probably not) the Daily Mail for bringing my attention to a truly hilarious article in an organ thrusting nobly where journalists have too often feared to enter.

On occasion I find some mild entertainment is to be had disecting poor journalism and pointing out its all-too-frequent failings.

I can honestly say that in this case, it's simply not needed.

The article, complete with numerous pictures of attractive young ladies showing lots of flesh, exposes the horror of parents up and down the land at the thought that their daughters, led astray by lipstick lesbian celebs, might be conned into kissing another female.

As the Mail puts it...

So while there is a generation of young female celebrities trying to shock us (or garner media attention) by sending a message that girls can like girls, and then boys, and then girls again, what's really disturbing is that this trend is being emulated by many of today's teenagers.

Indeed, having spoken to many youngsters about this, I'm coming to the worrying conclusion that Katy Perry's song I Kissed A Girl And I Liked It, which was a massive global hit last year, increasingly represents the experience of a generation of girls who are happy and relaxed about public, same-sex sexual experimentation.

I spoke to a group of girls and boys, aged 14 to 23, most of whom said it wasn't unusual to see straight girls kissing other girls at parties.

Well, there's no doubt that adults, and particularly the parents of teenage girls, will be disturbed, to say the least.

Peer pressure...teenagers doing things to shock their elders...sexual experimentation among young people. It never happened in my day and, let me tell you, it's the thin end of the wedge.

Confusing thing tax...can't expect ministers to grasp it

Within yesterday's announcement that, despite ID cards becoming voluntary, the National Indentity Database will carry on, was a rather odd comment from the Home Secretary.

According to The Guardian:

"[Alan Johnson] also denied that there were any significant public spending savings to be made by cancelling the project saying: "This scheme pays for itself. If you cancel all you will get is diddly squat."

This is a reference to the self-financing nature of the project under which it is to be paid for through increased charges for passports and the £60 cost of a biometric identity card."

No, Alan, that isn't self-financing. That's us paying for it. It's just another tax, and a regressive one at that since the poor single parent or pensioner gets to pay just as much as the multi-millionaire. I can avoid paying it by never leaving the country - lucky me.

The only way the argument could possibly work would be if there was some significant benefit to me as the passport holder for getting a cool biometric passport and having my details on the National Identity Database. Then I would be paying for something for my personal benefit.

There isn't. Today I can use my passport to travel to other countries and I can use it as ID. That will stay the same. I don't get any benefit. Even with the most optimistic Government claims, the benefits are to society in general.

It's like saying that Trident is self-financing because it gets paid for by taxing the people who are protected by it. That just isn't how things work.

The Government do seem to be getting very keen on their regressive taxes, though. Passports, ID cards, telephone lines (to fund the broadband revolution). I guess making the poor pay more and letting the rich off the hook's right up Gordon's street these days.