Davblog

In which someone you've never heard of writes about things you have no interest in

Archive for the ‘politics’ Category

Liverpudlian MPs

Back in the day, when I grew up on my Liverpool council estate every member of Liverpool City council was Conservative. The city had eight Conservative MPs.

This is Nadine Dorries writing on Conservative Home a couple of days ago. She should really learn that if she doesn’t check her facts, then someone else will. You’ll be shocked, I suspect, to hear that this information is less than completely true. To me, it looks like Liverpool never had more than six Tory MPs while Dorries was growing up there.

Dorries was born in 1957. So let’s look at the 1955 general election and see which MPs were elected in Liverpool then. Liverpool has nine MPs, six of which are Tory. None of the seats changed hands in 1959. In 1964, however, the Tories lost four seats, taking their total down to two. This number remained constant in 1966 and 1970. The Tories lost another seat in February 1974 and remained steady on only one seat in October. Finally, in 1979 (when Dorries is 22 – so I’m not sure it still counts as while she was growing up) the Tories doubled their number of seats to a rather unimpressive two.

So Liverpool never had more than six Tory MPs – al least not while Dorries was growing up there. But she thinks that she can just throw a fact into an article like that and people will just accept it’s true.

You should never trust a word that Dorries writes. She has frequently been proven wrong on details like this.

p.s. Tim Fenton has run this analysis too and has reached similar conclusions. And, surprise surprise, he finds that her claims about the council are nonsense too.

Equal Marriage

Over the last few days there has been a fair amount of heat and light coming out of the Tory party, generated by the discussion about equal marriage (or, as the tabloids like to describe it, “gay marriage”).

We’ve know for ages that David Cameron is in favour of it and that a lot of the Tory heartland isn’t. But at the end of last week Cameron said that he supported same-sex wedding ceremonies taking place in churches if (and that “if” is important here) the church is happy for them to take place. This hasn’t played well in the shires and various Tories have said a number of increasingly stupid things about it (for a particularly ridiculous example see Tim Fenton’s excellent piece on Nadine Dorries’ confusion over religious freedom and the ECHR).

The problem seems to be that all of the naysayers are illiterate. I said that the word “if” was important in what Cameron was proposes. To many of his critics it seems to be invisible. Where you and I are reading “churches may decide to hold same-sex wedding ceremonies if they want to”, Cameron’s critics are reading “churches will be forced against their will to hold same-sex wedding ceremonies”. They seem to be reading the story through some kind of middle-England auto-bigotry filter.

Some people on my side of the debate (in case that’s not clear, it’s the pro-equal-marriage side) have gone the other way – saying that churches should be forced to hold these ceremonies. I don’t want that at all. Here’s what I want.

I want churches to be stopped from marrying people.

Ok, that’s a deliberately attention-grabbing way of putting it. I should explain in more detail.

As I see it, there are two parts of a marriage. There’s the legal joining together of two people. And then, for some people, there’s a religious ceremony. What if those two parts were completely separated? What if churches lost the right to perform the legal part of the marriage ceremony?

This isn’t so strange. People do it all the time. If non-Christians want to get married, they have to do it in two stages. They go to the registry office to do the legal stuff and then they go to a mosque, temple or whatever to have a ceremony. What if all weddings worked like that?

So here’s what I propose:

  • In order to be legally married, you need to go through some process at a local registry office. This would be a purely legal thing. Bride and groom (or whichever permutation is appropriate) and a couple of witnesses. After this you would be legally married.
  • You then have the option to have some other kind of ceremony of any type you want. Many people would choose a church. Others would go to a mosque or a temple or whatever. You’d also have the option to do nothing else.

The advantage, as far as I see it, is that as the second part (the religious ceremony) now has no legal standing whatsoever, then the government would have no say at all about how it is run and whether or not churches or mosques or temples can run same-sex ceremonies. That decision would be unambiguously in the hands of the people running the organisation in question (but good luck getting a mosque to run a same-sex wedding!)

Of course, this is one of the areas where the religious playing field is uneven. Non-Christians are used to the set-up I describe above. The only reason that Christian churches get a special dispensation to carry out the legal part of a wedding is because they are the established church and therefore sometimes get to dabble in things that should completely off-limits to them.

All of which means that implementing my suggestion would be another step on the way to (or, at least, another very good argument for) disestablishment of the Church.

All in all, I can’t see the flaw in my suggestion. Can you?

Talking About Drugs

There are many things that make me angry in British politics, but I don’t think any of them make me angrier than the way that most British politicians refuse to have an intelligent conversation about drugs.

Here’s a case in point.

The Commons home affairs select committee are holding an inquiry into drugs policy. Yesterday, Professor David Nutt spoke to them. You might remember Professor Nutt. Under the last government he chaired the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs. That was until late 2009 when he wrote an article in the Guardian saying that there was no scientific evidence supporting plans to reclassify cannabis as a class B drug. The then Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, objected to a government scientific advisor producing scientific evidence which was at odds with government policy and sacked Professor Nutt from his post. This was followed by the resignations of many other members of the committee in protest.

Given all of that it was good to see that the current government were, at least, asking Professor Nutt for his opinions. In yesterday’s meeting Nutt stood his claim from 2009 that horse-riding is statistically more dangerous than taking ecstasy and also presented evidence that the introduction of Dutch-style coffee shops where cannabis can be bought and consume could well lead to a fall of 25% in alcohol consumption in the UK.

Once again Professor Nutt backed his theories with hard scientific evidence and once again his theories make the government very uncomfortable. The Guardian says:

Nutt’s remarks were immediately criticised by Tory MPs on the committee who said the idea that horse-riding and taking ecstasy were “morally equivalent” was irresponsible. Mario Dunn, Alan Johnson’s special adviser who was involved in the decision to sack Nutt, also observed that his remarks proved that “no responsible government would have David Nutt as a drugs adviser”.

Of course, this is completely misquoting Professor Nutt. He has never made the claim that horse-hiding and taking ecstasy are “morally equivalent” (whatever that means). He was comparing their relative levels of harm (both to the individual and to society in general) and reaching conclusions that the government didn’t want to hear.

And that’s the problem. The government – any government – likes hard scientific evidence when it backs up their policies. They are far less keen on it when it doesn’t back up their policies. In those cases governments either ignore the evidence or try to undermine it in some way. As Alan Johnson said in 2009, no government wants a scientific advisor publishing evidence that goes against government policy.

But that’s not how science works. Science is science. Scientific evidence can’t be changed to suit the whim of the current government (oh, alright, of course it can – but it shouldn’t be).

And I’m not saying for a minute that government policy has to be driven by scientific policy. I’m saying that it has to be informed by scientific policy. I’m saying that if a government doesn’t like the scientific evidence then it should have the courage to admit that rather than attacking or ignoring it.

In this current case, an honest government would say “Yes, the scientific evidence clearly says that cannabis is no more harmful (and almost certainly less harmful) than alcohol. But we don’t think that society (by which we mean the voters) would like it if we legalised cannabis or banned alcohol so we’re not going to do that”. But instead we have politicians who say “you can’t possibly say that” or “la-la-la, I can’t hear you”. And that’s a real shame. Until politicians can admit that the scientific evidence on drugs exists and is trustworthy, we can’t have a reasonable conversation on drugs policy.

Mark Henderson’s book The Geek Manifesto covers this (amongst many other things) in some detail. I highly recommend it.

Update: Oh look. A later story in the Guardian has the current Home Secretary strongly disagreeing with the current chair of the ACMD.

We Cannot Afford To Indulge This Madness

By “this madness”, of course, I mean religious leaders talking about what society wants without bothering to ask them. The latest example is this piece in the Telegraph by Cardinal Keith O’Brien. Let’s take a close look at what he says.

The Government is this month launching a consultation on same-sex marriage, asking the public whether it should be introduced in England and Wales.

That’s a good thing, surely? I mean going out and asking people what they think. Rather than just assuming that you know best.

I hope many respond and consider signing the petition in support of traditional marriage organised by a new organisation, the Coalition for Marriage.

And I hope that many more sign the petition from the Coalition for Equal Marriage.

On the surface, the question of same-sex marriage may seem to be an innocuous one.

That’ll be because it’s an innocuous question.

Civil partnerships have been in place for several years now, allowing same-sex couples to register their relationship and enjoy a variety of legal protections.

That’s not marriage though, is it? And, bizarrely, heterosexual couples can’t opt for a civil partnership.

When these arrangements were introduced, supporters were at pains to point out that they didn’t want marriage, accepting that marriage had only ever meant the legal union of a man and a woman.

Those of us who were not in favour of civil partnership, believing that such relationships are harmful to the physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing of those involved, warned that in time marriage would be demanded too. We were accused of scaremongering then, yet exactly such demands are upon us now.

That’s not how I remember it at all. It was clear to me that civil partnerships were a stepping stone on the way to full equal marriage. If that’s not what you heard, then perhaps people were being politically astute and trying not to scare you too much.

Since all the legal rights of marriage are already available to homosexual couples, it is clear that this proposal is not about rights, but rather is an attempt to redefine marriage for the whole of society at the behest of a small minority of activists.

Well, yes, clearly it’s an attempt to redefine marriage. But a “small minority of activists”? That doesn’t seem accurate to me. I see a huge wave of people in favour of equal marriage rights. Perhaps we’re both just talking to people like ourselves.

Redefining marriage will have huge implications for what is taught in our schools, and for wider society. It will redefine society since the institution of marriage is one of the fundamental building blocks of society. The repercussions of enacting same-sex marriage into law will be immense.

Maybe. We’ll see. But change isn’t always bad. Perhaps the repercussions won’t be as large as, say, the abolition of slavery. Society seems to have dealt with that change.

But can we simply redefine terms at a whim? Can a word whose meaning has been clearly understood in every society throughout history suddenly be changed to mean something else?

Yes. Next question.

If same-sex marriage is enacted into law what will happen to the teacher who wants to tell pupils that marriage can only mean – and has only ever meant – the union of a man and a woman?

The teacher who wants to tell pupils that will clearly be wrong, as the definition of marriage will have changed. So that teacher should be dealt with in the same way as any teacher who tells lies to pupils.

Will that teacher’s right to hold and teach this view be respected or will it be removed? Will both teacher and pupils simply become the next victims of the tyranny of tolerance, heretics, whose dissent from state-imposed orthodoxy must be crushed at all costs?

The teacher will be able to hold that view, of course. But that view will be wrong and therefore shouldn’t be taught to children (other than when setting historical context). Not seeing how the children are victims here. They should be being taught the truth – as defined by the law.

In Article 16 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, marriage is defined as a relationship between men and women. But when our politicians suggest jettisoning the established understanding of marriage and subverting its meaning they aren’t derided.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights should not be written in stone. If society changes and disagrees with its definitions then those definitions can (and should) be changed. People suggesting that aren’t derided because in the real world their suggestions make total sense.

[Update: It turns out that if you actually read the UDHR then you'll see that it doesn't say what the Cardinal claims it says at all]

Instead, their attempt to redefine reality is given a polite hearing, their madness is indulged. Their proposal represents a grotesque subversion of a universally accepted human right.

Reality has been redefined by society. Acknowledging this is not madness. We are subverting a human right but, rather, extending it.

As an institution, marriage long predates the existence of any state or government. It was not created by governments and should not be changed by them. Instead, recognising the innumerable benefits which marriage brings to society, they should act to protect and uphold marriage, not attack or dismantle it.

No, marriage was not created by governments. It was created by society. And society, therefore, has the power to change the definition. Of course governments recognise the benefits of marriage. They are not attacking or dismantling it – they are expanding and enhancing it.

This is a point of view that would have been endorsed and accepted only a few years ago, yet today advancing a traditional understanding of marriage risks one being labelled an intolerant bigot.

Well I wouldn’t use the word “bigot”. But I’d certainly suggest that anyone putting forward your arguments was out of touch with modern society.

There is no doubt that, as a society, we have become blasé about the importance of marriage as a stabilising influence and less inclined to prize it as a worthwhile institution.

This may be true. But it’s not gay marriage that has undermined it. You only have to read the celebrity pages of any newspaper to see how many heterosexual couples are doing all they can to undermine marriage. This cannot be laid at the feet of the campaigners for equal marriage rights.

It has been damaged and undermined over the course of a generation, yet marriage has always existed in order to bring men and women together so that the children born of those unions will have a mother and a father.

Actually, I think the damage goes back more than a generation. Yes, marriage has existed for as long as society. No-one is suggesting that it should be removed.

This brings us to the one perspective which seems to be completely lost or ignored: the point of view of the child. All children deserve to begin life with a mother and father; the evidence in favour of the stability and well-being which this provides is overwhelming and unequivocal. It cannot be provided by a same-sex couple, however well-intentioned they may be.

See, I think you’re just making things up now. I don’t believe that there’s any evidence that backs this up at all.

Same-sex marriage would eliminate entirely in law the basic idea of a mother and a father for every child. It would create a society which deliberately chooses to deprive a child of either a mother or a father.

We already live in a society where a large number of children are brought up by a single parent. Surely two parents (of any sex) has to be better than one?

Other dangers exist. If marriage can be redefined so that it no longer means a man and a woman but two men or two women, why stop there? Why not allow three men or a woman and two men to constitute a marriage, if they pledge their fidelity to one another? If marriage is simply about adults who love each other, on what basis can three adults who love each other be prevented from marrying?

Why not indeed? I don’t really see this as a danger. If you seen two parents of different sexes as a good thing, why wouldn’t multiple parents of mixed sexes be even better? Mind you, I don’t see anyone seriously campaigning for this.

In November 2003, after a court decision in Massachusetts to legalise gay marriage, school libraries were required to stock same-sex literature; primary schoolchildren were given homosexual fairy stories such as King & King. Some high school students were even given an explicit manual of homosexual advocacy entitled The Little Black Book: Queer in the 21st Century. Education suddenly had to comply with what was now deemed “normal”.

I’m not sure what policies in Massachusetts have to do with the discussion in hand. What is appropriate in British schools will be decided by the British parliament and British courts.

And your use of scare-quotes around the word “normal” rather gives away your whole view on this matter. Homosexuality is normal. Deal with it.

Disingenuously, the Government has suggested that same-sex marriage wouldn’t be compulsory and churches could choose to opt out. This is staggeringly arrogant.

No, that’s not arrogance. It’s government trying to accommodate the outdated views of people like you.

No Government has the moral authority to dismantle the universally understood meaning of marriage.

Maybe not. But society does. And government is acting as the representative of society here.

Imagine for a moment that the Government had decided to legalise slavery but assured us that “no one will be forced to keep a slave”.

Would such worthless assurances calm our fury? Would they justify dismantling a fundamental human right? Or would they simply amount to weasel words masking a great wrong?

Oh, you’re on very shaky ground here. Remember that the Christian church endorsed slavery for as long as it could get away with it. And besides, slavery clearly reduces human rights, equal marriage increases them.

The Universal Declaration on Human Rights is crystal clear: marriage is a right which applies to men and women, “the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State”.

This universal truth is so self-evident that it shouldn’t need to be repeated. If the Government attempts to demolish a universally recognised human right, they will have forfeited the trust which society has placed in them and their intolerance will shame the United Kingdom in the eyes of the world.

Didn’t we cover this a few paragraphs back? The Universal Declaration can and should be changed if it no longer reflects modern society.

The Cardinal has no reasonable argument here. He is simply saying that something shouldn’t change because it hasn’t changed before.

As he says in his opening paragraph, the government is opening a public consultation. If society believes what I think it believes then the final report will recommend that the definition of marriage should be changed. If society is still as blinkered as the Cardinal hopes then the report will recommend that things remain as they are.

That is surely the best approach to take. To ask people what they want. But scare-mongering and hand-waving of the kind in the Cardinal’s article has no place in the discussion. If he has facts and evidence to back up his claims, then let’s see them. But I don’t think he has.

Nadine Dorries: Just Say No

Today was the day that parliament had a rather long list of private members bills to debate. Originally there were sixty-four on the list. As this informative post from Kerry McCarthy tells us, they’d normally expect to get through about three of them. The MPs sponsoring the rest of the bills were pretty much wasting their time.

Number eight on the original list was Nadine Dorries bill to teach girls between 13 and 16 how to say no to sex. The Guardian’s headline was MPs to debate sexual abstinence lessons bill, which was slightly disingenuous as the chance of the debate reaching that far down the list was tiny.

But this morning, when the order of business for today in parliament was published Dorries bill was missing from the list. Everyone assumed that Dorries was responsible for this removal. As a spokeswoman for the Commons information office told the Guardian “No one would be able to remove a private members’ bill without the permission of a member”. The assumption seemed to be that Dorries had realised the futility of being so far down the list and had removed the bill. She wouldn’t have been the only one – the published list only contains forty-nine of the expected sixty-four bills.

At lunchtime, things got even more interesting. A new Twitter account called @NadineDorriesMP appeared with this tweet (in reply to a joke by John Prescott):

@johnprescott My bill has not ‘jumped off at Edge Hill’ if you care to read the order paper, it’s number eight on the list!!

Something about this timeline didn’t seem right to me. That tweet was posted at 12:47, which is almost two hours since I first saw the order of business without her bill. I assume the order of business was published some time earlier. The first hint I had that the bill had been withdrawn was this blog post by Kerry McCarthy which was published just after 10am.

On the basis that the real Nadine Dorries would have known by 12:47 that her bill was not on the order paper, I called the new Twitter account as a fake. But it seems I was wrong. People like Iain Dale confirmed that it really was her (and, yes, this is one of the few things I’d trust Iain Dale on).

All of which leaves us with a bit of a mystery. Either Dorries withdrew her bill or she didn’t. If she did then the first tweet on her new Twitter account is a complete lie. If she didn’t then we need to ask who did withdraw her bill – given that it’s only her who is supposed to be able to do that.

And even if someone else managed to withdraw her bill without her knowledge, something still doesn’t ring true. If she was expecting to debate her bill (no matter how tiny the chance) then surely she would have been hanging around in parliament all morning and I can’t believe that she didn’t see the order paper and notice her bill was missing. Or that one of her friends saw that it was missing and asked her what happened.

All in all I find it incredible that she could have got to 12:47 without knowing that her bill was not on the list. So how do you explain that tweet?

This is, I think, the third time that Dorries has joined Twitter. And with her first tweet she has already started people thinking that this time is going to be no different to the previous occasions. She will be ineptly trying to use it to promote her strange view of the world. And she will quickly make herself a laughing stock once more.

Update: At 16:37 this afternoon, @NadineDorriesMP tweeted the following:

Just to make it absolutely clear and leave no doubt whatsoever, my Bill was NOT withdrawn

Curiouser and curiouser. So, now we are left with two questions. 1/ Why wasn’t Dorries’ bill on the order paper? And 2/ At what point did she realise it wasn’t on the order paper?

Update 2: Welshracer may have got to the heart of the matter here. He points out what it says on the official parliamentary web page for Dorries’ bill.

The Bill was not printed and so was not moved for debate on 20 January 2012.

What do we make of this? One interpretation would be that Dorries didn’t withdraw the bill for debate, but that someone in her office forgot to get the bill printed so that it could be included in the debate.

But even in those circumstances you’d think that she’d get a phone call from the people who were planning the day’s business telling her what had (or hadn’t) happened. I still can’t believe that she didn’t know the bill wasn’t on the order paper when she sent her first tweet at quarter to one.

Update 3: Couple more pieces of information came in overnight.

Firstly, it seems that the new @NadineDorriesMP Twitter account was set up two weeks ago. It seems she resisted using it until goaded into it by John Prescott yesterday.

Secondly, the Independent managed to speak to Dorries about this confusion. She says:

The Bill is still live, but there was more chance of being struck by a meteor than getting it debated, so we told the Commons office not to bother printing a hard copy. What I didn’t realise was that if you don’t order it to be printed, it automatically comes off the agenda.

Of course I wouldn’t withdraw it … a lot of people had paid train fares to come and protest. It would have been churlish.

So we finally have the truth (or, at least, Dorries’ version of it). She knew it wouldn’t be debated so she decided not to have the bill printed. She didn’t know that would automatically remove it from the order paper. She didn’t withdraw the bill out of respect for the people who were coming to protest against it.

It’s also not clear to me in what sense the bill is still live. This was the final opportunity to debate private members bills before the end of this parliamentary session. Any unfinished business from this parliamentary session doesn’t get passed on to the next one, so anything that wasn’t approved is, as far as I can see, effectively dead.

You couldn’t make this up!

Pod Delusion Plug

It’s Friday, which means there’s a new episode of the Pod Delusion out. I’m plugging it because I’m in it. The first report is me talking about Nadine Dorries and her bizarre opinions of humanism. There’s another story about her too as the Pod Delustion’s editor, James O’Malley interviews New Humanist’s Paul Sims about her reaction to their Bad Faith Poll.

If I’ve done this right, then you’ll be able to listen to the show using the embedded doohickey below, but it’s on their web site too. I’m at 1:42 and Paul Sims is at 7:12 – but listen to the whole thing.

Dorries on Humanism

Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism.

That’s how Wikipedia starts its article on Humanism. Humanists (and I count myself as one) believe that it is possible to ethical and fulfilling lives without the need to rely on supernatural explanations. As the British Humanist Association says:

We take responsibility for our actions and base our ethics on the goals of human welfare, happiness and fulfilment. We seek to make the best of the one life we have by creating meaning and purpose for ourselves, individually and together.

Surely it’s hard to take offence at these beliefs?

Step forward Nadine Dorries. In a blog post late on Friday night she took an altogether different view of Humanism, saying “I am not sure why anyone would admit to being a humanist and part of an organisation which has such extreme views.”

And what are these “extreme views” that some humanist organisation holds? She explains:

A humanist recently commented that, not only did he believe that abortion was acceptable right up to the moment of birth, but that termination of a child’s life was acceptable up until the point where the child had the ability to reason, understand and justify life.

Now, I don’t know if a humanist recently said that or not. Dorries doesn’t deem it important to give us a reference so that we can confirm her claim. So, of course, the claim should be seen on the same level as something that some bloke down the pub said he’d read on the internet once. In fact her blog post is likely to become the source that is used to justify conversations like that. Spreading unsubstantiated rumours like this is never helpful. But it’s a tactic that Dorries specialises in.

And, of course, even if someone say what Dorries claims, extrapolating the beliefs of a whole group of people from one extremist is ridiculous. To illustrate that, here are a few other “facts”. Just to redress the balance.

  • A Christian once commented that all homosexuals should be chemically castrated. I’m not sure why anyone would admit to being part of an organisation which holds such extreme views.
  • A Tory once told commented that he wanted to make the NHS into a marketplace. I’m not sure why anyone would admit to being part of an organisation which holds such extreme views.
  • An MP once commented that she thought it was acceptable for a politician’s blog to be 70% fiction. I’m not sure why anyone would admit to being part of an organisation which holds such extreme views.

You might be wondering what humanists have done to invoke Dorries’ anger. The New Humanist magazine holds an annual “Bad Faith” poll to dishonour “the year’s most outspoken enemy of reason”. This year’s poll opened last week and Dorries is one of the nominations. Even before her bizarre outburst, she was in the lead. Now she has over twice the number of votes of her nearest competitor. I never thought I’d write this, but please… Vote For Dorries.

Update: In a blog post yesterday, Dorries published the “proof” of her claims. It turns out that the “recent” comment by a humanist is an out-of-context quote from a book that Peter Singer wrote in 1979. It’s clear that Dorries has a vastly different understanding of  the meaning of the words “proof” and “recent” to the rest us.

The Ministry of Truth does a fine job of deconstructing Dorries’ claims.

MPs on Twitter

Did you ever make a chance remark that plants a seed of an idea which then grabs hold of you and refuses to let you go until you’ve done something about it?

That happened to me on Sunday. I was cleaning up some broken feeds on Planet Westminster when I tweeted:

Cleaning up some broken feeds on Planet Westminster (http://bit.ly/47fCK) Interesting how many MPs’ blogs have vanished since the election.

And a couple of minutes later I added:

Someone should monitor the numbers of MPs actively blogging and tweeting over time. Maybe that should be me.

And that was it. I realised that I’d get no rest until I’d started work on the project.

Yesterday I published a graph of the number of MPs on Twitter over time. It’s only the first step. I want to start tracking how active they are and how well they interact with other Twitter users. Expect more graphs to appear on that page over the coming weeks.

I have to thank the nice people over at TweetMinster. They are doing all the hard work of actually tracking the MPs on Twitter. All I’m doing is processing their list.

A few caveats. Currently the graph is generated manually, so it won’t be kept up to date automatically. Also it just works from the date that people on the list joined Twitter. It doesn’t handle people leaving Twitter – they’ll just come off the list and all of their data will vanish from the graph. So it doesn’t track, things like Nadine Dorries’ two (or is it three) flirtations with Twitter.

You should also note that I also don’t handle people joining Twitter before they become an MP. For example, the first MP to join Twitter was Julian Huppert on 2nd May 2007. But he didn’t become an MP until three years later.

So take it all with a pince of salt, But I think it’s an interesting start. Let me know what you think. And feel free to suggest other useful graphs that I could create.

And, yes, I’ll get round to doing blogs too at some point.

MPs and Facts

When an MP is in a discussion and mentions a fact to back up their argument, it would be nice if you knew that you could trust that fact. Unfortunately that’s often not the case. To pick an example at random, here’s Nadine Dorries from last week’s Any Questions (the link will work for a few more days and Dorries starts this speech at about 41 mins):

The National Drugs Prevention Alliance once startled me when they told me that the cut of cannabis which teenagers are smoking now and using across the UK is actually fifty times more potent than it was even a year ago.

That sounded astonishing to me. In fact, it sounded extremely unlikely. So I decided to investigate a little further.

I found the NDPA’s web site and emailed them to ask for references to back up this claim. Very quickly, I got a reply from their Political Affairs Director, David Raynes. He advised me to listen to the edition of Any Answers which discussed the issues from that edition of Any Questions (again the link will only work for a few more days). At about 27 minutes in, David Raynes phones in to say this:

I asked to come on the programme, basically, to correct the figures that came from Nadine Dorries about cannabis. She was absolutely correct that it’s stronger than years ago, but we don’t agree exactly with her figures and it’s a long time since we gave her a briefing. Typically, modern cannabis is about three to four times stronger than the strongest cannabis of the sixties.

The NDPA is an organisation who campaign strongly for the continued criminalisation of drugs. They are a group who totally support Dorries’ stance on drugs. But even they couldn’t stomach the distortion of their message which she put forward and felt they had to speak up and distance themselves from her.

Of course people make mistakes in the heat of a discussion – and that becomes more likely if the discussion is live in a radio studio. But any reasonable person who realises that they have made a mistake like that would surely post a clarification and an apology on their blog. In Dorries’ case, I very much doubt that will happen.

Don’t you wish you could trust MPs?

Alternative Vote

Tomorrow the UK will go to the polls to decide whether we want to replace our current “First Past The Post” voting system with the Alternative Vote. Before you go to the polling station, I’d like to take some time to correct some misinformation that seems to have inadvertently been spread by various members of the No campaign.

Switching to AV will cost £250m

There’s a No campaign leaflet which breaks down this figure. Which is handy for our purposes.

£91m for the referendum. Well that’s already taking place, so we’re not getting that back. If the No campaign win, we won’t get that money back.

£130m for electronic voting machines. That’s electronic voting machines that no-one outside the No campaign has suggested that we would need.

£26m on voter education. Well, maybe. That’s about 50p per voter.

And there’s £3m which they haven’t bothered to explain.

So the true cost is likely to be about a tenth of what the No campaign claim.

Some people’s votes will be counted multiple times

This seems to be the one that really scares people. And if it was true, it would be a serious problem with the AV system.

It’s not true, of course. People’s votes aren’t counted multiple times, they are reallocated.

It might help to think of it as a series of votes rather than one vote. In round one, people’s first preference votes are counted. If no candidate reaches 50% of the vote we have another round of voting. Everyone votes for the same person as they voted for in the first round – except for the people who voted for the candidate who came last. Their votes are reallocated to their second preference candidate.

So in each round, every person gets a vote. Every person’s vote gets counted exactly the same number of times. It’s one person one vote per round.

AV Leads to more coalitions

We are definitely heading towards more coalitions. But that has little to do with our voting system and a lot to do with the way that the political landscape has changed in the UK.

In a two-party system it’s easy to get a definitive win in a general election. But we no longer have a two-party system in the UK. No matter what the Conservative and Labour parties want you to believe, we now have three major parties and many other parties who people want to vote for.

This is what will lead to more coalitions. The fragmentation of the electorate, not the voting system. Do people really need reminding that we currently have our first coalition government for decades and that was elected under the FPTP system.

This is actually the best argument in favour of AV. We’ve effectively had a two-party system for two hundred years.But that is changing. People want more choice. And we need a voting system that reflects that.

No-one really wants AV

Actually, it’s hard to argue with that. The vast majority of people who are campaigning for the Yes campaign would far rather have some other, more proportional, system. But the No campaign take that fact and suggest that we shouldn’t support a system that we don’t want. That we should hold out for a change to a system that we really want.

That’s nonsense though. This is the first chance we’ve had to reform our electoral system in living memory. A No vote won’t be interpreted as a vote for a truly proportional system over AV. No, it will be interpreted as support for the status quo. A No vote will effectively take electoral reform off the government’s agenda for a generation.

AV might not be what we really want, but it’s a step, however small, in the right direction. It shows an appetite for reform. It shows that we aren’t happy with the current system.

Of course, there are some people who are perfectly happy with the current system. These are the people who do well out of it. The two main parties who get exaggerated majorities out of it. The only reasonable argument I’ve heard for keeping FPTP is those parties admitting that they don’t want to give up the advantage that it gives them.

Don’t let them get away with that. Please show them that you care about politics in this country. Show them that you support change.

Please vote Yes to AV on Thursday.