Category: politics

Dorries Round-Up

Update (28th October): I’ve just been shown The Nardinia Chronicles, a new blog with a lot of detail about Dorries’ idiocy.

A round-up of all of the blog posts that have been made about Nadine Dorries since she was cleared by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards last Thursday. If anything is missing then please let me know.

And for more historical context on this, here’s humphreycushion‘s similar list of blog posts that followed Dorries’ recent disablist comments.

She Writes Fiction

Given what we now know about the content of Nadine Dorries’ blog, the title of this post (which I’ve reused here) seems somewhat appropriate. Dorries must have known that John Lyon’s report on her was about to be published so it might be seen as slightly disingenuous to write about other people publishing fiction as fact given the revelations that were just around the corner.

It’s also interesting to revisit some of her old blog posts and play “spot the 30% that is true”. We could start with the “She Writes Fiction” post, but it’s hard to get anywhere near a 30% figure for facts in that piece.

Or there’s the “Hand of Hope” post (and its sequel, “Hand of Truth“) where Dorries delights in overturning pretty much all scientific evidence on pre-natal surgery. Far less than 30% facts there too.

Perhaps we should look at her posts about the expenses investigations last year. Here’s the post that contains her response to the Telegraph and the one where she expands on the previous one. But no, those are both clearly complete nonsense as the Lyon report demonstrates. Or maybe the one where she claims that everyone in Westminster “fears a suicide“. Is that only 70% true? Perhaps everyone in Westminster really feared a paper cut.

Or how about the one where she fearlessly refused to kowtow to the speaker. Is only 30% of that true? Perhaps she just thought about doing it.

Last night, in an interview, Dorries claimed that she may have got the 70/30 figures the wrong way round. But does that really make a difference? Is a MP who tells lies on her blog 30% of the time rally much better than one who does it 70% of the time? Is that what the voters of Mid Beds really want from their MP?

She’s clearly gone too far this time. A lot of this morning’s press is covering this story. It’s even in the Daily Mail. Her constituents will know about this. What will their reaction be? I know that Mid Beds is one of those constituencies where the Tories can never lose. But surely the constituents deserve a better quality of MP than this? Surely the local Conservative Association can’t ignore this. Someone must be having a quiet word with Dorries about now. And if the local party won’t ask her to stand down immediately or deselect her before the next election, then there’s clearly only one option open to us.

Where’s Martin Bell? It’s time for another Tatton moment.

38 Degrees

When I was on my self-imposed blogging hiatus in August there was one story that I read about and planned to write about on my return to London. But, course, by the time I got back there were more pressing concerns and it soon slipped my mind. Yesterday I read something that reminded me of this issue and simultaneously invalidated most of what I would have written at that time.

The story was the spat between MP Dominic Raab and the campaigning organisation 38 Degrees. To remind you of the basics, 38 Degrees have a system that allows constituents to send email to MPs on specific campaign issues and Raab objected to the number of identical email messages that he was receiving. He asked 38 Degrees to remove his contact details from their system. You can read blog posts from both Raab and 38 Degrees putting their sides of the story. An LBC radio programme set up a discussion between Raab and 38 Degrees’ Executive Director, David Babb. In this discussion, Raab claimed that every email he got from the 38 Degrees system was identical. Babb claimed that 80% of them had been customised in some way.

The system that 38 Degrees have set up asks you for your postcode which it then uses to work out who your MP is. It then presents you with the text of an email that it wants you to send to your MP. Text beside the email message encourages you to edit the message to make it more personal, but it’s possible to send it without any personalisation. The disagreement between Raab and Babb on LBC was to do with the number of people who edit these messages before sending them.

Clearly an MP getting 50 identical emails from constituents isn’t going to give them the same attention as 50 different messages on the same topic. If you’re not going to alter the text in any way then you might as well just sign a petition. If you don’t care enough to write a personalised message, then why should the MP care what you say.

And that’s about where the story was when I came back from holiday and put it to the back of my mind. Then yesterday I read this blog post by Sam Smith. Sam makes a number of good points, but the one I want to concentrate on is the one about the level of customisation in the email messages. Sam points out that if you send the email without editing it at all, then it will be addressed to “Dear [Insert MP name]“. It seems clear that editing the message to correct this failure of basic courtesy falls within 38 Degrees’ definition of “customisation”. This therefore means that 20% of the email they were sending to Raab didn’t even address him individually. No wonder he got annoyed.

This is a fundamental flaw in the 38 Degrees system. They know the name of the MP, There’s no reason why they can’t put the correct name into the email. Not doing so can only be attributed to either laziness or incompetence on the part of the people who wrote the system. It’s astonishing that an organisation that wants to be taken seriously can think that this is acceptable. This is something that should be fixed immediately. The email system should be taken off-line until this is fixed.

This, of course, explains the disagreement between Raab and Babb about the level of customisation in the messages. Babb is counting the people who corrected the name and Raab is only talking about the content of the email. It’s tempting to believe that Babb was being deliberately over-literal in his answer to the question in order to back up a rather dubious point. It would be interesting for 38 Degrees to tell us what proportion of people actually customised the content of the message. I suspect that the number is far lower than 80%.

The problem is that if you give people an easy option, then many of them will take it. And, as I said above, MPs are completely justified in attributing less importance to identical email. Sometime you hear people comparing messages that they get back from MPs and complaining that different MPs have sent back almost identical messages to the same mass email. Well, I don’t think that you can expect an MP to spend any more effort on a reply than you put into your email. If you’re using an unaltered email from 38 Degrees then you can’t possibly complain if the reply is written by someone in Central Office.

This is all a terrible shame. Email gives us an unprecedented level of access to our elected representatives. It would be a disaster if 38 Degrees ham-fisted attempts to make use of this system spoil it for the rest of us and stop MPs from replying to email at all.

But it doesn’t have to be like this. Email can be an effective campaigning tool when used carefully. The Lighter Later campaign takes a different and, to my mind, more useful approach. The 38 Degrees approach seems to be based on the idea that people are too stupid or too lazy to write their own email. Lighter Later trust people and give them an almost empty text box in which to compose an email. They give some useful information to help you to write the message, but all of the text is your own. It would be great if 38 Degrees and other campaigning organisations could take the same approach. Sure, you’re likely to see fewer messages sent, but the ones that are sent will have greater effect.

I would strongly recommend that you don’t use the 38 Degrees system until it greatly improves. But if you feel that you really want to support one of their campaigns[1] then please a) ensure that you fill in the MP’s name correctly and b) delete all of their pre-written text and start again from scratch. Your MP will take far more notice of your message.

[1] Which is very likely – they campaign on very important issues.

Update: Denny points out that I should mention TheyWorkForYou who allow you to contact your MP on any subject – giving you a blank slate to work from. I believe that all three sites (38 Degrees, Lighter Later and They Work for You) use Write To Them to actually send the message. The difference is only in the amount of pre-processing that the site uses.

Greens and Science

At the time of the European election last year, there was some debate in the blogosphere about the Green Party’s attitude to science.  Holfordwatch picked up on a report which said that the Greens supported the continued use of “alternative medicine” in the NHS. Rational people, of course, gave up all idea of voting for them.

To their credit, the Greens responded to this by clarifying (and, actually, seeming to completely drop) some of these policies. In this Q&A in the Guardian, their press officer, Scott Redding, was asked:

If the balance of evidence suggests that a treatment does not perform any better than placebo, should it be supported by the NHS?

He replied:

The short answer is No. Our policy is that any medicine or treatment available on the NHS should be backed up by scientific evidence. Some new treatments, and some currently available on the NHS, will pass this test, others will not.

Of course, you might well think that it doesn’t matter what the Green Party thinks on this as they’ll never have the power to enact their policies. And you’d be right to think that.

But they do have an MP now. Caroline Lucas is the MP for Brighton Pavilion. And whilst she’s not exactly driving government policy, she does have the same ways to make her views known as all other MPs, including signing Early Day Motions.

So, given the clear direction indicated by Scott Redding, it’s disappointing to see the she has signed one of David Tredinnick’s nonsense EDMs on homeopathy (as discussed previously on this blog).

On one hand, the Greens clearly say that they won’t support medical treatments without scientific evidence to support them. And then their first ever MP goes and gives her support to something that is on a the same level as witchcraft. If I was one of the enlightened people who voted for her back in May, I’d be feeling pretty pissed off about now.

I had hoped that, at least, the Green Party would prove themselves to be above the lies and spin that characterise so much of British politics. I’m really disappointed to see those hopes dashed.

Update: Lucas has received a lot of comment over this on Twitter in the last few hours. She has posted what I can only assume is supposed to be an explanation for her actions:

EDM is about lack of BMA’s consultation & argues that local NHS better placed to know patient needs, based on objective clinical assessment

It’s nonsense of course. Tredinnick is a well-known parliamentary advocate for homeopathy. His EDM is purely about supporting the provision of quackery on the NHS. Tredinnick is deliberately inventing scientific controversy where none exists. The science is settled. Homeopathy does not work.

If patients have been told that homeopathy is worth investigating, then their doctors should make it clear to them that they have been misled. Doctors should not be encouraging this delusion.

Blog Nation 2010

Yesterday, I was at Liberal Conspiracy’s Blog Nation 2010 conference. This was a chance for left liberal bloggers to get together and discuss strategies we can adopt now that we find ourselves in opposition (or a minority partner in the coalition government).

Sunny has already blogged his thoughts on how the conference went. He asked for other people’s thoughts/ These are mine.

It was great to meet so many liked-minded bloggers and to put faces to blogs that I’ve been reading for years. I also felt that most of the presentations and discussions were really useful and interesting. There were, however, a couple of area that I thought could be improved.

Pretty much all of the discussion centred on the messages that we can publish to counter the right-wing rhetoric we get from most of the media. This was all good stuff, but I couldn’t help wondering if we were addressing the problem at the wrong level.

I have no doubt that we’re all already doing what we can to publish these kinds of stories. I’m sure that we can all raise our game in this area, but  don’t believe that is the main problem that we have. The main problem is making sure that as many as possible are reading what we write. An d I was slightly disappointed that this issue was barely covered.

I have no easy solution to this problem. I suppose that we need to give some more thought to SEO. But I’m sure that there are other things that we can do to get our message in front of more people. I’d welcome a discussion on this topic at next year’s Blog Nation. But in the meantime, feel free to add ideas in the comments below.

On the Intelligence of MPs

It’s easy to make cheap cracks about how stupid MPs are. The problem is that many of them seem determined to do nothing at all to counter this impression. Indeed, they often seem keen to reinforce it.

David Tredinnick (Con, Bosworth) is a particularly good example. He is a proponent of “complementary and alternative” medicine. This, of course, marks him out immediately as someone whose pronouncements on pretty much anything should be viewed with deep suspicion, but he likes to emphasise his idiocy by proposing Early Day Motions in support of homeopathy.

And it hasn’t taken him long to stamp his brand of stupidity over the new parliamentary session. On Monday of this week he proposed four EDMs about homeopathy.

Each of these proposals is, of course, complete nonsense. They could only be written by someone with no understanding of science. If your MP is one of the (currently quite small) number of MPs who have signed these motions then I feel really sorry for you as your MP is obviously not quite as bright as you would no doubt want them to be.

There is, however, a brighter side to this. The new Lib Dem MP for Cambridge is Julian Huppert and he is obviously determined to continue the excellent work done in parliament by Evan Harris and he has proposed amendments to these motions which basically rip out the guts from the original motions and replace them with common sense (completely reversing the meaning of the motions in the process).They are 284A1, 285A1, 286A1 and 287A1.

I’ve written to my MP asking her to sign the amendments. I recommend that you do the same. Tell them that signing Tredinnick’s original motions will lead to people they don’t have the intelligence to do the job they were elected to do.

Iain Dale Talks Balls

Iain Dale has some new and interesting information about Labour Party leadership contender, Ed Balls. Apparently whilst he was at Oxford in the  80s, Balls was a member of the Conservative Association there.

Except, of course, the news isn’t as new or interesting as Dale would have you believe. Dale quotes from an article in the Independent from July 2006 where Tory MP Philip Hollobone remembers Balls being a member of the association.

But, crucially, Dale “forgets” to link to the article in question so that his readers can check his sources for themselves. And after the bit that Dale quotes, the article goes on to say this:

“Ed hasn’t exactly advertised the fact, but he’s never sought to hide it either. It even featured in the jokes at his wedding,” I’m told.

“He joined the Tories at Oxford because they used to book top-flight political speakers, and only members were allowed to attend their lectures.

“Ed was, however, also a member of the Labour Club. He was more active in that, and was always, at heart, a man of the left.”

Dale leaps to the conclusion that because Balls was a member of the Conservative Association, he must have been a conservative. The unquoted section of the article makes it clear that Balls was a member of the association because they had interesting political meetings. The comments on Dale’s blog post go further than this and make it clear that this is really common at Oxford – if you’re interested in politics then you’ll join a number of political societies whether or not you agree with their politics.

Obviously Dale is a Tory blogger, so you’d expect him to try to attack the Labour leadership candidates. But to sink to this level shows a certain level of desperation.

If you’re going to base a blog post on an article that can be found on the web, then it’s only common courtesy to link to that article so that your readers can read it for themselves and draw their own conclusions about what you’re writing. Not doing so immediately makes people think that you’re hiding something. Which, in this case, seems to be the case.

It’s a nasty, tabloid way of reporting. And I hope that Dale aspires to be higher quality than that.

Killing Maggie

It’s twenty years since she left office, but Tories still don’t understand the depth of the hatred that Maggie Thatcher engendered in a large proportion of the population. Amongst my group of friends we had a agreement that any of us who got within striking distance of her would do our best to do her some serious damage.

Of course, there was no danger that anyone would ever get close enough to her that we would be called on to back up these threats with action. It was just a joke that we shared.

Well, until the day I found myself within striking distance.

At some point in 1993 I was in Madrid airport waiting for a flight back to London. We were in the departure lounge, the plane could be seen on the  runway, but we weren’t boarding. We waited and waited but they didn’t let us board. Eventually, over thirty minutes late, we were called and started to make our way onto the flight.

As we were called, I was standing closest to the exit from the departure lounge, so I was the  first person to head towards the plane. As I went through the tunnel to the plane, a door opened in the side and a small group of people appeared in the tunnel. They had obviously circumvented the usual check-in procedures and had come up some stairs from the tarmac.

And one of them was Maggie. I was standing about three feet from her.

Of course I did nothing. If I had, you would have known about it. “Yobbo Pushes Maggie Down Steps” would have been the headline in all of the British papers the next day.

I just stood there blinking as she (along with the rest of her party) was whisked onto the plane – where they were secreted in the first class section. By the time I got onto the plane, they were nowhere to be seen.

Of course there  was no way I was ever going to do anything. Our bragging about doing something to her was just that – bragging. It was a one in a million chance that I was ever in a position to even consider making good on my promises.

But in my lifetime, there has never been a politician who split the nation like Maggie did. Of course, the number of people who loved her was larger than the number of people who hated her. But those of us who hated her, hated her passionately.

Which is why I (along with many people) can completely understand what John McDonnell said yesterday. Of course it was a joke, but it was a joke that will resonate deeply with almost half of the population who lived through the 1980s in the UK.

If I had a vote in the Labour leadership election, I’d be seriously considering giving it to McDonnell. He’s obviously my kind of politician.

Update: I highly recommend listening to Elvis Costello’s Tramp The Dirt Down.

Programme for Government

Our new coalition government has released full details of its five year programme. They’ve even produced a web site that contains all of the information (although currently it seems a little broken and is just presenting a page where you can download a PDF).

I thought it was worth digging into it a bit to see what the programme says about some of the issues that the skeptical/rationalist community are interested in.

Firstly, I looked for information about the provision of homeopathy and other “alternative medicine” on the NHS. Sadly, the relevant section of the report is silent on this issue so we don’t know yet whether or not the new government is in favour of spending public money on magic water. I should point out that my petition on this subject is still open – although the whole government petitions site is currently in limbo until the new government decides what to do with it.

Next I looked to see what the document said about faith schools. I found one mention. And it’s not good news. In the section on schools, it says:

We will work with faith groups to enable more faith schools

So that’s a bit of a worry. Of course it doesn’t say whether they’ll be spending public money on these schools. Hopefully this won’t mean more religious-run academies where children are taught that the Earth is 6,000 years old.

Finally, I stepped back and tried to find out what the programme had to say about levels of science and research funding. And at that point, I had a bit of a surprise. Take a look at the list of high-level categories listed on the right hand side of the web site. Do you notice any obvious omissions? Look carefully now.

There is no category that obviously covers science. I downloaded the PDF version of the document and searched for the word “science” thinking that I must have missed something obvious. The word appears in the document twice. The section on the environment says:

As part of a package of measures, we will introduce a carefully managed and science-led policy of badger control in areas with high and persistent levels of bovine tuberculosis.

And then the section on schools says:

We will seek to attract more top science and maths graduates to be teachers.

Searching for the word “research” fares a little better (four mentions) but they’re still rather specific and give no useful information on how the government feels about science and research spending in general. I find it astonishing that a document like this can find space to talk about badger control and completely avoid the bigger issues. Where is the commitment to levels of spending on science? Where is the discussion of the importance of science-led policy-making?

All in all, this document gives me no comfort at all. I strongly suspect that we’re heading for a rather irrational five years. I really hope I’m proved wrong.

The Political Web

Long-time readers might remember The Political Web, a web site that I threw together at a BBC hack day a couple of years ago.

The site has languished as I haven’t had time to do anything with it for well over a year, but last night I refreshed the database that powers it so that it now contains details of all of the new constituencies and MPs.
I have other plans too (just no real idea when I’ll have time to implement them).