Recently in politics Category

Four years ago I drew a comparison between the US Presidential Election result and the 1992 British General Election. This year the comparison seems even more apt. The footage we saw of the celebrations in Chicago and elsewhere in the US as Obama was confirmed as the winner brought back memories of how we all felt in the UK on the night of May 1st 1997.

I just hope that Barack Obama doesn't turn into Tony Blair.

It's a strange world when you have to rely on the House of Lords to throw out ridiculous legislation from a Labour government. But that's exactly what happened yesterday as the Lords voted against the government's proposals for 42-day detention of suspected terrorists. Pretty much everyone in the country now agrees that the proposals were draconian and unnecessary. Well, with a couple of notable exceptions. Firstly the Home Secretary has drawn up a single clause Bill which she will present to Parliament should the opportunity ever arise.

And secondly, the Sun is pretty angry about it this morning. I picked up a discarded copy on the tube this morning (discarded by a BBC employee getting off at White City) and was able to enjoy the full force of Rebekah Wade's ire in today's The Sun Says. For those of you who can't bring yourself to visit their web site, I reproduce it in full below.

A GOLDEN opportunity to make Britain safer from terrorists has been shamefully spurned.

The House of Lords has scuppered a Bill that might have saved many lives.

How al-Qaeda must be revelling in the knowledge that Britain is more concerned about possible infringements of civil liberties than of taking the war on terror to them.

Holding terrorism suspects for 42 days would be a vital tool for the security services as they unravel criminal conspiracies of unprecedented complexity.

Its opponents argue that the country’s against it. Nonsense. More than 100,000 Sun readers voiced their support in 2005 — when Tony Blair wanted 90 DAYS, not just 42.

David Cameron’s Tory MPs, against their natural instincts, fought any detention beyond 28 days simply for opposition’s sake. There were plenty in their ranks who secretly backed 42 days.

Tory Lord Tebbit, himself a victim of terrorists, rightly asked yesterday what his party will do if they win power and find they need 42 days. How will they possibly argue for it?

As he also pointed out, the injustice of holding an innocent person for six weeks can be rectified. The injustice meted out to an innocent person murdered by terrorists cannot.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith will now have to force through emergency 42-day legislation the next time a major suspect is held.

And the Tories will have to back her - they cannot risk sabotaging a case for political advantage.

Anything that makes the Sun as angry as that has just got to be a good thing.

This just came up in a discussion in the office. You read it here first.

Sarah Palin claims to be a christian. If that's the case then why are at least two of her children (Willow and Piper - I'm researching the others) named after teenage witches? I reckon she has wiccan sympathies.

Does anyone else have any evidence to add?

Mind you, this makes me somewhat conflicted. I'd far rather have a wiccan as VP than an evangelical christian who supports the teaching of creationism in science classes and denies anthropogenic climate change.

A while ago, I set up Planet Westminster - a pretty simple site that simply aggregates all of the MPs' blogs that I could find. It was largely created to scratch a personal itch. I wanted a simple way to subscribe to all MPs' blogs in my feed reader. And that's really how I use it most of the time. I just read it in Bloglines rarely bother to look at the site (which explains why I haven't fixed the character-encoding problems that are obvious to anyone visiting the site).

But I had a look at it today. And I tweaked a couple of presentation problems. As part of the process, I ran the software which aggregates the feeds by hand a couple of times. And that showed me one interesting issue that I had previously missed. The program displays an error when it can't find the feed that it's looking for. It's currently generating eleven "missing feed" errors. That's out of thirty-six feeds that I currently monitor. Perhaps a couple of those could be put down to temporary network glitches, but that's potentially over a quarter of the (small number of) blogging MPs who have either given up on blogging or have moved their feeds without putting redirection in place (that's starting to become quite a regular topic round these parts).

At one point it looked like MPs might start blogging in reasonable numbers. We'd broken the 5% barrier. It would be a shame if they decided if it was a waste of their time and started to abandon it.

The errors I'm getting are as follows (with links to the missing web feeds) . If any of these are your MP, then perhaps you'd investigate what's going on and report back. One of them is my MP, Martin Linton, so I'll start by investigating him.

• Stephen Crabb
• Jon Cruddas
• Mark Lazarowicz
• Martin Linton
• Kerry McCarthy
• Maria Miller
• Austin Mitchell
• David Miliband
• Bob Spink
• Shaun Woodward
• Derek Wyatt

Update: Having looked into it a bit further, I see that many of the problems are down to people moving their web feeds without putting redirection in place. Obviously I don't blame the MPs for this, but it indicates how little their "tech support" people know about how this stuff works.

A few of the blogs have closed down though. And it's interesting to note that in a couple of places a blog feed has been replaced by a news feed.

I need to put aside some time to do some more research into this in order to ensure that the date I have is up to date. And this is exactly the kind of information that PoliticalWeb is supposed to provide.

Well that about wraps it up for the Labour Party as far as I'm concerned. Less than three years after they doubled the the amount of time that a suspect could be held without charge, they have pushed through a bill which increases the time by another 50%. If the bill gets through the Lords, you'll be able to be held for 42 days. This is far longer than in any other western democracy.

Like pretty much everyone I know, I've been becoming more and more disgusted with the Labour government. But through it all I clung to the belief that they were the best alternative. And I (usually) still voted for them.

But that's all over now. A party that has so little regard for human rights is not one that I can possibly vote for. I left the party and sent back my membership card in protest over the Ken Livingstone/Frank Dobson fiasco in 2000. I'm beginning to wish that I hadn't as this is a far more important matter to protest over.

The problem is, of course, who do I vote for now? Only the Labour and Conservative parties have a chance of winning my constituency. I've always been physically repulsed by the idea of voting Tory. Is it time to try and overcome that revulsion. Or do I effectively waste my vote by voting Green or for one of the more extreme left wing parties. I suppose I have a year or two to decide.

But this is a sad day in British politics. The modernisation of the Labour Party has gone too far. It's time for "New Labour" to go. We want our party back.

Update: Blimey. A Tory politician with principles. Hats off to David Davies.

Time for our newly elected mayor to start earning his money. I may not agree with him on many things, but I love what he said about George W Bush.

The President is a cross-eyed warmonger, unelected inarticulate, who epitomises the arrogance of American foreign policy.

I wonder if Boris will be meeting Dubya on his forthcoming trip to London. Maybe Boris is a secret supporter of Operation Manticore.

Look, posters based on the this quotation!

Update: Ooh. New! Improved! Pictures

One of the joys of MPs having blogs is that you often get to see what they are really like without their utterances going through the filter of the party spin machine. And it's amazing how often so many of them make complete fools of themselves.

Today's example is Nadine Dorries. Of course as a Tory she's very happy about the results of yesterday's council elections. I can't really blame her for that. But does she channel that happiness into a well-researched and interesting article about why people voted the way they did? Did she write something about how the Tory party can build on this success in order to maximise their chances in the next general election?

I think you can guess the answer to those questions.

No, she wrote some childish nonsense[1] comparing Gordon Brown to Andy Pandy.

Oh dear boys and girls, Gordon's not looking very well today.

Lets put him back in the desk shall we and see if he can face coming out tomorrow.

There's obviously a very good reason why she isn't making large sums of money as a comedy writer.

Voters of Mid Bedfordshire, is this really what you want from your MP? She is making you a laughing stock. Please use your vote more wisely next time.

[1] It's possible that this link might not go to exactly where it needs to. Dorries "blog" (it's not really a blog at all) has a ridiculous URL scheme which means it's impossible to link directly to individual items.

You have to feel sorry for the electorate in Mid Bedfordshire. When they elected Nadine Dorries in 2005, I'm sure they couldn't have know what a huge mistake they had made.

You might recall how she accused Ben Goldacre of publishing parliamentary secrets. When Goldacre pointed out that the facts he had published were in the public domain, she ignored him. When people tried to point out the errors on her web site (which she calls a blog even though it's nothing like one) she responded by removing the ability to comment.

It's therefore nice to be able to report that Ben has caught her out again. This time she is propagating a well-known urban legend which has been doing the rounds for almost ten years. The story goes like this. in 1999 Dr Joseph Bruner carried out an operation on a 21-week-old foetus. During the operation a photo was taken which shows the hand of the foetus apparently holding to the surgeon's finger. Anti-abortion campaigners like to use this image to show that carrying out abortions at this age is wrong.

[Update: Previously I called the photo an "internet hoax". I think that's inaccurate. I'm not saying that the photo is faked. I'm just saying that it doesn't show what the anti-abortionists say that it shows.]

There are (at least) two problems with this. Firstly, Dr Bruner is clear that the foetus was fully anaesthetised throughout the operation. There's no way that the foetus could have moved in the way that some people claim. Secondly, even if the foetus did move in the way described, that is no measure of the long-term viability of the foetus.

Anyway, that's a debate that I don't really want to go into now. The point is that the photo has been around for years and that there has been enough debate on it to at least through severe doubt on the interpretation that the anti-abortionists (and Dorries is a loud member of that group) like to place on it. It has just taken me ten minutes with Google to work that out. Surely it's not too much to ask that our elected representatives put in a bit of effort to verify things they publish as fact.

Let's also remember that Dorries is very keen to mention the fact that she used to work as a nurse. So you might think that she has the medical knowledge to realise that what she is posting as fact is (at the very least) rather suspect. I know that we can't expect MPs to be experts on every subject that they have to deal with. But this is an area where Dorries claims some level of expertise.

I don't know if anyone in Mid Beds reads this blog. But if anyone from the constituency comes across this entry and is considering voting for Dorries in the next general election then I urge you to reconsider. The constituents of Mid Beds deserve better than this.

Update: Dorries has responded to some of the criticism in post that is laughably called "the hand of truth". I suppose we have to give her some credit for responding. Usually she just ignores her critics completely. But her response does absolutely nothing to either address the issues or enhance her reputation as a medical expert. Firstly, she asks why the surgeon would bother to anaesthetise a foetus - apparently forgetting that the mother and the foetus share the same blood - so it's hard to anaesthetise the mother without effecting the child. Secondly, she seems to think that the foetus must have made the incision in the uterus wall that we see in the photo as it's jagged and no surgeon would be so untidy. I didn't realise that a foetus had the strength to break through the mother's skin. If that's the case then surely it' surprising that so many of them get carried to full term.

She also implies that the surgeon might lying about what happened because he's in fear of the "vociferous, and unfortunately violent" pro-choice campaigners in the US. I don't know about you, but I can't ever remember reading about violent pro-choice campaigners. From what I've seen, it's the anti-abortion campaigners that you need to worried about crossing.

But it's how she closes which annoys me the most. She says:

Finally, don't listen to me, don't listen to the pro-abortionists. Trust your own eyes, believe what you see.

And she ensures that you don't listen to the other side of the argument by failing to actually link to any of the criticism (you can find a lot of it by googling for "dorries hand of hope"). To me, that indicates that she isn't interested in a fair debate on the subject. She just wants to lie to the electorate and push her biased view of the world.

Don't believe what you see. Question everything you see and everything you're told. Research the subject and see what the experts say. And decide who you'd rather believe - the surgeon who was carrying out the operation or a stupid MP who is obviously pushing an agenda.

The Metropolitan Police have started a new counter-terrorism campaign which encourages people to report any suspicious activity that they see. Suspicious activity like owning too many mobile phones and taking photographs.

I'm particularly puzzled by the poster about photography. It asks you to report people taking photos of CCTV cameras. Surely if you have a CCTV camera, then you know when people are taking photos of it. The CCTV system will record it.

I'm convinced it's all just another ploy to make people suspicious of each other.

Update: Some lovely remixes of the adverts over at BoingBoing.