Tagged: dorries

Nadnomics

Nadine Dorries (the MP for mid-Narnia) has been explaining why she is not in favour of all-women short-lists. I have to confess that positive discrimination makes me slightly uncomfortable, so it would have been easy for her to write something that I would have had to grudgingly admit to agreeing with.

Luckily for me, she didn’t do that. She wrote a load of total nonsense.

A lot of it is the usual crap that we have come to expect from Mad Nad. Parliament is a boys club. Women have a hard time there. She only survives because she is “shot through with working class pride”. I’m surprised she didn’t mention that women are generally happier in the kitchen.

That’s all business as usual as far as Dorries is concerned. What’s new (as far as I know) is here introduction of a new branch of statistics (let’s call it “Nadnomics”) which bears no relation to any statistics that I have ever been taught.

Here’s what she says:

As only 30% of applications to become an MP are from women, and that’s after all the hype and window dressing, we have to ask the question, what do women really want? Because it’s becoming pretty obvious that 70% of them don’t want to be an MP.

That’s a pretty astonishing leap of logic. Because 30% of applications to become MPs are from women, that must mean that 70% of women don’t want to be MPs.

Let’s take this nice and slowly for the slow of understanding. We have a population of people who have applied to become an MP. How big do we think that this population is? Well, Nad doesn’t say but we can estimate some figures. There are about 650 constituencies in the country. Let’s assume that on average they have five candidates standing and that each party has six people applying to stand in each constituency. That gives us about 20,000 people trying to be an MP at any time. The true number will be lower than that as I’m completely ignoring the fact that the majority of MPs don’t stand down at an election and their places on the ballot paper are therefore uncontested.

So we have a vague estimate of 20,000 people who want to be an MP. If we believe Nad’s numbers,  14,000 (70%) of them are men and 6,000 (30%) are women. Let’s make up another number and assume that there are at any time 20 million men and 20 million women who are eligible to become an MP. This means that 0.07% of men and 0.03% of women want to become an MP. A long way from the numbers that Nadnomics gave us.

Yes, I was making up numbers all over the place. And the margin of error in my calculations is huge. But it would need to astronomical (which it isn’t) in order to get anywhere near the Nadnomics numbers.

And I haven’t even started to question Nad’s source data. Where does that 70/30 figure come from? Is it from the Tory party? Or has she aggregated data from all parties? Perhaps other parties have different percentages. Has she considered that?

Yes, there’s a problem that women are criminally under-represented in Parliament. And yes, there’s an interesting debate to be had around whether or nor all-women short-lists are the best way to address this problem. But throwing around ridiculous numbers like this is not the best way to approach it.

Voters of Mid-Beds, your MP is a fool. Please don’t re-elect her.

1970 Calling

Nadine Dorries seems to be writing her blog today from about forty years ago. She’s talking about single mothers.

I like the idea that we can introduce a structure that will capture 16 and 17 year old girls and teach them parenting skills, help them to acquire the knowledge which will enable them to run a home, manage a budget, cook meals, feed
and nurture a baby and learn to value and respect themselves.

How you got that? Parenting skills, running a home, cooking meals and looking after babies – that’s all woman’s work. Presumably the men are all too busy off hunting mammoths.

Oh, she mentions boys too. But only insofar as we should stop them getting young girls pregnant. Of course the whole thing is driven by Dorries’ belief that the way to stop children having sex is to stop sex education classes in school. Because, of course, without measured and practical advice from school children would never get the idea to experiment with sex. I mean they’d never get that idea from, oh pretty much anywhere they look in society.

The people of Mid Beds elected her to represent her. If she’s at all representative, then I’m really glad I don’t live in Mid Beds.

Oh look. Now I’ve gone and got all angry.

Update: A far more measured dissection from Sara Bedford.

Not A Broadcast Medium

How do you use Twitter? Do you see it as a tool for interacting with people, or do you simply use it as a broadcast medium? Is it a place for dialogue or monologue?

I started thinking about this over the weekend whilst thinking about Nadine Dorries, the MP for Middle England. Back in May, Dorries had a very strong opinion on Twitter. She wrote:

In discussion over lunch today the conclusion was reached that twitters use twittering, by and large, to moan and complain. It’s a virtual gnashing of the teeth, or beating of the chest. A cyberspace ‘well I never’.

And:

Twittering has to be a symptom of a dysfunctional society.

Before reaching the conclusion:

Anyway, safe to say, I shan’t be joining the legions of twitters any day soon.

It was therefore surprising, to say the least, to see @NadineDorriesMP appear on Twitter late last week. She did, however, acknowledge her change of heart:

I did attack Twitter initially and for that I do eat humble pie, however, you will never know when the milk in my fridge is out of date or I’ve run out of tea bags, of that you can be sure.:)

Whether she’ll be true to her word this time, only time will tell. But it’s interesting to watch how she uses Twitter. Out of almost thirty tweets, only two of them have been replies to people. A few more mention other Twitter users. But the vast majority of her tweets are just a broadcast message and there’s no evidence of her actually engaging in discussion with anyone over her opinions. Twitter search shows that there are plenty of people trying to engage with her, but she has so far chosen to ignore them.

You can also look at the number of people who she follows on Twitter. As I write, that’s eleven. There are close three hundred people following her, but she’s only interested in reading what eleven twitterers have to say. That’s not a ratio which makes me think she’s interested in hearing other points of view or getting involved in conversations.

That’s when I realised that there are two different ways that people use Twitter. Most people (or, at least, most people I follow) see it as a powerful way to interact with people. Even people who have huge numbers of followers engage with at least some of their followers. Take, for example, three people who I follow who have huge followings – Tim O’Reilly, Stephen Fry and Neil Gaiman. If you look at their tweets, you’ll see that they’re full of replies and retweets. These are people who are using Twitter to build and deepen the relationships they have with their followers. You’ll also notice that they all follow large numbers of people. They all know that the more people tweets that you read, the more interesting stuff you’ll find and the more useful Twitter will become to you.

On the other hand, there are the people who see Twitter as just a broadcast medium. People who just speak and don’t listen. People who only like the sound of their own voice – or, at least, don’t mind giving that impression. These people (and Dorries is only the most recent example I’ve found – I won’t embarrass any others by naming them) seem to only be using Twitter because it’s the newest platform for getting their message out there. They seem to have no interest in talking about their ideas. They aren’t interested in what we have to say in reply. That may not be a true representation of how they feel, but by not talking to people on Twitter that’s the impression they are giving.

It’s something that can be measured. I think there are three ways that you can measure someone’s “socialability” on Twitter.

  • The ratio of the number of people they follow to the number of people who follow them
  • The percentage of their tweets that contain references to other twitterers
  • The percentage of their tweets that are retweets

Twitter makes it easy to get this data for all accounts. I think it would be an interesting project to rank Twitter users by how socialable they are. But like all good ideas, I’m sure that someone else has beaten me to it. I’ve done a quick bit of Googling, but I can’t find anything obvious, so if anyone knows of a site that produces these stats, please let me know in the comments.

And to Nadine Dorries (if she ever reads this), please interact more.

Unsaying Things on the Internet

I think that one of the reasons that a certain type of politician is wary of the internet is that once you’ve said something on the internet, it becomes very hard to unsay it. If you’re used to dealing with the world of newpapers and broadcast media where everything is ephemeral then it must be quite a culture shock to deal with a medium where everything is archived and people can carefully compare what you said last week with what you are saying today. Of course, if something is published on your own web site you’d think that it was easy enough to alter what you wrote and claim that we’ve always been at war with Eurasia. But it’s not that simple.

Here’s a good case in point. Last week Nadine Dorries wrote a piece on her blog entitled “All’s Fair in War and Politics”, where she questioned the credentials of one of her opponents. It was an astonishing piece and not something that a careful politician would ever write. Here’s what she said:

My Labour opponent had a very strong letter in the Beds On Sunday this week.

In the letter he deployed his usual tactic of distorting the facts,
something I’m becoming used to these days; however, he also said:

“I fought for as a soldier in Iraq in 2003”.

Anyone who reads my blog will know how pro-military I am.

I stand in awe and admiration of our soldiers, their professionalism and bravery.

Only last week, I wrote of how moved I was when I heard a Scots
Dragoon Guard use his moment on TV to talk about the moment a soldier
receives his pre-assignment message: ‘ contact with the enemy is
certain’ – and what it is that fires that soldier on, one of our
heroes, into battle.

So, you can imagine, when I read the words “I fought as a soldier in
Iraq” I was quite impressed. Gosh, thought I, good job I’m the MP or I
may be tempted to vote for him myself.

Only, did he fight in Iraq? Did he go out into the danger zones
along with the a regiment on Op Telic 8, and risk his life and limb
side by side with our soldiers, for the sake of freedom and democracy?
The values for which he claims to have “fought in Iraq” .

I will be interested to find out the answer.

Claiming to be a hero when you write a political letter as the
Labour candidate in a newspaper is a very big claim indeed. One that
secures advantage and wins you votes.

Let’s hope it’s true.

I got that from Google’s cache of the site because it’s no longer on her web site. It seems that someone has had a quiet word in her ear and the piece has been somewhat toned down. Here’s what it currently says (I’m not just linking to it in case it changes again in the future):

The local press are picking this up now, I will leave it up to them.

Anyone who reads this blog will understand that I have the hugest regard for all serving military personnel, TA, Army, Navy and Air Force and consider myself very lucky indeed to have two bases in my constituency. RAF Henlow, Chicksands and a TA training base.

I talk to many soldiers, regular and TA before they leave to serve, and as detailed in my blog, ‘A Soldiers Tale’, when they arrive home. I know and understand well exactly the danger and the operations they engage in.

However, the one thing I have learnt over the last few weeks is that in the battlefield of politics, one needs to be absolutely honest AND precise. Nothing less will do.

Which is, I hope you’ll agree, completely different to the original piece. It’s so watered down that the original point has been completely lost (it’s like homeopathic blogging!)

I’m not sure what Dorries intended by editing this post. Or, more importantly, editing this post without saying what she had done. A more responsible blogger would have struck through the original text and left a note saying why it had been done. Or, if the text needed to be removed for legal reasons, replaced it with a note explaining what had happened.

Editing text without any explanation really looks like that you’re intending to fool people into thinking that the current version is what you had always believed. And that’s dishonest. And we don’t expect dishonesty from our MPs[1]. Luckily the internet has a longer memory than that.

We have always been at war with Oceania.

[1] Well, ok, yes. Of course we do expect dishonesty from our MPs. But we shouldn’t.

Supporting Mad Nad

I find myself in the extremely odd position of having to support Nadine Dorries. I mean, obviously I despise the woman. And I don’t think she ever wrote a word on her blog that I agreed with. But I do think that she should be allowed to spout whatever nonsense she wants without having lawyers shutting her down. It’s appalling that any ISP will just remove a blog on the basis of a letter from lawyers. Nadine may be barking mad, but she hasn’t been found guilty of any crime.

Craig Murray explains in more detail, so I don’t have to.

So, whoever’s making a list of bloggers who object to this action, please include me on the list.

A Missing Blog

Looks like Nadine Dorries might have gone too far this time.

She’s been on extremely dodgy ground for the last week, since the Daily Telegraph’s investigation into MPs’ expenses started looking at her. Over the last week she’s been posting an increasing bizarre stream of consciousness on her blog. She tried to explain what was going on with here expenses but only succeeded in raising more questions than she answered.

Over the last couple of days, she excelled herself with three astonishing claims.

  • MPs are really worried that this investigation will lead to suicides in their ranks.
  • MPs were told to see the Additional Costs Allowance as part of their salary and were encouraged to spend as much of it as possible.
  • The Telegraph’s investigation into expenses is a plot by the Barclay brothers (who own the paper) in order to destabilise the main parties and boost UKIP’s chances at the forthcoming European Elections.

Yesterday she did a round of media appearances where she repeated all of these claims and compared the Telegraph’s investigation to a McCarthyite witch-hunt. This was too much for David Cameron, who publicly rebuked her – she denied this on her blog but it got plenty of press coverage.

You’ll notice that I haven’t backed any of this up with links to her blog. That’s because it doesn’t seem to be around at the moment. It seems that The Telegraph objected to her article and sent in the lawyers. That’s a shame, especially given that she was doing such a good job of digging her own political grave.

Blogging Nonsense

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.

Nadine Dorries is Confused Again

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 throw 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’s 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.

Nadine Dorries’ “Blog”

Nadine Dorries is the MP for Mid Bedfordshire. On her web site she has something that she calls a blog, although it only really resembles one superficially. Up until a couple of days ago, the biggest problem with it was that it didn’t allow linking to a particular entry, you could only link to a page containing all of the entries on a particular day. A couple of days ago things changed and the site became even less blog-like.

You’ll have seen the recent news about the Commons science and technology committee’s report on the abortion law. Dorries was one of two members of that committee (the other was Bob Spinks) who didn’t agree with the report’s findings and issued their own “minority report“.

In that report they say this:

We were greatly concerned to read in the Guardian on 27 October an article clearly aimed at undermining the credibility of Professor John Wyatt, which contained detailed information about Wyatt’s evidence, which was passed by him to the committee after his oral evidence session, and which could only have been passed on to the journalist concerned by a member of the Select Committee. There should be an enquiry about how this information got into the public domain and as to whether such a personal attack represents a serious breach of parliamentary procedure..

The author of the article in question was Ben Goldacre of the Bad Science web site. In a blog posting, Goldacre points out that the information that Dorries and Spinks are so concerned about him having access to is all in the public domain.

Readers of Goldacre’s blog tried valiantly to post comments to Dorries’ blog explaining her error, but none of these comments were published. Eventually Dorries posted another entry on her blog explaining that she would no longer be publishing any comments on blog. She claims that it’s because she doesn’t have time to moderate the comments before posting them. A cynic may well think that it’s because she doesn’t want to run the risk of people pointing out her errors.

And this is, of course, where Dorries’ web site loses all right to be called a blog. Too many politicians are deliberately misunderstanding the point of blogging. A blog is a great way to build up an interaction with your audience (in the case of an MP, your constituents) but too often these days we see blogs just being used as a monologue rather than a conversation. Even when sites allow comments, too many people prefer to remove (or not publish in the first place) comments that show them in a bad light or try to hold them accountable for their mistakes.

Of course, people should be free to publish or not publish whatever they want on their web sites. but if you’re not prepared to have a decent conversation with your readers, then don’t call it a blog. It’s just a marketing tool.

More on this from several other blogs. And Tim has set up an alternative place for people to comment on Dorries’ output.