Tagged: politics

The War You Don’t See

If people really knew the truth the war would be stopped tomorrow.

This quotation from David Lloyd George, talking about the First World War, opens John Pilger‘s new documentary, “The War You Don’t See”, and it immediately sets the historical context for Pilger’s main argument. War has, of course, always been terrible and governments have always sought to conceal the truth of that from the general population. But it’s only really with recent invention of the embedded journalist that the media has become a knowing partner in this deception.

Pilger has plenty of evidence to back up his claim. At one end of the spectrum he questions important people from the BBC and ITV news teams about their coverage of the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the reporting of this year’s attack on the Gaza Flotilla by the Israelis. In both cases he rather runs up against a brick wall as the news organisations claim that they couldn’t have known that Iraq had no WMDs or that it was impossible to find a decent Palestinian spokesperson to put their side of the story on the main bulletins. At the other end of the scale he has Rageh Omaar and David Rose (formerly of the Observer) apologising for their part in perpetuating the myth of the practically bloodless liberation of Iraq.

Then there are the statistics. In the First World War, 10% of the casualties were civilians. Through all subsequent wars, that number increased until in the Invasion of Iraq it reached 90%. These are terrifying numbers and numbers that our governments would rather not have us dwelling on.

Pilger has plenty of explanations for this collapse of journalistic standards. Firstly there is the threat to the embedded journalist that anyone going off-message will suddenly lose all access to the people in power. Secondly, there is the constant need to fill 24-hour rolling news schedules. And then there are all the reasons covered in depth by Nick Davies in “Flat Earth News” – cutbacks in budgets, pressure to be first with a story (no matter how under-researched) and the rise of churnalism.

Towards the end of the documentary, Pilger looks at what might take the place of journalists if they can no longer do their job and interviews Julian Assange. This shows how recently the film was completed as it mentions the Wikileaks cables and the attacks on Assange.

The documentary gets its TV première on IYV1 at 10:35 tomorrow night, but tonight it was shown at a number of cinemas around the country and was followed by a Q&A with Pilger who was at the Curzon Cinema in central London. The questions covered much of the same ground as the film and Pilger was happy to go into more detail about his motivations for making the documentary – apparently it wasn’t his idea, the original idea came from within ITV. Someone asked what we can do to help Julian Assange and Pilger suggested joining the protest outside Westminster Magistrates Court when Assange appears there again tomorrow. The protest starts at 1pm.

It’s been a while since John Pilger made a documentary, but it has been worth the wait. This film is as good as anything he has made.

Bread and Circuses

The country is broke, students are rioting and it’s about to start snowing.

But that’s OK as a scion of our great and glorious ruling family has announced that he is getting married next year. And, to demonstrate their benevolence, our rulers have granted the lower orders an extra day off from our toil so that we can also celebrate the occasion. In fact we’ll have two four-day weekends separated by a three-day working week. Truly the generosity of our betters knows no bounds. Long may they rule over us.

Bread and circuses, my friends. It’s all just bread and circuses.

Conversations with CateyMaxx

Summarising @Nadine_MP‘s “informed consent” ideas: A woman can’t have an abortion until a christian nutter has tried to scare her out of it?

That’s the content of a tweet that I sent just before 6pm last night. I thought it nicely summed up the reasons behind Nadine Dorries’ recent speech in Parliament. I didn’t, of course, expect everyone to agree. I wasn’t prepared for the response I got from one corner of the internet.

Having sent the tweet, I went out for the night. Had it not been the era of the smartphone, I would have been completely cut off from the internet for the next few hours. But as I arrived at the venue I checked Twitter to find three tweets from CateyMaxx. For those of you who don’t know, CateyMaxx has been one of a small number of people who have been supporting Nadine Dorries over recent weeks. She said:

CateyMaxx: @davorg lol evening Dave – your usual Stirring self I see! You don’t believe that crap so why on EARTH do you say it? [6:28]

CateyMaxx: @davorg & also – what’s with the ‘Christian nutter’ jibe? @Nadine_MP is advocating informed choice – where do her religious beliefs come in? [6:30]

CateyMaxx: @davorg always presuming, of course, u know & understand her religious beliefs b’cos I certainly don’t! Maybe u’ve had a convo with her? [6:31]

Over the next ten minutes I sent her some replies – which she, in turn, replied to. I think I’ve reconstructed the order correctly here, but we’re often typing across each other.

davorg: @CateyMaxx We already have informed choice [Yes - I meant "consent", not "choice"] – just not of the kind Nadine wants to see. [7:20]

CateyMaxx: @davorg I’m sure you know all about the choice that’s available to pregnant women? You’re so unnecessarily pedantic. [7:21]

davorg: @CateyMaxx She’s definitely a christian – she has said as much. And she hangs around with mutters [Typo: that should be "nutters" - I hope that's obvious] like Christian Concern For Our Nation. [7:23]

davorg: @CateyMaxx Informed concent is already a legal requirement before any major medical procedure. [7:27]

CateyMaxx: @davorg ok, so let’s be clear – you say ‘Christian Concern’ (who @Nadine_MP as u put it ‘hangs around with’ are nutters? Can you elucidate? [7:27]

CateyMaxx: @davorg but it’s the TYPE of information which is accessible to ppl that matters . .surely. All @Nadine_MP is trying to do is make more [7:28]

davorg: @CateyMaxx Anyway, I’d love to chat more but I’m at a gig and the first band is about to come on. Have a nice evening. [7:28]

CateyMaxx: @davorg info to a wider no. of ppl – so they no the mental, emotional aswell as physical implications of abortion. What is wrong with that? [7:29]

CateyMaxx: @davorg lol . .you too! [7:29]

And that’s where we left it. Or, at least, that’s what I though. I dipped back into Twitter a couple of hours later whilst waiting for the headliners to come on, only to see this:

CayeyMaxx: New Blog Post: Tory Totty Online: Is OCD Sweeping the Blogosphere? http://bit.ly/91JJsf [9:17]

I replied as soon as I saw it and we got into another conversation.

davorg: @CateyMaxx Nicely done. Writing an attack on me like that when you know I’m busy and won’t be able to respond for 12 hours. [9:39]

CateyMaxx: @davorg Havent written an ‘attack’ on you – merely reported what’ on your blog. Why? What’s up? [9:40]

davorg: @CateyMaxx And missing out my side of tonight’s conversation was a nice touch. You’ve been learning from the masters :-) [9:42]

CateyMaxx: @davorg thats because you LEFT the conversation and didn’t answer me lol Its all there in b&w. No-ones attacking u – dont be so sensitive [9:43]

davorg: @CateyMaxx I wrote 4 or 5 replies to you which are missing from your blog post. That’s hardly balanced reporting. [9:47]

davorg: @CateyMaxx Hope your blog comments are working early tomorrow morning :-) [9:48]

CateyMaxx: @davorg in that case . . .I will go back and have a look and then put them in the post . . . . the comments are working fine. Feel free. [9:53]

CateyMaxx: @davorg Oh yes – I’ve found them. Will add them to the post now ok? :-) [9:54]

davorg: @CateyMaxx Thank you. I’ll a comment tomorrow. Must go again. Tunng are about to come on. [9:57]

And at that point, I settled in to enjoy Tunng and CateyMaxx wandered off to do whatever she does at that time on a Saturday night (I think it might involve watching the X Factor results programme).

Obviously I’ll come back to this later today and respond to the points that she made, but I just wanted to start by setting the scene and getting the full conversation written out in the order that it happened.

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.

Complicated Voting System

The Daily Mail never misses an opportunity to push its agenda, does it. Writing about the Labour Leadership election today, Nicola Boden says:

Once regarded as the dark horse in the competition, the energy
spokesman, 40, took the crown thanks to the party’s complicated voting
system.

“Complicated”? How can you possibly describe the single transferable alternative vote as “complicated”? Unless, of course, you’re writing for a publication that is trying to persuade its readers that any deviation from first past the post is unnatural.

Update: Corrected STV to AV. And that, of course, makes the Mail’s comments even more political. AV is the voting system that we’re due a referendum on.

Email From The PM

We’re all, no doubt, used to getting 419 scams in email. I get several a day, but they’re not often as brazen as this.

PRIME MINISTER’S OFFICE

TREASURY AND MINISTER FOR THE CIVIL SERVICE,

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM.

Our ref: ATM/13470/IDR

Your ref:…Date: 14/09/2010

IMMEDIATE PAYMENT NOTIFICATION

I am The Rt Hon David Cameron MP,Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury and Minister for the Civil Service British Government. This letter is to officially inform you that (ATM Card Number 7302 7168 0041 0640) has been accredited with your favor. Your Personal Identification Number is 1090.The VISA Card Value is £2,000,000.00(Two Million, Great British Pounds Sterling).

This office will send to you an Visa/ATM CARD that you will use to withdraw your funds in any ATM MACHINE CENTER or Visa card outlet in the world with a maximum of £5000 GBP daily.Further more,You will be required to re-confirm the following information to enable;The Rt Hon William Hague MP First Secretary of State for British Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. begin in processing of your VISA CARD.

(1)Full names: (2)Address: (3)Country: (4)Nationality: (5)Phone #: (6)Age: (7)Occupation: (8) Post Codes

Rt Hon William Hague MP.

First Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs

Email; bfcaffairs@info.al
Tel: +447405235350

TAKE NOTICE: That you are warned to stop further communications with any other person(s) or office(s) different from the staff of the State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs to avoid hitches in receiving your payment.

Regards,

Rt Hon David Cameron MP

Prime Minister

I’ve left the contact details in there as I feel sure that William Hague doesn’t really use an Albanian email address:-)

The email pretends to come from an address at the directgov.uk domain (note, not direct.gov.uk) and the reply-to address goes to Thailand.

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.

Polite Discourse

So today was the day that I was called a “sack of shit” by one of the UK’s most popular political bloggers.

It was all pretty silly really. I didn’t even really disagree with what he had written. I just pointed out that his blog entry had two completely unattributed quotations.

It’s Iain’s blog, of course, so it’s completely up to him whether or not he wants to publish unattributed quotations. My point was that not to do so might lead people to wonder where they came from. It’s so easy to link to sources on the web that if you don’t you run the risk of arousing suspicion.

I found a reference for one of the quotes (it was a parliamentary Early Day Motion – they aren’t hard to find), but Google came up blank for the other. I had assumed that it came from a blog post, but that no longer looked likely. I asked Iain if he had made it up. I didn’t believe for a second that he had invented it (although, of course, he has previous in this area), I was just demonstrating the conclusions that it was possible to reach from the information he had made available.

And that’s when he might have overreacted just a touch in his reply. A suspicious person might wonder why that touched such a nerve, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt (I’m sure he’d do the same for me). I pointed to his reply on Twitter and he responded:

@davorg Next time don’t make groundless allegations. if you can’t stand the heat, and all that…

I made no allegation, let alone a groundless one.

Bizarrely, even though he took such obvious umbrage at my question, he followed my advice and edited his blog post so that it included a link to the EDM. He also stated in his reply that the other quotation came from a private email. So I got all the answers I wanted. Which was nice.

When you’re blogging you can choose the amount of reference material that you show to your readers. I like to link to any articles that I’m quoting and generally throw in as many links as possible to my sources so that my readers can make up their own minds about my interpretations of what I’m writing about. Other people deal in scurrilous rumour or unsubstantiated gossip. You wouldn’t expect them to link to their sources. That’s their choice. It’s their blog. They can follow their own rules. Whatever makes them comfortable.

In my opinion, showing your sources is treating your readers as adults. It’s trusting them to draw their conclusions about what you’re writing. It’s showing your working for extra credit. Giving your readers no information about your sources is treating them like idiots. It’s a tabloid style of blogging and whenever I come across that style of blogging it makes me wonder what they are hiding.

In my mind, showing your sources equates to quality blogging. Not doing so is suspect.

I don’t expect  everyone to agree with me. I do, however, expect to be able to make these suggestions on one of the UK’s most read political blogs without the blog author calling me a sack of shit.

That’s just rude.