It’s a matter of common knowledge that the Daily Express has long since scraped right through the bottom of the barrel and is now busily digging its way to Australia.

Nevertheless, the latest entry in it ongoing ‘thieving foreigners’ series really takes the biscuit:

NOW POLES GET FREE ABORTIONS ON NHS

POSTERS advising Polish women to fly to Britain for free abortions on the NHS sparked outrage ­yesterday.

They urge women to take advantage of EU rules allowing Poles free medical care in the UK.

And it tells them it is cheaper to fly to the UK to end an unwanted pregnancy than to pay for an illegal ­backstreet ­termination in Poland.

The advert – which borrows tastelessly from a famous “Priceless” credit card campaign – is promoted by a Polish feminist group. It was condemned last night for encouraging “abortion tourism”, and piling pressure on the hard-pressed NHS.

Poland has the fourth, or maybe fifth, most restrictive abortion laws in Europe behind the Vatican City, Malta, Andorra, the Irish Republic and, sad to say, Northern Ireland, and that makes thing kind of thing both inevitable and the clearest possible demonstration of the utter futility of  placing draconian restrictions on access to abortion services. continue reading… »

Spring is a time of year that full of firsts. The first newborn lambs. The first snowdrops and daffodills…

…and the first election leaflets to feature an inaccurately drawn graphs, the credit for which appears to be going [inevitably] to the Lib Dems in Camden for this delightful effort>

(Hat Tip: Ben Goldacre)

Obviously, the actual graph that Ben ran across is on the left with my own rather pointed commentary on the right.

So, what are we going to do about this kind of thing?

Rather than run through the usual exercise of taking the piss on a case by case basis, I thought we might try a bit of different approach in an effort to encourage political parties to be a bit more honest in their dealings with the y-axis.

So, today, I’d like to announce the official launch of Liberal Conspiracy’s own Graph-Fix service, which is open to all our readers of whatever political persuasion.

The way the service works is all pretty straightforward.

If you do receive an election leaflet that features a dodgy-looking graph, and it can be any kind of graph from any party, not just the LibDems, then all you need do is send a scan or digital photograph of the graph to me at talkpoliticsuk[at]gmail[dot]com along with the details of the party/candidate responsible and the constituency in which it was delivered.

For purely practical reasons, I would prefer that you only send General Election leaflets – unless you run across something particularly egregious in a local election leaflet – and because there are a fair number of boundary changes this time out, you should also include any information that the leaflet might contain about the source of the information contained in the graph.

I’ll then check the graph for accuracy and, if necessary, redo it so that it provides an accurate visual representation of the information it contains, after which I’ll contact the party in question and send them over a set of corrected image files for future use, including a high quality .eps file for use in their printed materials and jpeg and png files for use on their website.

If we get a few of these, then I’ll also produce a weekly round-up/rogue’s gallery post of the most egregious pieces of y-axis abuse I’ve received that week together with a few suitably sarcastic comments to keep you all entertained.

And that’s all there is to it…

Oh, and regardless of whether you do choose to make use of this service, I would still recommend that you take the time to scan and upload any leaflets you receive to the Straight Choice’s live election leaflet archive.

Oh dear…

Trevor McDonald Meets David Cameron attracted nearly 1.7 million viewers on ITV1 last night, Sunday 14 March – less than half the audience for Gordon Brown’s interview with Piers Morgan on the same network last month.

The Conservative leader opted to submit to a fly-on-the-wall documentary rather than an interview, with McDonald and the cameras following him at work and at home.

ITV1’s resulting 60-minute documentary attracted 1.689 million viewers and a 10.8% share from 10.15pm, according to unofficial overnights.

This compared with Morgan’s interview with Brown, seen by 4.2 million viewers, a 22.7% share, when it screened in the same Sunday-night slot on 14 February.

If that weren’t bad enough, the Guardian are also reporting that Cameron was well beaten in the ratings by both Match of the Day 2, on which the featured games were Man Utd v Fulham and Sunderland v Man City, and by a repeat of episode three of Great British Railway Journeys, which saw Michael Portillo travelling from Todmorden to York with a trip on the Embsey and Bolton Abbey Steam Railway thrown in for good measure.

What else can you say but…

…Mwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

A couple of weeks ago James Graham helpfully documented one of the more rapid reverse ferrets in recent political history; the rapid withdrawal of a wholly idiotic Lib Dem statement made in response to the Science and Technology Committee’s recently published evidence check report on homeopathy. This week, James is back with a revised Lib Dem statement on homeopathy which he bizarrely describes as ’sensible and measured’. Frankly, ‘disingenuous and weaselling’ would be a rather more apt description of the new statement, which reads as follows:

A recent report by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee examined the provision of homeopathy through the NHS and called for funding by the NHS to be stopped. The Committee did recognise that many users derive benefit from its use and did not argue that such treatments should be banned.

When it comes to NHS provision, we support a review by NICE into the cost effectiveness of Complementary and Alternative (CAMs) therapies, including homeopathy; as well as expanding the work of NICE to look at the cost-effectiveness of existing conventional treatments.

The Liberal Democrats believe that, as a basic principle, individuals should have maximum freedom about how they choose to get treated, so long as the therapy is safe. We know that many complementary therapies are popular with the public. The NHS budget is limited and we want to make sure that NHS funding is focused on treatments which are efficacious and cost-effective. NICE reviews of all existing treatments would give us the best possible basis for future decisions over funding.

continue reading… »

Is Alan Johnson right to accuse the Tories of deceit over their recent claim that violent crime has risen by 44% since 1998?

Of course he is, in fact he doesn’t go anything like far enough in his accusations. Not only are the Tories wilfully misrepresenting the evidence provided by the police recorded crime statistics, but they are also pursuing a deliberate and wholly mendacious strategy of seeking to undermine public confidence in the British Crime Survey, a point that Johnson has, as yet, failed to put over forcefully enough.

As evidence, let’s refer back to an article by the Shadow Justice Minister, Dominic Grieve, which was published by the Telegraph in January 2009 under the title ‘Fiddling statistics is no way to restore public confidence”.  In the article, Grieve makes the following claims about the British Crime Survey.

The BCS is an obviously poor measure of violent crime. It does not count homicide offences, rape and multiple assaults. It also excludes some of the most vulnerable victims of violence, including: the homeless, elderly people in care homes, students in digs and – until this year – all children. In fact, we know that police recorded violent crime has nearly doubled since 1997.

Grieve’s suggestion that the BCS is an ‘obviously poor measure of violent crime’ because it does not count homicide offences is as risible as it is boneheaded. The clue here is in the name, British Crime Survey, which explains precisely why it doesn’t count homicide offences – you need to be alive in order to complete the survey form. In any case, homicides accounted for only 662 of the 2.1 million violent offences that the BCS estimated as having taken place in 2008/9, a mere 0.03 percent of the total number of offences. continue reading… »

A new report by the TUC, which is published today to coincide with the start of its annual Women’s Conference, indicates that women are likely to bear the brunt of any job losses resulting from early cuts in public services.

The report, Women and the Recession – One Year On, warns that early public spending cuts would hit female employment hardest because around four in ten women work in public sector occupations, compared to less than two in ten men.

Of particular concern here is the fact that those regions in which women are most likely to rely on the public sector for employment (Wales, the North East and Yorkshire and Humber) also have some of the highest male unemployment rates in the country, making it very likely that early spending cuts, of the kind favoured by the Tories, will result in a substantial rise in the number of families in which neither of the parents are in work.

The report also notes that job losses and other cuts in public expenditure will have a long-term impact on women by substantially reducing their retirement income.

Currently, the average income that women receive in retirement is a third less than the male average, a figure that would be far worse were it not for the superior record of the public sector in providing decent pensions for women and lower-paid staff. With women holding almost two-thirds (64.5 per cent) of defined benefit schemes in the public sector, any cuts in pension rights would disproportionately fall on them.

The report also estimates that women are currently subsidising the public sector to the tune of around £5billion a year in unpaid overtime.

Commenting on the report, TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said:

“Slashing public spending may satisfy fiscal hawks and city traders but it would cause misery to millions of people who have already suffered from the recession. A fresh wave of public sector job losses could leave many families with both parents out of work.

“Many women choose to work in the public sector because it offers secure work with a good work-life balance and a decent retirement income. It’s hardly fair that these are now all under threat thanks to the mistakes of super-rich bankers, who are already back collecting their bonuses.

“When politicians talk about the need for deep spending cuts they rarely say how this would affect ordinary working people. But as our report makes clear – women would have to pay for these cuts with their jobs and pensions.”

The full report can be downloaded here.

I don’t usually do requests, but at the prompting of Watchman in comments, this is part four of my trilogy of posts on teenage pregnancy, and this time we’re looking at whether educational performance makes a difference.

I’ll keep this one short and sweet.

To try and answer Watchman’s question, I went back to the area data for local authorities in England (using data from 2007) and mapped the conception rates and percentage of pregnancies ending in abortion, for women under 18, against GCSE grades, using standard DCSF categories, e.g. the percentage of school levers gaining 5 GSCEs or better at grades A*-C, etc.

The main results are pretty much what most people would expect.

There is a positive correlation between conception rates and the percentage of young women leaving school without any qualifications at all, although the Pearson coefficient (PMCC = 0.4) indicates that the link here is not, perhaps, as strong as many people would expect.

For young women leaving school with at least some qualifications to their name, the correlation between educational performance and conception rates is a bit stronger (PMCC = -0.5 to -0.6) for most of the performance categories.

In general terms, areas with better GCSE results have lower conception rates in women under 18, although the link is a fairly moderate one.

There was, however, one very interesting result in the analysis. continue reading… »

And so we come to the third and final part of my triptych of commentaries on teenage pregnancy, in which we’ll look afresh at the national picture and at:

a) why Labour’s efforts to reduce the number teenage pregnancies by half between 1999 and 2009 proved to be a failure, regardless of what Alex (at Labour List) would like to think and why, in fact, it was never going to be a success; and

b) why social conservatives have nothing at all to crow about here, and are no more likely to succeed in cutting conception rates amongst teenagers than Labour.

To quickly recap the story so far, what we’ve found it that within England there is a strong link between conception, birth and abortion rates for women under 20 and local patterns of socio-economic deprivation.

By looking at data from the EU, we’ve also found regional patterns in Europe that correspond to local patterns in England, with trends in teenage pregnancy rates in areas of low socio-economic deprivation most closely resembling those in Scandinavia, while areas of high socio-economic deprivation show trends that most closely match the Baltic states and other parts of Eastern Europe.

So it seems that the economy is driving teenage pregnancy rates..?

Yes…  and no. continue reading… »

“Foot arrived in the High Street, on what was his 70th anniversary of joining the Labour party, pushing a Zimmer frame that doubled as a seat. When supporters came up to meet him he took his glasses off and tipped his head to one side to listen. At 92 years old he was as articulate as ever.”

“Looking at literature from the BNP that had been circulated locally, he said. ‘They are a disgrace to this country. We had a similar problem with Mosley in the East End. They came in and tried to steam up hatred on racial grounds. Labour led the opposition to Mosley then, and they will do it today with the BNP. People have to vote Labour to stop this.”

The Observer, Sunday May 1st 2005

—–

On behalf of everyone associated with Lib Con, we’d like to express our condolences of Michael’s family and friends.

Last week, I looked at the some of the evidence for the apparent relationship between socio-economic deprivation and conception/abortion rates for English local authorities and arrived at two main conclusions:

1) There is a strong positive correlation between deprivation and conception rates in under 18’s – the more deprived the area, the higher the conception rate.

2) There is, when you exclude London, a solid negative correlation between deprivation and abortion rates – the less deprived the are, the more likely a pregnant teenager is to terminate their pregnancy.

One question that came up several times in comments was, inevitably, that of why England has the highest conception and abortion rates in Europe.

Part of the answer lies in the fact that one follows the other, if you measure both in rates per 1,000 teenagers but that’s only part of the story.

Relative to much of Europe, England has a fairly modest rate of abortions relative to the annual number of conceptions amongst teenagers.
continue reading… »

Do the Tories really want to pick a fight over the issue of teenage pregnancies?

The reason I ask is not just because of the Tory’s latest statistical debacle; although it has to be said that their inability to get a decimal point in the right place hardly inspires confidence in a party that has aspirations of becoming the next government and taking over the running of the economy.

Last year, I put together a (popular) article that sifted some of the facts about teenage pregnancy from the media-driven fiction.

With an election in the offing, and the Tories already threatening to turn this issue into a political Aunt Sally, yet again, its seems to me to be about the right time to revisit this issue again and look at what the evidence has to say rather than what the Daily Mail would like you to believe.
continue reading… »

A senior German Bishop has responded to the latest child abuse scandal to hit the Catholic Church by suggesting to a local daily newspaper that the ’sexual revolution’ of the 1960s and 70s was at fault for abuse by priests.

According to German news website ‘The Local‘, Walter Mixa, the Bishop of Augsberg, told the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung that “The so-called sexual revolution, in which some especially progressive moral critics supported the legalisation of sexual contact between adults and children, is certainly not innocent,” before adding that the media was also at fault.

The article from which these comments are taken can be viewed in slightly mangled English via Google Translate, which gives this version of the Bishop’s remarks

Bishop Mixa emphasized in these “heinous crime” was the “so-called sexual revolution, certainly not innocent.”We have seen in recent decades, especially in the media, an increasing sexualisation of the public, which also promotes abnormal sexual preference rather than limited,” said Mixa.”Especially progressive morality critics had” even the legalization of sexual contact between adults and minors required.

If anyone come up with better translation then the original German language version of this article is here and please do feel free to post your efforts in comments.

The Bishop was commenting on a scandal that engulfed an elite Catholic school in Berlin at the beginning of the year, which kicked off, in January after a former priest who’d taught at the school between 1975 and 1983 admitted to forcing boys into having sex.

Canisius College, which is operated by the Jesuits, has since admitted that systematic sexual abuse did take place during this period and that it undertaken by at least two priests, although one is reported to have denied having had any part in such activities.

In keeping with previous scandals of this kind, these admissions have opened up a sizeable can of worms for the Catholic Church. It’s now thought that more than a hundred former pupils of Canisius have either contacted lawyers, or the school itself, with complaints of sexual abuse, while the Jesuits have issued an apology and admitted to covering up case of abuse at schools in Berlin, Hamburg, St. Blasien, Goettingen and Hildesheim.

The worldwide Jesuit order has also confirmed the existence of similar cases in Spain and Chile.

Earlier this month, Der Spiegel published a report which suggested that at least 10 church employees in Germany are currently facing accusations of sexual abuse and that at least 94 clerics and church laymen have been suspected of abuse since 1995, only 30 of which were prosecuted due to legal time constraints on pursuing cases.

Clearly, the Bishop is hoping that the timing of these cases, which date from the mid to late 1970s and early eighties, will lend some credibility to his efforts to blame clerical involvement in acts of  schoolboy buggery on the media and on the liberalisation of wider society.

This is, however, entirely at odds with the evidence of abuse that emerged as a result of similar scandals in both the US and Irish Republic.

In the US, the John Jay report found evidence of sexual abuse within the American Catholic Church dating back as far as 1950, whiles Ireland’s Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA), which published its finding only last year, uncovered evidence of systematic abuse in Ireland’s state funded but church-run reformatory and industrial schools stretching back to the 1930s. CICA found that sexual abuse, ranging from improper touching and fondling to rape with violence, was endemic in boys’ institutions through the entire period covered by the inquiry, although not so in girls’ schools, where the main risks of sexual abuse came from predatory male employees/visitors and from outside placements.

More importantly, in terms of Bishop Mixa’s comments, much of the evidence, from Ireland in particular, dates from a time long before the ’swinging sixties’ and the so-called ’sexual revolution’, leaving him- and other members of his church – desperately short of a cop out.

It’s not just Conservative Central Office who’re having a few graphic design problems at the moment.

This is the actual poster that The Spectator are using to promote an upcoming education conference called ‘The Schools Revolution’ at which the Tories Education spokesman, Michael Gove, is the headline act:

Does it remind you of anything? Like, say, this…?

Or perhaps this…?

Maybe this makes things a bit more explicit…?

Memo to the Spectator’s design department… not the best choice of colour scheme there guys, D’oh!

A couple of weeks ago, Ben Goldacre bashed out a quick piece for the Guardian’s news desk on the subject of the General Medical Council’s damning verdict on the conduct of Andrew Wakefield, in which he said:

As the years passed by, media coverage deteriorated further. Claims by researchers who never published scientific papers to back up their claims were reported in the newspapers as important new scientific breakthroughs, while at the very same time, evidence showing no link between MMR and autism, fully published in peer reviewed academic journals, was simply ignored. This was cynical, and unforgivable.

That last paragraph is particularly important because it shows one of the more common ways in which mainstream media outlets consistently distorts the truth by selectively highlighting particular claims and/or research on the basis of whether it conforms to an established narrative. Take, for example, yesterday’s Sunday Times, which devoted several hundred words to the uncritical promotion of the latest effluvial outpourings of  TV weatherman and all-round climate crock, Anthony Watts.
continue reading… »

This one comes straight from the file marked ‘It’s our willy and we’ll wave it if we want to’…

If they can mess with our posters, shouldn’t we have fun with theirs?

On Monday Labour launched this poster and Tory Rascal hit back with this…

Fun???

Having given it a bit of thought, I’ve decided to spare Tory Rascal the humiliation of reposting their desperately unfunny attempt to spoof this Labour poster…

…but if you do happen to have a bit of masochistic streak then the links are already there, so you can go see for yourself.

Not that’s a recommendation, of course.

We are talking here about a party that considers Guido’s nose-picking video to be the height of comedic sophistication, so…

…if you’ve got a strong stomach and can manage to picture Barry Chuckle reciting the contents of Stan Boardman’s Big Book of German Knob Gags then you’ll have already got a clear idea of the level that ConHome are operating at and can safely save yourself a few minutes of your life that you might otherwise have wasted.

Seriously, if you are going to try and take the piss out of a poster then at least make the effort to do it properly…

UPDATE

This is fantastic…

I have to say that this is the first time I have ever seen a parliamentary committee publish anything like this…

1 Allegation of Contempt: Mr Trevor Phillips

We met on 9 February to discuss a draft Report on the Equality and Human Rights Commission. It emerged at the start of the meeting that Trevor Phillips, the Chair of the EHRC, had recently spoken to at least three Members of the Committee about the Committee’s consideration of the draft Report and the publication of written evidence with the Report. In our view these discussions could constitute a contempt of both Houses in that they may be an attempt to influence the views of certain Members of the Committee shortly before it considered a draft Report directly relevant to Mr Phillips in his role as Chair of the EHRC. We recommend that the matter should be subject to investigation by the Privileges Committees of both Houses.

This allegation relates to a investigation by the Human Rights Joint Committee into the circumstances that led to several resignations from the EHRC last year.

One of the more common, and thoroughly, dislikeable practices associated with climate change ’skepticism’, creationism/intelligent design and with the peddling of pseudoscience, is that of quote-mining.

Quote-mining is the practice of scouring scientific papers and reports for quotes that can be readily presented out of context in support of the quote-miners preferred position or argument irrespective of whether those quotes provide a fair reflection of the actual contents of the paper. It’s actually a practice that recognised as a logic fallacy, not to mention a form of false attribution and it’s neither a clever nor a particularly honest practice for anyone to engage in.

Sadly, there’s currently a perfect illustration of the fallacious use of quote mining to be found at Devil’s Kitchen; one that relates – unsurprisingly – to one of the key chapters in the IPCC’s AR4 report on Climate Change. continue reading… »

A detailed examination of expenses claims submitted by Nadine Dorries, the Conservative MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, indicates that she submitted almost £70,000 in expenses claims for services provided by two public relations companies in the 2½ years from November 2006 to June 2009.

These claims include more £20,000 for services provided by a PR company, set-up by a former Tory spin doctor in 2004, relating to Dorries’ controversial anti-abortion campaign, which failed to secure a change in the law cutting the upper-time limit for abortions from 24 to 20 weeks.

Dorries has also claimed more than £30,000 for services provided by two other ‘research’ companies with close ties to the Conservative party since becoming an MP in 2005.

Dorries’ official MPs website has also been found to have cost the taxpayer almost £9,000 since 2005 despite it not having been updated at all in the last twelve months.

Responding to reports that his company, Media Intelligence Partners, had received more than £66,000 in payments claimed against MPs expenses, ex Tory spin doctor Nick Wood told the Telegraph that MPs would typically pay for research, and then received PR advice from his company free of charge.

There should be, at least, a full investigation into the use of these companies, on expenses, by Conservative MPs.
continue reading… »

If proof were ever needed of the utter political bankruptcy of the current system of appointing new members to the House of Lords, then this BBC report is it:

Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson nominated as ‘people’s peer’

Paralympic gold medalist Tanni Grey-Thompson is set to become a “people’s peer” after a recommendation from the House of Lords Appointments Commission.

We can skip the next couple of paragraphs, which are just the usual puff about Grey-Thompson’s personal achievments, and move straight on to the punchline:

She will be one of four new non-party-political peers recommended to the Prime Minister by the commission.

The others are Design Council chair and former Whitehall mandarin Sir Michael Bichard, Royal Opera House chief executive and former BBC journalist Tony Hall, and eminent surgeon Professor Ajay Kakkar.

So, our other three ‘people’s peers’ are:-

- A career civil servant and Companion of the Order of the Bath.

- The Chief Executive of the Royal Opera House who’s role and achievements at the BBC are being woefully underplayed to give him a bit of the common touch.

Hall was not just a BBC journalist. He’s a former editor of the Nine O’Clock News, Director of News and Current Affairs Television, Director of News and, in 1999, he was an unsuccessful candidate for the job of Director General. Not uncoincidentally, the achievements section of his CV includes both the launch of Radio 5 Live and, somewhat more relevantly, the launch of BBC Parliament.

As for Professor Ajay Kakkar, my first reaction was ‘who?’, but on looking him up, he’s:-

Professor and Chairman of the Centre for Surgical Sciences at Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary College University of London. Surgeon St Bartholomews Hospital and The Royal London Hospital and Director-Designate Thrombosis Research Institute, London, UK.

Its an impressive looking CV and it appears to come (although its not mentioned) with the obligatory Harley Street practice.

In all, this sheds a bit of interesting light on the appointments process undertaken by the House of Lord Appointments Commission.

On this evidence that appears one of picking a name that people will have heard of, for the sake of a nice headline, and then shoving three other well-stuffed members of the establishment in the behind in the hope that no one will notice just how obvious a piece of utter bullshit this whole ‘people’s peers’ business has been from start to finish.

There’s something I’ve been meaning to have a bit of a rant about for a while, and after listening George Galloway’s verbal excrescences on tonight’s Question Time I can hold back no longer.

If you live in England and you genuinely think that there is something deeply and desperately wrong with the idea of judges making law then you are, without question, an ignorant, mouth-breathing moron who knows nothing of this country’s history and even less about its legal and judicial system.

There, I’ve said it. That feels so much better.

I am thoroughly sick and tired of listening to people whining about so-called ‘judicial activism’, especially when their ritual whining incorporates a shit-load of banal maundering about how Parliament hasn’t done this, or said that or passed a law to the effect of the other as if this somehow invalidates anything and everything the judiciary does that they just don’t like.

If that’s you – and I do appreciate that such a view is not one that widely held by our regular visitors – then just this once I want you to listen up, numb-nuts.

‘Judicial activism’, the whole business of judges making law, is not flaw or a fault in our legal system. It is a feature of that system. continue reading… »