Yor mission, should ou choose to accept it, is to help out with tagging the political links and associations of some panelists.

What I’m actually looking for is information and opinions on some of the other, less obviously political names on the list, either in terms of a verified link to British political party – I thnk we all know now that Carol Vorderman is rabid Tory, even if that wasn’t entirely obvious until she appeared on the show, or a reliable assessment of where they sit on the standard left-right political axis.

To keep it simple, stick to left, right and centre as answers where possible, although I’ll also take with neutral or independent if you feel that someone is genuinely operating outside the usual categories.

Final instructions if you do feel like ptiching in:

- any responses in comments and not via Twitter please, as its just easier to keep track of things that way

- no tracking people down via Twitter to ask them about their political views if you don’t already know where they stand, it;s not nice to hassle people for trivial reasons, and

- for the avoidance of any doubt, the Brian Cox who appears on the list is the actor, not the scientist.

So now, without further ado, on with the list, which is given in rank order by number of appearances:

Lord Alton, the crossbench peer who obtained the new figures, said: “I have written to Lord Howe setting out a number of concerns about how Parliament came to be so very badly misled about the costs to the NHS associated with abortion.

I think the most pressing concern Lord Howe needs to address is why Lord Alton’s can’t understand his own bloody correspondence.

There’s a long background here. For several years, Lord Alton and others have been chasing the cost to the NHS of the abortion services that are contracted out to independent providers.

Every time (questions and responses here) the government’s position has been entirely consistent – those figures were not available because they weren’t collated centrally and at no point has the government ever suggested otherwise.

You can argue that the government should have asked PCTs to include these figures in their central cost returns. But it didn’t and as a result Lord Alton and others have been clearly advised on no less than 11 occasions in the last three years that figures for the direct costs of commissioned abortion services were not available.

So when you’re told that the NHS spends £83 million a year on terminations, excluding any figures for independent sector contracts, and that the independent sector carries out more than 100,000 abortions a year, compared to 70,000 or so by the NHS – it doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out there’s a big chunk of money somewhere that hasn’t been fully accounted for.

The NHS’s estimated average unit cost for a termination – £680 – is inflated by the inclusion of costs relating to non-elective procedures. These procedures are not undertaken by independent organisations and if we exclude them the average cost comes to around £580.

There are two key points to make here.

First, Lord Howe is proposing a new method of calculating the cost of abortion services to the NHS that is woefully inadequate and gives an innaccurate and vastly over-inflated estimate. More of that here.

It will over-inflate cost estimates of abortions in the UK by anything from 40-50% if adopted. We need to act quickly to stop from happening before it starts generating ammunition for the anti-abortion lobby.

Second, even Lord Howe openly acknowledges that independent organisations like BPAS and MSI provide abortion services at a cost below standard NHS tariffs. This discredits the anti-abortion lobby’s claims that service providers are acting unethically to boost their revenues.

Full details
Abortionomics
Abortionomics 2 – Warning, May Contain Evidence

From what I can tell, the BBC’s report started out the headline “Internet is ‘changing our memory’” but have since backed off a little and are now running the story as ‘Internet’s memory effects quantified in computer study’.

The Guardian – with perhaps more than half an eye on climbing Google’s own search rankings with its take on the story – has gone for the headline; ‘Poor memory? Blame Google.

But the prize of the most absurd piece of scaremongering is, at least for the time being, shared by the San Francisco Chronicle with ‘Google is Destroying our Memories, Scientists Find.

All these reports are based on a single piece of research published in the journal ‘Science’ for which, currently, only the abstract is available without paying a subscription fee.

As abstracts go, this one doesn’t really give us much to work with:

The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can “Google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.

But we can glean a little more detail from the report that appears in the Guardian:

The research, published in Science magazine, involved a series of experiments. In one, participants were given pieces of information to type into a computer. Half were told the computer would retain the information and the other half were told it would be erased.

Participants “did not make the effort to remember when they thought they could later look up the trivia statements they had read,” the researchers reported. In another experiment, when participants were given information and folder names in which they were stored, they were better at recalling the folder names than the information.

“The results … suggest ‘where’ was prioritised in memory, with the advantage going to ‘where’ when ‘what’ was forgotten,” the researchers said.

In fact its not the least bit surprising at all, nor does it indicate that Google is somehow altering, zapping or destroying our memory at all.

What is changing is the way in which we are using our memory. We are doing nothing more than adapting to a change in our external environment and adopting a slightly different, but somewhat more efficient way of using of memory in response to those changes.

It takes time and energy – and, therefore, resources such as food – to build up all those memories, so the more we clutter up our brains with extraneous information the more time and energy we’re expending on that activity as opposed to other activities that may be just as important, if not more important, to our personal chance of surviving long enough to procreate and pass on our genes to the next generation.

What the internet provides is a more efficient and, given the limitations of human memory, more reliable means of storing information that would otherwise be available if we had to rely solely on our own memory.

In terms of our own individual biological economy, remembering where important information can be located, be that on the internet or simply in a public library is much more cost effective strategy for stroring and recalling information than one that requires us to try to cram all that information in to our own head.

For most of human history – between 99.7% and 99.925% – our species has been wandering around the planet and doing fairly well for itself without ever feeling the need to cram our head full of stuff like literature, mathematics, physics, history or anything else that we’ve been insisting on cramming into the heads of all offspring for the last century or so.

The concerned, if not fear-laden, tone of many of these articles makes sense only if you assume that its natural for humans to carry huge amounts of information around in their head when, in reality, this is an entirely unnatural activity and one what has emerged only very recently in human history.

The amendment calls for ‘independent’ abortion counselling for women who want an abortion, with the aim of excluding respected organisations such as BPAS and others, and is tacked to the contentious Health and Social Care Bill.

She wrote:

The British Association of Counsellors and Pyschotherapists (BACP) which has 32,000 individual and organisational members has declared its support for women to receive independent pre and post abortion counselling and has backed our amendment to the HSCB (Health and Social Care Bill). The following press release has been issued

The same press release has also been published at Dorries’s ‘Right To Know‘ campaign website.

So blogger Tim Ireland took the liberty of contacting the BACP press office with a couple of questions which aimed to clarify the organisation’s exact position on the contents of Dorries’ press release and on her proposed amendments.

Tim put the following questions to BACP:

Can you please confirm the accuracy of this quote on the site of Nadine Dorries (in bold) and point me in the direction of the source document? I cannot find a corresponding press release on your site.

Also, what is your position on CareConfidential’s non-disclosure of their anti-abortion position? They claim on their website to offer “unbiased pregnancy and abortion counselling”.

And this is the ful text of the response supplied by Phillip Hodson on behalf of BACP [my emphasis]:

Dear Tim,

1. In response to an enquiry, BACP issued a statement saying it believes counselling should be an independent accountable and ethical process free from ideological bias and manipulation. This is in accordance with our Ethical Framework which gives a paramount place to the needs and values of clients.

2. Our statement in its entirety reads as follows:

“BACP believes that all women (and their partners if required) considering terminating a pregnancy should be offered free, independent, unbiased and ethical abortion counselling at any point, supplied by trained counsellors. Counselling can help women (and their partners if required), reflect on and understand the often complicated feelings surrounding termination, and can aid decision-making. Counselling can also help women come to terms with the psychological consequences of the decisions they make. BACP respects that the laws governing termination of pregnancy in Northern Ireland are laid down in statute and fully understands that counsellors who work in this field in Northern Ireland should pay due regard to the document: Guidance on the Termination of Pregnancy: The Law and Clinical Practice in Northern Ireland”.

3. Since 2002, in accordance with our key message that counselling ought to be part of the nation’s healthcare, BACP has been calling for a better pre- and post-abortion counselling service. See endnote [i].

4. BACP has never suggested or implied that organisations like BPAS and Marie Stopes International should stop providing abortion advice or any of their other ancillary services. Counselling and advice-giving are in any case separate activities – “counsellors never give advice”.

5. BACP has no involvement with the organisation CARE CONFIDENTIAL and we confirm that it is not a member of our Association.

6. BACP is an acronym for THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR COUNSELLING AND PSYCHOTHERAPY and not as stated in Ms Dorries’ press release. We currently have nearly 36,000 members – not 32,000 as stated in Ms Dorries’ press release.

Phillip Hodson

It is entirely clear from Phillip Hodson’s response that…

1. BACP have issued nothing more than a general position statement in response to an enquiry – and Tim is enquiring as to who made that enquiry.

2. That BACP have NOT offered full-throated support for Dorries’s amendment, in fact their statement draws a clear distinction between abortion advice and counselling and states explicitly that:

BACP has never suggested or implied that organisations like BPAS and Marie Stopes International should stop providing abortion advice or any of their other ancillary services.

This goes entirely against the express intent of Dorries’s amendments, which does seek to prevent BPAS and Marie Stopes International providing information and advice relating to abortion.

It does NOT look like the BACP is not giving its full backing to Dorries.

This is not the first occasion like this either. During her ’20 Reasons for 20 Weeks’ campaign in 2008, she claimed that Marie Stopes International was in favour of her proposal to reduce the upper time limit for legal abortions in the UK, prompting the organisation to issue the following statement:

Contrary to assertions on Nadine Dorries’ campaign website Marie Stopes International (MSI) does NOT favour a reduction of the abortion time limit. We hereby reaffirm our continued and unyielding support for 24 weeks and respect for the needs and rights of women to access abortion at later gestation.

Dorries and her supporters claim that she isn’t pushing abstinence-only sex education and, of course, use this claim to deflect criticism based on the well-documented evidence of the abject failure of abstinence-only programmes in the United States.

To understand why, we need first to be clear about what is actually included in the National Curriculum under sex education as a mandatory element – and everything we need to know is to be found in the Science curriculum.

Currently Sex ed covers the following topics:
- Anatomy
- Puberty
- Biological aspects of sexual reproduction
- Use of hormones to control and promote fertility
And that’s it. There’s nothing whatsoever about relationships, about sexual morality or values, nothing about peer pressure or any related social issues, nothing specific on STIs, and next to nothing about contraception beyond the fact that the oral contraceptive pill will be covered under ‘use of hormones…’.

The entire relationship element of sex and relationships education is an optional extra and one that young people will only get if their school goes to time and effort of delivering a full SRE curriculum and only then, in some case, if they parents don’t withdraw them from these lessons.

As a result, the sex and relationships education that is delivered in schools can be extremely variable both in quality and scope, despite the strong evidence from other countries in Europe which shows that high quality, comprehensive sex and relationships education is effective is delaying first sexual activity and in reducing STI transmission and unwanted pregnancy.

And to this already uneven mix, Dorries want to add mandatory abstinence education which, for some young people will mean that all that they actually receive is abstinence-only education.

Dorries, or rather the people behind Dorries – such as Andrea Minichiello Williams – know and understand this perfectly well, in fact they’re positively banking on the variability of the current quality and scope of sex and relationships education, and limited time allotted to it in many schools, as a means of getting as much abstinence-only education into schools as possible.

Part of the calculation here is that is some schools, which offer only a minimal amount of SRE outside of science class – in some case as little as a single half day session with an outside advisor from, for example, Brook, adding a mandatory abstinence requirement will serve to push even that cursory amount of SRE, much of which will focus specifically on contraception and STI transmission prevention, off the curriculum entirely.

It assesses the effectiveness of abstinence-only sex education programmes for HIV prevention amongst young people.

The briefing pulls together the evidence from a wide range of published studies covering the outcomes of abstinence-only programmes in both the US and internationally and arrives at an unsurprising but damning conclusion:

A systematic review of 13 published trials of abstinence-only programs conducted among 15,940 American youth found that abstinence-only programs did not affect the risk of HIV transmission or the incidence of unprotected vaginal sex, number of partners, condom use, or age of sexual debut.

Perhaps the starkest message comes from an evaluation review to 10 federally-funded abstinence-only programmes which was conducted with the full support of the US Federal Government:

A federally-supported, 10-year evaluation of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs found that these programs had no impact on youth remaining abstinent, age at first intercourse, number of sexual partners, or condom use.

In fact, these programs appeared to have negative effects on knowledge: abstinence-only program participants were less likely to know that condoms can lower the risk of STIs, and more likely to report that condoms never protect against HIV.

So, abstibence-only education not only fails to successfully promote abstinence but, when its run by religiously motivated organisations, as has often been the case in the United States, it frequently fosters dangerous levels of ignorance in relation to very basic practices which are proven to reduce the risk of STI transmission, i.e. condom use.

“Abstinence-plus”, as the name suggests, promotes abstinence alongside accurate information on contraception, STI risks and risk reduction, etc. Many of these programmes still fall some way short of being fully comprehensive sex and relationships education because they omit information on variation in human sexuality and provide a rather narrow view of human sexual behavior but on the whole they are reasonably effective and a considerable improvement on the failed abstinence-only programmes.

Evidence in the social sciences is rarely, if ever, as clear cut as it is the core natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology) but even allowing for that limitation, the evidence for what is and isn’t effective when it comes to sex and relationship education is about as clear as its possible to get.

If you’re at all serious about reducing the prevalence of unwanted pregnancy in young people and lowering the risk of STI transmission then comprehensive sex and relationship education, the kind that treats young people as independent, autonomous moral agents who are capable of making their own choices, is the only way to go.

That this is still a matter for debate in the UK is down to the failure of successive governments to promote the best interests of both the country and of young people in the face of parental and, particularly, religious objections to teaching young people the truth. That comprehensive sex and relationships education is not part of the national curriculum and not mandatory in all schools is matter something that we, as a nation, should be thoroughly ashamed of.

The poll, itself, is pretty much standard TPA fare – a stream of questions asking whether the public would support cutting expenditure on thing that appear to be pretty expensive but about which the majority of the public know and understand far too little to make anything that remote resembles an informed choice.

Most of the questions are related to the DFID’s spending on international development where, if you asked the public to explain in their own word why they think we spend money in this area, the most common answer would be ‘Sorry, but I ain’t got a Scooby’.

There are, however, a couple of questions in there which nicely illustrate both the TPA’s own ideological prejudices and the disingenuous manner in which they go about manufacturing their message, the first of which relates directly to the role of trade unions in the public sector.

51% support stopping the practice of paying full-time trade union organisers in large public sector organisations

Remember, what the TPA are promising here is public support for ‘billions’ in spending cuts and, indeed, the big ticket items of the TPA’s list – freezing the DFID budget and ditching the HS2 high-speed rail project and Green Investment Bank – does give them a headline ‘savings’ figure in excess of £36 billion, but when it comes to cutting the funding for union orrganisers the projected savings are rather less impressive.

SAVING = £67.5 million

Before the coalition started playing slash and burn with the public sector, estimates of the total pay bill for the public sector as a whole ran to anything from £164 billion to £180 billion a year, putting the cost of full-time union organisers at a staggering 0.04% of total expenditure.

This is, of course, just a very small part of the work of trade unions – most of the bread and butter work of shop stewards and paid union reps/organisers goes almost entirely unnoticed unless you’re actually a member of a union or you work in a unionised environment.

The other question that rather piqued my interest was this one:

63% agree with the statement that charities that also spend large amounts of money on things other than giving aid to the developing world shouldn’t be given grants from the international aid budget.

That’s another classic example of a question which relies almost entirely on public ignorance.

Should, for example, Save The Children, be excluded from receiving grants from the international aid budget just because the spend ‘large amounts of money’ on ‘other things’ like charitable activities in the United Kingdom, fundraising – which actually pays for most of their work – and the basic working infrastructure the absolutely need to have in order to put the money they do receive to good use.

Of course people will object if charities are seen to be spending overseas development money on ‘other things’ when they have no idea whatsoever what these ‘other things’ might be let alone how they might relate to and support the work of the charity.

Whether they’d express the same objections if they were given sufficient information to actually assess the uses to which overseas development charities put the funding they receive is another matter entirely, for all that, unlike the TPA and its own source of funding, this information can be readily obtained from published charity accounts and by requesting information on SLAs, funding agreement and returns under the Freedom of Information Act.

—-
A longer version of this post is at Ministry of Truth

This morning, a bit of a kerfuffle has broken out on Twitter after Kevin received a nastygram from the Daily Mail’s lawyers threatening him with a libel action if he didn’t remove a two-year old post from his blog.

Kevin took down his post, but it can still be read via Google’s cache.

Its worth reviewing some of the text of the letter that’s been sent to Kevin:

It has come to our client’s attention that a page on the website at http://www.angrymob.uponnothing.co.uk/home/43-somethingmademeangry/805-paul-dacre-must-die is being used to publish material which is seriously abusive and defamatory of Mr Dacre.

We’ll come to this in a minute, but as a matter of opinion I doubt very much that Paul Dacre must be overly concerned about any abusive remarks made by Kevin given his reputation for verbally abusing his employees which, according to the book Flat Earth News, has led to his own staff giving the paper’s daily editorial meeting the name ‘The Vagina Monologues’ as a result of Dacre’s habit of calling everyone a cunt.

Please take this communication as formal notice of this defamatory and abusive publication.

Now a rather important legal point.

When giving a notice preparatory to action in an alleged defamation case, the complainant – in this case Dacre/Daily Mail – is required to specify precisely which statements they consider to be defamatory. A general claim which does not specify which statements they intend to treated as defamatory is just not good enough, not even for an attempted take down notice targeting a hosting provider, which is what this letter appears to be.

Please confirm urgently that the above-mentioned defamatory material will be removed within 3 business days. Otherwise our client will have no option but to include you as a party to the proposed legal proceedings for defamation.

A statement to which the only honest response should be either ‘Bite Me!’ or a citation of Arkell vs Pressdram.

This brings us to the original blog-post.

Yep, Kevin was angered by a fairly standard migrant story which, as matter of opinion, could easily be considered to be racist in its tone and intent but which has been carefully written to sidestep the law as it related to the incitement of racial hatred.

Let’s be clear, our own right-wing tabloid and mid-market press are extremely adept and well-practiced when it come to pushing the racist buttons of their readers without stepping over the line of what is and isn’t deemed to be unlawful in this country, and this particular Mail article is a fair example of the ‘not racist but’ genre of news reporting.

Kevin wrote then:

When you read this Daily Mail headline – and if you dare, the whole article and comments – it is easy to forget that Sue Reid – the author of this disgusting piece of hatred journalism – is actually talking about the lives of sick babies – something supposedly sacred. Here they are described as a ‘strain’ and used as an example of ‘the changing face of Britain’.

Personally I celebrate the fact that ‘The 243 mothers are from 72 different nations. They include Mongolia, the remotest regions of Russia, Japan, Africa, South America, swathes of Asia, Australasia and even Papua New Guinea’. I think it speaks volume about the value that we as a nation place on human life; that we are in the majority a nation who doesn’t worry about the nationality of a child that might die but instead save it – regardless of whether we can wring the money out of the parent.

I just pretend that none of my taxes go to treating a single sick Mail reader. And I consider them all to be sick for wanting to enrage themselves with such hateful bullshit each day, and for treating the lives of a few sick children as a burden which we must get rid off.

What we have here is, on the face of it, an extremely wealthy media organisation trying to bully a lone blogger and his hosting provider just because – two year ago – he said something about a newspaper editor that the editor has taken umbrage with.

What this does, however, neatly illustrate in the context of reforming our libel laws, is that the lack of protection afforded to web hosting companies continues to be the weak link in the chain, one that desperately needs to be addressed.

And nowhere more so than over at Heresy Corner, where the Heresiarch has rather uncharacteristically succeeded in massively over-analysing the situation…

So how can Twitter satisfy the demands of the English courts – assuming, that is, that CTB’s case is found to have merit? The obvious way would be to block Twitter in the UK, putting it permanently out of the reach of British judges. It could happen. Already some US-based news and gossip sites, including National Enquirer, are unviewable in Britain without use of a proxy server, so alarmed are the publishers by English libel law. If CTB’s case succeeds, or inspires others, Twitter’s bosses might begin to see such a course of action as preferable to fighting costly legal battles on foreign soil.

I don’t think I could live without Twitter. I’m frightened.

I’m not, but then I’m an old school nethead who’s seen this kind of thing several times before.

The clue to what’s actually going on here is in the statement from CTB lawyers – who just happen our to be our old ‘friend’ Schillings – as cited by the BBC:

Lawyers at Schillings who represent CTB have issued a statement clarifying the action it has taken.

It said it was not suing Twitter but had made an application “to obtain limited information concerning the unlawful use of Twitter by a small number of individuals who may have breached a court order”.

From that we can reasonably infer both that Schillings are seeking to obtain registration information and server logs relating to a small number of specific Twitter accounts involved in the publication of CTB’s real name in breach of a High Court injunction.

They seem to be operating under the belief that at least one of these accounts will be traceable back to an individual who is some way connected to one of the main parties involved in the ongoing case to which the injunction relates.

It also seems eminently reasonable to think that CTB and Schillings suspect that the injunction was deliberately breached by this as yet unidentified person(s) – specifically so the injunction could eventually be lifted on the grounds that the information was already in the public domain and had been broadcast so widely that the injunction no longer served any useful purpose.

Whether this has any prospect of success seems largely a question of whether the courts, either here or – eventually – in the US, view this as nothing more than a speculative fishing expedition.

Or they might take the view that ‘CTB’ and Schillings have reasonable grounds to suspect that a deliberate attempt has been made to negate the injunction by an individual or organisation with a vested, and possibly pecuniary, interest in the case to which the injunction relates.

What this will not mean, however, is the end of Twitter in the UK or large numbers of Twitter users receiving a summons to answer a charge of contempt of court simply for having retweeted a bit of salacious gossip.

What the law recognises is that the specific circumstances in which a rape take place may give rise to a number of aggravating factors and/or mitigating factors that must necessarily be taken into account when handing down a sentence following a successful conviction.

Use of extreme violence – i.e. beating the victim to a pulp in addition to raping them – multiple/repeat victimization and/or the existence of prior convictions for rape are treated as aggravating factors and result in a much longer sentence.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that a ‘date’ rape is any less a rape than another kind of rape – a rape is a rape is a rape.

But one of the reasons why some rape attract longer sentences than others stems from the fact that aggravating factors such as extreme violence or a history of serial offender suggests very strongly that a particular offender may by more likely to reoffend on release and present a significantly greater risk to the public for a much longer period of time than another offender, who may have been convicted for a first offence carried out with minimal physical violence.

This merely acknowledges that the interests of justice, which rightly includes considerations of punishment, public protection and rehabilitation, are best served by giving the judiciary a degree of latitude in sentencing in order to fit the sentence both to the crime and to the offender.

‘Date rape’
That’s pretty much the argument that Clarke should have made but, it has to be said, he appears to have botched it completely and panicked under fire even to the point of suggesting that consensual sexual intercourse between and 18 year old and 15 year old can be considered to be rape by virtue of the legal age of consent being 16.

This is a complete nonsense – although a 15 year old cannot consent to sexual intercourse in law, in practice courts have due regard that they may easily be capable of giving consent if their capacity to do so is evaluated in other objective terms, such as the Gillick test of competency. For that reason, if a charge is preferred at all in such a case, it will one of unlawful sexual intercourse not rape.

Only if an individual is under the age of 13 does the law regard them as being incapable of consenting to sexual activity is any sense, legal or otherwise, so a 13 yr old who had sexual intercourse with a 12 year old would be charged with rape even if the actual age difference between the two was a matter of only a few weeks or even days.

If, however, the 15 year old in Clarke’s badly drawn hypothetical example, does not consent to having sexual intercourse with the 18 year old then that is rape, regardless of whether you want to call it date rape or something else entirely, and the severity of the offence is a function of the presence or otherwise of aggravating factors, not the age or relative inexperience of the rapist.

So, let’s be absolutely clear here.

1. Some rapes are objectively and legally more serious than others.

2. Rape is rape, regardless of the presence or absence of aggravating factors.

3. There may well legitimate arguments to be made about sentencing policy, both in terms of whether the minimum and maximum sentences available to judges is either too short or too long and about whether judges place too much or too little weight on the presence or absence of aggravating and/or mitigating factors when determining sentences.

HOWEVER

4. Shouting ‘Rape is Rape’ at politicians in no sense addresses any the issues set out in point 3, unless the suggestion is that all rapes would attract the same draconian sentence, nor does it address other potential complications, e.g. the suggestion that some juries may be reluctant to convict if the feel that the minimum sentence for a particular offence, such as rape, is set at too severe a level and appears to the jury to be, subjectively, disproportionate to the facts put before them in court.

In short, Rape is anything but a simple or straightforward issue and cannot be reduced to a shouting match on a radio show, even if Ken Clarke has fucked up badly and made a number of indefensible remarks under fire.

But much of what needs to be said can be readily covered using her pseudo-blog post on the same subject, which makes two key claims without any evidence whatsoever.

Today I presented a 10 minute rule bill to the House regarding the teaching of abstinence to 13 – 16 yr aged girls in school.

The thrust was that girls as young as seven are taught about intercourse, safe sex, how to apply a condom on a banana, where to get condoms, how to detect an STI and that they don’t need to tell their parents anything.

I believe that is tantamount to encouragement and that we have the balance wrong.

Never mind getting the balance wrong, Dorries got her "facts" wrong (as usual), putting her remarks firmly into the 100% fiction category.

To be absolutely clear on this matter, once and for all, children as young as seven are not taught about intercourse, safe sex, condom use or STIs in schools. Dorries is playing the tired old tabloid trick of making false claims about the subject matter taught to seven year olds based on the contents of the full PSHE and SRE (sex and relationships education) curriculum, which runs of early years education (3-4 years) right through to the end of secondary education (year 11, 15-16 years), presenting children and young people with age appropriate information at each key stage and year of the curriculum.

Contrary to everything Dorries has claimed today, a typical PSHE/SRE curriculum for year three children (7 years) covers the following topics:

• Self esteem
• Challenging gender stereotypes
• Differences: Male and Female
• Family differences
• Decision making
• Safety

You’ll note, straight away, that there’s a very marked lack of shagging, condoms or information on STIs in there – reproduction typically doesn’t enter the picture until year 6 (10-11 years) while contraception fails to enter the frame at all until year 8 (12-13 years) and its only in year 9 (13-14 years) that the curriculum covers contraceptive methods and STIs. – all information taken from SRE core curriculum for London, published by Young London Matters.

Staying on the subject of fiction, Richard Bartholomew has kindly tackled the statistics cited by Dorries – and attributed to Dame Joan Bakewell – in her speech in relation to the alleged sexual content of prime-time television:

Dame Joan [Bakewell] said that our society is saturated in sex: a typical prime-time hour on TV contains 2.6 references to intercourse, 1.2 references to prostitution and rape, and 4.7 sexual innuendoes.

Unfortunately, as Richard notes, Dame Joan Bakewell said nothing of the sort:

The statistics are actually a boilerplate talking-point which has been doing the rounds on Christian websites for years, sometimes attributed to a “Florida State University study”. One example of their use is the 1993 book by Bill Hybels and Rob Wilkins, entitled Tender Love: God’s Gift of Sexual Intimacy. According to them:

According to one study, a typical network prime-time hour contains an average of 1.6 references to intercourse, 1.2 references to prostitution and rape, 4.7 sexual innuendoes, 1.8 kisses, and 1.0 suggestive gestures.

Again, we have an example of Dorries sourcing her information from the heartlands of the American Taliban although, as Richard goes on to point out in a footnote, the original source of these claims may be 1987 study conducted for Planned Parenthood, the US equivalent of our own Family Planning Association, which was reported in the New York Times in 1988.

If Richard is correct – and I suspect he might well be – Dorries’ statistics are more than 20 years out of date and relate to prime-time television in the United States and are of no relevance to this current debate, not least because, unlike the UK, prime-time on US networks is defined as 8pm-11pm (Eastern/Pacific Standard Time) and 7pm-10pm (Central/Mountain), which means that two of the three prime-time hours in the two most populous and important US time zones fall after the UK’s 9pm watershed. In the US, prime-time viewing means the graphic CSI franchise – in the UK it means the One Show.

As usual, if you’re looking for a fact free environment, then Dorries’ pseudo-blog is the place to go.

Dorries recently put forward two abortion-related amendments to the Government’s Health and Social Care Bill.

The Powerpoint presentation was produced by Dr Peter Saunders of the Christian Medical Fellowship for the Lawyers Christian Fellowship (LCF) in 2006.

[You can download it from here (PPT file) or view on Google Docs]

It advocates pursuing a long-term strategy of seeking chip away at the UK’s existing abortion laws. Its ultimate aim is to obtain the outright prohibition of abortion in any circumstances, including rape, foetal abnormality and serious risk to the life of pregnant women.

It lists possible answers to questions people may have. For example, in response to: “Surely we can’t return to the days of back street abortionists and abortion tourism?”, the presentation says: “Claims of thousands of deaths before the 1967 Abortion Act were wildly exaggerated,” without offering any evidence to support that claim.

Clear links exist between Dorries and several of the organisations involved in lobbying against current abortion laws, one of which – the Lawyers Christian Fellowship – was intimately involved in the running of Dorries’ earlier ’20 reasons for 20 weeks’ campaign.

The LCF worked closely with Nadine Dorries in 2008 when both were lobbying for the abortion legal limit to be reduced from 24 weeks, as it currently stands.

Activities of the then LCF Director of Public Policy, Andrea Minichiello Williams, were part of a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary (short clip below).

In an interview last year, Nadine Dorries also admitted that her ’20 Reasons for 20 Weeks’ campaign website was created by interns at the fundamentalist group Christian Concern for our Nation for free.

Another member of this alliance – CARE (Christian Action Research and Education) would, in all likelihood, be the major beneficiary of the first of Dorries’ new amendments. The organisation seeks to prevent established abortion service providers, including the British Pregnancy Advisory Service and Marie Stopes International, from providing pre-abortion counselling, forcing women into the independent sector.

As we revealed in 2008, Dorries herself prefers that legal abortion limits are reduced to around only 9 weeks.

Dr Saunders himself admitted this in 2008.

Dr Peter Saunders, general secretary of the Christian Medical Fellowship, said his group was supporting 20 weeks as a first step. “It gets a lot of people on board and gets us on the way,” he said. “We have to realise we are in for a very long battle here.”

The presentation referred to in this article was obtained by entirely legal means from the website of the Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship. Extracts from the presentation are provided here without the express permission of the LCF or Dr Peter Saunders for the purpose of news reporting, research and criticism.

Both articles did little more than aggregate information from public sources. Now Elson has started putting out allegations of harassment against Tim and calling it “spiteful and fabricated tittle-tattle”, while saying nothing of the issues involved.

It’s worth remembeing that Nadine Dorries’ expenses claims have been under a considerable amount of public and media scrutiny since May 2009.

Back in February 2010, I was the very first blogger to start asking questions about the large sums of money that Nadine Dorries was claiming for PR and media services.

My own preliminary research indicated that Elson’s company had received over £30,000 from Dorries between September 2008 and June 2009, £24,000 of which had been claimed from Dorries’ staffing allowance as payments for ‘agency staff’.

Most, if not all, MPs employ a parliamentary researcher. Most however are paid directly out of the Parliamentary payroll rather than being employed through a third-party arrangement with an outside company.

Then there’s the salary itself. IPSA’s current pay scales put the salary range for a research assistant at £23K-£33K a year, full time, although judging by the adverts on the W4MP recruitment website, around £25K-28K seems to be the usual going rate.

Throughout her time working for Dorries, Elson was receiving payments of between £3450 and £3525 per month, the equivalent of £41K-£42K a year salary before tax and national insurance (and with no employer’s NI payable by Dorries) putting Elson right at the top end of the scale for a Senior Parliamentary Assistant had she worked for Dorries full-time, rather than splitting her time between Dorries and her other PR work back in Gloucestershire.

There are several reasons then to justify asking questions about the manner in which Dorries has been running her Parliamentary office since September 2008.

There also the little matter of the Daily Mirror report, in January, which claimed that Dorries’ expenses file has been passed to the Police for investigation.

What is not at all clear, as yet, is why this file was given to the police and which of Dorries’ expenses claims, if any, might be under investigation. Is it the issue of main/second home that the police are interested in, or they investigating other matters that have yet to be fully disclosed.

We can say however, that Dorries claimed over £130,000 in expenses, including £30K to a couple of official Tory research operations, during her first five and half years as a backbench MP to cover the costs of PR, Media and Research services, despite being arguably the most consistently ignorant and ill-informed MP in the House.

Can anyone really call that value for money?

—
A longer version of this article is at Ministry of Truth.

Pilger is easily one of the greatest investigative journalists and documentary film-makers of the modern era. One cannot, therefore, be anything other than saddened by the all-too-obvious decline in his powers of observation and objectivity evident is his article this week for the New Statesman.

It amounts to little more than a stream of mendacious ad hominem attacks on anyone who dares to suggest that Assange should be required to answer the allegations laid against him in a court of law.

He says:

It seems the lesson must be learned all over again as a group of media feminists joins the assault on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, or the “Wikiblokesphere”, as Libby Brooks abuses it in the Guardian. From the Times to the New Statesman, apparent feminist credence is given to the chaotic, incompetent and contradictory accusations against Assange in Sweden.

Bollocks.

All things considered, the general ‘feminist’ response to the allegations against Assange has been considered, moderate in tone and mindful of the need to allow due process to run its proper course.

Calls for Assange to be immediately and publicly castrated with the broken coke bottle on prime-time television have been in rather short supply, leaving those of us who can bothered to listen to what feminist commentators are actually saying to enjoy the kind of delightfully constructed and thoughtful arguments put forward by Laurie Penny.

What many feminists have, quite correctly, found objectionable is the indecent haste with which Assange’s supporters have sought to have him declared innocent of any wrongdoing on the strength to nothing more substantial than their own ignorance of Sweden’s laws and legal system.

He goes on:

On 9 December, the Guardian published a long, supine interview by Amelia Gentleman with Claes Borgström, the “highly respected Swedish lawyer”. In fact, Borgström is foremost a politician, a powerful member of the Social Democratic Party. He intervened in the Assange case only when the senior prosecutor in Stockholm dismissed the “rape” allegation as based on “no evidence”.

In Gentleman’s Guardian article, an anonymous source whispers to us that Assange’s “behaviour towards women . . . was going to get him into trouble”. This smear was taken up by Brooks in the paper that same day. Ken Loach and I and others on “the left” are “shoulder to shoulder” with the misogynists and “conspiracy theorists”. To hell with journalistic inquiry. Ignorance and prejudice rule.

Look around you, John. Look at the manner in which the two complainants are being attacked, vilified and, in the eyes of many of Assange’s supporters, discredited on the basis that – horror above all horrors – both a self-professed feminists.

Look at the speed with which the news that these allegations had been levelled against Assange mutated, without the slightest shred of supporting evidence, into the widely broadcast allegation that Assange is the victim of a CIA-led ‘honey-trap’ operation and, particularly, at the kind of unconvincing bullshit ‘reasoning’ put forward to support that particular conspiracy theory.

He also says:

For three months, Assange and his lawyers have pleaded with the Swedish authorities to let them see the prosecution case. This was denied until 18 November, when the first official document arrived – in the Swedish language, contrary to European law.

Having taken the time to investigate the confusion cloud surrounding the allegations against Assange, which appears to be rather more than Pilger – a professional journalist – can be bothered with, I’d agree that overall the investigation does appear to have been conducted in a slipshod manner.

What is evident here, confirmed by Pilger’s use of inverted commas around the word ‘crime’ is that he has already prejudged the outcome of these allegations on the basis of the information already in the public domain, much of which is rather confused and incomplete.

Make no mistake: Pilger’s documentaries on Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge (“Year Zero”), East Timor (“Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy”) and. most recently, on the shameful treatement meted out to the Chagos Islanders by successive British governments since the late 1960′s (“Stealing Nation”) fully deserve to be counting amongst the most iconic and powerful piece of film journalism in the entire history of the medium.

But in this case, Pilger is guilty of rushing to a hasty judgement and can have no legitimate complaint when others accuse him of standing ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with misogynists and conspiracy theorists.

—
A longer version is here

Gemma Lindfield, for the Swedish authorities, told the court Assange was wanted in connection with four allegations.

1. Miss A said she was victim of “unlawful coercion” on the night of 14 August in Stockholm. The court heard Assange is accused of using his body weight to hold her down in a sexual manner.

2. She alleged Assange “sexually molested” Miss A by having sex with her without a condom when it was her “express wish” one should be used.

3. She claimed Assange “deliberately molested” Miss A on 18 August “in a way designed to violate her sexual integrity”.

4. She accused Assange of having sex with a second woman, Miss W, on 17 August without a condom while she was asleep at her Stockholm home.

These allegations match up with the comments of Miss A’s lawyer, Claes Borgström on 25th August, where he told the newspaper that:

I want to stress that there are significant details missing in this report, details I base my accusations of rape on, but I am prevented from revealing what these details are.

It would hurt the investigation to make the information public at this stage. It’s my opinion [Finné] was in error. I believe Assange will be accused of sex crimes.

None of the public statements issued by Assange or his lawyer, prior to today, seem to indicate that either were aware of this allegation before today’s hearing. This unfortunately means the new allegations are likely to interpreted by some of Assange’s supporters as concrete ‘evidence’ that Assange is the victim of stitch-up and that he has been subjected to manifestly unfair treatment by Sweden’s prosecuting authorities.

Under English law, both the coercion allegation and the allegation of sex without a condom while Miss W was asleep would, at the very least, be investigated as rape allegations.

So it is clear there are legitimate grounds for Assange to be questioned and face a trial. These allegations cannot be taken lightly.

But there are complications. To give one example of what I mean, Miss A is reported in the media, including our own Guardian newspaper, as indicating she did not regard herself as having been raped:

It is quite wrong that we were afraid of him. He is not violent, and I do not feel threatened by him.

The responsibility for what happened to me and the other girl lies with a man who had attitude problems with women.

I’ve managed to track down the original article from which those quotes were taken and discovered another statement attributed to Miss A, which add:

The woman in her 30s said that she, for its part [excuse the machine translation] claims to be the victim of a sexual assault or molestation, but not a rape.

For reasons that are entirely unclear but I suspect come down to nothing more than the press pulling its information from a piece of wire copy, that last quote doesn’t appear to have found its way into the English language coverage of the story. But it does represent an important qualification of Miss A’s widely cited comments on the subject of whether she had been raped.

Yesterday, Reuters reported:

…a lawyer representing the Swedish government laid out for a British judge four specific charges of sexual misconduct, three related to Miss A and one related to Miss W. The word “rape” was not part of the charges but “unlawful coercion” and Assange’s alleged reluctance to use condoms was.

Not many people seems to be asking, in relation to the allegations against Assange, why he visited Sweden back in August.

Assange visited the country in order to cut a deal with Sweden’s Pirate Party which would allow Wikileaks to move its servers over to their ISP, which also (since May 2010) hosts the Pirate Bay torrent site that has, so far, managed to successfully resist all legal attempts to take it offline.

But he also cut a deal with AftonBladet under which he would write a monthly column for them. This would then allow him to apply for full source protection under Sweden’s strong press freedom laws, giving Wikileaks an additional layer or two of legal cover for its activities.

This is the same newspaper whose incomplete account of the police investigation into Assange’s behaviour during this trip has led just about everyone a merry dance for the last four months, leaving them barking up the wrong ‘broken condom’ tree when, based on yesterday’s charges, there is a bona fide rape allegation on the table [at least as far the definition of rape in English law is concerned].

Some will, no doubt, see this information as further evidence in favour of some of the wilder conspiracy theories that are currently doing the rounds.

It’s not clear how all this will play out in the Swedish legal system.

But given Amnesty International’s concerns about how rape victims are treated by the legal system in Nordic countries, there is real cause for concern.

Littlejohn’s claim is not only wildly innaccurate but relates to an issue on which the PCC has previously seen fit to issue additional guidance to editors as follows:

“The Commission – in previous adjudications under Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Code – has underlined the danger that inaccurate, misleading or distorted reporting may generate an atmosphere of fear and hostility that is not borne out by the facts.”

So you’d imagine that Primly’s complaint would be something of a formality and lead, almost automatically, to Littlejohn getting a bit of slap on the wrist.

But no, this is what the PCC has actually had to say:

The complainant considered that the article falsely stated that “Afghans climbing off the back of a lorry in Dover” were given precedence in the allocation of council housing.

The Commission acknowledged the complainant’s concern over the statement; however, it had to consider the remark in the context of the article in which it appeared. The article had been clearly presented as a comment piece, in which the columnist expressed his concern that a soldier who had served in Afghanistan had not been granted a council house. The Commission considered that the columnist had exaggerated and simplified the example of housing immigrants for the purpose of stressing his assertion that the “system of government exists simply to punish those who do the right thing”. It emphasised that the newspaper should take care when using such rhetorical methods of expression that readers would not be misled into understanding that they reflected statements of fact.

In this instance, on balance it considered that readers would be aware that the columnist was not accurately reflecting the government’s policy on the housing of immigrants, but that he was making an amplified statement for rhetorical effect. It was therefore the Commission’s view that, on this occasion, readers generally would not be misled in such a way as to warrant correction under the terms of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Code of Practice.

So what the PCC is saying, once you cut through all the waffle is that, in its opinion, Littlejohn is such a prolific bullshitter that even the Daily Mail’s readers cannot be expected to take his opinions seriously.

Now I’m not sure that’s entirely true, but then I’m also not inclined to underestimate the stupidity and ignorance of the typically Daily Mail reader.

It is, nevertheless, quite an interesting innovation on the PCC’s part, albeit one that should, in the interests of clarity and transparancy, be full reflected in the text of the PCC’s Code of Conduct.

I suggest the PCC put in place is an official register of bullshitters, a formal list of media columnists and commentators whose opinions are known to be so routinely unreliable that the PCC will no longer entertain complaints about the accuracy of their remarks on the grounds that their status as a prolific bullshitter is a matter of common knowledge.

The market, according to IDS, will provide, a mantra that been blindly repeated by politicians of all parties for the last thirty years even in the face of concrete evidence that, for many people in Britain, the market has actually failed to do anything of the sort.

To illustrate just one of  the problems that politicians have been steadfastly ignoring for the last 30 years, let’s look at some of that evidence…

What we’ve got above is a table showing the workforce structure of three English boroughs; Wokingham, the least deprived area in England, Calderdale, which sits right in the middle of the deprivation indices, and Middlesbrough, which is solidly in the top ten most deprived areas and, perhaps, the architypal post-industrial ‘wasteland’ of the last 30 years. We also have the averages for England and, if you have already guessed, the structure we’re using is boradly analagous to the standard ABC1C2DE measure of social class.

For the most, the data holds few surprises. Wokingham is heavily skewed towards AB class employment, Middlesbrough to C2DE with a substantially higher number of people who’re long term unemployed or have never worked, while Calderdale sits roughly in the middle and not too far off the national average.

What I want you to focus on, specifically, is one category that sits more or less in the middle of the table, the data for small employers and the self employed, a category which makes up a reasonably healthy 7% of the local labour market economy in both Wokingham and Calderdale but a mere 3.7% of the labour market in Middlesbrough.

This, if you unquestioningly swallow government rhetoric, is the sector that will play the crucial role both in generating much needed economic growth and in creating jobs for all the people currently languishing on benefits and yet, in Middlesbrough, where there is the greatest need for both growth and job, this sector is half the size of that in either Wokingham or Calderdale.

There is a harsh fact of life here. Many, if not most, small businesses and, especially, self-employed workers, are heavily, if not exclusively, dependent not only on their local economy but on discretionary spending within that economy. Local retailers, tradespeople, jobbing builders, electricians and plumbers, etc. they all need a viable pool of relatively wealthy neighbours – businesses and individuals – to be spending their money in the local economy so they can make a living, take on apprentices, create jobs and get local people off the dole.

Education and training, the other great government mantra of the last 30 years, will not, on its own, bring investment into areas like Middlesbrough or create jobs – in fact it may even make local conditions even worse.

A few years ago, I was shown a confidential report into a governement-funded regeneration programme in the North West which had, publicly, been hailed as success by virtue of the number of local people who’d gained new qualifications as result of the funding. Privately, this particular report catalogued the failures of the programe – it didn’t bring investment into the area, it didn’t create a significant number of jobs and the local economy actually suffered because most the people who gained marketable skills were moving out of the area to look for employment, a phenomenon called ‘hollowing out’. The people who could get out, did. Those were left were slightly better qualified than when they started and twice as pissed off at the lack of jobs.

Rebalancing the economy requires far more than simply engineering shifts in the pattern of economic growth and job creation between industry sectors. To really make work pay and reap the benefits of shifting people off welfare and into employment, where you create both growth and jobs also matters and all the more in areas like Middlesbrough, which needs high value jobs as much, if not more than it needs jobs at the bottom of the market, if small businesses are to take up their share of the load when it comes to revitalising the local economy.

‘The market will provide’ is not a policy, its just wishful thinking.

Nadine Dorries has warned that another expenses scandal is coming at MPs “like a train” due to the inadequacies of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA).

While lobbying the House of Commons Backbench Business Committee for a debate on the new expenses system, Dorries claimed that MPs were ‘frustrated, angry and despairing’ at the current system because…

“IPSA have been refusing a large number of claims which MPs have been putting forward, not because they are inappropriate claims, but because they have missed out a field on the form or incorrectly completed a form,”

Not the kind of complaint that will elicit much in the way of sympathy from anyone who’s ever submitted a claim for welfare benefits or wrestled with a tax return.

In response to a parliamentary question, at the end of October, IPSA revealed that of 5,256 claim forms submitted in September, 162 were still awaiting payment, adding that this was because the claim form had not completed correctly or because the MP had either failed to provide sufficient supporting evidence for their claim or submitted a claim which had given rise to ‘some other query’.

Most small businesses would be overjoyed if 97% of their credit accounts were settled within 30-60 days, but this is seemingly not good enough for Members of Parliament, even if the fault lies largely with their own inability to submit the correct paperwork.

The main thrust of Dorries’ argument to the committee, which was also backed by Tory MP Adam Afriyie, seems to be that the rejection of a small number of inadequately presented claims by IPSA will inevitiably by misinterpreted by the media as evidence of further impropriety, giving rise to another expenses ‘scandal’. The argument, one presumes, is that it would, therefore, be preferable for IPSA to go back to the old system of rubber stamping MPs expenses claims without asking too many awkward questions and take it on trust that MPs have now learned their lesson, in order avoid feeding more ammunition to the Daily Telegraph.

That’s one way of looking at it.

Another way of looking at this is to note that all three major parties operate their own centralised research facilities in the House of Commons, for which MPs pay an annual subscription fee.

If MPs can spread the costs of research in such a manner then its surely not beyond the wit of some of them to club together and hire a couple of competent accounts clerks, so as to ensure that their expenses forms are filled in correctly and that the proper evidence is submitted with their claim.

Prior to the arrest, local police had suspected that more than a dozen unsolved shootings over the last year, in which one person died and eight more were wounded, may have been the work of lone gunman. The man arrested at the weekend has now been charged with one count of murder and seven attempted murders.

Make of that story what you will, but what has piqued my interest here is not the story itself but an Early Day Motion (EDM 907) put down a couple of weeks ago by Labour MP, Keith Vaz, in relation to these shootings.

That this House notes with concern that the recent race shootings in Malmo, Sweden have been associated with the violent video game Counter-Strike; further notes that the internet-based, first-person shooting game that pits a counter-terrorist team against terrorists was previously banned in Brazil and in 2007 was associated with US College Campus massacres; recognises the potential impact of violent video games on those under 18 years; and calls on the Government to ensure the purchase of video games by those under 18 yearsis controlled and that parents are provided with clear information on the violent content of certain games.

WTF?

So how do we get from racist nutjob shooting at the local migrant population to a three-year old video game?

Surprisingly enough, not via the usual suspects, the Daily Mail and Daily Express. On this occasion it appears to have been The Times that decided to have a bit of dabble in stirring up a faux moral panic by quoting the opinions of a Mr Ahmad al-Mughrabi in its coverage of the story…

I am sure that this is down to some crazy kid who plays that sniping game Counterstrike all day.  I don’t believe in the lone Nazi theory

So who is our mysterious Mr al-Mughrabi? Is he a police officer? A city official? A representative of the Swedish Justice Ministry?

No, as far as anyone has managed to ascertain, to date, he’s just some bloke that The Times picked off the street at random and that’s all the evidence that Keith Vaz needs to put down an EDM and start banging on about violent video games, yet again.

As for the rest of Vaz’ ‘evidence’, sales of Counterstrike were, indeed, banned by a Brazilian judge in January 2008 on the grounds that, in the judge’s sole opinion, the game…

“bring[s] imminent stimulus to the subversion of the social order, attempting against the democratic and rightful state and against the public safety”

At the same hearing, the judge also banned the sale of the fantasy role-playing game Everquest following, one assumes, several reports of car-jackings in Sao Paulo in which the perpetrators were identified as a couple of halfling rogues and tame beholder.

Needless to say, a regional federal court lifted both banning orders in June 2009.

And the campus shootings?

Both the Virginia Tech (April 2007) and Northern Illinois University attacks were alleged to have been linked to Counterstrike but, on both occasions, the allegation originated came by way of a Florida lawyer and anti-obscenity campaigner, Jack Thompson, who even went so far as to ‘predict’ that the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech attack, Seung-Hui Cho, had been ‘trained to kill’ in the game before the shooter had been identified.

Neither investigation, unsurprisingly, found any evidence to link either the shooting to the game. Cho had never owned or even played Counterstrike and the ‘best’ that anyone game up with in the case of the NIU shooter, Steven Kazmierczak, were a couple of unverified newspaper reports in which Kazmeikczak’s dormmates claimed that he used to play the game. Cho and Kazmeikczak were, however, found to have had an extensive history of psychiatric illness, including periods during which they had been admitted to institutions as in-patients.

Thompson, on the other hand, has now been permanantly disbarred by the Florida Supreme Court for inappropriate conduct, including making false statements to tribunals and disparaging and humiliating litigants in a judgement that also described his filings as “repetitive, frivolous and insulting to the integrity of the court”, the latter being an observation one could easily apply to Keith Vaz’s ‘campaign’ against video games.

In the very first paragraph of Dorries’ speech she says:

Abortion in this country is an industry from which a small number of organisations and individuals make vast amounts of money.

Really? Vast amounts of money? Well let’s have a look, shall we.

The British Pregnancy Advisory Service is one of the larger providers of contraception, abortion and related sexual health services in the UK and, happily for our purposes, its also a registered charity (No. 289145), all of which means that its really easy to follow the money and assess the veracity of Dorries’ statement.

The organisation operates a national telephone helpline and associated call centre which handles around 290,000 calls a year, within incoming calls charged at local rate. It counsels around 70,000 women a year on their abortion option and, based on information taken from its most recent published accounts, provides and another 39-40,000 consulatations a year to women seeking help and advice in relation to contraception, STI’s etc.

Of the 70,000 women seeking advice on abortion, 55,000 go on to take up the procedure at one of BPAS’s 22 clinics or day care centres, with 93% of patients getting their treatment paid for by the NHS.

BPAS currently has service agreements with 96 NHS Primary Care Trusts and 11 Local Health Boards and accounts for around 25-27% the abortions carried out in England and Wales each year.

Taking information from its annual accounts, we find that, for the year 2009/10, BPAS’s annual income was £25.042 million of which all but £33k was derived from fees for services.

Abortion costs
For 2009-10, the standard NHS tariff for abortions ranged from £502 for a medical abortion to £649 for a ‘D&E’ (surgical dilation and extraction). Had BPAS done nothing else that year but carry out medical abortions for the NHS at its standard tariff then, with 93% (51500) of its clients having their treatment paid for by the state, it would have generated an income of £25.85 million from the NHS.

This would be £840,000 more than its actual income for the year. Far from making ‘vast amounts of money’ it seems that BPAS actually provides the NHS with a range of cost effective services at less the NHS’s own internal tariffs.

On the expenditure side, BPAS spent £22.96 million on service provision and further £811k on education and research. As ever, the big ticket items in the expenditure column are the total staff and related costs, including agency and other fees (£14.84 million on the service side and £359k education and research) with actual salary costs for the year weighing in at £10.96 million.

Take the organisation’s top earners – seven employees who earn in excess of £60k a year – out of the equation and the average (mean) full-time salary at BPAS is around £28k a year gross, rather less than half the amount that Dorries pockets at the House of Commons.

If you’re only in it for the money, the slur that Dorries levels at abortion service providers, then there are any number of more lucrative options you could choose to pursue, whether its the traditional consulting rooms on Harley Street or, perhaps, the kind of job that allows you to stick your friends and family on expenses and send the bill to the taxpayer.

Woolas went to the High Court, this morning, to ask for a judicial review of the election  court’s decision, a move rejected by the court, which told him to take his case to appeal.

It’s not entirely clear, as yet, why and on what precise grounds Woolas sought a judicial review at this point in time.

Update 1 – 2:47pm:
While the application was rejected on technical grounds. various people on Twitter are saying that Woolas is seeking an oral hearing to renew his Judicial Review application. We’ll keep updating as we hear more.

Update 2 – 3:10pm There will be no new election until after judicial review application by Woolas is considered, says Speaker John Bercow.

Update 3 – 3:15pm Polly Curtis at the Guardian says it’s likely to go to the Court of Appeal.

Yesterday, the ultimate fate of these systems was revealed in a rather terse response to a parlimentary question tabled by the Tory MP for East Yorkshire, Greg Knight:

Chris Grayling (Minister of State (Employment), Work and Pensions

In 2008-09 a total of £1,734,314.07 was paid directly to the 24 local authorities involved in voice risk analysis pilots. There was no DWP funding for voice risk analysis in subsequent years. The pilots finished in December 2009. Local authorities can continue to use voice risk analysis at their own discretion and at their own expense.

The DWP’s brief – and wasteful -flirtation with this supposed ‘lie detector’ technology looks to be over, more or less, with the suggestion that Local Authorities may continue to the use the system at their discretion and [council tax payers'] expense indicating that the DWP would like to allow the system to wither away quietly ‘on the vine’ with as little fuss and attention as possible.

That isn’t going to happen.

For starters, there is more than whiff of burying bad news about the manner in which the DWP has pulled out of using this system.

Over the course of the last nine months the DWP, and almost all of the participating local authorities, have repeatedly refused to release any data relating to these trials under FOIA on the grounds that it would be published at a future date as part of the final evaluation of the trial. That evaluation report, which was due to be completed in May/June of this year, has still not been published, nor does it appear to be scheduled for publication at any time during the next month or so, although a briefing for local authority staff has recently – and very quietly – found its way onto the DWP’s website, one that provides at least some information as to why the DWP have chosen not to persist with this system.

The evaluation is based on the result from the 23 pilots which provided auditable information in time for evaluation. The main conclusions are:

- of the nine local authorities testing VRA at new claims stage, three were judged successful

- of the two local authorities testing VRA on changes in circumstance, one was judged successful

- of the twelve local authorities testing VRA on in-claim reviews, one was judged successful

To be judged ‘successful’, trial sites had to generate an error rate of less than 30% with a bias towards false positives – wrongly identifying a sizeable number of claimants as possible fraudsters would be tolerated  – and yet, even with this low measure of success in place, 18 of the 23 local authorities that supplied auditable data failed to make the grade.

One can, however, glean a little more information on the failings of the system from an internal report published in March by one of trial sites, Bexley Council, which found that the trial system initially doubled the amount of time it took to process a housing benefit claim and proved to be between 4 and 5 times more successful in identifying underpayments than potential frauds and overpayments.

Ultimately, the DWP have tried to duck the major issue here, that of the wholesale unreliability of the technological aspects of the VRA system, by publishing this conclusion:

DWP conducted the research to investigate whether VRA worked when applied to the benefit system. From our findings we cannot conclude that VRA works effectively and consistently in the benefits environment. The evidence is not compelling enough to recommend the use of VRA within DWP.

At no stage did the evaluation carried out by the Department explicitly consider the effectiveness of the technological aspects of VRA. However, social research evidence suggests that the scripting and training elements of the trial were successful.

This leaves a number of outstanding concerns, not least as it appears that some of the trial sites have continued to use the VRA system , at their own expense, after the conclusion of the trial in the mistaken belief that the system works and will help to reduce fraud and administration costs. In reality, if the system is being used by these local authorities as was originally intended then this will almost certainly increase rather than lower the risk of housing/council tax benefit fraud going undetected, given that claimants who ‘pass’ the VRA test and are classified as low risk are not required to provide the same level of evidence, i.e. original documents, in support of their claim as would be the case in councils were VRA is not in use.

By ducking the question of whether the VRA technology actually works, the DWP is effectively allowing the system’s UK licensees, Capita and Digilog UK, to continue to peddle its manifestly unreliable [and wholly pseudoscientific] system to other local authorities and other industry sectors, notably the insurance sector where several companies have been using VRA to triage insurance claims.

To make matters worse, the Israeli company behind the VRA ‘technology’, Nemesysco, has been actively trading on the unjustified veneer of legitimacy conferred on its products by the DWP trial in an effort to peddle a variation on its system to the airline security sector as a ‘border access control system’ which, the company claims, will ‘detect’ the ‘harmful/malicious intentions’ of airline passengers, a system that [unfortunately] already appears to be in use at one major Russian airport.

It’s one thing to peddle a supposed lie detector as a tool for identifying benefit cheats, quite another to pitch it as a ‘terrorist detector’, particularly given recent events.

Bearing all this in mind, a fresh FOIA request went in to the DWP, yesterday, asking for both the full evaluation report and the raw data from the trials, and further requests will be going out to the participating councils, over the next few days, in order to identify where the VRA system is still in use and what, if anything, this is costing council tax payers.

Tell you what, try watching the video here while I try to figure out why I can’t get the damn thing to embed properly.

(Via Pharyngula)

To be a bit more specific, what I’m going to do here is explain one of the more common ‘tricks’ that homeopathic ‘researchers’ use to generate bogus claims for the efficacy of their ‘magic’ sugar pill and water using nothing more than the abstract of a piece of ‘research’  published only a couple of months ago in a homeopathic journal.

The paper in question carries the impressive sounding title ‘Heparin-binding epidermal growth factor expression in KATO-III cells after Helicobacter pylori stimulation under the influence of strychnos Nux vomica and Calendula officinalis‘ and comes from the journal ‘Homeopathy’, which is published by Elsevier (publisher of both The Lancet and Gray’s Anatomy) – and don’t worry if the title seems like gibberish for now, I’ll quickly explain all the salient features of the research as we go along.

The Experiment.

So, lets kick things along and take a look at the abstract’s introduction:

Previous studies have shown the stimulating effect of Helicobacter pylori on the gene expression of heparin-binding epidermal growth factor (HB-EGF) using the gastric epithelial cell line KATO-III. Strychnos Nux vomica (Nux vomica) and Calendula officinalis are used in highly diluted form in homeopathic medicine to treat patients suffering from gastritis and gastric ulcers.

All of which necessitates a very quick biology lesson…

- Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) is a common bacteria that can inhabit and infect various areas of the stomach causing inflammation of the stomach lining (gastritis) and gastric ulcers.

- KATO-III cells are cultured human cells, the kind that make up the stomach lining, and

- heparin-binding epidermal growth factor (HB-EGF) is a protein that plays a role in wound healing and is ‘manufactured’ by epithelial cells, including KATO-III cells, when they’re damaged.

So the experiment were looking at here involves infecting cultured KATO-III cells with the H. pylori bacteria and then dousing the infected cultures with one of two widely used homeopatic ‘treatments’  for gastritis/gastric ulcers – Nux Vomica (Strychnine) or Calendula. PCR tests are then used to measure the amount of HB-EGF produced by the KATO-III cells.

In theory, if either of the ‘remedies’ actually work, then KATO-III cells that have been doused in woo should produce much less HB-EGF than an untreated control culture.

The Results.

Now let’s look at the results…

Baseline expression and stimulation were similar to previous experiments, addition of Nux vomica 10c and Calendula officinalis 10c in a 43% ethanolic solution led to a significant reduction of H. pylori induced increase in gene expression of HB-EGF (reduced to 53.12+/-0.95% and 75.32+/-1.16% vs. control; p<0.05), respectively. Nux vomica 12c reduced HB-EGF gene expression even in dilutions beyond Avogadro’s number (55.77+/-1.09%; p<0.05). Nux vomica 12c in a 21.5% ethanol showed a smaller effect (71.80+/-3.91%, p<0.05). This effect was only be observed when the drugs were primarily prepared in ethanol, not in aqueous solutions.

So the results purport to show that both homeopathic solutions generated a statistically significant reduction in the amount of HB-EGF produced by the infected cell cultures using pretty extreme dilutions – a 10C solution would have one part in 10²⁰ while a 12C solution goes beyond Avagadro’s number, at which point there would be no molecules of active ingredient in the solution whatsoever.

Based on these results, the ‘researchers’ arrive at the utterly bogus conclusion that…

The data suggest that both drugs prepared in ethanolic solution are potent inhibitors of H. pylori induced gene expression.

An outcome that supporters of homeopathy have been cheerful reporting, particularly on Twitter, as ‘evidence’ that homeopathy actually works even though, as the segments picked out in italics (above) show, there’s a much simpler and more obvious – in fact screamingly obvious – explanation for these results.

The Real Explanation.

One of the more obvious methods of reducing the amount of HB-EGF produced by a cell culture infected with the H. pylori bacteria is, quite simply, that of killing the bacteria and, therefore, the infection by dousing the whole shebang in alcohol.

The researchers got their greatest effect, in terms of a reduction of the amount of HB-EGF compared to the control, when their woo was administered in a 43% ethanolic solution (equivalent to neat vodka), they got a smaller effect when using a 21.5% alcohol solution (equivalent to a fortified wine) and they got no effect at all when they used plain old water – results that are entirely consistent with the hypothesis that its the alcohol solutions, alone, that are responsible for these results.

If nothing else, there’s an eminently testable hypothesis for you – run the same experiment but replace the Nux Vomica and Calendula solutions with a bottle of Red Label Smirnoff and a decent Reserve Port…

…you’ll get near enough the same results and still have the makings of an after-hours lab party to show for your efforts.

Using alcohol solutions in cell culture experiments of this kind – and here’s another example as picked over by the redoubtable Orac – is such an obvious scam that it really deserves to be put up there alongside perpetual motion machines and astrology in the pseudoscience hall of shame.

Where it doesn’t belong is in any kind of reputable medical research institution although, sadly, that’s precisely where this paper originated, at the Medical University of Vienna, the largest medical university in all the German-speaking countries.

Disclaimer.

Regardless of the actual explanation for the results of this study, alcohol is not recommended as treatment for gastritis or gastric ulcers – nor is homeopathy – so if you do have/develop either of these conditions then go see a doctor and get them treated properly.

Although some are clearly not enamoured of the idea, I think there’s ample evidence that Julian is on to something here, particularly in suggesting, by implication, that many MPs lack the skills and knowledge necessary to understand much of the information that’s presented to them on a regular basis.

Only the other day, Tory Health Minister Anne Milton provided a prime example of the merits of Huppert’s suggestion while making a concerted effort to reclaim the title ‘milk snatcher’ for a new generation of Tory ministers;

I am writing to you about our proposals to abolish the long-standing statutory Nursery Milk scheme, which is Great Britain-wide, by April 2011.

There is no evidence that it improves the health of very young children yet the cost of delivering it is increasing significantly, almost doubling in the last five years.

There is indeed very little evidence that consuming cows milk improves the health of very young children, but this because the vast majority of studies that have examined the health benefits of milk have been conducted on older children, and most of those on pre and post-pubescent girls. There is, however, a very important difference between the being no evidence of a health intervention’s effect and having evidence that the intervention is ineffective, as the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews correctly notes:

A common mistake when there is inconclusive evidence is to confuse ‘no evidence of an effect’ with ‘evidence of no effect’. When there is inconclusive evidence, it is wrong to claim that it shows that an intervention has ‘no effect’ or is ‘no different’ from the control intervention. It is safer to report the data, with a confidence interval, as being compatible with either a reduction or an increase in the outcome.

It’s not for lack of evidence that, for example, both the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee and the British Medical Association have called for the NHS to discontinue funding for homeopathic services, rather there is more than enough evidence that homeopathy has no effect beyond placebo to justify such a recommendation, a fact that continues to elude homeopathy’s supporters and, sadly, the government as well.

It should be noted that what Julian Huppert is calling for here is not a science course in the conventional sense of studying physics, chemistry or biology but one that would cover fundamental concepts common across all the sciences and beyond, into economics and the social sciences, particularly those required to understand and interpret evidence correctly.

As much as Tom Harris might think that its ‘difficult to make the case for sending MPs on crash science courses before the case for educating us about finance and economics, or law, or the construction industry, or the TV industry, or the internet‘, I would have no such difficulty. Most if not all of those fields will, from time to time, generate statistical ‘evidence’ to support arguments put to MPs in favour of, or against, particular aspects of tax policy, statutory regulation or public sector spending and it would be extremely reassuring to know that MPs are at least reasonably well-equipped to make sense of that evidence and adequately sift the wheat from the chaff.

It’s not just MPs who need a ‘science’ education.

If anything, I’d go much further than even Julian Huppert has suggested and extend his proposal to include senior civil servants and executive members of other public sector bodies and agencies whose role requires them to consider statistical evidence when making decisions on the commissioning of services and the spending of public money because, again, there is ample evidence to support such a proposal.

In the early 1990s, researchers from the University of Bristol conducted a study of ‘evidence-based purchasing’ in the NHS (published as Fahey et al, 1995 in the BMJ) in which 182 executive and non-executive members of NHS Health Authorities in two regions (Anglia and Oxford) were asked to review four proposals for either a mammography or cardiac rehabilitation programme and indicate whether they would be prepared to fund each of the programmes. In each case, the four proposals provided for consideration all related to the same proposed programme and differed signficantly only in the manner in which the statistical evidence for the effectiveness of the programme was presented, i.e. as a relative risk reduction, absolute risk reduction, proportion of event free patients, or as the number of patients needed to be treated to prevent an adverse event.

For both interventions, the proposal that presented its evidence in terms of relative risk reduction received significantly greater support (mammography = 79%, cardiac rehab = 76%) than the ‘next best option’ (mammography = 51%, cardiac rehab = 62%) with two of the mammography proposals receiving only half the level of support (38%) of the leading proposal.

Only 3 of the 140 individuals who actively participated in the study correctly identified that all four proposals they were asked to review presented the same clinical results.

The other key feature of the study worth commenting on is that although both the interventions used showed very similar relative benefits, the absolute benefits of each of the two interventions were very different, specifically the background of risk of death for a patient having had at least one prior heart attack is 85 times greater than that of a middle-aged woman who would have been eligible to enter the proposed mammography screening programme. Had the study also gone on to ask participants to choose between the two interventions on the basis that they could fund only one of them, its conceivable that a significant number would have opted for the mammography screening programme despite the fact that, in absolute terms, it would provide considerably lower benefits than the cardiac rehab programme.

It in situations like that, which are likely to become more and come prevalent as public spending cuts begin to bite, that the true value of an education in the fundmentals of science becomes apparent…

…although I pity the poor sod charged with educating Nadine Dorries in the science, a task not dissimilar to that of teaching table manners to the starving wolverine.