Apathy Sketchpad

I sent this to Newsjack. They didn’t use it. Given the reception Newsjack got I’m not sure how annoyed I really ought to feel about that. That’s not to say it was all bad by any means, but if it’s worse than the worst thing in Newsjack then I really shouldn’t show it to anyone ever. In any case, it’s sufficiently topical that I presume if I sit on it any longer it will cease to be any use to anyone, so here it is:

So the Practice Election is over. I thought it was the European Parliament election, and the local council elections. That’s what I thought it was. But apparently I was wrong and it was just a practice-run for the general election that David Cameron is so keen on. I assume this because I’m being told to vote Conservative “if [I'm] sick of Gordon Brown’s hopeless Govenment”.

The Conservative position at the moment seems to be ‘Vote For Us; We’re Not Labour’. They’ve got a checklist on their leaflet of policies that they support and Labour oppose — which is fine, but they’re bound to differ on some points or they’d be the same party, so unless they explain why these policies are good ideas, they’re saying little more than ‘We Support Our Own Policies’. And they’re all just generically right-wing policies. Everything on the list is in the form ‘voting against EU [blank]‘. I get how they’re not Labour, but they do seem to be UKIP.

Third on the list is “Voting to keep the UK’s opt-out from the EU Working Time Directive, allowing people to choose how much overtime they work”. As I understand it, the idea of the Directive is to make sure nobody is forced them to work nominally-voluntary overtime, say by paying them so little that they basically have no choice. I don’t know if I support that, but if I oppose it it’s not because (from the leaflet):

More than three million people in the UK, many working in the health service, have opted out of the Euro-regulations because they rely on overtime to boost their pay to make ends meet.

Maybe I’ve misunderstood this, but it seems to me that if you need to work overtime in order to make ends meet, then you’re being exploited. If you have a full-time job and can’t support yourself on your basic salary, you’re not being paid enough. Unless they all have irresponsibly vast progenies, this isn’t an argument against the Working Time Directive, it’s an argument for a massive increase in the minimum wage and a Working Time Directive. These are surely exactly the people this regulation is designed to protect? Once it’s illegal for them to do the overtime, presumably their employers will be forced to increase their wages, because they’re not going to turn up if the pay isn’t enough to live on. They’ll look for something else and claim benefits in the meantime. Surely that’s exactly the point?

But mostly what makes me cross about the Conservatives lately is their ‘handling’ of the MPs’ Expenses scandal. David Cameron, realising that ‘MPs’ becomes ‘the Government’ in people’s heads, then ‘Gordon Brown’ and then ‘Labour’, keeps standing up in Parliament shouting about how Gordon Brown has ‘lost control’ and ‘isn’t it time to call an election and let the public say how they feel’, all without mentioning that almost all the really bad expenses stories were Tory MPs. Brown can’t control the opposition MPs, therefore there should be an election, at which everyone will vote Conservative because they’re ahead in the polls principally because they swindled their expenses.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t much like Labour either. But I think the extent of their present unpopularity is unfair — it’s caused more by bad timing, Gordon Brown’s inability to control his own facial muscles and the cross-party-at-worst expenses scandal than anything they’ve particularly done wrong — and the Conservatives aren’t better. The Conservatives think anti-science nonsense-fountain Nadine Dorries is a viable MP. Ann Widdecombe, an insane, shouty, far-right lunatic who supported The Master for Prime Minister, is their health secretary. They are, if anything, worse than Labour at almost everything that Labour are unpopular for, but they’ve cunningly exploited it as a selling point anyway because they’re The Opposition, and it’s an easier narrative if you can Vote For Change than if there are inconvenient details like, say, the Liberal Democrats to worry about.

And people fall for it. The council election results are in. The Guardian put them on a map, and it just looks like a map of Britain painted blue. There’s one Lib Dem council, a few with No Overall Control, and the rest are Tory (and a few in a nice sky blue that wasn’t on the key so I don’t know what it means).

There are even fears that the BNP might get a seat on the EU Parliament. That’s almost criminal — they’re not remotely interested in contributing to the running of the EU; they just want cash. A seat on the Parliament comes with £5 million of funding, which they could use to push their racist agenda. You can’t let a racist fringe party have that kind of public money just because you’re upset at MPs. And again, they’re not a protest vote because they’re worse than either Labour or the Conservatives. Okay, so some Labour and Tory MPs fiddled their expenses, but BNP members (they escaped the scandal by cunningly not having any MPs) have made explosives, attacked people, robbed houses, stolen cars and assaulted the police.

And it’s hard to say before the results come out, but apparently there’s a chance they’ll manage it. If they do, I shall blame the Telegraph newspaper. There’s no point blaming the people who voted BNP or the BNP themselves; they’re all idiots or racists or both, and you can’t expect any better of those people. But the Telegraph ought to know better.

The reason I blame the Telegraph is that they were the ones to break the expenses story. And they could have done so properly: reporting the genuinely scandalous examples as such, while praising or quietly ignoring MPs whose expenses claims were perfectly reasonable. Instead, they tried to read a scandal into even the most innocent behaviour, and paint all MPs as equally corrupt. Possibly they did this because targeting the worst offenders is difficult for a historically pro-Tory paper, but it did wonders for the BNP, who immediately started shouting nonsense like ‘punish the pigs’ as if petty revenge was a good reason to vote fascist. Meanwhile the Liberal Democrats, who are less corrupt and less terrifyingly illiberal than any of the above parties, haven’t been doing as well as one might expect, and I put this down to the Telegraph trying to paint them as corrupt for no good reason and the ‘two-party’ false dilemma whereby people unhappy with life under a Labour government automatically side with the Tories without bothering to look up either party’s policies.

Basically, people need to take a good long look at their reasons for voting. ‘Punishing’ the government is not a reason. A demand for vague, unspecified ‘change’ is not a reason. ‘We always vote Labour in our family’ is not a reason. A reason is something like ‘I strongly agree with his policies on Europe and the environment’.

Because it turns out this stuff might be important some day.

What with being away, I’ve only just this minute seen the BNP Party Political Broadcast.

At least, I thought I had. Now I’m fairly convinced what I saw was a brilliant satire. I tend to ignore the BNP, so I wouldn’t know Nick Griffin from Peter Serafinowicz in a fatsuit. I’m given to understand that the BNP are trying to claim popularity on the back of the MPs’ expenses scandal, presumably on the grounds that MPs are unpopular and they’re the only party who don’t have any. If this video is real, they’re actually going more for a kind of pity-vote. It’s so adorable. Here, have a look:

My favourite part is the woman who stands in front of bemused-looking houses presenting a bizarre kind of plumbing forecast. I love that she stumbles repeatedly on the word ‘hip’, and yet nobody thought to try anything as reckless as a second take. But my favourite part of this, my favourite part, is when it cuts from there to another, nearly identical scene, with about half a nanosecond’s pause between the sentences. It looks like a Mitchell and Webb sketch that would start with ‘hello and welcome to Coverage Of People Asking For Security Lighting And Getting It. We’re here with this elderly couple who want a downstairs shower and we’ll be catching up with them when it’s been installed which is now’.

I also liked the bit where Nick Griffin brilliantly promises ‘no Big Brother spychips, inyerbins’, as if that had ever been a major concern. You can’t just make up policies and then promise not to enact them. ‘No spy chips in your bins, no compulsory gay sex for children, and we won’t nail a railway sleeper to your dog.’ Thanks. I think I’m going to go vote for the man from the Nationwide adverts.

And just when you think it might actually be real, it cuts to hopeless graphic of the website, with a voiceover that sounds like it was recorded in a toilet cubicle. And then the phone number appears behind the on-screen graphic! That’s the final brilliant touch that lifts this video out of Slightly Naff and into the realm of Satirical Genius.

And the whole way through the video, everyone is trying very hard to squeeze everything in. There are almost no pauses between sentences, even where you really need one. And yet, most of the time they’ve used is wasted on fluffing lines and the huge pause at the end while clipart shuffles ponderously around the screen.

It can’t be real — nobody would sign off on it as anything other than parody.

Another batch of NewsBiscuit submissions. As ever, one above the fold, rest below it. These are rather old, so the topical ones obviously no longer qualify as such. I think they’re all from March: I’ve not been writing much of this stuff for weeks now, mostly due to business, not being in the mood, and various other distractions. (And let’s face it: nobody ever won a mug by writing two items a month.)

Microsoft running ’secret database program’ on millions of computers

There were fresh fears raised this week about online safety and privacy, as it emerged that software giant Microsoft had secretly installed a database program on millions of computers across the world, many in homes and businesses. The mysterious program, known only as ‘Access.exe’ is installed when the user first uses Microsoft Office, and hides among the regular components of Office. Although the program only came to light recently, it is thought that it may have been present on even early versions.

The program was found when Sarah Armstrong, a teacher in London, asked a friend for help with Excel and was shown the extra software hiding in the start menu. Immediately, she called other friends, who confirmed that they had ‘the Access program’ installed. Fearing the worst, she contacted Microsoft technical support and demanded to know why the program had been secretly installed on her computer. According to Armstrong, the support representative candidly told her ‘That’s our database program.’ Armstrong then asked ‘could you use Access to store people’s personal details and track their behaviour?’ and the representative said ‘yes’.

The Daily Express described the revelation as ‘just more evidence of what life is really like in Database Britain’. Microsoft has insisted that the public should not worry about Access, and that the program exists to help users control their own data, however when Armstrong contacted Microsoft demanding to see the information Access databases had about her, she was told that this was ‘impossible’.

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Everyone makes mistakes. I think that most people realise this, and are aware that it applies even when a mistake can lead to deaths. I’m pretty sure that we all realise that these things happen even when everyone does everything right and we shouldn’t be too alarmed about it. If it’s handled well, it needn’t be that big a deal to the general public. To illustrate this, I present two examples:

1. In June 2006, a man was accidentally shot by a police officer in an anti-terror raid on a house in Forest Gate. The police admitted the error and moved on. I bet you can’t remember his name. (It was Mohammed Abdul Kahar.)
2. A year earlier, Jean Charles de Menezes was shot by the police in Stockwell tube station. The story given to the media and the public was that he was acting suspiciously, and the police shouted for everyone to stay still and get down, and one report claimed he then ran away and vaulted over a turnstile. This totally vindicated the police, until it turned out to be a lie. We heard about little else for weeks and the police suffered a massive loss of public trust. Four years on and I can still remember how to spell his surname.

Clearly nobody at the Met has ever watched Coupling. (Or the news.) When Ian Tomlinson died at the G20 protests on April 1st, the police claimed he collapsed and died of natural causes. A post-mortem said he’d had a heart attack. This turned out to be a lie: we now know he died of internal bleeding, such as might result from being hit with a stick and pushed over. I say “lie” rather than just “not true” because the pathologist who performed the erroneous post-mortem examination had previously been reprimanded for misconduct in a case involving a death in police custody, and had returned a ‘natural causes’ verdict on a suspected murder victim found in the flat of a man who went on to kill two people. He was perhaps a poor choice, unless the aim was to ensure a favourable verdict. The police said that “officers gave him an initial check and cleared his airway before moving him… as during this time a number of missiles - believed to be bottles - were being thrown at them.” This also turned out to be a lie.

After a few days it emerged that shortly before Tomlinson died a policeman had hit him with a baton and shoved him over. We only know this because of eyewitnesses and video footage of the police officer attacking him, none of which came from the police. There’s lots of video of police misconduct at the protests, which is good, because it’s almost the only effective recourse we have against corrupt policing (since they’ve taken to disregarding the law requiring them to identify themselves). This may be why a law was introduced shortly before the protest making it illegal to video the police, which in turn might explain why people have been sending their videos to the Guardian rather than the IPCC, who today admitted they sought an injunction to stop Channel Four showing a new video of the incident. At one point the IPCC claimed there was no CCTV footage either. This also turned out to be a lie.

The government are granting increasingly absurd powers to the police, and when they’re abused nothing is done. The officer who killed Tomlinson hasn’t been arrested. His name hasn’t been released. The police and the IPCC lie about the circumstances and the evidence, and the government just carry on passing new laws to increase their ability to do so.

Watch your MP. They’re the only person in government directly answerable to you. Pester them relentlessly if they act up. They’re subject to great pressures from Westminster to vote the ‘right’ way, but if they don’t get elected they don’t have a job. It won’t help, probably. But it has to be worth trying, unless someone has a better idea.

Click to enlarge

It’s Student Election Time!

Actually, it’s not. Hasn’t been for a bit now, but the uninspired propaganda chalked onto the floor still haven’t completely washed away. The thing that gets me about student election campaigns is the pointlessness of it all: nobody has any real policies because none of the positions offer any real power, so voting decisions come down to personal relationships and advert quality, but since none of the candidates differ significantly, all the adverts are identical and none of them say anything. They just say ‘vote Jennie #1 for editor’ or something, with no reason offered for you to do so. Participating in this absurd farce is supposed to look good on one’s CV. I have no idea why.

I did not vote in the student elections.

Angry about a potential Liberal Democrat policy to oppose religious discrimination in school admissions, a group of ‘faith leaders’ (a piece of journalese which roughly translates as ’self-important windbags’) have written a letter to the Guardian which is packed so full of logical fallacies there’s hardly any room left over for proselytising.

It’s mostly dull, but this bit is worth mentioning:

Tomorrow, delegates at the Liberal Democrat conference will have a choice of supporting the heritage and future of [faith] schools, or supporting a policy that would damage that which helps make them so successful. We hope that they choose to back the clear consensus of public opinion as reflected in the Guardian’s own poll published this week, which showed 69% of those with school-age children support a religious ethos in schools.

It seems to me that the argument is completely empty: there’s no reason to think that a school’s religious ethos would be damaged by admitting pupils who didn’t subscribe to that religion. I went to a church wedding last year, and spent the entire time resolutely not-believing in God, and yet the whole thing went off without a hitch, all the while exuding religiosity. The actual beliefs of the participants is completely irrelevant: me toeing the line and sitting quietly at the back of the church looks exactly the same whether or not I accept the ideas being preached from the front of it, and that’s as it should be. The whole thing is worse when there are children involved, because the idea of what they believe is fuzzier: an adult can believe in God and while they’re still wrong we must at least respect that they’re capable of deciding for themselves what they believe (even if they choose not to). With children that’s less true: a seven-year-old Christian is just parroting what his parents taught him. Even I was a Christian at that age (I think — I really don’t remember much from that long ago). The idea that you have to have pupils of a particular religion in order to maintain a school’s ‘character’ is a ridiculous claim made to justify a form of discrimination that should have been banned decades ago.

To me, the strongest argument against faith schools is that they don’t give children a chance to be who they want to be: a child from a Muslim family at a Muslim school with Muslim friends is not really being given any opportunity to develop in any other direction than strict adherance to Islam. That works out great for Islam, but pretty badly for the child, who may turn out to be gay or rational and have massive problems reconciling these natural traits with his imposed faith. I would solve that by banning faith-based education, but a good compromise is to allow culturally-religious schools such as the one avowed atheist Marcus du Sautoy’s children attend but ban them from discriminating.

The first two sentences of the letter are:

Tomorrow, the Liberal Democrats will debate education policy, including their position on the country’s 7,000 schools with religious character. The debate needs to be informed by facts and not conjecture.

Let’s see some facts, then. I would like to see a single scrap of evidence for the claim that discrimination is required to maintain the effectiveness of faith schools. I fully expect that there isn’t any.

This has been kicking around my drafts folder for ages. Not sure why I never posted it, but here it is now anyway.

Suppose you got a massive bucket of bricks that weighed more than all but the fattest bastard. Clearly it is a bad thing to weigh more than it. Say then that every year you removed a brick, until it weighed the same as someone merely fairly chubby. It is clearly still bad to weigh more than the bucket of bricks. It is still true that those heavier than it die younger than those lighter. Only now, loads more people are heavier than it — primarily because it’s so much lighter than it used to be.

You now understand logic better than The Christian Institute:

A new in-depth study has added to mounting evidence that being born outside of marriage damages children. The report, compiled by researchers at the University of Essex, says that 44 per cent of babies are now born to unmarried parents. Cohabitees are estimated to make up three-quarters of those parents.

Well, technically, but hold on…

A new in-depth study has added to mounting evidence that being born outside of marriage damages children.

What? The study does no such thing. It says that co-habiting parents are more likely to split up than married ones (a fact which has many interesting causes, none of which involve Jesus), that children whose parents split up are worse off than those whose parents stay together, and that more children are being born out of wedlock.

Well yes, but unmarried couples are staying together longer than they used to: because the point at which the average couple marry — the number of bricks in the bucket — is changing. It’s not an illusory problem, and I’d hate to imply that it is, but the simplistic spin put on it by the Christian Institute (”The Christian Institute exists for the furtherance and promotion of the Christian religion in the United Kingdom”, so no agenda there) is just pathetic. To support that conclusion, you want a large cohort study, with a group of children of married parents and a matched group of unmarried ones — with similar incomes, social class, inteligence, location, and so forth, as any of those and other factors could affect odds of break-up and children’s welfare. That wasn’t even hinted at in any account of the report I can find. (I don’t think a RCT where the participants are unaware whether they’re legally wed would be particularly useful, but it would certainly be funny.)

And remember: the CI is a charity. Every time someone donates to them, the income tax paid on that is handed to the CI. So you funded this article. And so did I. And I’m cross about that, because it’s like everything I hate most rolled into one.

Here are my NewsBiscuit submissions for the last month. First, one that made the front page:

• Government Agrees Rescue Package For Snowmen (original submission)

Now the others. Tip of the hat to anhodika for inspiring the first one and to Smudge for the headline on the second one. (Community site, see?)

Straw refuses to publish details of amendments to Freedom of Information Act

Following backlash against the scrapped publication of Parliamentary minutes from the run-up to the Iraq war, Jack Straw has announced that there will be a series of reforms to the current Freedom of Information Act. He promised reporters that the new Act would be more efficient and less easily circumvented, but he refused to divulge how this would be achieved or exactly what the proposals were.

Speaking on BBC Radio 7, he said that the new rules would stop politicians ‘publishing embarassing information in obscure places where it would be unlikely to be widely seen, such as Hansard or this show’. When asked where the information would instead be published, Straw looked puzzled, and after a pause said that the new proposals favoured openness but that the specifics of the proposals were not intended for public dissemination.

Straw went on to explain that while it is important that the public has a right to access information about government, that must be balanced with other concerns, such as security. ‘Of the nation?’ prompted the presenter, to which Straw replied, ‘well yes, obviously, but also of my job.’ When pressed for more information, he explained that ‘if the public know how to get information, then so do al-Qaeda, and that could pose serious threats.’ Instead, the government is set to bring in a replacement Act, whereby the public has a right to access large amounts of government information, including Parliamentary minutes and MPs’ expenses, but will not be told how to do so. He promised, however, that details of the process would be made freely available to anyone who asked to see them, as long as they submit their request in a correctly formatted letter to the new Information Commissioner’s office, whose address was also available on properly presented request.

The new Act is expected to come into force at the start of April, however Straw promised that information important to the public, such as war minutes and MPs’ expenses, would be covered by the new rules immediately ‘to aid transparency in government’.

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One of the most senior figures in the Catholic Church in England and Wales has defended his decision to allow a known paedophile to continue working as a priest… The archbishop said he had been acting on advice from professionals at a time when the behaviour of child abusers was not as well understood as at present. … Documents seen by the BBC suggest the archbishop ignored the advice of doctors and therapists who warned that Hill was likely to re-offend. … He later became chaplain at Gatwick Airport where he abused a boy with learning difficulties.

Archbishop Murphy-O’Connor has now agreed that boys abused by the priest should receive compensation, but as part of the settlement they were required not to speak publicly about what happened.

I’ve linked to this story before, but I think it bears repeating, because according to the Times,

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor is on course to become the first Roman Catholic bishop to sit in the House of Lords since the Reformation… The Archbishop of Westminster looks almost certain to be offered a peerage after his retirement, which is expected within weeks.

Gordon Brown’s brilliant plan, then, is to let this man have a direct say in public policy without ever facing an election. This man whose poor judgement allowed children to be abused. This liar and hypocrite. This ardent anti-secularist. This man should be allowed a vote in the houses of Parliament. I’m sorry, no. This man should be sidelined, marginalised and ignored like the unrepresentatively right-wing liar in the increasingly unpopular and irrelevant cult that he so clearly is.

We’ve already had one secretly-Catholic Prime Minister this century, who’s now promoting religion as the answer to everything. The government have opened 84 faith schools in the last 11 years despite polls showing they’re unpopular. Why are they so keen to push faith down our throats? Religion is a great tool for controlling the masses, but it only works if the masses genuinely believe it, and we clearly don’t. Even people who profess faith are generally secularist in politics. This is just going to make Labour even more unpopular than they already are. It’s like they’re throwing this election on purpose.

I can’t see any way of looking at this other than as just one more bizarre gift of power from this government to religion. The alternative is that Brown genuinely believes that Cormac Murphy-O’Connor would be a good member of Parliament.

Frankly, I’m not sure which is scarier.