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.

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.

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’.

EXCLUSIVE: Harriet Harman’s Court of Public Opinion

Speaking on the Andrew Marr show on BBC1, Harriet Harman told viewers that Sir Fred Goodwin’s £650k pension “might be enforceable in a court of law this contract but it’s not enforceable in the court of public opinion and that’s where the Government steps in”. This comment confused many viewers, and so her office has since issued a further statement to clarify and expand on what was meant by this remark:

“In government, we try to legislate in advance wherever possible. We try to anticipate events and make laws to protect people from crime and keep people happy and healthy. But there are things it is impossible to anticipate, and the strict application of the law can result in regrettable or unpopular actions being taken. In those cases, the new Court of Public Opinion will correct the oversight.

“In this case, clearly the law has failed to anticipate the interactions between the financial bailout and contract law, and the first act of the Court of Public Opinion will be to remedy this by stripping him of his legal right to payment for services rendered. Future plans for the new Court include expulsion of Gary Glitter from the UK, in spite of his legal right as a citizen to live here, and the torture and/or execution of the social workers involved in the Baby P case (however indirectly). Right now on the government’s e-petitions site there are dozens of petitions demanding that important football matches be shown on free-to-view TV channels, so naturally that is something we will be looking into at some point.

“The new Court will allow the government to suspend inconvenient laws, such as the Human Rights Act, in certain cases when there is public support or a loud backlash from tabloid newspapers or religious groups. This will help make society fairer, except for that part of the population that the people have decided no longer deserve the protection of the law.

“In order to differentiate clearly between the new Court and the existing Courts of Law, the Court of Public Opinion will not hear cases in a conventional courthouse, but will instead hear them in a specially commissioned television show, including a jury of public phone-voters. These will of course be strictly controlled to ensure that any member of the public who pays the £1.50 call costs will have their vote counted.

“It is hoped that we will have the system up and running by 9PM next Saturday when the first hearing, The People Versus Fred Goodwin, starts on BBC2. If the Court proves a success, we hope to move it to BBC1 within the year.”

The human rights group Liberty has expressed outrage at the plans. Harman’s office has responded by inviting them to appear on episode five of the show, entitled The People Versus Meddling Hippies. Liberty initially declined the invitation, but the government insisted it was really more of a summons.

Sweatshop worker biopic ‘Slumdog Milliner’ fails to wow Oscar panel.

God, Women Eh, Study Finds

A four year study into behavioural gender phenotypes at Sheffield University concluded this week that men are genetically incapable of living either with, or without, women. The discovery follows a long investigation, led by recently divorced behavioural athropologist Dr Clive Allen. Allen claims the controversial research ‘clearly demonstrates’ that all women are ‘irrational and vaccuous windbags, incapable of reason and who delight in shopping for things they will never wear using their husband’s money’, and vindicate his positions on everything he and his ex-wife ever disagreed about.

As part of the work, the researchers split 1004 male volunteers into a ‘test’ group, who were instructed to, and a ‘control’ group, who were asked to refrain from. After following both groups for six months, no significant difference was seen between the groups, and the scientists concluded that men are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

Another experiment published in the same work involved a survey of 2503 men. Each was asked about the time his partner took to get ready for a night out, and how she looked when this was complete. Attractiveness was found not to correlate with time taken to get ready, but it was found that the time was significantly longer when the party was with the man’s friends who he hadn’t seen in ages.

Out of 503 women tested, it was found that 498 had the physical strength and manual dexterity required to successfully lower a toilet seat, and the paper concluded that ‘more research is needed’ to determine what they’re all whining about the whole time.

Critics have accused Allen of mysogyny. Allen says that his data show that his attitude towards women is, in fact, based on solid scientific evidence, and that those who disagree are deluding themselves.

BBC Exec says Top Gear is ‘just a vehicle for Jeremy Clarkson’

Clarkson told reporters ‘if Top Gear was a vehicle, it would be a tank!’ however fellow presenter James May said ‘of course it’s a vehicle — and it’s not going anywhere’.

Church of England to offer Sharia-Compliant Christianity

Online Privacy Campaigner Disappointed Google Street View Stops Two Streets From Her House

Google unveiled the first Street View images of the UK, covering central London, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and Edinburgh yesterday, and like many people, Clare Hunter immediately loaded Google Maps to look for her own house. Hunter, who has long been one of Google’s fiercest critics over user privacy issues, said she was ‘mildly disappointed’ that the coverage area stops two streets from her house.

‘It’s frustrating,’ she told reporters. ‘America has had this for ages, and we’ve patiently waited, and now when it arrives I’m just outside the zone. It wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t so close!’ Hunter admits that if you load a nearby street and look through a gap between two houses, Google has caught a picture of what she is ‘pretty sure’ is her washing line. ‘In some ways, I wish I’d had some washing out that day, so I’d know for sure. Although that would raise serious questions about the ethics of putting people’s dirty laundry on the internet.’ After a moment’s thought, she corrected this to ‘wet laundry’.

Other members of her campaign group whose houses do lie within the Street View coverage area have contacted Google to complain, but they were surprised that Hunter did not sympathise with them. ‘Whenever we’ve had privacy concerns in the past, Clare’s been very helpful and supportive, but when I visited her yesterday and showed her the photos Google had taken of my house — and in one case my cat! — she just said “oh, sure, rub my face in it, why don’t you?” and closed the browser window.’

Hunter has plans to harness the democratising power of the internet for an online campaign to have Street View extended, which will launch as soon as she finishes filling in her Facebook account.

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.

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.

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.

• 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’.

Book readers ‘must destroy own memory after last page’ - Authors Guild

The Authors Guild have announced that they are to take legal action against Mike Bradshaw, a 23 year old chemistry student at Durham University. The Guild alleges that Bradshaw ‘described the plot’ of Stephen King’s ‘Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption’ to Patricia Hunter, another local student, at a party at a friend’s flat two weeks ago.

‘I don’t know what the problem is,’ Bradshaw told reporters. ‘I wasn’t even talking about the book - we were discussing films and I said I liked The Shawshank Redemption. Patricia asked what it was about and I told her. I don’t know how they ever expect to sell old books and films if people aren’t allowed to reccomend them to each other.’ Roy Blount Junior, president of the Guild, have said that their members do not have a problem with reccomendations per se, but have stressed the difference between simply stating that you enjoyed a book and explaining what the book is about. The latter, they claim, is infringment.

Blount went on to clarify that in any case the court case was not strictly about Bradshaw’s recounting of the plot, but in fact was about the ‘illegal copy’ of the book that Bradshaw had stored in his memory. ‘Memorizing passages, phrases or plot details from a book is creating a copy which is not allowed by copyright law,’ Blount explained. ‘The author receives no remuneration for this copy and we cannot be sure that the holder of this copy is not creating derivative works in their imagination, for example, placing our members’ characters into situations the authors never intended, or even allowing characters from different authors’ works to meet. In any other medium, this would be unacceptable. Why should the mind be any different?’

Meanwhile, communications company T-Mobile are planning a case against Miss Hunter, claiming that their own copyright was infringed when she gave Bradshaw an unauthorised copy of her mobile phone number.

Obama ’still getting all Bush’s mail’

Official documents released today have shed light on how smoothly the transition form Bush to Obama administration has gone. The reports reveal that an early attempt by Republicans to claim ownership of the White House under common law on the grounds that Bush had lived there uncontested for eight years has been rejected because actually many people complained about it almost constantly. A smaller complaint from Bush himself was noted but not acted upon: apparently Bush was upset as he was ‘just getting the hang of this President thing’.

Obama has had fewer complaints, the main one being that he is still receiving all Bush’s old mail. The report mentions at least one copy of ‘Guns And Ammo’ magazine and several personal letters. There is even some mail arriving from previous White House resident Hillary Clinton, although some of this has arrived from companies that did not exist eight years ago, suggesting she may have sent out over-optimistic ‘change of address’ cards during the primaries.

The report goes on to mention official statistics from Canadian immigration authorities, who have noticed a marked decrease in unauthorised border crossings since November, except across the Western border where Canada meets Alaska, where crossings have slightly increased.

Most worryingly for American citizens is the revelation that the second Amendment to the US Constitution, which reads ‘a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed’ may have to be repealed. The report claims that eight years is ‘plenty of time’ for a citizen malitia to rise up and defend the nation’s freedoms from attack from a corrupt government, and that if the people didn’t want to accept the responsibilities that come with gun ownership then they couldn’t expect to retain the right to it either.

First day’s play abandoned as players realise cricket is actually pretty dull.

All photos in January’s FHM look like airbrush artist’s ex-girlfriend

Colin Jones was one of many men who, after buying the latest FHM as normal this January, was surprised to find that all the models looked almost identical. Some of them were taller or slimmer, or black, but all of them had the same smile, the same blue eyes, and the same high but elegant cheekbones. FHM have received forty complaints about the incident, although it seems that the vast majority of readers did not notice, since the photo alterations only affected the models’ faces.

Jones, however, was one of very few men who recognised the repeated face. It was his neighbour, receptionist Miranda Lee. He took the magazine round to show her the strange phenomenon, expecting her to be puzzled, but instead she simply said ‘that b*****d!’ and stormed off. Lee drove immediately to her ex-boyfriend Craig Turner’s flat. Turner has worked for FHM touching up photos for six years, and had been unceremoniously dumped by Lee following a disastrous Christmas. When Lee arrived, she found Turner, who still harbours a strong desire to mend the relationship, had six copies of the latest FHM and several large printouts of the model photos.

FHM have apologised to their readers and promised to make ‘less-significantly altered’ photos available to readers on their website. Turner has since told reporters ‘the guys at the magazine were actually very understanding. They said they weren’t going to fire me for it but that I should be more controlled in future. Apparently, almost all of the complaints were about the Rachel Stevens shoot — if I’d left that one set alone, probably nobody would ever have known. The worst part of it is that I’m never going to get Miranda back now. She thinks I’m a creep and she’s getting loads of attention from men. They don’t even know why they fancy her.’

Tabloid Editors Apologise to Jade Goody

At a press conference today, representatives of Britain’s tabloid press have apologised for their treatment of Big Brother contestant Jade Goody over the last few years.

The editor of the News of the World read aloud a statement in which he expressed ‘deep regret that [they] painted her as a stupid, vacuous bimbo’. He went on to say that ’since the details of her disease were released, [they] have come to realise that she is, in fact, a brave young woman struggling against difficult circumstances’.

The group have pledged to support her in the future, and have given her a regular column in the Express, which will be released unedited ‘in case her erratic spelling and unconventional use of facts are important in the way she expresses herself’.

Controversial bishop promises to deny smaller atrocity

The ultra-conservative Catholic bishop Richard Williamson, whose excommunication was lifted by Pope Benedict XVI earlier this year, has broken his silence and released a statement in which he promisese that he will accept the historical truth of the holocaust and instead deny a series of smaller atrocities against the Jewish people.

Williamson had been under fire for his claims that ‘there were no gas chambers’ and only 300,000 Jews were killed in concentration camps. The true figure is nearer to six million. He now says that he will accept there were gas chambers, and from now on will instead deny that episode of South Park where Cartman makes Kyle watch The Passion Of The Christ.

A full list of Williamson’s new beliefs about the oppression of Jews, which were agreed upon after long consultation between Jewish spokespeople and Williamson’s assistants, has been posted on the Vatican website, and includes a claim that Fourth Council of the Lateran did not force Jews to wear the Judenhut, and a denial of the full horror of Zoe Wanamaker’s role in My Family. A denial of the phone calls made to Andrew Sachs’ voicemail was ruled out at an early stage of discussion due to their sensitive nature, but Williamson will be allowed to exaggerate the success of Clement Freud on Just A Minute.

When asked by a reporter whether he considered it dishonest to change his historical beliefs for political reasons rather than as a result of new evidence, Williamson replied ‘no, I’m a Catholic’.

Jaguar hit by wildcat strike. More soon.

1,500 attend first convention of casual Doctor Who fans

Over 1,500 casual Doctor Who fans gathered in London last night for TARDIS, the new convention specifically aimed at the idle viewers who enjoy it when it’s on but certainly wouldn’t stay home to see it. Most of the attendees lived locally. According to the convention’s Facebook page, entitled ‘who want’s [sic] to meet up re. dr.?’, casual fans from further afield were put off by the amount of effort involved in a trip to London.

Many guests came dressed as their favourite Doctor, usually David Tennant, who was generally referred to as ‘The Second Doctor’. Sarah White, a housewife from Hackney, said the event had been fun. ‘I dressed up as Rose Taylor,’ she said, ‘although I dress like this most of the time anyway. I always watch Doctor Who, because my children love it, and I guess it’s pretty good sometimes, so it was nice to be able to come here and discuss other things with like-minded people. I had a lovely chat about local restaurants with a man dressed as a Cyberman, although to be honest I couldn’t really hear him over the crumpling tin-foil.’

To open the event there was going to be a montage of clips from the first series since the re-launch, played to the extended theme song on a large screen in the conference hall, but this was cancelled after many guests said that they might want to watch that series some day and didn’t want to know what happens.

The pinnacle of the convention was a guest appearance by new Doctor Matt Smith, who will take over from David Tennant next year, and Doctor Who writer Steven Moffatt. Unfortunately, none of the guests recognised either, except for one who had seen Moffatt on a Coupling DVD extra.

OK! Magazine reject new slogan ‘Where Celebrities Go To Die’.

Base rate of interest ‘just made up number’.

As part of a wider plan to inspire confidence in banking by a policy of absolute honesty, the Bank of England was forced to admit this week that the so-called base rate of interest is in fact ‘just a made up number.’ Following the slashing of the rate due to the current economic downturn, many high-street bank executives realised that they didn’t actually have to pay any attention and kept their rates exactly as they were. A manager at Lloyds TSB told reporters, ‘why should we do what they say? It’s just a number they put out every so often. We don’t adjust our rates based on what Natwest do, or the current terror threat level, or any of the other meaningless numbers people release these days.’

Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, said that the base rate was ‘at best, a way of keeping score.’ According to King, the rate is lowered when things look bad ‘to try to make people feel like we [the Bank of England] are doing something,’ and raised again when things are more stable ‘partly so that people feel that everything is normal, but mostly so we have somewhere to lower it again next time everything goes pear-shaped.’

Economists have reacted angrily to the news, saying that in fact the Bank of England is central to the national financial infrastructure, and any change in their rates has a wide-reaching impact. They say there are ’sound economic and financial reasons’ why banks should pay close attention to the rate and adjust their policies accordingly, however King, speaking on a panel of high-level banking officials, dismissed this argument as ‘just what we tell you.’

Other ‘honest banking’ proposals include the scrapping of ‘introductory’ high rates for savers, renaming many common bank charges to ‘greed tariffs’, and the ending of the requirement that bank employees smile.

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.

And that’s not their fault, generally. Please don’t think I’m mocking the ignorant here. My point is that people in charge should fix it. It’s a massive drain on resources. If you can spend a week training someone to use their computer efficiently, you’ll get that week back with interest within a year or two. I don’t understand why companies spend so much money on computers and software, then give them out to all employees without even explaining how to operate them, and then spend even more time and money trying to build a network so secure that their random clicking can’t do any damage. Why not just teach them how to correctly use the software and then let them get on with it? If you’re ignorant, you get training to fix it before you do any damage. You don’t get wrapped in cotton wool. That does nobody any good.

Today at work the IT department sent round information on how to encrypt sensitive data. They recommend TrueCrypt and Axcrypt, both of which are free. When something might affect the University’s reputation like a leak of personal data the IT department (who mostly actually do know what they’re doing) insist on doing things properly, and that means open-source.

Also today, the Pentagon shut down their website because someone at Wikileaks noticed a series of secret reports left in an unprotected directory on one of their public servers in the form of doc files encrypted with Word’s built in password feature and cracked them. The password was ‘progress’. That’s moronic. That’s the only way to describe it. The files should have been encrypted properly, with different, longer passwords with numbers and capitals and punctuation in. They should have been on a secure server where Joe Cracker couldn’t get them. Had they done that then the job of cracking them would have been intractable. As it is, it was inevitable.

I know a bit about this stuff, so to me, this is shocking. There is literally no excuse for doing something like that. Nobody that computer-illiterate should be ever have been allowed near the server. If you don’t know about online security then you might not realise how bad this is, so let’s be clear: this is much, much dumber than leaving an unencrypted USB stick on a train. I can see how that happens. I can see how you might leave encrypted files on a public server. They’re encrypted; it shouldn’t matter if people get hold of them. I cannot see how you accidentally choose a rubbish password and Word’s in-built encryption for official documents about a war. Ironically the document is about what information is public and what information is secret. This story — that the Pentagon is crap at security on a monumental scale — should be huge. Demonstrably it is not. I discovered it via a blog.

Christian Scientists Split God

A group of Christian research scientists in Massachusetts announced this week that they had managed for the first time to split God, also known as the Higgs particle although mostly to annoy physicists, into his component parts. God is believed to have existed in the conditions immediately prior to the Big Bang.

They made the discovery using a machine called the Holy Smoke Chamber. A fragment of the True Cross was accelerated to 40% the speed of light and collided with a King James Bible. The 25m wide device is cooled by a constant stream of holy water. A team of 5 priests work round the clock blessing the inbound pipelines. Researchers were able to detect two of God’s components in the debris from the explosion.

According to Christian scientific theory, God is composed of three smaller particles called father, son and holy spirit. The trace from the Holy Smoke Chamber clearly shows a trail for the son particle, which curves gracefully through the chamber for five nanoseconds before ascending into heaven, more-or-less in line with the theory. The father particle’s trace, however, did not agree with calculated predictions. The researchers have admitted that the way the father particle moves is ‘mysterious’, but are confident an explanation will be found. The holy spirit particle was not observed. The Christian scientists believe that this particle passed clean through the chamber like a ghost.

Most Christian scientists agree that the father and son particles could tell us a lot about the universe if we can unlock their secrets. The experiments have been criticised by others, however, who claim that earlier work by Revelation et al suggests that recreating the son particle on earth could trigger a process known as ‘armageddon’, which potentially could wipe out life on Earth.

DCSF delight as exam results show which pupils are stupid

Schools minister Ed Balls has expressed his delight at a ‘mixed bag’ of exam results, which he says ‘accurately show which pupils are clever and which are a bit stupid.’ When the results were announced, Gordon Brown described them as ‘disappointing,’ saying that ‘we had hoped more students might achieve the top grades,’ but Balls now claims that the purpose of exams is to gauge the different ability of students in various subjects and that a good distribution of grades, including fails, is needed to accomplish this.

‘This is absolute nonsense,’ said Beverley Hughes in an interview earlier today. ‘The purpose of testing students is to demonstrate how wildly successful our education reforms have been. We had been looking forward to another year of record-breaking exam results, and the exciting possibility of introducing a new top-grade to cope with the number of pupils achieving A* at GCSE, but now the system has been hijacked by teachers who just want to know how their students are doing.’ Insiders say the planned introduction of the new grade, tentatively named ‘AA1*+’ was intended to be a much-publicised event designed to underline the runaway success of both students and the Labour Party. The introduction has been put on hold pending an improvement in exam grades.

Employers have praised the latest results, saying that their similarity to the previous years’ results will make it easier to compare job applicants who sat them in different years, as well as clearly showing which pupils are habitual underachievers and should not be considered for important jobs. It is even thought that preventing stupid people from entering highly paid and responsible jobs could help the economy in the long term, and employers have been looking for a system of doing just that for many years, but Children’s minister Delyth Morgan has said that national exam results should not be used in this way. ‘This isn’t what they were designed to do. They are purely a tool for demonstrating the achievements of our department and the government in general.’ Some employers have gone so far as to suggest that some government ministers have a vested interest in maintaining the status-quo in which unqualified and incompetent people can remain in well paid, high-power jobs simply by engineering a series of spuriously inflated exam results. Ed Balls has strenuously denied these rumours, citing a government spreadsheet which would ‘authoritatively debunk these rumours’ had he not left the CD on a bus.

Analogue Switchoff: Your Questions Answered

Will I need to get a new TV?

No. In most cases you will need to purchase a digital receiver box to plug into your existing set. This will enable you to receive digital broadcasts after analogue is turned off. Most analogue TV will be switched off by 2011, but your area may differ.

Will I need to get a new radio?

Eventually. Analogue radio is being continued longer than analogue TV. No date has yet been set for this but sometime around 2015 seems likely. When this happens you will need to purchase a ‘DAB’ Digital Radio.

Will I need to get a new clock?

Yes. When analogue time is turned off in 2020, old-style analogue clocks will stop working. You will need to upgrade to a digital clock to enable you to continue telling the time. You will probably already own a digital clock as it will be built into your digital radio.

What other analogue products will need replacing?

If for some reason you still own a video cassette recorder, you will need to replace it with a Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) player. You will also be unable to play vinyl records and audio cassettes and will need to replace these with digital media such as MP3s or CDs.

Is there anything else I should know?

In 2025, analogue description will be turned off. Among other changes, you will no longer be able to describe the height of a person by gesturing and saying ‘about this high’. You will need to give a figure. You may continue give this figure in feet and inches as long as you also provide a metric estimate. For reference, six feet is approximately 1.5m, and two inches is roughly 0.05m.

Atheist Buses to be followed by Agnostic Trams, Troubled Billboards

Following the success of the so-called “Atheist Bus” campaign, other irreligious groups have launched similar efforts. The atheist message being plastered across buses throughout Britain reads “There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Next week sees the launch of the “Agnostic Tram”, which bears the message “I don’t know if there’s a god - I’m just a tram.” The group behind the “Troubled Billboard” has not yet managed to agree on a wording, but the current favoured text is “There must be more to life than just this, but there’s so much bad stuff in the world… oh, why is it so complicated? I just try to be nice, what else can you do?”. The organisers had hoped to get a bus advert too, but it rapidly became apparent that there simply wouldn’t be enough space.

Commuters in Huddersfield have recently started seeing adverts in train stations which say “We don’t know if we actually believe in God, but we are spiritual”. In one case, this advert is running right next to one that reads “I don’t know whether or not there’s a God, but there definitely aren’t any Thetans.” Nobody yet knows who paid for the double-page advert in Monday’s Telegraph which simply stated “oh, God, I’m so depressed.”

Surprisingly, a recent MORI poll asking which religious beliefs were most common found that most Britons agreed with the statement “I don’t care enough either way that I feel I have to paint it on a bus”.

Civilian deaths in Gaza. More soon.

UN Troops Help Woman With Own Personal Battle Against Cancer

Long-term cancer patient Amanda Myers, 42, was surprised earlier this month when fifty UN troops arrived in her hospital ward to help with what had previously been her own personal battle against cancer. Also surprised were the soldiers, who had previously been deployed keeping the peace in the Middle East. ‘They didn’t seem to know why they were there,’ said Myers. ‘They’ve been very helpful, though. Supportive and always happy to pop to the shops when I need something.’

President of the UN Security Council Jean-Maurice Ripart told the press that after accusations that the UN did nothing about the oppressive regime of Saddam Hussein, the UN was keen to regain popularity by fighting something that everyone would support. What happened next is unclear, but it is known that the council discussed removing a rogue head of state, but had difficulty coming up with anybody suitably unpopular. After a number of names were dismissed as either only ambiguously dangerous or too obscure, the British delegate suggested cancer, having forgotten that English humour is not always understood by other nations.

A representative of the hospital where Myers is being treated said ’strictly, we’re not supposed to allow visitors to stay in the ward 24/7, but when I explained this to the sergeant, he said “I don’t think so, Sir” and didn’t move. In the end we just let them stay. They haven’t caused any problems, apart from the two trasnsplant patients killed last week by friendly fire.’

So far, the UN say, the tumour in Myers’ lung has ’stubbornly refused to negotiate’, but they remain confident of victory.

Terrorist changes mind after seeing atheist bus advert

Police were called to a bus in London yesterday after a man was seen emptying an unidentified liquid onto the floor of the vehicle. Witnesses say he then dropped the bag and ran out of the bus laughing. Police analysis confirmed that the liquid was an explosive mixture of flour and peroxide which the would-be terrorist had apparently chosen not to detonate.

‘I spotted him as soon as he got on the bus,’ one witness said. ‘He looked troubled and was carrying a large bag. He seemed to get more and more agitated until he ripped open his bag, jumped out of his seat, and got off as quickly as he could at the next set of traffic lights.’

Following a brief investigation, police believe the man was an Islamic fundamentalist, most likely working alone, who was plotting to blow up the bus in protest at supposedly immoral western culture, but when getting onto the bus had read the advert on the side which says ‘there’s probably no God, now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’

The man has not yet been identified, but someone matching his description was seen that evening, sitting in the corner of a strip club with a bottle of tequila and a copy of ‘Unweaving the Rainbow’.

Bush refuses to let Obama move into Blair House early

“I know the feeling” - Gordon Brown

Crop circle found that says ‘there probably is’.

OfCom say Prince Harry video ‘outside remit’

Despite receiving hundreds of complaints, OfCom have refused to rule on the alleged racial slur in a video made by Prince Harry three years ago and released recently by the News of the World, claiming that home videos are not subject to their guidelines.

One complaint, leaked to newspapers, reads ‘I would like to complain in the strongest possible terms about the despicable language used by “Prince” Harry in the recent programme “That Video He Made”. Although I myself am not in Harry’s squad and did not see the events in question, I found the seven seconds of out-of-context commentary which I read about in a reputable newspaper [sic] three years later deeply offensive, and I would like to know what measures will be put in place to prevent it happening again.’ OfCom described the letter as ‘typical’.

Prince Harry, who made the offending remark, has already issued a statement saying that the term was used ‘without malice’ and ‘as a nickname’. However, in an interview with BBC News the soldier’s uncle, who wasn’t there, has never met Harry, and knows only what his nephew chooses to tell him about their relationship, claims otherwise.

The Daily Express has already announced that it intends to escalate the incident to the level of Scandal, and claims to have found a series of similar incidents involving racist remarks or actions by other members of the royal family. A spokesperson for the palace told reporters that he thought it ‘highly unlikely’ that the newspaper had unearthed such events, describing the royals as ‘highly reputable members of the international community’ who ‘would not engage in racism or stereotyping.’

Scientists admit Hadron Collider created Financial Black Hole

New compression algorithm discards information listeners are too uncouth to appreciate

Apple have launched a new compression algorithm developed to further extend the capacity of their iPod music players. The format, called XF2, works by discarding any information that the listener won’t appreciate anyway. For example, the best selling XF2 file at the moment is Alexandra Burke’s cover of Hallelujah, which when compressed contains no Biblical imagery or dark undertones at all.

Audiophiles have been outraged by the announcement and are boycotting the new technology, however the general public have warmed to it immensely. One user told reporters “it’s great; I’ve managed to get the entire back catalogue of Girls Aloud, Hearsay and Britney Spears onto my iPod, and there’s still loads of space left.” A spokesperson for Apple commented on this review saying “what’s really good is that in this case the algorithm produces lossless compression, because there was never really anything to that music to begin with. This allows the system to shrink the songs greatly without losing anything. Many so-called ‘boy band’ songs can actually be reconstituted entirely just from the titles.”

Some users have got more out of it than others. Michael Simon, a builder from Oldham, has found that most songs are very small files that download very fast, but Jason Cockburn, a writer from London, says that the music he downloads seems hardly to have compressed at all, with the exception of Don McClean’s American Pie. “That’s probably because it’s a stupid nonsense song anyway,” he said.

Apple have admitted the new system does still have some bugs: currently the algorithm crashes when trying to compress Bohemian Rhapsody.

The name ‘XF2′ does not stand for anything. In production the project had a much longer, cleverer name which was a reference to Dante, but that name has not been announced because the press release was XF2 encoded and it was felt that journalists wouldn’t get it.

Atheist bus on collision course with Church

Could Apple Juice Be Cure For Hiccups?

According to Professor David Cook of Durham University, the answer may be ‘yes’. The discovery was made yesterday, when Cook had hiccups and noticed they were gone later that afternoon. In an exclusive interview secured by chance in a bar, he said “I don’t know what did it. Possibly they just went away on their own. I know I’d had a glass of apple juice. I suppose that might have helped.”

This ground-breaking clinical research offers hope to millions of sufferers worldwide, and nutritionist Patrick Holford has already launched his own range of apple-juice based pills which you should buy. In a press-release, he said that healthy adults should probably drink fifteen glasses of apple juice every two hours or, failing that, take just one of his ‘Cidex’ brand apple-juice supplements.

Holford explains that the active ingredient in apples is the cell wall, which is much thicker than the membrane in human cells and therefore stronger. This means that the cells can be used to strengthen aspects of the human body such as the immune system, allowing patients to naturally fight off viruses such as the hiccups.

Sufferers of the hiccups are already demanding access to this new cure on the NHS, but NICE have remained adamant, saying that the treatment is unproven and therefore not cost effective. Newly founded support group JUICE has described this as ‘blatant bias and discrimination’ against sufferers of ‘a serious disease which is often under-reported’. They say that experimental treatments such as this should be made available automatically.

If you would like more information on where to get this amazing new medicine, contact Cidex Ltd. immediately, on 0845 123 4789.

Here is what I think happened: Sarah Palin is a victim of circumstance. Her meteoric rise to infamy is the fault of the people of Alaska and the Republican party rather than her own. Palin’s problem is that she has no internal barometer of her own ability to do any given job. When she saw an ad saying ‘mayor needed, job may involve constructing coherent sentences’ she (wrongly) assumed she could do it. When the gubernatorial elections rolled around she assumed she could do that too. Whether she asked to be considered for vice-president or whether someone approached her, I don’t think it ever occured to her that she might actually not be smart enough to run the entire country. And there will always be people like her, as evidenced by the paper Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognising one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments (link is to PDF, title will worry the self-employed). That’s why we have systems of exams and qualifications and job interviews — and indeed elections — in place to prevent the incompetent from being given important jobs they are likely to mess up. It doesn’t always work, but it’s usually effective. Think of all the cretins you’ve ever met. Was any of them a doctor or a teacher or an MP? Probably relatively few of them were.

But because now other people have put the idea into Palin’s head that she might actually be qualified to be President, it’s going to be very difficult to convince her otherwise which is, presumably, why she launched SarahPAC. A PAC is, I’m told, an organisation that collects money and turns it into political capital, and is often a precursor to a Presidential campaign. Exactly what else hers might be for is unclear, but given the timing, the five-page or so website, SarahPAC.com, is generally assumed to indicate that she’s planning a campaign for 2012.

I dont’t think we can make Sarah Palin go away, but I think we can ensure her campaign fails. I don’t think we can stop the far-right lunatic fringes of the Republican party from supporting her, but I think we can stop anyone else making that mistake. I don’t think contempt is appropriate, but I don’t think that pity is going to stop her. I propose that ridicule is the answer. People have to see how completely absurd it is that someone so utterly useless could become President.

That’s why my response to SarahPAC.com was to register PacSARAH.com and put up my own page. I like to think it is no less insane than hers.

PacSARAH.com. Spread the word.

a secular attack on… Christianity; an act of betrayal by the Assembly Government.

Go on. Have a guess.

Whatever you said, I really doubt you got it right. I don’t think any rational person could, even in jest, come up with something as mindlessly imbecilic as the correct answer: Tudur was referring to the decision to allow sixth-formers to opt out of collective worship sessions.

He feels personally betrayed because the state is refusing to force anyone wanting to go to university or get a decent job to sit through his church’s propaganda. I simply cannot fathom how anyone can be so insane without becoming a serial killer. I can see how you might, if you are a total bastard, want the state to fund and mandate your proselytising. I can see how you might, if you were a bit stupid and terrifyingly right-wing, think that that was even a good thing for the state to be doing. But you surely have to be more than slightly unhinged to actually expect it to happen, don’t you?

The fact that it did happen was a throwback. An anachronism. It has been fixed, but as I’ve said many times before, once someone has something they will very, very quickly assimilate it into what they see as their fundamental human rights, even if it explicitly steps on other people’s.

Geraint Tudur is general secretary of The Union of Welsh Independent Chapels. I have no particular idea who they are, but it seems like people for some reason listen to them.

A document from the committee led by Michael Martin, the Commons Speaker, said: “It has been argued that it would be excessively burdensome for Members to have provided receipts for all transactions and that additional costs incurred … would be likely disproportionate.”

Which seems almost reasonable except that a reader quickly wrote in to point out that

As a self-employed person I am instructed by my local tax office to keep, log and report all expenses, down to a sandwich or coffee, for five years. Failure to do so will mean I cannot claim these expenses against legitimate business expenses and hence mitigate my tax bill.

MPs don’t just claim the top 28% back from public funds, remember, they get this stuff for free, entirely from taxes. Now I’m not against that, obviously; they have as much right to an expense account as everyone else. (That means they also have as much obligation to let the people paying for it know what they use it for as everyone else. I’m sure we can all think of at least a couple of examples where MPs have been caught abusing this system and their carreers have been damaged as a result. That’s what this would stop.) If they want the self-employed to log these things in exchange for a small fraction of this money, it seems reasonable to suppose they’d be willing to do it themselves for the full amount. But then, it would seem reasonable that if MPs were willing to ban smoking in all workplaces including bars (which again, I support) that they would include in that ban the bars in the Houses of Parliament. It should be a clue that they’re not fit to govern when they enforce rules and then refuse to live by them. It is especially so given that MPs are the people whom it is most important are subject to scrutiny: we entrust them with great power and it’s only fair that we can watch to see what they do with it.

Here is the actual proposal:

This Order amends the entries for the House of Commons and the House of Lords in Part 1 of Schedule 1 to the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (”the Act”).  In respect of Members of Parliament it removes most expenditure information held by either House of Parliament from the scope of the Act.

It strikes me as either lazy and stupid or just massively dishonest. The whole premise of democracy rests somewhat on transparency and openness: if the people aren’t given all the information, how are they supposed to make a decision? Worse, if they’re drip-fed information by the government, then they’ll only know things that make the government look good, and that will just serve to keep the same government in power forever.

It’s vitally important that such things are opposed, because systems naturally fall into that rut anyway. For example, the recent Political Parties and Elections Bill Committee discussed making it more difficult for large, well-funded parties to pour endless money into local elections relatively free of scrutiny by working around the rules. That such a bill is needed is a clue that the system is naturally rigged in favour of whoever is in power. That we’ve only ever had two parties in power, or even with a reasonable shot at government. And apparently the discussion was largely controlled by the chairs, who were all Labour and Conservative members, who primarily selected trivial amendments tabled by Labour and Conservative members, and apparently the way these committees work is that rather than continuing until you reach an agreement or have discussed every idea, you talk until four o’clock then call it a day. That’s not democracy; that’s cricket! It even ends up being abused in the same way as the rules of cricket. The upshot is that the rules to stop big parties abusing their positions end up being controlled by big parties, and the people with the power to change that are the people it’s protecting. The only way around it is for the public to be aware and determined, until it stops being viable for MPs to behave that way. After all, they win nothing if they protect the system and immediately get voted out of it. But we’re a very long way from that at the moment.

And now, some MPs are planning on voting themselves out of having to publish details of their expenses. They say this is because it is too time-consuming and expensive to do so (although presumably it would be cheaper in the long run not to give them carte-blanche to buy any expensive telly they’d like), and they cite as an example details already logged, collated and scheduled for publication, which apparently cost the taxpayer £500,000. That being the case, why are the new proposals so carefully timed and retrospectively acting so as to block the publication of those details? They’re effectively free: we’ve paid for them already. There’s no means to an end in blocking them: the only plausible end is simply keeping your spending a secret, and at that, keeping it a secret from the people who end up footing the bill. This, at the same time as they’re trying to design an invasive and frankly rather stupid database containing details of emails, phone calls, internet activity and text messages for everyone in the country whether or not there is even the slightest suggestion that they may have done anything wrong, which they are presumably going to leave on a train or something. The hypocricy that they show in fighting for their own rights and privacy while trampling everyone else’s is staggering. And we only really have one means of recourse:

MPs have the power to keep their expenses secret if they win the vote, but they do not have the power to keep their voting secret. Not only the results of this vote will be published, but also a full list of MPs who backed it, opposed it, and didn’t vote (which, let’s not forget, is a cowardly way of looking like you object while actually helping the bill to pass). Pester yours to vote the right way. Then, after the vote (whether it passes or not), see how they voted. And bear that in mind when you decide if you want to sack them at the next opportunity.