The original story was pretty weird. The idea that the country was effectively run by a short-tempered, foul-mouthed Scot is, while not implausible, at least a bit derivative. It was pretty uninteresting when it was just allegations in a book, but then Christine Pratt of the National Bullying Helpline told ITN that they’d had several calls from Downing Street staff and rather than everyone saying “that’s shocking, thankyou for raising this important point,” which is presumably what she was expecting, everyone said “hang on, isn’t that a massive breach of confidentiality?” and then every single one of the charity’s patrons resigned. That two of those patrons were members of the Conservative party (one Ann Widdecombe, one a London councillor) and the website carries an endorsement from David Cameron doesn’t make the whole thing look any better. Pratt responded to this by promising to dig through thousands more confidential emails so she’d have “proof” (as if that was the problem). Now there are concerns that the whole charity was never anything more than a front for an anti-bullying consultancy firm. They’ve spent almost nothing and are behind filing their paperwork.

That alone would be plenty of stupid for one story, but then an Asian news channel helpfully animated the whole story in GTA-style. That, I would say, is the second layer of absurdity in the story.

The last story they animated is an enraged Gordon Brown hurling a tangerine into a laminator. This never happened. It was in fact a story invented by Robert Popper, author of The Timewaster Letters, which he phoned in to the ever-credulous LBC radio station, and was somehow uncritically reported by both The Sun and The Telegraph.

I can only presume that The Sun, in their zeal to make Brown look just as bad as possible, will literally publish any old fucking nonsense sent into them. If someone told them that Gordon Brown heated his house by burning stolen babies I’m confident it would be front page news the next day. The Telegraph just print whatever everyone else print because why check something if the competition can do it for you? Essentially the press in this country is nothing more than an institutionalised grapevine.

Of course, this rather took the heat off the National Bullying Helpline, so it was good to see them back in the news today, when one of the other ex-patrons accused Pratt of bullying her.

TV presenter Sarah Cawood…, a former patron of the National Bullying Helpline, says Christine Pratt left her in tears after accusing her of failing the charity. ”She was really pushy and I felt bullied.”

If the worst Labour’s critics have to throw at them is obviously made-up stories and allegations from corrupt charities then (a) maybe we might be spared a Conservative government after all, and (b) they haven’t been paying close enough attention.

I await with baited breath next week’s developments in this story. For my money, I predict that David Cameron will ask Gordon Brown about the tangerine story in PMQ, Christine Pratt will peel off a rubber mask and turn out to be David Cameron (or, more probably given his complexion, vice versa) and someone at The Sun will read this blog and run with the stolen-babies story. I’m available for quotes.

Electoral reform looks to be coming, and it’s long past time. The current First Past The Post system magnifies majorities — any party winning 51% of the vote in every constituency will have 100% of the Parliamentary seats. (A cynic would think that this is why incumbent governments have been so far unwilling to change it.) In the last election, for example, the Liberal Democrats got 22% of the popular vote, but 18% of MPs, whereas Labour got 35% of the vote and 41% of MPs. A common proposed solution is Proportional Representation (PR), which is what happened at the European Parliament election: each constituency has multiple seats, which are doled out to best match the proportion of votes for each party. This would obviously benefit the Lib Dems and penalise Labour.

The Lib Dems are apparently proposing a Single Transferable Vote system, a form of PR where you also get to nominate a second choice. Harris says they’ve drawn up some ideas for how to divide up these new mega-constituencies that are designed to favour their own MPs as far as possible:

They want electoral reform, not for their own good – oh, no! – but for the good of the nation. … So, rather than leave the drawing of the new boundaries to a politically-neutral body such as the Boundary Commission, the LibDems have helpfully done it themselves. … Simply gerrymandering LibDem-held constituencies using the excuse that their MPs tend to represent rural areas simply isn’t honest. Not that we expect honesty from the Liberals, of course (a prize to the first commenter or Tweeter who claims that by attacking the Liberals I’m betraying my fear of the threat they pose).

Which is all well and good. Possibly they have cynically chosen this variant of PR and this map to maximise the benefit to their party, although the epic smackdown in the comments suggests otherwise. For some reason, I’m inclined to irrationally disregard his opinion because he uses the word ‘gerrymandering’ I have no earthly idea why. But, let’s have a look at Labour’s proposal.

Labour are suggesting Alternative Vote (AV). Here, someone disillusioned with Labour but rightly disgusted by the Conservatives might vote Lib Dem, but nominate Labour as ’second choice’. In most constituencies that would count as a Labour vote. This is obviously better than a system where left-wing voters are split between two parties and a right-wing minority can seize power, but given how much of Labour’s decline in support has been defection to the Liberal Democrats, it doesn’t look entirely selfless either.

Meanwhile the Conservatives, who despite their own best efforts are still favourites to win the election, don’t seem keen on reform at all, although this could be a part of their cunning electoral strategy of not doing or saying anything at all unless pressed, and then repeatedly U-turning until nobody knows what their position is.

A Heresy Corner commenter for some reason calling him or herself Wasp Box suggested The Report of the Independent Commission on the Voting System as a source of good, unbiased information, and the proposal in there is called Alternative Vote Top Up, which I think is AV with a pool of ‘top-up’ MPs attached to no constituency who would be selected to make sure the overall party numbers were about right. This report was commissioned by Labour, with the Lib Dems’ support, and neither of them are now following its recommendation. So maybe the Liberal Democrats have chosen the system that will benefit them the most, but even granting Harris that, the Lib Dem proposals are a lot better than those of his party, whose own report describes them as “unacceptable”.

I’d say all three major parties are pushing systems that would work out well for them. Quelle surprise. But to me, that just makes Harris’ condescending and sarcastic tone grate that much harder, especially since he’s attacking the one party whose self-interest is nearest to the public interest.

The pragmatic necessity, though, doesn’t extend to any old nonsense. This week, there have been two weird uses of this law. The first was Tim Nicholson, who won a judgement about unfair dismissal after he was sacked for hectoring his company about green issues.

His solicitor, Shah Qureshi, said: “Essentially what the judgment says is that a belief in man-made climate change and the alleged resulting moral imperative is capable of being a philosophical belief and is therefore protected by the 2003 religion or belief regulations.”

This was best summed up, I think, by David Mitchell on the News Quiz, who essentially said that it’s good these ideas get respect but that it’s bad that the way they do so is to be more like religions. He said that arbitrary religious reckonings musn’t be questioned but scientific facts backed by evidence are fair game and that that was the wrong way around.

More recently,

Alan Power, a trainer with Greater Manchester Police, will rely on a previous judgment that found his belief in mediums who contact the dead is akin to a religious or philosophical conviction. In an unpublished judgement in Mr Power’s favour seen by The Independent, the employment specialist Judge Peter Russell said that psychic beliefs are capable of being religious beliefs for the purpose of the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003.

If you need convincing that this is perverse, read this:

Judge Peter Russell… said: “I am satisfied that the claimant’s beliefs that there is life after death and that the dead can be contacted through mediums are worthy of respect in a democratic society”

Really? I would say they’re worthy of mockery, and I’d further say that they’re a very good reason to sack him if

Mr Power told the court that he had a belief in psychics and their “usefulness in police investigations”.

According to a blog,

The judge said that a later hearing would have to establish whether Power was ‘dismissed for the possession of religious or philosophical beliefs or for his alleged inappropriate foisting of his beliefs on others’.

But then, according to the Times,

Mr Power, who worked for Greater Manchester Police for three weeks in October last year, was sacked over his work with neighbouring police forces and his “current work in the psychic field”, the tribunal heard.

If Power wins the second hearing then this would effectively shepherdus into the fictional world of Rob Grant’s Incompetence. This is a book set in a dystopian future in which it is illegal to discriminate on the grounds of incompetence, and therefore everyone does the job they want and most of them are terrible at it.

This is part of the wider problem of religion: it demands that we respect ideas that range from slightly odd to downright idiotic, but doesn’t properly define which ones, so any attempt to mandate that respect is doomed. You can’t build an internally consistent set of rules if you have to accommodate the mandatory respect of a handful of strange beliefs. You end up having to respect any belief regardless of its merit and that leads to people being killed by elevators with buttons wired up for floors that don’t exist.

It should be illegal to fire someone because they believe in man-made climate change because that’s sensible. It should be legal to fire someone because they believe in psychic mediums because that’s stupid. Surely we have a law for that? Surely that’s what the ‘unfair dismissal’ means?

Ann Widdecombe, who can always be relied upon to jump into the wrong side of any issue put before her, offered this dismal attempt at an explanation:

Look, you read your newspapers every day. Scientific advice changes almost as often as the wind.

You can hear this on iPlayer now; I heard about it from @krypto. And she’s right, of course, because the sum total of everything we know about the universe changes when we learn new things. Your choices are to go with what we know now, understanding that it could change in the future, or to make shit up and run with that. If you want to make shit up then fine (it’s called religion), but don’t foist your made up shit on me, and don’t employ a scientific advisor to make it look credible or else exactly this is bound to happen.

The Daily Mail’s A N Wilson also defended Johnson, who presumably wishes he wouldn’t, saying

The only difference between Hitler and previous governments was that he believed, with babyish credulity, in science as the only truth. He allowed scientists freedoms which a civilised government would have checked.

This was accompanied by an inset photo of Hitler until The Jan Moir Police made them take it down.

While obviously Wilson’s biggest crime against reason in that quote is kidnapping the word ‘only’ and dumping it, lost and confused, in front of an idea well outside its comfort zone, he’s also quaintly ignorant. Hitler was a big fan of science in principle, but corrupted it with quackery and racist ideology, and all but banned theoretical work as ‘Jewish science’ (except secretly where it might help his war effort). Anyone caught doing science that didn’t fit the racist message was fired. One mathematician even attempted to prove quantum mechanics and Nazism were the same thing. All of this is covered in John Grant’s Corrupted Science which I presume the Daily Mail’s A N Wilson hasn’t read, because it is a book.

Melanie Phillips, also of the Mail, implied pretty strongly that Nutt’s claims were simply wrong, which would at least be a legitimate defence of his sacking, were it true.

The reason they are casting the Home Secretary as the villain of this episode is that the chattering classes have bought into the idea that soft drugs are indeed less dangerous than alcohol or tobacco. They therefore think Nutt is the voice of scientific reason.

But he is not.

She does, at least, appear to have read his speech, as she criticises it piece by context-free piece, which is perhaps as strong an endorsement as a scientific claim can get. Melanie Phillips’ views on science are almost uniformly opposed to reality. Take, for example her butchering of the Cochrane report on MMR or her support for ‘intelligent design’. Incidentally, Nutt’s speech cites the MMR fiasco as an example of harm done by ignoring evidence. Phillips doesn’t mention this. (For a better cricism of Nutt’s ideas, see the Transform blog post about the original paper.)

On what I will generously refer to as ‘the left’, Alan Johnson himself defended his actions by saying

Professor Nutt was not sacked for his views, which I respect but disagree with … He was asked to go because he cannot be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy. This principle is well understood and long established.

Widdecombe also made this case. And it’s true, although irrelevant. This was a lecture about scientific work, not a campaign. In any case, I think it’s equally well understood and established that you can’t ignore science and expect your science adviser to sit there and let you get on with it. Even if Nutt had crossed the line into campaigning, I think he would have been justified in doing so. As it is, Nutt did little more than present an alternative idea for consideration and present arguments in its favour (i.e., science). Gordon Brown believes Nutt should be fired for this, “because we cannot send mixed messages”, an argument pre-emptively demolished by Nutt himself on page 12 of the PDF transcript.

Martin at LayScience.net points out [with my annotation in square brackets] that

nobody hearing Professor Nutt speaking about the government is going to confuse him with a Labour minister [and it was made clear Nutt was speaking only as a scientist], so the problem that Gordon Brown is referring to is the problem of a senior scientist publishing and publicising research that contradicts the government line. In Gordon Brown’s world of control freakery, such dissent is not to be tolerated.

which sounds familiar but I shan’t comment on why because I’m not sure what happens if both sides of an argument are compared to Hitler.

Don’t listen to these people, and don’t listen to me. Read Nutt’s speech for yourself. If you’re a scientist, you’ll find its structure and tone familiar and start to wonder what all the fuss was about. If not, just read it and then ask yourself if you’d consider it ‘campaigning against government policy’ or ‘a man telling a class what he does at work’.

But given that, in that same issue of that same newspaper, he was quoted congratulating the England cricket team, that goes out the window. I presume that if he has time to write to reality TV stars like Rhydian or Andrew Flintoff then he also has time to look over every single case for compassionate release.

No. Obviously I don’t presume that. Gordon Brown can write personal letters to whomever he wants, just like I can. His will be in the news because he’s Prime Minister. Mine won’t, because I’m just some guy.

But… at the same time, I don’t believe Gordon Brown watches the X-Factor. I’m prepared to believe he genuinely followed the Ashes, but the point is that he’s not writing these letters personally. He’s doing it for publicity. Which is fair enough, but who does he think he’s impressing? I don’t know anyone who wants Gordon Brown out of office because he’s out of touch, and anyone that does…

Well, they’re hardly going to vote for the Conservatives, are they?

picture credit: ssoosay

Advances in technology are already leading to the development of robots that mimic human appearance as well as movement. And security experts fear terror groups could diguise them as innocent pedestrians in future plots.

The key word here, I think, is ‘future’. I’m thinking maybe… forty years hence? I mean, maybe mankind will be able to create a realistic replica human in the next decade, but not at a price some wingnut religious fundamentalist would be able to afford. Certainly it won’t be cheaper or easier than radicalising a disillusioned student any time even remotely soon.

The call [for ideas for anti-terrorism gadgets] is part of a new terrorism science and technology strategy and echoes the fictional boffin “Q”, made famous in the James Bond stories.

Yes, thankyou. Just report the news and I’ll relate it to my experience of popular culture myself. Further, I hypothesise that any article that uses the word ‘boffin’ is a load of shit. You don’t even need a clever idea to spot an android posing as a human. A cheap (by then) thermal camera will do it, I should think. A weighing scale will probably suffice. Analyse its gait. Fire random EM pulses about the place.

Millions of pounds could be available to fund the right product and one idea that has already found success is a maritime “stinger” able to stop a terrorist speedboat.

Terrorists haven’t got speedboats. They’ve got flour and vegetable oil. They’ve got rucksacks and bus passes. They dig up corpses and bomb cars. They use mobiles and email and trains, just like everyone else. The only terrorists who have speedboats are the fictional ones made famous in the James Bond films. People with easy access to speedboats wouldn’t bomb in such crude ways even if they wanted to — which they wouldn’t because people who’ve got speedboats tend to be pretty chuffed with the status quo just the way it is, thankyou very much.

Some of them have missiles, mind, so the problem of ‘how to blow something up without being there’ isn’t one they can’t solve already.

Experts with ideas to counter future threats are urged to get in contact.

Okay. I have some ideas.

First, I thought that we could counter the clear and present danger posed by terrorist androids posing as humans by the invention of the Android Detection Kit. It’s small and fits in a handbag, and although it looks like one of those little flexible magnets people used to use to distinguish aluminium cans from steel ones, with the writing crossed out and ‘android detector’ written in, it is in fact a highly technical robosensor unit.

Next, we should definitely develop some kind of teleport jamming field, because the danger that a terrorist might simply beam a bomb into the middle of a shopping centre or a train station is– well, not a train station, obviously, because we’d all be teleporting around the place instead, but maybe the car park outside the teleport shop.

Although I suppose they’d just teleport your teleport to you. Never mind.

Lastly, I think releasing a gaseous form of Carex into the environment would help. It would be designed to work on humans rather than bacteria, and would kill the bad humans while promoting the growth of good humans, such as homo immunitas.

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.