Apathy Sketchpad

Since it’s now a bit more than three months since the election and the BBC still haven’t got round to replying to my email about the coverage, here it is in isolation:

Thank you for your impartial coverage of the general election which focussed on the important parts rather than frivolous nonsense.

This was exemplified by your coverage of the two high-profile Liberal Democrat losses, Dr Evan Harris and Lembit Opik. While large photos of each outgoing MP were on the screen, you rightly ignored Dr Harris’ place on the Science and Technology Subcommittee. You rightly paid no heed to his campaigning against religious interference in abortion law. You wisely didn’t mention his campaigning against NHS spending on unproven and disproven forms of alternative medicine. His work on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act was surely dismissed, as was his outspoken opposition to the sacking of Professor Nutt. I thought you might have been taken in by his campaigning to reform our absurdly draconian libel laws, but no. Not you. With your superhuman wit and journalistic integrity you cut straight through all that tedious bullshit and reported the far more important fact that Mr Opik might have had sex with a minor pop star.

Twice.

Sirs, I salute you.

Because this particular combination of things is unlikely to ever become this topical for a third time, I’m posting a very slightly updated version of a sketch I wrote during series two of Newsjack and wasn’t used. You may draw your own conclusions as to why not:

“Vote for policies”, we’re told, “not personalities”.

The Conservative Manifesto says:

[Our] economic vision… is a vision of a truly modern economy… where Britain leads in science, technology and innovation.

and

We will make sure that… commissioning decisions [are made] according to evidence-based quality standards

But then,

[The] Minority Report on abortion [is] a rollercoaster ride of pseudoscience and dubious data, signed by one Tory MP with the support of one other… If you want a good example of how spectacularly weak the evidence behind this “Minority Report” is, then you need look no further than the bit where they talk about, er, well, me, bafflingly:

We were greatly concerned to read… detailed information… which could only have been passed on to the journalist concerned by a member of the Select Committee. There should be an enquiry about how this information got into the public domain…

All the facts came from the written evidence published openly and in full during the select committee hearing. … I totally downloaded the PDF.

The Conservative Manifesto says:

[Our] economic vision … is founded on a determination that wealth and opportunity must be more fairly distributed.

and

We proposed legislation so that anyone wanting to be a member of either the House of Commons or the House of Lords will need to be treated as a full UK taxpayer.

But then,

[Former Conservative Party Leader] William Hague was said to be aware 10 years ago of a deal struck by senior Tories that eventually resulted in [Conservative Deputy Chairman and billionaire] Lord Ashcroft secretly remaining a [non-tax payer] after obtaining his peerage

The Conservative Manifesto says:

We will review and reform libel laws to protect freedom of speech, reduce costs and discourage libel tourism.

But then,

The BBC has shelved a Panorama documentary about the business affairs of the Tory billionaire Lord Ashcroft, because of a threat of legal action.

The Corporation has received what one insider described as “several very heavy letters” from Lord Ashcroft’s lawyers. There is now little or no prospect of the investigation being broadcast before the general election, if it goes out at all.

And the Conservative Manifesto says:

A Conservative government will ensure every vote will have equal value…

But then,

[They] support the first-past-the-post system for Westminster elections, “because it gives voters the chance to kick out a government they are fed up with”.

In fact, that quote is also from their manifesto. Which says:

Government has been far too profligate for far too long. … The explosion of unaccountable quangos, public sector ‘nonjobs’ and costly bureaucracy is an indictment of Labour’s reckless approach to spending other people’s money. …

A Conservative government will bring in new measures to enable the public to scrutinise the government’s accounts to see whether it is providing value for money. All data will be published in an open and standardised format.

But then,

Senior Conservative MP… Derek Conway, a former government whip and an MP for 23 years, paid his son, Freddie, a third year geography student at Newcastle university, £981 a month for unspecified work. …

The disclosure comes as the Tory private member’s bill to exempt MPs from requests under the Freedom of Information Act makes its way through parliament.

The Conservative Manifesto also says:

Wherever possible, we believe that personal data should be controlled by individual citizens themselves. We will strengthen the powers of the Information Commissioner to penalise any public body found guilty of mismanaging data. We will take further steps to protect people from unwarranted intrusion by the state

But then,

I couldn’t see any of this in the Conservative Party [iPhone] app. And in fact, it’s not [the user's] details being submitted – it’s [a friend's]. Who doesn’t get a say in it at all. …

It’s possible that personal data is being stored or processed by the Conservative Party, without them having any contact with the person whose data is being processed. There is no verification that the data is provided with the consent of the person that data refers to. The app doesn’t give a clear indication of what the data will be used for. Neither the app nor its supporting web sites contain a privacy notice describing how the data may be stored and used.

The Conservative Party, as an entity, is saying all the right things, but the actual people who comprise it are not yet showing any apparent willing to live by these lofty ideals. And these aren’t backbenchers, councillors and researchers. This is a former leader, a former whip, the Deputy Chairman, their manifesto, Select Committee members and their official iPhone application.

I agree that we should lead in science and technology, base NHS policy on evidence, distribute wealth fairly, exclude non-taxpayers from the Lords, reform libel law, ensure everyone has a fair say in elections and increase openness and accountability in public spending. And if I thought for one second that the Conservatives would actually do any of those things, then maybe I would vote for them, but it looks to me like the Conservatives are the people we need these reforms to protect us from.

Asking them to “fix our broken politics” would be like asking a bull to glue together all our broken china.

On March 17th, my local MP, Labour’s Gerald Kaufman, wrote me a letter regarding an email about the Digital Economy Bill which I sent using 38 Degrees’ website. His letter said:

Thank you for your letter dated 16 March. I agree with you that laws of such sensitivity ought not to be rushed through Parliament. I have taken up these issues with the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and assure you that I shall remain alert on this issue.

On April 7th, the Digital Economy Bill was voted into law and if Gerald Kaufman MP bothered to turn up, he didn’t vote.

That is not “remaining alert” and on May 6th I will not be voting for Gerald Kaufman.

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I know it’s only February and I know there’s an election to look forward to, but if there’s a more completely absurd news story this year than the Gordon Brown bullying debacle then I’ll be very, very impressed.

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.

I was reading a blogpost today by Labour MP Tom Harris, who I am inclined to like purely because I confuse him with Labour MP Tom Watson. In it, Harris decries the Liberal Democrats’ proposals for electoral reform.

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.

There is a law which states that you can’t discriminate according to religious beliefs. In principle I think this is a bad law, because the idea that someone can’t be refused employment on the basis that they’re delusional is absurd, but pragmatically I think it’s necessary. Relatively few people choose their religious beliefs and people whose parents have inducted them into cults have it bad enough without having a tough time getting a job.

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?

Presumably if you’re reading this you’ve heard that Alan Johnson demanded David Nutt resign as head of something called the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs for comments he made in a speech reproduced as a pamphlet you can download. I have read his speech. It’s quite interesting. It discusses the intentions of the drug classification system, criticises the current implementation, and offers a proposal for and justification of an alternative based on a systematic comparison the effects of a range of drugs, according to criteria decided by the public. This is complete with references, and in short exactly the sort of thing a Professor of Neuropsychopharmacology should be doing and while it’s not perfect I honestly can’t imagine why anyone would sack him for it.

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’.

I was going to throw this up on Google Reader and let FriendFeed tweet it at you all, but since I have apparently become the standard reference for ‘perfect formula’ stories, I thought I’d stick it up on here. Presenting… The Respectable Face Of PR Science Formulae!

From the b3ta newsletter, it’s OK Cupid’s analysis of what words and phrases are more successful than others at eliciting a response to a first-contact message. Essentially, it’s a formula for the perfect on-line chat-up line, and it basically reads ’spell right, don’t be a creep, and mention specific interests’. It’s just a blog post, so it’s still not really Proper, Peer-Reviewed Science, but there are enough mentions of N and f and statistical significance — all used quite correctly — as well as a note about anonymisation, that my instinct says they probably did it right. And the results are a nice mix of the obvious (read the other person’s profile), the counter-intuitive (confidence is bad) and the interesting (mentioning a religion is good but mentioning atheism is better).

In any case, it does what the original ‘perfect formulae’ story tried to do (or at least what its creator claims he tried to do and I see no reason to disbelieve him), which is to combine clever PR with an actual attempt to show how science can be relevant. And it worked, because here it is in the Telegraph, alongside a photo of attractive young people kissing each other, for purely illustrative reasons, naturally. Wouldn’t it be nice if companies realised they could get the PR without the sneers of intellectuals if they just did these things right?

Also I’m inclined to like it because it seems to say that self-effacing male atheist physicists are sexy. And I think we can all agree that that’s basically indisputable.