Apathy Sketchpad

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.

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’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I feel now like I may have been a bit harsh on the Church of England. Obviously I don’t think it should remain Established a moment longer, and naturally my ideal world wouldn’t include it, but…

Well, first of all, it’s at least trying to be progressive. They ordain women, much to the chagrin of Anne Widdecombe, a woman so conservative she even objects to equal rights for women, and gay people (although they do ask them not to actually have sex, although in fairness that’s as much the government’s fault for failing to legalise gay marriage as such). If there really has to be an Established church (which there clearly doesn’t) then I’d rather it be them than most of the others.

And what happens?

A breakaway sect of Anglicanism (a phrase I never imagined I’d have to type — cake or death, anyone?) forms, designed to keep those dirty gays out. And people (like the aforementioned Tory notjob) desert the Church for the safety of Catholicism, where of course there is no danger at all of anything remotely resembling liberalism, progressivism, or any form of acknowledgement that it’s not the middle ages or that making stuff up is different from research. These people usually justify their actions by saying things like “you can’t just ignore the parts of the bible you don’t like”, while wearing cotton-polyester blend. So either you’re being selective, and therefore will need to either stop being a sexist homophobic bigot or find a better reason, or else you’ve got to accept the whole bible, including all the really fucked-up stuff with rape and murder and slavery and so on and so forth. Honestly I’d be happier if they just came right out and said “I think homosexuality is wrong and I won’t be a member of any church that supports it”. They’d be flat out wrong, but at least they’d be honest. When did palatable become better than honest?

If all this is right, then to say the C of E is doomed because it’s losing people is like saying that a cancer surgery patient is doomed because they’re losing cells. If enough of the fools abandon the ship then the Church may even end up being a force for good.

Of course, I’ll still want it disestablished.

(There are some really fucking weird versions of Cake Or Death on Youtube…)

This is one of those times when something I was meaning to write anyway suddenly becomes topical. I choose to ascribe this to coincidence, but if you are insane you may like to instead surmise that I am a computer simulation created by another version of myself.

I was probably a couple of days away from getting round to blogging about just how intensely I dislike Ann Widdecombe, when this lands in my Google Reader inbox:

Ann Widdecombe has enjoyed a controversial political career

Ann Widdecombe set to stand down

Former shadow home secretary Ann Widdecombe has confirmed she will end her 20-year political career at the next general election.
Miss Widdecombe, 60, announced she would not be standing for re-election in the Kent constituency of Maidstone and the Weald…

…whatever exactly a Weald might be. It’s illustrated with what appears to be the BBC’s stock photo of Widdecombe, which looks like it was captured when she tried to canvass the House Of Horrors, and which appears on almost every BBC News webpage that so much as mentions her.

Well, good riddance to her, I say. I don’t like her. I don’t like her voice, I don’t like her hair, and I don’t like her politics. In many ways the last one is the most important. Rather than attempting to structure this in any particular way, I am instead going to type things as I think of them and therefore jump around the topic like some otherwise-crazed anti-Widdecombe pinball.

First, she signed this Early Day Motion in support of spending tax money on homeopathy, a ludicrous treatment that doesn’t work. Ann Widdecombe is in favour of spending tax money on pseudoscientific ‘complimentary medicines’ that have no clinical effect whatsoever. And it shows us that she’s not afraid to speak out on an issue just because she doesn’t understand it.

That, or she thinks herself to fully understand all topics, a theory bolstered by the general smugness that pervades everything she does and the fact that she seems quite happy to dole out advice on all kinds of things, no matter how far they are from her own area of expertise, whatever that may turn out to be. In Anne Widdecombe To The Rescue, she doled out all kinds of improperly thought out quick-fix advice. Her advice is always much the same, and stems mostly from her apparent conviction that anything deviating from ‘normal’ family life is Bad and deciding all further issues on the School Dinner Lady mechanic, that is, by assuming the first version of events she hears is the truth and anything that deviates from it must be wrong. And she believes in the Ultimatum as a good way to solve all problems. Her attitude is aggressive and uptight and she advocates it as the solution to everything. Here’s an example from her rather offensive Guardian column, where she advises people about relationships despite being famous for not having any:

My husband left his wife and child for me eight months ago. I have two children, younger than his, from a previous relationship. Despite what I feel was a very reasonable divorce settlement, my husband still spends as much on his first child as he did before, and still gives his ex-wife additional money whenever she asks for it. It all amounts to easily as much as he spends on us, his new family. I think we should be his first priority now, especially as his ex-wife is a professional woman and has ample funds for everything she and her child might need. He wouldn’t be depriving them of anything. Am I right?
Name and address withheld

He should have stayed with his wife as he vowed to do when he married her. You should have married and stayed with the father of your kids. Then you wouldn’t be in this silly mess, where the only victims are the children. Goodnight.

Very mature. Surely she should be able to do better than that: she was rude and confrontational and she made no attempt to answer the question. That, and she displayed a pathetically backward approach to relationships which suggests to me that her knowledge of the world around her is nothing approaching what I would demand for the job of running any part of it. And she didn’t even consider the possibility that it was the father of the letter writer’s children that caused the breakup of their relationship. The letter writer might be an innocent victim who, even by Widdecombe’s quaintly 1950s moral code has done nothing at all wrong, and she is simply attacking her for her circumstances. Joe Joseph can do better than that.

Her rather abrasive attitude is basically all she does throughout the whole article. The next letter is from a man who expects his vegetarian wife to cook meat for him, and her advice is to “shove a steak under the grill and mix it with whatever gunge she is turning out”. Then a mildly reasonable reply to a writer who doesn’t like their newly discovered sister, spoilt by the phrase “get a life”. Then, this:

I have been going out with my boyfriend for five months and it is driving me mad that he still shares a house with his ex-girlfriend along with other friends from university. He says he has no feelings for her any more – even though they broke up just four months before he started going out with me – and that they are never alone in the house together because of the other lodgers. I don’t care – I just want him out of that house and away from her. He earns enough to rent a place on his own, and I think he should be able to see that it is unreasonable still to be living with an ex when he has a new girlfriend who is bothered by the situation. Should I insist, or dump him? I don’t think I can learn to live with it.
Name and address withheld

Never alone in the house together? What do the other students do, set up a chaperone rota? Give him an ultimatum and don’t be wet enough to give it twice. But before you do that, ask yourself the most important question of all. You don’t really trust him, do you? If you believed him, you wouldn’t be in this tizz. Trust is the most essential element in any relationship and yours doesn’t have it, so no matter where he lives it is doomed. Take charge and make a fresh start now.

That is unremittingly awful advice. An ultimatum is the worst thing you could do. If you can’t discuss something like an adult then what chance do you have? Aside from anything else, unreasonable is not an attractive look on most people, and attractiveness is important when you’re demanding that someone move house for you at short notice. And notice is important: another vital detail Widdecombe fails to pick up on in this letter is the timing. The article came out in March. Five months before March is October, and four months before that is June. Add a little time between letter and publication, and that’s the time when this guy broke up with his ex. Student housing contracts always begin and end at the end of June, and are therefore usually signed before then. It would seem probable to me that they signed to live together before the break-up and, unlike the letter writer and Widdecombe, decided to just be adult about the whole thing and cohabit without any drama. He’s now, in all likelihood, contractually obliged to pay the rent until next July and therefore probably won’t want to splash out on a second rent payment just to satisfy his jealous and untrusting girlfriend. I wouldn’t.

And to round it all off, her advice is that the relationship isn’t working so she should end it. Possibly this explains why she is so perennially single. I don’t know how she expects the writer of the first letter to “[marry and stay with] the father of [her] kids” if her advice is to break up the moment you hit a difficulty.

More recently, she made a programme called Anne Widdecombe Versus Prostitution, in which she made a token effort to stamp out prostitution (which is ironic given that when she’s supposed to be helping run the country she’s happy to lend her face to basically anything, not just populist pseudo-political drivel, but Celebrity Fit Club and even advertising pasta or supporting Doctor Who villains — she’s kind of like Neil and Christine Hamilton, except that they can hold a relationship together). I didn’t watch this show. I only found out about it because Charlie Brooker didn’t enjoy it either. I did see a clip on Screenwipe of it, though, and it went much like this:

“You used a prostitute.”
“Yes.”
“But you used a prostitute!”
“Yes.”
“A street prostitute.”
“…Yes.”

I don’t think the idea that other people might think prostitution is basically okay had occurred to her, which is strange considering that she was talking to prostitutes and their customers.

As if all that wasn’t enough, look what she calls her website! “The Widdy Web”? What the hell is that? And she writes for The Daily Express — a rag whose primary business model is little more than exploiting dead blondes for profit. (Actually, that may explain it.)

And all that, and I honestly can’t think of any good she’s ever done. I checked her entry in Wikipedia and it seems she’s held two positions of major national power and the only thing Wikipedia lists that she did in that time was to visit every prison in the country — which is exactly what I expect of her: all perfectly good PR but nothing of any substance or evident use. Probably she spoke with the inmates and said “well, you shouldn’t have broken the law in the first place, then you wouldn’t be in this silly mess”.

Maybe I’m missing something. If any of you can tell me any small good that Widdecombe has ever done for the world then please do, but as of right now, everything I know about the woman, even after research, leads me to dislike her.

What, I ask of you, is she for, and why do people in these constituencies continue to elect these inane celebrities when they could be electing representatives?

A thread on the Bad Science forums has just directed me to this page, a parliamentary early day motion in favour of homeopathic hospitals, along with a list of the MPs who are stupid and/or ignorant enough to have signed it. Here’s the text of the motion:

That this House welcomes the positive contribution made to the health of the nation by the NHS homeopathic hospitals; notes that some six million people use complementary treatments each year; believes that complementary medicine has the potential to offer clinically-effective and cost-effective solutions to common health problems faced by NHS patients, including chronic difficult to treat conditions such as musculoskeletal and other chronic pain, eczema, depression, anxiety and insomnia, allergy, chronic fatigue and irritable bowel syndrome; expresses concern that NHS cuts are threatening the future of these hospitals; and calls on the Government actively to support these valuable national assets.

Almost every word of that is wrong. Homeopathic hospitals cost money and don’t work; that is a negative contribution. “Complementary treatments” is a misleading term and does not refer to homeopathy alone and so the number attached to it is irrelevant and misleading. Complementary medicine cannot offer “clinically-effective” (which should not be hyphenated) solutions to any health problems (except possibly for psychosomatic ones). Threats to these hospitals’ futures is not a cause for concern, the government should not support them, and they are not “national assets”. That’s pretty bad for a single sentence.

It also links to this page which tells you who your local MP is and how to contact them, so that if yours is on the list (mine isn’t) you can let them know that the NHS should probably not be spending millions of pounds of your money on hospitals whose stated goal is to prescribe a nice cool glass of water for every known illness.

I shall add this motion to my long list of reasons not to like Ann Widdecombe. The only other name on there I know anything much about it Lembit Opik, and frankly I expect more from him. If he wants me to believe his asteroid science he could start by showing he understands that water cannot cure allergies. If someone who understands science tells me there’s a danger then I’ll worry. If someone who thinks homeopathy is clinically effective tells me there’s a danger then I’ll laugh.