It was reported today by the BBC that women in same-sex relationships can now register both their names on the birth certificate of a child conceived as a result of fertility treatment.

But prominent Tories were not happy. Nadine Dorries told the BBC:

If we want to build a stable society, a mother and father and children works as the best model.

We should be striving towards repairing and reinforcing marriage. I think this move sends out the exact opposite message.

The modern face of the progressive and compassionate Tory party no doubt.

According to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, there were 728 lesbians who underwent in vitro fertilisation (IVF) between 1999 and 2006.

The BBC also reports that: “Also, sperm donors will continue to be able to opt in or out of having their name on the birth certificate, but if both mothers wish to have their name on the document, the donor cannot be registered in that way.”

The Other Taxpayers’ Alliance has come up with an indispensable guidelines for the media on whether they should be using the TaxPayers’ Alliance as rent-a-quotes.

The guidelines feature essential top 5 reporting tips and a handy flowchart to help them plan their story. It also features examples of bad research by the TPA.

The top 5 tips
1. Give context
The TaxPayers’ Alliance is a right-wing pressure group – and so should be described as a ‘right-wing pressure group’. Additional adjectives may be used at your discretion.

2. Use initiative
When presented with a TPA press release, aim to rewrite at least half of it. Try getting a second opinion. Or failing that, Google.

3. Add perspective
The TPA calls itself a ‘grassroots alliance’ of ‘ordinary taxpayers’. But it doesn’t have a membership – just a free-to-join mailing list of 20,000, which represents 0.04% of taxpayers. This compares with, say, the 1.3 million taxpayers who are members of the public sector trade union, Unison.

4. Name names
‘Ordinary taxpayers’ who support the TPA include: Sir Tom Cowie (Life President, Arriva), Sir Rocco Forte (Chairman, Rocco Forte Hotels), Peter Hargreaves (CEO, Hargreaves Lansdown), Malcolm H.D. McAlpine, (Director, Sir Robert McAlpine), Stuart Wheeler (Chairman, IG Group), and Lords Salisbury, Pearson, Derwent, Hodgson, Chadlington, Kalms and Vinson.

5. Investigate
Who funds the TaxPayers’ Alliance? Why won’t it tell us – or even reveal its income?

You can download the short document from here.

Published by the Other Taxpayers’ Alliance.

Have the Tories collectively lost their minds over the summer?

In today’s Sunday Times former MP Michael Portillo writes about unemployment in Britain. And then Charles Murray – a huge favourite of race supremacists – turns up.

More than 20 years ago I was already wrestling with those questions as a social security minister and they are undoubtedly still more acute now. I was strongly affected then by the studies of trends in the United States identified by Charles Murray, the conservative polemicist.

Bizarrely enough, Portillo doesn’t mention that Murray was the author of The Bell Curve – a book which was reported as offering genetic reasons for differing intelligence between races.

As recently as 2007, Charles Murray wrote on the disproportionate representation of Jews in the ranks of outstanding achievers. He said one of the reasons is that Jews “have been found to have an unusually high mean intelligence as measured by IQ tests since the first Jewish samples were tested.”

His article concluded with the assertion: “At this point, I take sanctuary in my remaining hypothesis, uniquely parsimonious and happily irrefutable. The Jews are God’s chosen people.”

Anyway, Michael Portillo goes on to say:

To quote Murray: “During precisely this period, fundamental changes occurred in the philosophy, administration and magnitude of social welfare programmes for low-income families and these changes altered — both directly and indirectly — the social risks and rewards, and the financial costs and benefits, of maintaining a husband-wife family.”

Because black families were among the poorest — but not because they were black — they fell victim to spiralling welfare budgets. State handouts devalued education, discouraged work and marriage, encouraged teenage pregnancy and undermined parental authority.

There is plenty of evidence to illustrate that African Americans were in poverty precisely because of discrimination.

We’re now being asked to listen to Charles Murray on welfare policy. Is this what the Tories have come to?

via Andy in the comments.

In the Observer today, columnist Andrew Rawnsley picks up Labour’s ‘two-faced Tories’ meme.

He hits at Chris Grayling over his comments comparing The Wire to parts of Britain, which back-fired once it was revealed Grayling had barely watched the series.

Rawnsley says:

So long as Gordon Brown persisted with his transparently untruthful claim [about spending cuts], there was less attention paid to the essential dishonesty of the Tory position. At the moment, David Cameron and his team speak with two tongues. One Tory tongue declares that they will make deep cuts and asks us to salute the bravery of the Conservative leadership for saying so. “The public finances are awash with red ink,” he cries. “George Osborne and I have been straight about the need to sort out the public finances… spending plans need to be reduced.” Yet his prospective ministers are simultaneously talking from a contradictory script.

The other Tory tongue sprays us with implied promises that there will be more money for services under a Conservative government. From law and order to schools and hospitals, from defence to transport, Tory spokesmen and women routinely suggest that life will be radically improved once they are the owners of ministerial limousines. Mr Grayling introduced The Wire into our debate to promote the Tory trope of “Broken Britain”. He was factually wrong to suggest that “many parts” of British cities resemble the murderous streets of Baltimore.

He ends by saying:

The Tories are either conning themselves or they are trying to dupe the voters – it is probably a blend of both – when they suggest that you can have both deep cuts and better public services. As they say in The Wire: “A lie ain’t a side of a story. It’s just a lie.”

The Conservative party have a 17% lead in polls according to an Ipsos-Mori poll out in Sunday’s Observer.

The Tories stand at 43%, while Labour is at 26% and Libdems at 17%.

The Tory lead has roughly stabilised to around 15% with no real change over the entire summer, according to the head of Ipsos-Mori.

In a short analysis piece on their website, Sir Robert Worcester, founder of Mori, says:

In rainy July the eight published polls from six different polling organisations, fieldwork starting the 10th and ending the 30th July, averaged Conservatives 40.3%, Labour 25.1%, Liberal Democrats 19.3% and others combined, 15.4%.

Although the media made something of a meal of a July low of 38% for the Tories (Populus/The Times), which gave them a lead of just twelve percentage points, all eight were within the “standard” margin of error +/-3% of 40.3%. All eight polls had Labour at 25.1% (+-/3%), all eight had the Liberal Democrats at 19.3% and all eight had the others combined at +/-3% around 15.4%.

He adds that since the beginning of the year over 100,000 people have been questioned in 73 polls.

What does that say about the state of British politics?

First, since the beginning of the year, the monthly averages have shown that 42%/43% for the Tories in the spring has been sustained. The miserable 23% for Labour in May and June has recovered somewhat, except for a few numbers in the high 30s, and is now at 25%/26%.

However, the “core vote for Labour” of 30%, breached in the 1983 Election with 28.4% voting for Michael Foot as Leader of the Labour Party (the least popular leader in the polling history, with the least popular policies in polling history and the least well organised campaign in living memory), suggests that the current sustained level of Labour’s low level of support, not scoring any figure of 30% or above since early April, must make for dismal reading at Number 10 with the election forecasted to be on 6th May 2010.

A six-month trend picture is published here (PDF), covering several polling organisations.

Hundreds of people attended Manchester’s Gay Pride event yesterday. The event featured competing logos from Labour and Tories: with the latter unveiling their new rainbow logo.

Many Labour activists were seen carrying banners saying: ‘Never kissed a Tory’.

The photos are on Infantile and Disorderly.