How British is Nick Clegg? Who cares?
Sunny’s already flagged this up in the daily round-up post, but in case you haven’t picked up on it, Sunder Katwala has posted a pretty good commentary on the Mail on Sunday’s attempt to attack Nick Clegg for not being British enough.
As for me, well I must admit that I was rather more intrigued by the Daily Mail’s previous foray in the murky realms of ‘Britishness by blood’ than by its new, empty-headed ‘birther-lite’ attack on Clegg:
Although the figures from the Government’s Office for National Statistics show an increase in numbers of foreign born people they still fail to record the true impact of immigration because they record their children as British rather than second or third generation immigrants.
The thing that puzzled me at the time was that of the reasoning behind making your grandparents the arbitrary cut-off point for the Mail’s definition of British?
Why stop there when, thanks to rising life expectancy over the last century or so, an increasing number of British families span four living generations? My own kids having a living great-grandparent and were they an immigrant – they’re not, BTW – then my kids would know perfectly well that at least part of their genetic make-up had arrived here from overseas.
So what, if anything, is the rationale behind this?
I ruminated on this at the time for, ooh, all of a couple of minutes before alighting on the obvious answer – the Royal family.
And, sure enough, if you mooch through the list of the last four reigning monarchs and their consorts then you’ll find that the Mail’s preferred cut-off point convenient allows them to classify the present Queen as British by blood. Both of the Queen’s grandparents, George V and Mary of Teck were, conveniently, born in the UK – even if Mary’s familial title comes from Germany – and they were the first members of the royal family to take a British familial name, Windsor, since the Glorious Revolution of 1689. However, if you take things back just that one extra generation, to Edward VII and Alexandra of Denmark, then the family name was still that inherited from Edward’s father, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and Alexandra was actually born in the Yellow Palace Copenhagen – all of which would make the present Queen an immigrant.
None of this, of course, lets the present heir to the throne off the hook. However you want to slice its, Chuck the Hippy’s dad was born Prince Phillipos on the island of Corfu and is as British as retsina and doner kebabs, so its only going to take the one state funeral to kill off this particularspecious line of reasoning.
There are, of course, even more absurd ideas out there than even this ‘British by blood’ nonsense; and none more so thnt the ridiculous allusions to British ‘folk races’ that the BNP incorporated into its constitution in an effort skirt around Britain’s anti-discrimination laws.
The very concept of a ‘folk race’ isn’t British. It’s an idea that emerged out the German Counter-Enlightenment of the late than and early 19th century and found its clearest possible expression in the infamous slogan ‘Ein Volk, ein Riech’, so let’s not be under any illusions as to where Griffin’s been nicking his ideas from. There really is nothing British about the BNP at all – even their main concept of what Britishness mean comes from Germany.
This idea of ‘folk races’ is that never really caught on Britain, muich beyond a bunch of odd ball Victorian antiquarians who spent most of their time fabricating twee, carefully santitised, cultural ‘traditions’ for the people of the Celtic fringes, occasionally at the behest of parliament. Where once ‘North of the border’ meant hoardes of blue painted, hairy-arsed Scots with claymores, by the time the Victorians had finishedwith Scotland, all that was left was a bunch of shortbread box tartans, grouse shooting on the moors and the novels of Sir Walter Scott. That led, in the fullness of time, to Brigadoon and Moira fucking Anderson at five past mdnight on the BBC on New Year’s Day, every fucking year – which proves the despite our best efforts to suppress the buggers, the Scots still manages to extract a measure of revenge.
These are the kind of ‘traditions’ that the BNP are alluding to when they refer to ‘folk races’ of Britain – a bunch of made up stuff that’s less than 200 years old tacked on to a couple of languages that should try using a few more vowels… os it that something else the English took from them? The vowels, I mean…
Pretty much every other trace of indiginous culture on the Celtic fringes was wiped out by the English after the buggers had the nerve to fight back andalmost all what people think of, today, as Scottish or Welsh culture dates back no further than the mid-19th century and the beginning of the Welsh and Scottish nationalist movements. It’s a mid-Victorian fabrication and, arguablly, a very early example of what, today, might well be described as ‘Disneyfication’.
That said, the whole notion of’ Britishness’ is, in its own way, an equally artificial concept.
‘Britishness’ is nothing more than a civic identity created and used for manifestly political reasons over the course of the last 300 years or so. If you look at ‘British history’ before the Act of Union, and particularly before the Stuarts ascended to the English throne in 1601, then all that British really meant for most of the preceding 500-600 years was the English trying to batter the Scots and Welsh into submission in to create a Greater England, albeit one that borrowed its name from the Romans.
What ‘British’ meant to out ancestors and what it means to us today are two entirely different things. My own view of what ‘Britishness’ is very different from that of my mother and father and about as far from removed from the way my grandparents saw things as it is from the views of the Victorians or even earlier generations. Indeed, I’ve got every expectation that my own kids will, as they get older, see things very differently from the way I do. ‘Britishness’ changes with every generation, which is why its a waste of time trying to define it or pin it down to a particular set of supposedly unchanging and immutable traditions and values, least of all one’s made up in the last couple of hundred years that try pretend that they’re much, much older.
So, does it really matter that Clegg’s moth is Dutch and his father half Russian?
No. It’s who and what he his is now that we should be interested in – everything else is irrelevant.
Why the Tory party’s promise on cancer-screening is empty
It’s not often that you come across a pledge in the election manifesto that genuinely makes you think ‘WTF?’ but, credit where its due, the Tories have managed exactly that by promising to “support the roll-out of screening programmes for common cancers’.
What screening programmes would that be, exactly?
Britain already has a long established breast cancer screening programme which, as I pointed out only recently, the UK’s existing screening programme is about as optimal as its possible to get given the limitations of the tests used in screening.
Its not perfect, and there are some significant issues in regards to informed consent and the disclosure of the potential risks associated with false positives, but otherwise its as good a programme as you’ll find anywhere in the world.
There’s nothing in the currently available evidence to support making any significant changes, least of all extending the scope of the programme much beyond the extension that’s due to come into effect in the next year or so.
For cervical cancer, the UK also has an established screening programme and although current research evidence is a little more equivocal that you might like, it does appear to show that routine screening has significant benefits for women over 25, but not for women aged between 20 and 24.
As with breast cancer, most of the significant issues that arise in cervical cancer screening relate to the reliability of the tests used in screening, which are generally considered to be weak relative to the tests used in other diagnostic fields.
For collorectal cancer, Britain began the roll out of its national screening programme in 2006, so its really far to early to assess the effectiveness of mass screening. As with the other two cancers for which routine screening is available, what we do already know is that the main limitations that will apply to this new screening programme are related to the effectiveness and reliability of the tests used for screening, which are still being assessed.
When the EU last assessed the progress of its member states in implementing screening programmes for these three common cancers, in 2007, only Finland matched the UK’s success in rolling out national, population-based, screening programmes, putting the UK. The rest of Europe was still playing catch-up.
Are there any new screening programmes in the pipeline?
Other than these three existing screening programmes there are two further types of cancer that could be candidates for mass screening.
The first of these is ovarian cancer and there is currently a trial in progress, called UKCTOCS, which will assess the feasibility of routine screening for women aged between 50 and 74. Thus far, the preliminary results of this trial seem promising although, again, the main hurdle that researchers are facing lies in the limited reliability of current tests.
However, the UKCTOCS trial will not be complete until 2014, so there is no prospect of a national ovarian cancer screening programme in the lifetime of the next parliament.
A smaller trial has recently close that, if successful, could lead to a targetted screening programme for women who have a familiy history which indicates that they are at much higher risk of developing ovarian cancer than most women. This trial has yet release any results or indicate when it will report its finding, so its impossible to say whether it will leading to viable programme or whether that programme will be ready to roll out during the next parliament.
And that leaves us with prostate cancer…
Prostate cancer is the other hypothetical option and it can be screened for, but in most men its a form of cancer that progresses so slowly that men are much more likely to die with it than die of it.
Prostate cancer, if it is found, is also eminently treatable, the downside of which being that the existing treatment options tend to produce some pretty unpleasant side effects and have both mortality and morbidity associated with them. Depending on how its treated, common side effects can include everything from incontinence and impotence to through to a significantly increases risk of diabetes, osteoporosis, heart attacks and strokes. This is for a condition that, although it will develop in 1 in 6 men during their lifetime, will kill only 3 out every 100 men who develop prostate cancer.
Dr Richard J Ablin, the doctor who discovered the PSA test that is used to screen for prostate cancer, has stated the popularity of the test amongst American men ‘has led to a hugely expensive public health disaster’ in an op-ed in the New York Times in which he also gave this stark assessment of the reliability of the test:
…the test is hardly more effective than a coin toss. As I’ve been trying to make clear for many years now, P.S.A. testing can’t detect prostate cancer and, more important, it can’t distinguish between the two types of prostate cancer — the one that will kill you and the one that won’t.
So is this all just an empty promise?
Yes. Absolutely.
As far as screening is concerned the UK already has screening programmes in place for the three common types of cancer covered in the Council of the European Union’s 2003 recommendation.
Of the other cancer’s for which a national screening programme is a possibility, one, ovarian cancer, is at least 5-6 years away from producing sufficient trial evidence to verify whether a mass screening programme is even viable.
As for the other candidate, prostate cancer, there’s nothing I could possibly add, at this point, to top Dr Richard Ablin’s assessment of his own discovery:
“I never dreamed that my discovery four decades ago would lead to such a profit-driven public health disaster. The medical community must confront reality and stop the inappropriate use of P.S.A. screening. Doing so would save billions of dollars and rescue millions of men from unnecessary, debilitating treatments.”
So I have to ask again, where are these cancer screening programmes that the Tories are planning to support?
Founder of Tory LGBT group defects to Labour
Last week, The Independent ran this rather embarrassing story…
The founder of the Conservative Party’s biggest group campaigning for gay rights has said she will now vote Labour at the general election after David Cameron failed to reprimand a Shadow Cabinet member for questioning gay rights.
Anastasia Beaumont-Bott, the first chairman of the LGBTory group, said she felt guilty for having told gay voters to back the Tories in the past after Chris Grayling, the shadow Home Secretary, said he believed bed and breakfast owners should have the right to ban gay couples from staying in their property. She called on the Tory leader to dismiss Mr Grayling. So far, Mr Cameron has refused to take any action against him.
Today, according to Sky News, things have escalated further…
Two former Tories have joined the Labour party after criticising the Conservatives’ approach to gay policy.
Anastasia Beaumont-Bott, who was previously head of the Tory’s gay campaign, accused the party of an “elaborately executed deception” on gay rights.
She said the party had not changed its approach to gay people and had no mention of new rights in its manifesto.
David Heathcote has also joined Labour after being a Tory supporter for 20 years and becoming an approved parliamentary candidate.
He said he felt “tremendously let down” by shadow home secretary Chris Grayling’s comments that Christian bed and breakfast owners should have the right to turn gay people away.
Having crossed the floor, Anastasia had a few choice comments to make about Cameron’s own commitment to LGBT rights.
Her statement was first reported by Left Foot Forward
A leopard does not change its spots, and neither has the Conservative Party. Once upon a time, I made the massive mistake of believing that they had. And I‘m here to tell you how wrong I got them.
Mr Cameron, I believed in you and your party, and you let me down. I thought your party was progressive and would stand up for the great ignored.”, but your party ignored my complaints about discrimination and smears…
Mr Cameron, you have not only lost my vote. You have lost my respect.
Oh dear, it’s all coming unglued…
Decoding the Tory cancer policy
Healthcare provision NHS is, naturally enough, one of the more important battlegrounds on which the upcoming election is being fought – after the economy, of course.
Its area that has already thrown up its fair share of controversy, particular in regards to cancer services. Labour have been pilloried by the right-wing press over an unsubstantiated allegation that it specifically targeted some cancer sufferers with a leaflet attacking Tory plans to remove targets for providing access to cancer services, a media-generated furore that conveniently deflected attention away from a much more serious issue:
Only last week, the Tory’s putative Health Minister, Andrew Lansley, was torn off a strip by the Sir Andrew Dillon, the Chief Executive of the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) for misleading patients over current policy on authorising new drug treatments for use by the NHS.
Unlike the cancer leaflets issue, this is no mere storm in a teacup but an issue that goes right to heart of the Tory’s manifesto plans and, in particular, to this statement from the Tory manifesto:
NHS patients rightly expect to be among the first in the world to access effective treatments, but under Labour they are among the last.
The key phrase here is ‘effective treatments’ – in fact it is precisely because the NHS (through NICE) is one of the few healthcare providers in the world that actually examines the evidence for the efficacy of new treatments, relative to existing treatments for the same condition/patient group, before approving them for use that we have to wait a little longer to access some new drugs than is typically the case in, for example, the United States.
Although the FDA does evaluate the effectiveness of new drugs, what it doesn’t do is assess their performance relative to the efficacy of existing treatments, an essential feature of the kind of cost-benefit analyses that form part of NICE’s evaluation protocols. That has a clear knock on effect on the work that NICE undertakes for the NHS. Because comparative studies aren’t required by the FDA in order to obtain a license in what is by far the largest and most important pharmaceuticals market in the world, the drug companies do not include their in the standard trial protocols. What NICE typically get to work with are hypothetical comparative models derived from combining trial data for the data for the new drug with data from separate trials of the current best available treatment. These models, which are initially provided by the drug manufacturers, are a constant source of dispute as, naturally enough, manufacturers are prone to cherry picking the data for their models to create the most favourable impression possible, all of which can easily lead to several weeks and even months of wrangling over the validity of these models, delaying the evaluation process as a whole.
This is the real choice that the two parties are offering cancer patients and it one that best illustrated with a case study of new drug, Dronedarone, which NICE is expected to approve for use by the NHS later this year.
Dronedarone, which is marketed under the brand name Multaq, is new drug treatment for atrial fibrillation, a common from of cardiac arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat), a condition for which there have been no significant advances in drug treatment for around 25 years.
Only 18 months ago, Dronedarone was being touted as the ‘next big thing’ for patients with atrial fibrillation and attracted glowing coverage in the Daily Telegraph, in a typically uncritical article which suggested that more than 300,000 patients in the UK could receive the drug, when it was licensed for use, and that it could prevent up to 10,000 stokes in that patient group every year.
In January this year, the drug hit the headlines again, on this occasion because an initial technical appraisal of the drug, which was licensed in the US in July 2008, recommended against approving it for use by the NHS. Inevitably, this was picked up by the media who ran the story in line with their usual narrative, under which NICE were accused of refusing the sanction of the use of the drug for bureaucratic reasons relating to its cost relative to existing treatments.
What’s much more interesting, and revealing, about these two stories, which were published only 16 month apart, it the very different estimate the later story gives for the number of patients who were thought likely to benefit from Dronedarone. From an initial 300,000+ cited in September 2008, this figure has now fallen to a mere 40,000, a drop of around 87%.
Clearly, something else was going on in the background – something that the Daily Express chose not to disclose to its readers.
What the Express didn’t mention
What has in fact happened was that, even before it was licensed, the trial results for Dronedarone had failed to live up to early expectations. In fact what the manufacturers own data showed was that, for the vast majority of patients with atrial fibrillation, Dronedarone was only half as effective as existing drug treatments for this condition, all of which are considerably cheaper because their patents expired several years ago, allowing them to be produced as generics.
As a result, although the drug was licensed by the FDA in July 2009 it was awarded only a restricted licence, one that limited it use to a specific subset of patients for the purpose of reducing the risk of heart-related hospitalisation where those patients also had one or more other significant cardiac risk factors such as diabetes, high blood pressure, a prior stroke or advanced age (i.e. over 70). This was, and still is, the only patient group for which there was clear evidence that the drug performs better than existing treatments.
Dronedarone is also required, in the US, to carry a ‘black label warning’ prohibiting its use with patients with two specific types of heart condition, both of which cause give rise to atrial fibrillation, after a trial that included patients with those conditions had to be stopped before it was completed because preliminary data showed that the drug doubled the mortality rate in those patients. That’s another minor detail that the Express chose not to mention.
This is precisely what NICE also found when it published its initial technical appraisal of Dronedarone in December 2009 and it explains why that appraisal came out against approving the drug for use in the NHS on the basis for which its initial application had been submitted. That is the other crucial omission from the Daily Express’s overheated article. Dronedarone was put forward for evaluation by NICE in November 2008, eight months before the drug was awarded it restricted license in the US and some four month before the FDA published its technical appraisal of the drug, in March 2009. Although the drug had been granted a limited license in the US in July 2009, a year after it was put forward for evaluation by the FDA, NICE were still in the position of having to evaluate Dronedarone as a potential treatment for patients that the FDA had already ruled out in the review, because that was what was on the application submitted by the drug’s manufacturer, Sanofi-Aventis.
After reviewing the technical appraisal and consulting with the manufacturer and range of other stakeholders (i.e. charities, patient support groups, etc.) NICE has now decided to recommend that Dronedarone should be approved for use by the NHS on broadly similar terms to that for which it is licensed in the US. This has been described by the Telegraph as a ‘U-turn’ – it isn’t. The post appraisal consultation that NICE undertook is a standard element in its review process and the higher cost of the drug, relative to existing drugs, was a fairly insignificant factor in the technical panels initial assessment – what actually matters was the fact that, for most patients, Dronedarone is less effective than existing treatments.
There is, however, one very important difference between NICE’s revised recommendation and the license terms set out by the FDA. Based on its evaluation of the research evidence NICE is proposing to approve the drug for use only as second-line treatment, i.e. one that will prescribed only to patients that meet the relevant criteria if existing treatment prove to ineffective or if the patient experiences any significant side-effect from those drugs.
(The FDA made no such recommendation)
This view is supported by a newly published review in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology which calls into question the value of the data quality and relevance to clinical practices from one of the key trials included in the evidence submitted to the FDA (and NICE) and cautions against the indiscriminate use of the drug in the face of efforts by its manufacturer to actively promote it for use ‘off-label’, i.e. outside the terms specified by the FDA license.
This is side to whole debate about patient access to new drugs that the public rarely sees, although if you are interested there’s a pretty good article here (may require registration) that does a fair job of explaining the controversy that this particular study has sparked off and the complexity of the issues it raises. Typically, disputes over the value of the evidence base for, and efficacy of, new drugs are played out well away from the public’s gaze on the pages of medical journals and other specialist publications. Only if something goes badly wrong, as happened with thalidomide, or if long-term follow-up studies emerge that raise significant questions about the effectiveness of particular drugs, as has happened relatively recently in the case of SSRI antidepressants (e.g. Prozac), does the public ever get wind of the kind of uncertainties and risks that remain in place, even after a new drug has been licensed for use.
For that reason, it’s actually very easy for the Tories to mislead the electorate by promising that cancer patients will receive faster access to ‘effective treatments’ even though what their policy actually amounts to is, for the most part, simply that of giving NHS doctors more scope to bypass the recommendations issued by NICE and prescribe new drugs off-label. That may give some cancer patients the drugs they want, but it in no sense offers them any guarantee that the treatment they get as a result will actually prove to be effective. Some may benefit, others may not – it’s even possible that some cancer patients may have their lives shortened or experience severe side-effects as a result of being prescribed new drugs either off off-label or under conditions in which their efficacy has not been adequately verified.
While the Tories may be able to promise faster access to new treatments, what they cannot legitimately promise is that those treatments will be effective, and that is the real debate that we should be having here, not to mention the challenge that Labour and other parties should be putting to them in response to this part of their manifesto.
Labour’s cancer leaflets – yet another Tory statistics fail
By a happy coincidence, I was already some way into researching Andrew Lansley’s spurious claim that ‘broken government promises’ were denying thousands of cancer patients access to life-extending drugs when the latest ridiculous claim, that Labour have specifically targeted women who have had breast cancer with new leaflet broke.
According to the BBC’s report, Lansley also got in on the faux outrage act:
Earlier, shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley said he had written to Gordon Brown to ask him to confirm that no confidential information had been used to select the recipients. He said the leaflets raised “a number of serious questions about who authorised the potential misuse of personal data and who was involved in the production of the cards”.
And even Vince Cable, who one would have thought would know better, managed to join in and make rather a fool of himself in the process. While it would, indeed, be rather disreputable for any party to knowingly target cancer patients with a leaflet of this kind, that’s not what’s happened here.
continue reading… »
Breaking: Simon Singh wins libel appeal
Fantastic news from the Royal Courts of Justice, this morning, where Simon Singh has won his appeal for the right to rely on the defence of “fair comment” in the libel action brought against him by the British Chiropractic Association.
According to one tweet, from Jack of Kent, the judgement cites both Orwell and Milton – If M’luds are breaking out Areopagitica as an authority in a case of this kind then this really is going to be the landmark decision that Singh’s supporters [including me!] have been hoping for.
What the Beeb didn’t say about breast cancer screening
This morning there are many women across Britain, not to mention a few charities, who will have woken up to what seems to be some very reassuring news:
Breast cancer screening does ‘more good than harm’
Breast cancer screening does more good than harm, with any over-treatment justified by the number of lives saved, say experts.
Mammograms can spot dangerous tumours, but might also detect lumps that are essentially harmless, exposing some women to undue anxiety and surgery.
But data suggests screening saves the lives of two women for every one who receives unnecessary treatment.
Even allowing for the generally abysmal state of science/medical journalism, as practised by mainstream news organisations, this is a story that I find particularly frustrating.
continue reading… »
Telegraph columnist rips ConHome a new arsehole
You’ve got to love Gerald Warner’s response to Tim Mongomerie’s accusations of disloyalty to the Tory cause:
Over on ToadyHole they are not liking it up ’em. Tim Montgomerie, the self-important prat who runs the ConservativeHome website, has excommunicated The Daily Telegraph and its bloggers for disloyalty to the Cameronian cause. Lord Tebbit, whom some people might have thought had made a marginally more important contribution to Toryism than Montgomerie, is denounced as “Someone who should know better”.
The bull of excommunication names the other guilty men: Simon Heffer, Douglas Murray, Michael Deacon and Yours Truly. “Anathema sint!” Beyond the Telegraph fold, Peter Hitchens and Amanda Platell are also given the bell, book and candle treatment. “There is constructive criticism,” intones Montgomerie, “and there is destructive criticism… At the moment there’s too much ill-discipline on our side of the fence.”
Sorry? On whose side of what fence? Not all of us are prepared to huddle in the Cameronian sheep-pen, waiting to see our ideals slaughtered by a bunch of opportunists and adventurers who have hijacked the Conservative Party. As Montgomerie sententiously observes: “It’s worth noting that if there’s ill-discipline amongst the commentariat (sic) there’s enormous discipline within the parliamentary party.”
My only complaint here is the lack of advance warning – had I know it would kick off in such an entertaining fashion, I’d have bought popcorn.
Sunny updates: more responses to Montgomerie by…
Peter Hitchens – The rise of Comrade Cam-il-Sung, the modernising centraliser
Damian Thompson – Tim Montgomerie, please note: CCHQ is too scared to allow its candidates to blog
Douglas Murray – Note to Conservative Home: People are loyal to institutions which are loyal to them
Breaking – LHC working: No Black Hole
“ATLAS has seen collisions !” may not become as iconic a statement as ‘The Eagle has landed” but that tweet, sent by Prof. Brian Cox at 12:06 BST, marks the beginning of a new frontier in particle physics.
The Large Hadron Collider is working as expected and Switzerland is not – I repeat NOT – rapidly disappearing into an artificially generated black hole.
Gullible press taken in by CSI Woo York claim
In the last few days we’ve seen a couple of classic pieces of lousy and wholly uncritical technology churnalism in the media.
One, the spurious claim that ‘Facebook cause syphilis’ was quickly taken apart by Ben Goldacre despite the somewhat worrying refusal of NHS Tees to provide Ben with access to the data on which the ridiculous claim, which, rather alarmingly, was made by the trust’s Director of Public Health.
That leaves me to tackle this story, which emerged as wire copy from the Press Association and rapidly found its way into both the Daily Mail and The Sun before, worryingly, creeping into the industry press as well:
Typing technology ‘pervert trap’
Paedophiles using the internet to target youngsters could be tracked down – by the way they use a keyboard.
Researchers are investigating ways to use technology that can determine a typist’s age, sex and culture within 10 keystrokes by monitoring their speed and rhythm.
Former Northumbria Police detective chief inspector Phil Butler believes the technology could be useful in tracking down online fraudsters and paedophiles.
Professor Roy Maxion, associate professor at Newcastle University, has been carrying out the research in the US.
This is industrial-grade bullshit piece of advertorial from start to finish but, for reasons that will shortly become clear, still well worth picking to pieces.
Let’s start by telling you the truth about Dr Roy Maxion’s background and his actual research. continue reading… »
House of Lords Reform – Tory Style
If ever further proof were needed that the Tory’s ‘Honest Dave’ shtick is no more than a shallow and unconvincing veneer then allow me to direct you to Conservative Home, where Jonathan Isaby is looking for a few suggestions:
ConservativeHome has been running a series highlighting people David Cameron should consider appointing to the House of Lords, since any Conservative administration formed after the general election would be able to call upon the support of the lowest number of Conservative peers in history.
Awww Diddums…
Its a clear indication of just how out of touch the Tories are that even after one of the own MPs proposed that any future peerages should be restricted solely to people taking up ministerial appointments or, if not, then at least restricted to retiring MPs who weren’t caught with their nose in the trough during the expenses scandal, Isaby is still pressing ahead with a Con Home series entitled ‘Search for a 100 Peers. continue reading… »
Graph-Fix Round-up – Lloyd George knew my bar chart
Last week, I promised you all a weekly round-up of some the worst examples of graph abuse appearing on election leaflets and although the number of submissions has been fairly low, so far, there’s been plenty of ‘quality’ material to play with.
Before kicking on with the round-up, a special mention has to go out to Mark Pack over at Lib Dem Voice for catching The Mirror’s art department playing silly buggers – nice one Mark.
Okay, that’s the preamble out of the way. Now on with the show, and we’ll kick things off with a fine effort from a minor party. continue reading… »
Pope implicated in child abuse cover-up at school
From the New York Times…
Top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit.
The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal…
…The Wisconsin case involved an American priest, the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at a renowned school for deaf children from 1950 to 1974. But it is only one of thousands of cases forwarded over decades by bishops to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is still the office that decides whether accused priests should be given full canonical trials and defrocked.
In 1996, Cardinal Ratzinger failed to respond to two letters about the case from Rembert G. Weakland, Milwaukee’s archbishop at the time. After eight months, the second in command at the doctrinal office, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican’s secretary of state, instructed the Wisconsin bishops to begin a secret canonical trial that could lead to Father Murphy’s dismissal.
But Cardinal Bertone halted the process after Father Murphy personally wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger protesting that he should not be put on trial because he had already repented and was in poor health and that the case was beyond the church’s own statute of limitations.
Maybe we should put an 18 rating on his visit, just to be on the safe side.
The Cider Tax Rules
Just about the most immediately contentious announcement in yesterday’s budget was the decision to increase the rates of alcohol duty levied on cider by a whopping 10% over and above the inflation rate of 3% used as the basis for other rises in excise duties.
Within what seemed to be a matter of minutes of the announcement, the provisional wing of the Wurzel’s Appreciation Society had a Facebook group up and running while I understand that in Hereford, today, the SAS have been placed on stand-by in case it becomes necessary to protect the Bulmer’s factory from a rampaging mob of anonymous protesters, all wearing Justin Lee Collins masks. Rumours also suggest that a bomb threat may have been issued to the Burnham-on-Sea branch of Oddbins by a group calling itself the People’s Front of Somerset*, prompting the Home Office to raise the terrorist threat level in Minehead to ‘who gives a fuck, Butlins doesn’t open for another fortnight’.
(Or was that the Somerset People’s Front? Hell, I dunno, might have been the People’s Popular Front of Somerset for all I give a toss!)
Truly, the End of Days is upon us all, but do cider drinkers really have any cause for complaint?
Or is this just another lame excuse for me knocking up a graph… continue reading… »
VAT on Royal Mail services?
I think I’d better nip this one in the bud before any conspiracy nuts latch on to it…
VAT on Royal Mail services in 2011?
Here’s a curious thing, buried in the back of the Budget document it says;
“VAT and postal A.96 – From 31 January 2011 VAT will be applied at the standard rate to certain postal services provided by the universal service provider (Royal Mail).”
Did the price of stamps and other stuff in the future just go up by 17.5% or more?
So much for his comment of “I have no further announcements on VAT”
NOTE: Currently Royal Mail services are zero-rated and exempt from VAT.
Google is your friend as a quick search turns up this report from last November…
Royal Mail is facing another serious threat to its efforts to compete with private-sector rivals, just weeks after trades unions agreed to call a halt to a debilitating series of strikes during negotiations with the company.
The postal operator has been told by HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) that it will soon be forced to begin charging valued added tax (VAT) for many of its services, having previously been exempt. At a stroke, that would add 17.5 per cent to the prices it charges businesses, rendering it at a serious competitive disadvantage.
HMRC’s ruling follows a judgment in the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in a case brought by TNT Post, one of Royal Mail’s fiercest competitors in the UK. Under European Union law, publicly owned postal operators are exempt from having to charge VAT on their services and Royal Mail has always been able to enjoy this protection.
However, last month, TNT successfully challenged Royal Mail’s exemption, on the grounds that it should not apply on commercial contracts subject to a competitive tendering process. The ECJ ruling means that in most cases where Royal Mail pitches for work with business customers – the most crucial part of its market – it will now have to begin charging VAT, as all of its private-sector rivals already do.
So, no – the price of stamps won’t be going up and as technical change resulting from an legal ruling on the correct interpretation of existing law, its not something that would announced in the main Budget Speech.
Budget 2010 Live – #budget2010
Join us from 12 Noon for our live coverage of this year’s crucial pre-election Budget speech, where we’ll be linking up with our friends at Left Foot Forward (who’re providing the hosting), Labour List and the TUC’s ToUChstone blog.
For twitter uses, you can follow all the action via the #budget2010 hashtag, where you’ll find us and Channel 4.
See you below the fold at Midday – and bear with me if it takes a minute or two’s tinkering to get everything running smoothly.
Lord Carey: Mendacious and Hypocritical
Even with the Budget coming up, I can’t resist having a bit of a polite rant over this letter, which appears in today’s Times newspaper:
Sir, At the time of the passage of the Civil Partnerships Act 2004 we were reassured by the Government that there was a clear distinction between such partnerships and marriage. Churches were told that they would not be compelled to “marry” homosexuals. With the passage of Lord Alli’s [sic] amendment allowing civil partnerships to be conducted on church premises this distinction has been broken. Yet another example of creeping legislation that is often hasty, ill conceived and opportunistically tacked on to existing Bills without a proper chance for scrutiny.
If there is a genuine need for a change in the law this should be done properly by revisiting the Civil Partnerships Act.
Yesterday Christian Concern for Our Nation delivered a petition to the Government, signed by more than 6,000 church leaders and Christians, asking it to reject the amendment, which they believe could coerce clergy into acting against their conscience.
How long will it be before church ministers are threatened with legal proceedings if they perform marriages between a man and a woman, but not civil partnerships?
Lord Carey of Clifton
House of Lords
The mendacity on display here would be breathtaking, coming as it does from a former Archbishop of Canterbury, were it not for the reference to Nadine Dorries’ buddies, Christian Concern for Our Nation, who are well known to be habitual bullshitters. continue reading… »
Budget 2010 – sign up for our Liveblog
For what will be the final Budget speech before the general election, we will be linking up with Left Foot Forward, LabourList and the TUC’s ToUChstone blog to host a special livechat event.
We’ll be kicking off proceedings at 12 Noon with coverage of Prime Minister’s Questions and going straight through into the Budget speech, giving you immediate reaction to the Chancellor’s announcements.
And if you’re the forgetful sort, you can also sign-up below, using your email address, to receive a reminder when the webchat goes live.
Straw backs libel reform
In what is, for bloggers, very welcome news, Index on Censorship are reporting that Jack Straw has announced that the government believes the case for libel reform has been made, and that the Ministry of Justice will now move to make reforms to England’s defamation laws, potentially with a Libel Reform Bill.
In terms of the specifics, it appears that the pernicious Brunswick (multiple publication) rule will go and will be replaced with a single publication rule operating under a one year limit, but with scope to allow judges to extend that limit where necessary.
Consideration is also to be given to the creation of a statutory defence for publications that are in the public interest and to procedural changes designed to curb the growth in libel tourism.
All-in-all this appears to be several steps in the right direction and a significant victory for the ongoing Libel Reform campaign.
It is, however, only the beginning for campaigners.
What is now needed, and quickly, is the commitment of all the main political parties to, at least, the MOJ’s proposed reform package.
Cameron Aide’s girlfriend made ‘legal threat’ to web developer over #cashgordon debacle
One of the more curious episodes in yesterday’s #cashgordon debacle came by way of a tweet by “Jimmy Sparkle”, one of the techies who’s playing with the Tory’s new webtoy helped to break it.
Jimmy is a web developer and cheekily took advantage of the non-existent security on the Cash Gordon website’s twitter feed to tweet a segment of Javascript that, for a very brief period of time, redirected visitors to the Tory’s site to his own personal site. Sparkle Interactive.
Compared to some of the other redirection scripts posted to the site before the Tories took it down, which included a rickroll and the infamous Goatse (and if you don’t know what Goatse is, don’t search for it at work – you’ll get fired) Jimmy’s piece of scripting was one of the least contentious and inflammatory things tweeted to the site all day. Nevertheless, within a couple of hours of the site being taken down, Jimmy put up this tweet.
conservative party phoned my workplace claiming they may sue me for supposedly hacking their website… tweeting != hacking. lol #cashgordon
Pretty shabby, huh? continue reading… »
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