Big Sticks and Small Carrots

Tim has received some answers from Tom Watson.

According to the Sunday Mercury, Tom Watson’s wife earns up to £20,000 a year and we now know she earns that working as his PA.

Is that more than average for such a job? Well, the last time I read about how much an MPs PA earns, it was in amongst this lot. The investigation into Derek Conway’s expenses included an interview with his wife. She told the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards that “her role as his PA had been to deal with correspondence and keep his diary. She also arranged meetings, and visits to Parliament by groups, etc. from the constituency, of which, because of the constituency’s proximity to London, there was a considerable number”.

Conway’s wife is apparently paid £3,271 a month to do this job; that works out at £39,252 per year. According to the Telegraph, this “almost £40,000 a year” is “significantly more than the Parliamentary average for such a role”.

So then, what do they mean by “significantly”? If it means twice as much as average, perhaps £20,000 would be a sensible sum. But twice as much is surely more than “significantly more”; they’d have said Conway’s wife gets “double” the average or something. Or would they?

To be fair, I don’t really know whether these two jobs are comparable. And I don’t know whether Mrs Conway delivers good value for the money she earns.

I do know that the £40,000 a year Conway’s wife gets was not part of the equation when “Guido” attempted to make his bizarre comparison. In fact, Staines is spinning like Alistair Campbell on a Waltzer. He knows better than most Conservative MPs how badly the Conway affair hurt the Tories and even attempted some damage limitation himself. Now, with nothing but innuendo and implication, he’s trying turn that hit around by suggesting that Labour MPs are worse.

This does at least have the advantage of exposing the claim that “Guido Fawkes” treats all politicians equally for what it is. I’d spell it out but I’m trying to give up blog swearing* at the moment.

* Not that I don’t recognise that there’s an art to it. Perhaps the outstanding practitioners have made me realise that it wasn’t ever going to be my field.

“Guido” has launched an attack on Tom Watson.

Tim has already had a good look at “Guido’s” post, incluing asking some questions regarding Tom Watson’s expenses, but let’s just expand slightly on the way Paul Staines has done his maths:

Last year Watson pocketed his £60,000 salary and his parliamentary expenses amounted to £150,000-plus – bringing his total package to £211,000 - making him the 73rd highest claiming MP out of 646 MPs. Quite an achievement for an MP not claiming for travel to and from Scotland. He of course employs his wife Siobhan at the public’s expense, his brother, Dan, is constituency director to Euro MP Michael Cashman, Dan Watson’s wife, Joanna, has no fewer than three jobs. Like her husband, she also works for Mr Cashman and for Wolverhampton Labour MP Pat McFadden, yet still finds time to be a Labour councillor in Sandwell. Amy Watson, cousin of Tom and Dan, works for Birmingham Northfield Labour MP Richard Burden. The West Midlands constituency Labour Party offices are packed with Watsons…

The total annual cost to the taxpayer of the Watson family’s five not-so-little piggies is in excess of £300,000. Far more than the disgraced Derek Conway fiddled…

The Conway scandal centred around £40,000 he’d paid to his son and it has to be said that £300,000 is definitely far more than £40,000. You can’t argue with numbers.

But what is “Guido” comparing? The £300,00 is in large part made up of Tom Watson’s salary as an MP (£60,000) and his expenses for 2006/07 (£150,000). The £40,000 is not in large part made up of Derek Conway’s salary as an MP (£60,000) and his expenses for 2006/07 (£140,000).

(By the way, Conway’s London constituency is about 100 miles closer to Westminster than Watson’s. “Guido” never mentioned that.)

Instead, the £40,000 refers to specific money paid by Conway to his son. Having investigated whether these payments were justifiable, the Standards and Privileges committee said they were “astonished that there appears to be no evidence, independent or otherwise, of any aspect of Freddie Conway’s work for his father”. They also concluded that Derek Conway had paid his “all but invisible” son bonus payments which were substantially larger than allowed by the rules.

I can find no similar report from the Standards and Privileges Committee regarding Tom Watson and £300,000.

So is it a like for like comparison? Obviously not. I feel silly even asking the question. And yet, “Guido” has attempted to suggest that it is.

I can’t say for sure why Paul has attempted to make this ridiculous comparison but I suspect it has something to do with his willingness to treat all politicians with equal distain…

[Subject: Comment Policy]

[10th November, 4.40pm]

I have noticed that you have not approved the comment I submitted to the thread below at approximately 8.30 pm on the evening of 7th November.

http://elleeseymour.com/2007/11/06/my-sympathies-for-nadine/

Could you please advise me as to whether I should post it again or whether there was a specific reason why it was not published?

I also noticed that you have published a comment on the same thread this morning which clearly refers to a group of people, myself included, as “scum”.

Can you please advise me of the extent to which you will allow me to defend myself from this ad hominem attack on your blog? If limitations are in place, can you please explain the reasons for these limitations?

Please be advised that I have posted a copy of this email on my own blog as I am quite happy to have this conversation in public.

Garry Smith

www.sticksandcarrots.net

Yesterday, Justin posted an excellent article for Liberal Conspiracy on the whole issue of honest debate on blogs

There’s been an interesting development in the comment thread. At  around 1.30 am this morning, someone posted a comment using an ID from a brand new Blogger account. That brand new blog contains very thinly veiled nasty personal attacks on Nadine Dorries. They are, in fact, exactly the sort of attacks which are described in the standard defence employed by certain bloggers - “I refuse to answer your legitimate question and to justify that refusal, I’m going to spin it to look like it’s part of a personal attack”. The brand new blog contained unjustified attacks of just the sort which are often falsly claimed.

When Justin deleted the first comment, the brand new blogger complained about Liberal Conspiracy “sinking to the depths of Guido Fawkes, Iain Dale etc”.

Which is funny given that the brand new blog contains just the sort of unsubstantiated tabloid gossip, crude jokes and other assorted cheap shots pioneered by Guido.

There is a very obvious difference between deleting links to nasty gratuitous personal attacks and deleting legitimate comments because they are politically embarrassing. We can argue about what is and isn’t legitimate but here a couple of my own rules of thumb:

1. Questions about the behaviour of a member of parliament acting an their capacity as a member of parliament - normally OK.
2. Links to nasty personal attacks of a potentially libellous nature - normally not OK.

I don’t think that’s overly controversial (especially for a project like LC) but it apparently is to the brand new blogger.

Of course, a link to that nasty personal attack against that MP in that context would have been very useful to those attempting to spin away legitimate criticisms with false accusations of “vitriolic” personal attacks. A cynic might draw conclusions from that.

A cynic might also suggest that someone is deliberately attempting to divert attention from the legitimate discussion and turn the thread into a fatuous debate about Liberal Conspiracy’s own comment policy.

But we’ll never know what their motivation was. The brand new blogger chose to remain anonymous so it could have been anyone at all.

Anyway, Sunny has deleted the brand new blogger’s comments and rightly so. Liberal Conspiracy has a clear comment policy.

If anyone wants to sensibly continue the discussion into the difference between nasty personal attacks and legitimate comment, feel free.

If there’s one thing with unites bloggers of all political persuasions, it’s the right to free speech. When Alisher Usmanov attempted to deny Craig Murray and Tim Ireland that right, literally hundreds of blogger stood up for Craig and Tim. The bullying tactics and smears used by Usmanov’s legal people to shut down a perfectly legitimate debate into their clients conduct had people protesting left, right and centre. And rightly so. It was a wonderful thing to see (and be a small part of).

And yet, when I recommend reading Tim Ireland’s new post on the bullying tactics and smears used to shut down another perfectly legitimate debate into the conduct of a member of parliament, it will not generate the same strength of feeling.

I’ve thought about this and if I’m honest, I don’t really understand why this should be the case. It is true that Ellee Seymour is one of the bloggers on the list of supporters linked above but I can’t see how that could be considered a free pass. Suppressing a legitimate debate after publicly protesting when someone else suppressed a legitimate debate surely makes it worse, not better.

I don’t get it.

As I write this, what you’ll see if you click through here is the third version of the thread. The first contained Tim’s comments, the second had all Tim’s comments removed, and the current one has selected comments reinstated. This third version appears to have been created to give credibility to the claim, no, let’s not mince words, the lie on another thread that:

[N]o comment has been deleted. One was held up in comment moderation while I was out and later published.

Totally disingenuous semantics aside, this is a lie as you can easily see if you click through (right now anyway, we may not have reached the final version yet). In what is now comment one, I refer to the links in an earlier comment by Tim’s. It’s still missing. In what is now comment two, Matt lays into Tim but according to this latest version, Tim hasn’t left a comment yet. Maybe Matt has ESP or something and knew that Tim would be along shortly.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, that’s not it. Tim’s first comment has been removed from the thread. And it was removed not because of anything untoward in the comment but for other reasons entirely.

The comment I submitted yesterday evening at around 8.30pm has still not been published. Here it is awaiting moderation. As is, the last word is left to Welshcakes Limoncello who supports the idea that no comments are missing despite the fact that this is demonstrably untrue. And Tim has the evidence which proves that the thread was altered and some comments reinstated sometime after I’d submitted my last comment. At that point, a decision was made (by Ellee or someone operating her blog with her permission) not to post my comment.

A cynic might suggest that that decision was made in an attempt to provoke me into a leaving rather more heated comments which could then be used at a later date as “evidence” of my unreasonable attitude. Ellee’s off for couple of days now, you see, and it’d obviously be unreasonable to expect her to take a moment to check her moderation queue before she went rather than leaving people hanging on for days…

My politely phrased questions have been ignored and the evidence on the threads manipulated in an attempt to make me look foolish. Lies have been told. Insinuations and outright smears have been published.

And all of this is because Tim and I share a desire to openly and honestly discuss the minority report and behaviour of Nadine Dorries MP. Importantly, we’re trying to conduct this open and honest debate on a blog which claims to allow it.

It doesn’t. Attempts to conduct open and honest debate or present evidence she’d rather have suppressed in the comment section of Ellee Seymour’s blog can be downright hazerdous.

As I said, I genuinely don’t understand why more bloggers aren’t outraged at this. Here’s the post again. Where are your angry pants?

 Mini-Update (10 mins later)

Just to be absolutely clear, I’m not suggesting anyone get shouty in Ellee’s comments. I don’t recommend that at all.

Also, the comparison made in this post is one of principle, not of scale.

Bloggerheads: Elle Seymour: a timeline of lies and libel

Scary. Proper scary.

(I’m not going to label this post “New Tories” because it’s not fair on the many honourable right leaning bloggers out there. I normally do it to make a point but it might be better to make it explicit. I would argue that this sort of thing is a problem for the right too. The nasty party image is never going to go away as long as this sort of thing is tolerated. In fact, while I’m certainly not demanding a will-you-condemn-a-thon (© Malky), I do think it would actually benefit right-wing bloggers to publicly disassociate themselves from this sort of behaviour.

I hate using those labels but you hopefully get what I mean.)

Update (Wed. night)

It seems that some of Tim’s comments have now been restored to this thread but not all of them. Matt’s smear remains but Tim’s response has not reappeared.

In another thread, Ellee has continued to suggest that no comments have gone missing and continues to misrepresent, well, just about everything.

Bizarrely, Welshcakes Limoncello chips in back at the other thread to agree with Ellee, despite the fact that W.L. commented directly under one of Tim’s missing comments yesterday (see “Tim’s response” link above). Remarkable.

My reply was still in moderation at lights out. (Humour me, I’ve only recently discovered how easy it is to host images on my shiny new blog.)

There also still appear to be very large gaps in the “dealing with the point” section.

As an aside, you might have noticed that it now looks like I’ve double posted one of my comments on the linked thread. If you care, but mostly just because I’d like to record it, the reason for that double posting is below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

There are two posts on Bloggerheads which are part of the vast left wing conspiracy which I recommend reading if you’ve not already done so.

1. Iain Dale: I bet you think this song is about you…

Contrary to what that propagandist would have you believe, I do not obsess over Iain Dale.

I do, however, worry a great deal about the potential that’s being pissed away by Dale and others like him who declare themselves the masters of the blogosphere while rejecting everything that makes blogging valuable to the electorate.

I often heard Dale claim that the UK is/was “4-5 years behind the Americans” with regards to political blogging, when this simply wasn’t the case at the time. Unlike the Americans, a couple of short years ago we enjoyed cross-party dialogue that actually involved elected officials. Take-up was slow because of the challenges involved (tricky things like transparency and accountability) but we had something valuable that the Americans did not, and it was growing.

Then a whole bunch of carpet-baggers came charging in with Iain Dale and Paul Staines at the head of the pack. They mimicked the counter-productive shouty and tribal approach used in the US and declared themselves pioneers.

Suddenly, certain elected officials, activists and media controllers felt free to run faux-weblogs because accountability no longer appeared to be a defining or requisite factor. [more]

2. Nadine Dorries and what she has (and has not) learned from Iain Dale

Like yet *another* graduate of the Iain Dale School of Blogging, she has cleverly made a false claim and run away when it has been challenged.

Nadine made a claim which was, if anything , even more ridiculous than Iain’s suggestion that 4:3 format is a vast leftwing conspiracy. In any honest debate in which she attempted to defend her allegation, she’s obviously going to end up looking like a complete laughing stock.

Everyone makes mistakes, of course. It’s what happens next which is the real test.

Nadine could have allowed her claim to be challenged on her “blog”. She would then have had to swiftly concede that she had unjustly attacked Ben Goldacre and falsely accused an unnamed member of the committee of agenda driven leaking. The next stage would have been an apology and a retraction. This is the way you would expect advocates of honest debate to behave.

But Nadine didn’t do that. Instead, she refused to allow the evidence to be presented on her “blog” even going so far as to remove the comment function altogether. Nadine has made absolutely no effort to inform her readers of the erroneous nature of her claim. Quite the opposite, in fact. There was no retraction, no apology and certainly no honest debate.

What possible argument could be mounted in support of this sort of behaviour? It’s her blog so she can falsely accuse respected journalists of improper behaviour if she wants to? If Ben Goldacre doesn’t like it, he doesn’t have to read it? She’s not in government so it doesn’t matter if she lies?

The distinctive values of blogging as a medium are under threat from behaviour such as this.

Clearly, ignoring this sort of mendacity will not make it go away. Those like Nadine who complain about a lack of honest debate while stifling honest debate on her”blog” will only be emboldened if people don’t make their opposition to such behaviour absolutely clear.

It’s up to us, all of us, to decide which path UK political blogging goes down. I make no apologies for arguing for a different path to the one chosen by Iain Dale and Nadine Dorries.

This new strategy is truly ingenious and deserves a wide audience. It’s a master class in political accountability and honest debate. Watch and learn children.

To recap, yesterday, several people, myself included, attempted to highlight a particularly ridiculous accusation in the minority report of Nadine Dorries MP by submitting comments to her “blog“. Nad’s minority report demands an enquiry into how the Guardian’s Bad Science columnist had got his hands on information which was already in the public domain. The report suggests that this “leak” may have been “a serious breach of parliamentary procedure”.

Unfortunately for Nad, Ben Goldacre has explained that he got the information by deviously downloading it from parliament’s website. Being a scientist, he has also provided clear evidence for this. Commenters at IDD and Ben’s blog noted that they would attempt to bring this to Nad’s attention.

During the afternoon, no comments referring to Dr Ben’s response were published on Nad’s blog. Early in the evening, a researcher posted a new entry - “Hiding in the Long Grass” (aka “Night Owl”) - explaining that Nad would probably be too tired to blog tomorrow. Two comments appeared under that post almost immediately, the second a response to the first. That’s some fast moderating going on there. Still no sign of the comment I’d submitted earlier in the day or the comments of anyone else attempting to mention Goldacre’s response.

Sometime late in the evening, I noticed that three more comments had been added to Nad’s original post. Mine, alas, was not one of them. None of the approved comments mentioned Dr Goldacre’s response.

And then, at the witching hour (check the time stamp), the previous entries disappeared and Nad posted this instead:

No More Comments
Posted Thursday, 1 November 2007 at 00:00

I am no longer going to post comments on my blog.

Please don’t send any more comments - It’s a time thing, I don’t have any.

I have to rely on the patience of others to read and post the comments for me. I am never in front of a computer for more than a couple of minutes at a time and this has now made reading the comments before they are posted impossible.

Knowing that there are comments on my site which I may not even have had time to see, makes me uncomfortable.

If any one wants to contact me you can still do so via the email facility on the home page.

I will continue to blog each day as I can do that on the run!!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the end of that.

You can’t deny that it’s an ingenious solution. Now, of course, she can continue to claim some sort of conspiracy where none exists. She doesn’t know any better because she didn’t have time to read the comments pointing out that she’s talking complete Nads. Inspired!

It is clear that the Tories really are leading the way with this whole accountability on the interwebs malarkey. In their efforts to avoid it, they really have come up with some genuinely innovative solutions.

As a footnote, it may interest you to know that there’s some talk of setting up a Downing Street petition in support of Nad’s enquiry over at the Bad Science blog and Ben seems rather taken with the idea.

“Nero” has put forward one possible text for such a petition:

We the undersigned demand a know how a credible scientific reporter gained information held within the public domain…

Via this rather informative Bloggerheads post, I see that Nadine Dorries is at it again. Having read this top secret information available exclusively to those with access to the interwebs, I then used that access to find yet more interesting top secret public domain information. (Keep this to yourself though).

Using my dastardly covert methods, I clicked through to the Iain Dale post linked in the above and noticed that several people had commented with a link to a Ben Goldacre response to Nad’s report.

Furtively, I copied and pasted the code for the link to the Bad Science post into my browser and read on only to discover that I’d stumbled into the lair of an evil genius.

In the Minority Report, Nad complains that a previous Bad Science column written by Dr Goldacre contained detailed information from the evidence presented to the committee and demands that there should be “an enquiry about how this information got into the public doman”.

Ben explains how he came to be in possession of this top secret evidence:

Seriously, it’s next level investigative journalism, this stuff. It’s like Watergate. It’s like those guys who got shot at in South America in the 1970s exposing CIA involvement in coups. This is the real deal. I totally downloaded the PDF. But I turned on the taps and put the radio on full blast first, just in case they’d bugged my flat.

Yes, the evidence in question was *already in the public domain*. It had been been published by scheming devious pro-abortion activists on a little known website called www.parliament.uk.

Good grief! Is there no end to these dirty tricks?

Interestingly, Nad has a blog and at least one person over at Iain’s has explicitly stated that they’ve submitted a comment to that blog asking her to address Goldacre’s post and withdraw the accusation that he had done anything untoward.

At the moment there are ten comments on Nad’s post. All are variations on the “you’re great Nad, we love you” theme. Will she allow others to challenge her position openly? Or will she stifle the debate on a post complaining about the stifling of the debate? If we’re really sneaky about it, I think we might be able to come up with a cunning and devious way to find out…

Regular readers might notice a certain similarity here with recent experiences I’ve had with another high profile Tory blogger who prefers not to participate in genuine debate. At the moment, it appears that Nad may deal with this issue by simply not publishing comments which expose her nonsense. This is, admittedly, rather quicker than Iain’s more time consuming method of deploying false claims, subject changes, instant memory loss and insults. Or maybe she’ll surprise us all and admit she’s made a ridiculous unsupportable accusation, withdraw it and offer a sincere and genuine apology.

By using the covert leftist method of reading the contents of her public blog (shh), it might just be possible to find out.

Update

To avoid any doubt, I submitted the following polite comment to Nad’s blog at 3.55pm today:

I wonder if you would like to respond to Ben Goldacre’s reply to the accusation you have levelled against him in your report?

http://www.badscience.net/2007/10/oooooh-im-in-the-minority-report/

Update 2 - 18.50pm

No sign of any critical comments appearing on Nad’s blog yet.

A new post written by Nad’s researcher, “Night Owl”, has appeared in the intervening period however. I’d have called it “Hiding in the Long Grass” but maybe that’s just me. Anyway, two comments have recently appeared under that post so someone is moderating some comments this afternoon.

Interestingly, if you have a look at the two comments on the “Night Owl” post, the second is clearly a reaction to the first. It is somewhat strange that this could happen so quickly given the apparent delay in moderation in the other thread.

Just when I’d promised myself I wouldn’t make any more Banana Republic jokes, this happens:

A Labour peer has admitted taking money to introduce an arms company lobbyist to the government minister in charge of weapons purchases. The case of “cash for access” in the House of Lords is likely to ignite fresh concern about ethical standards in parliament.The lobbyist paid cash for an introduction to Lord Drayson, the defence minister in charge of billions of pounds of military procurement, according to evidence obtained by the Guardian.

Money changed hands with former Labour frontbencher Lord Hoyle, previously Doug Hoyle, an ex-government whip and former MP for Warrington.The lobbyist, Michael Wood, who trades as Whitehall Advisers, agreed to pay Lord Hoyle an undisclosed sum in June 2005. MoD documents released to the Guardian show that Lord Hoyle then engineered a private meeting between Mr Wood and the newly appointed defence minister.

Mr Wood is a former RAF officer who works for BAE and other smaller arms companies to help get them contracts. He has free run of the palace of Westminster because he has a security pass as a “research assistant” to another MP. He operates his company from his nearby flat.

Read the rest…

Nggg…

Lord Drayson, of course, has a bit of a history.

THE controversial tycoon Paul Drayson’s links to the Labour Party have caused problems for the Prime Minister before.

But the previous rows over the pharmaceutical millionaire were dwarfed yesterday by the news that Lord Drayson had poured half a million pounds into Labour’s coffers just weeks after being made a peer by Tony Blair…

Lord Drayson, who accepted a life peerage from the Prime Minister in May, has been a controversial figure since he made his company, PowderJect, millions of pounds through a disputed government contract…

…PowderJect won a government contract to supply TB vaccines, although ministers insisted there was no connection between the contracts and the £50,000 donation to Labour made by Lord Drayson while the government was deciding who should be given the contract…

The then health minister, Lord Hunt, was accused of misleading parliament by claiming the government had had no choice but to use PowderJect to get the smallpox supplies, even though Lord Drayson’s firm was merely acting as a middleman.

The peer told the Lords that ministers were unable to go directly to Bavarian Nordic, the vaccine’s manufacturer, because it had said it would deal only through Lord Drayson for contractual reasons.

But Asger Aamund, chairman of Bavarian Nordic, said he would have supplied the vaccine direct - cutting out Lord Drayson and saving taxpayers millions - but was never asked to do so. The National Audit Office criticised the handling of the deal but found no impropriety…

Nnnnnnnnnnggggggggg…

Phew, that was close. Changing the subject wildly, does anyone remember the Red Dwarf episode where Lister was trying to teach Kryton how to lie?

LISTER: (Holding up a banana) Okay, let’s try again. What is it?
KRYTEN: It’s a banana.
LISTER: No, it isn’t. Try again. What is it?
KRYTEN: It’s a banana?
LISTER: (Exasperated) No, it isn’t! What is it?
KRYTEN: It’s an urrrr…. It’s an urrrr….
LISTER: It’s an orange! Go on, say it. It’s an orange! This! Is! An orange!
KRYTEN: It’s an orrrr… It’s an orrrr… It’s a banana! It’s no good, sir, I just can’t do it!

I loved that episode.