Big Sticks and Small Carrots

Last week, as you might remember, the Sun published a story about the RAF’s ability to  intercept radio traffic in Afghanistan. The consequences of publishing such a story were unwittingly revealed in a caption accompanying the article:

Unaware… terror mobs don’t know their words can be heard by RAF

It’s a stunner, alright.

If the story is true, the Sun have revealed an important military secret and consequently put the lives of British troops in Afghanistan at greater risk for the sake of a Muslim bashing headline and Rupert Murdoch’s bank balance. If it isn’t true, that opens up a whole other set of questions.

My attempt to raise these issues by submitting a comment under the story on the Sun website was not successful. Many other comments were published but mine was not. As yet, my attempts to find out why my comment wasn’t published have been equally unsuccessful. My email was apparently passed to the relevant department a week ago but that’s as much as I know at the moment. I’ve sent them another email. Just in case they forgot about the first one. I’m sure I’ll be receiving a satisfactory reply any day now…

To have your views airbrushed out of existence by the supposedly free speech loving media is unpleasant but not unexpected. It’s a common tactic in the “battle of ideas”.  You could say they’re fixing the playing field. You could say that they’re choosing to engage with only only those opponents they think they can beat. (The Sun did allow a couple of not very well considered critical comments through; these easy targets were then attacked by other “right thinking Sun readers”.) You could say this is cowardly, dishonest and unscrupulous.

Others will argue that it’s the Sun’s website so they have the right to maintain it as they see fit. True on the face of it, but having the right to act like a bastard doesn’t automatically mean that you should act like a bastard. It also doesn’t provide a free moral pass.

Anyway, I was wondering what could be done to get the media to more fairly my views and decided that some sort of organisation to promote them is the answer. In this media savvy world where people are constantly bombarded with information, the name is going to be all important. After spending £500,000 on consultants and PR firms, we’ve finally come up with a winner. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

An Influential Think Tank 

Guaranteed media coverage, no matter what dross we come up with.  ”An Influential Think Tank said today that multicoloured swapshop has eroded our cultural moustache in the jellied eels”.

Brilliant! But there’s still a problem. If An Influential Think Tank’s first press release was about the damage done to society by irresponsible reporting in the media, it’d create a standing wave paradox which would threaten the very existence of the universe.

Drat.

… What I think he said is an OUTRAGE!!!

If you felt a slight tremor sometime yesterday afternoon, it’ll have been caused by an enormous number of knees all jerking at the same time. Just the mention of the word Sharia is enough to cause many people to disengage their critical faculties and become subsumed by righteous indignation.

The BBC’s Have Your Say has been inundated with outraged comments (over 11,000 comments since yesterday afternoon, most still in moderation) and demands for the Archbishop’s resignation. There, and on blogs, a common theme is “I can’t believe he said that”. Unfortunately, this thought does not seem to have provoked any great desire to find out exactly what he did say. How many of those 11,000 people actually listened to the Archbishop’s 10 minute interview or read his speech? (Both available from the BBC article above.) How many bloggers offered their opinion based on nothing more than a badly written news summary of Williams’ views and their own deeply felt misunderstanding of the concept Sharia law? Too many to count.

But it wasn’t just Joe Bloggs. Here’s a quick analysis of some of the responses detailed in this morning’s BBC report.

The prime minister’s spokesman said Sharia law could never be used to justify a breach of English law.

Indeed. Williams never suggested otherwise.

Home Office Minister Tony McNulty said: “To ask us to fundamentally change the rule of law and to adopt Sharia law, I think, is fundamentally wrong.”

He didn’t say that either. Nice double use of fundamental there though.

For the Conservatives, shadow community cohesion minister Baroness Warsi said the archbishop’s comments were “unhelpful”.

She told BBC News 24: “Dr Williams seems to be suggesting that there should be two systems of law, running alongside each other, almost parallel, and for people to be offered the choice of opting into one or the other. That is unacceptable.”

Slightly different problem here. This already happens to some extent as the Baroness would have know if she’d read Williams’ speech. Is it Conservative policy that Jewish Beth Din courts are unacceptable and should be closed down?

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said he had “an enormous amount of respect” for Dr Williams, but could not agree with him on this issue. He said: “Equality before the law is part of the glue that binds our society together. We cannot have a situation where there is one law for one person and different laws for another.

“There is a huge difference between respecting people’s right to follow their own beliefs and allowing them to excuse themselves from the rule of law.”

Williams did not suggest that anyone should be allowed to excuse themselves from the rule of law. In fact, he made a point of saying, in his customarily confusing way, that this shouldn’t be allowed to happen.

All in all, not an edifying sight. And I’ve not even touched on the idiotic “they’ll be trying to behead you next” stuff.

In reality, as the Global Dashboard rightly notes, the Archbishop’s view is “thoughtful, considered and nuanced” (via another good post over at The Wardman Wire). The same certainly cannot be said for the majority of reactions to his comments.

An update is likely later this afternoon.

Given what I wrote about the Policy Exchange report into extremist literature in Mosques when it was published, I can’t say I was at all surprised to see Newsnight’s report on the subject last night. It appears that there are serious questions over the “evidence” used to construct the report. Osama Saeed has more on the Newsnight broadcast and on the implications of what was discovered.

I don’t think I’ll be having any second thoughts about my original post title on the subject.

Dean Godson, the Policy Exchange shouter sent to defend the report on Newsnight, adopted an all too familiar strategy to deal with criticisms of this so called academic report. He played the man, not the ball, accusing Newsnight’s editor of “disastrous editorial misjudgement” and of “appalling stewardship of Newsnight”. Textbook.

You might like to compare and contrast Godson’s approach to another response to criticisms of the report. Back in November, over the course of three posts, Dr Marranci of the University of Aberdeen raised a number of serious concerns regarding the methodology and ethics of the P.E. report. The report’s author, Dr MacEoin, responded. Here are the two quotations which illustrate the central theme of his response:

“I’ll read your remarks in more detail later. But I already see denial writ large on what is there.”

“As it is, you all seem to think this sort of thing is OK. You bring nothing but shame on yourselves by giving it even tacit approval. The materials are all entirely genuine, they are all available.”

In reality, anyone reading the posts on Dr Marranci’s blog can clearly see that these stock accusations are entirely without foundation. Dr Marranci’s primary concern, as an academic himself, is the fact that his study was being presented as an academic work when it is clearly nothing of the sort.

To conclude, I’ll repeat what I wrote last time round:

None of the above is to deny that there is extremist literature to be found in some British Mosques, of course. Nor is it to deny that the Saudi government actively seeks to promote its intolerant version of Islam in other countries including the UK. The point is merely that headlines generated by flawed reports masquerading as academic surveys should not be taken at face value.

Unlike almost all of the rest of the British media which reported the P.E. headline grabber unquestioningly, Newsnight actually investigated the veracity of what they were being asked to report. Like, you know, journalists. And the Policy Exchange study, unsurprisingly, came up short.

Respect to Peter Barron and Newsnight. Can we have more journalism like that please?

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.

According to the latest British crime survey, cannabis consumption among young people has gone down significantly since its reclassification in 2004. While these figures obviously don’t conclusively prove that the downgrading of cannabis is the reason for the reduction, it does make it extremely hard to argue that the change in the law has had the opposite effect.

Unfortunately however, it seems unlikely that these figures will have much impact on the attitudes of our elected representatives as they discuss the issue over drinks in one of the numerous bars within the Palace of Westminster. In fact, I can’t help wondering how those who oppose decriminalisation will spin this. Here are a few suggestions.

But, but but… that contradicts my gut feeling on the effectiveness of prohibition. This so called evidence must therefore be unreliable.

But, but but… the tabloid newspapers say that young people in the UK are almost all drug addled hospital cases and that it’s getting worse by the day. This so called evidence must therefore be unreliable.

But, but but… if this was true, it’d mean that the moral posturing which accompanies this debate is utterly facile. This so called evidence must therefore be unreliable.

Just a few ideas there. I’m sure they’ll manage to come up with a few more before to long.

I was busy doing this and that yesterday, trying to nail jelly to butterflies can be a time consuming task, so I didn’t spend as much time writing about the Scottish election fiasco as I’d have like to in an ideal world.

It was this lack of time which led to me incorrectly claiming that Brown had not pointed out that the report “scrupulously sought to avoid” allocating blame. I wasn’t paying proper attention. To correct that error, let me just state here that Brown did indeed quote the relevant section of the report. I can’t quite see how he thought it’d help him with the line he was trying to spin but he did do it. I withdraw my erroneous claim and apologise for making it.

On the wider point, after I’d written the post I did find the time to write, I got round to reading a blog post about the situation by Brian Taylor, BBC Scotland’s political editor. He correctly points out that we shouldn’t exaggerate the scale of the problem and ought to stay calm about the whole thing.

This got me thinking as to whether my post yesterday had been just a tiny bit shrill. These thoughts were amplified when I saw that a fair number of people seemed to have lost all sense of perspective and were busy suggesting that the UK was comparable with Burma in the comments to Gordon Brown’s CiF article on the situation there. That ridiculous comparison does an injustice to the people of Burma.

The UK is clearly not a banana republic. Nevertheless, on reflection, I’m happy with my post. This is partly because it was obviously an attempt at a humorous approach to the situation. More importantly, there’s a line in Brain Taylor’s post which helped clarify my thoughts. In relation to the conclusions which can be drawn from Gould’s report, Brian said:

The prime concern of politicians was . . . politicians. Quite.

In one sense that’s a perfectly fair comment. Who could really be surprised that an independent report into the behavior of politicians would discover such a thing?

It does not follow from that, however, that we should not be outraged when our elected representatives put their own interests above those of the people. We shouldn’t, and especially not when they’re playing self-serving partisan politics with something as fundamental as the workings of the democratic process.

We all know it happens and it’s probably safe to assume that we all think it shouldn’t. There’s an interesting debate to be had about whether there’s much that can be done to stop this sort of thing but one thing is for certain: simply accepting that politicians behave in this way and suggesting that it isn’t all that big a deal will only benefit the worst culprits and make them believe that they can get away with more of the same. No carrots, no sticks, just as you were. In fact, adopting a relaxed attitude to this example of partisan hackery doing damage to the democratic process is only likely to lead to a lot more of this sort of behaviour in the future.

Brian is right that we should keep this in perspective. But we shouldn’t simply shrug our shoulders and just accept it when politicians play self-serving partisan politics with the democratic process. If we do that, we definitely will get the politicians we deserve.

The spin and hype surrounding David Cameron’s “unscripted” speech still makes me laugh. Does it comfort you to know that he spent all that time memorising his lines so that he’d come across as talking from the heart? Would he continue to do that if he won the election?

Civil servant: Prime Minister, we have an urgent matter of national security which needs your immediate attention.
Dave the boy wonder: No can do. I’m in the middle of memorising my off the cuff remarks for next week’s press conference. Come back in a few hours…

That’ll work.

It was impressive that he managed to remember so much, I grant you, but then, Christopher Biggins can also memorise lines (for panto, you know) and I wouldn’t want him running the country.

Anyway, his “unscripted” speech was a veritable smorgasbord of crowd pleasing measures adrift in a sea of wishful thinking. Here’s one example. He said that “we need to scrap that early release scheme in prisons”. I’m afraid I don’t have the time to look up the figures but given that most prisoners serve approximately half of their sentence, we’re talking here about nearly doubling the number of prison places and the amount of “tax payers money” (copyright of the Conservative Party) spent on the prison budget. Can anyone tell me if this Daily Mail wet dream has been fully costed?

(By the way, I love the way that some on the right criticise the BBC for allegedly adopting a “government should spend more money” approach to every problem. Because the right wing press and the Conservatives never do this… )

There was lots of that sort of thing: national citizen service, increased spending on the armed forces, ending the couple’s penalty in the benefit system, a pension “lifeboat” fund and talk of tax cuts too. Just how quickly will the economy have to grow to fund all this stuff? Fantastically quickly, it would seem.

The speech was filled with just the sort of vacuous promise filled guff which brought Blair to power way back in 1997. Blair’s broken promises damaged trust in the democratic process in the UK enormously and led to the historically low turnouts of 2001 and 2005. Cameron’s decision to adopt a similar approach may well lead to even lower turnouts somewhere down the line. At the risk of sounding over dramatic, I genuinely believe that British democracy could be in a real spot of bother before too long. That will be of no concern to Cameron of course, as long as he wins the next election.

(I should add that Gordon Brown is hardly an innocent bystander in this. More on that in another post.)

David Cameron’s appearance on Newsnight last night was interesting. I see he’s been working on his super sincere “I’ve got gravitas” face. Impressive…

On marriage, he said something which had me scratching my head.

The evidence shows that marriage is a good institution that encourages people to commit to each other and to stay with each other.

He then acknowledged that some marriages do break up, fair enough, but what evidence is he referring too which demonstrates that marriage encourages people to stay together? He helpfully outlined it:

There is some very interesting evidence that Iain Duncan Smith put in his report which is that if you take an unmarried couple with a child, by the time that child reaches the age of five, half of them have separated. The figure for married couple is one in twelve.

Well, that is certainly evidence. I’ll even give them the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s true for now. What conclusion can be drawn from this evidence, Mr Cameron?

That to me is a figure we really have to look at and think marriage is a good institution, we should back it, and I think including in the tax system.

In summary, the argument is that because married people with children tend to stay together longer than unmarried couples, the institution of marriage causes these couples to stay together longer.

Hmm…

The detailed reasoning behind this argument is apparently contained in a previous report called Fractured Families. A helpful link to that report is provided in the newer one (pdf, page 13) but, alas, 404 Not Found doesn’t really advance the case a great deal.

Without being able to access the details, it does seem like there might be just a tiny wee hole in this “evidence”.

In the conclusions to the new report we find this comment (page 107):

As the chairwoman of OXPIP [an organisation which helps parents to bond with their children] said to us, ‘Marriage is the natural consequence of two adults being able to commit to each other because their own emotional development is secure and has given them the necessary confidence.’

To put it another way, marriage might well be a result of the relationship between two people who are already more likely to stay together than other couples.

The figures quoted by Cameron certainly don’t prove that marriage “encourages people to commit to each other and to stay with each other”. They might just as easily suggest that people who feel they are ready to get married under the current legislative framework are people who are already more likely to be able to maintain a stable relationship over a prolonged period. If the second suggestion is true, Cameron’s policy proposals are only going to increase the divorce rate by encouraging marriages between people who are not actually ready to make that commitment.

Bizarrely, as if this has somehow registered subconsciously in the minds of the authors, they wrote this as the response to the comment on marriage as a natural consequence of emotional development:

It is for this reason that we have resisted incentivising marriage although our measures strongly encourage it.

Wibble.

The death of Rhys Jones is a tragic event. Sadly, the media’s almost orgasmic delight at having such an emotive story to cover during the silly season is helpful only to those looking to boost sales/viewing figures. Obsolete has written an excellent post on that.

What I’d like to do is focus on just one point from this case. There is undoubtedly a real problem in some areas with violent groups intimidating people into silence when something like this happens. The police are trying very hard to reassure the public that they will be protected if they come forward with evidence.

From the BBC:

Speaking at a press conference near the spot where Rhys was shot, Ch Supt Chris Armitt said: “We understand that people are concerned about giving information to the police, we understand that people are frightened.

“[But] what I want to say to people is, listen, they’ve got to stand up and they’ve got be counted.

“We have ways of protecting members of the public who come forward with information, we can protect their identity.”

That’s perfectly sensible.

And this is from the same report:

Police have confirmed they have spoken to a woman seen pushing a pram near the Fir Tree pub just before the shooting.

That’s utterly barking.

Apparently, these Einstein’s have not worked out that if this women has seen the perpetrators of this crime, there’s a strong possibility that they’d have seen her too and that they might know who she is. If you were that woman, how would you feel next time you had to wheel your pram past the Fir Tree pub? Or the next time you hear a funny noise in the middle of the night?

This police confirmation and the media reporting of the same must be some new form of identity protection involving double bluff and…

No, sarcasm won’t do. This is absolutely ridiculous. How many other witnesses have been put off from coming forward because of this announcement? We’ll never know now.

Many years ago my mother saw two men syphoning petrol from the row of cars in the street in front of our house. My father was away on business so she phoned a neighbour (a prison warder) and asked him to contact the police; being a young mother alone with three children in the house, she didn’t want to phone directly and have the police come to our door in sight of the men. The police came, caught the culprits in the act, locked them in the back of the car, went to the neighbour’s door, took a brief statement and them came to ours to do the same. They did this in full view of the two men in the back of the car. Although no further harm came to the family as a result of this idiocy, it did have an effect on my mother and on her attitude towards the police. She felt that they had needlessly endangered herself and, more importantly, her children.

In recent conversation with her, I’ve argued that things have improved considerably in the intervening years. Today, as we sat together watching a BBC bulletin containing the information above, I had to concede that they might not have improved that much.