Head of comedy attends internal BBC climate change meeting!!!111

Tom Chivers has a piece today in The Telegraph which argues that the BBC does not need to be balanced in the debate on climate change because the facts aren't balanced.

He makes reference to a meeting that the BBC held to review its editorial policy on this subject a few years ago.

In the comments below the piece, thefilthyengineer makes an excellent point regarding one of the attendees of this meeting:

Well they did include:
Jon Plowman, Head of Comedy.
And that's not a joke. I have the full list.

HEAD OF COMEDY!!!!!!??? What on EARTH was he doing at a meeting like this!!!???

YOU COULDN'T MAKE IT UP!!! I mean COME ON BBC, what the sweet Jesusing FUCK are you playing at!!? Having the head of a department so frivolous attend a meeting on something that is not directly related to comedy!??

What do you mean the BBC needs to have balance in comedy output too? What, programmes like "Have I Got News For You" and "The News Quiz" need to try and maintain balance in their guests and it would be a good idea for managers overseeing this process to be up to speed on and input into these policy decisions?

Ok, but LOOK AT THE COMEDY MAN ATTENDING THE CLIMATE CHANGE MEETING!!! I mean COME ON BBC! IT'S 'ELF 'N SAFETY GONE POLITICALLY MAD OR SOMETHING....

Etc.

Why are only junior MPs standing down?

There are already 11 MPs who have said they will step down at the next election as a direct result of the expenses scandal. How many more there will be is anyones guess. I have heard estimates of 200 or more potentially. The next House of Commons could have the highest new intake of any in history at this rate.

David Hughes has raised an interesting point though on the Telegraph Three Line Whip blog. He is asking what about the big fish and he has a very good point. None of the MPs who have announced they are stepping down were in Ministerial or Shadow Ministerial positions. Andrew MacKay was an adviser to Cameron but most of the public would not have heard of him.

What about Hazel Blears or Alistair Darling, Jacqui Smith, Geoff Hoon, Tony McNulty, Andrew Lansley, Oliver Letwin or Alan Duncan. These people have all been accused of what seems to me quite dodgy behavour around expenses but it is looking like there may be no consequences for them beyond having to pay the money back.

I suspect the reason is that there is a sort of compact (probably unspoken) between Brown and Cameron that neither will push this for fear of opening the floodgates and seeming to lose control and potentially many Ministers and Shadow Ministers for if an MP is forced to stand down at the next election they can surely no longer serve on the front bench.

I think as there are more and more MPs forced to stand down the public will start to ask why the political minnows are the ones sufferring and the large fry seem to be getting away with it. This is surely going to be unsustainable.

Update to MP expenses scandal and safe seats correlation

Further to my previous posts from a week and a half ago here and here which looked at the MPs who had been implicated in the expenses scandal by the Telegraph and seemed to find a correlation between the safety of the seat the MP held and the likelihood of being involved, I have gone through the data again using the latest available list from the Telegraph. The link to this is here although it changes daily and may well be out of date by the time you read this (although I have saved it locally myself). The source data about the MPs is from the 2005 election and from Keele University here.

The last time I did the work a week and a half ago only 94 MPs had been implicated. As of today there are 243 so there is more data to work with.

I have posted the results below but first I just want to again caveat all of this. I am not a statistician and I know that we don't have all the data yet. If you read through the comments on the previous threads you will see some people say that there are problems with the approach or method and that things like confounding variables are not taken account of. There are also some comments from people who think the approach is OK. I accept that my approach is fairly blunt and is by no means to final word, however I have had a number of queries from people asking if I have done an updated version of this as the previous one is now well out of date, hence the new post.

Right, here are the results:

The median number is now 287.7. It has drifted back towards the median from 262.4 previously.

The graph now looks like this:

There is still an increase in each quartile but it is less pronounced than previously. There is still quite a stark difference though between the bottom and the top quartile with the top having almost twice as many as the bottom and now with more source data to work from.

One of the objections previously was that the Telegraph were bound to focus on the most newsworthy MPs first, but almost 3 weeks on that effect must surely have dissipated as they ran out of newsworthy ones. I certainly found myself doing this update wondering who a lot of the newly added MPs are. I hadn't heard of lots of them!

Right, I think this is the last time I will post on this now. I think I have found an interesting effect albeit with potential problems. I have had a few e-mails from people asking for the source data and I will respond to these soon but with this latest data (I held off responding because it was quite out of date by the time the requests started). Anyone else who wants it, please e-mail me at the e-mail address at the top. I would like to see others take this forward and also for someone to come up with a decent way of analysing this effect once all the data had been released. I will be interested to see what other people can find about this.

+++ Alan Duncan claims details released +++

Just seen that in the Telegraph tomorrow, Alan Duncan's claims for gardening are under scrutiny.

This looks pretty bad to me. It seems that he was claiming for paying a gardener thousands of pounds for the upkeep of less than an acre at 16 hours per week. This seems to go far beyond what is needed to support his parliamentary work.

Mr Duncan has set himself up for this after his very poor performance on Have I Got News For You a few weeks back where he came across as smarmy and arrogant when asked about this issue. What compounds this is that like Barbara Follet, Mr Duncan is extremely independently wealthy so this sort of behaviour looks particularly grubby.

Unsurprisngly his response has been to insist that the claims are legitimate and were approved by the fees office. That is the defence of all MPs and it is wearing extremely thin.

MPs should publish all details immediately

The Telegraph has a sensational scoop today with the leaked information about 13 Cabinet Ministers and their expenses. There seem to be some suspicious things going on such as Brown only having repaid an "oversight" when the Telegraph approached him yesterday, Jack Straw having claimed a full council tax rebate even though he already had a 50% discount on this and others. The revelations certainly do not make for edifying reading. The official line is that no resignations are necessary but I am not so sure and it is not for those involved to decide this. Once the details sink in, we will see how bad the revelations have gone down with the public.

It is also worth noting that the Telegraph has published these in completely unexpurgated form. The way that the Commons plans to publish these officially is to have some of the details blanked out which would have made it difficult to discern some of the anomalies.

The publishing of this information is manifestly in the public interest and the Telegraph were right to do so. However a leak of this sort was largely inevitiable. The Commons has thrown up barrier after barrier to this and on the current timetable they are not planning to release any information officially until July. They should change their minds and publish everything immediately. Otherwise they risk a further drip-drip of information leaking out into the public domain with the timetable controlled by the press who are bound to do this in the way that best sells newspapers, i.e. to eke the story out fot as long as possible and that can only be damaging.

Better to have it all come out in one go, and yes, I am sure there will be further claims that will raise very difficult questions and may even result in resignations and even possible by-elections but at least a line will be drawn under it all and MPs can start to try and recover from this dreadful episode.

Their secretiveness has got them into this mess and they need to get a grip and regaing control. Openness is the only way to do this now.

Other blog reaction here, here, here and here.

Jacqui Smith is getting away with it...

It's not often I agree so strongly with Simon Heffer but his column in the Telegraph today is pretty close to what I think about how some of the political class in this country behaves, with particular reference to Jacqui Smith.

Amongst others, he makes the following point:

"We know Miss Smith's game. She will struggle to hold her seat at the next election, as Labour will struggle to hold the country. Faced not just with the loss of a ministerial salary but also an MP's one (with all its juicy expenses), and with life in the House of Lords perhaps no longer a gravy train, it makes sense to coin it in while you can. This includes having her husband on her payroll, too. If lean times hit the Smith household, there should be a bit of fat to live off while the Job Centre does its work."

I am sorry to say that I think he is spot on here. I did not mention it in my previous post about lodgergate (as nobody else seems to be calling it!) but I did wonder if her behaviour could at least in part be explained by the fact that she has very little to lose because she will likely be out of parliament at the next election.

Irrespective of all of this, I find it shocking that the parliamentary standards commisioner can have dismissed the case against Smith so lightly. He claims that there is not enough evidence against her. So the only conclusion I can draw from this is that if with such an obvious case of manipulating the system to claim that kipping in a spare room round at your sisters (when your husband, children and most of your personal effects are in a house 100 miles away where you appear to spend the majority of your nights, your own website refers to you "still living in Redditch" and your own spokesman in an attempted defence referred to your Redditch house as your "home") can be claimed as your primary residence then the system is very, very broken. I am very saddened that more of a fuss has not been made of this by the media and other politicians.

Guido has been making a lot of running on this story (hattip to him for the Smith website bit above) and has written to the commissioner himself about this. I fully support his attempts to question this situation and keep the media's eye on it.

Jeff Randall gets it Spot On

Jeff Randall's piece today in the Telegraph seems to me to sum up one of the main problems today with political discourse in the UK today. It is an excellent article about why people in public life rarely tell the whole truth about things or even attempt to answer questions put to them. It also covers some occasions when politicians have tried to step outside the narrow bounds they set for themselves and end up commiting a "gaffe".

This state of affairs has concerned me for quite a while now. Peter Oborne's latest book The Triumph of the Political Class covers this subject matter and related topics in great detail and is a very good read for political junkies like me!

I have lost count of the number of times I have been willing politicians when they are being interviewed to answer the question, engage with the issue, resist the opportunity to distort or make cheap partisan points and been left disappointed. It is just part and parcel of the usual discourse unfortunately.

A good example of this is what happened with Andrew Lansley a couple of weeks ago (Randall makes reference to this in his piece). He made some comments which were in response to claims that the recession could be bad for people's mental health. His comments were pertaining to the potential upside of a recession and that there is evidence that because people tighten their belts they tend to eat more healthily and drink and smoke less. That is exactly the sort of interesting and sensible observation that ordinary people would be interested. I certainly was and I thought it enhanced the debate about the current situation. However there was an outcry stirred up mainly by Labour politicians and others in the media about how heartless this was and how "TEH TORIES THINK TEH RECESSION IS GOOD FOR US!!!11". Complete lack of any attempt to engage with the substance of what Lansley was saying and just an opportunity for cheap political point scoring. Pathetic. Tom Watson MP's comment on his blog is typical of the sort of reaction I am referring to.

Once it became clear that the media narrative considered it a "gaffe" Lansley was forced by David Cameron to apologise for his remarks. Probably the next time Lansley has an original and interesting insight into some issue of the day he will keep it to himself. And the homogenisation continues as the standard of political debate in this country step by step gets a little bit poorer.

*Edited to correct a couple of mistakes.