House of Comments - Episode 79 - The Debt Ceiling Gambit

Episode 79 of the House of Comments podcast "The Debt Ceiling Gambit" is out. Myself and Emma discuss Ed vs The Daily Mail and the fallout from this with journalist and author Toby Young and the US shut down with Deputy General Secretary of The Fabian Society Marcus Roberts.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here.

Other podcasting software e.g. for Android can be pointed here to subscribe.

You can download the mp3 for the latest episode directly from here.

Or you can listen to the embedded episode below here:

listen to ‘Episode 79 - The Debt Ceiling Gambit’ on Audioboo

Any feedback welcomed in the comments below.


PS: A big thanks to Audioboo for hosting the podcast for us. We would also like to thank Kevin MacLeod from Incompetech.com for our theme music.

Leveson is linked to Savile but not in the way Paul Dacre thinks

A couple of weeks ago, Mail editor Paul Dacre called for the Leveson inquiry to reopen in order to examine the BBC's role in the Jimmy Savile allegations of child abuse.

This is a rather bizarre request given that it would mean Leveson stepping well outside his original remit. But to be fair to Mr Dacre, he is, in his own way trying to ensure that that aspect of the Savile scandal is investigated thoroughly. It is highly unlikely that Leveson will be reopened though and there are already separate inquiries into what happened at the BBC in terms of both Savile and the Newsnight report that was spiked.

I do think however that the long serving editor has unwittingly highlighted the link that there is between the Savile scandal and the Leveson inquiry.

For months on end we have heard witness after witness testify as to how their lives have been damaged by the use of tabloid dark arts such as phone hacking. The extent of the use of these techniques is truly mind-blowing. From the voice-mail messages of a missing (and as we now know murdered) schoolgirl right through to finding out details of film stars, nobody was safe from having their most intimate details pored over by the hacks and then used in "exposes" or other stories.

Well, I say nobody. Actually there was one person who seems to have been safe from the tabloids' nefarious reach. Jimmy Savile.

Despite the fact that pretty much everyone in the media seems to have been aware of the rumours. Despite the fact that it is now coming to light that numerous of Savile's victims and others who witnessed incidents did try to speak out but were either not believed or laughed at. I doubt there is a single Fleet Street journalist throughout the 1970s and 1980s who had not heard on the grapevine about his alleged activities.

I keep reading and hearing that they couldn't stand the stories up and/or there was nobody to corroborate them. But as we have seen, all it has taken is for a few of his victims to be given the chance to speak out and in the words of Esther Rantzen, an expert on child abuse "they all corroborate each other". And many more have now been given the confidence to speak out as they realise they will likely be believed. If any newspaper had executed a proper investigation into Savile's activities 30 or 40 years ago perhaps his crimes would have been revealed sooner and some of his later victims would have been spared their ordeals.

We of course know that this did not happen. He was free to abuse right up until his death last year and was given a showbiz funeral with the obligatory hagiographic obituary pieces.

So the next time you hear Dacre and others from the tabloid world banging on about how Leveson needs to look into the BBC, just remember that Leveson came about because of the phone hacking scandal and the dark arts the newspapers used to get private information on people for their splashes.   Those same techniques that on occasion are defended in the name of "public interest".

You have to ask why on earth celebrity tittle-tattle was considered a legitimate target for their use and a suspected serial sexual predator like Savile was not.


This post was first published on Liberal Conspiracy.

John Redwood's comments are being taken totally out of context

Tory MP John Redwood wrote a blogpost earlier this week where he drew a parallel between how a middle class family who finds their income cut by 10% can make adjustments and used the analogy to describe how the UK state could also make adjustments.

Here is main part of what he wrote:

Tomorrow’s budget will probably be proposing cuts of less than 10% over the lifetime of this Parliament. Sensibly managed, this need not entail cutting anything that really matters.

The UK state has been living a middle class lifestyle. If you are living on a low income then of course cutting spending is difficult or impossible. If you are living a middle class lifestyle and your income goes down by 10% you have plenty of options. You can holiday nearer at home and cut out the foreign trip. You can eat in more than in the local restaurants. You can trade down for a cheaper car. You can draw some money out of the savings account to tide you over until your income goes up again. You can buy more of the value items at the supermarket, and put more vegetarian dishes into the home menus. You can discover home entertainment to keep the leisure bills down. You can turn down the thermostat a little and put on a jumper.

The UK state finds itself in that position today. It has plenty of assets. Some can be sold to help out. It has been dining out on consultants and temporary labour. It needs to do more in house. It has been appointing all too many to exotic job titles which we could manage without, and sending many of them on expensive overseas fact finding trips and seminars. It has indulged in a mind blowing array of politically correct regulations which often fail to tackle the underlying problem they wanted to address. It has been a master at buying the “nice to have” or the “why do we need this?” instead of concentrating on doing the basics well.

Seems like a reasonable post to me. Perhaps I might quibble with making a direct comparison between the UK state level and a household level as it is a bit simplistic but it allows him to make his broader point in an accessible way which I am sure was his aim.

However the Daily Mail has picked up on this and in a story entitled: "Cold and hungry? Wear a jumper and eat vegetables: Tory MP sparks outrage with advice on how to survive 'Bloodbath Budget'" it proceeds to take Redwood's comment totally out of context and treat them as if he is giving direct advice to people as to how they should handle the budget cuts which he is not.

Sunny Hundal on Liberal Conspiracy has taken only the section highlighted above in red and hence shorn it of all its context and then posted this entitled: "Redwood asks poor to ‘put on a jumper!’" even though Redwood explicitly states that if you are on a low income then cutting is "difficult or impossible". And just to repeat it is an analogy, not direct advice.

I tire of saying this but no wonder politicians are terrified of saying or doing anything outside of bland pre-prepared and vetted statements. All Redwood is trying to do here is point out a way that the public spending cuts could be viewed.

The reaction from The Mail, Lib Con and doubtless others is just deliberately taking his comments and twisting them in order to make it look like he is saying something that he is not.

UPDATE: The Mail article I linked to has now changed so that the Redwood stuff is not in the main article but instead in a side box where they show that Redwood denies what they originally claimed and they give him the right of reply.

Are you posh? Try the test...

According to the test in The Daily Mail today I am!

Have a guess which 3 I said yes to to qualify.

Hattip @TimMontgomerie via Dizzy Thinks

Peter Oborne should be in favour of breaking the 2 party stranglehold

I like Peter Oborne. He is partially responsible for my decision to get involved in active politics. I read his books "The rise of political lying" and "The triumph of the political class" a while ago and both books helped nudge me a bit further along the road to making the leap from interested of observer to participant. I told him so when I met him the The Convention on Modern Liberty last year.

His analysis of the "political class" as he defines it is compelling reading. It is formed of the people who take political power and patronage for granted and who wish to continue with this self-perpetuated 21st century narcissistic oligarchy within politics and the media. He doesn't however include all MPs within this definition. Only the ones who are part of the establishment. The way that Oborne thinks that the current egregious state of affairs will ultimately be resolved is in the penultimate paragraph of the book:

"It is almost certain therefore, that the next great political movement will come from outside the Political Class. Just as the Political Class has emerged from the wreckage of the party system so it is certain to produce its own antithesis. At some stage a British politician may well discover a new language of public discourse and methodology of political engagement which communicates simply and plainly to voters."

Now does that sound a bit familiar? It almost sounds like what has happened over the last week or so. An outsider not sullied by association with the Labour/Conservative classes that have ruled us for more than half a century has come along and is speaking a language that appears to connect with people. He is talking about breaking up the duopoly of power and privilege and changing the system so that there are no longer safe seats that can be awarded by members of the political classes to their acolytes.

However Mr Oborne does not seem very enthused about this. In an article for the Mail on Tuesday entitled "The Great Liberal Deception" he was very negative about the recent success in the polls of Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems. Although he does not explicitly state it, the tone of the piece seems tilted against electoral reform implying that Peter Mandelson is behind a shady deal for a hung parliament which might lead to this.

Now perhaps this is not so surprising. Oborne is at heart a conservative. However given the sterling work he has done, he must recognise that if we are going to get the sort of changes necessary to shake the political classes out of the comfortable position they have settled into in recent decades, now is the best time for this to happen.

A change to the voting system to eliminate safe seats would be a big step in the right direction for what Oborne ultimately wants to see. Politicians accountable to the people who elect them rather than the parties who select them. And the only way we are going to get this is via a breakthrough by the Lib Dems. The other parties will clearly not do this on their own.

Perhaps Mr Oborne should reflect on this. It's certainly a point I will put to him if I meet him again.

Press tries to smear Clegg

It is quite astonishing to look at the front pages of some of the press this morning. They are really going for Nick Clegg, especially the Telegraph and the Mail, both of which has very flimsy "stories" that really do not stand up to scrutiny and are blatant smear jobs not warranting even page 17 status let alone splashed across the front page. I'm not linking to them, you can find them if you wish. Tom Bradby, Nick Robinson and Jeremy Paxman all suggested last night that the Telegraph story is a smear or something and nothing.

It can only be because the press are running scared that the Lib Dems might actually do well at this election now. Every time the press runs smears like this, the stakes get a bit higher because the more it is clear that they are desperate to try and force the Lib Dem polling numbers down. If they are not successful in this endeavour then it will demonstrate that the power of the press has severely declined.

Obviously I hope that they are not successful, but I would be saying this even if they were going for Brown or Cameron. I want this election to be decided on issues. When there was talk of the Lib Dems coming under more scrutiny I welcomed this. I want to see our policies being debated properly and I think they stand up well against our opponents. This is not what the Mail or the Telegraph have done today. They are just hurling a tonne of crap at Clegg and hoping that some will stick.

Conservative blogger Iain Dale did a very good post earlier this morning which made clear what his view is on this sort of thing. Here's a snippet:

I don't want Nick Clegg to win. I don't want him to be Prime Minister. But he is not the devil incarnate. He's a nice guy, doing a fair job of leading his party. I do not agree with many of his policies. I think many of them are misguided. But I am happy to accept that he believes they will be best for the country. I am happy to debate them with him or any other LibDem and that's what politics and this election should be about. It should be about debating ideas, arguing about policy. It shouldn't be about this sudden urge to denigrate Nick Clegg as a person. It will backfire on those who promulgate these attacks because most people can see with their own eyes that he is a transparently decent individual.

Of course politicians should be scrutinised and questioned. But not like this

I hope Iain is right about this strategy backfiring for the press and fair play to him for posting this. I also hope that other bloggers from across the spectrum are willing to speak out against this sort of thing.

UPDATE: Caron has an excellent suggestion for how to deal with these press smears by trying to make sure they are hit in the pocket here.

What is the point of the PCC?

I have just learned that the Press Complaints Commission has ruled in favour of Jan Moir with respect to the article she wrote last year following the death of Stephen Gately (I blogged about it at the time here). There is some analysis of the ruling from Andrew Reeves here and Stephen Glenn here.

25,000 people complained to the PCC about this article, more complaints than they have ever had about any single article which left many people repulsed at the unfounded comments about a man who had just died.

If the PCC think that this article was fine then I seriously wonder what the point of it is. I also think that it is high time the composition of the upper echelons of the organisation were reviewed. Can it be right that Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail is chairman of its "Editors’ Code of Practice Committee"?

If we are going to have a PCC, it should be a robust, independent organisation which strives to uphold the highest journalistic standards. Otherwise, why are we even bothering to have one? It currently just seems to act as a veneer of accountability without doing very much to justify its own existence.

The Two Saras take Daily Mail apart on drugs and death penalty

The Daily Mail published a disgusting comment piece yesterday by Leo McKinstry accusing people who thought that Akmal Shaikh (the man executed by China yesterday morning for alleged heroin smuggling) should not have been executed of being "wailing liberals" and suggesting it was correct that he should have been executed, despite the many claims that he was mentally ill. (As is becoming standard policy on this blog I have not linked to the Mail piece - I am not giving them any more traffic directly from here).

I was going to try and find some time to have a crack at a fisk of McKinstry's piece today but I find that there is no need as the two Saras (Scarlett and Bedford) have already done a great job of this separately themselves.

Please read their thoughts here and here.

Sara Bedford takes A. N. Wilson apart

Following Melanie Phillips' ode to anti-scientific nonsense (that I blogged about here) in The Daily Mail yesterday there are two more pieces from that same publication that I have come across today. One by A. N. Wilson who seems to be making a fetish out of misrepresenting the scientific process (and also invoking Godwin's Law along the way for good measure) and another by Peter Hitchens in a similar vein. The Professor Nutt sacking seems to be bringing them out in droves.

I started to wonder if I was going to feel compelled to spend more time today rebutting this stuff but Sara Bedford has saved me having to do anything at all about the Wilson piece. She's done a fantastic and detailed point by point rebuttal of his piece here. It's well worth reading and I am happy to report she has done a better job than I could have!

Now I just need to find one for Hitchens' piece and I will be happy again....

PS: I am trying to minimise my links to The Daily Mail hence the lack of them but I am sure you can find the pieces yourself if you wish.

I give Melanie Phillips a good fisking

On Left Foot Forward.

It's in response to her article today in The Daily Mail entitled "Fatuous, dangerous, utterly irresponsible - the Nutty professor who's distorting the truth about drugs". I'm not linking to it again, the LFF post has a link to it.

After all the nonsense she's written about MMR over the years, you think she'd be a bit more circumspect about blundering into scientific areas like this....

Jan Moir "clarification" on Stephen Gately is full of holes - #janmoir

Jan Moir has published a "clarification" about her hateful article last week on Stephen Gately's death today in the Daily Mail. There is a cached version of it you can read here so that I don't need to link to her article. There is also a cached version of her original one here.

She seems to be trying to justify what she did and apparently it's all our fault for misinterpreting poor old Jan. The thing is, her explanation of what she meant is full of holes. I am not going to do a full fisk, I don't have the time or energy but here are a few of her points with my thoughts:

The point of my article was to suggest that, in my honest opinion, Stephen Gately's death raised many unanswered questions. What had really gone on?

After all, Stephen was a role model for the young and if drugs were somehow involved in his death, as news reports suggested, should that not be a matter of public interest?

Ah, the old "public interest" defence! Why is it in the public interest though Jan? The only thing I have seen (alleged) is that some cannabis was smoked on that night. Even if that was true is it really likely to have contributed to the death? Even if it did, why is that in the "public interest". It may be of interest to the public but that is a very different thing. Stephen was not a politician or public servant. This is thin, thin stuff from Moir clutching at straws.

We were told that Stephen died of 'natural causes' even before toxicology results had been released. This struck me as bizarre, given the circumstances.

Absolutely none of this had anything to do with his sexuality. If he had been a heterosexual member of a boy band, I would have written exactly the same article.

Really Jan. REALLY? In that case why did you say the following in your original article?:

"Another real sadness about Gately's death is that it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships.

Gay activists are always calling for tolerance and understanding about same-sex relationships, arguing that they are just the same as heterosexual marriages. Not everyone, they say, is like George Michael.

Of course, in many cases this may be true. Yet the recent death of Kevin McGee, the former husband of Little Britain star Matt Lucas, and now the dubious events of Gately's last night raise troubling questions about what happened."

These comments are not compatible with your claim that none of your comments had anything to do with Stephen's sexuality. They had everything to do with it. You specifically suggest that this case (and bizarrely a completely unrelated suicide) raise "troubling questions" and that "happy-ever-after civil partnerships" are a myth. It was hateful and homphobic and trying to deny you said or meant it is desperate stuff at this late stage.

Yet despite this, many have interpreted my words as a 'bigoted rant' and suggested that my motive was to insinuate that Stephen died 'because he was gay'.

Anyone who knows me will vouch that I have never held such poisonous views.

Was someone else typing those words last week then?

My assertion that there was 'nothing natural' about Stephen's death has been wildly misinterpreted.

What I meant by 'nothing natural' was that the natural duration of his life had been tragically shortened in a way that was shocking and out of the ordinary. Certainly, his death was unusual enough for a coroner to become involved.

What you actually wrote was:

"Healthy and fit 33-year-old men do not just climb into their pyjamas and go to sleep on the sofa, never to wake up again.

Whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one. Let us be absolutely clear about this. All that has been established so far is that Stephen Gately was not murdered."

which seemed to be setting yourself up as some sort of medical expert. Perhaps you could point us towards the actuarial graphs that show massive dips in mortality rates at the age of 33, after all no-one seemingly healthy and fit of that age just dies apparently.

Regarding the reaction to your column you say:

To say it was a hysterical overreaction would be putting it mildly, though clearly much of it was an orchestrated campaign by pressure groups and those with agendas of their own.

There's a big difference Jan between an orchestrated campaign and something that lots of people feel revulsion about when they become aware of it who then decide to act upon it. You are failing to understand the digital world we live in and how systems like Twitter and blogs can accelerate the reaction of the public to something they feel strongly about. Paul Bradshaw on the Online Journalism Blog does a good job of explaining this here.

No Jan, a good example of an orchestrated campaign would be something like the complaints about Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand last year that your newspaper organised. That was a situation where before your paper got involved there had been two complaints and afterwards there were thousands, often from people who hadn't even heard the original broadcast. I sense a bit of Rovian projection going on here (the deliberate projection of one's own behaviour onto one's opponent).

You round off your "clarification" by saying:

Finally, I would just like to say that whatever did or did not happen in Majorca, a talented young man died before his time. This, of course, is a matter of regret and sadness for us all.

So if he was so talented, why in your original piece did you say:

"A founder member of Ireland's first boy band, he was the group's co-lead singer, even though he could barely carry a tune in a Louis Vuitton trunk.

He was the Posh Spice of Boyzone, a popular but largely decorous addition."

This attempt to distance yourself from your words and views will not wash I am afraid Jan. We all saw what you said. It was a nasty, hate filled homophobic piece and no amount of "clarification" will change that.

You should apologise properly. This wriggling you are indulging in now is just pathetic.

The Jan Moir case and the PCC

Mark Pack has a great post on Lib Dem Voice today where he dissects the Press Complaints Commission's remit and explains why he thinks their oft-used criteria of "normally" requiring the person or family of the person directly affected to complain should not apply in the Jan Moir, Stephen Gately article case.

He suggests the following reasons:

(a) The widespread public reaction to the publication of the piece, resulting in the crashing of your website, a special page being added and your staff going on the record that they have received a near record number of complaints. That by itself is not a “normal” case.
(b) When someone’s relative has died there are all sorts of reasons as to why they may not wish to take up any regulatory actions. People may wish to grieve in private. They may have bureaucratic complications to deal with. They may wish to think about the media coverage of their personal tragedy as little as possible. Whatever the reason, these are precisely the sort of circumstances in which normal rules about requiring them personally to complain should not automatically apply.
(c) The nature of the complaints about the article, particular on the grounds of discrimination, is one that affects the wider population. For example, if a newspaper piece was to incite racial hatred, that could have an impact on people other than those named in the piece.
(d) Your remit explicitly provides for considering complaints from people other than those directly affected – hence the use of “normally”. If this is not such a case, what is?

I think all his points have merit but for me, point b) is the strongest. Why should his grieving family have to cope with pushing the complaint through? I also think point c) is strong as well as I think it could well have the effect of spreading discriminatory sentiment more widely.

The PCC has seemed largely toothless to me over the last few years. They need to grow some quickly.

If you want to lodge a complaint with the PCC yourself, you can do so here. You should make sure that you address the remit question in your complaint, perhaps using one or more of the above (in your own words!) or other criteria if you see fit.

Jan Moir and The Daily Mail vs Twitter and the Blogosphere

I'm on holiday at the moment and have just dipped briefly into the blogs and Twitter again before heading out for the evening but I have been disgusted by Jan Moir's horrible, hate filled smear against Stephen Gately of Boyzone (I'm not linking to it) full of innuendo about his death which she has tried to relate to the fact he was homosexual.

However at the same time, I have been heartened to see the number of people on Twitter and across the blogosphere, literally from all corners, Tory, Labour, Lib Dem and others all expressing their disgust at Moir's article and at The Mail for publishing it. Apparently the pressure has been so intense that the advertisers have asked for their adverts to be removed from the online page where the article sits.

I am also heartened by the number of comments below the article itself (500+ at last count) expressing their disgust with it. It means that they cannot fail to hear the message.

The Mail has recent form for this sort of thing. They have to understand how reviled they are making themselves by publishing stuff like this. Hopefully the reactions they have had to this and other recent examples will start to have an effect on their editorial policy.

Another symptom of Flat Earth News syndrome?

Sara Bedford asks a good question today: "Is the Daily Mail guilty of a contempt of court?". She noticed on their website a story about the "Torture Brothers" case that a court illustration had a caption which included the surname of the boys. She has a screen capture of it with the surname blanked out to illustrate what she saw (see right).

The offending page has been taken down and as far as I can tell any google cache references to it have also been cleared - I guess The Mail asked them to wipe their caches when they realised what had happened. So it seems like it was an error that has been rectified.

This does however throw up some interesting questions. In "the good old days" ((c) Daily Mail) when men were men and papers were papers I think something like this would have been much less likely to happen. That's because sub-editors and proof-readers would likely have been more involved and a clanger like that would have been caught. But nowadays with the much more compressed news cycle and the pressure to get the online content published and out I wonder if some of these steps are no longer there? Otherwise surely someone would have spotted this?

Nick Davies in Flat Earth News covers how the modern press is so overwhelmed with deadlines and lack of resources that mistakes frequently occur. I wonder if this is another example of this problem?

I have contacted the Mail to ask for their comment about what happened here but they are yet to get back to me. I will update this post when they do.

The Daily Mail is immoral

The Daily Mail is immoral.

There can be no other explanation for the fact that they are campaigning against the HPV vaccine in the UK and for it in Ireland as exposed by The Lay Scientist.

It is clear that they are doing whatever they think will sell the most newspapers in each country. In quite a lot of stories e.g. relating to politics where you expect newspapers to have an agenda and to pander to its readers prejudices, this would be fair enough. However in a case like this where they are dealing with a subject which affects people's health there is no excuse. If the weight of scientific evidence is for the HPV vaccine then they should report this in as straight a way as possible. If the weight of scientific evidence is against it then again they should report this instead. What they should not do is cherry pick arguments and data from one side or the other to suit an agenda tailored to increase sales of their newspaper.

The Daily Mail has a shameful record on MMR as covered in depth by the heroic Ben Goldacre and many others over the last few years. They should not be allowed to get away with blatantly playing games with the health of its readers, some of whom will trust what they read in its pages and may act upon this.