Nigel Farage should have a Commons pass

On Friday, Iain Dale blogged about the fact that Nigel Farage, the outgoing leader of UKIP and MEP has been complaining that his Palace of Westminster pass has been removed. The Westminster authorities have decided to remove the privilege from all MEPs. They claim it is to "save resources" but there is a very strong suspicion that the move is to ensure that the two elected BNP MEPs cannot have passes.

Iain says:

I have to say I have never quite understood why MEPs had passes to the building in the first place, so I can't get as excited as Nigel Farage about this.

I disagree with Iain here and fully back Nigel Farage. I think Iain should be getting excited about this. The authorities have taken away a privilege from all MEPs apparently in order to ensure lack of access for two of them. Whether you like the EU or not it is surely right that we make it easy for our elected European legislators to liaise with our elected MPs? This measure will make that more difficult.

As I have said about the BNP before, when the debate was raging about whether Nick Griffin should be allowed on BBC Question Time, they have elected MEPs. From this, certain things flow in a democracy. The Westminster authorities may think they are doing the right thing but they are making a mistake.

How many more rules are they going to change to affect two specific MEPs but also cause problems for the remaining 70 who are not fascists?

PS: I have also noticed that quite a few of the comments on Iain's post seem to agree with me.

Evan Harris accuses Alan Johnson of a "litany of errors" over Professor Nutt dismissal comments

Dr Evan Harris, the Lib Dem MP and science spokesperson has written a letter to Alan Johnson the Home Secretary drawing his attention to a number of factual inaccuracies in the statements Mr Johnson made to the House of Commons last Monday in the debate about his dismissal of Professor Nutt.

Dr Harris charges Mr Johnson with a "litany of errors" and states it is essential that he returns to the chamber to correct them.

I think it is very important that he does. Mr Johnson was able to deflect a number of the criticisms against him with his statement and responses last week but with all the errors that Dr Harris has highlighted it throws a very different light on it and suggests a beleaguered minister grasping at anything to try and defend his decision. Indeed as Dr Harris points out, some of the Home Secretary's comments would even be actionable had they not been said under parliamentary privilege as they are a slur on Professor Nutt's reputation.

Mr Johnson must return to the House in order to address these errors. Parliamentary privilege comes at a high price, that the statements and responses given must be as accurate as possible. It would seem the Home Secretary has not met this standard.

(Thanks to Paul on Liberal Burblings and Politics Home for drawing my attention to this story)

Dr Harris' letter is reproduced below:

Rt Hon Alan Johnson

Home Secretary

Home Office

I am writing to raise with you several issues where you misled the House of Commons during the Urgent Question on the Advisory Council of the Misuse of Drugs on Monday 2nd November. The points you made are of such seriousness to the professional and public standing of Professor David Nutt that you should now correct yourself in the chamber and apologise for misleading the House, and I would be grateful if you would confirm to me as soon as possible that you intend to do so at the earliest opportunity. I am copying this letter to Mr Speaker and to Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat shadow Home Secretary.

1. You stated in the chamber: “In February, while awaiting publication of the Government’s position on the classification of ecstasy, of which he was already aware, Professor Nutt published an article and addressed the media on the appropriateness or otherwise of the Government’s policy framework, expressing a view that horse riding was more dangerous than ecstasy.”

This is incorrect. A peer-reviewed journal – the Journal of Psychopharmacology –published the article (not Professor Nutt). It was in January 2009, not February as you stated. Professor Nutt wrote and submitted the article the previous year. It was reviewed prior to publication by two expert reviewers. Neither at the time of writing, nor at the date of publication of the article, was Professor Nutt aware of the Government’s position on the classification of ecstasy since the ACMD had not even published its report let alone received the Government’s response. Furthermore the content of the article was discussed with the ACMD secretariat (though he was not required by the Code of Practice to do so) and was discussed and approved in a conversation with Professor Nutt by Paul Wiles the Departmental Chief Science Advisor.

2. You stated in the chamber: “On Thursday 29th October Professor Nutt chose, without prior notification to my Department, to initiate a debate on drugs policy in the national media, returning to the February decisions and accusing my predecessor of distorting and devaluing scientific research”.

This is incorrect, as Richard Garside, Director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s College London has made clear. Professor Nutt delivered his lecture at King’s on 14th July 2009 to an audience of 150 people with no media. This was published by the CCJS on 29th October. As you know, there is no requirement on an independent scientific adviser to give prior notification of academic work to the ACMD secretariat in the Home Office in either the general or the ACMD code of practice. Nevertheless, Professor Nutt had indeed informed the secretariat of the paper and received feedback. Prof Nutt even discussed it with Paul Wiles, the Home Office Departmental Chief Scientific Adviser. In fact the Home Office publicised it in advance on their website here:

http://www.crimereduction.homeoffice.gov.uk/events/show_event.htm?event_id=170&view_type=list&current_page=1&monthID=0&yearID=0

The official flyer for the event described Prof Nutt as Professor David Nutt, Edmond J Safra Chair in Neuropsychopharmacology and Head of the Department of Neuropsychopharmacology and Molecular Imaging at Imperial College London. It was only the Home Office advert that also described him as Chair of the ACMD.

Prof Nutt would not, of course, be banned from accusing Jacqui Smith of “distorting and devaluing scientific research” under the ACMD code of practice , but he did not. There are no references to Ms Smith in his lecture and only 3 to the “former Home Secretary” which are factual. The reference to “distorting” and “devaluing” in the lecture clearly refers to the use of the precautionary principle.

3. You stated that the former Home Secretary – Jacqui Smith- had protested to Professor Nutt concerning the comparison in the Journal of Psychopharmacology article of the risks of ecstasy with the risks of horse-riding. You then went on: “In relation to the latest event, that behaviour has happened again. Professor Nutt is a man whom I respect, and he is very learned in his field, but, much to my regret, he published a paper without any notification to my Department, contrary to the code of practice under which he was appointed”.

This is incorrect. There was no evidence at the time or now that any of those events involved a breach of the Code of Practice for Scientific Advisory Committees or the ACMD by Prof Nutt, and this is reinforced by the fact that neither Home Secretary in either of their letters to him has made this allegation, and nor did you raise it in your recent and only meeting with Prof Nutt. Yet if this allegation were made outside the House, it would be actionable given the slur on Professor Nutt’s reputation.

4. You stated: “Our principal advisers—whether Sir David King, John Beddington, Sir Liam Donaldson or Professor Nutt—have to be clear that when they are appointed to such a crucial and privileged job—When such esteemed professionals take on such a job, they have the Government’s ear. They have a very important role in influencing the Government, and they must exercise it with care and caution. It would be quite wrong for advisers to undermine the Government as well as advise them.”

Professor Nutt is not a full-time Government or Departmental Chief Science Adviser within the civil service, but an unpaid part-time adviser paid as an academic. You confuse the two roles. Nor has Prof Nutt campaigned against Government policy. One academic paper and one lecture in one’s area of expertise do not constitute a campaign, especially as both the paper and the lecture were notified to the ACMD secretariat and beyond in the Home Office and the content discussed and approved.

5. You stated: “My final point is about what Professor Nutt did last week at King’s college; incidentally, he was opposed by Professor Robin Murray, the head of psychiatric research, who takes a completely different view.”

This is incorrect. As we saw above, the King’s College event was four months ago not last week. Professor Robin Murray was not there.

You will see from the litany of errors in your remarks that it is now essential that you return to the chamber to correct them. I look forward to your response.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Evan Harris

Member of Parliament for Oxford West and Abingdon

Remembrance Sunday in Sandhurst

My wife and I attended a Remembrance Sunday service this morning here in Sandhurst in the Memorial Park. It was very well attended and included officers from the nearby military academy as well as soldiers including members of the Gurkhas and many others.

The part of the service that always gets me is "When you go home, tell them of us and say, for your tomorrow, we gave our today." and this morning was no exception.

We do owe our today to them.

Idiotic article from Labour MP on CiF - brilliant comments below

I was simultaneously depressed and then immensely heartened by an article I read on Comment Is Free earlier. The Labour MP John Robertson has written an article full of prejudice and nonsensical arguments regarding drugs policy. He also unbelievably even tries to smear Professor Nutt as a bad parent.

However I then started reading through the comments below. I have gone through over 50 of them and apart from one person, the rest are all completely against Mr Richardson's argument. His article is basically ripped apart and exposed for the nonsense it is. I wonder if the government really realised how much more scrutiny their position would be put under when they decided to make it clear they reject an evidence based approach by firing Professor Nutt.

Here are a couple of examples of the comments:

You should be fighting to protect the children from the risk that horse riding presents to them. You need to send out a strong message that horse riding is dangerous. Really, it should be illegal, because that will really discourage people from doing it. Ever since the new, stronger breeds of horse have become popular then the percentage of people who state that horse riding is a primary source of recreation has increased from 3.4% to 6.2%. If these so-called scientists say that this so-called horse riding is safer than using an angle grinder that doesn't detract from the need to be presenting a strong message.

And another references a quote in the BMJ from the always excellent Professor David Colquhon:

Politicians are apt to invoke the precautionary principle when discussing illegal drug use, but it isn't quite as simple as that. The precautionary principle can result in harm to people. Perhaps the reason for including ecstasy with heroin in class A was to make people think that ecstasy was as dangerous as heroin (not true, but precautionary). But it is just as likely that people will conclude that heroin is as safe as ecstasy. That's the danger of lying, however good the motives.

It's well worth reading through the comments. Taken together they provide a comprehensive fisk of the article. Wonderful stuff.

Remarkably prescient blog post about Gordon Brown from 2004

Max Atkinson on Twitter has drawn my attention to this piece that he wrote about Gordon Brown and what a disaster he is as PM. He absolutely nails the major flaws that have led to his downfall and how the Labour Party were crazy to just allow Brown to become PM by default.

Oh, and he wrote the piece in 2004, 3 years before the handover even happened! No newspaper would publish it at the time though apparently.

Here's a snippet:

For at least two decades, viewers and listeners have had put up with the sight and sound of politicians treating interviewers’ questions as prompts to say anything they like, regardless of what they were asked, or as yet another opportunity to dodge an issue. As an exponent of how to carry this depressing art to its limits, Gordon Brown has no serious competitors among contemporary British politicians. When he was still shadow chancellor, one commentator noted that if you asked him what he had for breakfast, his most likely response would be ‘what the country needs is a prudent budget’ – and that would merely be the preamble to a lecture about his latest thoughts on the matter. I recently asked one of the BBC’s most experienced and best-known presenters what it was like to interview him. His answer was rather more outspoken than I’d expected:

‘Brown answers his own questions, never the interviewer's, and is utterly shameless. He will say what he wants to say and that's it. And he'll say it fifty times in one interview without any embarrassment at all. I've never met anyone quite like him in that respect. I once spent 40 minutes on one narrow point and still failed to get him to make the smallest concession. He's extraordinary and is never anything but evasive and verbose.’

It is one of the most prescient pieces I have ever seen (in retrospect) and it is well worth reading the whole thing.

Quote of the day

From Professor David Nutt:

If your policy is informed by an underlying moral imperative, be open about what that is, and don't try to disguise it with a veneer of pseudo-science.

BBC Question Time Live Chat - 5th November 2009 - #bbcqt

Remember, remember that it's #bbcqt day again and as usual the Live Chat on this blog will start tonight at 10:30pm.

It's in Reading tonight about 15 miles from where I live but they didn't invite me on. Still at least that means I can host the chat!

The panel will include the Welsh Secretary Peter Hain MP, the shadow environment secretary Nick Herbert MP, the former Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Ian Blair, the former MEP and broadcaster Robert Kilroy-Silk and the comedian Natalie Haynes. You might notice that there are no Lib Dems on the panel. Hmmm.

Liberal Democrat Voice also usually have an open thread for BBC Question Time which is posted just before the start of the programme.

Join us from 10:30pm below.

Poppy fascism?

Mike Ion has written a piece on LabourList today where he takes Jon Snow to task for his comments about "poppy fascism". Snow said:

I am begged to wear an Aids ribbon, a breast cancer ribbon, a Marie Curie flower...You name it, from the Red Cross to the RNIB, they send me stuff to wear to raise awareness, and I don't. And in those terms, and those terms alone, I do not and will not wear a poppy. Additionally there is a rather unpleasant breed of poppy fascism out there - 'he damned well must wear a poppy!' Well I do, in my private life, but I am not going to wear it or any other symbol on air.

Mike says he is a big fan of Jon's but thinks he is wrong on this:

What is wrong with wearing a "symbol" on air? Why not make an exception? Jon's logic appears to be: "I can't publicly promote all of the causes that I am asked to support so I will not support any of them." This is a bit like arguing that because I can't give to all of the charities that ask for my help I won't give to any charity.

The poppy is the symbol of remembrance. We do not diminish anyone by wearing it, least of all the veterans. Diminishing the debt we owe our predecessors would be accomplished by resigning ourselves to the notion that we cannot comprehend what happened. We undermine the notion of Remembrance Day by lack of reflection, not flippantly wearing, or not wearing, a poppy.

I am afraid that I do not agree with the final line of the above paragraph. We do not undermine the notion of Remembrance Day by not wearing a poppy. The wearing or not wearing of one is individual choice and there may be many reasons why people choose not to. It doesn't mean they are not respectful of the sacrifice our soldiers have made. As it happens, me and my wife always buy poppies around this time of year and wear them. We will also be attending a Remembrance Day service on Sunday. However I fully respect other people's right to decide for themselves what they want to wear and I do not judge them if they choose not to.

The problem is that what ends up happening is that people are then criticised for not wearing a poppy and pressure is put on them to do so. I saw a little snapshot of this happen during PMQs last week. I was live tweeting it and started to notice a few tweets saying things like "Harriet Harman is not wearing a poppy" and "Where is Jack Straw's poppy?". This annoyed me and I did a couple of tweets questioning this sort of "poppy tyranny" as I described it. Harman and Straw may well have had reasons for not wearing one. It was still a couple of weeks before Remembrance Day for example. Perhaps they had just forgotten. Perhaps it was on their other jacket. I don't know and frankly it is none of my business.

Everybody should be left to make their own decisions about this.

MPs would be mad to try and get a £15,000 pay rise

This morning's Telegraph reports that senior MPs are lobbying for a £15,000 pay rise for MPs. They seem to think that in the wake of the Kelly report on expenses, they should be compensated for the loss/reduction of some of their perks with a salary increase.

They clearly do not get it. The public are disgusted with the behaviour of some MPs regarding expenses and the mood is such that any attempt to try and push through a substantial salary increase like this will go down like the proverbial cup of cold sick.

There also seems to be a suggestion (from Sir Stuart Bell MP, a member of the Estimates Committee) that expenses should be merged with salary:

...so that in the longer term we can marry pay structures with allowances in such a way that the dreadful allowance system is abolished for all time.

I do think we should look at pay in relation to allowances and put ourselves in a situation where MPs will live on their pay and not have to claim any allowances at all, other than travel.

I don't really understand how this can work. Different MPs live different distances from London resulting in varying degrees of travel necessitated and also have wildly different family sizes and hence accommodation needs. How could one set salary level for all MPs work in this context?

It seems that MPs have undergone a collective nervous breakdown when it comes to this subject. They seem to be so traumatised by the expenses scandal that they are no longer looking at the subject rationally. I can how Bell's suggestion might superficially seem to get around the problem but it is very flawed and smacks of a knee-jerk reaction to try and make the nasty situation go away.

There would have been no problem if the expenses and allowances had been reasonable in the first place. Kelly' recommendations from yesterday try to address this. MPs should accept his recommendations in full (not cherry pick the bits they like) and also accept the fact that substantial pay rises are off the table.

Gordon Brown "resign" petition - A response!

In a rather unexpected move (unexpected by anyway), Gordon Brown has actually responded to the petition that called on him to resign on the No 10 petitions site and that 72,234 of us signed. His response reads:

The Prime Minister is completely focussed on restoring the economy, getting people back to work and improving standards in public services. As the Prime Minister has consistently said, he is determined to build a stronger, fairer, better Britain for all.

I think this response encapsulates everything that is wrong with our Prime Minister. It doesn't even address the issue, i.e. him resigning. I never expected him to actually resign but the least he could do is acknowledge what the petition said in the first place. It just looks like the sort of meaningless robotic nonsense he spews out at every PMQs and every time I ever see him interviewed.

The man seems to be entirely divorced from reality. As I mentioned months ago, more people have petitioned him to resign than the 24,278 who voted for him in his constituency in 2005 (the only mandate he actually has). In fact the total is nearly 3 times that number.

Still, we now only have a few months to go before we all get the chance to show him what we think. He will have no option but to respond to that petition.

My view on the Lisbon Treaty, David Cameron and the EU

So the Czech President has signed the Lisbon Treaty which means it will likely to come into force in a few weeks time. The big political question now is what David Cameron will do. Apparently he will make an announcement tomorrow or later this week depending on who you believe.

I had an interesting discussion with my fellow "House of Comments" podcaster Stuart Sharpe from off of Sharpe's Opinion on Twitter earlier on. I tweeted a couple of things asking what Cameron would do next given his previous "cast iron" commitment to a referendum. Stuart tweeted: "I don't really think it's fair to stab someone in the back and then dance on their grave, you see." and then linked to this post he did last month where he suggested that neither Labour or the Lib Dems have stuck to their pledges on a Lisbon referendum. He therefore thinks it is unfair for members of those parties to now use the Lisbon Treaty as a stick with which to beat the Tories.

I can see his point and if I was a Tory and/or Eurosceptic I would be pretty annoyed about this too. In fact I am annoyed about what Labour and my own party have done over this issue but my thinking on it is a bit too involved for the 140 characters that Twitter allows. I did try and outline it in a series of tweets but I will have a proper go here.

Firstly, I am in favour of us having strong ties with Europe. I think it is good for us and makes us stronger as a nation. I am not hugely wedded to the EU as it is constituted at the moment not least because of the lack of accountability of the European Commission. I don't like the way the commissioners are all appointed and it is often seen as a reward or sop for domestic politicians of the various member states. I think it would be much better if it was more democratically accountable. I also think that the fact the accounts have not been signed off is very bad and gives the impression of corruption even if this isn't warranted. I really don't understand why this has not been addressed more fully. However I also think that the arguments above can be and are overplayed by opponents of the EU. The Council of Ministers which consists of ministers from each country is democratic in so far as the ministers are elected in their respective countries. MEPs are also elected and although I don't like the specific proportional system used for this in the UK, it is better than First Past the Post and they are representative.

As for the Lisbon Treaty and how things have played out with that in the last year or two I have a few points:

I think that the EU hugely over complicates these treaties and makes it difficult for non-technocrats to understand them. I certainly haven't the time or inclination to wade through it. I don't really understand why they can't keep it simple. Something like the US constitution is clear, concise and simple enough to be understood by schoolchildren - indeed it is taught to them in schools. Does anyone seriously think that say the Maastricht Treaty or Lisbon could be taught in a similar way?

Unfortunately, that is not how these things are done in Europe (perhaps more learned people than me could explain why in the comments) so because it is so complicated, it was not a good idea to pledge a referendum. How many people would read and fully understand it before voting? That is where parliament should earn its money by debating the treaty and voting on it.

However the Lib Dems and Labour did pledge a referendum and because I think parties should honour their pledges, we should not have gone back on this. I know both parties had their arguments: "It's no longer a constitution" in the case of Labour, "The real question is in or out" in the case of the Lib Dems but to most people it seems like a reneging on pre-election promises. I find it very hard to argue against that.

Now that we have done though, I actually think our current policy is more sensible than our original one. The ongoing saga of Europe needs to be settled. The last referendum was 35 years ago and on a completely different question.

I genuinely think that a referendum on in/out would be close and may go "out". I would not want to see this outcome but I am a democrat and we need to allow the public to make up their minds on this in order to settle this issue at least for the next political generation.

As for David Cameron, well nobody forced him to make a "cast-iron" pledge in The Sun about a referendum on Lisbon with no caveats. That was his decision and so if he now goes back on that he is going to have to expect some flak, not least from many of his own party members for whom this is a vital issue and who may well feel betrayed.

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.

House of Comments podcast - Episode 3

The latest "House of Comments" podcast with myself and Stuart Sharpe of the Sharpe's Opinion political blog is now live. The website for the podcasts is here and the third episode which we recorded on Sunday is available to download via this page here (raw mp3 file here if you prefer). You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes here.

The format as usual is to invite one or two other political bloggers each week and discuss a few of the stories that are making waves in the blogosphere.

This week, we were joined by Mathew Hulbert of NetNewsDaily, and Thomas Byrne of Byrne Tofferings. We discussed (inevitably!) Professor Nutt's sacking, Conservative bloggers on Climate Change, three strikes for file sharers and the EU council President.

Yesterday I was proud to be a Lib Dem

Sometimes I disagree with things that MPs and other representatives of my party say. Yesterday's debate in parliament about the dismissal of Professor Nutt from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs was not one of those occasions.

Instead as each Lib Dem MP popped up to make their contribution I found myself feeling more and more proud. Alan Johnson the Home Secretary, Chris Grayling his shadow and most of the back-bench Labour and Conservative MPs who contributed were in agreement that Professor Nutt had to go and that the Home Secretary had done the right thing.

Chris Huhne, the Lib Dem Home Affairs spokesman led the way by pointing out that the government was as risk of recruiting an "army of nodding yes-men" as the logical conclusion of the latest debacle and suggesting ministers were being ludicrously thin-skinned. Evan Harris asked a very important question about the independence of the advice. For his trouble, Alan Johnson suggested that "A calmer, more rational view, ... may be impossible" from Mr Harris but instead of getting angry about that, Evan simply looked at the Home Secretary expressionless, treating the comment with the contempt it deserves. I have seen few MPs as rational as Evan Harris. Even Phil Willis with whom I have not always found myself in agreement questioned whether Mr Johnson has consulted with the government's chief scientific adviser to which the answer was no. As Mr Willis pointed out later on any notion of joined up government is now out of the window with each department retreating into its silo.

Even when Chris Huhne was rebuked by the Speaker for being a bit too enthusiastic ("uncharacteristically so" Mr Bercow suggested) I thought that was positive. Mr Johnson was talking absolute rubbish at some points and I am glad to see someone was getting annoyed about it!

The Conservative's response to this debacle has been woeful. They are clearly going to be even worse than Labour on the issue of drugs if they get into power next year. It is clear that we are the only major party seriously willing to look at and listen to the scientific evidence without going off on populist rants which utterly refuse to engage with the debate.

You only have to look at this post yesterday from Tory Bear to see how frustrated some in other parties are about this unwillingness. The only person he found himself in agreement with was Chris Huhne.

Yesterday was a good day to be a Lib Dem.

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....

Does Chris Huhne read this blog?

I watched the debate in the Commons earlier today where Alan Johnson attempted to defend his decision to sack Professor David Nutt from his position as chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs last week.

One thing that particularly caught my attention was Chris Huhne's description of Chris Grayling, the shadow Home Secretary as Alan Johnson's "mini-me", the exact description I used in a post about him on Saturday.

It made me wonder if Chris Huhne reads this blog....

Downing Street petition site rejects "Sack Alan Johnson" petition

Kalvis Jansons, the man who brought you the Gordon Brown "resign" petition has contacted me to inform he that he has tried to submit another petition calling on the PM to "sack the Home Secretary" in the wake of his deeply unpopular decision to himself sack Professor David Nutt from the ACMD.

The Downing Street petition site has rejected it. Its reasoning for this is that it is "similar to or overlaps with an existing petition" and cites this as the one it overlaps with. However all that one calls on the PM to do is to reinstate Professor Nutt. That is a completely different thing.

What's the point in even having a Downing Street petition site if legitimate petitions like this are going to be rejected for spurious reasons?

Alan Johnson's leadership chances are now finished

He always claimed that he didn't want it and wasn't up to it. Maybe we should have listened to him more keenly as the debacle of the last few days has shown Alan Johnson in a very poor light.

He sacked the head of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, Professor David Nutt on Friday which then garnered a lot of negative coverage. Professor Nutt did not go quietly and has appeared on the media numerous times and is also using the opportunity to get his message across with articles like this in The Times today about drugs harm. On top of that, more ACMD members have resigned over the weekend and more look set to this week. They have an annual meeting next week and there is speculation that any remaining at that point might resign en masse. There are also rumours that other government scientific advisers outside of the ACMD are very unhappy. The story is still top on the BBC News site after 3 days.

In addition to all of this, Alan Johnson appeared on Sky News yesterday morning and under fairly mild questioning from Adam Boulton he became visibly angry. His face was red and he was shouting and using very confrontation language. If you missed it you can judge for yourself on the embedded clip at the bottom of this post.

I also think it is quite telling that the audience on Radio 4's Any Question on Friday (still available here until Saturday on iPlayer) when asked by Jonathan Dimbleby whether they agreed with Johnson's decision did not have a single person raise their hand. I know it's possibly not a representative sample but it is indicative I think of a strong feeling across the country against what he has done. Quite a feat for someone who was supposed to have the common touch.

I think any ambitions Mr Johnson might have privately harboured about leading his party and the country at some point have now been sunk. The saddest thing is that this is a mess entirely his own making.

Mike Smithson on Political Betting also thinks this is the end of the road for AJ4PM.

Dr Les King resigns from ACMD in support of Professor Nutt

It has just been reported that Dr Les King has resigned from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs in support of Professor David Nutt who was sacked by Alan Johnson on Friday.

Dr King, who is well respected in this field and was previously head of the Drugs Intelligence Unit in the Forensic Science Service said:

There is a very strong feeling among the council's members.

I'm not going to say just how many I think might resign but there is an extremely angry feeling among most council members.

Amongst the scientists, I think a number will resign. It doesn't need the whole council to resign for the thing to stop working.

It will be interesting to see how many more members of the ACMD do the same in the coming days. The government has made it clear that they are not interested in their evidence so it would seem the logical thing to do.

Are MPs paid enough?

MPs are currently paid £64,766.

The current median average salary in the UK is £25,123.

So MPs earn more than 2.5 times the average salary. I know that they are expected to live in and commute between two separate places but they are given an allowance to cover the cost of the second home (if they live far enough away from Westminster) and also given expenses to cover the cost of travel between the two places. I also know that there are likely to be some changes to the regime around this but I am sure that MPs will still have an allowance for travel and accommodation that will be adequate.

There seem to be a number of people who think that MPs are actually underpaid and should earn more. Perhaps £100,000 or more from what I have read.

I am afraid I completely disagree. I know that some MPs (and prospective MPs) could earn more in their former professions but frankly, becoming an MP is about far more than the money. For someone from an average background the salary would be a huge increase. For those from more wealthy backgrounds it may be a salary cut. That's just the way it is.

There are all sorts of perks associated with become an MP which those seeking to enter parliament are well aware of and are outside of any financial incentive. Here are a few I thought of earlier (I am sure there are lots more):

• Name in "Who's Who" for life (Matthew Parris cites this as one of the best things about becoming an MP!)
• Getting on TV and radio frequently
• Ability to affect legislation
• Being a VIP in your constituency
• Having the ear of the most powerful people in the country
• Parliamentary privilege
• Great springboard to further opportunities post parliament

MPs are paid more than enough in my view. If someone is deterred from entering parliament because 2.5x the median average salary is not enough for them then they are probably not right to become an MP in the first place.

Mark Reckons - October 2009 STATPORN

In October I had 9,650 Pageviews from 7,675 Visits and a total of 4,891 Absolute Unique Visitors.

My top 5 blog posts were:

1) BBC Question Time Live Chat - 22nd October 2009 - #bbcqt (The infamous Nick Griffin one had nearly 3 times as many attendees to the chat as I normally get and lots of people watching it on replay)

2) Has Bracknell sent a message about local candidates in primaries?

3) Nadine Dorries did not get to parliament on the same basis as everyone else

4) Is Paxman/Boris the new Frost/Nixon?

5) Jan Moir and The Daily Mail vs Twitter and the Blogosphere

Top 5 referring sites were:

1) Lib Dem Blogs

2) Twitter.com

3) Lib Dem Voice

4) Bracknell Blog

5) Charlotte Gore Blog

2,397 visits came from search engines and the top 5 search terms were:

1) mark reckons (206)

2) david nutt (77)

3) paxman boris (64)

4) elizabeth truss (60)

5) jan moir daily mail (49)

Quote of the day

Taken from Iain Brassington's excellent post about Professor David Nutt's sacking by Alan Johnson on the BMJ Group Blogs. His friend Kate's response to Mr Johnson is:

I cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy and have therefore lost confidence in your ability to make decisions as Home Secretary. I would therefore ask you to step down from the Government with immediate effect.

Is Chris Grayling Alan Johnson's mini-me?

I think the most depressing thing about this whole latest drugs policy farago is that it is looking like things will not be any better if the Conservatives get in after the next election.

Every time there is a story about drugs, the government will pop up with what it perceives as tough rhetoric about needing to "crack down" and "tighten up" etc. But what also happens is that the Tories also pop up in a sort of "mini-me" role echoing whatever the latest government minister has said.

In response to Alan Johnson's bizarre decision yesterday to sack Professor David Nutt, here is what Chris Grayling, the Shadow Home Secretary has said:

This was an inevitable decision after his (Professor Nutt's) latest ill-judged contribution to the debate but it is a sign of lack of focus at the Home Office that it didn’t act sooner given that he has done this before.

Thus setting down a clear marker for more of the same from a future Tory administration. If anything they would be worse given that his one criticism seems to be that Professor Nutt was not sacked even sooner.

David Cameron once understood that current drugs policy is not working. When he was a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee, upon publication of a report on the issue he said:

Drugs policy in this country has been failing for decades. Drug abuse has increased massively, the number of drug-related deaths has risen substantially and drug-related crime accounts for up to half of all acquisitive crime. I hope that our report will encourage fresh thinking and a new approach. We need to get away from entrenched positions and try to reduce the harm that drugs do both to users and society at large.

I don't understand what's changed. He is now leader of his party and may well be Prime Minister in a few months time. If drugs policy has been failing for decades, why do we seem to be drifting towards more of the same?

We need sensible evidence based policy in this area. We cannot allow such an important area of policy to continue to be dictated by tabloid headlines.

Why has Alan Johnson sacked Professor David Nutt?

The news has broken this afternoon that the Home Secretary Alan Johnson has sacked Professor David Nutt, the head of its own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. Johnson's statement on this says:

I cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy and have therefore lost confidence in your ability to advise me as Chair of the ACMD.

I would therefore ask you to step down from the Council with immediate effect.

Mark Easton, the BBC's home editor has the exchange of letters between Johnson and Professor Nutt detailed on his blog here.

As I blogged yesterday on the Left Foot Forward blog, Professor Nutt had questioned the government's decision to reclassify cannabis from class C to class B and had made comments that the government was not listening to evidence.

Back in February, Professor Nutt was criticised by then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith when he stated that taking ecstacy is no more dangerous than riding a horse as I blogged about at the time. She had demanded that he apologise. The thing is that everything that Professor Nutt has said on this subject throughout his entire tenure has been backed up by evidence. The government's decisions seem to be largely based on what they think the tabloid newspapers will like.

Yesterday I asked if Alan Johnson would listen to Professor Nutt's advice. Far from listening to him, he has sacked him. David Nutt is an expert on drugs and their effects. Rather than listen to what he has to say based on painstaking research and evidence, the government would rather try and shut him up.

I very much hope he does not shut up. I hope he uses the freedom to speak he now has to denounce the government's approach in the strongest possible terms.

It is telling that the government seems unwilling to put anyone forward to defend this decision. Krishnan Guru-Murthy of Channel 4 News has just tweeted the following tweets:

Alan Johnson, and rest of Home Office, so far refusing to do interviews tonight to explain their sacking of David Nutt

Johnson's letter accuses Nutt of undermining public understanding of govt messages on drugs

Bizarre - nobody will come on to defend Alan Johnson. They all prefer to issue statements that can't be questioned.....

I think that sums up the government's cowardice.

The blogosphere is already reacting to this story:

• Duncan Stott has suggested that the ACMD should all resign in protest.
• Mark Pack, co-editor of Lib Dem Voice is also asking why Professor Nutt was sacked. Mark makes an excellent point that essentially what the Home Secretary is saying is that he wants only people who agree with government's pre-determined position to advise them. This makes a nonsense of any claim to be basing policy on the evidence.
• Alex Wilcock has done an excellent post entitled "Considering the Evidence Means You Must Consider Your Position".

And these are just the posts I have noticed in the last 10 minutes as I have hurriedly thrown this post together (I have guests downstairs!).

I am sure I will come back to this story again over the weekend as the implications sink in but for now I will just leave this thought. Perhaps something like this has been necessary in order for the public to start to see government drugs policy for what it is. They are not interested in evidence, just political posturing. It's time this was fully exposed and this sacking is an opportunity to do this.

Interesting "Bloggers' Circle" posts - October 2009

I am part of a project called "Bloggers' Circle" which encourages bloggers to link to interesting content from other bloggers.

This month a few have caught my eye:

Joe Nutt with a fascinating piece on "Policy based evidence making"

A subject close to my own heart (given my weekly Live Chats on this blog) but Max Atkinson asks why BBC Question Time is not as entertaining as it used to be and has some suggestions for how to improve it.

Dazmando writing on Bracknell Blog does something that some shy away from and discusses the underlying reasons why people might decide to vote for the BNP.

Currybet tackles the PCC with respect to the Jan Moir article on Stephen Gately.

BBC Question Time Live Chat - 29th October 2009 - #bbcqt

It's Thursday which of course means that it's #bbcqt day again and as usual the Live Chat on this blog will start tonight at 10:30pm.

Coming from Llandudno, the panel will include the former home secretary Jacqui Smith MP (wonder what she'll have to say about Professor David Nutt's latest comments about drugs), shadow Welsh secretary Cheryl Gillan MP, the leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats Lembit Opik MP (hurrah, Lembit!), Plaid Cymru's Elfyn Llwyd and the broadcaster John Sergeant (always good value).

Liberal Democrat Voice also always have an open thread for BBC Question Time which is usually posted just before the start of the programme.

I've tried making the height of the chat window a bit bigger tonight. Let me know if this causes problems.

Join us from 10:30pm below.

Will David Nutt be listened to by Alan Johnson?

Professor David Nutt has made some more comments today about the relative harm of drugs including alcohol and tobacco and has accused politicians of distorting and devaluing the debate. It sounds like he agrees wholeheartedly with me! Perhaps I should see if he will do a guest post for this blog....

Anyway, I have written a more detailed article about this including the media coverage and questioned whether Alan Johnson will turn out to be any more sensible on this subject than Jacqui Smith was in one of my regular pieces for Left Foot Forward today.

Is Arnold Schwarzenegger a fan of acrostics? 200 billion to one chance he isn't

Paul on Liberal Burblings has drawn my attention to a letter written by Californian Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to the members of the Californian State Assembly refusing to sign an assembly bill. The thing is there is an interesting message if you just read the first letters of the two paragraphs in the letter. They are in order F, u, c, k, Y, o and u. Is Mr Schwarzenegger a fan of acrostics I wonder.

A rather crude calculation by Gary Langer from ABC news puts the odds of this happening by chance at one in 10 billion although he is assuming uniform distribution of letters throughout the language and is simply using (1/26)^7 which of course is a bit simplistic (and is actually around one in 8 billion - he's rounding up by 2 billion).

A slightly more sophisticated way of doing this would be to weight the letters using letter frequency within English. According to this Wikipedia article, the letter frequencies are: f = 2.228%, u = 2.758%, c = 2.782%, k = 0.772%, y = 1.974%, o = 7.507%.

So I calculate the odds as 0.02228 x 0.02758 x 0.02782 x 0.00772 x 0.01974 x 0.07507 x 0.02578 = 0.00000000000504173890853168

Or to put it another way odds of one in 198,344,265,370 (nearly 200 billion).

This, to put it mildly seems vanishingly unlikely...

Here's the original letter:

Ammiano Veto Message

MPs on Twitter blocking followers

Sara Bedford has tweeted today about how she has been blocked from following an MP. She hasn't said which one (although I can take a wild guess). UPDATE: Sara has done a blogpost herself about this now and it is who I thought it would be - Nadine Dorries MP.

After that I tweeted asking if anyone else has been blocked by MPs and had a few responses both publicly and privately. Sara's case is not an isolated incident. So there are multiple examples of MPs deciding to block members of the public on Twitter from following them. Obviously I can't know all the reasons why these "blocks" might have occurred but I strongly suspect in at least some cases the MP is trying to prevent an opponent from having (easy) access to their Twitter stream.

This seems a bit odd to me. The way Twitter works is that your tweets go into the "public timeline". Anyone can see these either via direct links or just by going to your public page on Twitter. If someone follows you on Twitter, you don't have to follow them back. So to block someone is a bit of a drastic step in my view. Thus far, I have never blocked anyone from following me as I am quite happy for the world to see what I am tweeting about.

Of course people have the right to do what they want on Twitter including MPs. I am sure there are cases (e.g. where someone is being very abusive to you) where you might want to take a step like this, however in the case of Sara above I am sure that was not happening and in the other cases revealed to me I am pretty sure too.

The fact that some MPs are doing this makes me question whether they have understood the nature of the medium. It makes it look to me like they have something to hide or are afraid of allowing their opponents access to their public statements, because that's what Twitter is, a public forum.

(Incidentally it is possible to make all your tweets private but none of the MPs I am talking about here have done that to the best of my knowledge).

UPDATE1: Stu has pointed out in the comments that another result of blocking someone is that it stopping you seeing @ replies which I was not really aware of (probably because I have never blocked anyone). I can understand them not wanting to see @ replies from people being abusive but from people who just genuinely disagree and are questioning them (which I think is the case in the ones I have seen)? That's the Twitter equivalent of having someone kicked out of a public meeting because you don't like their comments or questions.

UPDATE2: Parlez_me_n_Tory on Twitter has also drawn my attention to this blogpost he wrote a couple of weeks ago on a similar theme about former Speaker contended and Labour MP Parmjit Dhanda who has blocked a constituent on Twitter.

My idea for POWER2010

Guy Aitchison from OpenDemocracy has tagged me in a meme asking for my big idea for POWER2010 (which I blogged about here previously).

There are obviously lots of things that I would like to see changed about our political system and Westminster. Most importantly for me would be electoral reform of the House of Commons to a roughly proportional system (I favour STV with multi-member constituencies). However I bang on about that all the time on this blog and I am sure there will be plenty of people submitting that idea already so I thought I would try something a bit different. Here goes:

What's the big idea?

I would like to see the chamber of the House of Commons and the way it operates reformed in a number of ways:

1) The chamber is too small to fit all MPs in. On budget day they end up standing at the back and sitting on the stairs. It's ridiculous that a chamber designed for 427 people is still being used for 646. It should be updated to seat all members. If it can be done in situ, fine otherwise it may mean moving the location of the chamber. So be it.

2) MPs should have desks in front of them for papers etc. MSPs have them. Why cannot MPs? It is not very dignified for them to have to stand up holding sheafs of paper.

3) Jeering and heckling should be stopped in the chamber. It belongs in another age. It makes our politicians seem like schoolchildren and is one of the things that turns members of the public off. Any MP heckling or barracking in this way should be suspended from the chamber and persistent offenders should be disbarred. This sort of behaviour would not be tolerated in most other institutions where people make speeches and need to be heard. Why do we tolerate it in our primary legislative chamber?

4) At the very least MPs should be able to vote electronically from their seats in the Commons as MSPs can in the Scottish Parliament. However I also think there is a case for MPs to be able to vote remotely if necessary. I should clarify this though, in that I do not think this should be done as a matter of course. It is better if MPs have been at a debate in order to listen to the arguments but let's not kid ourselves that that is what always happens now anyway. What I want to get away from is the silly situation of forcing members to make long trips back to the chamber in order to vote (sometimes even from abroad). This is unneccessary and again belongs in a different age. I accept this proposal needs to be tightened up a bit but in principle there should be a way to make it happen.

5) MPs should be able to address each other by name.

Why is this change important to you?

The House of Commons is our primary legislature and the way it is currently constituted and run belongs to a different age. My proposals might seem marginal and perhaps even petty to some but the current operation reflects very badly on MPs and our whole political system. Things like those listed above are part of the reason why people feel disconnected from politics and why it seems so alien. I have many friends and family members who are not that interested in politics and they are baffled by these things.

Of course there are lots of other, more important reforms that should be implemented (many of which I have blogged about before) and hopefully they will be submitted in large number to the POWER2010 commission. However I do feel that the measures above will go a long way to bringing the chamber and operation of House of Commons into the 21st century and helping the process of re-engaging the electorate with those who are supposed to represent them.

I now tag the following 5 bloggers to put forward their ideas:

Will Straw, editor of Left Foot Forward

Sara Bedford from Always Win When You're Singing

Dazmando from Bracknell Blog

Letters From A Tory

and The Fluffy one, Millennium Dome Elephant

Elizabeth Truss should not be deselected

Elizabeth Truss, the newly selected Conservative PPC for South West Norfolk is facing potential deselection following the revelations that she had an affair with fellow Conservative (and MP for London & Westminster) Mark Field.

My response to this is W. T. F.

There are several aspects to this that are noteworthy:

• There is no suggestion that Mark Field is going to be deselected. Why should it be that a woman is held to a higher standard than a man? Didn't it take both of them to have an affair?
• It seems that the local Tories in Ms Truss' constituency are angry because she didn't bring it up. Why the hell should she? It's her own personal business and it's not like 5 minutes googling couldn't have discovered it anyway.
• Why should the fact that anyone had an affair mean they should be deselected anyway? If that was the case we would have MPs being deselected all the time!
• What sort of people do we want in politics? Bland automatons who have never done anything remotely exciting or interesting in their entire lives? I would rather have people who have lived a bit. If that means some people who have had affairs or done other things that might not be 100% perfect then all the better. We are supposed to have people representing us with all our character flaws. Not some unattainable ideal.

I sincerely hope that Elizabeth Truss is not deselected. I also hope the selection process is not opened up again as it would be unneccessary. The candidate has been selected under the existing system, that should be an end to it.

The world has moved on, thank God from the time when women who had affairs were shunned by "right thinking society". The Tories in South West Norfolk need to move on with them.

Tory Bear in hyperbole shocker

Everyone's favourite young Conservative blue coloured fluffy bear has a shock headline this morning: "Lib Dem PPC in Bribery Scandal".

It turns out that the "scandal" is that Lib Dem York Outer parliamentary candidate Madeleine Kirk has put out a statement where she talked about the record number of people they had signed up to the party and the "bribery" portion is that local students were able to join the party for free rather than for £5 (an already heavily subsidised rate of the sort that all parties do).

So it's not really a scandal and it's not really bribery. It's just the sort of thing that political parties do to attract members.

There are other ways of looking at this story. How about: "Lib Dems help increase student involvement in politics". Or: "Young people given civic encouragement by political party". I would have thought that Tory Bear, being a young person involved in politics himself would be pleased to see all the stops being pulled out to try and increase student involvement.

TB himself in the comments to the post (in response to a comment I left) points out that it's the "deception and lies" that he objects to in Kirk's press release. It looks more to me like the sort of thing you get from all parties including the Tories highlighting what is perceived as good news within the party. Is he honestly saying that every single Tory press release highlights everything that pertains to the story? Come off it.

As it happens, if I had been putting out that press release, I would have been singing from the rooftops about how we had offered free membership for students. I don't think it's a bad thing at all, I think it reflects very well on us as a party.

TB also says in his comment to me that there is a big difference between "giving away flashy tat" and actually paying for people's membership. Really? It's all just part of the same continuum as far as I am concerned. In these days of falling party membership the parties have to adapt to try and engage people, especially the young. This is one way of doing that.

Nadine Dorries did not get to parliament on the same basis as everyone else

There is an interesting piece by Unity on Liberal Conspiracy this morning which highlights how Nadine Dorries' comments about having got to parliament without having needed any form of positive discrimination seems to be contradicted somewhat by a contemporaneous account published in The Times.

What I want to focus on though is the following claim from Nadine in her Conservative Home piece:

I have never, other than when looking into the eyes of my new born babies, felt as proud as I did on that night. That pride, that sense of achievement, the knowledge that I was selected on the basis of my performance and merit above all other candidates on that day is what enables me to hold my head up high in this place. It’s what humbles me every morning when I walk into Members’ Lobby. It gives me confidence to take on my male colleagues with not just a little bottle, because I got here by exactly the same process that they did. They are no better than me and I no lesser than they.

The thing is that isn't really true. There are 646 parliamentary seats in this country and not all are equal. Nadine was selected for the seat of Mid-Bedfordshire which is one of the safest Conservative seats in the country. This means that Nadine effectively won the seat at the selection contest. The selectorate chose her as the candidate that night and it would have taken a major, major upset for her not to have won the subsequent election which she of course did with a majority of 11,355. (Incidentally there was a 2.6% swing against Nadine in the 2005 election against a modest 0.6% swing towards the Conservatives nationwide).

In other words Nadine could have done virtually nothing during the 2005 election campaign and still have won with a huge majority . I'm not really sure how by her own terms Nadine can look people like Labour MP Laura Moffatt (majority 37), Lib Dem MP Sandra Gidley (majority 125) or her own parliamentary party colleague David Jones (majority 133) in the eye and see equivalence. People like them really, really had to fight to win their seats and they are all at real risk of losing them at the next election. Nadine realistically, as long as she can keep her local association sweet can remain the MP for Mid Bedfordshire as long as she likes.

The certainly did not get into parliament by "exactly the same process" as Nadine.

House of Comments podcast - Episode 2

Myself and Stuart Sharpe of the Sharpe's Opinion political blog are doing a series of political podcasts called "House of Comments". The website for the podcasts is here and the second episode which we recorded yesterday is now live and available to download via this page here (raw mp3 file here if you prefer). You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes here.

The format is to invite one or two other political bloggers each week and discuss a few of the stories that are making waves in the blogosphere.

This week, we were joined by leading Lib Dem blogger Alix Mortimer, and Will Straw, founding editor of the Left Foot Forward blog. We discussed various issues including Nick Griffin's Question Time appearance, government sex trafficking figures and their veracity, the continuing recession and women only shortlists.

I hope you enjoy it.

Liberal Democrats for Drug Policy Reform website launch

The Liberal Democrats for Drug Policy Reform website has been launched today by Ewan Hoyle the founder of the group. As a member of LDDPR, I look forward to seeing how this develops and hope to attend future events.

Ewan organised an excellent inaugural fringe event on drugs policy which inclued Danny Kushlick of Transform Drugs Policy Foundation as one of the speakers.

He has already seeded a few threads in the forum which looks like it could be a good place to get discussion about aspects and consequences of drugs policies going.

You can also follow Ewan on Twitter here.

Will Howells raises an interesting question about Twitter

In the last few days I have been listening to the first few episodes of "The Pod Delusion", a collaborative podcast about "interesting things". There have been some good contributions so far on subjects as diverse as Can you be a Formula 1 fan and still green?, a review of the first UK "Amazing Meeting" and what should young children be taught?

Lib Dem Will Howells is one of the semi-regular contributors and something he said in his review on Gordon Brown's recent conference speech has raised an interesting question for me. He talked about how all the people on Twitter were live-tweeting the speech (of which I was one) and how when he got to his section about young single mothers and the group accommodation they would be provided with, we all decided what we thought of the policy within literally a couple of minutes. I remember this and indeed recall that Brown had barely moved onto his next topic before I started to see tweets denouncing the policy as "Gulags for slags", "Huts for sluts" and various comments about it being a return to a "poorhouse" mentality. I doubt there was anyone following it on Twitter who had not seen a multitude of conclusions about this well before Brown had even sat down.

Will's comment on this mentioned that of course for the journos in the hall there would have been press people ready to brief them directly after the speech to put Brown's words into context. The usual thing of "explaining what he really meant". The thing is though there is no briefing for those on Twitter or blogs. Instead we just make our minds up, based on what we have heard and then post our views online usually very quickly.

What this little vignette has made me wonder about is the longer term viability of the old way of doing things. Speech is drafted. Advance copy is circulated to the press. Speech is given. Speech is "put into context". Hacks go away and write it up with this context made clear. OK, I know it doesn't always work perfectly as journalists have their own agenda but it is the system. The "Gulags for slags" line was very amusing and was around the internet like wildfire within minutes. So much so that the mainstream media (many of whom also tweet and blog) picked it up straight away and it found its way into the newspaper coverage of the speech too.

In 1994, when Blair made his famous "Clause 4" speech to Labour conference, he was not totally clear about what he meant. He spoke in generalities and left it up to his spin doctors to brief the hacks afterwards as to what was really going on. I wonder how all this would have gone down were he doing it today.

Perhaps what will start to happen is that politicians will realise that being vague about something in a speech and then "clarifying" it in a briefing afterwards will not work in the world of Twitter and blogs.

Who knows, they might even have to start saying what they actually mean in a way that cannot easily be misinterpreted....

James Forsyth highights problem with our electoral system

John Pienaar's guest on his 5 Live political podcast this week was James Forsyth, the new political editor of The Spectator (it is still accessible here for a few days). The discussion was about BBC Question Time, Nick Griffin and the BNP and James made a number of what I thought were good points about the programme and how it played out.

What caught my ear most though was when he highlighted what he perceives as a major reason why the BNP has increased in popularity. It is a short section from about 9 minutes in for about 20 seconds:

A colleague of mine went out canvassing with them (the BNP) recently and he said it is amazing to talk to people on the doorsteps who are voting for the BNP and they are voting because they haven't seen a politician because they live in a seat that is so safe for the Labour Party that no-one's been there for 20 years. That's what we've got to, you know, politicians have to realise that they can't take votes for granted.

I suspect the point that James was trying to make here is of a one with lots of right-wing commentators and bloggers who are constantly trying to make the point that the BNP is growing due to Labour's failures. Of course what he has inadvertently highlighted is one of the huge problems with our current First Past the Post electoral system. In areas that are very safe Labour, or Conservative or any other party, there is no real incentive for politicians of either the incumbent party or realistically main opposition parties to focus their efforts there. This is not being defeatist, it is being realistic. Parties are bound to target their resources where they think they can make the most difference and under our current system that is in the marginal seats and wards. This produces situations where people are effectively disenfranchised.

The political voids that this then creates can be filled by parties like the BNP who can step in and as they are the only voice that is being heard make council gains before the Labour and other parties who have sluggish or non-existent local party infrastructure even know what has hit them.

So James highlights a very real problem but makes no attempt to define how to resolve it, just a plaintive cry that "politicians cannot take these votes for granted". The reality is that the current situation will perpetuate. The weakness is systemic and even if the bigger parties plug the voids in a few areas, the BNP can just move into other areas. The solution is to remove the safe seats and wards by reforming the electoral system to make every vote count.

James didn't say this though and from what I can tell The Spectator's editorial line does not favour electoral reform either. I would therefore be interested to hear what alternative practical steps he thinks can be taken to avoid from what I can tell is an inevitable consequence of our existing system.

LDV piece on where to get ideas for blogposts

My contribution to the Lib Dem Voice "Introduction to blogging" series has been posted today.

The topic that I was asked to contribute on is "Where to get ideas for blogposts".

The series will eventually be compiled into an e-book which will also comprise comments contributed so if you have any thoughts on this topic please pop along and add them to the LDV thread.

Anton Vowl skewers press hypocrisy on the BNP

I don't often do blog posts that basically just link to a single other post but Anton Vowl's post on "The Enemies of Reason" today entitled "Hmm... remember this?" is absolutely superb and deserves to be linked to widely. He contrasts the "outrage" expressed on the front pages of today's tabloids regarding Nick Griffin (largely directed at the BBC for letting him on) with many previous front pages of each of them showing headlines that could pretty much have been BNP press releases.

His conclusion is:

It's all very well people blaming Labour, or the BBC, or whoever, for the 'rise' of the BNP. But if there has been a significant increase in BNP support - and it hasn't translated into votes yet, despite a severe recession and growing unemployment - perhaps that might have more to do with the legitimisation and absorption of their extreme views by newspapers creating scare story after scare story concerning race and immigration, often baseless stories created simply to scare? It's one thing going to a BNP meeting but it's quite another to hear exactly the same thing over the breakfast table from a publication which purports to report the facts.

It is one of the best blog posts I have ever seen. If you haven't read it yet, go and do so right now!

Interview with Julia Hobsbawm, Chief Executive of Editorial Intelligence

I have attended a few events organised by Editorial Intelligence in the last few months. They are a company that works to aggregate the interesting comment from the mainstream media and blogs amongst many other things.

I recently spoke at a breakfast event organised by them (which I blogged about here and here) and afterwards I took the opportunity to grab a quick interview with Julia Hobsbawm, the founder and Chief Executive of the company to find out a bit more about what they do which I have embedded below:

"Gordon Brown resign" petition closes with 72,000+ signatures

The "Gordon Brown resign" petition which was still in No 1 position for live petitions yesterday has now closed with 72,222 signatures. It is now in the top 10 of all time petitions. As we all know, these petitions generally reflect much wider opinion but I think it is a decent snapshot of those who think for whatever reason that he should no longer be our Prime Minister.

Indeed it is notable that despite all his rhetoric, it had been announced today that the UK is still in recession. The only developed economy still to be in that position. This just underlines for me that even on the one thing Brown is supposed to be experienced on, the economy, he has utterly failed.

I just wanted to say congratulations to Kalvis Jansons, the organiser of the petition. I know he worked tirelessly to promote the it and I think the fact it was top of the live petitions for so long and achieved so many signatures is a sure sign that he tapped into a strong feeling across the country.

The is some MSM coverage of the closing of the petition here and here.