Last week William Hague took the lead in PMQs, and said:

Isn’t there something supremely ironic about being lectured about food waste by a prime minister who is past his own sell-by date?

Which is quite supremely stupid. That’s not ironic, that’s just arsing about with words. Isn’t there something supremely ironic about being told to clean up your act by someone who was washed up long ago? Isn’t there something supremely ironic about being lectured on food dialogues by a has-bean? See: stupid. Just a worthless ad hominem.

Obviously it’s meant to sound like the PM is being hypocritical, which isn’t surprising given ‘you’re a hypocrite’ is apparently the only technique taught at politician school¹. Harriet Harman didn’t do much better, with some comment about not getting dietary advice from someone who used to drink a lot. Or something. I stopped caring.

Anyway, this reminded me of B4L’s recent post about Labour reactions to David Davis, which makes the rare valid point about hypocrisy (a point completely ignored by the crazies in the comments). Also worth seeing are the 10 Socialist Commandments. It’s an oasis of sanity, that site.

1. sorry, bitter today [↩]

I don’t understand one-issue by-elections. I’m not going to vote for the BNP candidate who declares the campaign solely about free bouncy castles. That’s ass-backwards. If he gets elected, there’s nothing saying he can only vote on bouncy-castle-related issues. Trick. I might agree with David Davis about the 42 days, but I disagree over a lot more. Even if he campaigns on general civil liberties, that’s only one part of the political agenda.

I’m assuming his seat is safe, so this is really about consciousness-raising. Which could be worthy, but only works if everyone is in on the game. You can’t have a meaningful by-election that’s only about one issue. That’s contradictory. If everyone agrees to use the by-election as a platform to vote on civil liberties issues, fine, but they haven’t. The voter’s duty is to elect the person who best espouses their views, and that averaging-out should take all issues into account. This is just buggering about with democracy, and isn’t fair.

Strikes me that an MP in the shadow cabinet is already in a good position to fight these things, but I suppose he’s gambling on publicity helping his cause. Which is convenient, as you can’t argue with the publicity argument. PR is a good argumentative firewall. Claim that something is good/bad publicity and the discussion has to stop, as nobody really has any clue. Discussions about the ‘New Atheists’ eventually devolve into this - one side claims they’re harming the cause, the other side says they’re not. And that’s it. Sometimes you can look at the results over time, but gauging the effects of publicity is complex at best - both sides can cherry-pick statistics forever - and rarely produces anything definitive.

David Davis has probably done a good job of screwing the Labour Party, though. If Labour put forward a candidate, at their current popularity levels, they’ll go down hard. If they don’t, they’ll look scared. They could just say this outright, given it’s what everyone’s thinking, but for some reason government doesn’t work that way.

Theyworkforyou.com email me whenever my MP - John Maples - says anything. He’s in the Conservative Party, and not the most active of MPs:

• Has spoken in 12 debates in the last year — below average amongst MPs.
• Has received answers to 9 written questions in the last year — below average amongst MPs.
• Replied within 2 or 3 weeks to a high number of messages sent via WriteToThem.com during 2007, according to constituents. [Andrew's note: not mine, though]
• Has voted in 60% of votes in parliament — well below average amongst MPs. (From Public Whip)

He didn’t turn up for the smoking-ban votes, and seems to be against gay rights when he’s there, which isn’t often¹. He was present for all the hunting ban votes - you know, the important stuff - and was strongly against.

It seems a bit odd not to be around for such things. Maybe he’s been ill. But when he’s there, he does things I don’t like. I wouldn’t (and didn’t) vote for him, but I still like to follow what’s going on, and today I had an email to say he’d been fairly active in a recent debate.

Turns out he’s a climate-change denying n00b. Here’s his first contribution to the debate on the Draft Climate Change Bill:

After the Bill abolishing slavery was passed by the House, the British Navy patrolled the Atlantic, stopping other countries indulging in the slave trade. Is the hon. Gentleman suggesting that we do the same with global warming?

Helpful, I think you’ll agree. Then comes:

I do not believe that the science is anything like as settled as the proponents of the Bill are making out. In fact, the scientists hedge their predictions with an awful lot of qualifications and maybes that those who invoke them often omit. The science is a bit like medicine in the 1850s. The scientists are scratching the surface of something that they do not really understand, but no doubt will. They are probably on to something, but nothing like the whole story. What they say does not justify any of the apocalyptic visions that we have heard set out.

This is called the language of science. You have to put in all the qualifications, or you’re not doing proper science. Full debunking. Medicine in the 1850s? There was no medicine in the 1850s! This is supposed to be an accurate comparison with the thousands of climate scientists who’ve been collecting data and making confirmed predictions for decades? And then he accuses other people of making statements with no basis?

The record shows that the climate warmed from 1920 to 1940, cooled from 1940 to 1975, rose again from 1975 to 2000, and since 2000, according to the Hadley centre, has not risen at all. In the past seven years, global temperatures have not increased. All the predictions that we work from, whether from the IPCC or anybody else, are based on models, none of which can account for the cooling between 1940 and 1975.

Here’s a graph of global temperature over the last century, and explanations of why it varies. Things are always more complicated than you’d think. I’ve no idea whether climate models take into account the supposed cooling - it seems to be understood fairly well, from what I can tell - but here’s why not-perfect models are still useful and make confirmed predictions.

There’s lots more - he’s been reading books by climate change skeptics - but I want to skip to this:

Over the past 150 years, sea levels have risen by about 30 cm, which is the predicted rise for the next 100 years. Okay, it will happen slightly quicker, but we coped with that rise perfectly easily over the past 150 years so we can cope with it over the next 100 years.

Wtf. I lost electricity this evening, and the freezer’s been warming up. All the ice cubes have been fine for the last hour, though, so I’m sure they can cope for the next. No worries. What’s that, you say? Everyone else’s freezers have broken down too? What do I care about them?

Secondly, we have urban heat islands. In cities, temperatures have risen considerably. The temperature in London has risen between 4 and 6° C since 1950, as it has in Los Angeles, Tokyo and other places. It is a fact of urbanisation called the global heat island effect. We know how to deal with that. If we are richer, we can have air conditioning. We know that if we put in more parks, water and trees in cities, we can cool them considerably. We know how to do that. We can adapt to that very successfully.

Brilliant! Air conditioning is the solution! You’ll be kept cool, and there are no ironic disadvantages. Only if you’re rich, of course - if you’re poor, screw you. And what an idea to build lots of parks in, you know, the world! If only someone had thought that planting trees might help. Ooh, could cost a bit, though - best watch that.

Did I mention he’s a Conservative? Can you tell? It’s almost like the rest of the world doesn’t exist.

To be fair, he abruptly comes back down to Earth a bit later:

Some man-made warming is going on. It is worth taking action now: a price mechanism through carbon tax, energy efficiency and nuclear power are worth pursuing, especially nuclear power. Research into alternative power sources—fusion, carbon capture and adaptive strategies—is also worth conducting.

I agree about nuclear power, but I’m not sure about fusion - that’s a way off, I think. Hardly makes up for the earlier comments, though.

I’m far from knowledgeable about climate change, but I see no reason to doubt the conclusions of massive, independent studies by the UN and countless governments. Whenever I investigate any claim that supposedly casts the whole thing into doubt - usually by non-scientists, and usually with a great deal of paranoid conspiracy thrown in for good measure - there’s a comprehensible annihilation of it by people who know what they’re talking about.

So this is all a bit depressing, but at least he’s showing an interest.

1. to be fair, the train service from Stratford to London isn’t the best [↩]

I can’t help feeling sorry for Hillary Clinton. She’s at the point in a political career where the vitriol is non-stop, and while I’m aware politicians have to be thick-skinned, the media scrum to kick someone while they’re down is always unpleasant. I’m sure she can cope ok, but I don’t see the virtue. I also find it galling that people are still bringing up the infamous sniper-fire comment. On Sunday Norm said “she was either lying or deceiving herself bigtime”, and the general media attitude seems to be she’s either a liar or stupid. Thing is, memory doesn’t work like that. Events merge and stories change with the retelling, all without deliberate intent.

Steve Novella explains properly. It’s entirely possible she genuinely remembers landing under sniper fire - even if it didn’t happen, people can still have entirely convincing memories - and this whole mess came as a complete surprise. And memory failures aren’t stupid, they’re normal. I’m amazed this doesn’t happen to politicians all the time - how many people and events do heads of state deal with in a given amount of time? I need to make notes on someone’s network layout before leaving the building or I’ll have forgotten it by the next time they call. I’d expect a politician to have a better memory than me, but they’re not super-human. When you’re making who-knows-how-many speeches per week on a non-stop campaign trail, something’s going to slip. Probably lots did, but most of it wasn’t intended to demonstrate a personal virtue, so nobody cared. Dr. Novella sensibly doesn’t take a position on the truth of the matter, but come on. What are the odds that an experienced politician deliberately lied over something so easy to check? I tend to think this was something that should have been double-checked, wasn’t, and blew up way out of proportion to the mistake.

I’m personally happy Obama has the nomination - refusing campaign donations from lobbyists is quite the stand - but the schadenfreude at Clinton’s defeat is ugly. I’d personally like to see her picked as running mate, but I get the impression there’s not a hope in hell. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of analysis of where she went wrong - abruptly becoming a gun-toting, hard-drinking non-’elitist’ was particularly transparent, if you ask me - but the sniper-fire comment deserves to be let go.

Welsh channel S4C filmed a love scene for drama Caerdydd¹ inside a baby-changing room at the Welsh Assembly. Some people aren’t happy, including Conservative William Graham:

This is obviously unpleasant and unnecessary. Potentially it’s distressing for people who don’t like the idea of one of the buildings they funded being used in this way.

Do they not show Torchwood in Wales? Then came the most cognitively dissonant statement ever:

One doesn’t want censorship but nothing that is controversial or concerning should happen.

Coincidentally, this is also the Conservative Party’s new slogan.

1. the website for which is currently displaying ‘Bad Request (invalid verb)’ [↩]

I’m spending lots of time following the US elections, at least partly because UK politics is so embarrassingly stupid at the moment. To wit, David Davis on the MP bugging row:

“Why was this allowed to happen without ministerial knowledge?” he said. “When it was discovered in December, they didn’t tell Jack Straw or Jacqui Smith.

“These intercepts have broken a prime ministerial promise. They involve the intercept of the justice whip - someone who works with Mr Straw.

“This is a very serious issue. It’s a breach of a prime ministerial undertaking to Parliament, so it makes the prime minister a liar, basically.”

The undertaking was 40 years ago. I’ve no idea on the rights and wrongs of bugging MPs, but a breach of a 40-year-old prime ministerial pledge without Gordon Brown’s knowledge does not make him ‘a liar’. That is stupid. Is it possible there’s been a slow gas leak under Westminster Village for the past few weeks?

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith told the Sunday Times she wouldn’t feel safe walking alone at night in her area of London. In the past few hours I have heard this described as:

1. Correct. It’s a warzone, and here’s an anecdote to prove it.
2. Incorrect. London’s streets are completely safe, and here’s an anecdote to prove it.
3. ‘Feeding a culture of fear’.
4. A major gaffe - what’s the Home Secretary doing admitting that the streets aren’t safe?! (the media might hate ’spin’, but if you don’t use it you’re apparently a rubbish politician).

How exactly should she have answered that question?

The BBC have an interesting article on Tony Blair’s religious convictions, but it’s this quote from Menzies Campbell that particularly catches my eye:

The public might have been less willing to give him the triumph of three consecutive general election victories if they’d known the extent to which ethical values would overshadow pragmatism,” Sir Menzies said.

Weird thing to say. Aside from the underlying assumption that it’s only the religious who have strong ethical values, is he suggesting that doing the right thing should always come second to doing the practical/easy thing? Possibly not, but that’s the way it’s presented.

It’s odd that this is perceived as something the public would see as a bad trait - I’d have thought a politican who says he’ll always do what he thinks is ethically right would actually be more popular¹. Tony Blair’s suggestion that the public would have labelled him a ‘nutter’ if they’d known he never went away without a Bible is far more likely to be true.

1. not trying to specifically defend Tony Blair here, I just mean in general [↩]

(There’s a good joke near the end of this. Really there is. I am so proud). The first topic on today’s Jeremy Vine Show was the obesity study that’s all over the news, which concludes:

The causes of obesity are extremely complex encompassing biology and behaviour, but set within a cultural, environmental and social framework

But everyone’s ignoring that bit and concentrating on:

There is compelling evidence that humans are predisposed to put on weight by their biology. (…) Although personal responsibility plays a crucial part in weight gain, human biology is being overwhelmed by the effects of today’s ‘obesogenic’ environment, with its abundance of energy dense food, motorised transport and sedentary lifestyles.

This makes sense. On the pleistocene savannah it was evolutionarily advantageous to eat everything you found, and this has broadly been true for most humans throughout history (and, obviously, still is for much of the world). Nothing too controversial, you might think, except that the thrust of the radio show revolved around whether this simply gave obese people an excuse.

Obviously there were plenty of crackpot callers. It’s all their own fault / this is just the no-blame culture¹ / America = worse / blah. This is to be expected. But then came Richard D. North, spokesman for a Conservative party think tank. It’s not often I find my jaw literally dropped, but I did after he said something along the lines of:

Middle-class people aren’t obese. It’s the ex-working classes who haven’t got their heads around the concept of discipline.

To summarise, his argument was: stupid fat people should be ashamed, and making obesity a major social faux pas will solve the problem much faster than evil and useless government interventions.

My opinion: total cretin. I thought he was an MP at first, and am relieved to discover that’s not the case - he’s a ‘commentator’. I am concerned people pay him any attention at all, though. Sounds less like a think tank and more like a think wank. (told you it was worth waiting for).

I suspect 99% of listeners, no matter what their political leanings, also thought this guy was a nutjob. Why are radio debates so rubbish? Why do they always give a mouth to extreme nuttery instead of trying to progress the conversation? Jeremy Vine could easily point out that “middle-class people aren’t obese” is demonstrably untrue, or that saying “I don’t think that’s true and here’s an anecdote to prove it” in response to a scientific paper isn’t a valid argument, or that the topic of state intervention is of course something that divides right and left. But this never happens, on any radio station, and these kinds of debate never help with anything. Weird.

1. ok, this was on the BBC website, but I thought was too priceless not to include [↩]

I’m going to hope the Labour Party were planning inheritance tax cuts before the Tories made their announcements, but, still, that’s some pretty dire PR work. Geez. I could care less about election timetables, but this is just depressing. Talk about squandering your public support.

Seriously, inheritance tax cuts? I was under the impression we on the left weren’t keen on people getting money they haven’t worked for without some kind of tax. Of course the Tories think the opposite - that’s why they’re Conservatives! Why not emphasise this? And why not use stamp duty instead? People couldn’t afford mortgages until their mid-thirties before the market went tits-up - it’d be a great way to appeal to younger voters on an issue that doesn’t seem to have any particular basis in the Labour ethos¹. What a cock up.

1. does it? [↩]

In God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens invites the reader to “close your eyes and try to picture what you might say if you had the authority to inflict the greatest possible differing in the least number of words”. I’d suggest ‘the sins of the father are passed onto the child’, while Hitch goes with something similar to the words of the head of the Catholic church in Mozambique:

Condoms are not sure because I know that there are two countries in Europe, they are making condoms with [HIV] on purpose

This is why it’s vital to deny authority to organisations founded on falsehoods and incapable of change. This man did not start out ambivalent and come to the conclusion that condoms are being deliberately laced with HIV, he’s clearly looking for a way to justify Catholic teachings. The belief comes first, all thought second - that the hatred of condoms could be morally vacuous and exist only to induce guilt and thereby create more devotees is not a possibility.

Sure, this is some nutter in Mozambique. A UK priest wouldn’t say such a thing, it’s true, but why not? It’s obvious: they’re probably better educated. But all the UK priest does is find another, less obviously nonsensical, reason to think condoms are evil. If the Mozambique guy were in the UK, he’d be coming out with the regular nonsense about the social problems caused by casual, read: protected, sex. The error is exactly the same: belief, then justification.

This isn’t a unique flaw, of course. Most people, including me, instinctively migrate towards information that supports their point of view, and will ignore competing evidence up to a point. It takes an effort of will to avoid this inclination. But the nature of religious institutions is that they cannot change their core beliefs - if condoms were shown to directly cause world peace, the Catholic church would still hate them. A priest who saw reason and acknowledged that condoms are a force for good would be rejecting his entire belief system, and it’s (not surprisingly) incredibly difficult to do such a thing.

It’s tempting to make comparisons with political beliefs. What’s the difference between the Catholic church and a political party, if both have core beliefs? It’s that the latter should (and, I think, do) base this upon evidence, and would, on average, be prepared to change its ideas should they not pan out in practice.

Any system which has core beliefs set in stone (not to mention based on particular historical events that may or may not have actually happened) shouldn’t have any say over public affairs. Differentiating between the systems is another reason the most important education goal should be teaching children how to think.

By the way, I look forward to the Pope stepping in to put the matter straight.

I occasionally get caught out by straw-man arguments. A subtle mangling of my position and I find myself defending something I don’t believe. I’m much more aware of this tactic now, and notice it more than I used to. Sometimes, however, it doesn’t take much. Right after Ahmadinejad’s now-infamous “we don’t have homosexuals in our country”¹, he said:

Maybe you think that being a woman is a crime. It’s not a crime to be a woman.

Ha. Take that, America.

I don’t know about the rights and wrongs of inviting total dickheads to speak at universities. They shouldn’t be stopped from doing so, of course, but I can see the argument that it gives them a platform. The issue tends to rest on their public speaking skills - there’s also always the danger of eloquent and charismatic speakers giving a good impression and swaying at least some of their audience. Not thinking of anyone in particular. Happily, it appears that Iran’s president is simply rubbish, and is getting the drubbing he deserves.

1. I love how even the translator can’t help a mocking tone [↩]

I’m sympathetic to the idea of a compulsory DNA database, but willing to be swayed. Neil has an interesting post on the problems of the current system, so I’ll stick to the theoretical arguments. Here’s how it seems to me:

Advantages:

Crime. A national database would obviously help a massive amount in solving crimes.

This is easily enough of an advantage for me to take the idea seriously.

Disadvantages:

Practical - how do you actually get DNA samples from the entire population?

Technological - how do you create a database that big, and keep it secure?

Abuse - what if Future Evil Government want to use it for Evil Purposes? What if Not So Evil Government agree to let insurance companies access the data?

I think the practical and technological problems could, in theory, be solved. For example, if an open-source system were used it’d be in everyone’s best interests to make it as secure as possible. This might take some doing convincing - governments have a habit of awarding billion-pound contracts to IT firms who, unsurprisingly, make everything proprietary - but, still, it’s possible.

Liberty, interestingly, don’t really go with the ‘freedom’ angle I expected. They’re much more concerned about abuse, and this certainly seems to be the major issue. I’m personally happy for the police to have access to my DNA profile - I don’t see what harm this could actually do - but I’m not so sure about insurance companies / others. I can’t think of a way to ensure this doesn’t happen. But, then, aren’t there many laws like this? Evil Government would just do what they wanted anyway, wouldn’t they?

What else is there?

Errors - what if a mistake means the wrong person is arrested?

I’m not particularly worried about this. Re-testing of the individual involved should prove their innocence, and, again in theory, it’s entirely possible that such errors could be kept to a minimum.

Other than the abuse problem, it’s easy to envisage a system that doesn’t suffer from these flaws. But I get the feeling that even if all the problems were solved, Liberty etc. wouldn’t like it. And that’s what interests me. What’s wrong with the Perfect Theoretical Database? I imagine it would involve some mention of ‘civil liberties’, and I want to understand exactly what this argument involves. The BBC feedback site is full of raving…ravers…and there’s little enlightenment to be found. Is it privacy? Because I don’t see why anybody would object to a system in which only the police can access your details, if your DNA turns up a match. What exactly is it that people don’t like? Being forced to do something?

Having said all this, I suspect people are going to have to adapt to their DNA profile being ‘out there’. Once technology reaches the point where my DNA can be scanned to detect increased risks of future medical problems, I’m in. If this means my profile has to be stored in computerised medical records, where any dirty hacker could potentially snag it, so be it. And what if insurance companies start offering free DNA scans for potential heart problems, say, on the basis that you allow your policy to be adapted accordingly? It’s going to come, it’s just a question of how it’s managed. Do I trust private databases more than a state-run system? I doubt future generations are going to give two hoots about their ‘private’ information being accessible to the world - it’s beneficial far more often than otherwise, if you ask me - but the transitory period could get tricky.

I’d heard it said that Tony Blair was a presidential Prime Minister, but I didn’t realise what it meant until today. In one aspect, anyway.

At times of heightened emotion it seemed natural that TB would make a statement - he was the face of the government and, it seems reasonable to say, the country. On 9/11, the death of Princess Diana, the success of the Olympic bids, or any kind of national problem, Tony Blair was always there, expressing the appropriate emotions. Whether or not they agreed with him politically, I think most people came to expect this. For lack of a better word, TB was a spiritual leader as much as a political one.

Today I heard someone claim Gordon Brown will be far less of a media Prime Minister. He won’t make such statements. He’ll run the country politically, but won’t speak for the country in quite the same way.

I find this a strange concept. To me that kind of spiritual leadership seems modern: the way of the future; a government without that quality seems to be lacking something. Maybe I feel this way because it was happening during my formative years, or possibly it’s the influence of US tv. I’m very possibly wrong, and a faceless government won’t seem as different as I anticipate.

But the media are used to having a go-to guy. So, at least a little, is the country. If it isn’t Gordon Brown, who’s the obvious man to turn to? Who in modern politics has the necessary charisma and media savvy? David Miliband, possibly. But also David Cameron. Which is worrying.

Applause and a standing ovation at the end of the final PMQs - both fully justified if you ask me. There were no snarky comments or hurling of insults at the other parties; it was dignified and impressive. I think I saw David Cameron waving his arm to demand his party rise, which is cool.

I don’t know enough to comment properly on Tony Blair’s politics - others Bloggers4Labour will no doubt do a great job - but I agreed with him more than I didn’t. BBC2 cut away during the final thirty seconds of the speech, which was annoying as hell, but once I saw it I thought the final tribute to politics was worthy and well spoken. I think only Bill Clinton compares when it comes to gravitas, or quality of leadership.

Having said all that, it’s always embarrassing watching the House of Commons in action. I don’t care if it’s century-old tradition - the roars, cheers and boos are just pathetic, and I cringe every time. Not, however, quite so stupid as anti-war protesters. What kind of moron thinks yelling ‘war criminal’ from the gates of Downing Street is a clever thing to do?

Gordon Brown will no doubt bring interesting change. Exciting times.