And another thing…

THE BBC, eh? Damn bunch of lefty liberal bleedin’ hearts. In my day they would have had all that beaten out of them by a dose of national service, hanging’s too good for them, etc, etc… As most right-wing bloggers might say.

But here’s a screengrab of the website of Tina Stowell, the Beeb’s Head of Corporate Affairs:

Notice anything odd about it? The tree-shaped logo, perhaps? Look familiar?

The right-wing blogs don’t often mention that the Head of Corporate Affairs at the Beeb is not only a wannabe Tory candidate, but still has a live website proclaiming her love of all things Cameron. Interestingly, a search at the Biased BBC site for Tina Stowell’s name produces this result:

The Head of Corporate Affairs is the figurehead who represents the public face of the corporation to businesses and other outside organisations, including MPs.

And you know something? I don’t have a problem with this. I would much prefer to know the  politics of someone I’m dealing with because at least you know where they’re coming from. She wants to become an MP? Good for her! I hope she gets a nomination and then is soundly beaten by her Labour opponent.

But there will be those, understandably, with some qualms about someone in such an important and influential position in the BBC maintaining such an ostentatiously public position on politics, particularly in the run-up to the general election when the output of the BBC and other broadcasters will come under intense scrutiny by all the parties.

So the question I would pose to all the right-whingers who constantly moan about BBC bias is, inevitably: would you be as relaxed about a Labour aspirant occupying this job?

I suspect this is another of John Rentoul’s “Questions to which the answer is no”.

HAD lunch this afternoon with a friend who also happens to be a journalist on a national newspaper (you see the important distinction?) and he was recounting his experiences reporting from Conservative annual conferences.

One year, when the Tories had their jamboree at Blackpool (this was during the unhappy reign of IDS as leader), after many hours in the conference hotel bar getting terminally blootered researching for future stories and developing his network of contacts, he poured himself into a taxi and returned to Mrs Pettifor’s Luxury Towerview B&B, or wherever it was he was staying.

The next morning he awoke and found the receipt given him by his taxi driver the night before. It had been completed in immaculate, careful handwriting: departure address, location address, the time the journey took place and, of course, the cost. My friend was so impressed by the workmanship practised by the taxi driver that he turned the card over to see if there were any more examples of this calligraphy.

And indeed there was: “You’re going to lose the next election, Tory Boy!”

UNUSUALLY, I found myself shouting at a co-panellist on The Westminster Hour on Sunday evening. In my defence, the co-panellist in question was Caroline Lucas.

The Green MEP and I were discussing the issue of climate change sceptics (I refuse to call them “deniers”) and the stupidity of scientists who undermine their own credibility by exaggerating the effects of climate change in order to create a headline or to scare politicians into action. The scientific basis for man-made climate change is already overwhelming; why undermine it by making ridiculous claims about the Himilayan glaciers melting in 35 years’ time when you know it not to be the case?

One of the exaggerated claims which I have found unhelpful in the past was Caroline’s, which she made during The Westminster Hour last July:

Climate change is killing 300,000 people every year, according to the latest UN report.

But two days ago, when I quoted this as an example of the same kind of scare-mongering, she responded:

I knew there were climate change sceptics in the Conservative Party. I didn’t realize there were quite so many climate sceptics (sic) in the Labour Party.

This is a very typical Green smear: accuse anybody who casts doubt on any apocalyptic predictions as a sceptic. That way, you can close down any debate without having to talk about the scientific facts, even though the International Panel on Climate Change has admitted that one of its predictions was untrue,

For a party which claims to put the environment at the top of its agenda, this is crazy. The public have to be persuaded to accept the scientific case for the causes – and cures – of climate change, not scared into accepting it by “facts” which turn out not to be facts at all.

The 300,000 figure Caroline had quoted previously is a case in point. It’s taken from the Human Impact report of the Global Humanitarium Forum, published last year. And it does indeed state quite unambiguously that:

every year climate change leaves over 300,000 people dead…

Case closed. Game, set and match to Lucas.

Except that, a little further on in the report, there’s this:

The human impact is still difficult to assess with great accuracy because it results from a complex interplay of factors. It is challenging to isolate the human impact of climate change definitively from other factors such as natural variability, population growth, land use and governance. In several areas, the base of scientific evidence is still not sufficient to make definitive estimates with great precision on the human impacts of climate change.

Recognizing that the real numbers may be significantly lower or higher than suggested by these estimates, they should be treated as indicative rather than definitive. (my emphasis)

Yet, listening to Caroline back in July, I got the distinct impression – and I’m quite sure this was her intention – that she was offering a definitive figure on the number of fatalities which result each year from climate change. She offered no caveats or qualifications and in doing so she misled her audience.

Is it possible that Caroline hadn’t read the report beyond the executive summary? No, of course not. I’m sure she read the whole thing more than once, including the bit that warned that the 300,000 figure should be “treated as indicative rather than definitive”. Then, not only did she start quoting it as being unambiguously definitive, she accused those who questioned that figure of being climate change sceptics!

If Caroline Lucas is one of the nation’s leading advocates of man-made global warming, then it’s little wonder that the sceptics have their tails up at the moment.

The public are not as thick or as gullible as Lucas would have us believe – they’re prepared to be convinced by fact and reason, not by scare stories and slander.

AS THE date of Tony Blair’s appearance before the Chilcot Inquiry draws ever nearer, news editors start to salivate and the Stop The War Coalition place an order for some new placards (get the spelling right this time, eh lads? It’s “AI”, not “IA”. Honestly, standards these days…).

The thing is, everyone knows what he will say when he gives evidence. You know it, I know it. Some of us will believe him. Others won’t. No-one will change their minds.

The Telegraph will be pompous and self-righteous in its reporting of the event, and will probably try to detract attention away from the fact that the Tories supported the move to war.

The Guardian will be reluctantly and cautiously critical, but will also be careful to point out that there are two sides to every story.

I’ve no idea what David Aaronovitch in The Times will say but I know that he’ll be right and I’ll wish I’d said it first

The Daily Mail will claim that Blair’s decision to invade Iraq resulted directly in record numbers of immigrants coming to the UK.

The Daily Express will complain that Chilcot didn’t ask Blair about his involvement in the Diana cover-up.

The Independent will carry a front page headline calling on everyone to switch their car engines off while waiting at traffic lights.

And in The Sun, Tina, 22, from Essex, will say that what’s important is that we support our troops.

Actually, I’m with Tina on this one.

IS USING Photoshop or other “airbrushing” software the equivalent of lying?

Personally, I don’t go along with Jo Swinson, the LibDem MP’s campaign against airbrushing photos of models on advertisements. Yes, I accept it’s a good PR campaign for someone who’s keen to raise her media profile in advance of the general election, but as a piece of legislation, the move is nonsense. Such a law would be utterly unenforceable for a start.

There seems to be a view in this country that any attempt to remove or hide physical blemishes is intolerably vain. When Paul Potts shot to fame as the winner of Britain’s Got Talent in 2008, there was some media speculation that he had used his newfound wealth – horror of horrors! – to fix his teeth, which had previously been, shall we say, rather uneven and not exactly sparkling white. If he did have some cosmetic dental work done, good on him. Quite right too.

Witness the inevitable sneering that always takes place whenever some celebrity or other gets any cosmetic surgery (which, by definition, is nobody’s business but theirs), or if a politician is accused of dying his hair (and, for the record, no, I don’t). Women using make-up is acceptable, paying for the extra cost of white fillings likewise. But more expensive dental work, a nose job or a boob job… well, that’s just vanity, isn’t it? Yes, it is. And everyone suffers from it to a degree.

Frankly, it’s absurd to suggest that in 2010, a software package that’s been around for more than two decades should be banned from a graphic artist’s toolbox, or that any photograph created or amended using the programme has to be flagged up as such. At the root of the argument is an assumption that the public believes everything they see in adverts. Because we’re thick, see?

And what if Photoshop has been used to remove a background object in a photo of a model, but the model herself hadn’t been altered? Would that have to carry one of Ms Swinson’s “health warnings”?

And if Photoshop should now be seen as A Bad Thing, what about studio lighting which makes a model look better than in real life? What about make-up which covers a blemish or a wrinkle? Should such photographs carry a warning saying “This model has been altered using Max Factor”?

Of course, there are issues about misleading consumers if an image used in an advertisement is inaccurate or deliberately misleading. That’s why we already have safeguards, and why the Advertising Standards Agency has already decreed that they Oil of Olay ad featuring a remarkably wrinkle-free Twiggy should no longer be used.

Introducing a new law imposing ridiculous obligations on artists and businesses – obligations which could never be properly enforced – would be a complete waste of time. Better, surely, to rely on individual consumers’ judgment and on the existing safeguards.

SO THE general election campaign has started already, eh?

How will the public put up with the constant policy announcements, rebuttals, prebuttals and arguments between now and polling day, whenever that is? Best subscribe to Sky Movies for the duration or go abroad for a few months, blah, blah, etc, etc…

Are our “humorists” and cartoonists, let alone our political commentators, even capable of doing anything other than rehashing these tired old clichés? Oh, how awful it is to live in a democracy and to be given a choice about who forms the government! And how dare the government and opposition parties interrupt our daily diet of Big Brother and Celebrity Soap Stars Do Their Washing Up or whatever just so that they can explain what they would do with the reins of power in the next five years…

Don’t enjoy politics? Tough. I can’t stand football, but I still have to sit through sports “headlines” interrupting proper news bulletins every day.

Yes, politics and politicians have a terrible reputation, and it’s worse since the expenses scandal. But it was bad before then and it always will be. We can’t blame the media exclusively for our reputation; our own behaviour has brought us to this place. But the media’s constant and unimaginative carping about the negative aspects of politics does the whole country a disservice.

Maybe democracy is a rubbish way of running a country, but as Churchill said, it’s better than all the alternatives.

What’s even more infuriating is that the same commentators who spend their whole time describing politics as dishonest and boring and who describe politicians as venal and narcissistic, are the same people who, after polling day will scratch their heads and wonder why turn-out was so low.

I WAS tempted to write this post under the headline “Tory Hubriswatch”.

Tory MPs are planning to replace John Bercow as Speaker and install Edward Leigh instead. This speculation is based on the incontrovertible fact that the Tories are guaranteed to win a comfortable majority at the general election. According to The Guardian:

Leigh’s allies believe the Cornerstone group represents between 30 and 40 MPs, and if the Tories won with a majority of that order they would demand an election for the role of Speaker in return for their voting bloc.

Okay, first off: no-one has to “demand an election” for the Speaker, because there is one at the start of each parliament anyway. It’s the first order of business for the new Commons after any general election.

Second, “in return for their voting bloc”? Have I just woken up in Crazyland? It is inconceivable that in the event of a Conservative victory, any “bloc” of Tory MPs would withold their votes, risking the demise of their government and their own expulsion from the party, just for the sake of securing an election for the Speaker – an election, remember, that’s going to happen anyway.

As to the more substantive issue – John Bercow’s tenure in the chair – there are certainly enough bonkers Tory MPs who would gladly bring opprobrium on their party for the sake of their sectarian grievances and obsessions; it has always been thus. But John has been freely and democratically elected as Speaker in a secret ballot. No, I did not vote for him, but I am able to accept the will of the majority, and the… (how shall I describe them?) eccentrics in the Tory Party should do the same.

YESTERDAY I poked fun at right-wing and Tory blogs for their refusal to criticise Philip Davies MP for his green-inked rants against political correctness.

Today it may be the other side’s turn for criticism. This story in the Mail on Sunday may not be entirely accurate. There may be some details left out. But for the moment, it’s all we have, and the facts appear to be that a Christian teacher has been sacked after offering to pray for a sick child’s recovery. This, apparently, could have been interpreted as bullying (hat-tip to Iain Dale).

So the question I want to ask is: what do the left-wing and Labour-supporting blogs have to say about this apparently appalling example of moronic discrimination against Christians? What is the left-wing saying? There is no left-wing intellectual analysis that would justify this chain of events as they have been reported this morning. Are there any who are expressing indignation? Given that the overwhelming majority of voters – including a massive majority of traditional Labour voters – will share my own anger at this story, the Left risks looking utterly out of touch by remaining silent.

Why must we allow the right wing to claim that white, middle class Christians are the only minority group in the country that the Left don’t give a damn about?

Someone offering to pray to a God in whom you do not happen to believe is not bullying, even when you haven’t invited such intervention on your own behalf. I have prayed for lots of people who are not Christians and I will continue to do so, with or without their permission.

Christians are also accused of “bullying” whenever they seek to evangelise. “How dare a Christian tell me I should convert to their faith!” is the shrill, defensive nonsense we often hear. Well, I’ll tell you what: if you don’t want to become a Christian, don’t become one, okay? Problem solved. No bullying, just an exchange of views with no minds changed. Move on.

Christians are instructed by Jesus Christ to evangelise on His behalf. If non-Christians – and yes, that includes Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Seikhs and buddhists as well as atheists – feel offended by this form of outreach, well that’s a pity, but they’ll just have to deal with it as best they can.

UPDATE: Humble pie time for Harris, it seems, and rather than delete the above post (which was my first instinct, to save my blushes) I’ll simply add this: Bob Piper has done the rest of us a favour and has actually read to the very end of the article – which is what I should have done had the red mist not descended after the fourth paragraph and motivated me to open my laptop. Bob rightly accuses Ian Dale (and by inference, me) of a Pavlovian response to this story, and of failing to acknowledge that the (supply) teacher in question is simply under investigation – the normal procedure when a complaint is made.

Still, an object lesson in blogging to end the year on. Thanks to A Very Public Sociologist for alerting me to my mistake.

Still, I trust lots of left-wing bloggers (including Bob) will come out in support of this woman in the run-up to the internal investigation…

POLITICIANS  and political pundits like to pretend that we know our history.

The next election will be 1979 all over again, they cry. Or it will be a re-run of February 1974, say others. Perhaps it will be like 1992 say some.

Except it won’t: it will be exactly like 2010 and it will be different from every preceding election, just like every election is unique in some way. The estimable Bagehot of The Economist has written an excellent piece on the subject:

History never really repeats itself. Rather, as Mark Twain put it, it sometimes rhymes. The fit is almost always partial rather than exact—and the echoes and patterns are often visible only at a distance. In the case of the forthcoming general election, British politics may have been too convulsed for previous contests to be of much use in predicting the outcome.

I would recommend you read the whole piece here.

LIBDEM MP Jo Swinson has revealed through her Facebook page Twitter that she has been dropped by the Beeb from tonight’s Question Time panel.

I know how she feels, though in my case it was a senior minister who ordained that I should not appear, despite the Beeb actually wanting me on the panel. This was in the aftermath of the hoo-ha over my blogpost asking why everyone was so bloody miserable. I was still a minister at the time, and wanted to remain one. So, cravenly, I submitted and withdrew.

“Thanks, Tom, we’ll make it up to you,” I was told. Weeks later I was sacked.

Politics, eh?