Dorries Round-Up
A round-up of all of the blog posts that have been made about Nadine Dorries since she was cleared by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards last Thursday. If anything is missing then please let me know.
- Nadine Dorries: Cleared
- Nadine Dorries: Sense and Sensibility
- Comment is Free: Nadine Dorries's trouble with the truth
- ConservativeHome: Standards Commissioner rejects complaint about Nadine Dorries' use of parliamentary allowances - after a 15-month inquiry
- Bloggerheads: Nadine Dorries is a corrupt liar
- Bloggerheads: Nadine Dorries excuses her stupid lies with dangerous lies
- Bloggerheads: Some questions for John Lyon, Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards
- Tory Bear: Defending Nadine
- Davblog: She Writes Fiction
- The Nadine Dorries Project: Nadine Dorries tells lies about why she told lies
- Tory Totty Online: Nadine Dorries - From Zero to Hero Once More
- Richard Bartholomew – The 70 Per Cent Solution: Who Are Nadine Dorries' "Four Stalkers"?
- Iain Dale's Diary: Nadine is Cleared by Standards Commissioner
- Bad Conscience: The Unsensible Knave
- Enemies of Reason: Nadine Dorries and Blogging
- Slugger O'Toole: MP Nadine Dorries – politician or journalist?
- Stumbling and Mumbling: The Dorries paradox
- A West Walian Perspective: Nadine Dorries - A Blogging Hypocrite
- And In Other News: It's that Woman again
- The Richard Lyle Organisation: When Boredom Becomes A Real Problem
- Steal Your Abs » Blog Archive » MP says her blog is '70% fiction'
- MP says her blog is '70% fiction' | Paperless Media
- Political Scrapbook: Nadine Dorries admits - I'm a liar!
- Political Scrapbook: Nadine Dorries to star in US TV Drama
- Nadine Dorries MP says her blog is '70% fiction' - xuefang32's blog
- Too Beautiful: Today's fake: British MP says her blog for ...
- Audioboo: Nadine Dorries on MPs using Twitter, fact checking & health reforms
- Peter Black AM: Fact or fiction - the life of Nadine Dorries
- The Dorries paradox | www.bullfax.com
- The Appalling Strangeness: The Woes of Nadine Dorries
- The Appalling Strangeness: More Dorries
- The Appalling Strangeness: TB *Hearts* Nadine Dorries
- Ramble One: Time’s up Mrs Dorries
- Ramble On: Still not stacking up – not even 30% of it
And for more historical context on this, here's humphreycushion's similar list of blog posts that followed Dorries' recent disablist comments.
She Writes Fiction
Given what we now know about the content of Nadine Dorries' blog, the title of this post (which I've reused here) seems somewhat appropriate. Dorries must have known that John Lyon's report on her was about to be published so it might be seen as slightly disingenuous to write about other people publishing fiction as fact given the revelations that were just around the corner.
It's also interesting to revisit some of her old blog posts and play "spot the 30% that is true". We could start with the "She Writes Fiction" post, but it's hard to get anywhere near a 30% figure for facts in that piece.
Or there's the "Hand of Hope" post (and its sequel, "Hand of Truth") where Dorries delights in overturning pretty much all scientific evidence on pre-natal surgery. Far less than 30% facts there too.
Perhaps we should look at her posts about the expenses investigations last year. Here's the post that contains her response to the Telegraph and the one where she expands on the previous one. But no, those are both clearly complete nonsense as the Lyon report demonstrates. Or maybe the one where she claims that everyone in Westminster "fears a suicide". Is that only 70% true? Perhaps everyone in Westminster really feared a paper cut.
Or how about the one where she fearlessly refused to kowtow to the speaker. Is only 30% of that true? Perhaps she just thought about doing it.
Last night, in an interview, Dorries claimed that she may have got the 70/30 figures the wrong way round. But does that really make a difference? Is a MP who tells lies on her blog 30% of the time rally much better than one who does it 70% of the time? Is that what the voters of Mid Beds really want from their MP?
She's clearly gone too far this time. A lot of this morning's press is covering this story. It's even in the Daily Mail. Her constituents will know about this. What will their reaction be? I know that Mid Beds is one of those constituencies where the Tories can never lose. But surely the constituents deserve a better quality of MP than this? Surely the local Conservative Association can't ignore this. Someone must be having a quiet word with Dorries about now. And if the local party won't ask her to stand down immediately or deselect her before the next election, then there's clearly only one option open to us.
Where's Martin Bell? It's time for another Tatton moment.
Ticking Religious Boxes
In a few month's time, everyone living in the UK will be expected to fill in the census return so that the government can get its once-a-decade look at the population of the country. As was the case in previous census in 2001, one of the questions will be "what is your religion?" It's really important to answer that question accurately. And last week the Census Campaign launched in an attempt to persuade people of this fact.
The government uses statistics from the census to justify certain kinds of policy. For example a large number of religion people might indicate that faith schools (or, more accurately, superstition schools) are a good idea. It's vital that the government have accurate data to base these kinds of decisions on. The campaign suggests that in 2001 a large number of non-religious people ticked a religious box and that therefore the census data over-estimates the number of religious people in the UK.
There are, of course, a number of reasons why you might tick a religious box. Perhaps you were bought up in a religion which you no longer follow but that you still feel some cultural link with. Or perhaps you think of yourself as christian because you live in a (supposedly) christian country even though you take no part at all in regular christian worship. The campaign would argue (and I would agree with them) that in those cases you're skewing the statistics by claiming that you are christian.
I assume that the campaign will ramp up over the next six months. But for now, just think about how you would answer the question. Are you really religious? I mean, really?
Oh, and there's a fund raising drive going on as well. If you donated to the Atheist Bus Campaign, you might consider giving a similar amount of money to this campaign as well.
38 Degrees
When I was on my self-imposed blogging hiatus in August there was one story that I read about and planned to write about on my return to London. But, course, by the time I got back there were more pressing concerns and it soon slipped my mind. Yesterday I read something that reminded me of this issue and simultaneously invalidated most of what I would have written at that time.
The story was the spat between MP Dominic Raab and the campaigning organisation 38 Degrees. To remind you of the basics, 38 Degrees have a system that allows constituents to send email to MPs on specific campaign issues and Raab objected to the number of identical email messages that he was receiving. He asked 38 Degrees to remove his contact details from their system. You can read blog posts from both Raab and 38 Degrees putting their sides of the story. An LBC radio programme set up a discussion between Raab and 38 Degrees' Executive Director, David Babb. In this discussion, Raab claimed that every email he got from the 38 Degrees system was identical. Babb claimed that 80% of them had been customised in some way.
The system that 38 Degrees have set up asks you for your postcode which it then uses to work out who your MP is. It then presents you with the text of an email that it wants you to send to your MP. Text beside the email message encourages you to edit the message to make it more personal, but it's possible to send it without any personalisation. The disagreement between Raab and Babb on LBC was to do with the number of people who edit these messages before sending them.
Clearly an MP getting 50 identical emails from constituents isn't going to give them the same attention as 50 different messages on the same topic. If you're not going to alter the text in any way then you might as well just sign a petition. If you don't care enough to write a personalised message, then why should the MP care what you say.
And that's about where the story was when I came back from holiday and put it to the back of my mind. Then yesterday I read this blog post by Sam Smith. Sam makes a number of good points, but the one I want to concentrate on is the one about the level of customisation in the email messages. Sam points out that if you send the email without editing it at all, then it will be addressed to "Dear [Insert MP name]". It seems clear that editing the message to correct this failure of basic courtesy falls within 38 Degrees' definition of "customisation". This therefore means that 20% of the email they were sending to Raab didn't even address him individually. No wonder he got annoyed.
This is a fundamental flaw in the 38 Degrees system. They know the name of the MP, There's no reason why they can't put the correct name into the email. Not doing so can only be attributed to either laziness or incompetence on the part of the people who wrote the system. It's astonishing that an organisation that wants to be taken seriously can think that this is acceptable. This is something that should be fixed immediately. The email system should be taken off-line until this is fixed.
This, of course, explains the disagreement between Raab and Babb about the level of customisation in the messages. Babb is counting the people who corrected the name and Raab is only talking about the content of the email. It's tempting to believe that Babb was being deliberately over-literal in his answer to the question in order to back up a rather dubious point. It would be interesting for 38 Degrees to tell us what proportion of people actually customised the content of the message. I suspect that the number is far lower than 80%.
The problem is that if you give people an easy option, then many of them will take it. And, as I said above, MPs are completely justified in attributing less importance to identical email. Sometime you hear people comparing messages that they get back from MPs and complaining that different MPs have sent back almost identical messages to the same mass email. Well, I don't think that you can expect an MP to spend any more effort on a reply than you put into your email. If you're using an unaltered email from 38 Degrees then you can't possibly complain if the reply is written by someone in Central Office.
This is all a terrible shame. Email gives us an unprecedented level of access to our elected representatives. It would be a disaster if 38 Degrees ham-fisted attempts to make use of this system spoil it for the rest of us and stop MPs from replying to email at all.
But it doesn't have to be like this. Email can be an effective campaigning tool when used carefully. The Lighter Later campaign takes a different and, to my mind, more useful approach. The 38 Degrees approach seems to be based on the idea that people are too stupid or too lazy to write their own email. Lighter Later trust people and give them an almost empty text box in which to compose an email. They give some useful information to help you to write the message, but all of the text is your own. It would be great if 38 Degrees and other campaigning organisations could take the same approach. Sure, you're likely to see fewer messages sent, but the ones that are sent will have greater effect.
I would strongly recommend that you don't use the 38 Degrees system until it greatly improves. But if you feel that you really want to support one of their campaigns[1] then please a) ensure that you fill in the MP's name correctly and b) delete all of their pre-written text and start again from scratch. Your MP will take far more notice of your message.
[1] Which is very likely - they campaign on very important issues.
Update:Denny points out that I should mention TheyWorkForYouThey Work For You who allow you to contact your MP on any subject - giving you a blank slate to work from. I believe that all three sites (38 Degrees, Lighter Later and They Work for You) use Write To Them to actually send the message. The difference is only in the amount of pre-processing that the site uses.
Where’s Your Data
We hear a lot of talk about how cloud computing is the future. Those of us who still run some of our own internet infrastructure are increasingly seen as slightly eccentric and old-fashioned. Why would anyone host their own mail server when we have Gmail or run their own blog when there is WordPress or Posterous. In fact, why have your own server at all when you can just use Amazon EC2?
Well during September I was reminded of the downside of the cloud when I almost lost two old blogs.
One of the earliest blogs I wrote was on the use.perl web site. Yes, it all looks a bit ropey now, but back in 2001, it was cutting edge stuff. Everyone in the Perl community was using it. But it never really had a service level agreement. It was run on someone's employer's network. And, of course, that was never going to last forever. Earlier this month he announced that he was leaving that job and the use.perl would be closing down. Currently, I think that the site is in read-only mode and there are some people in the Perl community who are trying to set up alternative hosting for the site. I hope that comes off. There's almost ten years of Perl history stored up in that site. It would be a shame to see all those URLs turn into 404s.
And then there's Vox. I never really used Vox that heavily, but I dabbled with it for a while. And now it's also closing down. Six Apart put in place some procedures to transfer your blog posts to TypePad, but for reasons I couldn't work out, that didn't work for me. What I really wanted was to import the data into this blog (which runs on Movable Type, another Six Apart product) but for some reason that option wasn't available. In the end I managed to import the posts into Posterous, but I seem to have lost all of the tags (not really a problem) and the comments (a pretty big problem), Oh, and I've just noticed that the images are still being hosted on Vox. Better fix that before Vox closes down - tonight.
So I've learnt an important lesson about trusting the cloud. It's all very well putting your data up there, but be sure that you have an exit strategy. Find out how you can get your data out. And how much of your data you can get out easily. I put all of my photos on Flickr, but I keep copies locally as well. But the again, that's not really enough is it? Sure I've got the photos, but if Flickr closes down tomorrow, I won't have all the social interactions that have built up around my photos.
These scares have made me start to think about these issues. And I've been tracking down some other old stomping grounds. I'm pleased to report that my first ever blog (hosted by Blogger, which is now owned by Google) is still available.
Where's your data? How much could you reconstruct if Facebook closed down tomorrow?
Complicated Voting System
The Daily Mail never misses an opportunity to push its agenda, does it. Writing about the Labour Leadership election today, Nicola Boden says:
Once regarded as the dark horse in the competition, the energy
spokesman, 40, took the crown thanks to the party's complicated voting
system.
"Complicated"? How can you possibly describe the single transferable alternative vote as "complicated"? Unless, of course, you're writing for a publication that is trying to persuade its readers that any deviation from first past the post is unnatural.
Update: Corrected STV to AV. And that, of course, makes the Mail's comments even more political. AV is the voting system that we're due a referendum on.
The War Against Christmas
Does the pope read the Daily Mail? It seems possible given some of the contents of his speech at Westminster Hall today:
There are those who argue that the public celebration of festivals such as Christmas should be discouraged, in the questionable belief that it might somehow offend those of other religions or none.
There's that favourite Daily Mail straw man, the war against Christmas. They'll be claiming tomorrow that it must be true because the pope says it is (he's infallible, you know). But it's not any more true today than it was yesterday. It's a pile of lies and exaggeration which is rolled out by the tabloids every year in order to scare the christians into toeing the party line.
It's getting earlier each year, too.
Update: And here, as expected, is the Mail's story on this:
The Pope issued a clarion call to defend Christianity last night, saying Christmas was at risk of being struck from the calendar.
Nonsense. It's all nonsense. No-one is offended by christmas. No-one is trying to ban or rebrand christmas.
Tabloid Watch has more about tabloid coverage of this idiocy and here's what Enemies of Reason has to say.
Sobering Lessons
In his first speech after arriving in the UK, the pope said:
As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a "reductive vision of the person and his destiny"
What about the sobering lessons of the religious extremism of pretty much any century. He seems to have conveniently forgotten those.
Third World Country
The BBC are reporting that Walter Kasper, one of the pope's senior advisers has pulled out of the papal visit to the UK after saying in a magazine interview that the UK is a "third world country" marked by a "new and aggressive atheism".
Of course, atheists are used to being called aggressive because we ask religious people to defend basically illogical concepts. But this idea that atheism makes a country "third world" is new. Of course, it's nonsense too. The few parts of the world where christianity is still growing are largely parts of what we used to called "the third world". The developed world (with some exceptions - and, yes, I'm looking at you, USA) is putting religious nonsense behind it.
The Vatican have stepped in to clarify Kasper's remarks. I'm quoting the entire third paragraph of the BBC's story here as I think it's likely to change when they realise what it says:
The Vatican said the cardinal had not intended "any kind of slight", and was referring to the UK's multicultural society.
Did you get that? I'm astounded. Is there any other way to read that than:
Sorry he called you third world, but you have to admit the country is full of darkies.
The Daily Express will love it.
And these are the people we've invited over on a state visit.
[Thanks to Denny for pointing this out.]
Email From The PM
We're all, no doubt, used to getting 419 scams in email. I get several a day, but they're not often as brazen as this.
PRIME MINISTER'S OFFICE
TREASURY AND MINISTER FOR THE CIVIL SERVICE,
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM.Our ref: ATM/13470/IDR
Your ref:...Date: 14/09/2010IMMEDIATE PAYMENT NOTIFICATION
I am The Rt Hon David Cameron MP,Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury and Minister for the Civil Service British Government. This letter is to officially inform you that (ATM Card Number 7302 7168 0041 0640) has been accredited with your favor. Your Personal Identification Number is 1090.The VISA Card Value is £2,000,000.00(Two Million, Great British Pounds Sterling).
This office will send to you an Visa/ATM CARD that you will use to withdraw your funds in any ATM MACHINE CENTER or Visa card outlet in the world with a maximum of £5000 GBP daily.Further more,You will be required to re-confirm the following information to enable;The Rt Hon William Hague MP First Secretary of State for British Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. begin in processing of your VISA CARD.
(1)Full names: (2)Address: (3)Country: (4)Nationality: (5)Phone #: (6)Age: (7)Occupation: (8) Post Codes
Rt Hon William Hague MP.
First Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
Email; bfcaffairs@info.al
Tel: +447405235350TAKE NOTICE: That you are warned to stop further communications with any other person(s) or office(s) different from the staff of the State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs to avoid hitches in receiving your payment.
Regards,
Rt Hon David Cameron MP
Prime Minister
I've left the contact details in there as I feel sure that William Hague doesn't really use an Albanian email address:-)
The email pretends to come from an address at the directgov.uk domain (note, not direct.gov.uk) and the reply-to address goes to Thailand.