Facts, Littlejohn style

Richard Littlejohn is upset in his latest column, apparently because the Guardian has been mean to him for perpetuating tedious health and safety myths, something he undoubtedly does. Near the end of his column, after a physically painful 'what if Bob Dylan wrote a song about Gordon Brown?' skit which I urge you to skip over at all costs, he launches into a spirited defence of his attacks on what he calls 'elf'n'safety';

This week, the Guardian (who else?) carried a 32-page supplement extolling the elf 'n' safety industry.

Two pages were devoted to denouncing the Daily Mail, in general, and this column, in particular, claiming most of the stories we carry are made up.

Littlejohn takes umbrage with this, and drops a massive evidence bomb to shut up the smug Guardianistas in the next paragraph;

Only yesterday there were absolutely true stories about a helter skelter in Sheffield, which cost taxpayers £90,000, being closed to the public by safety officers

Absolutely true? The Yorkshire Post covered this story without mentioning the words 'health' or 'safety', because it had nothing to fucking do with it. The reason the public can't access the big slide is because it's in a private office building where people work. It's not been 'closed to the public', because it was never open to them. If there's a story here, it's about public money being used to fund something that only benefits the workers of a private office block, not a spurious 'elf'n'safety' one. What's more, the public will actually get to use it at some point, in apparent defiance of the safety elves that live in Littlejohn's head:

Cllr Anginotti promised the council would offer members of the public some opportunity to try out the 85ft (26m) spiral slide over the course of the summer.

She said: "In terms of public access, this summer there will be a free open day at Electric Works for members of the public who wish to try out the slide.

There are times when I'm actually embarrassed for Littlejohn. Here he is, trying to prove his worth as a purveyor of hard-nosed journalistic facts, and yet he crams so much fail into a brief sentence segment you wonder if he's doing it deliberately to generate more criticism he can self-righteously moan about. Sorry to labour the point, but in that brief section of one sentence, which is supposed to prove how good he is with facts he manages to get the following things wrong:
1) it hasn't 'been closed to the public', it was never open to them,
2) it will at some point be open to them, and
3) it has nothing to do with health and safety legislation.

His second example is only fractionally less rubbish:

...and another about a caravan camp banning washing lines because people might decapitate themselves.

The Telegraph covers this. What you can glean from the Telegraph's slightly less rabid (although still anti-H&S) account and the actual quotes from people who made the decision, is the following:
1) Littlejohn's 'decapitation' line is bollocks; the ban is on rotary washing lines, and in so far as it's a health and safety measure it's to do with kids not running into the vertical metal poles which support rotary lines.
2) health and safety is at least a reason for it this time, but there are also two others which Littlejohn would like you to discard; a) they're considered ugly and there's not a lot of space for them and b) the company makes money out of the ban by forcing campers to use its own launderette.

Whether you agree or disagree with the policy, it's telling that that the reality of any H&S concern here is fairly reasonable; kids are encouraged to run around in the fairly confined spaces of the caravan park, and having what amounts to randomly-placed metal poles in the way could cause a problem. I reckon Littlejohn realises that this is slightly too close to sensible, so he invents a ludicrous scenario about adults decapitating themselves so you can go "Yeah, he's right! I've got a washing line and I've literally never beheaded myself! You couldn't make up how elf'n'safety's gone to mad hell in a handcart! Mind how you go!".

He makes two other claims. One of them is kind of true, it's about a policeman who wouldn't sit on a bike for a photo because he couldn't ride a bike, and police rules stop policemen riding a bike on the job unless they've done their cycling proficiency test, largely for insurance reasons in the same way my private company won't let you drive a company van without a licence. It's an entirely pointless story, the irony of it being that it distracts from the genuinely silly real scenario whereby a policeman has been asked to pose on a bike for a 'look at the jolly cycling cop' photo when he evidently doesn't use a bike for his job, and secondly it was largely his own cautiousness and there's no evidence that he'd have been cast out into a like of fire by his superiors if he'd sat on the bike (another cop posed for the photo in his place anyway).

The final example is a Littlejohn classic, in that it appears to be a story that's landed in his inbox, and I can find nothing to support it anywhere:

Across the country, all hospitals have installed alcohol-based, anti-bacterial handwash dispensers to stop the spread of diseases and superbugs.

But St Margaret's Hospital, in Epping, has now removed the dispensers over fears that alcoholics might rip them off the wall, drink the contents and poison themselves.

The hospital was acting on the orders of something called the National Patient Safety Agency.

Talk about foaming at the mouth. Another 'myth', I suppose. You couldn't make it up.

If anyone can find out where he's got this from, let me know. I ask because the body he attributes this advice to is currently in a campaign to educate people about the importance of washing hands, and it seems a kind of big claim for something no-one else seems to be reporting. There's not enough information to judge this story on, the only references I can find come from Littlejohn, but I will say this; complaining about overbearing health and safety regimes IN A HOSPITAL seems like something of a futile effort.

My main criticism of all this isn't really about whether or not the stories are true, although I kind of like to know if they are because I'm anal like that. My problem with these stories, like the 'PC gone mad' ones, is that they're such a shit attempt to weave this huge overarching narrative on the basis of thousands of bits of really weak evidence. Man doesn't get on bike? Caravan campers have to abide by slightly restrictive caravan park rules? People not allowed to wander freely round office at all hours and go down a big slide? Individually these things are so utterly banal that they ought to be quirky asides on page 37 of the Pisstown Gazette, not forming the basis for six-figure salary commentators to wave their fists righteously in front of the baying mob.

Littlejohn is unhappy with the Guardian's suggestion that these micro-myths belittle the importance of sensible health and safety policy, but I think that's fair comment. The HSE has gone as far as having a Myth of the Month section to deal with a mere fraction of the never-ending slew of shite the press come out with, concerned that it does indeed detract from the serious work they do. Littlejohn is a prime offender in this regard, and you can see how it might irritate people to have smug twats like Littlejohn take cheap shots based on dubious and in some cases unverifiable anecdata.

On a lighter note, Queen's Trinity Cross medal scrapped... because it's 'too Christian' is good fun. I recommend reading all the stuff about the medal being specific to Trinidad & Tobago, before skimming through the comments to see how many people assumed it was being given to people in Britian, including baffling nonsense like this:

Will we start renaming Charing Cross railway station?
- Adrian, Reading, UK, 8/5/2009 11:37

It is time we stopped pondering to the every wish of Muslims and Hindues who choose to live in Britain. This is a Christian country and as so they should abide by our christian values....
- Elizabeth, Ayrshire, Scotland., 8/5/2009 11:31

This is not about being "unlawful and offensive" to Muslims and Hindus. It's about destroying Christianity in Britain, nothing more or less.
- Renee, Melbourne, Australia, 8/5/2009

When in Great Britain do as the British do has to be the rule. How dare they suggest otherwise.
- Vaj, Savoie, France, 8/5/2009 11:36

It's another of example of the tone of an article combining with the prejudices of the readers to evoke the desired response, despite the facts. Littlejohn would be proud.

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In other news, I probably won't post much if anything over the next two weeks, I'm having some time off work to chill with Mrs No Sleep 'Til Brooklands, and since I fully intend to actually enjoy myself it might be nice if I didn't needlessly subject my brain to the mad world of the gutter press for a bit. Woohoo!

Melanie Phillips: intelligently designed?

Oh, joy of joys, Mel's back on the Intelligent Design bandwagon in the Spectator, with a stirring missive full of cold, hard assertions she's pulled out of her arse. In Creating an insult to intelligence, Phillips begins by saying how irritated she was to hear Kenneth Miller on the radio being mean about ID. (Critiquing radio is great since no-one, least of all me, is going to bother going through the iPlayer or Listen Again or whatever to check if your account of what was said is in any way fair or if you've been taking things out of context, not that Mel would ever do that).
Anyway, ignoring all the enormous gaping flaws in ID, she takes offence at Miller for saying that the 'theory' of Intelligent Design is...

...nothing more than an attempt to repackage good old-fashioned Creationism and make it more palatable.

This is a fairly widespread and perfectly fair opinion from Miller, one which was given some serious legal basis by the Kitzmiller vs Dover ruling, which agreed that the version of ID the Discovery Institute and its friends were trying to get into the schools was indeed creationism in the most threadbare of cheap suits (more of which later). Phillips gets mad:

But this is totally untrue. Miller referred to a landmark US court case in 2005, Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District, which did indeed uphold the argument that Intelligent Design was a form of Creationism in its ruling that teaching Intelligent Design violated the constitutional ban against teaching religion in public schools. But the court was simply wrong, doubtless because it had heard muddled testimony from the likes of Prof Miller.

It was 'simply wrong'? Ooh, this'll be good!

Whatever the ramifications of the specific school textbooks under scrutiny in the Kitzmiller/Dover case, the fact is that Intelligent Design not only does not come out of Creationism but stands against it. This is because Creationism comes out of religion while Intelligent Design comes out of science. Creationism, whose proponents are Bible literalists, is a specific doctrine which holds that the earth was literally created in six days. Intelligent Design, whose proponents are mainly scientists, holds that the complexity of science suggests that there must have been a governing intelligence behind the origin of matter, which could not have developed spontaneously from nothing.

There's a quite staggering amount of horseshit there, so we'll start at the beginning. The 'textbooks' she's referring to is really only one textbook, 'Of Pandas And People', written by William Dembski and Jonathan Wells, two Christian theologians (by sheer coincidence, of course). It was the book the IDers were trying to get into schools in Dover to be taught as science, and it's essentially a creationist argument against evolution which uses the term 'intelligent design' instead of 'creationism'. That's not my opinion, either. It came to light that they had literally replaced the word 'creationists' with 'design proponents' in the majority of cases, primarily because in the editing process someone fucked up a 'Find and Replace' meaning there was a draft saved showing the 'missing link' between the two terms; 'cdesign proponentsists'. Dembski and Wells are among the leading lights of the ID movement, and while they publicly avoid using the word 'creationism' too often, that nugget of info about the book that turned up during the trial suggests they consider the two terms pretty much interchangeable, as indeed they are in reality despite Phillips' protests. Phillips has dismissed actual evidence regarding a pivotal ID text in favour of a completely evidence-free assertion that ID 'comes out of science'.

One of Phillips' problems (and woah, she's got problems) is that she makes the mistake of defining 'creationism' entirely by the batshit insane Young Earth Creationists, who literally believe everything happened the way it sort of almost says in the Bible and that the world is less than 10,000 years old. This is ridiculous; creationism as a term covers all manner of things, including old-earth creationism, which kinda sorta accepts bits of science and evolution with the caveat that it all happened because God planned it that way. When scientists like Miller talk about ID and creationism being interchangeable, what they mean is that they are both (usually) religiously-derived hypotheses that put a creator at the beginning of the universe, and cast scientifically-unfounded doubt on evolution. IDers replace the word 'creator' with 'designer', but the difference is largely semantic.

The idea that 'Intelligent Design comes out of science' is disingenuous at best. The term was popularised by Phillip E. Johnson, a born-again Christian heavily involved with the Discovery Institute, for which he, famously, co-authored the Wedge strategy, a pretty damning piece of evidence that intelligent design is not a scientific theory, but a bid to "reverse the stifling materialist world view and replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions". I urge you to read about it, as it pretty nakedly states what the movement's intentions are, and renders claims that it's merely about scientific truth laughable. William Dembski, who wrote 'Of Pandas And People', contributed to the idiotic ID film 'Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed' and is also inextricably linked to the Discovery Institute, is perhaps the best-known of the ID proponents and a key writer for the definitive ID blog Uncommon Descent. By happy coincidence, he believes that "The Designer of intelligent design is, ultimately, the Christian God". This appears to be an amazingly common theme among cdesign proponentsists; they take offence at the suggestion that ID is just a weak argument for God and claim they're simply talking science, but they almost invariably happen to believe that the designer is God.

ID is the successor to 'creation science'; creationists used to try and get that taught in schools until 1987 when the decision of the Supreme Court in Edwards v. Aguillard effectively killed it. There's a clear path you can draw from there to ID, and it's done briefly but quite well by the Wiki entry on creation science.

The claim that ID's "proponents are mainly scientists" holds little water; you'll notice that Phillips completely fails to mention them. So far, Intelligent Design hawkers have conspicuously failed to get any papers in proper peer-reviewed science journals. There are scientists among them, such as Michael Behe, but his theories have been discredited by all major scientific organisations and institutions. There's a difference between something 'coming out of science' and something which is believed by a few scientists. It's a conclusion without a plausible mechanism, without evidence. At best, it's a scientifically lazy critique of evolution. It fails to justify its assertions, merely trying to pick holes in evolutionary theory. Its central theory, irreducible complexity, has failed to generate convincing examples for its argument. That argument boils down to 'shit is way too complicated to have evolved'. That isn't science. (The amusing part is that Darwin himself predicted that people would be droning on about the complexity of the eye in the Origin Of Species. The evolution of the eye has been comprehensively studied since then, and IDers have failed to come up with a compelling challengeto these studies).

The confusion arises partly out of ignorance, with people lazily confusing belief in a Creator with Creationism. But belief in a Creator is common to all people of monotheistic faith – with many scientists amongst them -- the vast majority of whom would regard Creationism as totally ludicrous. In coming to the conclusion that a governing intelligence must have been responsible for the ultimate origin of matter, Intelligent Design proponents are essentially saying there must have been a creator. The difference between them and people of religious faith is that ID proponents do not necessarily believe in a personalised Creator, or God.

Interestingly, one of the scientists who believes in God is, er, Ken Miller, the very person she's arguing with. Phillips omits that inconvenient piece of information. Miller is a Christian who is also a scientist, and he wrote 'Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution'. He has no problem with the idea of a creator because he fucking believes in one himself. The difference is that he understands that the science simply doesn't support it. He's well-versed enough in the history of Intelligent Design to know that it's the discredited creation science by another name, and it offends both his scientific and religious sides to see religious conservatives distorting science to give their ideas legitimacy. It doesn't have any. As Miller points out, it doesn't need any. The only reason the creation science/ID nonsense abounds is because there are creationists who cannot accept evolution, trying to use ID to get their beliefs into schools, which they can't do under the US laws regarding the separation of church and state, hence cases like Dover and the recent battle to get even more watered-down anti-evolution crap into schools in Texas. (That link, by the way, is an excellent piece by Steven Novella which deals with ID crank Michael Egnor making a suspiciously similar pedantic argument about the word 'creationist' to the one Phillips is advancing, so I'd recommend reading it).

Ultimately what Phillips' argument comes down to is a tedious attempt to pass the word 'creationist' onto the wacky Young Earthers no-one agrees with, in order to distance ID from the creationism it's so obviously a part of. It's an entirely pointless argument which completely ignores everything that's wrong with ID, instead focusing on criticising scientists for terminological ignorance which she is just as guilty of. In the end, whatever you call it, ID has failed spectacularly, and Phillips' clichéd moaning does nothing to make a case for it.

Ken Miller's point is straightforward; believing in God is fine, just don't use the awful pseudoscience of ID to justify it. And that's unmistakably what's going on; if you're believing in ID but not God, you may well be mental. The science simply doesn't back ID. If Phillips had a fraction of the intellectual honesty that Ken Miller has, she'd feel embarrassed publishing this shit.

There's a war going on, you know! Quick, someone else write about it!

Guardian writer Tanya Gold (also of the Daily Mail) is on top form today with 947 words about how she's sick of hearing about Nazis, particularly in films specifically about Nazis that she went to see. Nazi cows, Nazi cats, actors playing depressed Nazis. It's all just Hitler porn and it disgusts me is a great example of a kind-of well-meaning, kind-of sensible thought which is argued so badly that it almost makes you want to believe the exact opposite. It's been prompted by a largely irrelevant piece of tat about "Nazi super-cows" that appeared in various papers, not for any political or newsworthy reasons, but entirely because the phrase "Nazi super-cows" is inherently funny, and the millions of cheap internet links it gained will have done wonders for the Guardian's hit count.

Gold goes on about various Nazi-themed films, but her argument begins to look shaky right about the time she does this:

I could go on[...] I could tell you about the Cats Who Look Like Hitler web page - "click here to add your Kitler".

She goes on to mention Cats That (not Who) Look Like Hitler again:

There is a point to all this Hitler porn, you may say. Snoopy Versus the Red Baron has a valuable lesson to teach us about tyranny. Cats Who Look Like Hitler have something to meow about the dangers of genocide. Bollocks, I say.

Of course, Cats That Look Like Hitler is merely a whimsical internet repository for pictures of cats that, well, I'm sure you can figure it out. It doesn't even begin to attempt to say anything about genocide, so to argue that it tries to and fails is a tad disingenuous, and runs the risk of making you look stupid even in comparison to a plainly stupid website. Gold keeps throwing out various examples of Hitler appearing in popular culture, but her problem is that she just lumps a load of unrelated instances together out of context. She mentions that 'he' (rather, a ludicrous animated version of him) appears in South Park, where he appears singing 'O Tannenbaum' in Hell, and then mentions 'Heil Honey I'm Home!', a BSkyB sitcom from 19 years ago that was cancelled after a single episode. Both these examples are of things that briefly took the piss out of Hitler, making the context completely different to the supposedly serious films like Valkyrie she mentions at the start.

So, perhaps we're to conclude that Gold is against all mentions of the Nazis (except a couple of highbrow reference points she includes). A lesser writer than myself would make the point that that sounds a bit...y'know, totalitarian itself, but I'll neatly avoid the Godwin minefield there (while still mentioning it, ahhh) and we'll move on to the compelling argument behind why we should stop making cartoons that make Hitler look ridiculous:

This disgusts me. It makes me wretch. I thought the whole point of the second world war was to eradicate Nazism from the face of the earth. No more swastikas, no more shiny boots, no more dwarf narcissists giving vegetarian dinner parties and shooting liberals.

Well, no, the Second World War wasn't about getting rid of the fucking swastika and the shiny boots, was it? Unless my understanding of history is rather warped, I would have thought the symbolism and the fashion choices of the Nazis ranked pretty low on the list of 100 Things That Worried Us About Nazism, some distance behind all the dictatorship stuff, the country-invading and the massive amounts of Jew-murdering. I don't think there were any soldiers who thought they were dying to protect their grandchildren from seeing flippant animated comedy several decades in the future.

Ultimately though, all this is a distraction from Gold's main, ridiculous point:

There are genocides happening today, and they are being shot off the front pages by Nazi cows - Nazi cows! - and interviews with Mortensen talking about playing a depressed Nazi: "I spent a lot of time in Germany just looking at people." Really? Five million have died in the Congo in the last 10 years, in a war for the minerals that we use.

The Nazi cows story wasn't on the front page of any newspaper as far as I can make out, with the exception of The Times, which used it as their picture story with a headline about how they 'terrorised Julius Caesar', rather than referring to them as 'Nazi super-cows'. The main headline was about MPs' expenses. I agree that the papers are far too full of cheap nonsense, but the problem is far more widespread than stupid stories about Nazi cows (notwithstanding the fact that most of her examples are from TV and film anyway rather than the press). In a week in which everyone's been going on about some woman who can sing quite well despite not being exactly being prime masturbation material, it seems nuts to go on about the Nazi cows piece as if it's our Nazi obsession that's keeping the Congo out of the papers. For a start, we're in an age where the obsession with celebrities means the Guardian writes almost as much pointless guff about Ashton Kutcher and Paris Hilton as the tabloids.

Of course, most of that stuff goes in its own section, as has the Nazi cows story, which papers seem to be filing under 'Quirky', so it's not quite as simple as 'every word you write about Hitler is a word you could have written about Darfur'. There are, however, people who do have a binary choice they can make about what to write about; columnists. They can write at great length about the Congo if they want to. So let's have a look at what Tanya 'shut up and start talking about important genocides' Gold has been talking about recently.

A week ago, Gold was writing about the aforementioned woman on Britain's Got Talent. The week before, she was writing about the pressing issue of how she doesn't like posh hotels any more. She's written recent articles about how much she likes a character from shit 80s soap Dynasty, and going further back an urgent public service announcement about how why you probably shouldn't go out with men that want to fuck other women. A glance through her articles sees her talking about diet pills, her weight loss regimes, dating advice, gap-year students, trying to track down her ex-boyfriends, Judith Chalmers not wearing any knickers, Carry On films...

Her Daily Mail columns (yep) are even more illuminating. Last week she was found dribbling over hunky muscle men and how she doesn't fancy geeks. Recently she's written about how she hates Valentine's Day, how she's bored with her life, an expensive dress and why people should stop telling her what to eat.

Now, all of these are perfectly valid topics for a columnist, and she tries to make some serious sociological points with many of them (and to be fair to her, she's also written a very good, very personal and important piece about rape which is well worth reading and gives an insight into a serious issue). It's perfectly fine. But if you're going to mostly use your platform as a columnist to write about the horror of staying in upmarket hotels and how you once dated a swinger, and not to educate people about the horrors in the Congo, then it kind of undermines you when you start laying on the weltschmerzen despite apparently never having bothered to write about it yourself. I couldn't find a single column in Gold's article history dedicated to actually making a point about the various worldwide genocides that are currently going on. 'There are more important things than this; you should write about them even though I'm not going to' is the kind of lazy argument lots of us fall into at times, but it doesn't make it any less rubbish.

Gold's piece kind of sums up the attitude that most people (and I'm not exempting myself from this) have towards the Congo and Sierra Leone and Sudan and all these other places; just pay lip service to how terrible it is, speak wistfully about how sad it is that no-one cares, and then go on not really caring yourself and expecting everyone else to write/do something about it.

Income tax mysteriously related to income, journalists discover

Some shocking stats in today's Mail, where it turns out that people who receive more income pay more income tax. This was fearlessly revealed in Tax map of Britain shows middle-class towns clobbered by the Treasury. How long has this so-called 'income' tax been going on, and why weren't we informed? Witness the grotesque disparity:

Taxpayers in middle-class towns are handing over up to four times more to the Treasury than those in less affluent areas, a tax map of Britain has revealed.

FOUR TIMES? What sickening bias.

The tax map reveals that in St Albans, the average paid in income tax is £10,500. This is almost a quarter of the average income of £43,500 in the Hertfordshire town.

By contrast, in Hull, which is at the bottom of the table, the average wage is £17,300 and each taxpayer hands over an average of £2,360 in income tax - equating to around a seventh of income.

The references to towns are something of a red herring, since your income tax is only related to what you earn, and not where you live. If you live in St Albans but only earn £17,300, then you will be taxed the same as the average person in Hull, likewise rich people in Hull will be taxed the same as an equally rich person in St Albans (admittedly the cost of living may be lower, but that's offset by having to live in Hull).

The 'tax map' aspect of this is strange, it seems to just be a way of bringing a memorable new angle to the tedious tradition of the well-off moaning about how much they're getting taxed. You could take the same figures and complain about how the average person in St Albans gets earns 2.5 times the amount of money that someone in Hull does. But then the demographic of the Mail is the middle-class, and the wannabe middle-class, leading to the grim spectacle of people who earn £43k a year effectively complaining about lucky people living in Hull on £17k are.

Surprisingly, this income tax business seems to come as news to some people, who had apparently hitherto been unaware of the concept of progressive taxation. Despite the figures telling you nothing other than that the income tax is doing what it has always been intended to do, folks in the comments are unhappy:

Stealth tax by another name. What's next - a return to window tax?
Dr Stephen Fox, Sydney Australia,

Mail readers, and the paper itself, love to talk about 'stealth taxes'. Originally this used to refer to hidden charges in the tax system that most people didn't know about, whereby they'd be hit by unexpected levies, but now it seems it's become synonymous with tax itself. It's hard to think of a way income tax could be any less stealthy. Announced annually in the Budget, written about in the press, rates published for all to see, and the figure literally printed on your monthly payslip under the none-too-stealthy name of 'Income tax', it seems to me that Alastair Darling is not perhaps the most cunning of pickpockets in this regard. Short of coming round to everyone's house at the end of each month in a massive Income Tax Collection Tour Bus with flashing neon signs on the side and the words 'WE'VE COME TO COLLECT YOUR TAX!' blared out over a loudhailer, before making you fill out a ceremonial oversized cheque for the amount, it's difficult to know what would actually prevent a Mail reader from deeming a tax 'stealthy'.

Another doctor writes:

Income tax is robbery under threat of jail. It is an immoral tax on the family and should be abolished. the left squeal it is about ability to pay. I say it's my money and I know how best to spend it. Half of it taken before it is even seen is disgusting.
Dr Nick Ashley, Huntingdon England,

Not only stealthy, but robbery! Immoral robbery at that. I'm not sure why Dr Nick (who disappointingly fails to begin his reply 'Hiiii everybody!') wants to see his tax money before it's taken away from him, but whom am I to judge one man's deeply personal attachment to his money?

Next up, Claire arrives to put obligatory Token Reasonable Commentator Dereck in his place, with a winning mix of condescension and factual inaccuracy:

Seems like stating the obvious to me, the more you earn the more you pay, as it should be.
- Dereck Smith, Insch United Kingdom

Perhaps you haven't quite understood this article. Of course logically the more you earn the more you pay, but surely the percentage should be the same? How is it right that people in St Albans pay 25% tax, whilst those in Hull pay only 14%? What happens to those people who work hard to make £43,000 a year, and get their pay rise which takes their earnings to £43,874? Their tax doubles, and they end up taking home less than they did before their pay rise!

Classic stealth tax, by a very clever government who could foresee that the average rise in wages would quickly bring many 'average' workers into the 40% tax band!
Claire (ex-pat), California, USA, 20/4/2009 9:11

Perhaps the California sun has affected Claire's brain, but she's voicing a misapprehension held by a surprising amount of people. Let's re-read the funniest part of that again; "What happens to those people who work hard to make £43,000 a year, and get their pay rise which takes their earnings to £43,874? Their tax doubles, and they end up taking home less than they did before their pay rise!". Of course, that's not what happens at all. When you cross a tax threshold, your earnings ABOVE THAT THRESHOLD are taxed at a higher rate. This makes it literally impossible for the situation Claire mentions to occur. She's right that it would be daft to do it that way, because it would result in people actually refusing pay rises. That's exactly why it doesn't work like that. Wealthy people get the same tax allowance as everyone else, and their income below the 40% threshold is taxed, amazingly, at the same 22% 20% rate as everyone else!

Next, Jessica from Poole steams in:

Why is it people think the more you earn the more right people have to take your money. The people with the most money are in fact the so called 'poor' who take everthing they can in benefits and housing and pay nothing back to society. It sickens me that decent hard working individuals who have always worked and paid whats fair, who would be ashamed to go on the dole if they were jobless despite paying into it, are the ones that are always targeted for tax hikes. If people honestly think £40,000 is a high wage think again. Factor in mortgages, pension contributions, NI, food prices, fuel prices and normally looking after a family on top of the ridiculus amount of tax they have to pay and what you find is a class of people with very little disposable income. It is disgusting, something has gone seriously wrong in this country and it needs to be sorted out.
Jessica, Poole, Dorset, 20/4/2009 9:44

Aside from the hilarity of claiming that earning double the national average wage doesn't constitute a 'high wage', I had to re-read that a couple of times to make sure that Jessica actually said, without irony, that "The people with the most money are in fact the so called 'poor'". Impressively, that's not actually the most unhinged comment:

Typical Mclabour and Mcbaldrick.
Where are all these cities?
England, of course - WHERE ELSE?
Mcbaldrick loathes and detests us hard working thrifty ENGLISH taxpayers and savers.
No votes from us to him - AND HE KNOWS IT.
ROGER, brighton, in the USSR - Union of Scottish Socialist Regulators, 20/4/2009 10:18

There seems to be a growing aversion to calling Gordon Brown by his real name, instead substituting any number of increasingly bizarre names with the prefix 'Mc', He's Scottish, you see. It won't be long now before his name is so unspeakable that he'll be referred to in hushed tones as 'The Scottish Prime Minister', lest saying his real name bring bad luck. The Scottish income tax conspiracy that Roger darkly hints at is an intriguing one, to say the least. In order for it to work, Brown merely has to ensure that his fellow Scots earn considerably less money than the English, and thus somehow win! Welcome to the technicolour dreamworld that is the inside of a Mail reader's head; a world in which Gordon Brown opens his paper to see Dundee listed as one of the ten poorest towns in Britain, and cackles with Machiavellian glee. "Ah, I see my plan to ensure that my Scottish brethren pay low income tax by virtue of being really quite poor is working perfectly!".

It's Easter! Suck it, Dawkins!

It's Easter weekend, hooray! I don't know about you, but I always found the resurrection story to be the moment where the Bible jumped the shark; it always smacked a bit of the writers trying to write themselves out of a corner. Still, until they approve my alternative suggestions for more contemporary national holidays based around similarly ludicrous fictional moments that stretch some of the goodwill you have towards a series (I'm thinking National Marge Accidentally Gets A Boob Job Day), it'll have to do I suppose. So what better way to celebrate the peak/nadir of the Bible than by writing a joyous paean to all things spiritual, so that we might reflect on the important lessons of Jesus' death and subsequent reappearance?

Well, it seems A.N. Wilson has indeed found a better way; stickin' it to the godless! Yes, Religion of hatred: Why we should no longer be cowed by the chattering classes ruling Britain who sneer at Christianity is in many ways Wilson's masterwork, up there with that time he stuck up for Thatcher. It starts off with a simple, some might say quite boring, account of a Palm Sunday procession he took part in, before he gets to the big question, a question that's simultaneously massive and yet somehow irrelevant:

But how many in Britain today actually believe the story? Most recent polls have shown that considerably less than half of us do.

I suspect the majority of the people who don't are those of us who have had trouble finding out which parts of the Bible are supposed to be actually true, and which parts are just allegories not to be taken literally, and have subsequently decided that the best course of action is probably to take all the broadly physically impossible shit with a grain or three of salt. Wilson goes on to say that, he too, once became one of those people who thought it might not be true, even going so far as writing a book about it.

Like most educated people in Britain and Northern Europe (I was born in 1950), I have grown up in a culture that is overwhelmingly secular and anti-religious. The universities, broadcasters and media generally are not merely non-religious, they are positively anti.

To my shame, I believe it was this that made me lose faith and heart in my youth. It felt so uncool to be religious. With the mentality of a child in the playground, I felt at some visceral level that being religious was unsexy, like having spots or wearing specs.

This playground attitude accounts for much of the attitude towards Christianity that you pick up, say, from the alternative comedians, and the casual light blasphemy of jokes on TV or radio.

Luckily for the Church, Wilson had stopped believing in the veracity of the Biblical account for entirely superificial reasons, which meant he could be won back into the religious fold with an equally stupid justification (more of which later). Huzzah! Wilson then goes on to complain about Polly Toynbee being artlessly secular in The Guardian, which ironically seems to carry more pro-religious writing than the Daily Mail itself (it's all here, and if you have the patience to actually read most of that you may qualify to become a saint yourself). Wilson also complains about what he suspects to be the attitude of the BBC towards religion, which as the national broadcaster nevertheless has daily religious programming required by law.

So, what of Wilson's reasons for turning back to religion? We already know that he stopped believing because he thought religion was a bit uncool (and A.N. Wilson is nothing if not cool), so why the second 180?

My own return to faith has surprised no one more than myself. Why did I return to it? Partially, perhaps it is no more than the confidence I have gained with age.

Rather than being cowed by them, I relish the notion that, by asserting a belief in the risen Christ, I am defying all the liberal clever-clogs on the block: cutting-edge novelists such as Martin Amis; foul-mouthed, self-satisfied TV presenters such as Jonathan Ross and Jo Brand; and the smug, tieless architects of so much television output.

Some might say that that's a slightly childish reason for adopting a belief system, particularly given that there's no evidence that Jo Brand (what an odd reference) gives the merest fuck what A.N. Wilson thinks about religion, or indeed anything. Still, TAKE THAT, JONATHAN ROSS! Apparently Wilson's simmering resentment towards novelists, TV presenters and comedians is so intense, that in his sheer fury the most appropriate adjective he can come up to describe them with (after 'smug') is 'tieless'. Of course, we all know where the Holy Bible stands on ties; who can forget the story of Jesus chasing the polo-neck wearers out of the temple? Jesus famously knew the importance of a tie; would anyone have taken his proclamations seriously if it wasn't for his impeccable Savile Row threads?

It's not entirely clear whether Wilson has ever actually seen Jonathan Ross, who almost always presents his chat show in a suit and tie. Nor is it clear why he castigates the female Jo Brand for not wearing one, but alas, Wilson moves in mysterious ways. You have to wonder where the depravity of it all might stop though. Today, no ties; tomorrow...? It doesn't really bear thinking about. Fuck, they might be messing around with logic next...

Ah, say the rationalists. But no one can possibly rise again after death, for that is beyond the realm of scientific possibility.

And it is true to say that no one can ever prove - nor, indeed, disprove - the existence of an after-life or God, or answer the conundrums of honest doubters (how does a loving God allow an earthquake in Italy?)

Easter does not answer such questions by clever-clever logic. Nor is it irrational. On the contrary, it meets our reason and our hearts together, for it addresses the whole person.

At this point I'd like to offer Wilson my services as an editor to clean this bit up a tad. I propose adding a little coda to the first sentence of the last paragraph so it reads "Easter does not answer such questions by clever-clever logic, or, indeed, at all". I feel that by adding the last bit you can prevent the readers from becoming confused when you then fail to offer any kind of explanation for why God lets innocent people die in an Italian earthquake, instead dribbling on about 'addressing the whole person' like some kind of tedious two-bit holistic therapist.

In the past, I have questioned its veracity and suggested that it should not be taken literally. But the more I read the Easter story, the better it seems to fit and apply to the human condition. That, too, is why I now believe in it.

I'm not sure whether that is merely largely meaningless, or if Wilson does in fact live in an area with a particularly high resurrection rate. Indeed, it took me a while to navigate through that section. At first it looked like he'd decided to believe that something physically impossible did in fact genuinely happen simply because some element of the telling of the story struck an emotional chord with him, which seemed to be missing a link somewhere. But then I realised that my problem was that I was attempting to use 'clever-clever logic', when in fact logic is something to be sneered at while bemoaning that people sneer at your own beliefs. By jettisoning the restrictions of 'logic', you can gleefully stomp around the lush fields of logical fallacy with impunity. Argument from authority? Hit me with that shit, Wilson!

And in contrast to those ephemeral pundits of today, I have as my companions in belief such Christians as Dostoevsky, T. S. Eliot, Samuel Johnson and all the saints, known and unknown, throughout the ages

Yeah, we got Dostoevsky, what have you atheists got? JO BRAND? Pah! Suckers!

As a matter of fact, I am sure [...] that materialist atheism is not merely an arid creed, but totally irrational.

Oh, this'll be good. Irrational how?

Materialist atheism says we are just a collection of chemicals. It has no answer whatsoever to the question of how we should be capable of love or heroism or poetry if we are simply animated pieces of meat.

Let's assume for a moment that that's true, and look at the gauntlet that's just been thrown down. This is Wilson's moment to convince the unwashed heathen masses with the deep religious explanation for how we meatbags can write poetry or fall in love. The next sentence may very well change your life, so make sure you're not leaning back too far in your chair right now, lest its awesome revelatory power send you toppling backwards:

The Resurrection, which proclaims that matter and spirit are mysteriously conjoined, is the ultimate key to who we are.

So there you have it. It's because of 'spirit', which is 'mysteriously conjoined' to matter in some way. And to think I was worried that this might somehow still be less rational than materialist atheism! Boy, is my face red right now.

To sum up, then; under a materialist worldview, some questions about the human condition and consciousness remain as yet unexplained, but with religion, instead of keeping a worryingly open mind about possible explanations, we can just rest safe in the knowledge that it's all just some kind of 'mysterious' thing. And thus is was that A.N. Wilson so thoughtfully redefined rationality; a vague and utterly unsubstantiated explanation for an ill-defined question is probably better than none at all! I can't recall now why I ever found religious explanations unsatisfying.

So there you have it, atheists, secularists and liberals; if this doesn't make you finally put a fucking tie on, I don't know what will.

Outrage as licence fee payer profits from filth!

Hooray! The Ross/Brand story is back, and there's a new angle for outrage! Do you have a TV? Do you pay your licence fee? Then YOU'RE BEING SCREWED apparently!

Make Ross pay: As BBC is fined record £150,000 over sick stunt, MPs demand £6m-a-year star and Russell Brand foot bill (By Paul Revoir, Liz Thomas and Simon Cable - apparently it takes three people to do journalism of this quality)

MAIL COMMENT: Pay up, Mr Ross!

That Mail comment in full:

The Mail rarely has much time for over-mighty, highly-expensive quangos but today we congratulate Ofcom, which has fined the BBC £150,000 for the 'gratuitously offensive, humiliating and demeaning' attack on the actor Andrew Sachs by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross.

The bitter irony is that because the BBC is a publicly-funded body the fine will be paid by the very licence fee payers subjected to their stream of puerile filth.

That is why we have a suggestion to make: shouldn't Mr Ross (whose friend Mr Brand, true to disgusting form, joined the anarchists smashing up buildings at the start of G20) pay the money himself?

Now, I reckon that since the Mail started the story, which received just two complaints at the time of broadcast, and thereby began the snowballing public outrage which led to this £150,000 fine, maybe the Mail should pay?

It's genuinely hard to know what's most ridiculous about this; congratulating Ofcom for fining the BBC on the one hand, while writing stories about how outrageous it is that the 'licence fee payer' has to pay on the other? Is it the deliberate ignorance of the fact that this is a fine specifically for the failures of the BBC's editorial process which the Mail had consistently criticised, and thus nothing to do with Ross (or Brand), who have both already been punished? Or the deliberate ignorance of the fact that since the money from the fine goes to the Treasury it essentially remains part of the public purse anyway? Is it the utterly irrelevant dig at Russell Brand for being at the G20 protests the other day a mere six months after he was forced to quit the BBC? Is it the ludicrous attempt to link Brand to the 'anarchists smashing up buildings' which he had nothing at all to do with?

I would say the most ridiculous part is the Mail's sudden attack of amnesia about the much-trumpeted fact that Jonathan Ross was suspended without pay for 3 months. As the Mail constantly reminds us, Ross is paid '£6m a year', which would mean that the BBC saved £1.5m when it suspended him. Since the money Ross (well, Ross' production company, but shhh!) earns is apparently dramatically above the market rate, we can safely assume that the programmes that took his place cost considerably less than that, meaning that this fine is almost certainly more than entirely covered by the money it fined Ross, putting the BBC (and by extension you) in profit.

In case you missed it, the Mail does briefly allow this point to be made by a BBC spokesman in the first link. It's there in paragraphs 17 and 18, right after the quotes demanding Ross pay out of his own pocket from Georgina Baillie, Esther Rantzen, Don Foster (a Lib Dem spokesman), Lord Rees Mogg, the director of Mediawatch, the Tory culture secretary, and, with dreary inevitability, someone from the fucking TaxPayers' Alliance. That's balance for you.

I wonder if they had to flip a coin between 'Ross costs YOU the licence payer £150,000! Take to the streets!' and 'BBC makes net profit from Ross shame! Abolish the licence fee!'. Maybe they can get a columnist to make the latter argument and ensure all the bases get covered.

Anyway, I'm glad we have the Mail to stand up against the 'stream of puerile filth' the BBC 'subjects' us to. On a completely unrelated note, here are FOURTEEN burlesque pics of Mel B. Fourteen is the exact number required to judge how 'tacky' and 'provocative' something is, just in case you thought they were being a tad gratuitous or attempting to have their cake and wank over it there. If you're still struggling to decide how disgusted you are, you can enlarge nine of the pictures. Thanks for that, Simon Cable (see also first link). I think my favourite bit of that article is the phrase 'semi-naked man'; there's something about the use of 'semi-naked' as a description that always tickles me. It's a combination of the fact that you could replace the word 'semi' with 'not' and have it be just as accurate, and the way that it it implies something shocking about people who still have all the rude bits of their body covered. "Hey, did you see the Ricky Hatton fight the other night? Semi-naked, he was!".

Fun with figures in the Express

Today's latest bag of immigration crap from the Express is £200M BENEFITS BILL AS OUT-OF-WORK POLES FLOOD BACK. I say 'latest'; the £200m benefits figure, and indeed the entire premise of this story, might sound familiar to those of you who read a strikingly similar piece by Nick Fagge at the start of this year. According to journlisted, Fagge published a story which began "THOUSANDS of Eastern European migrants who lose their jobs plan to ride out the recession on British 
benefits – costing taxpayers around £200million a year" on January 8th this year, however the link it gives is now dead.

Helpfully, you can Google a bit of that to find the article pasted on a truckers' forum here. The phrase "THOUSANDS of Eastern European migrants who lose their jobs plan to ride out the recession on British 
benefits" is repeated wholesale in the new article, which claims "Last month the Daily Express revealed how thousands of ­Eastern European migrants who lose their jobs plan to ride out the recession on British benefits".

Here's another similarity. Fagge's January article said:

The average family with children can claim around £715 a week in benefits in Britain, compared with just £178 in countries such as Poland.

...that latter figure seems to have been 'sexed down' in Martyn Brown's new version:

A family of four immigrants can pocket an average in benefits of £715-a-week in Britain, compared to £125 in Poland.

Evidently a rapid decline in Polish benefits in the last couple of months!

The £200m figure is particularly interesting. It seems to have been extrapolated from a previous figure of £125m. The closest we get to a source for these figures is this line casually tossed in at the end:

In August 2007 there were 112,000 Eastern Europeans claiming £125million a year. That is now expected to soar to £200million.

So what we have here is an unsourced guess which seems to be based on an estimate of how many Poles will lose their jobs but stay here. Already the figures look rather shaky, but where does the £125m a year come from? As far as I can make out, it's the same £125m figure James Slack was using in the Mail. Well, as 5cc covered last August, that figure seems to be something of a mess itself. In brief, it's estimated from some figures in an official Home Office report (pdf) that covered a three-year period, on the apparent assumption that everyone in those three years claimed their entire benefit all the time. The £125m figure is completely unverifiable; Slack has conjured them up from his table, but they're based largely on guesswork. The figures he uses for the numbers of Eastern Europeans claiming benefits are the total number of applications received in a three-year period, with no indication of how many of those might have stopped receiving them or how he's arrived at a specific total from decidedly less specific original figures.

I tried to work out how he got to £125m a year, but using the figures in the table, the closest I could get was around £111m a year, and that was based on an absolute maximum whereby every one of those applicants claimed the total benefit they were entitled to for the full three years in the report (something we know not to be true, since the figures break down year-by-year showing that only a fraction of the applications in the period concerned were approved in 2004 and 2005, with the majority only beginning to claim in 2006-7, where the report concludes, meaning most had been claiming for less than half that period).

Trying to work out these figures is a bit of a wild goose chase though, so let's step back and look at the bigger picture; what does this £200m a year in 'benefits' include? The word 'benefits' instantly conjures up dole money and people faking it on the sick, but when the word 'benefits' is applied to immigrants, it covers a multitude of things, the most ludicrous of which are tax credits and child benefits. In both those cases, you have to be working and therefore paying tax to receive them. Child benefit is a tiny rebate of the tax and average working person would pay, and tax credits again are simply rebates for people working and paying tax. They have nothing to do with what the Express wants you to imagine, which is scrounging Poles on the dole. And yet these will comprise a huge proportion of the "£200m a year benefits" figure. The whole premise of the article is misleading; £200m 'benefits' a year doesn't mean a great deal if they're benefits paid to working people, because working people contribute more to the country in tax than they get in child benefit, tax credits, pensions and all the other miscellaneous shit the Express is including in its made-up total.

As another example of how wacky these figures are, we get this:

Up to 200,000 Poles are set to flood back here as they become disillusioned by the reality of the economic downturn back home.

So where does the '200,000 Poles set to flood back' idea come from? Oh, right, here:

Nearly half of Britain’s 450,000 Polish workers were expected to leave as businesses were struck by the credit crunch last year.

And here:

Up to 200,000 migrant workers are set to lose their jobs this year.

If this is saying what I think it is, 200,000 migrants are going to lose their jobs. All of them will go home to Poland, and then all of them will come (or 'flood', if you prefer) back to the UK. Amazingly, despite having lost their jobs, they will return here and get jobs, because having jobs is the only possible way they could receive anything like £200m a year in benefits. Ever get the feeling that these figures are based on so many separate guesses that they're utterly meaningless?

But even if these figures were accurate, is there any point to them, beyond pointing the finger at immigrants in these economically-troubled times? Expect more nonsense in the coming weeks and months about how the Poles are getting it all nice easy while the hardworking British man gets shafted.

Only the FSM can save us now!

It's sometimes reassuring to find that it's not only articles in the lowbrow Mail that cause me to want to bang my head on the desk. Yes, it's Guardian time! Enter, stage left, the frequently pointless CiF Belief blogger Andrew Brown, attempting to troll both religion and science at the same time with his usual panache in If God does not exist, we must urgently invent one. First off, some background if you've never read Andrew Brown. He's sort of pro-religion and sort of pro-science, and so his blogs tend to alternate between annoying both camps as he bravely tries to reconcile science and religion with whatever tools he can find (although he's still not as annoying as Mark Vernon).

The other thing to note about Brown is that he bags a lot of angry comments because he isn't particularly adept at getting his point across. He had to enter his comments section on numerous occasions the other day in the entry Why religion can't be just for consenting adults to try and explain what he was getting at when he wrote things like;

But religion is not like that. Any religion is much more a matter of "Yes" and "No" – things that any child can understand, and can't in fact be brought up without

(The premise of his column seemed to be that children can't logically understand religion, so you need to just inculcate it into them in the same way you teach them not to run out in front of a lorry, apparently under the impression that kids remain impervious to any kind of logic until they turn 16).

Anyway, back to today's effort, and Brown starts his column off by setting up and then knocking down an atheist straw man argument that will piss off both camps:

If God won't rescue us from impending doom, as the Archbishop of Canterbury claims, what possible use is it to believe in him? This looks like a knock-down argument, but it turns out to be a swing at empty air.

For background, the Archbishop of Canterbury recently tried to stave off people wondering where the fuck this God guy has got to by saying that he was going to leave us alone to figure out climate change and economic problems by ourselves (see God 'will not give happy ending' - stop sniggering at the back, perverts!). Brown reckons that atheists will try and show this as evidence that believing in God is pointless, which some of them probably will. They shouldn't bother though; if people managed to stay religious despite being hit with two World Wars, the AIDS epidemic, and that fucking Sandi Thom single from a couple of years back, it seems that the belief that God actually cares enough to save us from abject misery isn't a prerequisite for believing he exists.

Brown makes pretty much this point, albeit without the needless swearing and comedy 'incongruous third item in a list' technique I just used, but so far so good. He then goes on to argue that this means religious people therefore have to believe that we can save ourselves. What do atheists believe, then? That we're all screwed and can't possibly do any good? Presumably atheism is basically the same thing as nihilism now. Brown goes on:

So wouldn't we be better to trust to our own powers, and to our rational self-interest? This is where the argument gets interesting: if our rational self-interest were enough to solve the problems of humanity, we would hardly have any at all.

Let's enjoy that last bit again; "if our rational self-interest were enough to solve the problems of humanity, we would hardly have any at all". Hold that thought while you read this bit:

If the global crises facing the world are to be solved, then this will demand something that looks very like a religion. It will be necessary to invent god because organised religions or things very like them are the only ways ever discovered to make millions of civilians co-operate whole-heartedly.

Now let's go back to his previous argument, and replace 'our rational self-interest' with 'religion' and see how it sounds. "If religion were enough to solve the problems of humanity, we would hardly have any at all". Wow, it works pretty much just as well, doesn't it? I'd have more sympathy with this whole piece if it was clear that we'd been led into disaster by thousands of years of a dominant atheist paradigm, but a quick glance across the globe suggests that we're not about to be electing Richard Dawkins ruler of the world any time soon. Did I miss the meeting where atheism killed off religion?

The blog essentially comes down to a false dichotomy; there's rationality and there's religion, only one can save us. People have worked together in the name of God before, whereas by not believing in God you essentially commit yourself to a life of self-interest. Y'know, if you ignore all the examples of altruism in animals, and the history of the ethic of reciprocity, among other things.

So, let's accept for a moment the premise that the non-religious are gonna be too self-involved to convince people that climate change is worth doing something about. How does Brown propose we go about establishing this new quasi-religion in an era of science and education where large numbers of people (like me) have grown accustomed to the idea that you can get along just fine without the need to serve the nebulous interests of an invisible entity that may or may not have a beard and may or may not be a complete bastard? Well, he doesn't. He merely seems to be lamenting that we'd be able to get everyone to work to a common goal if only they all believed the same improbable thing. Well done, you just successfully wasted my time arguing that we could solve climate change by simply doing something completely impossible! If we're just going to make up fantasy solutions to climate change, might I propose that we build a massive metaphysical knife capable of stabbing God with, so we can rough him up a bit in a cosmic subway and threaten him until he comes to help sort out the mess?

Perhaps the biggest problem with all this is that even if we could convince everyone to join hands across the globe under the same religion, we'd still be have some work to do to convince many of them that climate change actually exists. Since the current Bible seems to missing the pages that explain what to do in the event of the build-up of man-made greenhouse gases causing an upward temperature shift, we're going to have to also come up with the authority that it exists, presumably without using actual science since that's incapable of uniting people. Of course, if you want to appoint me as the God figure in our sassy new 21st century religion, I'll be happy to don an ethereal-looking white robe and dictate 'Anthropogenic global warming is hella real, kids, be cool!' to whatever stone-tablet scribes you've got handy. Always like to do my bit, see. I'd also be prepared to work under the noodly appendages of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, if you need someone a bit more photogenic than me.

Hopefully the last Dunblane update ever

In a previous entry, I made the following promise:

If the Express do make a better fist of apologising than the standard 'remove the article from the internet and it's all alright', I'll gladly tip my hat to them though.

Well, yesterday's Scottish Sunday Express did indeed make a (slightly) better first of apologising, and you can read it here. I wasn't pushing for heads to roll or for Paula Murray to be publicly flogged, so I suppose I should be happy, but the nature of the apology leaves a bit of a bad taste in the mouth. It's hugely self-serving, the bulk of it being dedicated to talking about how the Scottish Sunday Express is a 'great newspaper' which has 'enjoyed a long love affair with the people of our nation' and 'established a reputation for crusading journalism'.

The apology does eventually get round to admitting that they 'got it all wrong', which is what we wanted them to acknowledge, but immediately goes back on the defensive by erecting the following enormous straw man; 'It is our belief that nobody was misquoted'. That was never the point. It was suggested that MSP Elizabeth Smith was quoted out of context (suggested, indeed, by Smith herself), but no-one ever sought to claim she didn't say what she said or that the quotes pulled from Facebook weren't accurate, and it was always a side-issue. It was about people being tired of a press which increasingly seems to be losing the ability to differentiate between deserving targets and innocent ones, between stories and non-stories, between scandalous behaviour and the utterly normal boozing of 18-year-olds. Or worse, papers who can distinguish between those things but carry on anyway, expecting to get away with it. As the press rails against ministers for claiming ridiculous expenses using the excuse that they operated within the rules, this was a chance to remind the press that just because it might be legal to publish details of these young people now they've turned 18, that doesn't make it the right thing to do.

Hopefully this will all get put to bed now, but it's been interesting while it lasted. It's got people talking (again) about the relative roles of the mainstream media and bloggers/the internet. It seems that the massive surge in interest in this story over the past week or so online may have played a role in getting an apology of reasonable-ish prominence (it was on page 5 and quite long, rather than buried in the letters pages). We shouldn't overstate the case, but the the petition (currently just past the 10,000 signatures barrier) and the intervention of high-profile folks like Graham Linehan getting the word out probably helped (Linehan certainly helped me at any rate; my comments exploded briefly after he re-tweeted one of my entries). All this is good news for bloggers, and sometimes it's tempting to get overexcited about the role of new media like this. The internet, when mobilised, is proving a great way of organising responses, correcting facts and exploding myths, and the best bloggers are often hugely more entertaining and thorough than their hamstrung mainstream counterparts, partly because we don't have to spend most of our time copying out Reuters reports or talking about Jade Goody when we couldn't give a shit. There are certain benefits to writing for the love of it/because you have something to say, which you can lose to an extent when going professional and having to work to tight deadlines.

That said, most of us don't want to see the mainstream media die (not least because I'd have to find something else to moan about). What we can hopefully achieve is some greater quality control. Maybe, just maybe, more outrages like this might end up with the Paula Murrays of this world doing proper investigative journalism instead of poring over the Facebook accounts of people who were once nearly killed and really ought to be left alone. If there's a message that comes out of the ongoing Internet vs Print Journalism wars, hopefully it will be that journalists need to up their game. Make your USP the fact that you can do better research than the average blogger, or write more eloquently. Uncover the real hidden stories which we don't have time, contacts or ability for, go after the real shitbags, and then write about them in a compelling way. People will continue to pay for quality, so let's have it, and remember that when you try and foist too much shit on people, they will let you know about it.

These kids may not be guilty now, but give them time!

Time for a complete non-story which is nevertheless an interesting indication of the way the Mail's sensationalism and dog-whistling gets their readers angry at shit that the articles technically don't say. The story is Boy aged TWO is youngest Briton to be threatened with an Asbo after he is accused of verbally abusing adults. It takes a whopping 23 paragraphs before we get to the police confirmation that the letter threatening the two-year-old with an ASBO was sent to the wrong address by mistake.

He added: 'Having conducted a review of these incidents, it now transpires one of the households has been incorrectly identified to ourselves as having children who may have been responsible.

'It has since been brought to our attention that the letter sent in error was received by a family with a child of two years of age, this was clearly not intended and we apologise for any distress this may have caused.'

So, it's essentially the perennial "Man wrongly sent £6billion phone bill!" fluff piece, except the headline and the structure of the article is done in such a way that the casual reader might be forgiven for thinking it's actually one of the Mail's even more perennial "Kids are running riot in the streets, only Littlejohn can save us now!" scare stories. And heck, it seems to work if the comments are any guide. The charming A.Hiscox writes:

Nice to see that the mum has a different surname to her youngest child and both the mum and the youngest child have different surnames to the current partner. No mention of the older two's surnames, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was another surname there too!

Actually, the article gives the surname of the youngest child as Poyser, which is in fact the same surname as her mother's partner, so he's clearly living with both his parents, but his mother hasn't changed her name because they're not married. The commenter has no evidence at all for his assertion that the other kids are born to different fathers, but, y'know...c'mon...chavs innit?!?! John G from Lancashire doesn't fuck around and gets straight to whatever he thinks the point is:

what the hell is wrong with this country

No time even for a question mark, this shit is too urgent! Helpfully, he gets an answer from Lou in Derbyshire:

what is wrong with this coountry is that it is ruled by children, the vast majority of them are horrible hooligans with parents who just ignore them. They are unable to discipline them and therefore they grow up with no fear or respect.

Elizabeth from London doesn't know if these kids are innocent or guilty, but they clearly will be one day:

3 kids at the age of 24??? Great, and of course she isn't working and living off the state...I can believe that those kids are trouble already, and if they are not yet, they will definitely be in the future!!!

Someone living in France cuts through the boring complexity of social issues and makes a devastatingly strong and original point which should shame us all into action over whatever the problem is here:

You couldn't make it up! What has happened to 'Great Britain'? It seems that it has totally lost it's "Great".

The dangers, there, of getting your impression of what Britain is like from the pages of this rag. The excellent thing about that one is that you could copy and paste it into about 80% of Mail stories and it would make about as much sense.

The comments, sadly, continue largely in this vein; a couple of people pointing out that it was a mistake and the kids have done nothing wrong, getting lost in a sea of self-righteous posturing and sanctimonious finger-wagging from the Mail readers, who have a go at the mother for letting her kids do things they haven't done, provide advice about how she should get them in line whether or not they're out of line, and generally lament the collapse of society. Perhaps the bleakest comment is one from Donna in Edinburgh. Unlike some of the others, she appears to have actually read and understood the story, and yet she sweeps the 'not actually true' detail aside;

...yes the letter was a mistake. But I bet you the children are not as Innocent as she makes them out to be.

You know, I try not to to criticise Mail readers too much, because I feel most of them are just badly let down by the warped interpretation of Britain their paper gives them, but sometimes they really don't make it easy to sympathise.