There are days when you’ve just got to laugh…

£8m donor to Tory party was delusional, son tells court

I have to say that from where I’m sitting that seems to be less a headline and more an axiom but do go on…

When David Cameron became leader of the Conservatives in November 2005 he must have been thrilled to know that the party was about to receive a huge £8.2m bequest from one of its staunchest supporters. But nearly two years on, the Conservatives yesterday found themselves in the high court trying to prove they are entitled to the money, after their supporter’s heirs claimed Belgrade-born millionaire Branislav Kostic - known to his friends as Bane - was suffering from “insane delusions” when he made his will.

I’m intrigued - just how insanely delusional does someone have to be to be to donate £8 million to the Tory Party?

Andrew Simmonds QC, for the Tories, argued that he gave the party the money because he was disappointed with his family and because “of his great and long-standing affection for the Conservative party and his admiration for Mrs Thatcher”.

Well yes, that might well qualify, although there’s rather a lot of it still about.

He was, according to Ms Montgomery, “gripped by delusions concerning conspiracies, dark forces and plots to kill him that had already begun to poison his relationship with his wife and sister and came to distort much of his world view.

Your average neo-con forum troll/blogroach then, so I guess the sheer weight of numbers militates against that as conclusive evidence of insanity.

In December 1984 he wrote to Mrs Thatcher telling her she was the only person in the free world who could save “us” from bestial monsters. “You are the only hope for a dignified decent and honest future,” he wrote.

Mmm… things are starting to look a little dicey…

“Please rehabilitate Cecil Parkinson he is a victim of organised crime … I am sending a cheque for £5,000 to fight the evil and wicked demons and satans and I am fully at your disposal.”

Pardon? Is he suggesting that it was the Mafia that got Parkinson’s secretary up the duff?

He also sent a £3,000 cheque to Lord Tebbit, then chairman of the party.

Well at least that confirms what we’ve thought all along. Norman Tebbit (Witchfinder General) does have a plausible ring to it…

In 1987 he wrote to then Conservative MP David Mellor, asking him to be a trustee for a new will that would leave everything to the Conservative party and disinherit his own family. He asked for his help against the “dark forces” massed against him.

Now that clinches it - he wrote to David Mellor and asked him to be a trustee for his will? That’s about as open and shut as it gets - give the family their money back…

The court heard that at two meetings and two lunches at Simpsons in the Strand with a solicitor from the firm, Kostic made two new wills - tearing up one - and then settled on one he had written himself, aiming to give the cash to a new organisation called the Margaret Thatcher Revolution.

So had she not been unceremoniously ejected from Downing Street by her own party, Thatcher’s retirement plan seems to have been that of hosting her own late night Channel Four comedy/chat show? I’ll bet that ‘Four Fascists and a Piano’ were a bit pissed off when that gig feel though… still it does go some way to explaining 18 Doughty Street.

Mr Simmonds, for the Conservatives, said Kostic had been described by friends and family as warm, generous, gregarious and a man of great intelligence. His letters demonstrated a love of language and an “appreciation of metaphor and hyperbole”.

You see, he wasn’t mad, just literate…

He added that, while it was accepted that Kostic suffered from a delusional disorder, it was not accepted that this rendered him incapable of making a proper will.

<PAXMAN> Yeeeeeeeessssssssss! </PAXMAN>

I guess that if this proves anything, its that you don’t have to be mad to donate money to the Tories…

…but it sure does help!

Dale’s having another hissy fit - shall we have a look through the round window..?

BBC Bans Emily Maitliss Spectator Column

I’ve never seen Matthew D’Ancona fulminate before, but I suspect he might self combust when he appears on my 18 Doughty Street show tonight at 10pm. Why? Because the BBC have stopped Newsnight presenter Emily Maitliss from writing for The Spectator. Her diary last week provoked the ire of BBC head honcho Helen Boaden, who overrulled Head of News Peter Horrocks and told Maitliss she could in future keep her thoughts to herself. It seems the BBC are still in the post Hutton paranoia era.

Paranoia about what, exactly? (as usual, Iain’s spitting out accusations without citing sources properly and linking to the material he claims to be a bone of contention)

Fortunately, your humble scribe has no such problems, and here (in full) is the diary entry by Maitlis, which Dale claims provoked the ‘ire’ of Helen Boaden…

Diary

Emily Maitlis

Washington

High tea with George Bush in the Oval Office. Polite but tough questioning on my book. He tells me how much he’s enjoyed reading it. Next stop, the wonderfully counter-counter-cultural bowling alley with Dick Cheney, flanked by Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History. They tell me how much they’ve enjoyed my book.

Paris

Croque monsieur for 70 at the Elysée Palace with Nicolas Sarkozy. Nico tells me he’s only just put down my book. I tell him how much I’m enjoying his presidency. We part amicably.

Afghanistan

To the Tora Bora caves for mint tea with Bin Laden, author of 9/11, then off kite-flying with his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. They tell me they take issue with my thesis but have greatly enjoyed my book.

London

I, Emily, awake from terrifying yet exhilarating dream in which I have become Andrew Roberts, the historian. Realise with much sadness that no global leader has ever complimented me on my book. Recall with yet more dismay that I have never actually written one. Put on washing: economy, coloureds, max spin, 60 degrees. Then hastily pick up names dropped carelessly around bedroom in my sleep. Minus a few which I kick under the chair for later use. Piers Morgan has sent me an email advising Beroccas, a pint of milk and a few prayers before we meet for lunch.

Life as a newsreader would not be complete without the wonderful world of award ceremonies. I’m not talking Cannes, Bafta, Venice anything that obvious. No, I mean the Oscars of the Heating and Ventilation World, the Pride of Plumbing, the Celebration of Steel. Believe me, the list goes on. Protocol dictates that you host the awards with a friendly hello and brief introduction. But sometimes your mind goes blank. I have just hours to go and nothing to kick off the evening. In panic I call up Andrea Catherwood and Katie Derham and seek help. The TV girls are united. You need autocue mishaps, they say. And shower me with their cast-offs. ‘Have you done the one where you say, “That’s all from the one o’clock news, I’ll be back with the main news just before sex”?’ Katie asks. ‘What about, “And now for the weather, frequent rain and a lot more drivel to come”?’ Andrea offers up. Ah, to have such friends. We have shared on-air maternity wear, baby clothes, career highs and lows. But to lend another your own cock-ups? Greater love hath no man.

Excited call from the Newsnight producer. I have made it, she informs me, on to The Noticeboard. Oh hallowed wall. This is where all our press mentions, our newspaper clippings are proudly displayed. The investigative reporting that has helped fell governments; the devastating discoveries, the piercing interviews. Was my recent forensic questioning of Hamas picked up by the Independent? Could the New Statesman have warmed to my discussion of motoring and embarked on a three-part series in my name? My reverie is quickly shattered when Lucy tells me. ‘You’re in heat magazine. As Parky’s pin-up. I stuck it on the board anyway.’ I am flattered. (Michael, truly I am.) But why oh why couldn’t it have been for the London Review of Books?

Milo, aged two, has developed a fixation with Spartacus, introduced to him by his nanny. I’m delighted, in a pushy Notting Hill-mother way, although struggling to recall who Spartacus was. Mark, his father, is not impressed. Spartacus, he reminds me, was the Roman initiator of the Slaves’ Revolt, fomenter of the Uprising. But he is possibly reading more into the situation than it warrants when he tells me he believes this is our long-suffering nanny’s way of asking for a pay rise and that she is about to leave us. I begin a frenzied scouring of our Greco-Roman glossary in panic. But the situation miraculously resolves itself. Spartacus, it turns out, is actually a cartoon superhero called Sportacus who Saves the Planet. His best friend is Stephanie. She has Barbie-pink hair and Barbie-pink shoes and the kind of dress that makes Zandra Rhodes look like a home secretary. On Thursday Milo announces he no longer dreams of being Spart/Sportacus. He wants to be Stephanie instead. Mark, his father, is not impressed.

I am presenting News 24 from outside Parliament as Tony Blair quits the stage and Gordon Brown shuffles in. It is momentous, it is emotional, but more than anything, it is wet. It reminds me of a day, exactly ten years ago, when I witnessed and reported on another handover of power — as Hong Kong was returned to China. Then, as now, the driving rain seemed to compound the very Britishness of the occasion. We never knew if Chris Patten was crying, or if a carefully positioned raindrop merely lent the shot more poignancy. At home, Milo is watching. ‘Why is Teddy Bear leaving?’ He asks Mark. ‘Mummy just said Teddy Bear was leaving Sedgefield.’ Why he gets the name of a remote Durham constituency right I will never fully understand.

And so, finally, to a charity do for Breast Cancer Haven that I am hosting with Rory Bremner. During drinks beforehand I spy Andrew Roberts. I blush and tell him how much I am enjoying his book.

Emily Maitlis is a BBC newsreader and a contributing editor of The Spectator.

You know, I read it two or three times and about the only faintly objectionable thing I can see in it is that its shite…

No, to be fair, I can see that Bin Laden gag at the top (and if any of Dale’s regulars are looking in, there is no book, just so know) might not go down a storm in some quarters - unfortunately for Dale those quarters would consist entirely of the same people who’re likely to be feverish scribbling green ink notes of complaint to the Beeb having been entirely taken in by Dale’s histronics.

But the article is still shite.

For fucks sake, so he’s got Matthew D’Ancona on the couch at Fox News Lite tonight (ooh no missus, don’t), he could just fucking say so without trying on such a desperate and blatantly obvious shill for viewers - is that stat porn really that bad at 18DS?

Did I mention that Maitlis’s diary column is shite?

But it is still one rule for some and a different rule for others. Why is Andrew Marr’s diary in the Telegraph more acceptable than an Emily Maitliss column in The Speccie?

Let me take a few wild guesses…

1. Andy Marr doesn’t do straight news broadcasting/presenting on a BBC contract these days (he’s a freelancer) - unlike Maitlis - so he creates no significant credibility issues for the Beeb if his Torygraph column’s a bit on the shite side. Maitlis’s column is, on the other hand, shite.

2. Andy Marr’s column - so far as one can tell from his latest missive - is played out pretty straight but with a somewhat conversational tone. Maitlis appears to channelling the bastard offspring of Billy Liar and the 3AM girls while writing her column - which is shite.

3. Marr doesn’t seem intent on making a complete arse of himself. Maitlis is doing little else but make an arse of herself by writing shite…

Oh, and her column… it’s shite, you know… especially the Spartacus/Sportacus ‘gag’ which is a pretty fucking weak method of admitting you watch Nick Jr while desperately to pretend you’re an intellectual.

I am so very glad I don’t have to watch what I say like everyone at the BBC seems to have to.

It doesn’t seem to me that the Beeb’s problem with Maitlis comes down to them expecting her watch what she says so much as the Beeb maybe worrying that any credibility she might have as a news presenter is going to disappear rapidly down the shitter if she keeps on knocking out great steaming piles of vacuous shite like that last diary column.

Look I’m not kidding - read it again… it’s shite.

But then that’s not really the kind of angle that speaks well of Matty D’Ancona’s stewardship of the Speccie - ‘Beeb pulls newsreader out of Spectator because her column is shite’ ain’t really the kind of headline that’s going to bump up the stat porn at 18DS much, which seems to be quite the most plausible explanation of Dale’s efforts to cry wolf.

It does seem off that Boaden should intervene to overrule Horrocks. He will not have been pleased. Ever ready with a quotable phrase, D’Ancona has called it the Vicky Pollard School of Managenment - yes but, no but.

Fuck me - we live in a country where you can’t shift for spotty faced youths imitating characters from Little fucking Britain and yet Dale still manages an effort that’s much more Stephen Pollard than Vicky Pollard.

So far as I can see, if takes the Vicky Pollard school of management to spare the Speccies reader the mind-numbing experience of Maitlis’s Jade Goody school of Dairy Journalism then that seems a pretty fair exchange in my book.

That said, it might be worth tuning in tonight to see D’Ancona fulminate, if only to see if anyone asks him the sixty four thousand dollar question…

Matthew. This column by Emily Maitlis… you actually paid her to write that shite?

Oh, btw - the image at the top is courtesy of Tim Ireland - so no nicking it without his permission…

Simon Heffer in today’s Torygraph…

We need to stop this, and to stop flagellating ourselves about drinking, because if not our attitude to the place of alcohol in our society is going to become downright silly.

For the avoidance of doubt, I am well aware of the following things. First, greater prosperity has left young people in particular with more disposable income than ever before, and for reasons of fashion they often choose to spend it on drink.

Second, being young, they behave appallingly having had some drink (though we have all seen older people do that, too).

Third, many from deprived backgrounds choose to spend an unhealthy proportion of their welfare benefits on drink, which causes them to beat their wives and children and to be incapable of productive work: disgusting activities, but ones that, short of totalitarian intervention by the social services, are unlikely to be stopped by sticking 7p on a pint of beer.

Fourth, we have many more casualties of drink in this country now than 25 years ago, a period in which consumption of alcohol has doubled. I do not find any of these things acceptable or even tolerable, and I am sure they are damaging society and incurring a huge cost to the taxpayer.

However, we need to put them in some perspective.

And the old cunt’s idea of perspective…

Something, obviously, must be done: but it needs to be targeted.

Licensees who sell drink to under-18s should be prosecuted, and they and their premises banned from selling alcohol indefinitely. If this hits some big supermarkets as well, so be it.

Pass one new law, which is to make punishable by a prison term the resale or trafficking of alcohol to minors.

Enforce the public order laws rigorously, with heavy fines and community orders - such as cleaning up the mess in town centres on a Friday and Saturday night - for those drunk in public.

Limit the opening hours of public houses. Refuse licences for off-sales to businesses in areas of high crime and disorder.

Make it easier for employers to sack staff who are ill or incapable through drink.

Above all, consider the issue of food stamps rather than cash to welfare claimants to prevent them from spending disproportionate amounts of taxpayers’ money on drink.

That’ll be a no to ‘compassionate conservatism’ then, Simon?

(First published at Guido 2.0)

This is my first proper article for Guido 2.0 (also posted over at my usual ‘hunting ground’, the Ministry of Truth) to which I’ll be contributing as and when I find the time (and Paul Staines is up to something that particularly piques my interest). As should, hopefully, be clear from my brief ‘hello world’ post, my real interest lies in the nature and use of spin and propaganda, which means that most of what I post here is likely to be directed towards deconstructing and debunking Staines’ incessant stream of political innuendo - showing you exactly how he bends the truth to advance his personal/political agenda.

For this article my focus will be three recent posts by Staines all of which relate to a market research company called Opinion Leader Research, of which the joint Chief-Executive is one Deborah Mattinson, who Staines describes as ‘Gordon’s personal pollster’. What I will be doing is fisking each of these three posts to show both where Staines has made basic errors of fact and where he has (deliberately) misrepresented certain matters in order to paint a picture of possible ‘corruption’ without the slightest shred of evidence to support such innuendos.

So let’s start at the beginning with this post from 26th Feb 2007:

Smith Institute’s Mattinson Spins Poll for Brown

The Brownites are obviously getting increasingly desperate about his bad personal poll ratings versus Cameron. The Guardian/ICM survey last week showing Brown 13% adrift of Cameron (worse than Blair) shook Labour MPs at a vital time and led to renewed calls for Labour to skip a generation with Miliband.

A week later comes the Brownite response, today’s Guardian reports on a survey of a hundred “opinion leaders” which shows Gordon outperforming Dave on a whole range of indicators - scoring a modest 92% on integrity.

Okay, that’s fine so far - all factually correct if somewhat meaningless - comparing a public opinion poll to a survey of 100 ‘opinion leaders’ is something of an ‘apples and oranges’ comparison, which would be a fair point to make - but then fair points are hardly Staines’ style.

Who conducted this highly scientific “survey”? None other than Opinion Leader Research run by Deborah Mattinson, the long time Labour Party consultant who is now Gordon Brown’s unofficial pollster and sits on the advisory committee of the Smith Institute - alongside the veteran U.S. pollster Bob Shrum. It was Shrum’s anti-Cameron advice to the Sith that forced the Charity Commission’s official investigation. Guido wonders why a non-partisan, non-political, educational charity has so many pollsters involved?

Mattinson does, indeed, sit on the advisory committee of the Smith Institute, as do 12 other people including Lord Whitty - now of the National Consumer Council but once the General Secretary of the Labour Party - Polly Toynbee of the Guardian and several academics…

…but not Bob Schrum, who is actually a research fellow at the Smith Institute and not a member of the advisory committee at all.

This paragraph also introduces what you will soon see is a standard theme of Staines’ posts about Mattinson and OLR, in which he refers to both as ‘pollsters’.

This, certainly in the case of OLR, is deliberate and misleading spin.

What does ‘Pollster’ mean to you? To many, if not most people it implies the kind of telephone survey-based political opinion polls that one gets bombarded with in the press, especially in the run to an election - the kind that asked people how they intend to vote or what they think of particular government policy. Indeed that’s exactly what Staines wants people to think because that would raise genuine questions about quite why the Smith Institute would have such a company involved in its work.

Look, however, at what OLR actually does - for which one simply has to visit its website - and one finds that very little of its work is survey-based and/or relates to questions of public/political opinion. Like most market research companies it offers a wide range of research services including focus group studies and even citizen juries - services that are clearly relevant to a non-partisan, non-political, educational charity that carries out research into matters of public policy.

‘Pollster’ is no where near being close to adequate describing the full scope of OLR’s work and is used by Staines to promote a deliberately narrow view of its activities of a kind that aims to mislead his readers into thinking that a company that carries out a wide range of research for clients using techniques that are applicable to many different areas of research does nothing more than surveys of political opinion that are limited application to the government. This, if one looks at OLRs portfolio of clients/research is anything but the case.

Mattinson has plenty of previous, she was wheeled out by the dark forces of the Sith the last time Brown’s negative ratings caused rumblings. Popping up in the Times with an article claiming, ironically, that it was all spin and that Gordon is in fact a popular guy.

Of course surveying “opinion leaders” is completely subjective and easily manipulated to give the required answers. Mattinson’s clients know it, but since her clients include Defra, the Department of Education and Science, the Department for Work and Pensions and coincidentally HM Treasury, you can be sure she knows where her bread is buttered and what they want to hear.

Most if not all forms of research can be readily manipulated to produce specific outcomes by a wide range of methods from how the research is constructed and carried out to how the results are interpreted and presented - in fact there is a massive body of literature in the sciences and social sciences on just this subject. The fact that research can easily be biased towards a particular outcome proves nothing without evidence to show a particular piece of research actually is biased.

What Staines fails to show here is any evidence that would support an assertion that OLR is producing, or has produced, deliberately biased or misleading research for, or on behalf of, its clients - there is no substance to his claims here, merely innuendo of a kind that one could level at any market research company working for any client at any time if one disapproves of the client or disagrees with the outcome of the research. It’s the stuff of conspiraloons and tinfoil helmets, which is entirely appropriate for Staines’ website as it does at least demonstrate that he knows his audience - he is writing primarily for people whose inclination is to believe the worst of the government irrespective of whether there is any evidence to back up such assertions and feeding them exactly what they want to hear. Whether there is any evidence to back his claims is, at best, a secondary consideration and more often than not a complete irrelevance.

Anyone with any common sense, of course, would ask to see some concrete evidence before accepting that such a claim is anything other than a bit of ’smoke and mirrors’ propaganda, especially when faced with such an obvious straw man argument.

Is Guido the only one who has noticed that in times of need, Gordon’s pollster conducts polls with dubious methodologies which she then writes up in hagiographical pro-Gordon articles?

Well that’s really up to Mattinson to decide whether to do that kind of research and write those kinds of articles, for newspaper editors to decide whether to publish the results of her polls and the readers of those newspapers to decide how much credence to give them - is there any material difference between Mattinson talking up Brown and the Telegraph talking up Cameron or are most of us well aware of where the print media’s various political biases lie and take pretty much everything with a pinch of salt. Again we have innuendo but no evidence to support the assertion.

Is Guido the only one who thinks there might, in the circumstances, be a serious conflict of interest in her not only sitting on the board of the Smith Institute but also having HM Treasury as a paying client? Who commissioned and paid for this survey of “opinion leaders”? How did she get the HM Treasury contract? Was it by competitive tender?

One quick error of fact to correct - Mattinson doesn’t sit on the Smith Institute’s board, she’s a member of an advisory committee, which is a very different thing.

As for whether or not a conflict of interest exists if and when OLR tenders for government contracts, well yes the potential does exist but then it always exists whenever anyone with an association with a party in government tenders for a government contract. That’s why governments have stringent tendering procedures to prevent such conflicts influencing decisions and everything from the National Audit Office and Audit Commission to the Public Accounts Committee to scrutinise such processes to ensure that they are handled equitably and without bias or political interference.

Once again, Staines is peddling innuendo without any evidence to back up an assertion of corruption, despite the fact that had he any evidence to offer he would be perfectly free to raise his ‘concerns’ with the National Audit Office or the Public Accounts Committee, both of whom have the authority to investigate such matters.

Guido has asked them repeatedly this morning who commissioned the poll, but nobody at Opinion Leader Research seems to know…UPDATE : Guido has just noticed that The Sun this morning headlines Deborah’s “survey” Brown is back in poll victory. Will that do Gordon?

I’m sure it will, but this is irrelvant - although it does lead us neatly in Staines’ second post on OLR, some two days later, in which he gets a reply to his questions:

Pollster’s Answers Lead to More Questions

Opinion Leader Research have got back to Guido and they say nobody paid for that research. They just asked questions slanted to favour Gordon for no particular reason.

There are one or two omissions of fact here that need to be explained before we move on.

The ICM poll that put Cameron 13% ahead of Brown was conducted on 16th-18th Feb 2007 and reported in the Guardian on 20th Feb.

The OLR survey of ‘opinion leaders’ was conducted between 15th and 20th Feb and hit the press on the 26th Feb - so the poll was completed on the same day that news of Cameron’s apparent 13% lead over Brown was published with the research having started the day before the ICM poll began.

That hardly supports the idea that OLR’s poll was a ‘response’ to the ICM poll, given that OLR started its research the day before ICM started asking questions for its survey - and in any case the two are very different polls with very different methodologies, which hardly makes them comparable in any meaningful sense.

As for the claim that OLR’s questions were biased toward Brown, what OLR actually asked was whether the respondents in its survey (20 senior execs in the city, 20 in major companies, 20 in NGOs, 20 in the media and 20 in politics and government) thought Brown and Cameron:

1. Believe in what they say

2. Have integrity

3. Lack real substance

4. Understand ordinary life, and

5. Would set this country in a better direction as Prime Minister.

And okay, one could well argue that question 4 is a tad biased given that everyone knows that Cameron is a scion of the aristocracy but as for the other four questions, its interesting to see Staines suggesting that questions about whether Cameron believes in what he says and has integrity and real substance are biased against him and in favour of Brown. That’s actually quitea remarkable assertion when one comes to think about - please don’t ask about Cameron’s integrity, its an unfair question (???). Hardly a ringing endorsement of Cameron is it?

They also say they won their lucrative HM Treasury contract and the Bank of England contract in a competitive tendering process.

They won’t say why the Treasury needs pollsters, what they poll about, or how much they have been paid.

Guido could understand if the Treasury needed statisticians, but pollsters? Perhaps the Bank of England would be interested in measuring, say for example, people’s inflation expectations, but their opinions? If public money has been spent by the Treasury on pollsters who have asked questions that assist Gordon in his personal political ambitions, that would be a massive breach of the Ministerial Code bordering on corruption. If it were to be proved that the payments to do something innocuous were effectively a hidden subsidy covering the costs of doing polling on issues of interest to Gordon Brown for no particular reason it would be scandalous.

Actually both of Staines’ questions are easy to answer on the basis of minimal research - it took me 10 minutes or so armed only with Google and Hansard, so its not that hard to find.

OLR did not actually do any ‘polling’ for the Treasury at all - because that was not what the contract they had in March 2006 was about. What they actually did is described here, on their own website where everyone can see it…

This research was commissioned by HM Treasury, on behalf of the Financial Inclusion Taskforce and its overall aim was to develop greater understanding of financial exclusion from the consumer perspective. In particular, the study was tasked with exploring the demand-side barriers to mainstream banking and to gain consumer views on how banking and credit services can be made more appropriate and accessible.

Four half day workshops were conducted across England, Scotland and Wales. Each workshop was attended by 40 people who were recruited according to quotas set to reflect the characteristics of the financially excluded.

Participants worked in groups to discuss their experiences and explore solutions. The research materials were designed using Easy Read stimulus to ensure they were accessible and engaging. Keypad quantitative technology was used to gather views and feed these back instantaneously; this process helped to engender a sense of collaboration amongst people in the workshop.

That’s not a ‘poll’ at all, nor is it inappropriate research for the Treasury to be undertaking, as Staines is trying to suggest - and it certainly isn’t backdoor opinion polling for Gordon Brown either.

What it is, is a perfectly legitimate series of focus group studies for a policy development taskforce looking at what, for some, is a very important issue - demand-side barriers to accessing mainstream banking services.

As for how much it cost - well one can say for certain that it cost less than 200,000 Euros for starters…

How do we know that? Well, because under EU law, the tender documents for any public sector service/supply contract with a value over 200,000 Euros has to be published in the Journal of the European Community and will appear on the EU’s Tenders Electronic Daily website - and as this contract does not appear on TED it has to have been for less than 200,000 Euros.

All of which explains why this next parliamentary question, to which Staines refers…

Since Gordon’s personal pollsters won’t give Guido answers, maybe Gordon will answer Stewart Jackson’s parliamentary questions?

• To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether the decision to engage Opinion Leader Research to undertake polling for HM Treasury was subject to a competitive tendering process and will he make a statement.
• To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer how much has been spent in each year since 2001 by HM Treasury on polling services provided by Opinion Leader Research and will he make a statement.

Got the following answer…

John Healey [ holding answer 1 March 2007]: The Treasury has not commissioned any opinion polling in the past three years. I refer to the answer I gave the hon. Member for Fareham (Mr. Hoban) on 4 December 2006, Official Report, column 196W.

In short, the research that OLR did for the Treasury was not an opinion poll - which Stewart Jackson could have found out from OLR’s website for nothing and saved the taxpayer the cost of yet another irrelevant written question.

And if one checks the response to Mark Hoban’s question on 4 December, one finds the actual costs of contracts awarded to OLR by the Treasury in the last three years given as follows…

John Healey: Over the last three financial years the Treasury has employed Opinion Leader Research Ltd. to conduct research on public attitudes towards public services and to inform decisions in the run up to the 2005 Budget (£19,021 in total); and to run workshops for the Financial Inclusion Taskforce (£133,237). The costs stated are excluding VAT.

Not much of a cover up is it - you can get the exact figures on what the Treasury actually paid OLR out of Hansard in a matter of 30 seconds simply by searching for ‘Opinion Leader Research’.

A co-conspirator points out that they also had no identifiable paying client for their “What it means to be British” research in 2005. Shortly afterwards Gordon began loudly banging his Britishness drum. Opinion Leader Research has helped Gordon on “Britishness” issues before, their research was used extensively in “New Britain” a 1999 publication produced by the Smith Institute. The pamphlet was itself singled out and explicitly criticised by the Charity Commission as being party political in the first 2001 investigation into the Sith.

There is a slight problem with this passage, one which, if one scans the comments on this article, is noted by someone named Julian:

Hope you are aware that Opinion Leader Research is just another of Chime Communications which also just happens to be the holding company of that well-known politically impartial organisation … Bell Pottinger.

Chime Communications is the owner of Opinion Leader Research and the CEO of Chime and Bell Pottinger is none other than Baron Timothy Bell, former MD of Saatchi and Saatchi and PR advisor to Margaret Thatcher… oops.

(Staines, naturally, fails update his original post to reflect this information, which completely destroys the main thrust of his innuendo, unless he’s going to suggest that Tim Bell has gone over to the ‘dark side’ and joined ‘The Sith’.)

Guido sees a pattern here; the Treasury hosts over a hundred of the Smith Institute’s seminars - rent-free, simultaneously the Treasury pays the Smith Institute to hold seminars. The Treasury pays Deborah Mattinson’s Opinion Leader Research generously, Deborah Mattinson sits on the Smith Institute’s board and does “polling” that is helpful to Gordon - for free. She also writes hagiographical press articles about Gordon, based on her own polling research, whenever negative independent poll findings come out.

Not only is there no evidence for any of this, but the information that was already in the public domain at the point this was written entirely contradicts the picture that Staines is trying to paint - never let documentary facts get in the way of a good bit of tinfoil-hatted innuendo never mind that its Tim Bell’s operation you’re slating here, eh Paul?

It is becoming increasingly clear that the taxpayer has been paying, via the Treasury, for Gordon’s polling and spin, all tightly coordinated via the Smith Institute to promote the Brownite political agenda. This is abuse of office.

Except, of course, that its not clear at all that that is what’s happening here. What the taxpayer has actually been paying for from OLR is a matter of public record and not only does nothing in the public domain support any of Staines’ innuendos, but much of it expressly contradicts his spurious claims.

And with that, we’ll move on to his last post on OLR, which appeared today…

Sith Pollster Believed Under Professional Standards Investigation

As if Gordon’s Sith allies didn’t have enough problems with the Charity Commission investigation, it appears that the Market Research Standards Board is to investigate Opinion Leader Research, Gordon Brown’s pollster. Guido called the Standards Board to get confirmation, but they said they could not comment on individual cases. When Guido asked them to confirm they weren’t investigating OLR, they declined.

Oo-er - sounds serious doesn’t it?

Except that when one looks at the kind of things that the ‘Market Research Standards Board’ tends to investigate one find that this includes:

Questionnaire wording - These complaints concern allegations of bias in the questionnaire. This includes the existence of ‘persuasive facts’ in the questionnaire and questions that lead respondents to a particular answer.

Interviewer behaviour : non member - Many complaints concern interviewers’ interaction with members of the public, for example, allegations of tactlessness, pushiness, or over familiarity. The MRS can investigate these complaints where the interviewer is supervised or is the responsibility of an MRS member or where the interviewer works for an MRS Company Partner organisation.

So, if there is a complaint against OLR it could be about any one of a number things and completely and utterly unrelated to any of the innuendos being spread by Staines or, alternatively, this rumoured complaint could be based on nothing more than the readily debunked and insubstantial innuendos that Staines published back in February.

Moreover, not only does the MRSB - which is only an internal watchdog of a trade association, after all - not confirm whether a complaint has been made against a member but it also does not publish any detailed information on any disciplinary matters even after they have been dealt with, the upshot of which is that there is no way of knowing if there is a complaint against OLR, where the complaint originated, what the substance of the complaint is or (eventually) the outcome of any investigation and or disciplinary proceedings, should any result. This is absolutely perfect terrain for an inveterate rumour monger and/or his camp followers as they can spread innuendo to their hearts content, safe in the knowledge that no one is likely to come out and directly contradict them or put the record straight, because such matters are dealt with entirely internally and the most that the Market Research Society publishes is general statistics on the number and type of complaints they receive.

In all respects this is even more fertile ground for running innuendo-based smears than usual as, unlike the Charity Commission, the MRSB does not publish its findings and there is, therefore, no chance of Staines’ little innuendos being publicly (and officially) debunked.

At this point, given Staines’ predilection for innuendo and conspiracy theories, lets throw a little innuendo of our own into the pot for a moment and see if what emerges sounds plausible.

Over the last few months, the Smith Institute and some of the those associated with it have been under a concerted attack from both Staines and the Tory Party, who see it as means of miring Gordon Brown down in as yet unsubstantiated allegations of low-level sleaze. And throughout this period the attacks have all followed roughly the same basic pattern.

It starts out with a stream of innuendos and very loose claims of unspecified ‘misconduct’, none of which can actually be substantiated and in which Staines typically plays a part in spreading the gossip. This is left to brew for a little while after which there is some sort of formal complaint to regulatory body, which is generally the point at which the rumours and innuendos get a bit of mainstream press coverage - largely because once the formal complaint goes in they can more or less get away with repeating the rumours and innuendos without much of a risk of catching a libel action in reply.

This was the pattern with the complaint to the Charity Commission, with the Tories recent speculative efforts to get the Electoral Commission to go a fishing expedition into the Smith Institutes finances and now the same pattern seems to be emerging around another organisation with links to the Smith Institute - Opinion Leader Research.

What all these complaints have in common, apart from the involvement of Staines (and the Tory Party) in spreading the innuendos as widely as possible and routinely purporting to be ‘in the know’ about them is:

a) They’re all indirect attacks on Gordon Brown’s integrity, routed via a relatively soft target, i.e. The Smith Institute,

b) None of them have been substantiated (as yet) in the slightest, and

c) They all related to activities in which the legal/regulatory framework that its alleged that the Smith Institute (and now OLR) have somehow breached is unfamilar to the public and in most respects rather arcane and technical.

For example - so far as one can tell, the Bob Shrum seminars on which the complaint the Charity Commission is based, were actually arranged through a subsidiary trading company owned by the Smith Institute - SI Event’s Limited. Now, in charity law, registered charities are permitted to own and operate trading subsidiaries - and many do - and those subsidiaries are not subject to the same restrictions on activities that apply to the charities themselves, provided that a clear dividing line is maintained between the work of the charity and that of its trading arm. That’s the legal position but it one that not well understood by the public - in fact most of the public are unlikely to even realise that such a thing is either possible or legal.

So while the law is clear, the public understanding of the law is, at best, vague, which creates just the right environment for the spreading of rumours and innuendo of a kind that relies heavily on the public’s lack of detailed understanding of the nuances and subtleties of charity law.

The same can be said of this Times report on the Tories recent complaint to the Electoral Commission, which includes the following entirely misleading statement:

Under electoral laws, any organisation that develops policy for political parties or helps promote politicians must declare all donations of more than £5,000.

This is only true of an organisation operating in electoral law as a registrable third party, which means an organisation that actively campaigns for or produces electional materials supporting a particular party or block of candidates or one that directly sponsors research that aims to promote a particular policy for or to a political party for political reasons - rules that cover the sponsorship of conferences and publications carried out to that end as well as the research itself.

However, such activities must also be expressly political and tied directly to a specific party (or parties) or a specific policy associated with a particular party - the rules are not generic or all encompassing and it’s simply not true that any organisation the develops policy for political parties must declare their donations - which is what the Times suggests. If it were then pretty much every political think-tank from the Adam Smith Institute and Centre for Policy Studies on the right to the IPPR on the left would have to register with the Electoral Commission and identify all their donors - which would make for interesting reading, certainly, but is hardly what any of main political parties would want.

At this stage, the only thing that gives any of these ‘complaints’ any credence at all is the fact that a regulatory body is or may be conducting an investigation into the allegations about which Staines and others have been spreading rumour and innuendo. But any such credence is necessarily subject to rather a sizeable ‘but’…

If you take the time to look at the regulations that govern any of regulatory bodies that have recently received Smith Institute-related complaints and read up on their own rules and codes of practice, then what becomes immediately apparent is that each of them is compelled by their own regulations to investigate complaints forwarded to them about organisations over which they have regulatory jurisdiction, irrespective of whether or not there is actually any substantive evidence of wrongdoing. All that is necessary to trigger the complaints procedure and cause an investigation to be conducted is a properly-formed allegation of misconduct, i.e. a complaint of a breach of regulations of a kind that is within the purview of the regulator to investigate. Satisfy that condition and the regulator is compelled to conduct at least an exploratory investigation to ascertain whether a full investigation is merited, even if that investigation turns up nothing of substance and proves only that the complaint itself in unfounded and lacks any factual basis.

It’s death by a thousand cuts, isn’t it - just keep throwing the mud and some of it will stick, at least until the investigation is concluded and a ruling is made, which could take months. In fact in the case of the Charity Commission it will take months, because their investigations invariably do.

Moreover, once the investigation is underway, there is very little that the organisation against which the complaint has been lodged can do, publicly, to refute allegations without being perceived to be trying to interfere with the course of the investigation - the Smith Institute, for the time being, simply cannot fight back because its hands are tied by the Charity Commission’s investigation - another fine point of Charity law that is not widely understood by the public is that Charity Commission investigations and ruling are, in law, of a judicial character, which means that the general rules of sub-judice apply. All the Smith Institute can do for the time being make flat denials and take a beating in the press until the conclusion of the investigation, at which point it may be able to fire back - but by then the damage may well have gone too far to be retrieved by publicly confronting its accusers.

Now you could write that off as simply a bit of spin on my own part - an effort to counter one set of conspiracy theories by clouding the waters with another conspiracy theory of my own, and its true that I have no more evidence for any of this last series of speculations that Staines has of corruption in any dealing between OLR and the Treasury.

The thing is, though, if there really were any substance to Staines’ rumours and innuendos about OLR and awarding of public sector contracts then that would amount to criminal corruption of a kind that would result in a Police investigation were a complaint made to them - in fact a Police investigation into such allegations would be far more damaging to Brown, the Smith Institute and OLR than Staines’ current run of innuendo or any number of complaints to ’soft’ regulators and trade associations - so why not make the complaint and have done with it?

Well, for two very obvious reasons:

1. Staines has no actual concrete evidence to support any his rumours and innuendos whatsoever, and

2. The little matter of the criminal offence of wasting police time.

If Staines was really in possession of evidence to show that OLR had been corruptly awarded government contracts or even confident that a police investigation - or even one by the National Audit Office or Public Accounts Committee - would turn up any such evidence, then he, or someone of similar mind and intent, would make the complaint and let the police investigate the matter. With the possibility of causing that kind of damage, why confine yourself to fifth rate innuendos on your website…

…unless all you’re doing is blowing smoke.

Guido has previously noted the cosy closeness of the relationship between OLR, HM Treasury, the Smith Institute, Deborah Mattinson and Gordon Brown. Whenever more objective polls are gloomy for Gordon, OLR can be relied on to produce “Gordon more popular than sliced bread” stories.

And Staines can be relied upon to spread rumour and innuendo, even when 10 minutes research turns up ample evidence that his allusions are without substance.

So perhaps the real question here is not so much who OLR are cosy with. but just exactly who Paul Staines is cosy with at the moment… any guesses?

All the talks of smears and stalkers over the last week or so is clearly getting to Iain Dale…

Furthermore, the affair was going on while he [Lord Goldsmith] was giving advice on the legality of the Iraq war. Inexplicably, he changed his mind on the legality of the war overnight. He had told the PM it could be illegal, and yet 48 hours later told the Cabinet the reverse. At he time it was thought that Lord Falconer, the then Lord Chancellor, had persuaded him of the error of his ways. I understand that Goldsmith’s affair with Kim Hollis was common knowledge in the upper echelons of the legal profession and would probably therefore have been known by Falconer. Is it beyond the realms of possibility for Falconer to have hinted at his knowledge at the time to Goldsmith?

Okay???

So what you’re suggesting Iain, is that Charlie Falconer might sidled up to Lord Goldsmith and said:

‘Look, I have to tell you that Tony’s not happy with the advice on Iraq… now about that barrister you’ve been knocking off on the side…’

There is only one possible response to that…

One has to wonder quite what Iain has in store for us this week.

Perhaps he’ll be telling us that it was Alistair Campbell who ordered Princess Diana’s assassination by MI6, because he’d thought up all that ‘People’s Princess’ shtick for Tony and decided it was too good not to use.

Or maybe he’ll tell us the real truth about Ollie North sending arms to Iran - that what he really sent them was a shipment of prosthetic arms.

And I really am looking forward to being told that Elvis is alive and well and will be doing a summer season at Butlins, this year, disguised as an Elvis impersonator.

D’oh!

Ben Goldacre comprehensively fisks Gillian McKeith…

In fact, I don’t care what kind of squabbles McKeith wants to engage in over the technicalities of whether a non-accredited correspondence-course PhD from the US entitles you, by the strictest letter of the law, to call yourself “doctor”: to me, nobody can be said to have a meaningful qualification in any biology-related subject if they make the same kind of basic mistakes made by McKeith.

Not an article by McKeith, but her entire career.

Just read and enjoy…

(via Mr Eugenides)

UPDATE: More detail here - http://www.badscience.net/?p=362

Christ, the more you dig around in places like Fox News Lite, the more seriously scary wing-nuttery you uncover.

Michael Ehioze-Ediae is a bit of new one on me, although a quick Google search adds membership of the Conservative Christian Fellowship (quelle surprise) and a recent debut on ‘Conservative Home Television’ (produced by Fox News Lite, naturally) to his offical ‘rap sheet’ as “a member of the Editorial teams of CentreRight.com and 18Doughty Street’s news agenda.”

What caught my attention was a current ‘News Agenda’ piece carrying Michael’s byline, which start out mundanely enough with the headline, ‘Time to stop Ahmadinejad‘ and then barrels rather quickly into ‘2. The legal case for war’.

Whoa there. Can we stick to one, err sorry, I mean two wars at a time (Iraq & Afghanistan) here. Isn’t that enough to be going on with?

Still, this kind of thing needs checking out, so what we do find but young Michael reporting on ‘an event organised by the Conservative Friends of Israel” during the course of which “a group of jurists presented their case for international legal action against President Ahmadinejad of Iran.”

They want to prosecute Ahmadinejad? Okay… let’s take a look…

Ah, right. I get it… Michael, do you not think it worth mentioning that the ‘group of jurists’ comes from the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists (ILJAJ) and that the report is co-published by the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, so it’s not exactly impartial here is it?

Nevertheless, the IAJLJ is actually an organisation with a decent historical provenence to it, so I thought I’d take a bit of a look at the argument they’re advancing, which rests largely on article 3c of the UN Convention on Genocide, which covers direct and public incitement to commit genocide… and okay Ahmadinejad’s a bit of wingnut, himself, but even so, much of the actual argument in this report is stretching credibility.

But what really doesn’t help, in terms of credibility, is the highly selective ‘evidence’ presented of Ahmadinejad’s alleged incitements in appendix 1 of the report, in which the authors selectively cite an Al-Jazeera mistranslation of what is his most notorious (and routinely misrepresented statement), “As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map.” only to later cite another part of the same speech, this taken from a different and much more credible translation, in which the infamous ‘wiped off the map’ comment is accurately rendered as;

“‘Imam [Khomeini] said: ‘This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history.’ This sentence is very wise. The issue of Palestine is not an issue on which we can compromise.

(Quick note - MEMRI, who provide the accurate translation, includes amongst its founders, an ex-Israel Military Intelligence Colonel and a number of prominent Neo-cons, so it Ahmadinejad had specificall said ‘wiped off the map’ then you can damn sure that’s what the MEMRI translation would say).

This might seem like hair-splitting, but there is considerable semantic difference between idea of wiping a country off the map and eliminating a regime from the pages of history, and such things would be important in the unlikely event of Ahmadinejad ever finding himself in front of a court on a charge of inciting genocide.

Still what do you expect when you discover also that the “included MPs from the main British political parties such as Michael Ancram, Michael Gove and David Trimble.” (so the ‘main British political parties’ amount to the Tories and the Ulster Unionists???) and also on the guest list was “Benjamin Netanyahu the former Israeli Prime Minister.”

The whole ‘what did he really say?’ thing is well enough elsewhere not to dwell on it too much, but the general gist is that what these jurists are arguing for is for a criminal trial at the Internation Court, which rather leaves me at a loss to understand quite how Michael gets from there to…

2 The Legal Case for War

You fucking what? But, hey, it gets better

Article 2(4) of the UN charter prevents a party from making statements threatening the use of force against another state. Further Article 51 of the same charter permits a state to act in self defence against a state threatening it. It is argued that these legal provisions give Israel the right to attack Iran after its President called for it to be wiped of the map. A call he has made repeatedly. Ahamdinejad has constantly referred to the fact that he was only repeating what the Imam stated. By Imam he means the late Ayatollah Khomeni. This implies that wiping Israel of the map is also a religious duty.

This whole passage is a complete and utter load of bollocks. Article 2(4) does indeed mention threats:

All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

But article 51, doesn’t and authorises military action only in self-defence and if actually attacked

Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defence shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.

In short, pre-emptive strikes are no a legitmate response to a bit of verbal sabre-rattling. But if that weren’t a bad enough bit of misrepresentation, we then move on to this…

Iran is developing a nuclear weapons programme and it has been estimated by the head of Mossad that it has about 3 years to develop a nuclear weapon. This will give it the ability to carry out its threat.

Just one point to make here, which seems to completely escaping most pundits. In order to nuke Israel, Iran must also be prepared to nuke Islam’s third most holy site (the Al Aqsa Mosque) after Mecca and Medina, the location from which Mohammed, according to Islamic tradition, ascending to heaven in the company of the Archangel Gabriel for quick tour, during which he received the commandments (including the five daily prayers) before nipping back down to Mecca to pass them on to the faithful.

In other words, an act that, broadly speaking, could be matched by Christians only if the Vatican decided to nuke somewhere like Bethlehem.

I don’t know about you but from where I’m sitting that does rather work against the idea of Muslims deliberately irradiating the fuck out of Jerusalem, however much they might have in for the Israelis, because somewhere in this I think they’d quite like the Mosque back, and undamaged as well.

Still accuracy clearly isn’t Michael’s forte as he then goes on to state:

Ahmadinejad’s behaviour follows the same pattern as Hitler of Nazi Germany. He stated in his book Mein Kampf that he intended to exterminate the Jews and he carried out this threat by killing 6 million Jews. We must therefore act before history repeats itself.

Sorry, Michael, wrong again. Mein Kampf was published in two volumes in 1925 and 26 and while old Adolf did have plenty to say on the subject of Jews and most (all) of what he did say was pretty in your face, he never actually got around to stating that he intended to exterminate them in either volume - with fourteen years to read through it before World War II kicked off, I do reckon someone might just have noticed the bit about extermination rather before whole shooting match actually kicked off.

You haven’t actually read Mein Kampf, have you? Which is not such a bad thing in some respects, although I would suggest you do, as a matter of historical interest, before you start telling people what’s in it, just so you can avoid any more blatantly stupid mistakes like this one.

Or indeed, this one…

As Benjamin Netanyahu reminded the audience yesterday, when Hitler started his campaign against the Jews, people thought it was just a Jewish problem. How mistaken they were! The whole world was drawn into a war with Nazi Germany.

Does this one even need a history book to sort out? Would a copy of Fawlty Towers on DVD not do just as well?

Basil: Now, wait a minute. Well, I got a bit confused here. Sorry! I got a bit confused, ’cause everyone keeps mentioning the war. So, could you— what’s the matter?

Elder Herr: It’s all right.

Basil: Is there something wrong?

Elder Herr: Will you stop talking about the war?!

Basil: ME?! You started it!

Elder Herr: We did not start it!

Basil: Yes you did — you invaded Poland.

To be fair, I can see what Netanyahu was actually saying, which was that we might have avoided World War II, and everything that went with it, had we paid a bit more attention to what Hitler was up to with the Jews, which is fair comment, although you could just as easily make the same observation about his violating the Treaty of Versaille in 1935 by introducing conscription,  moving troops in the Rhineland in 1936, supporting Franco in the Spanish Civil War and annexing Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938. So, on the whole, we missed quite a few pointers when it came to Adolf, not just the shitty attitude towards his own Jewish population.

The point here is simply that if you’re going to try pumping out propaganda then its as well to ensure that your schtick isn’t shot though with basic and easily check factual innaccuracies, especially when you trying to pitch a case for going to war - Mmm, where else have I heard that before, I wonder… - and that’s when people tend to start checking up on your comments.

So there you go - another completely impartial and anti-establishment offering from Fox News Lite - good stuff, eh?

I’m a bit bored after that whole Nikkogen thing and looking for something fresh to get my teeth into, something new. Even the intellectual charnal house that is Mad Mel Phillips is not going to be enough today.

So, I as delighted to stumble across the sententious musings of Anthony Browne, chief political correspondent in The Times, on the subject of Christian opposition to the upcoming Sexual Orientation Regulations, or as we prefer to call it at the Ministry, flagrant homophobic bigotry.

Emboldened churches join forces to scupper new law on gay rights

The letter from Haringey council came as a shock. Gosia Shannon, a Polish immigrant, had been running a flourishing centre for isolated Eastern European families with pre-school children in the North London borough. But the council was threatening to withdraw all funding and close the group by the end of this month.

A fortnight earlier the group had made the mistake of voting to include the word “Christian” in its name, and the council discovered that it had a habit of singing songs about Jesus. In particular, a council official said that “Gosia’s attitudes toward gay parents worry me”. To keep its funding, the group would have to stop all religious activity and pledge to be open to Eastern Europeans regardless of their sexual orientation.

Ms Shannon insists that she welcomed the one lesbian couple who visited. “We don’t promote homosexuality but we welcome homosexuals. They are trying to impose their own culture on us, not the culture the community wants. Christianity is part of who we are.”

And we’re off to the flyer with that grand old staple, the ‘loony’ left, obsessed-with-political-correctness, Labour-controlled, London Borough Council.

Except…

This has almost certainly got fuck all to do with the views of a single, unnamed, council official on whether or not the group is sufficiently open to the gay community.

It turns out this particular project is funding via Sure Start, and in common with many, if not most government funding programmes, one of the many things that is excluded from being funded by such programmes are specifically religious activities.

Playgroup = money. Godbothering = no money.

This is not difficult to understand.

One might well think that the officer who wrote to the group threatening to pull its funding was being rather overzealous, and indeed, within a day of the letter going out, Haringey Council withdrew it and invited the centre leader to discuss their funding situation, and I can’t say that I’d disagree overmuch in relation to the main issue that was raised, that of teaching tots traditional Polish Christmas song - it’s a catholic country, for fucks sake, so what do they think they sing about at Chrismas? Tractors?

Nevertheless, other advice given to the group, about the inadvisability of making too much of its Christian values and the seeming omission of a statement in its constitution committing it to not discriminate against homosexuals is actual valid advice. The fact is, a Christian voluntary groups know this perfectly well, many funders will not give funding for specifically religious activities. The Awards 4 All programme, which distributes small ‘lottery grants’ will not fund ‘activities promoting religious beliefs’, thats the exact statement in their guidance for applicants.

That doesn’t that religious groups cannot get funding, far from it, but it does mean that the primary purpose of the funding must not be simply to push their beliefs down the throats of others, it must do somethiing else, like provide a playgroup, or a bingo club or lunch club or any one of myriad of other things, just not primarily or exclusively promote religious belief.

Likewise many funders want to see an equal opportunities statement, either in the group’s constitution or as a separate policy, and those funders do look for significant omissions in the wording of such a policy. You won’t, usually, hit a problem if you neglect to mention trans-gendered people explicitly - who can recall everyone? - but miss out on any of the main classes of discrimination; gender, ethnicity, disability or sexuality, and you could hit problems.

It’s perfectly reasonable to point out the facts of voluntary sector funding, and its then up to the group to decide whether to come into line with mainstream funder’s expectations or take their chances and leave themselves with a much smaller range of funding opportunities.

What Haringey council is trying to enforce with its purse strings, the Government is attempting through legislation. Religious groups are outraged that, from next April, it will be illegal to discriminate against homosexuals or transsexuals when providing goods and services. The clash between religion and secular liberalism is stirring high passions and has even brought threats of civil disobedience.

What a load of bollocks. Haringey isn’t trying to enforce anything with its purse strings - its a take it or leave it deal, you either meet the criteria under which we give you taxpayers money, or you don’t and you raise the money you need somewhere else. There is no basic right, divine or otherwise, to local government funding for a voluntary sector playgroup or any other project for that matter.

And as for this presumed clash between ‘religion’ and ’secular liberalism’, why don’t we just call it for what it really is, a clash between archaic, irrational bigotry and common-sense rationality.

The row has been rumbling on since the law was proposed last year, but exploded this week when the Government laid down the Sexual Orientation Regulations for Northern Ireland, to come into force from January 1. It provoked a political storm in the Province, while a group of black pentecostal churches took out a full-page advertisement in The Times in protest that the rest of Britain would follow.

The Catholic and Anglican churches have said that their adoption agencies, youth clubs and hospices might have to close. Christian bed-and-breakfast owners say they would shut rather than be forced to allow gay couples to sleep together in their house. The churches claim that Christian printers could be sued if they refuse to print gay literature, and that Christian bookshops could be sued for stocking denunciations of homosexuality.

Reading crap like this generally only provokes one reaction from me; ‘Well that’s real fucking Christian of you, isn’t it?’

The simple fact is that there are very few references to homosexuality in the Bible and most of them are, in one way or another, open to interpretation and subject to a degree of dispute as to the precise meaning of the passages - more often than not, what has been presented as general injunctions against homosexuality appear to relate far more to practices such as temple prosititution and have their historical origins in the rivalry between the Jewish priesthood, which eschewed homosexuality, and that of the priesthhood of Baal, which celebrated it.

It’s also the case that the vast bulk of these references come from either the Old Testement or from St Paul, who really was a dreary old mysogynistic bigot anyway.

As for the number one guy, Jesus, he had next to fuck all to say on the subject, and the four gospels certainly do not contain a reference to him every saying ’suffer the little children to come unto me… only not the shirt-lifters and carpet-munchers’.

In fact, if there is anything in the gospels that deals with Jesus’ attutide towards homosexuality it lies in a story told in Matthew 8:5-13 and again in Luke 7:2, which tell of a Roman Centurion asking Jesus to cure his ‘pais’ (that’s Greek, BTW) who lay paralysed or in agony and who was praised by Jesus for his faith.

Pais, which is the word used in the original Greek text of the passage in Matthew, translates roughly as a young male kept for sexual purposes by his adult ‘owner’ - ‘pais’ is the greek root word fron which the English word ‘pederasty’ is derived. In the version that appears in Luke, this word is omitted and the boy was altered to be a slave of interdeteminate age who was, eupheistically ‘dear to’ the centurion; one might say they were both very ‘earnest’ in their affections for each other.

This is the latest conflict in a wider war. Religious groups have been emboldened by their successes in forcing British Airways to drop its ban on a worker wearing a cross, and in getting the Government to backtrack on its threat to faith schools.

Andrea Williams, of the Lawyers Christian Fellowship, which has led the campaign against the gay law, said: “This is truly a clash of fundamental human rights. It would seem that, when these rights clash, the homosexual person’s rights trump the religious person’s rights.”

Oh look, its Andrea Minichiello Williams of the Lawyer’s Christian Fellowship, yet again.

I do love this particular organisation - a Lawyer’s organisation that doesn’t understand a very basic principle of human rights law; the right to hold a particular belief does not necessarily confer a right to manifest that belief in actions if such actions are unlawful and held to be contrary to the common good.

Rastas believe ganja to be a gift from god and an important part of their spirituality - doesn’t stop them getting nicked for possession.

Satanists might go in for sacrificing chickens - they’re still fucked if the breach animal cruelty and health and safety regulations when they do it.

And some Christians might believe they have a god-given right to act like a bunch of bigoted arseholes - doesn’t make it right and it certainly doesn’t mean we shouldn’t screw the bastards to the wall for unlawful discrimination just because they’ve got a book that says its okay. If someone owns a book on cannibalism, that doesn’t make it right to eat people, does it?

This seems to be the bit that these idiots struggle with, comprehension-wise - ‘god says so’ is not a rational argument and suffers from one major flaw, if someone doesn’t believe in your particular version of god then arguments like that cut no ice at all.

The campaign to bring in the Sexual Offences Regulations was led by Ben Summerskill, chief executive of the gay rights group Stonewall. Mr Summerskill reels off examples of anti-gay discrimination he encountered when he took up the job: “We were dealing with lesbians who were denied smear tests, and gay people being struck off GPs’ lists. Household insurance was refused. Older people were not being allowed to share rooms in a care home. These weren’t exceptions.”

Yoe see that’s really what we’re talking about here. Not some pissy bullshit about bed and breakfasts but crap like this, for which there is no possible justification. Yet to hear these bastards going on, you’d think that’s there an army of queers out there, carrying maps of every Christian-owned B&B in the country, just itching for the chance to pile in there and soil their nice Christian bed-linen with their abominatory bodily fluids.

“We going cottaging tonight, Lance?

Nah, fuck it. I thought we’s try that Christian B&B by the chippy, just to piss them off…”

As if…

So when the Government was legislating to introduce a commission for human rights, he persuaded the gay Labour peer Lord Alli to tack on an amendment to make it illegal to discriminate against gays when providing goods or services. The Government put it out to consultation and held a series of often embarrassing meetings with church leaders and gay lobbyists. It got such a huge response that the legislation was delayed by six months. A long official silence followed, only broken with the Northern Ireland decision last week.

Vincent Nichols, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Birmingham, has threatened to withdraw co-operation over schools and adoption agencies. Catholic priests are being urged to preach to their congregations and ask them to write to the Government.

In the Church of England, the Right Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, has said that church youth clubs and welfare projects may have to close. “In these proposed regulations there is no clear exemption for religious belief, even though it is widely known that several of the faiths in this country will have serious difficulty.”

And that’s the threat is it? Do what we say or we’ll take our ball home?

Fuck ‘em, much of this stuff they’re talking about relies on state funding in the first place, and if they’re not going to do it, there’s plenty of voluntary groups out there that would be glad of the cash injection and the chance to do a bit of good for all their local community. not just those who buy into godbothering in a big way.

If the Catholics don’t want to cooperate on schools, don’t fund their schools - it’s not as if the fuckers are short of few quid, so let’s see the Vatican sticking its hand in its pocket if its so all fire keen to run schools.

Seriously, if they want to play hardball then lets just call their bluff and pull the plug on public funding for faith groups that won’t accept the new regulations. Look at it this way, if what these groups are genuinely about is social welfare, good works and charity then it shouldn’t matter one bit who comes wandering in the door, gay, straight, black, white, whatever. The Bible says ‘love thy neighbour as thy self’ and doesn’t carry on to say, ‘…but not the queers, obviously - you can hate them if you like’.

The right to discriminate only matters if you’re not really, deep down, motivated by Christian charity but see your little community project as kind of religious timeshare presentation to sucker in the unwary so you can preach at them, and if that’s you’re motivation then you can fuck right off as far as I am concerned, especially when you want the taxpayer to cough up for it.

But the strongest reaction came from Britain’s conservative black church groups, who took out the Times advertisement. One of the leaders behind it, Alfred Williams, of the Christ Faith Tabernacle in New Cross, said: “People think it is better to die than to sin against their God.There will be a spontaneous reaction. There will be civil disobedience.”

Better to die than sin against god? Not the best thing to be saying right now, not if you don’t want MI5 round to pay you a visit.

There will be civil disobedience? Oh this is too fucking good for words. The Christians are planning to go on strike…

Mwahahahahahahaha!!! Who the fuck’s going to notice.

Can you just imagine this shit in practice?

More tea, Vicar?

No, sorry, I can’t. I’m on a work to rule… 

What are they going to do. Shut all the churches on Sunday?

You just imagine the owners of Ikea reacting to that, ‘Oh, be still my beating profit margin’.

Cancel Christmas?

We’ll just have a week long Saturnalia party instead, I’m sure the Romans won’t mind…

Shut down the God Channel? Hey this is sounding better and better as it goes along.

How about mass suicide? They did, after all, say that Christians think it would be better to die than sin against god. In fact, after saying something like that, isn’t, ‘there will be civil disobedience’ just a bit of cop out? I’m prepared to die for what I believe, just not quite yet. Maybe in thirty or forty years time… peacefully in my bed… of natural causes…

Lets face it, martyrdom just ain’t what it used to be. There’s no sense chucking yourself fearlessly into the gaping maw of a hungry lion shouting defiently that yours is the one true god, not when you can stand outside your local church hall in the freezing cold with a few homemade placards, a flask of tea and a junior reporter from the weekly free paper.

The Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association urged “massive resistence to this religious pressure”. George Broadhead, its secretary, said: “This is a truly poisonous campaign by a large number of Christian organisations. They are seeking to rob gay people of their basic right to protection from unjust treatment.”

And lest we forget, that’s what’s really at stake here -not special or extra rights for gay people, just the same basic rights to live their lives free from irrational and unlawful discrimination that are enjoyed by everyone else.

That’s the real issue, the hypothetical B&B owner so beloved of these idiots campaigners - no I was right first time - idiots could not legally turn someone away and refuse them a booking because they’re black, or female, or have a disability, or , now, because they’re too young or too old, or even because of their religion, so why should we not extend the same basic legal protections against unfair and unlawful discrimination to gays, lesbians and bisexuals.

Give me a rational argument, here. One that doesn’t involve quoting mistranslated scriptures, the so-called word of a god I don’t believe it or which claims, falsely, that homosexuality is a mere lifestyle choice, something akin to choosing to wear a beret or drink Tia Maria or watch Countdown.
You can’t can you?

Not without arguing that its your inalienable legal right to be a bigoted, homophobic twat…

…which is true, you can’t legislate to prevent people being assholes, but you can legislate to stop them behaving like one, which is precisely what these regulations are intended to accomplish.

A short while back, I posted an article which, in general terms, expresses the same kind degree of scepticism about claims made by a new company, Nikkogen, as expressed by Tim Worstall in this article, which came about as a result of Tim’s blog being spammed by Ray Jenkins, the commercial director of the company, as follows:

All the talk and written reports about; Climate Change, Carbon Taxes, Clean Coal, Carbon Capture and Storage, Nuclear’s back on the table – have probably contributed to the de-forestation of Norway and added a degree or more to global warming…lets stop talking and take action! One major item that’s running out and running out fast is time to do anything to put a stop to the damage we are causing.
Global warming and climate change are a major concern and action sooner rather than later needs to take place. Renewable energy sources are being taken up as an alternative; however, you need 300-400 wind generators to replace a small coal or gas power station. A company called Nikkogen based in the UK seems to have a serious answer to a lot of the issues mentioned above. They are looking to locally manufacture in the UK, and overseas in USA, Canada, Australia, Japan and China their zero-emission carbon free Power Systems that are scalable up to nuclear power station size. The website nikkogen.com is an interesting site and well worth a look; let’s hope we see these systems in place as soon as possible. Nikkogen’s website: www.nikkogen.com

Ray clearly doesn’t understand online etiquette, as he entirely omits any mention of the fact that he’s hawking his own company here and goes out of his way to pretend (badly) that he’s just an ordinary punter who’s happened across Nikkogen and thought, ‘fuck me, this is a good idea’.

More than anything else, what attracted Tim’s incredulity was this claim from Nikkogen’s website:

Our Zero-Emission Prime Mover Systems have been designed to work with electrical alternators generating clean electricity 24 hours x 365 days a year. With suitable electrical alternators, we can provide electrical outputs ranging from 40 Megawatts through to 240 Megawatts with almost zero ongoing running costs. A typical return on investment (ROI) if you purchase one or more of our Zero-Emission Power Stations is within two years.

Almost zero ongoing running costs? What, no fuel costs? No maintenance costs? No labour costs? I think you can appreciate why Tim was just a tad sceptical of such a claim, which amounts to ‘yes, you can have a free lunch’.

Having expressed my own scepticism of Nikkogen’s claims, I have, today, received this comment from Ray Jenkins:

Good morning Mr Unity,

(He actually used my real surname, which hasn’t exactly endeared him to me)

Please can you remove any reference to Nikkogen from your website/blog. The information on your website received automated or not is incorrect and any reference to our company as being a fraud is incorrect.

You may wish to contact Tim Worstall - who will I’m sure confirm that the information he provided via his website/blog was incorrect.

You have a week to remove any reference to our company.

Ray Jenkins

Director Business Development
Nikkogen Ltd
South Wales
United Kingdom

Tel: 44-121-288-2058 (Direct)

Oh dear…

The words ‘red rag to a bull’ come to mind straight away. You see, Ray, you really don’t get this blogging malarky do you, and you certainly haven’t taken the time to read any of my work, or you’d know better than to try playing the strong arm game.

In other words, Ray, the very last thing you’re going achieve here is to remove any reference to Nikkogen from this blog. I shall be pulling the original article, not because I’m in any way concerned by your implied threats but simply because all you’ve done by trying to get up in my face is motivate me to go and research your project in a bit more detail and get a much clearly and, I think, more accurate sense of what you’re trying to sell to investors.

Oh, and I should say, Ray, Before trying to bullshit me with claims that Tim Worstall has changed his opinion of your company/product you really ought to have spoken to Tim first and actually persuaded him to change his views.

Which you didn’t.

Which makes your claim that Tim will ‘confirm that the information he provided via his website/blog was incorrect‘ a complete and utter lie.

I should also point out here that I’ve just had to break off from writing this post to take my original comments on Nikkogen private, after Ray posted my full name and address in the comments to it twice, in the space of five minutes - as you might expect he’s also bandying around the old ‘you’ll be getting a letter from my solictor’ routine.

In fact, it gets even better, as he’s also claiming to have sent a letter about me to West Midlands Police Special Branch Department!

While I’m sure that will make a nice addition to whatever they might already have on file about me due to my past involvement in political activism, I’m not exactly clear of the relevance of this. Are you trying to imply that the mere fact that I’m rather sceptical as to some of the claims you’re making about you product makes me a terrorist or a threat to national security?

I actually decided to write a new post on Nikkogen, before the last run of stupid shenanigans started, and I look forward to hearing from both his solicitor and from Special Branch (as long as its not at 5 O’ Clock in the morning), the latter in particular as not only will I have few choice things to say about Ray, but as I cannot see that he has any basis whatsoever for a criminal complaint here I will take great delight in lodging a complaint of my own - I think the Protection from Harassment Act may afford what I’m looking for, should I get the standard issue through my door in the early hours of the morning.

As Ray’s first post prompted me to do a bit more background research - remember, much of Tim’s scepticism stemmed from the unrealistic and unfeasible claim made by Ray that their system would provide power with near zero on costs and their unwillingness to give even basic information as to the basis on the system functions - what this post was going to be was a rather more considered view of what Nikkogen seem likely to be pitching to the market.

For example, what I found was that a ‘Prime Mover’ is nothing more than an electronic torque management system that’s already in use in conventional diesel/gas turbine power generation where it does provide enhanced fuel efficiency. However, from what I can find, its not exactly the cheapest piece of kit around and would put a fair premium on the cost of any generation system sold by Nikkogen.

As for the likely power source for Nikkogen’s system, its claims about zero emissions, portablilty (Nikkogen is promoting a marine power system for uses on ships) and a process of elimination suggested that what we may actually have been talking about here is a hydrogen-based system.

Now that’s not a fraudulent system by any means, they do exist, but, as this article in popular mechanics shows, this technology is far from being proven, particularly in commerical terms, and Nikkogen’s zero emissions claim only really stacks up if one disregards the emissions produced in generating the hydrogen fuel. There is also, as a by the by, the little matter of the large tanks of extremely flammable hydrogen fuel to take into account, which would surely make for a interesting discussion at the local planning committee.

That’s now all by the by, as it seems that Ray’s beef with me is based on my earlier speculations being a little too close to the mark - according to information provided by Ray, himself:

Our technology is not rocket science it’s a well proven system. What we have done is to apply the latest engineering technology to it. All I am prepared to say is that Its fluid based and it has an interesting flywheel mechanism. It provides enough continuous energy output to drive a single 3 phase electrical alternators sized between 40 Megawatts through to 240 Megawatts .

It’s not a perpetual motion machine as it’s not 100% efficient – what it does however is self regulate for increasing loads as the alternator output current increases. If you want further information, we are discussing in more detail our systems with interested companies under a non disclosure agreement.

And in my original post, I did mention the ‘flywheel-based’ ‘perpetual motion’ system of power generation, which as a concept has been around for a long time - I’d have to check the US patent office to find out when the first such system was proposed - only to discard the idea as stretching credulity too far when Ray started throwing a wobbly.

[UPDATE: I should point out that, having done a bit of a search of the net, their are some working flywheel systems out there. However these systems are both very small scale and used only as backup supplies for wind generation or to power UPS systems.

What we’re talking here are systems like this one, which provide between 750 and 1000 kVA for a whole seventeen seconds.

In fact the cutting edge of flywheel generation at present seems to be this proposal, from Japan, for a 50Kwh-class generator using superconductors - remember Nikkogen are pitching in region of 40-250 MW - a hell of a step up in capacity.

I think you can you appreciate from that why scepticism is the order of the day.]

This makes matters extremely interesting because, in my original comments I made the point that such systems have been put forward before and have invariably failed to deliver as they always, without fault, fall foul of the second law of thermodynamics, which in physics in the very epitomy of the expression that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

You cannot get more energy out of a system than you put into - it is not possible. In fact you invariably get out less than you put in, as some of the energy ‘lost’ as heat and, occasionally, light. To give an example, converting in converting chemical energy (natural gas) into electricity in a conventional gas-fired power station, the usual efficiency rate is something of the order of 38-40% - 60% of the potential energy within natural gas is lost in the form of heat (both from burning the gas and from friction in the turbine) and light.
The simple fact is that such systems have, in the past, formed the basis of scam investments - that does not prove that Nikkogen’s is a fraud but it does justify extreme scepticism, at least until a working model is demonstrated and the science behind it properly peer reviewed  - and this does make any reference to such systems having been promoted fraudulently in the past, fair comment.

Cheer’s, Ray - nice of you to provide evidence for the defence.

Over at CiF, Frank Fisher, the Big Blogger winner knows as Pike Bishop, make a pretty decent fist of a critique of the government’s plans for roadpricing…

Sir Rod Eddington’s transport report suggests road pricing is the only way to solve Britain’s gridlock crisis - an “economic no-brainer” he reckons; coincidentally it’s the route that also guarantees massive receipts for the Exchequer, and a fabulous new surveillance system for the Home Office - little wonder politicians seem keen to embrace the big vision.

Eddington claims that road pricing will deliver £28bn a year to the UK’s economy - in fact, his assumption is that if congestion were to vanish totally business would save that sum. Of course, additional cash will also be generated: tariffs levied on motorists. Is anyone convinced the government will reduce other taxation to make this a tax-neutral measure? I thought not. But regardless of the financial impact on motorists, where poorer motorists will be hit hardest, and also the privacy argument (I’ll come back to that), is road pricing in fact the only way to cut congestion?

There is, however, another, rather fundamental problem with this whole scheme that no one seems yet to have noticed, and as you might expect from debates such as those surrounding ID cards, its technology that’s the problem.

It’s a matter of accuracy. If the government is going to charge you a toll for using certain roads, then you want to be damn certain that you’re only paying for your actual usage. The bill has to be correct.

And therein lies the problem.

You see, the technological ‘hub’ of this system, it has been suggested, will be a GPS tracking system fitted to your car, which will report your mileage, speed (think of all the tickets) and which roads you’ve used back to the government, so that your bill can be compiled an issued.

But, there’s a but in all this, and its a big one.

You GPS system are not 100% accurate - the location they provide is subject to a margin of error arising from a variety of different things, including atmospheric interference, multi-path errors (signals bouncing of nearby buildings and structures) and clock/timing errors.

A standard GPS system is accurate, as a result, of a margin of error of between 4 and 20 metres - best case is usually cited at 15 metres.
Now this may present few difficulties in tracking cars whizzing along the motorway, but in urban areas this error may cause considerable problems.

Consider the following scenario - two roads running roughly parallel to each other, one a main road into town and subject to road pricing, the other a minor road running through an estate for which there is a minimal or zero charge.

These roads are separated by a distance of around 10 metres, run parallel to each other for half a mile and eventually ‘meet’ at set of traffic lights (i.e. one can turn off the minor road at a junction which take you up to the main road at another junction.

A car travels up one of these two roads at thirty mile and hour - how can a system with a best case accuracy of 15 metres, be certain as to which road the car is on, and therefore what, if anything, they should charged for that portion of their journey.

This scenario is not only possible, but very likely be played out every day in Britains crowded towns and cities, if roadpricing is introduced.

Yes, the accuracy of GPS tracking can be improved, down to an accuracy of between 1 and three metres, but such improvements are not cheap by any means, requiring fixed base stations as well as satellites - and most of the technology is currently either still experimental or in use only by the military and/or aviation industry. And data from other systems (ANPR) could be used to improve accuracy as well, but there are still limits - 100% accuracy would be attainable only if every single chargable road were covered by an ANPR system - and how much would that cost?
As with biometrics on ID cards, the government are, again, pinning their future policy on the belief that ‘technology’ will provide - but what if it doesn’t.

What if the costs of a system with the necessary degree of accuracy prove to be prohibitive? Or if it simply proves impossible to attain the necessary level of accuracy in typically British urban conditions? What then?

A road-pricing scheme based on a tracking system that can’t tell exactly what road you’re on and, therefore, what you should be charged, is completely useless.