Planet Cameron is, by all accounts, a rather curious place…

Cameron stands by NHS cut claim

David Cameron is standing by claims 29 district hospitals are facing cuts to emergency and maternity services.

The Tory leader admitted one hospital, in north-west England, had been wrongly named by him as being under threat.

But he insisted all the others were facing potential cuts. The government says reviews are being carried out.

So you make a very basic error by incorrectly naming a hospital as facing cuts in services when it doesn’t and then stand by your claim? And to make matters even worse, the hospital in question is in the constituency of one of you own MPs…

It comes as Tory MP Henry Bellingham apologised to staff at his local hospital in King’s Lynn, which he said had been wrongly included on the list.

Mr Bellingham said the Queen Elizabeth hospital should have been consulted about the campaign.

“Obviously a mistake has been made and as a local MP I wasn’t consulted on this and I apologise unreservedly to the staff of the hospital,” the Norfolk North West MP told the BBC.

I do think there’s a lesson for all opposition parties, all parties actually and the government, if they are issuing a statement that affects an organisation, be it a hospital, the police, some school, they should always consult the chief executive or the headmaster or whoever it is.”

Seems fairly conclusive, although why it should be Bellingham making the apology and not Cameron is not exactly clear, especially as Bellingham states clearly that he wasn’t consulted about the hospital’s inclusion in Cameron’s propaganda - and while the underling apologises, Cameron is busy making excuses for his cock-up and trying to cover his arse…

However, Mr Cameron said that Queen Elizabeth hospital was under threat as it delivered under 3,000 live births per year - the level at which the strategic health authority decided a unit is not viable.

This is North West Norfolk we’re talking about here, a constituency that appears to amount to matter of Kings Lynn, the Queen’s Sandringham estate and a whole bunch of countryside - not a huge amount of scope for siting major hospital services, one might think, let alone for taking them away. The number of live births at the hospital may well be a factor in deliberations over the future development of maternity services in the area, but it will be one factor amongst many that come into play not least amongst which will be the available capacity at possible alternative sites and, especially in such an area, the matter of transport - to seek to reduce such decisions to a crude numbers game in which 3,000 live births is put forward as a hard and fast cut-off point for the viability of the service seems to say rather more about Tory preoccupations and propaganda than about any review process that may be undertaken in future.

Another hospital on the Tory list does not have a maternity or accident and emergency facility.

Altrincham General Hospital in Trafford does have a minor injuries unit. Mr Cameron said the party had meant to name nearby Trafford General Hospital instead.

Apart from that error, Mr Cameron said: “We stand by what we have in our document.”

That just takes Cameron’s arguments into the realms of high farce.

What we’re dealing with here is the matter of the location of A&E and maternity services in an urban area, specifically part of Greater Manchester and, like many such urban areas, if one compares how the various hospitals relate to each other in terms of geography and administrative organisation then quirks very quickly begin to emerge - for example Altrincham General may be part of the same NHS Trust as Trafford General, but if you live it that area and need to access A&E then you’re better off heading over to Wythenshawe Hospital, which may belong to a different NHS trust but is about half the distance from Altrincham of Trafford General. Its precisely these kinds of anamolous situation that make the question of where best to site critical services a considerably more complex matter that just plonking them on the site of existing hospitals and its impossible to adequate evaluate what the implications such decisions might be without being clear as to precisely what the alternatives on offer are - unless you’re politician whose more interested in vote-grabbing headlines than providing the best possible services to the public based on actual evidence.

To compound Tory embarrassment even further, having ‘fessed up to one cock-up and then claimed that everything else he’s said is gospel, it now seems that other hospitals listed by Cameron are fair queueing up to debunk his claims:

Other NHS trusts have contradicted the Conservative claims.

Chief executive of the Shrewsbury & Telford Hospital NHS Trust, Tom Taylor, said there is no threat to maternity services at the Princess Royal Hospital in Telford.

Meanwhile…

A spokeswoman for North Bristol NHS Trust - which covers Frenchay and Southmead hospitals - said Conservative claims that A&E services at Frenchay were under threat are “absolute rubbish”.

She told the BBC. “It simply isn’t true and it’s very annoying.”

However, the A&E unit at Frenchay will be closed and a new one built at Southmead Hospital five miles away, where there is only a minor injury unit at the moment.

So what’s happening here is simply that the A&E unit is moving from one site in the trust to another, one that seems, so far as one can see, to be rather more central placed in terms of the area the trust serves, which seems an eminently sensible course of action.

A spokeswoman for the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust, which is responsible for Horton hospital in Banbury, said there is no threat to its A&E unit and extra consultants were being employed there.

And another claim bites the dust.

The Beeb goes to to cite Cameron as promising  a “bare knuckle fight” with Prime Minister Gordon Brown over district hospitals - personally I’d prefer some sign that Cameron can actually present an argument based on facts rather than conjectures and misinformation.

As Cameron used to work in PR at one point then its seems only fair to close this piece with a few reflections on the nature of marketing from the late great Bill Hicks, in the vain hope that Cameron (and other politicians) might just take note and do us all the favour that Hicks recommends…

By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising…kill yourself. Thank you. Just planting seeds, planting seeds is all I’m doing. No joke here, really. Seriously, kill yourself, you have no rationalisation for what you do, you are Satan’s little helpers. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show. Seriously, I know the marketing people: ‘There’s gonna be a joke comin’ up.’ There’s no fuckin’ joke. Suck a tail pipe, hang yourself…borrow a pistol from an NRA buddy, do something…rid the world of your evil fuckin’ presence.

Getting quickly back on to theme of deliberate misreporting - and of the current tabloid hot ticket, ‘feral youth’ - we find the Daily Mail in full spittle-flecked fury mode over the ruling by an Immigration and Asylum Tribunal that Learco Chindamo cannot be deported on his release from custody for the murder of Phillip Lawrence:-

When ‘human rights’ are an insult to us all

There cannot be a decent human being who does not share her pain and disgust at what Britain has become: a land where the ‘rights’ of a killer are exalted, where crime victims matter not a jot and where a remote tribunal tramples over every sense of morality and self-respect.

The case of Learco Chindamo insults us all. A violent, truanting 15-year-old, he stabbed Mr Lawrence just for trying to stop the bullying of a younger boy.

Now that this squalid undesirable is ending his 12-year sentence, he should in the public interest be automatically deported to his father’s homeland, Italy.

Well I guess this means that I’m just not a decent human being in the Mail’s estimation because neither its by the numbers ranting or the obligatory entreaties of the distraught widow:

Mrs Lawrence said: “I am devastated, demoralised. More than that, I’m unutterably depressed that the Human Rights Act has failed to encompass the rights of my family to lead a safe, secure and happy life.

“I have always been a staunch advocate of the Human Rights Act but there is a missing term in it. It must encompass some responsibility.

“This isn’t just about me and my family. I am not solely thinking of me. I may be a mother but I am a human being as well. I feel I can’t fight any more. I feel I can’t survive this.”

… are sufficient to prompt this blogger into an unseemly bout of vicarious emoting over the High Court’s decision or the hurt feelings of Lawrence’s widow.

As is perennially the case, the headline used in the Mail’s online coverage of the story, ‘Widow’s fury as thug who knifed to death headteacher is allowed to stay in the UK’ is supplanted in it’s print edition by the altogether pithier and more overblown, ‘What About My Family’s Rights?’:-

To which the answer, as ever, is that you’ve already had them.

Chindamo was caught, tried, convicted and has served (almost) the sentence handed down by the court, and while one can always quibble about whether the sentence was long enough - remembering that for the victim (or their family) it almost always isn’t no matter what the court hands down - the fact of the matter is that that’s your lot; the criminal justice system has discharged its obligations to you once the offender has served out their sentence give or take any post-incarceration conditions that may be applied in cases such as this one where, as a murderer, Chindamo will be released under licence.

The Mail quotes Mrs Lawrence as having advanced the usual trite observation:

But she stressed that the law “bypasses humanity” and fails to take into account the views of “ordinary people”.

Does no one ever wonder if there might be a tangible reason why rulings handed down by courts/tribunals sometimes appear to deviate from what is presumed to be ‘public opinion’?

In fact there’s a very good reason for this; this being simply that these bodies deal with the full material facts in such cases, facts that are all too often omitted or downplayed in the media coverage of such cases, upon which the public has to judge the merits of their decision.

Thus the Mail initially informs its readers that:

Chindamo, son of a vicious Italian gangster and a woman from the Philippines, came to the UK at the age of six.

Which is certainly true, but some considerable way short of the full truth, which the Mail discloses only towards the end of the article and after its has fully vented its spleen:

Born the son of a Mafia hitman known as the Acid Man, Learco Chindamo seemed almost destined for a life of violence.

His mother Paquita split from her husband Massimo [and subsequently moved the UK after a brief period living in her native Philippines] after he threw her out of a window, breaking both her legs.

Little wonder, then, that Chindamo is reportedly unable to speak Italian, for all that the Mail pours scorn on this line of argument in its editorial:

But not in the view of the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal. These worthies decreed that it would be a breach of his human rights to be sent to that free, sunny, civilised EU nation because, among other things, he can’t speak Italian.

The ‘amongst other things’ in the case would presumably be the fact that Chindamo has had no contact with his Mafioso father or other members of the Italian branch of family since his mother came to the UK in 1988 to escape from her violent husband, and no matter how clement the weather might be in Italy one doubts that this would prove to be much consolation should Chindamo be dumped in what, to him, is an entirely foreign country, where he doesn’t speak the language and where he can have little or no expectation of picking up the threads of his life. in complete isolation from his mother and siblings, who constitute his only real family.

Unless the Mail would like to see his family deported as well, to keep him company - and never mind the risk of violence towards his mother should she be found by the boy’s father.

Its these little details that make all the difference, for all the Mail would like to pretend that they don’t exist or have no bearing on the decision of the High Court.

Picking up on the BBC’s coverage of the story we find that another minor detail has escaped the Mail’s attention:

The human rights lawyer David Enright said on Monday that under the current rules, it was impossible for people to be deported from one EU country to another.

Chindamo came to the UK when he was six. His father is Italian, his mother is from the Philippines and he has an Italian passport.

Mr Enright also dismissed the government’s protests as “posturing”, saying it had accepted the 2006 European Commission regulation into British law.

“(This) said that any EU national who had lived in the UK, even in prison, for more than 10 years, could only be removed from Britain on imperative grounds of national security - which clearly would not include Mr Chindamo or anyone like him,” he added.

So this is not just a matter of the general application of article 8 of the Human Rights Act, but one specifically covered by regulations on deportation set by the EU and incorporated into UK law more than a year ago. Hardly the most persuasive argument for the Mail and its right-wing readership but it does seem to conclusively settle the matter in terms of the legality of the decision and the scope - or lack thereof - for a government appeal in this case.

There’s a tidy little dilemma for the fiscally parsimonious right. Which is more important to them? Making a show of mounting a futile legal challenge to a decision that is politically inconvenient but legally correct, or saving a bit of taxpayers’ money by not embarking on futile litigation of a kind that is doomed to failure from the outset?

That we are debating this at all is merely a function of the Chindamo family never having taken the opportunity to become naturalised British citizens as was certainly possible up to the point at which Learco committed this offence, and why would or should they have considered such a move when under the EU’s freedom of movement/residency regulations the Italian passport obtained by her marriage to Learco’s father was good enough to permit them to build a life for themselves in the UK. Had they taken out British passports, or were Chindamo merely a common or garden domestic murderer and not one with the added frisson of an Italian passport this debate would, at best, revolve around whether the sentence of twelve years, handed down in 1996, was sufficient to fit the crime - and its well worth noting that unlike the vast majority of adult murderers, Chindamo appears to served out his sentence in full and with no remission.

But for his holding an Italian passport, Learco Chindamo would be released on licence at the end of his sentence as a matter of routine and although the profile of his case would certainly generate some media interest - and the usual bleating from the press about how sentences for murder aren’t long enough - such interest would be short-lived and, no doubt, curtailed by court-imposed restrictions designed to give the young man the best possible chance of putting his crime behind him and rebuilding a life as a useful, and reformed, member of society. Rehabilitation is, after all, part of the core purpose of the criminal justice system.

The public interest in this case, such as it is, rests squarely in the question of whether Learco Chindamo is, as he claims, a reformed character bent on rebuilding his life on his release - and the Mail does report that he has gained an NVQ in health and social care while in prison and plans to seek a career in nursing (cue yet more scare stories about ex-criminals gaining jobs in the health sector) - or whether he still constitutes a risk to public safety, this being a question for those in criminal justice system who are dealing with the practicalities of impending release. The personal feelings of Mrs Lawrence and her family are, frankly, of no consequence but for the matter of applying licence terms to Chindamo’s release designed to circumvent the possibility of his coming into direct contact with the family as a matter of basic compassion.

Beyond that, the Mail’s reporting of this story amounts to little more than the usual tabloid diet of unrestrained voyeurism, which invites its readers to indulge in the vicarious and unproductive emotional fetishising of victimhood as a means of generating sales. While the Mail may contend that ‘there cannot be a decent human being who does not share her pain and disgust at what Britain has become’ the reality is that there cannot be an honest human being who does not recognise that, in this case, the criminal justice system has done its job and served outs its purpose in full nor and independently-minded human being who fails to see the Mail’s reporting of this case for what it truly, no more than a cynical effort to manipulate the prejudices of its readers in order to generate sales.

In cases such as this one, opportunism knows no bounds, hence no such story is complete without its coterie of bandwagon jumpers:

Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said last night: “It is a stark demonstration of the clumsy incompetence of the Government’s human rights legislation that we are unable to send a proven killer back to his own country, especially when that country is in the EU.”

Comments like this are, in reality, a stark demonstration of the clumsy incompetence of politicians in situations where political expediency and naked populism are thought more productive than the correct application of justice.

Once one understands the full background of the case and the history of the Chindamo family then in no realistic or honest sense can one argue that Italy is Leano Chindamo’s ‘own country’. We’re not dealing here with an individual who was born and brought up overseas and who came to Britain as an adult and of his own choice and volition but with someone who came to the UK as a young child in train with a mother escaping extreme violence. He had no choice is coming here and, like or not, Britain is the only country he knows and has provided the only life he knows, for all that he has spent the last eleven years of that life in prison.

Far from being ‘clumsy’, the Human Rights Acts requires the courts to consider cases, such as this one, on their individual merits and on the material facts at hand, as has long been one of the overriding principles of British justice.

What is actually clumsy here, not to mention crude and ill-conceived, is the politician’s marked preference, in the fact of media pressure, for ’soundbite’ justice, which manifests itself in this case as the notion that ‘foreign criminals’ should be automatically deported on release irrespective of their individual circumstance or the nature of the offence for which the individual was convicted. Follow the arguments of the likes of David Davis (and the Daily Mail) to their logical conclusion and we arrive rapidly at a situation where we start deporting people for speeding or parking offences on non-payment of their television licence, all of which are, strictly speaking, criminal offences.

Alan Gordon, vice-chairman of the Police Federation, branded the decision “absolute madness”.

Well of course he did - you didn’t expect this kind of story to pass without at least one ‘it’s all gone mad’ comment.

He said: “What about the human rights of Philip Lawrence, robbed of his life or the human rights of his wife and children, deprived of a loving husband and father. I don’t suppose Mr Chindamo had any regard for them.”

Alan Gordon may be, quite obviously, politicking here but one still cannot help but be alarmed by the obvious ignorance of his remarks. As Gordon should know full well, human rights legislation operates within a quite specific context, that of the relationship between the citizen and the state, not that of the relationship between individual citizens.

This is an all-too-seductive and deeply dangerous line of argument, one that sets up a false dichotomy between the rights of those convicted of a criminal offence and the right of ordinary citizens and, especially, those citizens who become victims of crime and advances the idea that that the rights we accord to criminals should be somehow different to and of a lesser status than the rights enjoyed by the rest of society where, in reality, the true position is that such rights belong to us all equally and that, in the case of convicted criminals, only certain rights - particularly the right to physical liberty - may be temporarily curtailed under judicial authority as a sanction for their criminal conduct.

This false dichotomy lies at the root of the political propaganda that has been used to justified pretty much every piece of illiberal legislation and every curtailment of civil liberties undertaken by the government over the last ten years and more - with some justification one can point to the watering down of the right to silence in the Criminal Justice Act 1994, piloted through the House of Commons by Michael Howard, as being the legislative starting point for the UK government’s long-term assault on civil liberties.

In terms of human rights and their application in British society the central issue in this case is not that of a supposed, and entirely artificial, ‘conflict’ between the rights of a criminal, and a ‘foreign’ criminal at that, and the rights of his victims family but the general and, I would argue inalienable right, of any individual to have their case heard and determined within the criminal justice (and immigration) system on the basis of its individual merits and by way of the due process of law, rather on the basis of crude and arbitrary ‘rules’ derived from nothing more than political expediency.

That the police appear constantly to prefer the latter rather than the former should be a matter of the greatest concern to all of us.

Finally on the list of bandwagon jumpers, and giving Iain Dale’s trite intervention the full regard it merits - none - we come to the most usual of suspects in such cases:

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of Migrationwatch UK, said: “This is yet another case where the human rights of the criminal seem to be overriding. The short answer is to pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights, as we are entitled to do, and write our own human rights law.”

One only has to understand the historical background to the European Convention on Human Rights, which was written by, in main, British lawyers working to well-established British legal principle and steered through the newly created Council of Europe by a, then, former British Prime Minister - Sir Winston Churchill, no less - to appreciate the full extent to which Green and his tawdry little pressure group are a bunch of complete idiots.

To all intents and purposes and by virtue of the manner and circumstances in which it was drafted, ECHR is our own human rights law - far more so than it is a European law for all that it was first agreed and enacted in Europe rather than in the UK. But for the provisions in article 14, covering discrimination, there is nothing in the core articles of ECHR for which one will not find established precedent in British statute or common law, much of which long predates the adoption of ECHR in 1950. Indeed, if one looks at the precise wording of the articles one quickly finds that they are expressed in terms far more in keeping with the British system of common law jurisdiction than with European conventions derived from the Napoleonic civil code, for all it allows other countries sufficient ‘wiggle room’ to operate their traditional civil code systems.

It is frankly absurd, and a complete, deliberate and largely xenophobic fiction to suggest that the principles set out in the Human Rights Act amount to some sort of alien imposition on UK law, let alone an unwelcome one - what could be more British in character than the principle central to the Chindamo case, that which holds that individuals have the right to a private and family life free from unwarranted, unnecessary and unlawful interference by the state? That such principles, when applied to specific cases, occasionally throw up outcomes that are politically inconvenient or that attract the ire of the unashamedly populist tabloid press, merely demonstrates that, overall, the judicial system is operating as it should in considering cases on their individual merits and applying the law as it is either written, or as it has evolved by means of judicial precedent where decisions, of necessity, need to fall back on the common law.

As noted earlier, but for his possessing an Italian passport, the possibility of deporting Learco Chindamo would simply not arise, and against the material facts of his background and upbringing in the UK the fact that he does hold an Italian passport is entirely immaterial. Having lived with his mother and siblings in the UK from the age of six, at the age of twenty six (or maybe twenty seven) Learco Chindamo is British in everything but name and regardless of the heinous nature of the crime he committed, to seek to deport him on release is a complete nonsense, not to mention a perversion of the long-standing traditions of the British justice system.

First things first. It is most remiss of me not to have acknowledged James Higham’s laudatory remarks in the latest of his regular Saturday blogfocus commentaries:

One year this blog has been going and how many blogs have we seen falling by the wayside in that time, coming back with a flourish and then fading away again? What’s it take to keep at it, to be consistent and never give way to the blues? These eight bloggers could tell you…

7. Unity is the scourge of the right but one thing undeniable is that he does his homework:

Scourge of the right? Who? Me..?

Still, this does provide a good excuse for correcting another omission by adding James’ blog, ‘Nourishing Obscurity‘, to the blogroll.

Meanwhile the venerable Britblog review keeps on rolling, all the way to issue #131, hosted by Matt Wardman, who poses something of a challenge to regular readers:

And one to prime you for next week - a very important story that has received very little coverage. The Press Complaints Commission has ruled that it will regulate the online versions of printed publications (i.e., newspaper websites). This has implications for bloggers - as it effectively splits the online commentary marketplace into regulated and unregulated sections. That raises a lot of questions, which I hope will get picked up this week. The full story - which all bloggers should study - is in the Independent.

The story may well raise some interesting questions, the Indy’s coverage doesn’t. In fact it amounts to little more than the usual journalistic sneering about the rapidly burgeoning medium of ‘citizen journalism’, even though the ‘citizen’ element of the story is largely a superficial one as the complaint at the centre of the story related to the inappropriate use of a bit of amateur video by the MSM, specifically the Hamilton Advertiser, Scottish Sun and Scottish Daily Mirror:

Old-style Fleet Street watchdog the Press Complaints Commission(PCC) has bared its teeth in the brave new world of citizen journalism. Every major news event from the London bombings in 2005 to the recent Mississippi bridge disaster has been recorded by amateurs using mobile phone video cameras, with newspapers and magazines standing in line to upload the best and bloodiest footage on to their websites.

By upholding a complaint against the Hamilton Advertiser, the PCC has made its first ruling on audio-visual content and sparked an industry-wide debate on the best way to police the largely untamed frontiers of the internet.

A 16-year-old pupil at John Ogilvie High School in Hamilton, near Glasgow, used her mobile phone to take a video of her fellow pupils misbehaving in class. The Hamilton Advertiser, a local paper, not only ran the story in print but also uploaded the video on to its website.

Two other papers, The Scottish Sun and the Scottish Daily Mirror, also used images from the video to illustrate stories concerning lax school discipline.

The president of the school’s parents’ and teachers’ association, Laura Gaddis, lodged a complaint against all three publications on the grounds the newspapers had not obtained permission to use the images.

But the PCC only upheld the complaint against the Hamilton Advertiser. It judged that the other two publications had made sufficient efforts to hide the identities of the pupils shown in the video.

Despite taking the plunge into the digital arena there remains something rather quaint and out of touch reality about the PCC’s own view of its actions:

A PCC spokesman told The Independent on Sunday that it is already facing criticism on this front. But he added that the PCC believes that, far from diminishing the effectiveness of print brands online, it gives them a distinct advantage.

“The PCC offers newspapers and magazines what is effectively a quality Kitemark. It assures readers that the material they are viewing can be checked for accuracy as well as for unwarranted intrusion.

“Most of the complaints we investigate relate to accuracy. Many publications run our logo online to differentiate themselves from unregulated news services,” said the spokesman.

I beg your pardon?

The MSM may have its ‘kitemark’, its voluntary regulatory code and its complaints procedures but - and its very big ‘but’ as far as I’m concerned - if one thing has become plainly apparent in the two and a half years or so that I’ve been blogging its that when it comes to comparing the ethical standards of the MSM with those of the vast majority of established Brit-bloggers, then its us bloggers who are routinely winning the ‘argument’ hands down.

Where does one begin to catalogue the ethical shortcomings of the MSM?

Copyright theft is, fortunately for certain media organisations, outside the purview of the PCC, but from the Daily Mail’s two-page ‘lift’ of material from the blog of PC Coppperfield: -

With 46% of the vote, Peter Wright, as Editor, takes the rap for the most outrageous and blatant piece of plagiarism of the year. Across two pages he cut ‘n pasted the writings of “PC Copperfield” of the Policeman’s blog. In the blogging Copper’s own words, “The Mail on Sunday never even asked… bastards“.

…to the plundering of Beau Bo D’or and other members of B3TA by the likes of Emap and IPC, the MSM has shown a flagrant disregard for the basic intellectual property rights of bloggers when it suits them, which means pretty much any time they’re short of a bit of content and too lazy/time-pressured to come up with something of their own.
Accuracy and misrepresentation most certainly do fall within the remit of the PCC and yet where was their much vaunted code of practice when Owen Barder was subjected to an outrageous and wholly unwarranted hatchet job by Simon ‘lying scumbag‘ Walters of the Daily Mail?

Nowhere.

And then there was The Sun’s tawdry tale of Muslim vandals picking on ‘Our Boys’ in Windsor…

MUSLIM yobs who wrecked a house to stop four brave soldiers moving in after returning from Afghanistan sparked outrage last night.

The house in a village near riot-torn Windsor had BRICKS thrown through windows and was DAUBED with messages of hate.

Four young Household Cavalry officers who had planned to rent it were also the target of phone THREATS.

They were yesterday forced to look elsewhere to live — after top brass warned them against inflaming racial violence near the Queen’s Windsor Castle home.

All complete rubbish, of course, as The Sun eventually admitted… some three months later:-

Following our report ‘Hounded out’ about a soldier’s home in Datchet, Berks, being vandalised by Muslims, we have been asked to point out no threatening calls were logged at Combermere Barracks from Muslims and police have been unable to establish if any faith or religious group was responsible for the incident.

…on a completely different (and unconnected) page to the original story, which still appears on The Sun’s website in an entirely uncorrected form and without any reference to the later retraction of the ‘Muslim yobs’ allegation.

Until it was overtaken by ‘feral youth’ stories, this silly season’s hot moral panic looked set to be ‘reefer madness’ following the publication of a meta-analysis in the Lancet that was woefully misrepresented, from the outset, in the broadsheets…

Smoking cannabis increases the risk of schizophrenia by at least 40% according to research which indicates that there are at least 800 people suffering serious psychosis in the UK after smoking the drug.

Increases the risk of schizophrenia by 40% from what?

What is the risk of developing schizophrenia if you don’t smoke cannabis, and does that risk apply evenly across the whole population or is contingent on other causal or contributory factors that modify the level of base risk according to individual circumstances? Is this 40% figure a measure of the increase in annual risk or lifetime risk?

Without any of that additional information, the assertion that smoking cannabis increases the risk of developing schizophrenia by 40% is entirely meaningless, even if the quoted figure is true. You simply cannot make an informed evaluation of personal risk from such a statement unless you can assess the percentage increase in risk against a known baseline figure.

Still the Guardian article was a paragon of journalistic virtue by comparison to the line taken by both The Sun and The Daily Mail, who both pronounced that smoking just one spliff raised the risk of mental illness by 40% - the research published in the Lancet said nothing of the sort, nor could such a conclusion be reasonably arrived at on the basis of the analytical techniques used in its compilation (even if these had been correctly reported, which they weren’t), not that the little matter of accuracy was going to be permitted to intrude on a good scare story, so good, in fact, that the tabloid fiction of ‘one spliff = 40% increased risk of mental illness’ has since been repeated as fact in the broadsheets.

It’s worth noting what the PCC’s code of conduct states on the subject of accuracy:

Accuracy

i) The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, including pictures.

ii) A significant inaccuracy, mis-leading statement or distortion once recognised must be corrected, promptly and with due prominence, and - where appropriate - an apology published.

iii) The Press, whilst free to be partisan, must distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact.

One wonders, sometimes, whether parts of the press are even capable of distinguishing clearly between comment, conjecture and fact.

Cast around most of the established bloggers - check the sidebar for links to some of (in my opinion) the best - and you’ll find example after example of occasions when the MSM have been pulled up short for making basic errors of fact or misrepresenting stories to suit their preferred political agenda and yet when challenged by their own regulator over their ethical shortcomings they persist with the fiction of their own superiority over bloggers:-

Bob Satchwell, executive director of the Society of Editors, agrees that newspapers and magazines should do all they can to maintain the quality of their brand on the internet.

“Publications just cannot operate on the basis that the internet offers open access to any kind of material with no control. This may be true of certain parts of the internet but not for newspapers and magazines,” said Mr Satchwell, who edited the Cambridge Evening News for 15 years.

He said that the internet age is entering a new era which will favour the websites of more traditional publications.

“The internet has been flooded with a huge amount of material of varying quality. But things are beginning to settle down as people come to realise the value of information that comes from a reliable source. The newspapers’ big online advantage is their brand,” said Mr Satchwell.

He added that, although the Society of Editors is generally opposed to the over-policing of internet content, the PCC’s Code of Practice performs a valuable function.

“I believe that the code is setting a benchmark that can only enhance the brands of newspapers and magazines online. The biggest issue online is creating credibility. You cannot develop a significant audience online until you establish credibility. Organisations signed up to the PCC do have credibility since the information they publish is open to scrutiny,” Mr Satchwell said.

Well yes. Quite. Credibility and reputation do matter - in fact as a blogger that (and posting material that some find interesting) is all that I’ve got to sustain interest in the things I write - my budget simply doesn’t run to TV adverts, online bingo and CD give-aways, in fact it doesn’t even run to covering me for publishing bullshit and hiding behind a lawyer in order to cover my arse. Like other bloggers I stand or fall on my reputation, and my reputation alone.

To suggest, as the PCC does, that the choice facing consumers is between a regulated (and credible) MSM and unregulated (and much less credible) bloggers is to put forward a false dichotomy that suits only their own interest. As bloggers we may not have a written code of practice, or a regulatory body to enforce one, but blogging is far from being ‘unregulated’. The combination of the immediacy and interactivity of the medium - get something factually wrong and it’ll generally be pointed out in comments in a matter of minutes - and the overriding importance of reputation and personal credibility ensures that blogging operates within a framework of self-regulation in which the expected ethical standards of behaviour are often considerably higher than those in use by much of the MSM.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in regards to handling of interaction with readers.

Like many bloggers I make of point of not censoring comments posted to this blog, beyond the routine removal of spam, no matter how bizarre or abusive they might get from time to time. Moreover I would never dream of removing or censoring a comment simply because it demonstrated that I’d made a mistake or posted something that was factually inaccurate - depending on whether the matter at hand is one of a difference of opinion or a verifiable fact, I’ll either defend my position, acknowledge the point of dispute or, if necessary, make an appropriate correction. I’m under no express obligation to do any of those things. I do them because, in the first instance, I consider them to constitute fair and honest dealing with the people who read my work and, secondly, because such an approach, I feel, serves to enhance and sustain my personal reputation as a blogger and I’ve found, from experience, that even amongst bloggers who might vehemently disagree with some of my views, that little bit of honesty applied to my dealings with readers is sufficient to ensure that I enjoy a fairly good reputation and a measure of respect, much as there are any of bloggers of whom I take a reciprocal view.

Now consider, by way of contrast, The Sun’s actions in regards the ‘Muslim vandals’ story I cited earlier.

The information that debunked their claim of Muslim involvement in the vandalism of the property in question was published in a local newspaper within a week of the appearance of the original story, this being the primary source I used to debunk the Sun’s overheated claims.

On the same day as I posted my article on this story, I also e-mailed Julie Moult, the reporter whose byline and e-mail address appeared on the story, pointing out the factual errors in The Sun’s coverage and requesting that it should be corrected to reflect this new information - I got no reply.

The Sun finally took action only after a complaint to the PCC by a Mr Imran Ahmed of Huddersfield:-

Publication: The Sun

Complaint:
Mr Imran Ahmed of Huddersfield complained that an article in the newspaper was inaccurate when it claimed that Muslim yobs had wrecked a house intended for soldiers returning from Afghanistan.

Resolution:

The complaint was resolved when the newspaper published the following correction setting out the true position:

BARRACK ATTACK
Following our report ‘ Hounded out’ about a soldiers’ home in Datchet, Berks, being vandalised by Muslims, we have been asked to point out no threatening calls were logged at Combermere Barracks from Muslims and police have been unable to establish if any faith or religious group was responsible for the incident. We are happy to make this clear.

It’s interest to note that the PCC considers the complaint ‘resolved’ even though the article that spawned this complaint still appears on The Sun’s website without any amendments having been made to reflect the paper’s retraction of the allegations of Muslim involvement and without anything appearing on that page to indicate that a retraction had been made - that’s the power of regulation for you.

A blogger who tried to pull the same kind of stunt to cover their arse on such a mistake would be roundly slaughtered by their peers (other bloggers) for failing to deal honestly with their error - and yet we’re the one’s supposedly lacking credibility.

Similarly, in the case of the Mail’s hatchet job on Owen Barder, the article that appeared (and still appears) online included the facility to post comments, which several bloggers did, all pointing out that the article was factually inaccurate and seriously misrepresented the content of Owen’s blog (now closed), not least in attributing comments posted by readers to Owen himself. As can be seen, if you follow the link, none of these comments made it through the Mail’s moderation system - in fact at one point shortly after the story started the spread amongst bloggers, the Mail removed the comments facility from the article entirely, only to reinstate it later when it was pointed out (by bloggers) that this, itself, amounted to blatant dishonesty.

This is by no means an isolated occurrence - there are several recorded examples where critical comments from bloggers, especially comments that directly challenge the accuracy of stories published by the MSM, have disappeared into the moderation system never to see the light of day, and this in an industry whose code of practice states:-

2. Opportunity to reply

A fair opportunity for reply to inaccuracies must be given when reasonably called for.

For bloggers, a ‘fair opportunity to reply’ means an open-access comments system and the publication of comments (at least) under the original article and without censorship or alteration. In much of the MSM, a fair opportunity to reply means that you can file a complaint with the PCC, wait a minimum of two to three months for the complaint to be investigated and then, perhaps, get a three-to-four line retraction printed well out of the way at the bottom of page sixteen under a couple of uninteresting stories pulled from the file marked ‘Filler - for use on slow news days’.

I could go on to catalogue several other obvious shortcomings one finds within the MSM pretty much as a matter of routine - Heather Yaxley, whose own commentary on this issue is cited by Matt in the Britblog review, correctly notes the propensity of the MSM for uncritical parroting of material supplied by press agents:-

In the case of newspapers, there is a lot to be questioned in respect of the accuracy of many of their more sensationalist stories - which have often been “crafted” by press agents, such as Max Clifford (famously “Freddie Starr ate my hamster“).

This kind of ‘cut and paste’ journalism is by no means confined only to ‘celebrity’ stories in the tabloids - take the Indy’s recent coverage of a new ‘miracle’ hay fever cure, which I extensively fisked here. Looking back over the original article published by the Indy it seems perfectly apparent to me that the entirely piece amounts to nothing more than a near verbatim repetition of the content of a press release put out by the pharmaceutical company responsible for this new drug. As such, the question here is not just one of accuracy but of the blurring of the lines between news reporting and advertising - for several days after posting this article I was getting search engine hits on my blog all of which posed the same question, ‘where can I get ….’, which to me suggests that at the very least one could reasonably consider the article in question an ‘advertorial’ even if it wasn’t marked as such by the Indy.

Such practices, which seem increasingly common in health journalism, appear to fall largely (and maybe entirely) outside the brief of the PCC - I would assume that any concerns about the blurring of the lines between advertising and news reporting could be referred to the Advertising Standards Authority, although its unclear if (and how) the ASA might approach such an issue if it were raised.

For all the both the Press Complaints Commission and the Society of Editors would have us believe that the presence of voluntary regulation marks out a genuine dividing line between bloggers and the MSM and, moreover, enhances the credibility of professional journalism, in practice it seems that not only are the self-regulatory practices of bloggers vastly superior to anything that the newspaper industry’s existing regulatory code has to offer but that, at its best, blogging is substantially more effective in calling the MSM to account when it standards and practices fall short of those set out in the code of practice. What the mainstream media’s voluntary code of practice and reliance on regulation lacks is the simplicity and immediacy of response that blogging offers, not to mention the visibility of response. Even with such facilities well within the grasp of most news websites - it requires only a comments system and a little basic honesty on the part of comment moderators, after all - the MSM routinely falls short of the standards of ethical behaviour found as a matter of near routine amongst established bloggers (and, it must be said, amongst those new entrants to blogging who take the time and trouble to acquaint themselves with the prevailing social mores of the medium).

When bloggers are routinely exposing factual inaccuracies and misreporting in the MSM’s news output within hours -and sometimes within minutes - of articles being published, to lay claim to credibility on the strength of a three month plus turnaround on even a basic complaint is little short of a joke, even if one excludes from consideration the manifest failings of system that routinely permits demonstrably inaccurate articles to go uncorrected provided that the offending newspaper published are carefully buried retraction somewhere on its website, even if that somewhere is in no way linked to related to the location of the original article.

Far from talking up its code of practice, the PCC should be actively talking to bloggers about its intentions in moving on to the electronic frontier and, in particular, about how its regulatory practices need to change to meet the requirements and demands of the medium.

If nothing else, the PCC needs to ensure that when it comes the publication of retractions and corrections, and in permitting a right to reply, both are carried out by means of appending such content to the original article rather than, as at present, permitting news websites to bury such content as far away from the article that spawned the complaint as possible. That, in terms of online publishing, is the minimum acceptable standard that should be accepted.

In addition, the PCC needs to take a view on the question of transparency, both in terms of operating comment systems and the making of stealth edits to cover up errors. On the former, the code of practice should include scope for complaints where, as happened in the case of the Daily Mail and Owen Barder, the newspaper deliberately concealed comments that directly challenged the factual accuracy of the article in question, while on the latter it should be made clear that the use of stealth edits is in no way a means of avoiding the requirement to publish a retraction should an article have been published, originally, containing errors of fact or misrepresentations.

Instead of drawing a line in the sand between the ‘regulated’ MSM and ‘unregulated’ (but actually self-regulated) blogosphere, the PCC would do rather better by engaging in dialogue with bloggers so as to better understand the demands it faces in seeking to extend its regulatory framework onto the internet - after all, in this, its us bloggers who’re the experts.

*Footnote - the title of this article comes from Ambrose Bierce’s definition of ‘Reporter’ in The Devil’s Dictionary: Reporter (n) - A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words.

Things are moving on apace with the ‘We Can’t Turn Them Away” blog campaign in support of Iraqis working for UK Forces who now find themselves under threat of torture and/or murder by local militias and death squads.

As you may have seen, the campaign is attracting widespread support from bloggers of just about all political persuasions, from journalists, newspapers and others working in the MSM and from mainstream politicians in all political parties - and to help spread the word even further we’ve now got around to releasing two sets of blog ‘furniture’ for use by anyone supporting the campaign.

First the horizontal animated banners, suitable for inclusion in blog posts…

And now the skyscraper banners for blog siderbars…

There may well be a central information blog to link to shortly, but in the meantime if you need a suitable link to go with your preferred banner then go for the post that started it all…

http://danhardie.wordpress.com/2007/07/22/we-cant-turn-them-away/

This just in, and reproduced verbatim:

 LEGAL CHALLENGE TO GOVERNMENT AS PRESSURE GROWS FOR INDEPENDENT 7/7 INQUIRY

Survivors and relatives of the people killed in the July 7 th London bomb attacks have warned the Government that they will seek a Judicial Review into its continued refusal to grant an independent enquiry into the attacks.

They will outline their legal case in a letter, which will be presented to the Home Office at noon on Wednesday 15th August 2007.

Graham Foulkes, whose son David Foulkes, 22, was murdered at Edgware Rd said:

“We were very disappointed that the Government rejected our call for an independent enquiry. We believe that our country can only benefit from an independent investigation into the largest ever terrorist attack on mainland Britain.”

He continued:

“There have been reports into the bombings. None of these have been independent. And as time has gone on it has become obvious that much of what we were told was untrue. For instance, we have gone from being told that the bombers were unknown to the authorities (”clean skins”, as Charles Clarke, the then Home Secretary said in the wake of the bombings) to finding out through the “Crevice” trial that at least two of the bombers were known prior to July 7 th 2005 and that one of them, Mohammed Siddique Khan (the Edgware Road bomber) had been followed home by the authorities.”

This concern has been supported by the Greater London Assembly who, on May 28 th 2007, passed a motion calling for an independent inquiry following the conviction of the Crevice Defendants “given the conflicting accounts of what happened in the months leading up to 7th July 2005″.

The legal case for an enquiry rests on Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights. This requires the state to protect life and to undertake an independent and effective investigation of the issue if the article is breached. Even if the requirement to protect life was not breached, the Article allows for an enquiry because of the obvious need for public protection.

Rob Webb, whose sister Laura Webb, 29 was murdered at Edgware Rd said:

“The drip feed of information since the attacks probably doesn’t give the whole story. But it is now clear that the security services knew far more about the bombers and the possibility of an attack than we had originally been led to believe. So the state looks to have breached its duty to protect life. We all – Government, Security Services, survivors, bereaved and of course the public at large, who remain at risk of terrorist plots, need to learn all we can about the 7/7 attacks. We need to know what could have been done to help prevent them and so help prevent innocent people from suffering the fate of all those who were caught up in the awful events of that day in July 2005.”

Should the Government once again turn down the request for an independent investigation, the signatories of the letter will seek a Judicial Review into the decision.

Rob concluded:

“We don’t wish to take our Government to Court. But we need to ensure that everything is done to prevent further attacks. We believe that an Independent investigation will help do that, which is why we are prepared to go to Court to ensure that one happens.”

Petition for an inquiry here

Signatories to the letter, which will be presented to the Home Office today include:

Nader Mozzaka, bereaved. Nader’s wife, Nazy, died at Kings Cross

Graham Foulkes, bereaved. Graham’s son, David, died at Edgware Rd

Rob Webb, bereaved. Rob’s sister, laura, died at Edgware Rd

Paul Mitchell, survivor. Paul lost part of his leg and had serious hearing injuries at Kings Cross

Thelma Stober, survivor. Thelma lost her left leg and had other serious back injuries at Aldgate

Kirsty Morrison, survivor, King’s Cross. Kirsty developed debililtating PTSD.

Elizabeth Alderton, survivor, Aldgate

Ros Morley, bereaved. Ros’s husband Colin died at Edgware Rd

Lesley Ratcliff, survivor, King’s Cross

Michael Henning, survivor, Aldgate. Michael had facial injuried and developed PTSD

Judy Mallinson. Judy’s husband, Ross, suffered serious head injuries.

Ema Plunkett, survivor, Tavistock Square

Elizabeth Kenworthy, Aldgate. Survivor and first responder

David Gould, bereaved. David’s step-daughter, Helen, died at King’s Cross

Angela Iouannou, survivor, King’s cross

Fiona Crosbie, survivor, King’s Cross

Mark Elding, survivor, Tavistock Square

Andy Brown, survivor, Aldgate. Andy lost both legs in the explosion.

Janine Mitchell. Janine’s husband Paul was seriously injured at King’s Cross

Janne Palthe, survivor, Edgware Rd

Thomas Ikemi, bereaved. Thomas cousin, Anthony, was killed in Tavistock Sq

Ross Mallinson, survivor. Ross suffered serious head injuries at Aldgate

Sarah Stow, survivor, Tavistock Sq

Tim Coulson, survivor, Edgware Rd

Rachel North, survivor, King’s Cross.

More on this breaking story here.

Radio Five Live’s ‘Pods and Blogs‘ show has been kind enough to pick up on and feature the ongoing blog campaign in support of those Iraqi employees who’ve worked for, and are still working for, UK forces and who now find themselves under threat from local militias and death squads.

The show, a podcast version of which is hosted here, includes an interview with Dan Hardie, who kicked off the campaign - no more needs to be said, just listen and understand…

 

 Pods and Blogs - Iraqi Workers [12:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (28)

And in case you haven’t figured it out by now, Tim Ireland’s sorted out this video to explain it to you… in Post-It notes.

Time to get back in the saddle with another episode of the Dale ‘n Dizzy show:

Labour caught out on the internet again?

Remember the last time Labour MPs had to apologise for making dodgy videos? No? Well I bet Tom Watson and Sion Simon so. Well, Dizzy has a good little story HERE about 15 Labour MPs in highly marginal seats filming videos in the Houses of Parliament. He speculates that they are for use in an election campaign - I suspect that they have been filmed as a contingency for an October election. However, I find it highly debateable as to whether the Serjeant at Arms would have given permission for such videos to be filmed on the Parliamentary Estate. Perhaps a question or two should be asked…

And…

Labour PPB for marginal elections footage leaks on to the Internet?

Whatever is going here? Take a look. We have two pages of videos titles “[Constituency Name’s] Labour MP talking about Gordon Brown”. Each video is professionally done, they only appear on Google and not on Labour websites or the Labour YouTube channel. They were all posted on the same date (27th July), they were all appear to have been uploaded anonymously.

They’re all filmed within the buildings of Parliament (did they get permission from the Serjeant at Arms?), they’re all talking about how brilliant the Government and Gordon is and how it will be good for their constituency, and, last but by no means least, they’re all MPs in marginal or hyper-marginal constituency with the exception of Preston (however that has had boundary changes).

Anyone want to place a bet that this footage is going to appear in Party Political broadcasts in the run up to the next General Election, possibly nationally but definitely locally?

Watch them all here.

Nice spot Dizzy, but you really should do a little more research before you start speculating. Not only has Curious Hamster taken care of the query about filming in the House of Commons (which Iain’s acknowledged - sort of):

Since the Grant Shapps “1234 incident”, I’ve noticed that Iain Dale has written a few posts on the subject of Labour and the interwebs. Today, taking the lead from Dizzy, he suggests that the Labour Party has been up to no good filming interviews in parliament without permission from the Serjeant at Arms and loading them up onto Google video.

In this case, you can almost hear the straws crackling under his grasp. 15 Labour MPs have filmed interviews in the same spot in Westminster Hall. Given that the filming of interviews is specifically allowed without need for permission in one part of Westminster Hall and given that one of the MPs filmed was the one who gave the answer linked above, I think it’s safe to assume that permission wasn’t require in this instance.

But a quick whizz around the websites of several of the MPs who’ve appeared in these video shows that they all appear to have something else in common…

…they all have a new-ish official Labour Party MP websites, which include a pod/videocast section, using the same Tangent Labs system that serves as the backend to Labour’s main party website, the main difference being that the MP sites are actually hosted by Tangent Labs, where Labour has its main site hosted on a server at Rackspace.

So Dizzy’s possible ‘leaked’ PPB footage turns out to be no more than a job lot of short videos filmed for MPs websites and without checking the numbers, one suspects that given the general theme of these videos - how things are different now Brown’s in charge - the significance of these MPs being, in the main, from marginal constituencies, is no more than the faint suspicion that Blair’s unpopularity following the Iraq War might just have had a fair bit to do with how and why they seat is quite so marginal, hence the need to big up the fact that there’s a new guy in charge.

It’s a nice spot by Dizzy but, as usual, the real story turns out to be considerably more mundane than his speculations.

UPDATE - Dizzy’s posted a response that’s worth answering…

1: I never said they hadn’t got permission nor did I speculate that they didn’t. I simply said “did they?”

This being the question answered by Curious Hamster.

2: I don’t have to do anymore research because it’s just my personal website where I express my personal opinions. The idea that I can’t write my opinions and ask a question online unless I jump through lots of hoops available to political saddos who work in Westminster earning peanuts is.. well it’s bollocks.

Funnily enough, I always find that doing a modicum of background research makes the difference between telling a story for what it actually is - Dizzy could easily have played to the gallery with a ‘look at this bunch of grovelling shites’ story, which is about as much as his discovery actually merits - as opposed to having your speculations shot down in flames on the back of five minutes of fact checking and being made to look a bit of a tinfoil-hatted dickhead…

But that’s just my take on things…

3: I have looked around the MPs websites, not many of them have them.

Okay, so here’s the list of the ones that do have them online…

Jim Knight MP - here

Paul Clark MP - here

Paddy Tipping - links to the video on Google Vids from this page

Andrew Smith MP - on his biography page

Claire Ward MP - another linker rather than embedder

Mark Todd MP - here

Stephen Ladyman MP - yet another linker…

Sarah McCarthy-Fry MP - here

Ruth Kelly MP - links from here

There are a few other assorted videos housed on the same account - here’s one of David Milliband talking about climate change as it appears on the website of Celia Barlow MP, while Anne Snelgrove has a couple of interviews with Hilary Benn and John Hutton on her site.

4: I am doing some different reseach though and there may be, as Ed Balls would say, “more to come”

Ooh, I can hardly wait…

I must congratulate Mr Eugenides on penning this moving eulogy for Shambo:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy T-bone,
Silence the tambourines and with muffled drums
Bring out the burger buns, let the ketchup come.

Let cattle trucks circle moaning round the barn
Scribbling in the dirt the message, Shambo Is Dead,
Put mournful garlands round the white necks of the temple monks,
Let the government veterinarians wear black rubber gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My midweek sandwich and my Sunday lunch,
My stir-fry, my fillet, my stock, my chop;
I thought that leftovers would last for ever: I was wrong.

The barbeques are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the mustard and dismantle the grill;
Pour away the gravy and sweep up the wood.
For no meal now will ever be as good.

I understand that Mr E has been contacted by a major Hollywood film studio and invited to write the script for a film version of the story of Shambo’s tragic demise under the working title of ‘Four Barbecues and a Carvery”

I’ve written a couple of articles in the last couple of months on the general theme of the abject state of science/health journalism in the mainstream press - see Why is the Indy Shilling for Big Pharma? and Dumbing Down Dementia- the second of which includes this observation:

“…if one wishes to find good quality source material for a good debunking, then I can heartily recommend that you open any newspaper and scour the news sections for the words ‘health correspondent’.”

Today’s proof of that statement comes from the Guardian, and specifically from the current health correspondent, Polly Curtis, who, so far as one can tell from information in the public domain, appears to possess solid credentials as a generic journalist - runner-up in the feature writer of the year category in the 2000 Guardian Student Media Awards, followed by a steady progression through the ranks at the Guardian from ‘contributor’ and journalist to, first, education correspondent and, now, health correspondent, but exhibits precious little to suggest that she is adequately qualified to correctly evaluate and report accurately on the content of specialist research/journal papers in anything other than a superficial manner.

Now I may, conceivably, be being a little harsh in my evaluation of young Polly’s apparent background where, in truth, she is actually packing a raft of GCSEs, A Levels and a degree in the natural and/or social sciences, some of all of which are relevant to the subject at hand (health) but when set against a benchmark of what science/health journalism looks like when written by a real scientist, of the likes of Ben Goldacre, then it would be fair to say that on the evidence of her efforts today, I have my doubts…

Cannabis use linked to 40% rise in risk of schizophrenia

You knew that was coming, didn’t you? Even if you didn’t see this being trailed on Breakfast TV this morning, you just knew that with cannabis/mental health scare stories being the current flavour of the month, there was going to be a very good chance that this would be the subject of Polly’s article.

Smoking cannabis increases the risk of schizophrenia by at least 40% according to research which indicates that there are at least 800 people suffering serious psychosis in the UK after smoking the drug.

Increases the risk of schizophrenia by 40% from what?

What is the risk of developing schizophrenia if you don’t smoke cannabis, and does that risk apply evenly across the whole population or is contingent on other causal or contributory factors that modify the level of base risk according to individual circumstances? Is this 40% figure a measure of the increase in annual risk or lifetime risk?

Without any of that additional information, the assertion that smoking cannabis increases the risk of developing schizophrenia by 40% is entirely meaningless, even if the quoted figure is true. You simply cannot make an informed evaluation of personal risk from such a statement unless you can assess the percentage increase in risk against a known baseline figure.

Mental health groups called on the government last night to issue fresh health warnings and launch an education campaign to advise teenagers that even light consumption of the drug could trigger long-term mental health problems.

Without wishing to sound cynical - well they would, wouldn’t they?

The fact of the matter is that however one views the motives the of the voluntary sector in general, such an education campaign amounts to, at the very least, as sizeable raft of free publicity for these groups to piggyback on - and that’s if the government decides to develop and operate such a campaign in-house. If, on the other hand, its decides to commission in resource materials or outsource delivery then there’s also the prospect of a few nice fat government grants as well.

The findings came after a rush of ministers declared their cannabis-smoking pasts and an order from the prime minister for officials to consider whether the drug should be reclassified amid fears about its more potent “skunk” form. Last night the Home Office said the research would be considered in that review.

And? I suppose that’s a useful bit of filler that describes the political context behind the current moral panic about cannabis use, but it still tells us nothing of real substance.

The study, an analysis published in the Lancet medical journal of previous research into the effects of the drug on tens of thousands of people, provides the most persuasive evidence to date that smoking cannabis can cause mental illness years after people have stopped using it.

Does it?

Let’s see what the Lancet actually has to say, at least in summary (to get the full article requires a subscription or payment of a day rate of $30).

Background

Whether cannabis can cause psychotic or affective symptoms that persist beyond transient intoxication is unclear. We systematically reviewed the evidence pertaining to cannabis use and occurrence of psychotic or affective mental health outcomes.

Fair enough.

The starting point for this research is ‘we’re not sure if there is evidence to support a causal link between cannabis and long-term mental health problems, so lets review the current evidence that’s available’.

It’s a meta-analysis study, which a perfectly valid research technique but one not without its potential problems and pitfalls, which is something I, unfortunately, cannot explore in detail without access to the full article, so for the purposes of this article we’ll take it as read that the study has been competently conducted and provides a valid set of outcomes and conclusions.

Methods

We searched Medline, Embase, CINAHL, PsycINFO, ISI Web of Knowledge, ISI Proceedings, ZETOC, BIOSIS, LILACS, and MEDCARIB from their inception to September, 2006, searched reference lists of studies selected for inclusion, and contacted experts. Studies were included if longitudinal and population based. 35 studies from 4804 references were included. Data extraction and quality assessment were done independently and in duplicate.

Okay, that’s also very useful is as much as it tells use two very important things.

First, given the scope of the publication databases listed as having been searched for suitable studies, it seems highly likely that the data used in the study in not UK specific. Nothing wrong with that, but it does mean that we may find some statistical discrepancies when comparing the output data in this study with actual data from the UK.

Second, this is research is based on data drawn only from longitudinal population studies. Again, there is nothing wrong with that, but what it does tell us is that it’s highly unlikely that the research will be able to provide anything more substantial than indications of any observed correlations between cannabis use and mental health problems - which means that any claims of causation deriving from or attributed to this research need to be regarded sceptically.

Findings

There was an increased risk of any psychotic outcome in individuals who had ever used cannabis (pooled adjusted odds ratio=1·41, 95% CI 1·20–1·65). Findings were consistent with a dose-response effect, with greater risk in people who used cannabis most frequently (2·09, 1·54–2·84). Results of analyses restricted to studies of more clinically relevant psychotic disorders were similar. Depression, suicidal thoughts, and anxiety outcomes were examined separately. Findings for these outcomes were less consistent, and fewer attempts were made to address non-causal explanations, than for psychosis. A substantial confounding effect was present for both psychotic and affective outcomes.

Now that is very interesting, because what the study is reporting - if we assume that baseline for no increased risk is a pool adjusted odd ratio of 1 - is that the 40% increase in risk cited by Curtis applies to ‘any psychotic outcome’ and not just schizophrenia.

There are actually a wide of conditions, diseases and even situations that can give rise to psychotic episodes and outcomes, ranging from the psychological (schizophrenia, bi-polar disorders, severe clinical depression and/or stress) to the organic (brain tumours, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, syphilis - in rare cases even influenza and mumps can induce psychotic episodes) to the broadly self-inflicted, which includes cannabis but also covers a wide range of other drugs that can, and do, have psychoactive effects ranging from dear old alcohol through a range of prescription drugs (barbiturates, benzodiazepines, some anti-depressants and anti-epileptics) to the classic range of ’street drugs’ which encompassed pretty much anything that’s cocaine or amphetamine-based plus all the usual hallucinogenics.

It also cites a doubling of the risk of psychosis (a 100% increase) in data relating to long-term use of cannabis and indicates some of the potential shortcomings of the research that the study reviewed. There’s both consistency in outcomes and in efforts to eliminate external factors in studies looks specifically at the incidence of psychosis, much less consistency and effort to account for external factors is studies focussing on depression/anxiety and a substantial confounding effect across all studies that needs to allowed for, statistically, before reaching any valid conclusions.

On the whole, that looks pretty good as research methodologies go, certainly good enough to suggest that this is, indeed, a competent and exacting piece of research and give the study’s conclusions some serious consideration.

Interpretation

The evidence is consistent with the view that cannabis increases risk of psychotic outcomes independently of confounding and transient intoxication effects, although evidence for affective outcomes is less strong. The uncertainty about whether cannabis causes psychosis is unlikely to be resolved by further longitudinal studies such as those reviewed here. However, we conclude that there is now sufficient evidence to warn young people that using cannabis could increase their risk of developing a psychotic illness later in life.

So, what the study actually concludes is that there is sufficient statistical evidence to take the issue of risk seriously although not enough to prove a clear causative relationship or accurately define the parameters of that relationship. Indeed the study goes on to indicate that, so far as statistical population studies go, we’ve pretty much hit the wall in terms of what they can actually tell us about the possible relationship between cannabis and mental health, which means that any further answers are going to have to come from those strands of research currently examining this relationship in terms of genetics and biochemistry.

In short, it doesn’t really tell us anything new and it certainly doesn’t establish a clear causal relationship between cannabis use and long term mental health problems, but it does suggest that there’s enough statistical evidence of risk to justify warning young people of the existence of such risks.

All very reasonable and nothing that’s really the stuff of scare stories and moral panics if understood (and presented) properly.

Getting back to Curtis’ article, the good news is that she’s at least taken the time and trouble to actually include some of the research outcomes in a form that can be evaluated.

The overall additional risk to cannabis smokers is small, but measurable. One in 100 of the general population have a chance of developing severe schizophrenia; that rises to 1.4 in 100 for people who have smoked cannabis.

The bad news is that she’s made a complete hash of presenting this information.

Notice the shift in tone - ‘the overall additional risk is small, but measurable’ - which is certainly true, but not what was implied at the start of the article when she was banging on about a 40% increased risk.

She also claims that this increased risk relates specifically to the possibility of developing ’severe schizophrenia’, which is certainly not what the summary given by the Lancet suggests - remember that refers to the increase risk of ‘any psychotic outcome’, not just schizophrenia and certainly not just ’severe schizophrenia’ - unless there is such a specific reference in the full article then it looks very much as if Curtis is over-egging the pudding and misrepresenting the conclusions of the study in terms that suggest that the qualitative elements of risk (i.e. the severity of the condition linked to cannabis use) are significant greater than those indicated by the actual study.

But the risk of developing other psychotic symptoms among people who smoke large quantities or are already prone to mental illness is significant, the researchers say.

People who smoke cannabis daily have a 200% increased risk of psychosis.

Well, yes, the study does indicate an increased risk with regular use and higher dosage, but that risk is a little over double the baseline risk (actually 109% greater) not the 200% that Curtis cites - a basic mathematical error, one would presume, but one that still gives a distorted picture of the actual outcomes of the research.

Moreover, while we’re talking about baseline risks, the 1 in 100 figure cited is the generally quoted figure for schizophrenia in the general population of the US, the actual figure given by the National Statistical Office for the UK is around 1 in 200 for all psychotic disorders, not just schizophrenia. In terms of assessing risk, this is actually rather important as what it does suggest is that even allowing for the degree of increased risk noted in the research study, the actual risk of a regular cannabis user developing a psychotic disorder in UK is only about the same as base risk of schizophrenia in the US.

In fact, if one narrows the scope down just to schizophrenia, then the generally cited rate of prevalence in the UK is only 3 cases per 1000 population with an annual incidence rate of between 0.1 and 0.2 cases per thousand, which makes accounting for the differences between US and UK rates even more important.

What this may well indicate, more than anything else, is marked differences in diagnostic practices between the UK and US that need to be considered and factored into our calculations, and which certainly needs to be accounted or allowed for in assessing the value of this research in terms of public policy.

They estimate that 14% of 15- to 34-year-olds currently suffering schizophrenia are ill because they smoked cannabis, a figure previously thought to be between 8% and 10%.

Because?

How the hell do you get ‘because’ from a study that concludes:-

The uncertainty about whether cannabis causes psychosis is unlikely to be resolved by further longitudinal studies such as those reviewed here.

The answer is, ‘you don’t', because, as yet, there is no definitive proof of causation and the most promising line of inquiry at the present time suggests that the risks of developing psychosis as a consequence of cannabis use are likely to be confined to a segment of population that has a genetic predisposition towards mental health problems to begin with.

Where, exactly have those figures come from?

According to the current diagnosis rates about 800 people would have been spared schizophrenia if they had not smoked cannabis.

Ah, now I see - they come from mixing and matching incidence rates (i.e. numbers diagnosed each year) with estimates of risk derived from prevalence rates.

Having done a bit of scouting around to see if I could find any reported studies where a comparison of outcomes between them and this new study might give the figures cited by Curtis, arriving eventually at this report, which appears to fit the bill.

If cannabis causes schizophrenia - and that remains in question - then by 2010 up to 25 per cent of new cases of schizophrenia in the UK may be due to cannabis, according to a new study by Dr Matthew Hickman of the University of Bristol and colleagues, published in Addiction journal.

Note, once again, the big ‘if’.

Not only that, but if we look at this study’s reported methodology, we find:

The research study matches historic trends in cannabis use and exposure from a national population survey against estimates of new occurrences of schizophrenia in three English cities (Nottingham, Bristol and the London Borough of Southwark). The researchers assess what might happen to schizophrenia cases if we assume a causal link between cannabis use and onset of psychotic symptoms, an association widely recognised by some psychiatrists and researchers and considered recently by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.

Now there is a potential problem with that methodology and that is:-

Ethnic minority groups are at increased risk for all psychotic illnesses but African-Caribbeans and Black Africans appear to be at especially high risk for both schizophrenia and mania. These findings suggest that (a) either additional risk factors are operating in African-Caribbeans and Black Africans or that these factors are particularly prevalent in these groups, and that (b) such factors increase risk for schizophrenia and mania in these groups. (source)

In terms of demographics, the Black population of Southwark amounts to 25.9% of the total population of the borough; for Nottingham its 4.34% and for Bristol its 2.32%.

For the UK as a whole, the Black population amounts to 1% of the total population, so the Bristol study is taking its data from areas in which a ethnic minority population that is known to be at increased risk of developing psychotic disorders is over-represented in comparison to the national population by anything from 2 to 25 times.

Not to mention that the study, itself, works from a premise that assumes that a causal relationship between long-term mental health problems and cannabis use will be established.

And is all that were not enough…

The researchers said the evidence was the strongest yet to show that cannabis caused psychotic mental illnesses, and not just that people who were ill smoked more. Dr Stanley Zammit, of Cardiff University, said: “We think the evidence is such that we need a new official warning about the risk.”

At the risk of repetition, the summary in the Lancet explicitly states:

The uncertainty about whether cannabis causes psychosis is unlikely to be resolved by further longitudinal studies such as those reviewed here.

And you’ll notice that the apparent claim of causality attributed to the researchers is not an actual quotation, in fact the only direct quotation given calls for the a warning about the apparent risks, which is supported by the conclusions of the research study but only the context of statistical correlations and not proof of causation.

Paul Corry, director of public affairs at the mental health charity Rethink, echoed calls for more warnings but said it was not evidence in itself that cannabis should be reclassified. “Rather than focusing its attention on the reclassification debate, the government would do well to crack on with the more important job of informing the public about the health implications,” he said.

Well yes, quite…

But then before doing that, should we not be just a little more exacting in how those are expressed, in terms of giving an accurate assessment of the evidence of risk provided by these studies and by not claiming causation when there is still no definitive evidence to support such claims?

There is rather more to this than just a blogger venting off a bit of steam about yet another piece of shoddy health journalism. In matters of public health education, particularly with young people and especially if what one is trying to achieve amounts to behaviour modification, there is nothing more important than trust - and there is nothing more certain to undermine trust than the misreporting and misrepresentation of evidence.

If you want young people to take on board the evidence of possible risks arising from the use of cannabis you have to be upfront in giving them accurate information, because no soon as you are caught cheating and overplaying your hand then that’s it, you’ve blown it and they won’t listen to you.

Moral panics might be good for selling newspapers, but they’re a lousy way of going about public health education.

UPDATE

Having worked your way through all that, this is the Daily Mail’s take on the story…

A single joint of cannabis raises the risk of schizophrenia by more than 40 per cent, a disturbing study warns.

The Government-commissioned report has also found that taking the drug regularly more than doubles the risk of serious mental illness.

Overall, cannabis could be to blame for one in seven cases of schizophrenia and other life-shattering mental illness, the Lancet reports.

The grim statistics - the latest to link teenage cannabis use with mental illness in later life - come only days after Gordon Brown ordered a review of the decision to downgrade cannabis to class C, the least serious category.

I suppose the only saving grace is that neither of the journalists bylined on the story - Fiona Macrae and Emily Andrews - appears to be billed a ‘health correspondent’, although its questionable as to whether they should even be billed as journalists.

It has long been accepted by the vast majority of the British people, whatever their views on immigration in general, that service to Queen and Country counts for something; that regardless of the different rules on immigration and residency that may or may not be in force at any particular time, any man or woman who, for whatever reason, places their life at risk in service of the realm has earned for themselves and , at least, their immediate family, the moral right to enjoy the very best of protections this country can offer, that of residency in this country.

One sees this view displayed most clearly in regards to the Gurkhas, whose moral claim to have earned, through service,the right to reside on these shores goes almost undisputed, even by members of the British National Party.

There is another group of foreign nationals who, at the present time, are no less deserving of consideration than the Gurhkas and to whom we have no less as a moral obligation to provide adequately for their personal safety, and the safety of their families.

They are not soldiers, although for the last four years they have worked alongside British forces in the most difficult and dangerous circumstances, putting their lives at risk merely for doing their job… oh what the hell, just read what Justin has to say and you’ll get the picture:

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Since British troops occupied Southern Iraq in the spring of 2003, thousands of Iraqi citizens have worked for the British Army, the Coalition Provisional Authority (South) and for contractors serving UK forces. There is now considerable evidence that their lives, and the lives of their families, are at risk: some former workers for the British have been murdered, and many others have fled to neighbouring countries or gone into hiding in Basra.

The British Government, for whom they were ultimately working, has not offered them the right of asylum in the UK. This is morally unacceptable. It is also unnecessary, since we are well able to accommodate several thousand Iraqi refugees, most of whom already speak English and all of whom have already worked for our country.

The most detailed recent report, by Jonathan Miller of Channel Four News, notes the murder of 17 translators in one single incident in Basra. It cites the cases of hundreds of others who have fled to a refugee existence in nearby Middle Eastern countries or are in hiding in Iraq. The British Government response has come from the Home Office, which has suggested that Iraqis put at risk by their work for British troops ‘register with the UN refugee agency’. Other reports provide supporting detail: Iraqis are being targeted for murder because they have worked for British forces. (See here and here.)

Marie Colvin’s report for the Times of April 8 speaks of desperate former workers for the British Army being turned away from the British embassy in Syria by staff who had orders not to admit any Iraqis. These brave men and women have testimonials written by British officers stating that they are at risk from jihadi violence: and yet we are still refusing to admit them to the United Kingdom.

If you feel that this is unacceptable and that Britain should prevent Iraqis from being murdered for the ‘crime’ of working for British troops, could you please write to your MP and ask him or her to press the Government for action. You can use the excellent website ‘Write to Them‘ or post a letter yourself.

Please be courteous when writing to your MP. It would be a good idea to read the reports above, and cite relevant facts. We would suggest that your letter could contain the following points:

• It is morally unacceptable that Britain should abandon people who are at risk because they worked for British soldiers and diplomats.
• This country will be shamed if any more Iraqis are murdered for the ‘crime’ of having supported UK forces.
• Iraqis who worked for British forces should not be told to leave Iraq and throw themselves on the mercy of United Nations relief agencies in Arab countries: these agencies are already being overwhelmed by the outflow of Iraqi refugees, and Iraqi refugees who have worked for British diplomats or troops may well be targeted by local jihadists.
• There is plentiful evidence that armed groups in Iraq kill the families of those they consider ‘enemies’: for this reason we must extend the right of asylum to the families of those who worked for us.
• It is entirely practical for this country’s troops in Iraq, and its embassies in neighbouring countries, to take in Iraqis who have worked for us and fly them to the UK. Indeed, there is already considerable anger among British servicemen that Iraqis are being abandoned in this way.
• This country is large enough and rich enough to accommodate several thousand Iraqi refugees. Denmark has already given asylum to all 200 Iraqis who worked for its smaller occupying force.
• It does not matter what your MP’s views (or what your views) are on the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. People who risked their lives for this country’s soldiers are now being abandoned by the British Government. Their lives can and must be saved by their being granted the right of asylum in this country.
• This policy should be implemented regardless of whether British soldiers stay in Iraq or are soon withdrawn. But it must be introduced soon: applications for asylum cannot be processed in a lengthy fashion, as the security situation in Basra is deteriorating rapidly, and delay is likely to lead to further killings of Iraqis who worked for British troops.

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There is also a petition you can sign at the Downing Street website - go on, you know you should.

As the suggestion has been made that we should tag other bloggers with this, I’m going to be really cheeky and tag Tom Watson.