Nadine Dorries is a Liar and Unfit for Public Office – Reprise

It’s been a while since I last blogged about my erstwhile MP and all-round nasty bullying harridan Nadine Dorries, but her recent absurd rant against blogger Tim Ireland (http://www.bloggerheads.com/) has shown once again that she is a liar and unfit for public office. 

In her idiotic attempt not only to bully Tim but to intimidate others who associate with him included this not-so-subtle threat:

My especially ‘poorly compulsive obsessive’ online stalker recently alarmed the Police enough for them to issue a verbal warning on tape at the completion of a five hour interview under caution. Following the warning, his tweets and blogs have remained monitored, as are those of people he communicates with on a regular basis.  Everything is compiled to be discussed with the Police at regular intervals. There is a very substantive reason for this periodic review.

Let’s skate right on past the question of who beyond Dorries herself described Tim as ‘poorly compulsive obsessive’ as the quotation marks suggest, and consider the accuracy of this threat. 

Bedfordshire Police Official Statement:
Officers from Bedfordshire Police have looked into a complaint of stalking/harassment in May 2010.

Both parties involved have been spoken with to determine whether any offences have been committed.  A man attended a voluntary interview and was given advice about his behaviour, he was not arrested or given a police caution.  At no time did either party have their internet activity or communications monitored. No further police action is planned.

You can decide for yourselves if these two accounts are in any way compatible. But if you come to the conclusion that they are not, that there is no way this could all be some terrible, almost pythonesque, misunderstanding, then you might agree with me that the only conclusion that can be drawn from this rather sad incident is as follows:

Nadine Dorries is a liar and unfit for public office.

Now. Tory Central Office, Office of the Speaker of the House of Commons, Mid Bedfordshire Conservative Constituency Party, who is going to do something about this increasingly erratic fantasist?

Standards – a stream of consciousness.

Which is worse? To set unreasonably high standards for oneself, intend to meet them but fail, or to accept that one’s behaviour won’t meet that level and accept low standards for oneself? Should we strive for an ideal, knowing we won’t reach it, perhaps hoping that it will improve matters even in failure, and in so doing make ourselves unhappy; or accept that we are flawed, sometimes intemperate, sometimes selfish creatures, shrug our shoulders and get on with it, accepting the damage done to others around us (and perhaps beyond) as inevitable?

I suspect there are two answers to this. I suspect that the first is that this is not a choice we are free to make. Either you set yourself those standards and, if you fail, hold yourself accountable for that failure; or you don’t. Some might describe this as having a consceince.

I suspect the second is that whether you beat yourself up for your failings or not makes precious little difference to the people affected by them.

“You are what you think; you are what you say; you are what you do” – Edwards James Olmos.

“Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.” – Max Ehrmann

Fred Goodwin’s Penis Did Not Cause The Financial Crash

There are some subjects one simply never believes one will have to write about or clarify. The title of this post might give some of you this feeling:

It certainly does me. And yet here I am having to explain why Fred Goodwin’s Penis Did Not Cause The Financial Crash.

The wholly spurious nonsense which gives rise to this clarification was first spewed forth suggested by that bastion of common sense, the Daily Mail, in their crowing coverage of the breaching in the House of Lords of the injunction taken out by Fred Goodwin to prevent reporting of his extra-marital affair*.

The argument was, in short, that the fact of his extra-marital affair sheds some dazzling new light on his management of the Royal Bank of Scotland, and could explain how the financial crash happened. It was therefore A VERY GOOD THING that the injunction had been breached, CAST NEW LIGHT ON THE EVILS OF INJUCTIONS, and was an IMPORTANT LESSON FOR US ALL.

Had this nonsense been restricted to the Daily Mail I would never have mentioned it, for obvious reasons. But when I heard the same idiocy being parroted by Eddie Mair on the BBC Any Questions program, I felt even the smartest among us (those much smarter than me) would feel like this:

So. In true sceptic style let me go through slowly and painstakingly what is surely already painfully obvious.

1) Fred Goodwin is not solely responsible for the financial crash.
Doubtless all of you know that Goodwin was the head of the Royal Bank of Scotland when the crash started, made some very risky decisions, the bank had to be rescued by the taxpayer, Goodwin still walked away with his obscene pension.
None of this makes Goodwin solely or even significantly responsible for a global economic crisis which, many analysts believe, started with the sub-prime mortgage crisis** in America and which was exacerbated by woefully inadequate regulation.

2) (and I am having trouble believing that I am typing this) Nobody’s penis caused the financial crash.
Or, more accurately, the state of nobody’s marraige caused the financial crash. There is some evidence to suggest that testosterone played its part in the aggressive risk taking behaviour of bankers in general, but none*** that shows that extra-marital sex increases the levels of testosterone and none which relate to Goodwin specifically.

3) Therefore – Fred Goodwin’s Penis Did Not Cause The Finiancial Crash.
I want to follow this with something pithy in latin, maybe quod erat demonstrandum, or res ipsa loquitur, but honestly the fact that I have to make this kind of explanation is just depressing really.

So. To suggest that Goodwin’s extra-marital affair raises some question about the corporate governance of RBS is fatuous in the extreme.

This is simply another effort by a newspaper to attack any form of injunction and justify why they shoud be permitted free rein to trample over the right to privacy that they find so inconvenient. The fact that this one concerns a character like Goodwin, who is so universally reviled, just makes this a soft target for a newspaper appealing to soft intellects.

This behaviour we expect of the Mail. But to hear the same nonsense spouted by the BBC in a current affairs program suggests something has gone horribly wrong in the fifth estate.

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*You’ll forgive me for not linking to the Daily Mail itself, here is the story as covered by the Telegraph
** you remember sub-prime mortgages, surely. We were all experts in the subject about 2 years ago. Don’t hear about them any more, do we?
*** none that I’m aware of, but I’m always delighted to be proved wrong in things like this.

The Conviction Rate – a number with no value

In the current furore over rape convictions, many people have run straight back to that old statistic about ‘only 6% of rape cases result in convictions’. The problems with this particular statistic are dealt with brilliantly here, but I wanted to take the opportunity to give conviction rates in general a quick kick.

Anyone who works in a field in which the Government meddle are concerned will complain about government statistics.

Waiting times in A&E wards , for example, tell you nothing about the work that goes on therein or the relative workload of different units; exam results and league tables in education tell you nothing about the potential the children had to learn, the improvement in the education of any given child, nor about the socio-economic background of the intake of the school. It is too broad brush.
The Government would respond by saying that it is merely an indicator, a measure by which comparisons can be made.

Whatever your views of this argument, (which to my mind boils down to ‘bad statistics are better than no statistics’, not a view I share), I would nonetheless separate out the conviction rate for special scorn.
The conviction rate tells us nothing – literally nothing – about how well our Police, Courts, CPS or advocates are performing their function.

Here’s why conviction rates are so worthless.

100 crimes are reported.
25 fail the evidential test and no charges are brought.
25 are guilty pleas.
Of the 50 that go to trial, 25 result in guilty verdicts, 25 in not guilty verdicts.
So we have a conviction rate of 50%.

Is that a good conviction rate or a bad one? Does it represent a good functioning legal system, or a terrible failure to protect the public? Or a travesty of justice which accords nobody a fair trial?

Now let us remember the point of the Criminal Justice System – to punish the guilty and to protect the innocent – and of that, whatever the Daily Mail or the current Home Secretary* may scream about at every given opportunity, the second of these two objectives is more important than the first.

Without knowing how many of the original complaints were true, let alone which of the true complaints resulted in convictions, it is utterly meaningless in terms of administering justice**.

Let me give you another little maxim used daily in legal circles: “The law is an art, not a science”. Trying to put a number on art (unless preceded by a pound sign) is almost impossible. This is why statistics in a criminal context are so pointless.

There was a better measure, one which is still in use today, 250 years after it was proposed by William Blackstone KC, whose name it carries. This is Blackstone’s Formulation, or Blackstone’s Constant:

It is better for ten guilty men to be set free than for one innocent to be condemned.

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*there are times when the two are almost indistinguishable. I’m thinking particularly of Jack Straw here, but you could fill that in with Blunkett or any number of others from either party.
** how do we know which of the complaints are true, which of the accused are guilty? In legal terms, we get that answer from the jury. This has the rather superb result that every conviction, notwithstanding appeal, is right and proper, and the effective rate of convictions in deserving cases only is 100%. This is Gaijin San’s Paradox.
*** this principle was in place long before Blackstone, it was he who codified it in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (published in the 1760s).

Rape is not a political football.

A lot of rubbish has been spoken about the offence of rape today, most egregiously by Ed Miliband. Rape is a serious matter which touches many people’s lives and which should be handled sensitively and intelligently. 

Instead of this Miliband has decided to play to the baying pitchfork-and-burning-torches mob led in this instance by the Daily Mail (as if we should be shocked at that) by calling for Ken Clarke QCs resignation after he (Clarke) made comments about distinguishing between offences of rape.

Let’s begin with three truisms. 

1) The punishment meted out by a court must be appropriate to the crime: it would be unjust if it did not. This is what we mean when we say culpae poenae par esto – the punishment must fit the crime.
2) Rape is a heinous crime, many believe the most serious in the criminal canon. There is no such thing as a non-serious or trivial rape. 
3) Some rapes are more serious that others. This is a simple fact. To distinguish between different facts of cases of rape does not diminish the gravity of those found to be less serious than others. 

Saying that some offences of rape are more serious than others IS NOT THE SAME as saying that some rape offences are not serious. 

The simplest illustration of this principle is the sentencing guideline for rape, set out by the Sentencing Guidelines Council (of which more later), which dictates how a crown court judge must approach sentencing in rape cases. 

The sentencing exercise involves a process to be undertaken by the judge, the first step of which is to asses on the basis of the facts of the case which category of rape the case falls into, as per the chart below:

SGC guidance

Common sense dictates that the Judge must distinguish each case according to its individual facts in order to make this judgement. It is perhaps distasteful but those who deal in criminal practice or legislation have to deal with varying degrees of rape. So it can be seen above that an offence which covers repeated rape of the same victim over a period of time, or rapes of a variety of victims must be punished more severely than a single offence of rape against a single victim; similarly a rape in which there is some element of abduction or detention or where the Defendant was in a position of trust. 

Date Rape
Some of the more considered responses to Ken Clarke’s speech, notably not Miliband’s, focused on his use of the term ‘date rape’. Open the link above, have a read through the whole sentencing guideline. You will not find any reference to so-called ‘date-rape’ in it. It is a phrase unknown to criminal practice, and not one used in court. This maxim falls victim to what I am hereby christening ‘Gaijin San’s First Law’, namely:
“JUST BECAUSE IT RHYMES DOESN’T MAKE IT EITHER TRUE OR USEFUL*”.

The issues in rape cases come down to the harm done to a victim, the manner of the offence and crucially the culpability of the defendant – again, look at the SGC guideline, page 7, which deals with the importance of assessing culpability in determining the sentence in rape cases. 

More latin for you – ‘actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea’ – the act does not make one guilty unless one has a guilty mind. It therefore follows that the state of mind of the defendant is a huge factor to be borne in mind when determining sentence. 

A person who knowingly and deliberately forces a person into sex against their will is more culpable than a person who believes, albeit not on reasonable grounds, that a   partner who has hitherto engaged in intimate contact consents to sex. Crucially, this is true whether it occurs in the context of a ‘date’ or not. 

The term ‘date rape’ is therefore of no value in assessing the gravity of the offence under consideration and is one which in my view should never become a part of the criminal law.

Clarke used a ‘shorthand’ phrase that he should not have in order to illustrate a point which is true and valid. Is that a sacking offence? In a parliament full of those who have been complicit in lies peddled to the electorate to derail the AV referendum I would have thought not.

Ed Miliband
But Gaijin-san, I hear you protest, Miliband could simply be expressing views he honestly holds about the principal of distinguishing between offences of rape.

There is a problem with that. The Sentencing Guidelines Council, which for the first time codified the distinction between offences of rape which had been a part of criminal practice since minute one, was created by a Labour Government in which Miliband was a minister.

Now tell me this is not political opportunism. 

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*Gaijin-san’s first law, subsection 1: “This applies equally to words which share assonance” Grudging thanks to @missellabell for this subsection.

Disclaimer…

Welcome new followers! Thank you for following, I’m genuinely flattered that you have chosen to. A few quick notes of caution, however,

1) If you’ve followed me because of some legal issue or some oh-so-worthy rant, you should know it’s not always like that, some days it’s all movie quotes and sex on space hoppers (don’t ask). If you’ve followed because of the movie quotes and space-hopper issues, you should know I do occasionally do law / politics / philosophy / ethics too.

2) 12 years of criminal practice have left me with a mouth like a navvy and a tendency to play rough, don’t be surprised to find the odd expletive. And if we disagree, which I sincerely hope we will, be prepared for me to come out fighting.

3) Very occasionally I have been known to go off on one. This can take longer than 140 characters. So if you see this -> expect to be in for a long rant.

4) Now you’re here, check out my following list – those are the 250 odd (at time of writing) best tweeps on twitter. Some are odder than others. Follow them too. You’ll miss out if you don’t.

5) I’m extremely protective over @missellabell and have a strict no-tolerance policy on people trying to kill her. Just don’t.

6) I try to get all the typos and autocorrect fuckups before I post, but some do occasionally sneak through. I’m always delighted* to have these pointed out.

*stabby

The rich just go on getting richer. How very relaxing…

David Cameron:

“In the modern world, of course you’re always going to have internships and interns – people who come and help in your office who come through all sorts of contacts, friendly, political, whatever.

“I do that and I’ll go on doing that. I feel very relaxed about it.”

Peter Mandelson:

“We [New Labour] are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, as long as they pay their taxes”

And you never see them together, do you?

…the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

One of the most basic experiments into animal behaviour and intelligence involves rats, buttons and electric shocks. You get your rat, stick him in a cage with two buttons, one of which releases food into the cage, the other which gives him an electric shock, then time how long it takes for rat-boy to figure out that if he keeps pushing the electric shock button it’s gonna hurt.

In 1791 the United States of America enacted the second amendment to the Constitution, granting to all it’s citizens in perpetuity the absolute and inalienable right to bear arms. Since then there have been innumerable instances of the abuse of that right resulting in deaths, individual or multiple, political or apolitical, targeted or random.

That’s 220 years of pushing the wrong button and no evidence that the society is learning.

“The right to bear arms is only slightly less moronic than the right to arm bears”. [Chris Addison]

“The way to calculate the intelligence of a mob is to take the lowest IQ of any individual member of the mob and divide it by the number of people in the mob” [Terry Pratchett]

“We kill too often because we’ve made it too easy, saving ourselves the mess and the work.” [Frank Miller - The Dark Knight Returns]

“A gun is a coward’s weapon: a liar’s weapon.” [Frank Miller - The Dark Knight Returns]

Utopia. Possibly.

I recently had a conversation with a couple of the most politically literate and intelligent people I know about reform of our political system. During this it occurred to me to ask – how would I structure an ideal society?

I always find it useful to consider the greats when these big questions arise, and I found myself heading directly for Shakespeare, who of course advises:

“The first thing we’ll do, let’s kill all the lawyers…” (Henry VI part 2 act 4)

So let’s move swiftly on from there. My ideal political solution in 5 steps:

1) Written constitution including a bill of rights equivalent to the ECHR.
To my mind our current fluid unwritten constitution is too vague, too uncertain to support a modern functional representative democracy. There will be those who won’t agree with me in this, who will argue that it is unnecessary or dangerous.
Unnecessary? We live in times in which our government enacted a law permitting for indefinite detention without trial; in which it is now proposed that the right to freedom of expression and assembly should be curtailed by a ban on demonstrations in London on the grounds of cost*. In a time where many MPs stood up to defend the notion that Phil Woolas should not be stripped of his seat for having lied to and deceived his constituents on the basis that such a step would be bad for democracy.
Our current crop of MPs, almost all career politicians, have been raised to believe that the interests of democracy require that the House of Commons have completely free rein. A written constitution is the first step necessary to ensure proper checks and balances.
Dangerous? The classic argument is of course that a written constitution cannot adapt to the changing times, and case in point is the right to bear arms enshrined in the constitution of the United States of America, which has caused so many problems.
I would suggest an elegant solution to this objection: lets not include a right to bear arms. Seriously, are there any other objections of that kind beyond that one? Because if not just not including it would seem to rectify that objection. The argument ignores two facts:
1) the American Constitution has been improved over time by amendment, indeed many of its most admirable qualities have come about by amendment, and
2) our constitution requires that at the beginning of each sitting of parliament a man in a velvet suit approach the doors of the commons and bang on them with a big black rod. Let’s not get hung up on flexibility shall we?

2) House of commons elected by proportional representation on fixed terms from fixed constituencies from which all legislation arises.
Yes I know that PR is not universally beloved but this is my idealised system, and on pure moral grounds I can see very little objection to using a fully proportional system. I also suggest that only the lower house should have the power to propose or pass legislation: my intentions for the upper house are wholly different:

3) A fully elected upper house (I’d prefer to call it a senate but I can see the term House of Lords sticking) purely to review legislation and propose amendments or refuse to propose it for law.
There are three measures that I would insist on:
A) That it be directly elected on rolling terms, again by proportional representation. Again I look to the USA model for this, that one third of the house be re-elected every 3 years;
B) that the election be not based on constituencies at all but that all voters choose by preference from a national pool,
C) and I can see this being the one which most people will find surprising/difficult: membership of a political party should be an absolute bar to entry.
To my mind the party system is responsible for many of the problems inherent in our political system, not least the dominance of the professional politician. I also recognise though that one cannot entirely disregard the party system: it is the natural tendency of politicians to band together with like minded others, if we disband all parties today then within a week new ones will have evolved. I do think however they should be kept out of my perfect upper house. It should be a council of individuals unfettered by party concerns or loyalties, able therefore to discuss proposed legislation on its merits.

4) A Supreme Court with the power to strike down legislation as unconstitutional.
As one of my colleagues immediately pointed out, a supreme court without a constitution is a fig-leaf, its power is curtailed and limited by the legislation handed down by Parliament – the reason why our appellate courts so often use the phrase “That cannot have been the will of parliament”.
It could also be argued that my proposed system duplicates the review function if the House of Lords and Supreme Court both have that function. I do not agree – to depend on only a senate, however constituted, to review the law as it is being passed, does not allow for flaws in the legislation being revealed by application through the courts, and that is to require too much by way of foresight of the upper house.

And finally, but to my mind no less importantly than any of my other proposed steps:

5) Citizenship, politics and philosophy taught in schools.
It occurs to me that this is a major step which would encourage engagement and involvement with the political system. Amongst the biggest problems we have with our political system in this country are apathy and ignorance. We feel disenfranchised because, in my opinion, we are not encouraged to engage in the political system, we are not taught the basic principles which underlie our democracy. Contrast that with America, or in fact with Switzerland, where political engagement is instilled into the electorate from an early age. In my opinion that is one of the major reasons why we are so apathetic towards what should be our government.

I anticipate that there will be others who disagree with my proposal, and I look forward to discussing the various merits/demerits of the situation. But, if I had a blank canvas on which to draw a perfect political system, that’s what it would look like.

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*The background to which of course being that the cuts imposed on the police which make the policing of demonstrations prohibitively expensive are part of the reason people are demonstrating. Know that feeling where you’re standing between two mirrors, watching yourself stretching out to infinity? That.

The Jack Of Kent Drinking Game

These are the official rules for the Jack Of Kent drinking game, officially announced here in my official capacity as official rulemaker. Officially.

Drinks of choice are either shots of Vodka or some decent whisky or glasses of Chianti. Pints of lager are not permitted.

BASIC RULES
The basis of the game is to drink the appropriate forfeit each time @DavidAllenGreen mentions certain phrases. The basic phrases are as follows:
Illiberal – drink one shot / one finger of Chianti
Extraordinary – drink a large whisky
Misconceived – drink a double vodka (thanks to @andromedababe)
Illiberal and Misconceived – finish any and all drinks you have.

ADVANCED RULES
#myarse – 2 shots / 2 fingers of Chianti (@bugsiegiven)
Any reference to DAG’s coat being open – 3 shots / 3 fingers of Chianti (@EUamegaraid)
Any swearword (except ‘arse’) – Down in one (@crazycolours)
@SallyBercow – Glass of Champagne (@chrismeredith and @DavidAllenGreen)
Gillian Anderson – down one bottle of Champagne (Bollinger for preference) (@chrismeredith and @DavidAllenGreen)
Any tweet which elicits outrage from a public figure [who *may* have recently given up blogging] – down in one (@bugsiegiven)
Any Alan Moore reference – One glass of port ideally to be followed by a reciting of the Rorschach soliloquy – points deducted for using the version from the film (@jearle)
Dear god – Each person drink one glass of communion wine Points can be deducted if the wine is insufficiently blessed.

PROFESSIONAL RULES
These rules may be observed but are at the discretion of the drinkers in question:
Reserved judgement: When DAG announces he has reserved judgement each person drinks one shot/one finger of Chianti. Each drinker then guesses what he judgement will be – whoever gets it wrong drinks another shot/finger of Chianti (@pinguette)
Blog post rule: (this one can get messy): when DAG tweets a plug for his blog:
1st plug = 1 shot
2nd plug = 2 shots
3rd plug = 3 shots
If the plug includes reference to comments – down in one. (@oliverhumpage/@EUMegaraid)
Rebutting an agenda – Round of champagne for all drinkers (@PME200)

ULTIMATE RULES
These are not to be attempted without supervision
Reference to New Statesman – Double espresso (@DanielDWilliam)

Thanks to all contributors. Please remember to drink responsibly.