the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Watching the final leaders debate on BBC1 last night, some of the things that I’ve mentioned on this blog throughout this election campaign made unwelcome appearances. It was nearly as a bad as me watching a hopeless yet earnest Pet Shop Boys tribute band doing a set comprised of all the songs of theirs that I least liked.

Plonker is still worrying incompetent as a debater, as unable to be concise as he is presents the facts, figures and other details which he hopes will provide the evidence to support his claims in anything less than pure technocracy. Which for me, is one of the most interesting things about him, his talent for removing any emotion from anything he says.

His career prior to becoming an MP would, one might have thought, have developed and then refined his debating skills to a higher level than he has thus far exhibited. That even as late on in the day and especially after his lacklustre performance during the first TV debate, his advisors would’ve coached him, or at the very least, tried to prepare him as best they could. But seemingly not. What he should have left viewers with was a sense that this was man who had a bright and golden vision for Britain, that under his and Labours leadership was a better future to be had for everyone. Instead of which however, he seemed to be offering a marginally less grim one than the one we have now.

Prada made repeated claims about cutting taxes, of how Labour couldn’t be trusted on tax, whilst ignoring the fire that was raging in his trousers. Its not that on his watch, there have been 25 rises on various taxes since 2019, which has created the largest tax burden on working people in 70 years or his exploiting of peoples own naked self-interest that bothers me, as much as his short term perspective does. I made this point before, that because the UK has an ageing population in order to meet the challenges upon the state that situation invariably brings, one of two things needs to happen. 

Either taxation will have to increase to match the funding our public services will need to cope with those demands, or drastic changes will need to be made to both the range of services the state provides and with that, strict enforcement of new rules surrounding what the eligibility for those services is.

But the brutal reality was not something either Plonker or Prada wanted to address. Plonker once again made his claim that he would create an extra 40,000 NHS appointments week to solve the waiting list crisis. As I pointed out with regard to his plans for 80 new courts to deal with rape cases, where is the capacity in the system to make his words anything more than that?  

For one thing, where are the staff going to come from, given that the NHS has over 100,000 vacancies?  And if that number could be magically reduced, this creates two new problems. Are those vacancies going to be filled by foreign workers – until such time as we have enough British born staff qualified to fill them – in which case we’re solving our problem by creating one elsewhere, and also where is the money going to come from to pay these mythical staff? 

Prada banged on continuously about the so called’ triple lock plus’ for pensioners, like it was a good thing. How can promising to increase the state pension – which last year totalled over £110 billions, or 42% of the welfare budget – be seen as anything other than astoundingly financially irresponsible? To effectively prioritise the needs of the one demographic that is known to consistently vote, for his own short term political gain. The ‘Triple lock plus’ is more like ‘triple threat guarantee’, as not only are they living longer, there are also an increasing number of them living longer and the cost to the state will only increase.

Now I’ve got that off my chest, I have to reluctantly admit that Prada was by far the better debater. A lot of what he said I either disagreed with or else were easily provable lies, but it was the way that he constantly hammered home the same points, avoided waffle and was occasionally tenaciously focused that impressed me. The way he carried on, you’d think Plonker was the one with a 14 year record to defend and that he was channelling his inner Goebells!

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Why this whole betting nonsense still continues to considered newsworthy is beyond me. So people betted on the outcome of a thing and suddenly the media profess to be aghast that such a thing has happened, that somehow this thing, being as how it is so egregious, is indicative of the lack of integrity of our politics.

Obviously not within the Labour Party. As the all-but elected next government, the media aren’t going to upset them too much, but misdeeds by Conservative MP’s? That’s a narrative that needs no selling, given as how their various scandals have kept both the tabloid and broadsheet reading public shocked, appalled and amused for decades

In an article published on the BBC’s website yesterday, their political correspondent attempted to explain why it mattered so much by the novel means of suggesting that basically there was not much of a story anyway.

‘In plenty of the alleged cases, we don’t know if there was indeed a bet, how much was bet, how many bets there were, precisely what was bet on, what the odds were, what the winnings were or, crucially, what the person placing the bet did or didn’t know about when the election would be.

Journalism can be long-winded and imperfect. We reporters rarely know as much as we would like to know, and we never stop asking questions.’

Except that there are some questions that they never stop asking because they never started asking them in the first place. Where has there been any discussion of the national debt? The implications for it of yet more borrowing, if Plonker has his way. A debt that stands at over £2,690 billions. Prada witters on about tax cuts, but no-one challenges him on how these can be afforded when the interest on the debt is £120 millions a day, or £1,388 a second.

Compared to those astronomical sums, the betting nonsense isn’t so much a storm in a teacup as not even the briefest of warm breezes across its surface.  

There’s always something a bit disappointing when someone that you’d previously thought of as a good egg, turns out to be a bit of a git. 

My opinion David Tennant was based on nothing than him being really good in one thing that I briefly liked – Doctor Who – and also never learning anything about him to that might counter that good opinion.

So his widely reported comments made a few days ago when receiving an award for being a ‘celebrity ally’ at the British LGBT awards caused me to rethink that previous opinion.

He said in his acceptance speech: “If I’m honest I’m a little depressed by the fact that acknowledging that everyone has the right to be who they want to be and live their life how they want to live it as long as they’re not hurting anyone else should merit any kind of special award or special mention because it’s common sense, isn’t it?

However, until we wake up and Kemi Badenoch doesn’t exist any more – I don’t wish ill of her, I just wish her to shut up – whilst we do live in this world, I am honoured to receive this.’

His idea of ‘acknowledging that everyone has the right to be who they want to be and live their life how they want to live it’ involves denying biological reality and massively curtailing the rights and freedoms of the majority of the UK population at the expense of a minority of a minority.

According to the 2021 census, women – the ones with vagina’s and not delusions – made up 51% of the UK population, whereas all transgender people – both trans-men and trans-women – and people who identify as non-binary made up 0.5% of it.

Of course Tennant was making these statements in front of an audience who would’ve agreed with the views he was espousing.  Is his wishing that Kemi Badenock didn’t exist and to shut up any different really to Alan Baker, or Sarah Jane Baker as he wants to be known, who last year told a crowd of trans activists, ‘’if you see a terf, punch them in the face‘?

Leaving aside the absolute bastardisation of language that even allows a word like ‘terf’ to have entered the lexicon – an acronym that stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist – the idea that anyone standing up for women’s rights is in anyway a either a radical or a feminist is laughably absurd, really what is the difference between the two statements.

Tennant’s comments are to me on the same spectrum as Baker’s comments were. Different ends of it granted, but the same spectrum nonetheless  They come from the same place, a place of ideological inversion, deluded reality and intolerant tolerance. Tennant knew he wasn’t jeopardising anything by saying those things, to those people at that event.  He knew that wasn’t doing a Lawrence Fox on his career.

That right that Tennant seems so keen on, that ’everyone has the right to be who they want to be and live their life how they want to live it’, isn’t a universal one it seems. ’ 

Does this remind anyone else of that line in ‘Animal Farm’?

“All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”

If, as Keyser Soze observered in ‘The Usual Suspects’, “the greatest trick devil he ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist.”, then what was true for the devil is true for welfare.

We have been so successfully conditioned to think of welfare spending as some kind of state sponsored paternalism, and thus the people who receive it as needing this kind of paternalism, existing as they do at the lower ends of the social spectrum, we think that’s all it is. All of the political debate and thus all of the the discussions concerning it are fixated exclusively upon this conception of welfare as existing only in this way.

Therefore those claiming those benefits are much easier to demonise in the media, and because of this, this makes it much easier for politicians to promote the idea of them being ‘scroungers’ and ‘cheats’ when cutting or withdrawing those benefits. This of course is nothing more than one big elaborate distraction – the scantily clad young female assistant to the old balding magician, whom you look at while he does the trick.

Corporate welfare (CW) can best be described as  governments financial assistance for business. Sounds innocuous?

Until, that is, one reads ‘The British Corporate Welfare State: Public Provision for Private Businesses.’, a by turns both excellent and shocking piece of academic literature by Professor Kevin Farnsworth, which lays bare the sheer scale and cost of the whole scam.

And this scam isn’t new. As early as 1776, Adam Smith, he who has an institute named after him so as to promote the ideologies he was expounding in his book  ‘The Wealth of Nations’. These can summed up as the notion that it was a governments duty to create the necessary conditions under which business could flourish.

So when Beveridge created the blueprint for the modern British welfare state in 1942, most of the focus was directed on his plans for combating the ‘five great evils’ that blighted the lives of the working classes – want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. But less commented on was his conviction that in order to have the money needed to do this, the needs of business would have to supported by government.

In 2015, when Farnsworth’s report was published, he estimated CW to cost upward of£93 billions and includes a great many expenditures which we think of as properly the duty of a government to pay for.

And an article in yesterday’s Guardian underlined both how blind we are to see CW for what it is, but also how it can be easily be mistaken as a public good.

‘Low wages under Tories have pushed 900,000 UK children into poverty, report finds’

Essentially implying that somehow because this had happened under 14 years of Conservative rule, that this was somehow all their fault, . And that only a change of government might improve things, it quoted Paul Nowak, the general secretary of the TUC, saying as much

“No child in Britain should be growing up below the breadline. But under the Conservatives we have seen a huge rise in working households being pushed into poverty. We urgently need an economic reset and a government that will make work pay.”

Earlier this month, the TUC published a report showing the number of people in insecure, low-paid work had increased by nearly 1 million during the Conservatives’ time in office, to a record 4.1 million.’

It also cited various statistical comparisons with other countries workers and their wage increases to bolster the claim that child poverty in is largely due to low wages. 

It doesn’t, curiously enough, apportion any blame whatsoever upon the employers that pay those low wages in the first place. They know that they can get away with paying low wages because they know government will step in to help boost workers incomes with additional financial support.

Working Tax Credits (WTC) are a device by which the government effectively subsidises employers who pay low wages and so rather than being cast as the villain in this false narrative that the Guardian endlessly promotes, they are at best accomplices. 

The WTC replaced the Working Families Tax Credit (WFTC), which operated from April 1999 until March 2003. The WFTC was itself a transitional system from the earlier benefit for working families known as Family Credit (FC), which had been in operation since 1986. In addition, people may also be entitled to Child Tax Credit (CTC) if they are responsible for any children.

So since 1986 we’ve been subsiding low wages and this is but one example of the state channelling funds to support the private sector, making a mockery of the notion of a free market. 

Consider housing benefit (HB). This is a benefit that helps defray the housing costs of those who live in private rented accommodation. Had the market been truly free – and HB wasn’t a thing – then those rents charged by those landlords would soon fall, as no-one could afford to rent them. But it is a thing and has been one since 1982. The cost of HB is staggering, £23.4 billions in 2022 -23, the fourth highest single expenditure by government.

Then consider that HB is but one component of Universal Credit, a benefit designed to combine six benefits to people on low or no income and which this year the government expects to cost £78 billions.

And then consider the ‘gig’ economy, workers on zero-hour contracts, part-time workers, those employed in either casual or seasonal work and ask yourself for whose benefit is that £78 billions ultimately benefiting?  

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I really thought that we’d be done with it by now, but the media is still promoting the idea that the whole betting irrelevance is somehow something about something, and that because of this, it matters.

To my mind, the sums involved are so trivial as to be laughable. Had there been a concerted effort by a gang who’d all placed bets at various locations all over the South East, with each bet in the region of £10,000 or so, then fair enough. But bets totalling £2,700 in one day.? 

But I must confess to being somewhat amused by this development, ‘Labour suspends candidate who bet on Tories to win his seat.’

After all, at the last election, the Tories did win his seat with of majority of over 23,000!  So if any bet can be considered a safe one…

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It’s baffling, it really is, the way in which the press seem to be inordinately preoccupied with an utterly trivial aspect of the general election, at the expense of doing what the press is supposed to do. I mentioned this yesterday, in relation to the betting nonsense that has so gripped the press as compared to absence of any discussion of the national debt. 

I mean, yes sure, there may well have been the odd mention of it here and there over the years, but there hasn’t, to my recollection at least been the same outrage, the same demands for drastic improvements or the setting up of a public inquiry similar to that which emerged after the Post Office Horizon scandal.

That scandal had the massively good fortune to be so complicated as to provide the media with an excuse not to have reported on it for years, but not so complicated however that when the story finally broke, it could easily explained.

That is, after all, what the press is meant to do, ferret away at a story, reveal the truth and present it in a readily comprehensible way? That’s what Private Eye did for years. 

They’d run a story every few issues about either the latest attempt by Post Office executives to cover it up, to insist that the Horizon software was totally reliable and so it must’ve been the sub-postoffice managers hat were responsible for the missing monies. Or else to highlight he fact that Post Office could launch its own investigations and despite knowing full well that the Horizon system was at fault, prosecute sub-postoffice managers.

Now we know otherwise. Now we know that it represents the biggest single series of wrongful convictions in British legal history. Now the press can do can do a full Fred Goodwin on Paula Vennells, the boss of the Post Office during part of this whole sorry affair, and can therefore be the scapegoat upon which the public’s righteous anger can incorrectly directed.

Like ex -Sir Fred, she has been stripped of her gong and no longer has her C.B.E to keep her company, but much  more importantly, her successor and predecessors, some of whom have arguably more culpabity than her, have somehow remained largely out of the spotlight.

Like Adam Crozier, her immediate predecessor from 2003 -2010. During that time, the Post Office secured more than 400 convictions in England and Wales using what they knew to be flawed evidence. Despite this, and despite having trousered over £9.7m in pay and bonuses, there haven’t been the same calls for him to return any of it, like their have been for her.

But don’t blame it on the privatisation of the Post Office that allowed this happen or on the ‘light-touch’ regulation of the financial sector that facilitated the Northern Rock disaster. Blame Paula, blame Fred, blame it the boogie if it makes you happy, because the system works perfectly and the last thing anyone needs are too many people questioning in whose interest does the system actually work. 

And can a system that pays £120 millions a day on the interest of a national debt of nearly £2,660 billions really be said to be working? 

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As any readers of this blog will no doubt be aware, I am a deeply cynical person and getting mores all the time. In fact I don’t think that I’ve ever met a more cynical person than me. Although newspaper editors are currently having a good go.

Witness the ongoing media obsession with finding Jay Slater. I must confess to not being as especially interested in him so much as I am with why the media wants to tell us about him, how it was his first time abroad, when and where he went missing, the search…

Has everybody forgotten what happened mere days ago with Michael Mosley? In essentially the same circumstances? With probably the same outcome. 

To me, the main reason for their detailed coverage, however much they might bang on about bringing it to the publics attention, is so that when the inevitable bad news is finally revealed, they can then feed off the attention they created and sell more papers.

Is no-one else thinking about ‘Ace in the hole’? Another Billy Wilder classic from 1951 starring Kirk Douglas which has that as its central premise?

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If the media are not presently engaged in a dastardly plot to distract the electorate from the more serious concerns that this country faces, then their fixation on the supposed betting scandal is not to helping to dispel that notion.

The newspapers seemed to be positively obsessed with it and they imagined that the more they reported on it, the more the public would want know. And because they believe this to be so, they are able to convince themselves that they are acting in the public interest. All part of of the usual self-serving justifications that were trotted out by newspaper reporters and editors during the Leveson Inquiry into press standards, in fact

About how a free press, one that was unfettered by any concerns of legislative restrictions, regulatory oversight or some other form of governmental interference was an essential part of a functioning democracy. That only such a press would be to hold the powerful to account, be fearless in its pursuit of the truth and have the resources needed to mount a lengthy and expensive investigation to uncover it.

To listen to them you’d be forgiven for thinking that the press exposed a scandal comparable to the Watergate every few months. As opposed the inquiry having been set up in the wake of the revelation that a newspaper had hacked of the ‘phone of a dead girl, when everyone else, including the police, thought that she was just a missing one. It soon emerged that most newspapers were so fearless in their pursuit of the truth, that they were willing break the law to do it. Even Guardian, which broke the story, had hacked ‘phones.

Anyway, this betting nonsense. Is this really what the media thinks the public want to know about less than two weeks before a general election? Granted, the sums involved were indeed truly staggering. Staggeringly small. As the Daily Telegraph reported, suspicions were first raised when £2,700 was bet on the date of the election prior to it being announced.

Maybe there exists another scandal, hiding in plain sight so successfully that its hardly ever mentioned, that exposes that £2,700 bet as the utter irrelevance it is. One that I can’t remember any politician talking about during the last few years. 

The National debt is currently about £2,690 billions. How and why we’ve accrued this sum is a discussion to be argued about by others better qualified to do so. According to The Office for Budget Responsibility, the interest on the debt will cost some £89 billions this financial year alone.

But what does mean, in the real world where money is spent on paying bills, having a cheeky Nando’s  or going to the cinema? We are forever being assailed by claims that something might cost £x billions to do, or else that savings of £x billions are there to be made, but a billion is just a word to most people and as such, has no functional meaning.

So you’d think therefore that the press might just have an interest in trying to explain not just how and why the debt was accrued. But to also question the affordability of the various spending commitments, promised tax cuts and the other assorted financial unicorns, that all of the political party’s are making, when set against the backdrop in which last year saw 10% of all government spending on national debt interest payments – not the debt itself mind – the interest on it. Which is more than the combined government spending last year on defence, housing and the environment. Or more than the combined spend on law, order and transport.

To at least have a go, to try and live up to the grand claims they made about themselves at Leveson, to make a complicated subject less so. To act in the real public interest, and not the pantomime version of it that the betting irrelevance is. To hold both Plonker and Daddy Bear to account. How the former is going to fund an extra 40,000 NHS appointments a week as he claimed he would on the leaders debate on Thursday night, or for the latter give details about how his plans to clamp down on corporate tax avoidance to pay for better social care will generate anything other than hot air? To fucking well do their jobs and to do them well, not to confuse an embarrassing mistake with with a bona-fide scandal or to peddle tittle-tattle about nonentities.

And even if the national debt stopped growing, we’d still be handing over £120 millions a day in interest payments.

But hey that £2,700!  That’s shocking! And what about Taylor Swift and that selfie of hers with Son of Baldie and the young parasites?  Look over here, don’t look there…

The one abiding thought that I was left with after watching the ‘Question Time Leaders Special’ last night was that there was nothing even remotely special about it. 

No, tell a lie – which seems highly appropriate – not for the first time it made me realise that politicians hate having to answer questions from the public. Despite them all giving it large about how they welcome the chance to it, the truth is that they’d rather being doing something else, something that they at least have some control over.

The benefits of having a studio based interview with a journalist are many. Everyone involved is aware not only of their role in the proceedings, but also the role of everyone else too The politician knows that the journalist will ask them some difficult questions, but not too many, possibly because the broad range of topics to be discussed – and not discussed – will have been arranged in advance, but mainly because the journalist knows that their career prospects are at stake. 

Too combative, too adversarial and their once bright future will be dimmed, as requests for interviews will be denied and access to political events and contacts will dry up. By contrast, if their not combative enough, they’ll be seen as a soft touch, someone who politicians can ride roughshod over precisely because of them being such a soft touch and because of that, be happily interviewed by.

Why am I thinking about Julia Etch-a-sketch?

Anyway, last night we Fiona the Bruce hosting, doing quite good a job actually. Keeping all the politicians to answering the questions they’d been asked, and the not ones that they wished they’d been asked. Paraphrasing audience members sometimes rambling questions into concise English and demonstrating an impressive command of detail to both inform us and to challenge them

First off, we had Daddy Bear from the Goldilocks party. To me, the Goldilocks party being involved in this election are the equivalent of Scotland being at the Euro’s. Everyone is glad that they made the effort to get there, not least because their supporters always enliven proceedings, but no-one seriously rates their chances. But at least they had a go and that’s the main thing! 

At one point Daddy Bear claimed that he would build 300,000 homes were each year in government to help with the housing crisis and ease the pressures faced by first time buyers attempting to get on the property ladder.  Fantastic. 

Although less fantastic was any sense of him being aware of the problems those 300,000 homes bring with them. No allusion to where they’d built or changes to planning legislation to allow them to be built. And I know that I already mentioned this in relation to rape cases not going to trial but where is the capacity? Where are the necessary tradespeople needed to build going to come from? Are we as a country even providing enough apprenticeships and vocational training to achieve that ambition.

And even if all that were to be magically resolved overnight, in a not so Grimm fairy tale, what about the necessary infrastructure that those 600,000 would need, assuming 2 person occupancy of these houses And what happens when they have children?? What about the hospitals where those children are to be born, the schools they might go to, the roads upon which their parents will drive to get to access them?

He didn’t need to go into any great detail, not least because he didn’t have the time to explain how interconnected everything was and how one solution revealed more problems to be solved but regardless of that, the audience wasn’t buying it.

Much like they’re not buying affordable homes, not just because they’re unaffordable, but also because last year they made up less than quarter of all homes built. According to the government, 212,000 houses were built last year, of which 45,000 were supposedly affordable.

And, to no-ones surprise he was repeatedly challenged as to why anyone should trust the Goldilocks, given their craven abandonment of a manifesto commitment to abolish student tuition fees in 2010, after entering into a coalition with The Status Quo  Not only did he claim that the political realities of  government finances had rendered that pledge impractical – which means that he could easily do the same thing again with everything with everything he promises this time – he also refused to answer repeated questions from Fiona the Bruce as to whether or not he’d enter into another coalition. 

He was swerving so much that had he been driving, the police would’ve arrested him for drunk driving.

Although the best swerve of the night for me came when John Swindle, leader of the Tartan party was challenged over the waiting times in Scottish NHS hospitals, something that as part of the devolution agreement, he has responsibility for.  Wonderfully, he claimed that as many of those on the waiting list had complex problems, that that was reason for the waiting list problem and so essentially, it was their fault!

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Just a quick observation about this whole betting irrelevance 

I can’t understand why its become such a thing. A few people made bets on the date of the general election before it was announced. Using information only someone privy to Pravda’s innermost thoughts might have. Is that it?

Were they putting on large bets, maybe £5 or £10.000? Had they told their friends to rush out a put on multiple bets of £1,000 all over the South East? 

No. According to The Daily Telegraph, suspicions were raised when £2,7000 of bets were placed on one day, when previously the daily total was usually for £500.

The only people who think its a big deal are the media, who seem compelled to report endless guff about it, and then have the temerity to claim that its news because everyone is talking about it. Only because they fucking go on about it!

This is an election campaign. There are serious issues that need to be discussed. This is so not one of them.

The BBC seems to not to just to be wanting to have it’s cake and eating it, but to then also try to convince us that if we so imagined that this was indeed the case, that we were mistaken.

I refer, of course to tonights BBC One ‘Question Time Special’, featuring – according to the BBC at least – the leaders of the four main political parties, The Status Quo, Not Quite as Status Quo as the Status Quo, the Goldilocks version of the Status Quo and The Tartan Status Quo.

One of the problems for me is that the BBC is more than happy to constantly talk up or talk down political parties based on nothing more than opinion polls. Polls which are invariably conducted using a statistically inconsequential number of adults, so inconsequential that they represent the margin of error that might nullify the very thing that the poll claims to prove, yet which to the media are somehow indicative of what the population thinks.

Of more of concern is the ‘bandwagon effect’, which as one might imagine, describes the effect of people wanting to back a winner, especially if that winner is confidently predicted to be winning by everyone. Everyone wants that! Only an idiot would support someone who they knew was going to lose, er like Plonker admitted to doing only this week, when he supported Corblimey in the 2019 general election. 

Essentially opinion polls create a self-fulfilling prophecy, and one that by reporting on these polls, the media helps inflate out of all proportion.

Which brings us back neatly to the BBC and tonights debate.

Ofcom (the broadcasting regulator) claims the guidance they’ve given to broadcasters is that the most important of all the factors is the performance in the last two general elections of the political parties. But as Farrago pointed out ‘“We haven’t stood in the last two general elections. It’s as if everything in our politics is designed to stop new boys and girls coming in and to keep everything the same.”

I’m no fan of Farrago, but I am a fan of fairness within the democratic process and this isn’t fair. If the BBC have no problem at all with constantly publishing poll results bigging up Reform UK in order that they can report on the Tories ever worsening woes, then shouldn’t be able hide behind some bureaucratic chicanery to deny him a place on tonights debate. 

So according to the latest update on the BBC’s poll tracker at 3.30pm on Thursday 19th June, just over 4 hours away from the start of the debate, The Status Quo are polling at 21%, The Not Quite as Status Quo as The Status Quo are on 41%. The Goldilocks version of the Status Quo is currently at 11% and the Tartan Status Quo is on 6%.

Meanwhile, Farrago and his Not quite as much not The Status Quo as they pretend, are on 16%, so one can understand his frustration at not taking part. Although possibly he’ll use this entire affair to bolster his narrative of him being the victim of an establishment stitch-up.  

The irony is that the debate follows England’s second match in the Euro’s and I can’t help in making the unfavourable comparison between the amount of time, forensic scrutiny and easily comprehensible analysis that has been devoted to the Euro football, against that afforded to the general election. Apart from last Friday, when only the opening game was played, there have been a minimum of eight hours a day – a fucking day! – devoted to this by BBC One and ITV.

It’s not as if England’s result on July 4th is anywhere near as important as the one tonight, is it

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And the problem with reliance on extrapolating the results from from a numerically small number to make a larger point is dodgy to say the least. Yes, the numbers may themselves be accurate, but the way in which those numbers, and the statistics that they then produce, can themselves be all too easily be presented in an eye-catching way, is less than helpful.

Take for example, 10 instance of a thing happening in one year and in the next it happens 15 times. The increase can be expressed in of two ways, either as an increase of 5, which is easily ignored, or as one of 50%, seems alarming. Both of which are correct, but if you were working for a charity that needed a big number to be the headline in a press release, which figure would you use? Knowing that the scarier the number, the greater the likelihood that that press release will be used as a the basis for a newspaper article.

‘Acid offences up 75% in UK but only 8% go to court, data suggests’ was the headline in the Guardian today. 

And just to make it clear, I’m not making light of acid offences in any way, what I am doing is simply proving the truth of Mark Twains observation, ‘That there are lies, damned lies and statistics’

‘The total number of recorded offences last year based on freedom of information (FOI) requests was 1,244 – up from 710 in 2022 – comprising 454 physical attacks and 790 other alleged offences, including carrying corrosives and threats of acid attack to aid other offences such as rape or robbery.’

So whilst technically acid offences, they’re not the sort of crime one normally associates with the words acid offence, not someone throwing acid into the face of someone else. Carrying acid, or threatening to use whilst committing another crime? Er, no. 

Those types of offences, the physical attack ones, the 454 which I hope weren’t all of the Katie Piper kind, make up 36.4% of the total. A bit less scary than 75%, but still appalling.

Nasty, and despicable yes, but did those threatening to use acid actually have the means to carry out their threat, or were they just doing – just doing! – what criminals have always done, which is to terrorise their victims into compliance?

If the charity which compiled the data and out out the press release, Acid Survivors Trust International, wanted people like me to take the issue as seriously as they do, then possibly not choosing the most media friendly way of printing that data might be a good place to start.

It always baffles me how the protesters from Just Stop Oil manage to avoid serious injury when attempting to draw attention to a problem, a problem that most people are quite content to remain a problem.

Their latest stunt involved throwing some powder at Stonehenge today to make some point or other about keeping oil or coal in the ground. About how much more needs to be done, with much more urgency and of course, much more guilt about living in a society where these boons to humanity have become commonplace.Bizarrely, no-one has ever lamped one of these fuckers and because of that, it emboldens them to commit even greater follies in pursuance of a goal as unlikely to be achieved as Scotland winning the Euro’s.

Do people care about the planet, yes of course they do! But they care about heating their homes a lot more.

Do they want more renewable energy, yes of course they do! But they also want the certainty that when they turn their light switch on in January – when the sun doesn’t shine – or in the summer – when the wind doesn’t blow – it’ll work.

Do some people agree think that electric cars are the future, of course they do! But most question their affordability and practicality.

Why don’t the protesters just sue their parents for committing the unpardonable crime of having had them in the first place, and further compounding that sin by doing so in a time and place which indulges their performative posturing?  

If only their Dads has kept it in their pants!

I must confess to being a tad confused by the media’s seemingly insatiable appetite for using opinion polls to manufacture stories out of at election time, when recent previous history has proven time and time again just how wrong they can be.

My opinion of opinion polls hasn’t been helped by their disastrous misreading of the 2015 election, one that was only eclipsed by their failure to accurately predict the outcome of the 2016 referendum. Mind you, that was only eclipsed by their utter failure in predicting the outcome of the 2017 election. So, improvements were urgently needed, as every newspaper and media outlet said in 2015, again in 2016, and er, in 2017 and yes finally some things changed and they got it a bit right in time for the 2019 one.

I’ve long been of the belief that the use of opinion polls should be seriously limited during an election campaign. This would be positive thing for democracy, not a negative. Yes, by all means, let the parties conduct their own polling for their own private use. How much support do they enjoy as compared to the other parties and therefore which policies are proving popular – or not – with the electorate, and what demographic of the electorate should they focus on. That sort of thing, for their eyes only, to be analysed by anals in pointy hats and not be used otherwise.

Lest there exists a situation whereby an opinion poll can that give rise to a story one day, is apparently contradicted the next, and for the same newspaper to report on both of these stories in a state of blissful ignorance that they’d ever published the one that they’ve just contradicted. And this also gives the false impression that x per cent of the population thinks’ this, as opposed to the more accurate – but less newsy – observation that x per cent of statistically insignificant number of the population thought this.

In yesterday’s Independent there appeared this headline, ‘More than half of voters want Jeremy Corbyn back in the Labour party, new poll reveals.’

Wow! That certainly was something, although what exactly that something was, and even how likely it was to become that something, was not discussed. There’s a poll, don’t you know, and polls tell us something, which in this case was that,

‘More than half of all voters believe that former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn should be allowed back into the party if he is re-elected as an MP in his constituency of Islington North.

Exclusive polling for the Independent by Techne shows that while 56 per cent of all voters say he should be re-admitted, this number is much higher among Labour voters, with 8 in 10 saying that Corbyn should be allowed to rejoin the Labour Party’

Seeing as how I’m brain damaged and get easily confused, I tried to make sense of it. So, people were asked a question predicated upon the notion that something that hasn’t happened yet does happen and creates the necessary conditions for that question to be asked? Hang on, didn’t Chris Morris do a sketch on Radio 4’s ‘On The Hour’ back in 1992 based a this exact premise.

But maybe, because of how I’m brain damaged, possibly I’m being unfair, maybe their methodology was sound, Oh the results were based what 1,624 adults said, it says. That can’t be right, especially if a newspaper is making such a bold claim in the middle of an election campaign based on such a small number of respondents.

Then I saw this opinion poll result based bollocks in The Independent today,’ Nigel Farage and Lee Anderson set to win seats in new Ipsos MRP poll. Ipsos projection also shows Jeremy Corbyn at high risk of losing his Islington North seat’

I thought that people liked him. Isn’t that what you said yesterday, and even if you didn’t explicitly say that, you certainly gave that impression. But lets not dwell on that because,

‘The model also projects that Jeremy Corbyn may lose his seat in Islington North after 41 years of being an MP. Labour is estimated at 54 per cent of the vote in the constituency, with candidate Praful Nargund, while Mr Corbyn may be at just 13 per cent.’

A quick visit to both websites, Techne who produced yesterdays opinion poll, an Ipsos, who produced today’s one, proved that there’s no such thing as a load of old bollocks that can’t have more bollocks added to it, with the help of some computer bollocks and impressively sounding sciencey bollocks.

At Techne, I found that whilst an impressive sounding 18,252 had been invited to take part in the survey, the overwhelming majority of these – 16,616 –  had either declined or else had not properly completed the survey in some way. I also discovered that interviews were either conducted using CATI or CAWI.

Both baffled and intrigued by these acronyms, I decided to investigate. CATI turns out to stand for Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing, whilst CAWI is Computer Assisted Web Interviewing, and despite both having the pro’s and cons, the main pro is that they are cheap. 

Then over to Ipsos. While they make all manner of highfalutin claims about how sciencey based their poll is, its still basically a load of old bollocks. 

‘Multi-level regression and post stratification (MRP) is an advanced modelling technique that estimates the likely vote share for main parties in each constituency by using a national survey with a large sample size. Data on how people say they will vote (and if they will vote) is analysed by a wide range of factors to see how different types of people, in different areas, are likely to act.’

Clever bollocks but still bollocks none the same.

‘For example, it estimates the probability that a woman, aged 25-34, with a degree, living in a Lab/Con marginal, who voted Labour in 2019 will vote for each party running in that constituency. These estimates are then applied to the differing profiles of each constituency to estimate vote counts for each party.’

Ah estimates, basically guesswork with a dash of optimism and a tiny bit of bollocks.

‘Nevertheless, this is just a snapshot of people’s current voting intentions, and there is still time for things to change.  As with any survey and any model, there are uncertainties to take into account, such as margins of error, the impact of unique local dynamics, and sensitivities to the data that goes in.’

Yeah, we know its bollocks, and this covers us when it does indeed turn out to be bollocks, but as no one will actually bother to look behind the story and check out our website, we’ll be fine.

My eyes are hurting a bit after having looked at a computer screen for so long, so I think I’ll take a break for today, and maybe tomorrow as well.