Category: Current Affairs

In the old days, single-issue nutters used to write letters in green ink. Now they are better funded, and they all seem to be called SomethingWatch.

Take MigrationWatch. This is a campaign group that fights against immigration using Daily Mail “Britain is full” arguments. It is not officially associated with a political party, but I think it’s safe to say their membership doesn’t overlap with that of the Workers Revolutionary Party.

Their views, and their tissue-thin pretence of impartiality, are summed up in a paragraph from their homepage:

Migrationwatch is not “anti immigration” but we do believe that the present levels of immigration, the highest in our history, are making Britain overcrowded and are changing the nature of our society.

Another preacher of that old-time Thatcherism is Transportwatch, a fairly new organisation dedicated to concreting over railways and making them into lovely, lovely roads.

The intellectual honesty and impartiality of this organisation (which seems to be more or less a one-man band) can be shown in their use of statistics. Their stock in trade is to compare apples and oranges, and my favourite examples are that roads (3,650 deaths a year) are safer than rail (10 or so deaths a year) because:

• There are more deaths on all railways, if you include trespassers, than there are on the roads, if you only count motorways; and
• There are more deaths per passenger mile on all railways than there are on rural bus routes.

But it’s OK. When TransportWatch get their way, Motorway Coaches will replace trains, and will be much faster over journeys of less than 80 miles. I look forward to the building of a motorway to my rural station in Sussex.

What with the fuss at the moment about creationism in schools, it’s interesting to remember a strong anti-creationist lobbying effort in the UK a couple of years back, led by … er … the Bishop of Oxford.

ITV’s show Vote for Me – a sort of pol idol, where a three-person panel quizzes people who want to stand as MPs – has been shunted to a graveyard slot at 11 p.m., but is still a fine example of down-the-pub politics. Notable horror: Rodney Hylton-Potts, the soi-disant cabbies’ friend, whose policy is to reduce the population of the UK by 30% through ending immigration and (all together now) leaving the EU.

I think I may have Bush fatigue. I’ve just been reading a post and comments on MetaFilter, and I wasn’t able to work up any sort of outrage or disgust at all, even though the US administration is flying a kite about indefinite imprisonment without trial. It wasn’t that I approved, just that I wasn’t horrified that a civilised country could act that way.

Perhaps the Bush administration has gone ultrasonic, and passed beyond the normal range of outrage, so that normal human beings can’t hear it any more.

Inquiries for opposition politicians are a bit like Chinese food – all very well but thirty minutes later you fancy another one.

From the “only the guilty have anything to fear” department: almost 1/2 of Americans polled for MSNBC believe that Muslims living in the US should have their rights restricted. Interestingly, the (to me) less atrocious idea of infiltrating of civic and voluntary groups (something I’m sure MI5 do over here right now) was much less popular – only 29%.

Crooked Timber looks to squash a spreading error – the idea that electronic markets predicted the US election better than the polls did. The actuality – that the markets were as inaccurate as the polls – indicates to me both the reliance of markets on available information and common wisdom, rather than anything more ethereal; and the primacy of polling data in the US political newsline. Are there alternative means of sampling public views than opinion polling? How reliable is it? Where is the political bias?

The British Government are closing a number of embassies and consulates to save money.

Elliot Spitzer, the corporation-bashing attorney general of New York, is standing for election as governor in 2006. The New York Times reports. Also, Mr Spitzer has a blog.

After unisex hairdressers, the unisex branch of the Church of England. BBC