No election TV debate, says Blair (BBC News)

For a man apparently trying to reinvigorate interest in elections, this would seem a strange decision. Perhaps he’s worried that it would give a boost to the oppostition, and make him look silly in an election which he’s fairly certain to win anyway.

The best move now for the Conservatives would be to arrange a televised debate between Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy, and then point out that Mr Blair cannot be bothered to attend to defend his policies. It could be a primetime Labour-bashing programme, an opportunity surely too good to miss?

Matt Wells strongly criticises the BBC (and pretty much everyone) in this article about their response to the Tsunami disaster. I agree that the lack of coverage on terrestrial BBC channels was somewhat lacklustre, but I think it’s unfair to criticise BBC News 24 in this way. My defence is below; for Roger Mosey‘s, click here.

While the competition were sending anchors to Thailand (Why Thailand? Presumably because that’s where most British tourists are), the BBC News 24 anchors remained in London, giving a much less nationalistic and narrow-minded view of the crisis.

BBC News 24 presented the world view, sat at a desk with the full facts in front of them, and passing to various highly experienced local correspondents around the affected region. Sky in particular concentrated on the plights of individual British tourists, exemplified by the pseudo-public-service-broadcasting ‘Messages Home’ ticker, whilst giving second billing to the world view, and shipped out anchors with little or no historical knowledge of the region to cover the disaster.

That’s not to say, by any means, that the BBC were right and Sky were wrong. It’s just that they’re catering for different audiences: Whilst the BBC takes the considered ‘broadsheet’ view, Sky goes for the getting-the-hands-dirty sensationalist ‘tabloid’ view. Many, if not most, people in the UK respond to ‘It could have been me!’ news reporting, and they should certainly be provided for. Comerical stations do this well. BBC News 24 should be providing something different, something more analytical, and so it has been.

The Guardian criticised BBC News 24 when it followed Sky’s lead. It now criticises it for doing something different. It complained that BBC News 24 had fewer viewers than commercial rivals. Now it barely mentions viewing figures.

BBC News 24 is doing its job and doing it well. Long may it continue.

The stark contrasts of the front pages caught my eye today.

By far the ‘best’ front page today is the Indy’s, continuing their tradition of poster-style front pages (of which I am a big fan):

The Sun and The Star both have different takes on the disaster, with the sun leading on Charlie Dimmock’s mother, and the Star just about managing to squeeze in a headline about the silence below a scantily clad ‘Jen’.

Rather than leading on the biggest natural disaster in history, the apparently respectable Mail lead on… Council Tax.

I suppose I should be glad it wasn’t their new favourite: gypsies.

After all of the posts on here recently about the religious explanations for the tsunami disaster, I thought it was about time that I gave my personal opinion on the matter. Not wanting to use my usual non-elequant writing style, though, I turned to classical poetry, and Voltaire, who’s opinions roughly match my own.

Some choice quotes (from the English translation, you’ll be glad to hear):

Behold these shreds and cinders of your race,
This child and mother heaped in common wreck,
These scattered limbs beneath the marble shafts—
A hundred thousand whom the earth devours,
Who, torn and bloody, palpitating yet,
Entombed beneath their hospitable roofs,
In racking torment end their stricken lives.
To those expiring murmurs of distress,
To that appalling spectacle of woe,
Will ye reply: “You do but illustrate
The iron laws that chain the will of God”?
Say ye, o’er that yet quivering mass of flesh:
“God is avenged: the wage of sin is death”?
What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?
Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice
Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?

God holds the chain: is not himself enchained;
By his indulgent choice is all arranged;
Implacable he’s not, but free and just.
Why suffer we, then, under one so just?
There is the knot your thinkers should undo.

But how conceive a God supremely good,
Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves,
Yet scatters evil with as large a hand?

And, since it’s 2005 and not 1756, here’s the Reduced Shakespeare Company with their similar take on things:

Why does God allow bad things to happen
To good people?

Praise the Lord for the good he can do,
But he should take the wrap for the bad crap too…
If He can’t take the heat,
He oughta get out of heaven!

Well over two hundred years of poetry in a single blog entry, all painfully relevant to modern world events. What other blog gives you more? 😉

Well this is good news… particularly as I filled up this afternoon. D’oh!

Howard concedes Tories may not win election (ThisIsLondon)

Talk about playing the media well – Michael Howard guarantees a high billing in tomorrow’s papers by ‘admitting’ the obvious – that he might not win the next election. And he’s releasing his manifesto in something of a drip-feed manner, releasing the introduction today, so he’ll get coverage for each little bit. Very good idea. Bravo.

The new Beta version of MSN Search is, on several fronts, better than Google. The main one is a feature that I need all the time: Type a search such as “Capital of France” and you get a straight answer from Encarta. That blows Google out of the water. And it still has my favourite bits of the Google idea: Type “Define x” and it gives a dictionary definition, and it’ll do calculations to, and there’s an image search application. The Desktop Search application is better integrated with Outlook than windows, and will work from the Desktop Search Bar. There isn’t a UK biased version of the Toolbar Suite yet, but if this arrives before Google’s version, I’ll be switching allegiance.

The Newsbot has come out of nowhere to be (in my opinion) better than Google News.

Once these get out of beta and well integrated into the desktop, Google could be seriously threatened.

So MSN is my ‘big tip’ for 2005.

There’s little in this Times article that I actually agree with. Sir Keith Povey, however experienced and respected he might be, clearly has values that are completely different to anyone else. He’s the kind of person who’d say “If you’ve done nothing wrong, then why do you fear the police?”. It’s actually quite scary to think that people like this are in high positions in the police force.

Sir Keith added that inventions such as DNA profiling would revolutionise policing. He forecast that Britain would have a national database based on samples compulsorily taken at birth within a decade. Police already have a growing database of convicted and suspected criminals.

This is scary stuff. There’s no way I want to live in a society where my DNA is kept on file from birth. I’m not really happy with the current situation of keeping convicted criminals’ DNA records on file for life (in fact, in many ways that’s less satisfactory than doing it for the whole country). The consequences of such a move could be absolutely terrible.

I know the civil liberties people will argue against it but it’s not just an enforcement tool; it’s an identification showing people are innocent as well as guilty,” he said. “I think we are talking about something in the next ten years. I don’t think it’s a big step because where are the objections in a lot of areas? “The benefits of DNA are so great and go well beyond law enforcement and it’s not that intrusive.

So not only does he want to keep my DNA on file, he wants to use it as evidence that I’m guilty of a crime. DNA should certainly not be used in this situation if a national database is implemented, since it is only about 99.999975% accurate (meaning that DNA found at a crime scene could match about 15 people in the country – which is also why it’s a bad idea to convict known criminals in a database based solely on DNA evidence, since the DNA would only narrow the field to 15 people (the other 14 of whom are unknown in this situation), and would not pin the crime to one person. In a national database scenario, this could get very messy – imagine finding, through a crime investigation your DNA gets you involved in, that the person you think is your father actually is not. This is a remarkably common scenario in Britain today. What greater intrusion of civil liberties than to become one of the top suspects in a murder you didn’t even know about, and have your perception of your familial relationships blown apart, on the basis of flawed DNA evidence? And yet Sir Kieth thinks this isn’t intrusive. I’d hate to see what he thought was intrusive!

“If you are really serious about ID cards, it’s got to be compulsory, mandatory to carry it and it has to be produced on demand to a police officer.”

Thousands of bags and wallets are stolen each year. What if yours was in this situation? Not only would you, under the current plans, be unable to claim the benefits and public services to which you are entitled (What if you were hurt in the mugging, needed to see a doctor, but couldn’t do so without your card?), but now Sir Keith wants to arrest you for not having your card. It’d be laughable if he wasn’t so serious.

Sir Keith pointed out that a few years ago closed-circuit television cameras were attacked as a threat to civil liberties, but now communities demanded them.

This is because cameras are of such poor quality that the pictures are rarely used as evidence, and I’m not aware of any case where somebody has been convicted solely through the use of CCTV. But they still manage to cut crime, because they act as a deterrent to petty criminals. And they therefore make people feel safer, which is why they are ‘demanded’. If there had been some widely publicised cases of people being wrongly convicted by virtue of CCTV pictures, then I expected they wouldn’t be quite so welcomed.

Sir Keith said he started on the beat 42 years ago in Sheffield and made his first arrest catching two men stealing scrap metal.

“In those days I always patrolled alone. In fact it was a disciplinary offence if you were caught talking to the man on the next beat, whereas now everybody patrols in pairs.

“I firmly believe there is far too much double-crewing, as we call it, whether on patrol or in vehicles. When you think officers have got sprays, side-handled batons — they don’t need to be in pairs most of the time,” he said.

He may feel that way, but at a time when police-public relations are at an all time low, and violent crime is on the rise, I certainly wouldn’t want to walk around on my own in a police uniform. Would you?

This is an incredibly brave Thunderer column from today’s Times. It could have gone horribly wrong, but I think that Martin Samuel has managed to pull off a very difficult stunt: Make an extremely controversial point in a good humoured way, and not end up Boris-ing himself.

For what it’s worth, I do tend to agree with him, and my initial reaction to the announcement of a three minutes’ silence was one of surprise at the length. More of a super-silence than anything else. And whilst this has clearly been a super-disaster, does having an extra-long silence really add anything to the sentiment? I think not. The tradition has always been that we have a two-minute silence, unless it’s felt that a one-minute silence is more appropriate. But now we’re having a three-minute one. Why? Is this disaster considered more tragic than the deaths of millions in wars worldwide?

Well done Martin for having the guts to write this brillian column, and well done to The Times for publishing it.

Hell is 57 varieties (Guardian)

Another thing I’ve been saying for years! Anyone would think I was guest-editing The Guardian today. I assure you I’m not, though, more’s the pity.