You may have noticed that Dawn Primarolo, Health Minister, has asked for a report into the ‘unacceptable’ and ‘unethical’ situation whereby recovering drug addicts are given extra doses of methadone or shopping vouchers in return for clean drugs tests.

Perhaps she should start by investigating the advice endorsed by her own Government, and published by the Government-established NICE three months ago. If she does, she’ll come across this:

Principles of Contingency Management

• Offer incentives contingent on each drug-negative test, usually either:
• vouchers that can be exchanged for goods or services of the service user’s choice, or
• privileges, such as take-home methadone doses.
• The value of vouchers should start in the region of £2 and increase with each additional, continuous period of abstinence.

You see, that’s one of the many problems with evidence-based medicine – it doesn’t necessarily fit in with the Daily Mail‘s ‘druggies are scum’ agenda. Sometimes, the most effective thing to do isn’t the most popular.

But presumably, since NICE advice is now officially unethical, the government will now be performing a spectacular U-turn on all NICE guidance, and issuing drugs regardless of ‘cost-effectiveness’ – and the dementia patients who so vigorously campaign for drugs (in a way that fits in with the tabloid agenda) will now be granted all they want, as the government will no longer be able to hide behind NICE Guidelines.

Note: I was sent this book to review by the publisher, and have reviewed it in compliance with the review policy of the site. Other companies are welcome to send me stuff to review – email me using the details on the right.

Crap: A Guide to Politics is a major update on Terry Arthur’s famous book from the 70s, 95% is Crap. It aims to deconstruct ‘political speak’, and expose it as ‘crap’ of one of twelve kinds, each of which is given a chapter in the book.

The book is certainly entertaining – it’s written with humour, and certainly made me smile. However, the clear anti-government stance of the author became wearing in parts, and there was often a strong feeling of him criticising every option without offering a solution.

That said, the book does highlight some quite startling U-turns by politicians, and some fairly worrying half-truths (and worse). It highlights the way in which the political process has become corrupt, and reliant on influencing the news cycle and assuming that the voter will forget last week’s news in favour of today’s.

However, the book itself has been published at an unfortunate time, which (thanks to the turbulent political times of late) makes it appear outdated as soon as it has hit the shelves. At the time of the book’s writing, Tony Blair is leading the Labour Party, much is made of Menzies Campbell’s leadership of the Liberal Democrats, and Cameron’s Conservatism is still seen as new and exciting. Clearly, things have moved on from there, but the central messages of the book hold true.

Arthur points out the core duality of any political process – the politican must represent both their constituents’ interests and their own, which are often disparous – and highlights some fascinating (and hilarious) episodes on which this has been clearly exposed to the public. But whilst maintaining a humour, there is a serious message underneath about the damage such approaches can have on the political process as a whole.

This book is both humorous, and also a serious deconstruction of the state of political play. That duality makes the book untidy and repetitive at times, and the humour sometimes comes across as juvenile, but it isn’t a bad book. It’s certainly accessible enough for the general reader, but perhaps not quite heavy enough for the political junkie. It’s worth a read.

Win My Review Copy

To comply with my self-imposed policy of not accepting payment for reviews, I held a competition to give away my review copy of Crap: A Guide to Politics. But it’s closed now – you’re too late.

Buy Your Own Copy

If you’re not feeling lucky, Crap: A Guide to Politics is now available to buy from sjhoward.co.uk/shop.

A single sentence in Mr Brown’s conference speech could have saved him a huge humiliation today. But he tried to keep his options open for too long, and look where he’s ended up. A huge climbdown following an unnecessary build-up, in the face of a terrible poll.

The number of mistakes that have been made in the handling of this situation is staggering.

He’s announced this decision in the face of a poll showing a Conservative lead, meaning that the poll gets more attention that it otherwise would have.

He’s done it on a Saturday so he gets a bashing in the Sunday papers and the Monday papers.

He’s done it in an embargoed interview, so the only pictures to accompany the story for the first (almost) 24 hours are those of Mr Cameron criticising him.

He’s done it in a BBC exclusive interview, pissing off every other broadcaster and guaranteeing himself a rough ride.

In fact, I don’t think there’s anything right about the way he’s done this. Yet he’s supposed to be one of the greatest political strategists of our time. What’s gone wrong? Is the pressure of being PM taking his eye off the political ball? And if he makes this much mess of not having an election campaign, how will he manage the real thing in a couple of years’ time?

Help me – I’m agreeing with Alastair Campbell.

There are many, many reasons why Mr Brown won’t call an election in the next few weeks. These include…

• It would be difficult for him to ‘win’ – only an improvement on Mr Blair’s last performance will be seen as a ‘win’, and that’s not the current trend.
• The latest polls – Labour has virtually lost its lead.
• The postal strike – Potential for electoral chaos.
• Electoral register – Because the new register only comes into force from 1st December, thousands will probably be disenfranchised.
• Technology – Much of the technical equipment that failed in the May elections hasn’t been fixed.
• The defence against not calling an election is stronger than that against calling an election. And not calling an election when the Conservatives have called for it makes Cameron look powerless, which is a reasonable swap for Brown looking a bit wimpy.
• The Brown honeymoon period is now well and truly over.

I’d be surprised if he called an election against that background. My history of predictions is pretty terrible, but poor ability doesn’t stop anything else I do…

Yesterday was the sixth anniversary of ‘9/11’. After 9/11, Jon Stewart gave a speech to open The Daily Show, a speech which I posted here back in June 2006.

Such is the power of the speech that yesterday tens of blogs linked to it on this site, providing over 130,000 extra hits, and propelling it comfortably to the top of the ‘most popular posts’ league. When a speech that is six years old can still generate this kind of response, it surely must be a great speech.

What a shame that politicians have moved so far from their people that it was left to a comedy newsreader to truly speak to the nation in the face of its greatest tragedy in many generations.

As I’ve alluded to in the recent past, quite a number of websites hotlink images from this one. It’s something that I once tried to discourage using complicated scripts, but then pretty much gave up. Many images on the site are, for some reason, highly rated by Google Images, which only increases the amount of hotlinking that goes on.

I was surprised today, though, to find that The Amateur Scientist had found this image on my server. I couldn’t imagine why it was on there… what post could possibly require an illustration of a herd of goats?

Then I remembered: It was this one. A fascinating anecdote, portraying the joys of political blogging when politics is dull.

Given that this purports to be a political blog, I will actually post something about politics sometime in the not too distant future, I promise… but all that seems to be going on at the moment is traditional Conservative Party dissent accompanied by traditional Conservative Party policy rehashes, in this case the idea introducing an optional volunteering scheme spun as ‘National Service’.

And Gordon Brown seems to be just plodding on in a Brownish way, apparently considering calling a snap election – of course he’s not really considering it, unless he’s more stupid than he looks, whatever the polls might say. Polls and elections are different species. Now I’m just waffling.

It’s Conference Season coming up, though, so they’ll be plenty of stuff to write then. In the meantime, go watch some stupid videos.

In a move almost as expected as Tony Blair’s, John Prescott has announced that he will resign as an MP at the next election.

It’ll be quite sad to see him go – Whilst he was a comically terrible Deputy Prime Minister, he was a colossal figure in the Labour Party, probably more important to it over the last fifteen years even than Tony Blair. Blair wouldn’t have got anywhere without Prescott, and neither would Labour.

He’s even provided much fun on these pages over the years – from his interview technique (more than once), to his non-job, to his affair (also more than once). His complete lack of PR awareness made him a bit of a figure of fun for the media, but his style meant that he could always connect with the grass roots of the Labour Party, unlike almost anyone else.

Brown’s government will dearly miss a figure like Prescott.

Iain Dale is asking people to nominate their top twenty political blogs so that he can compile a top 100 for his latest book.

These things are impossible to do, but glancing briefly through my feed reader, I reckon these are all good… but I’ve probably got them in the wrong order, missed people out, and made myself look stupid. But hey, no change there…

1. S J Howard (of course…)
2. Iain Dale’s Diary
3. Guido Fawkes
4. Nick Robinson’s Newslog
5. Downing Street Says
6. Dizzy Thinks
7. Charlie Beckett
8. James O’Malley: Living Legend
9. RecessMonkey
10. Adam Boulton
11. PM
12. NHS Blog Doc
13. Random Acts of Reality
14. Boris Johnson
15. Burning Our Money
16. Dirty Leftie
17. Paul Linford
18. Mark Mardell
19. Tim Worstall
20. Tim McLoughlin

So what are your top tips? Hop over to Mr Dale’s website and post your list. You have until 15th August. Obviously, there’s no dispute about Number 1… 😉

I’ve just published Returning Politics to the People over on Gazette Communities. Hopefully, the links are working better than last week. Regular readers will have heard it all before, albeit not in one post. Enjoy.