Fraud in the blogosphere

There are many reasons why I am not a successful journalist. One of them is my ability to remain oblivious to key events. Almost a week ago Lord Credo, the prolific blogger and Twitterer, was outed as a fraud. He had claimed to be at the heart of government, even to have David Cameron's ear. All of that was a lie.

In my defence, this news hardly broke the front pages. In fact, if this story shows anything it is that people care very little about the blogosphere. For all the talk about individual empowerment and grassroots journalism, the fact that not one person bothered to double-check a man 4,400 people thought to be genuine is indicative. He even managed to fool the Huffington Post.

It is tempting to blame the times we live in. In Agatha Christie's 'A Murder Is Announced', Miss Marple laments that 'no one knows any longer who's who'. The problem is 'people just come - and all you know about them is what they say of themselves'. No longer can we rely on a strongly integrated community to provide us with the necessary information on newcomers. 

This view is bunk. Over 100 years earlier people were able to accept the concept of a man being incarcerated, escaping, and returning home as a fictitious Count of Monte Cristo. Countless generations have claimed that when they were young they knew everyone on their street and that there was less crime. This claim becomes rather astounding when one considers that one in five women in 18th century London were prostitutes.

In fact, one could argue the confidence trick has become harder nowadays. In a Big Brother age of bureaucratic oversight in which we must all have qualifications from a universally accepted institution, it almost seems refreshing that a man was able to walk into the top echelons of society purely on the back of his personality.

That said, this man's actions were deplorable. He abused his friends' trust and defrauded them. If there is a lesson to learn from this sorry affair, it is that even in a modern world of instant communication and social media, you can't trust anyone to be who they say they are. You don't trust spam e-mails. Don't trust a Twitter profile.

Rescuing the working class: the need to rebalance our economy

Written for & originally posted by Conservative Way Forward (Yorkshire) on 18/08/11.

The recent UK riots sparked a frenzied media debate about a worrying phenomenon: an underclass which feels it has so little stake in society that it can happily destroy the community in which it lives. What is the cause of this deplorable development and what can be done?

One has to start with the disintegration of the working class. After the collapse of the manufacturing industry the working class split. Those who were able to moved to jobs in an increasingly dominant finance and services sector. In doing so they joined the middle class. Those left behind lacked the necessary education and skills to find employment in a modern economy. Wanting to avoid soaring unemployment figures, the Government ensured many of these unemployables ended up hidden on disability benefit. 20 years on and only now are moves being made to get these people back into work. In short, we relied on the success of the financial sector to paper over the cracks of a rotten system.

There is a geographic dimension too. Based in the City of London, the boom in the financial sector only created jobs in the south-east. The Government reacted by taking the money the south-east generated and throwing it at the rest of the country. How else could one explain why the public sector is the dominant employer in so many areas north of the Watford Gap?

When anyone challenges this system, there is uproar. If anyone tries to reduce the North's dependency on the public sector, the Left accuses them of targeting the poor. Similarly, whenever people try to ensure only those in need of disability benefit receive it, and that those able to work do so, they are accused of attacking the meagre protection provided to the genuinely handicapped. Meanwhile, whenever someone talks of rebalancing the economy in favour of other sectors which would benefit those areas outside the south-east, the Right accuses them of wanting to return Britain to the 1970s.

This is fraud, plain and simple. We can wring our hands about the decline of our nation all we want but nothing will change until we accept there is something fundamentally wrong with our dependence on finance. Otherwise, Britain will remain 'Great' only in name.

David Starkey & race: a short opinion

I tried but couldn't resist touching on David Starkey's rather disastrous appearance on Newsnight last Friday. Since so many have already opined on the subject far more eloquently than I could ever manage, I'll try to keep it short.

Many have argued that Starkey's comments have been pounced on by the PC brigade with the result being to shut down a much needed debate on race. Indeed, we do need to have that debate. It goes to the very heart of our understanding of our identity, both as individuals and a nation. It would seem strange to ignore something so fundamental when examining why society collapsed catastrophically last week.

But that's the point: this incredibly sensitive and personal debate is crucial if this country is to address the vast problems it faces today. Charging headlong at the issue, wild-eyed and foaming at the mouth like a bull to a red cloth, does nothing to aid that debate. Rather, it offends people to such a degree that it forces them into an ideological corner. Don't blame the PC brigade for shutting down the debate. Blame people like David Starkey.

Cracking rioters' skulls

One of the many videos that has gone viral in the past couple of days shows police stop, and then beat to the ground, alleged teenage rioters. You can even see one of them being kicked whilst on the ground.

If you haven't seen the video, you can find it here.

One must remember this video is completely out of context. We don't know what events led up to it, nor do we know what happened after. The police deserve the benefit of the doubt.

Rather, what is concerning is people's reaction. Comments on the original Youtube posting are all massively in favour of giving rioters a taste of their own medicine. The most popular comment at the time of writing reads: 'Good. I'm glad the nasty little f***ers got a hiding!!'.

There has to be something wrong when our first reaction to seeing a policeman take a truncheon to a teenager's face is one of satisfaction. I'm not denying these kids might be horrible pieces of work. They might have provoked the police. However, they don't appear to have been doing anything particularly wrong at the time of filming and they didn't appear to put up any resistance at all.

Just because a group of thugs act like sub-standard human beings doesn't mean the police should. The police are meant to protect us from thugs, not become thugs themselves. The police have, by and large, shown remarkable restraint in dealing with what are essentially scum of the earth. We shouldn't go about encouraging them to become thugs now.

#mediablackout

For anyone who regularly uses Twitter, #tottenham, #enfield and #londonriots will all be familiar trends from the past couple of days. On Sunday night, as the nation's capital once again erupted into riots, social media buzzed. There was, however, another trend which signified something quite troubling: #mediablackout. Why indeed was there so little live coverage from the traditional media?

The Met claimed it hadn't requested a blackout, and it might be too much to expect Sky News and the BBC to provide live television coverage from the word go. Logistics and limited resources mean cameramen can't be instantly on the scene. However, many like myself often rely on the live news feeds the BBC and others provide on their websites. They incorporate a wide range of sources, including social media such as Twitter, and can hardly be that difficult or expensive to set up. It was strange to see nothing of the sort from any major news agency.

Assuming the claims of a media blackout are true, how was it in the public interest? Whilst the traditional media remained silent Twitter was ablaze with people's reactions. Troublemakers continued to communicate through BlackBerry Messenger whilst the general public were kept in the dark about a genuine security issue. If there was a media blackout last night it was appallingly managed.

I hate conspiracy theories. They tend to be the half-baked product of someone with far too much time on their hands and too much faith in people's ability to cover things up. But either there was a ban on live coverage or our national media is so incompetent it can't report riots in the streets of our capital. Neither is an enticing prospect.

America: no longer making the grade

Yesterday, Standard & Poor's downgraded the US's credit rating from AAA to AA+. The world's largest economy was humiliated leading to fears of further market turmoil. One can blame a whole range of issues but deadlock on Capitol Hill has to be one of the frontrunners. Held hostage by the radical Tea Party, Republicans found themselves unable to compromise with Democrats on a coherent approach to deal with the nation's rising debt burden. With no credible plan,  S&P felt unable to award the AAA grade.

As this sorry episode has shown, an increasingly polarised Congress coupled with America's famed system of checks and balances threatens to bring the US to a standstill. If the US is once again to be governable then this partisan deadlock must be broken. Change will undoubtedly be difficult, but there is one reform that with little controversy could put America back on the path to a functioning political system.

Throughout the USA, state legislators draw up the districts that elect their representatives to Congress. Imagine if in Britain it were the responsibility of local councils to draw up MPs' constituencies. The conflict of interest, wanting to select electoral boundaries that would favour candidates from one's own party, would cause outrage. A Tory run council would draw up constituencies that elected Tory MPs, whilst Labour and Lib Dem councils would do exactly the same thing. It's called gerrymandering.

Unsurprisingly, we don't allow this to happen in Britain. We leave it to an impartial body, the Boundary Commission, to draw up constituencies. So do most other developed democracies. It is America that stands out as the exception. The consequence is electoral districts of incredible shapes that cannot possibly best serve the interests of their constituents.

When it comes to an election, the candidate whose party drew up the district will win by a landslide. It's comparable to the problem of safe constituencies in the UK, except worse. The only contest is when each party chooses its candidate. Since only party members can vote in primaries, ideological purists push out more moderate candidates. 

To break its partisan deadlock, America needs to bring back real competition to its elections. Putting a stop to gerrymandering would be a good start.

Guido Fawkes & the Death Penalty

Paul Staines, better known by his blog name Guido Fawkes, has grabbed a few headlines recently. His e-petition to restore capital punishment has caused quite a stir among political types and attracted over 3,000 signatures so far. Were it to reach the 100,000 mark it will be eligible for discussion in the Commons.

His claim to represent the 'regressive majority' has got the issue of capital punishment on the front page of the Daily Mail as well as discussed on Newsnight. He has even affected the way people view the Conservative party: restoration of the death penalty might be about as far from Government policy as one could get, yet Diane Abbott still felt able to scream of a Tory conspiracy to return us to the 1950s.

Fawkes evidently has some influence on the political debate. However, this is a man who regularly gets his facts wrong. He even happily contradicts them. Take as an example his coverage of the the financial performance of the Guardian Media Group, owner of the Guardian and the Observer.

In a highly critical post on 2 August he claimed  GMG's turnover in 2011 was £198m. Somehow, he saw no contradiction when this figure mysteriously jumped to £255m in a blog post the next day. This seemed all the more strange when this post concerned the purported deception by GMG in the presentation of its accounts. We are all human and we all make mistakes. That is perfectly understandable. When made in a vicious attack, however, an inability to acknowledge their existence is not.

This is a man who has a history of being cavalier with the facts. To allow such a man to drive the political debate is not just foolish. It is positively destructive.