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Amazing what you can find when you have a dig through the results of regulator’s investigations: Fox News slapped down over news report.

1. “We do not believe that a simple Internet search for the words “BBC” and “anti-American” is sufficient evidence to back-up such a statement”
2. “We do not accept that the Hutton Inquiry supported the statement that the “BBC felt entitled to lie and when caught lying, felt entitled to defend its lying”. The Inquiry stated that BBC editorial system was “defective”. At no stage did Hutton accuse the BBC management of lying.”
3. “There is no evidence, and Fox News did not provide any, that the BBC “insisted its reporter had a right to lie””
4. “Fox News was unable to provide any substantial evidence to support the overall allegation that the BBC management had lied and the BBC had an anti-American obsession”

I haven’t written anything about the European elections here (vote Green!) until now, but I am now sufficiently annoyed to do so.

Yesterday I received through my door the campaign literature from the BNP.

Among its contents, it says (and I quote):

1. The government is already planning to build 5 new cities, each the size of Birmingham, over the next 30 years to house over 5 million new immigrants. [emphasis theirs]
2. The asylum flood has helped to make Britain a battleground for foreign conflicts
3. Asylum is allowing hundreds of ‘asylum bombers’ to plan their atrocities in Britain

It’s the last one that is the most insidious; the first two are just plain wrong. Note the phrasing of the last one: plan their atrocities in Britain. They’re referring to the fact that apparently those that committed the Madrid bombings had links with migrant communities in North London. But the sentence doesn’t make that clear. They trick the reader into thinking that they’re saying immigrants have come here to plot terrorist attacks to be carried out in Britain, but careful reading shows something a lot more benign.

It’s inflammatory language, but language a clever lawyer can defend in court.

Bastards.

There’s a few things that have been bugging me about the proposals for a new UK National Identity Card. Obviously there’s the major one that it’s a bad idea and won’t work, but I think I can be more specific than that.

You can read more than I care to write about the matter at The Register, but there’s two major points I want to make.

1. The Government has lied. They held a public consultation on ID cards last year, and published the results. I quote:
   

   What was learned from the consultation exercise?

   11. Individual responses, sample surveys, and polling results have demonstrated substantial support for an identity card. Of the 5000 people and organisations who responded formally to the consultation, 4200 expressed a view. Over 60% of these were in favour. We also received over 5000 e-mails from an organised opposition campaign. Over 96% of these were opposed.

   The “organised opposition campaign” they mention is stand.org.uk. The government decided to ignore all 5000 of these opinions and claim that, overall, people were in favour of the proposals. This pisses me off, mainly because what’s the point of having a consultation if you’re going to ignore the results, but also because I was one of those 5000 e-mails, dammit! How dare they ignore my submission to the consultation!

2. My basic position on ID cards is “In general, it’s a bad idea, more so if you cock up the implementation”. Unfortunately the implementation being proposed is a complete foul-up. Basically, each card will have two biometrics on it, a primary (probably fingerprints) and secondary (probably facial geometry). If you were clever, you might think “hang on, didn’t David Blunkett say this would ‘make identity theft and multiple identity impossible, not nearly impossible, impossible’. If my fingerprints are stored on this card, what happens when someone nicks it? They’ve just stolen my identity, right? It’s not like I can report my fingerprints stolen and get a new set”. You’d be right, too. A system like that (such as the government proposes) would make identity theft easier, as well as more damaging when it happens.

   There is a way around the problem though, which at best leaves the possibility of identity theft as likely as it is today. It’s what a lot of clever people assumed the government would do. It’s called secure cryptographic hashing.

   Simply, when you go to have your fingerprints taken to get your card (try to put the slightly Orwellian picture this conjures out of your mind for a minute), the government doesn’t actually store your fingerprints themselves. What it does it produce a cryptographic hash of your fingerprints, a one-way mangling of them, and stores that instead. If the bad guys then nick your card, all they get is a meaningless number. But if all you’ve got is a meaningless number, how can you use it an as ID card?, I hear you ask. Well, the readers at airports, job centres etc. would also produce hashes of the prints they take, and instead of comparing the fingerprints, they compare the hashes. This means that they can verify your identity (which is what the cards are for, right?) without actually having to store your fingerprints on a scary national database. And of course, if your card is nicked, you just regenerate a new hash, and use that to authenticate from then on.

   The failure of the government to implement this safer system worries me. It’s not like they weren’t told to - privacy campaigners submitted reports to the consultation explaining in painstaking detail what the correct, safe way to do this kind of stuff is. But they’re being ignored, and that is very very troubling. Why does David Blunkett want to know what your fingerprints are? He still hasn’t answered that…

There’s a few things I generally don’t talk about on here, one of which is religion. Whilst it’s an interesting topic, it’s not one that generally gets anywhere when you discuss it. However, there was one thing lately that caught my eye.

If you watch Channel 4 at all, you’ve likely seen one of these. They appear after a program has finished, and go something like this:

For daily sex tips direct to your mobile, text LOVE to 83188 Texts cost 25p plus standard rate

I first noticed these after episodes of Sex and the City. I don’t have a particular problem with it, although in the case of Sex and the City it does seem a waste of money, as you could instead reenact some of the content of the episode you’ve just seen. I’m not sure who would want daily sex tips either, but that’s another matter. Some people must just not be very inventive..

So, in general, I have no problems with these. They’re obviously a money-spinner, but hey, fair enough, if someone wants to waste their money on it then that’s okay by me.

However, I saw another one the other day. It went something like:

For daily Christian thinking direct to your mobile, text DIVINE to 83188 Texts cost 25p plus standard rate

Is it only me that finds that slightly offensive? I mean, put aside the fact that what they’re effectively doing is exploiting religion to make a cheap buck and instead think about the content of these messages.. Who’s writing them? The Archbishop of Canterbury? The Pope? I somehow doubt it. I bet it’s some overworked Channel 4 hack who’s nipped down to Waterstone’s and bought a Christian book. They then pump the contents back at unwitting Christians for 25p a time. I was genuinely a little shocked…

Is it me, or is that a little exploitative?

The Madrid bombings were obviously followed by “grr terrorists we will defeat them oh yes we will” posturing from almost everyone. That was to be expected, and perfectly natural. I’ll admit to glazing over when Jack Straw came out shortly afterwards and began the war-on-terror rhetoric.

Far more interesting were the events two days later, when the Spanish people decided to chuck out the centre-right government (that had taken Spain to war in Iraq against the opposition of 90% of the population) and install the Socialists (who had pledged to withdraw Spanish troops if they were elected). The most interesting quote following this came from the Leader of the House of Representatives in the US, who said that the Spanish people had voted “to appease terrorism”. Bush et al were obviously not impressed by the choice of the Spanish people.

I think to say the Spaniards voted to “appease terrorism” is to distort the facts. The millions of people on the streets of Madrid were certainly not appeasing terrorism. They were out there in the pouring rain stating their views on terrorism very clearly. The main reason they kicked out José María Aznar was because they thought he had lied to them following the attacks.

Aznar and his allies (including Jack Straw, I might add) immediately sought to blame ETA for the attacks, because Aznar knew that his policies on ETA were strong. If the bombings had been ETA, Aznar’s party would probably have increased their majority in the Spanish parliament.

In the hours following the blasts, Popular Party officials were briefing the State media that the attacks were the work of ETA, despite having evidence to the contrary. They even proposed motions in the UN condemning ETA terrorism and persuaded the British government to support this line publicly (even though we probably knew that ETA had not carried out the bombings).

Unfortunately for Aznar, there was enough time between the bombings and the elections for the truth to start to seep out. Clues leaked to Reuters of possible Islamic links, and Aznar began to be undermined. When it became clear that Aznar had probably known of these links and had sought to influence the election by filling the media with reports of ETA’s involvement, the Spanish people were understandably pissed off. They kicked him out.

So who changed the election result? The terrorists? The Spanish government? The Socialists? It seems clear to me that by their deceit the government threw the election away. The Spanish people stopped trusting them (are you paying attention here, Tony?) and voted them out.

The Spanish people voted for truth and honesty in their democracy (a democracy which, let’s remember, is only 25 years old). That’s not appeasing terrorism. It’s exactly the kind of democracy that the US preaches, but rarely seems to practice. Perhaps Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld should reflect on that.

You might not have realised, but the vote in the House of Commons last week on the government’s proposals to introduce university top-up fees was only the Bill’s second reading. It’s not actually law yet.

The Bill now passes into the committee stage, where a cross-party group of MPs can examine the proposals in more detail.

“Erskine May” is the book of Parliamentary protocol and practice, which details the rules by which the examination of a Bill at each stage is governed. Whilst not technically ‘law’, the guidelines laid out in it are generally followed, as they’ve shown over many years to produce well-balanced legislation. One of the rules laid out in Erskine May states that the strength of opinion expressed in the Second Reading of a Bill should be represented in the composition of the Standing Committee that goes on to look at the Bill in more detail.

Reading the Hansard log of the Bill’s Second Reading, Douglas Hogg MP expresses concern that the close nature of the Second Reading (a government win by only five votes) might not be represented in the Committee.

Unfortunately, this has turned out to be true.

The government has allocated only two of the Labour seats on the committee (out of nine) to rebels, and of those two only one actually voted against the Government (the other abstained).

Understandably, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are kicking up a bit of a fuss about this. Whilst the government is not obliged to respect the rules laid out in Erskine May, it’s considered very bad form not to do so.

But the government has no qualms about this, so desperate are they to push the Bill through the Committee stage as quickly as possible.

It really makes me despair…

So, Lord Hutton reported.

I think most people are quite surprised; not about what he said, but rather about what he didn’t say. There’s no doubt that while the BBC was never going to come out of this smelling of roses, there’s no way that the government and the MoD should have done either.

I find all that rather uninteresting though. I think the wider issues for the BBC and broadcasting in general are far more important. I only really came to any conclusions about this whilst watching Michael Howard responding to the Hutton Report in the House of Commons.

It seems to me that the basic problem the Government had was that there was an opinion that broadcasters in general (and the BBC in particular) were anti-government and anti-war, and were following a deliberately confrontational line. Personally, I think that’s a very strong way of putting it, but in general the point is a valid one.

So why have broadcasters become so deeply cynical and attacking towards the government? At the risk of repeating an oft-heard mantra - it’s all the Tories’ fault.

It’s undeniable that the terminal decline of the Conservative Party over the last decade has resulted in a political vacuum. The country has lacked strong, credible opposition to the policies of the Blair government, and the result has been that media organisations like the BBC have effectively filled that void, and become the official opposition.

I realised that whilst watching Michael Howard scrabbling for cover in the Commons. Poor guy, he’d been lining Blair up for weeks over Hutton, and then the judge pulled the rug out from under him. But the fact remains that the government was fundamentally angry with the BBC over many issues other than the Gilligan story, mainly because of the role the BBC had been forced to assume as effectively being the Official Opposition.

My worry is that now the BBC has been neutered by Hutton, that vacuum will again exist. And the possibility of the lack of a credible opposition to the Government is far more dangerous and threatening than the prospect of leaving the BBC in the position it had assumed before Lord Hutton reported.

You can’t say I didn’t try…

Thank you for contacting me to express your concerns about the Government’s proposals for tuition fees.

I considered all the arguments very carefully before last night’s vote. I have had my own concerns about the policy. Over the past few weeks I have had personal meetings with both Charles Clarke and Tony Blair and pressed for some of the important changes that have now been made. I am writing to let you know that I supported the Government’s final proposals and would like to explain why.

There are two parts to the policy: the introduction of higher fees, and the introduction of variable fees. The arguments about each element are rather different.

Universities have been badly under funded for years. Under the previous Conservative Government funding was actually cut. It has risen faster than inflation under Labour but there is still a need for additional resources. I believe that it is reasonable to raise some of those extra resources from those who will benefit directly from higher education. In an ideal world we would not need to do this, but there are not only limits on how much can be raised by taxation, there are also other priorities. Within education alone, better under fives provision would probably have a far bigger impact on educational performance than investment in HE.

Obviously there are concerns about the impact of higher fees. However, the Government’s scheme now has very significant safeguards. Firstly, upfront fees will be abolished. (At present students or their families have to find over £3000 to go on a university course before they graduate and before they have any chance to earn.) In future, no repayments will be made until after graduation. The threshold for repayment (the income you need before you start repaying) will be raised by 50%, and no debts will last longer than 25 years which will help those who go long term into lower paid jobs or decide to take time out to have a family. Secondly, the position for low income students is significantly better than today. Not only will they not have upfront fees, but they will be able to draw up to £3000 a year to support themselves whilst they are at universities. Of course they will have to repay their fees after graduation like everyone else, but they will avoid the worst of the financial pressures that put many off going to university or to leave their courses early.

These are real improvements, not just on the Government top-up fees
proposals but on the current position for poorer students.

Variable fees present different problems. Some have been concerned about unfair funding of the newer universities. I have been most concerned that high fees (the £10,000 per year that some universities want) would leave the elite universities as socially unrepresentative and divisive as they are today. Variable fees still form part of the Bill. However, their scope has now been severely limited for years to come. The maximum fee will £3000 in real terms until the end of the decade at least. The Government cannot simply change this policy; they would need support from both Houses of Parliament. In the meantime, only limited variation will be possible which I don’t find entirely unacceptable and could bring some benefits to some universities, some courses and some students.

The changes and safeguards made the Bill one that I could support. Last night’s vote was not simply about the Government’s Bill. The alternative was the Conservative policy which will deny hundreds of thousands of students the chance to go to University. This is not just bad for those students; it is disastrous for the country.

John Denham MP (Southampton Itchen)

I think the key point is that is that he believes variables fees “could bring some benefits to some universities, some courses and some students” (emphasis mine). Hmm, not exactly cast-iron, is it…

I was thinking about the ongoing problems in the Middle East, and how there seems to be no real possibility of progress in the immediate future. There must be reasons for this right? I mean, I’m sure neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians are happy with the current state of affairs, where suicide bombers attack the Israelis whilst the Palestinian’s homeland is occupied and their human rights are abused.

So why is there no progress?

I think the answer has something to do with the lack of political visionaries in the region. When I think about major world problems in the past, and how they have been solved, I see one key person taking a stand for the future of their people. Think about it:

• British rule in India - Gandhi
• Apartheid in South Africa - Nelson Mandela
• Votes for women - Emmeline Pankhurst
• Black rights in America - Martin Luther King

The list could go on.

When I look at Arafat and Sharon, I just don’t see the kind of qualities that those people exhibited. Which is terrible, because it means we could be as much as a generation away from finding lasting solutions to the problems in the region.

Tom Hurndall’s mother has written about her feelings on the shooting of her son, and Israel’s continuing policies in Gaza and on the West Bank.