Denis Macshane Says- "Embrace Racist Xenophobes"

Denis MacShane writes:

3. Racism and xenophobia are now part and parcel of European elections. Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel made their views against the accession of Turkey, a majority Muslim nation, the archstone of their campaign. The manifesto of the centre-right EPP federation explicitly referred to Europe as a Judeo-Christian concept. No room for Muslims then.

Gosh, well these racist xenophobes sound awful. Let's see what else MacShane has to say:

10. David Cameron was rejected by more than seven out of 10 voters yesterday. He now has to put in place his isolationist EU politics by breaking links with mainstream centre-right parties

So having just denounced the mainstream European centre right parties as racist and xenophobic, he denounces David Cameron for having nothing to do with them.

Over-Centralised Britain.

Much as I dislike traffic wardens can someone explain why councils need specific permission from Westminster to recruit them?

Selfishness & The Left

John Denham, Labour mp, declares that Labour has to stop believing that the south of England is a selfish place. It has always seemed bizarre that the one region of the country whose wealth was transferred to the rest get characterised in this manner. In fact the way the left use the term 'selfish' is bizarre full stop, people who want to keep the money that they have worked hard to earn are selfish but people who receive money that was earned by other people are not. Selfish and greedy are rarely used to describe people or organisations who live off the taxes paid for by the supposedly selfish tax payers.

Incidentally this is John Denham's career to date:

After leaving education in 1977 he became an advice worker at the Energy Advice Agency in Durham, before becoming a transport campaigner with Friends of the Earth in 1978. He was Head of Youth Affairs at the British Council from 1979 until 1983, and was responsible for public education and advocacy for War on Want from 1984 to 1988. He subsequently worked for Christian Aid, Oxfam and other development agencies until his election to Westminster.

So he has not done any work that involves him being a net contributer to society, he has only ever spent other people's money and you can guarantee that he doesn't view this career path as selfish.

Rape Conviction Rates.

In the light of the rejection by judges of the government's proposals to change the law regarding rape I have been thinking about the oft cited low conviction rates for rape allegations. The proposals themselves are as ever with this government extremely silly and involve things like redefining rape to include things like having sex whilst drunk. Six percent does seem like a remarkably low proportion of convictions to allegations but is it necessarily so or is it merely poor statisitical reasoning to assume it is so?

Suppose a test for a disease is 99% accurate, ie if 100 people with the disease are tested 99 will be shown by the test to have it and if 100 without the disease are tested then 99 will be shown to be clear. However if the disease affects only 1 in 10000 people then how likely is someone who is diagnosed with the disease to actually have it? The answer is of course not 99%, in fact because 1% of the results are wrong and the disease is rare the person who tests positive is around 100 times more likely to be negative for the disease.

So at first a conviction rate of 6% appears extremely low, but because far more women are not raped during a given period than are raped this is not necessarily so. Suppose 500 women are raped in a month and one in 5 report the crime. Suppose also that 10 000 000 women are not raped, but for whatever reason one in 100 000 decide to make a bogus allegation to the police. In this situation half of the rape allegations received by the police would be bogus, despite the fact that only 0.001% of women are anything other than completely honest about the situation.

Now these figures are obviously random, but no more so than the various ministers and columnists who assume that a 6% conviction rate means that the other 94% are examples of the system letting rapists get off. It certainly does not justify newspaper columnists screaming "Any man reading this article can go out tonight, pick out a woman, force her into sex, and be almost entirely certain he will walk free"

There is a strand of thought amoung political extremists that no one ever lies about being raped but recent high profile cases like the Duke Lacrosse case or the Warren Blackwell case or Timothy Gee demonstrate that this is simply preposterous, people lie about all sorts of things. This is why the disturbingly widespread belief that the normal standards required for a fair trial should be dismissed in rape cases is so very wrong.