The shadow home secretary’s office are the only people able to release the complete details of the “study” – which is, in fact, “not a study at all”, as a spokeswoman for the House of Commons Library explained to Left Foot Forward:

“I’m afraid I cannot send you the information you require, it was an individual request for information from a member. I can’t even tell you who that member is because it was a confidential request, though it’s pretty obvious who it was.

“In any case, it’s not a study at all, just some answers to a request from a member.”

All of which poses a number of questions, both for Grayling and the papers which ran with his figures:

• Why is Grayling so reluctant to release the full details?

• Why didn’t any newspapers press him on the details?

• Would Grayling have released any figures at all if they had contradicted his hypothesis?

• Would anyone have found out about his request if he had failed to release the findings?

Left Foot Forward has previously reported that violent crime is down, on a range of indicators, both in the past year and over the past 15 years.

The recent “Home Office Statistical Bulletin: Homicides, Firearm Offences and Intimate Violence 2008/09″ shows homicides down 14% from 2007/8 – the lowest level for ten years – “Sharp instrument” homicides down 6%, shooting homicides down 26% and all firearms offences down 18% – the fifth consecutive fall.

The official figures also reveal all violent crime, classed as robbery, sexual offences, assault and murder, is down nearly 50 per cent since peaking in 1995.

Inclusion on the blocklist would be based around accusations of  copyright infringement with no apparent process of redress to remove a site from the blocklist.

Lord Clement-Jones talked about his party’s position on the Digital Economy Bill on LibDem Voice.

Clement-Jones tries to excuse this tactic, more associated with North Korea than Clapham North, by pointing to the list of recommended blocked sites currently held by the Internet Watch Foundation. However, vague accusations of copyright infringement are not the same as the serious child sexual abuse content that Internet Watch Foundation deals with.

Many of the sites discussed are used by consumers and businesses for perfectly legitimate reasons. And in common with the technological solutions used by authoritarian regimes can be circumvented through the use of free proxy servers or low-cost foreign virtual private network services.

A telling comment on Clement-Jones’ post points to his association with DLA Piper, a law firm which specialises in intellectual property cases and has:

“Acted for, and lobbied on behalf of, the RIAA and MPAA in the past.”

Perhaps the most telling mark of the proceedings is credited to Lord Puttnam by The Guardian:

“On Monday, Lord Puttnam said that the scheme was being rushed through parliament without sufficient scrutiny, and that legislators were subject to an ‘extraordinary degree of lobbying’ from copyright holders.“

With the election outcome looking less certain by the day, BBC bosses have chosen an odd moment  to pre-spin an announcement due next month on their strategic review. They have clearly been spooked by attacks from News Corporation and other vested interests, and capitulated.

Today’s Times reports:

“The BBC will close two radio stations, shut half its website and cut spending heavily on imported American programmes in an overhaul of services to be announced next month.

“Mark Thompson, the Director-General, will admit that the corporation, which is funded by the £3.6 billion annual licence fee, has become too large and must shrink to give its commercial rivals room to operate.”

News Corporation had complained that the BBC digital expansion had dislocated the media market and that commercial players could not compete. Put another way, Rupert Murdoch wants to charge for online content but cannot do so while the BBC is producing a free website that outstrips its commercial rivals. As a result, 25 per cent of the staff who work on the BBC’s fantastic website are to pay the price and face redundancy while popular stations like 6 Music are facing the chop.

The origins of this appeasement to the Murdoch Empire, which will be seen as an attempt to curry favour with an incoming Tory government looking to threaten the BBC licence fee, are from James Murdoch’s speech to the Edinburgh Television Festival last August. Murdoch Jnr. accused the BBC of a “land grab” causing the Director General, and others at the top, to take fright.

The beeb has been weakened by revelations that more than 100 of the BBC’s senior staff earn £21.2 million exacerbated with over-the-top expenses. While financial hubris has been demonstrated with their expansionist plans – not least in going over budget on the rebuild of Broadcasting House. And by letting BBC worldwide buy Lonely Planet. This sense of entitlement has meant they’ve been subjected to similar coverage to that meted out to MPs.

All this makes defending the BBC harder to do. Yet defend it we must if we want to protect a public service media. A universal licence fee means that the BBC has to provide a service for everyone and one that everyone wants. Otherwise the cry will go up to scrap the licence fee. A diminished BBC is what its detractors want. Bad political judgement and financial mis-management in the past is what Mark Thompson seems intent on delivering.

After the polls narrowed again last night, speculation increased of a March 25th election. At 9.33 this morning, Conservative Home editor Tim Montgomerie tweeted, “I’ve just been txted that Ladbrokes have suspended betting on March election”. An hour later, Iain Dale stirred the pot with an article titled “Is Brown Marching His Troops Up the Hill (Again)?” While at 11.20, Guido Fawkes wrote:

Gordon’s has never recovered from the election-that-never-was in Autumn 2007 because he allowed the speculation to go on too long. The Tories are secretly praying he holds off until May, as are the media whose well planned agendas would have been a total waste of time. Bookies have stopped taking bets on March 25th. If Gordon doesn’t make a move to confirm or quell the hype it will be Bottler Brown all over again.”

The mainstream media then picked up the thread with City AM political editor, David Crow, tweeting “Lots of rumours at Westminster that brown about to call an election. Top Tories have cancelled all meetings.” This was re-tweeted by Guardian Deputy Editor, Ian Katz who commented “That wd be inconvenient”.

But there are five reasons why we’re still heading for May 6th:

1. Announcing an election over the weekend would sabotage the passage of key pieces of Government legislation including Harriet Harman’s Equality Bill; the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill which includes provisions to set up the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority and for a referendum on electoral reform; and the Child Poverty Bill which will entrench in law the Government’s commitment to eradicating child poverty by 2020.

2. The Labour party is carrying on as normal. This weekend they’re launching a clever social media tool called “Take a Long Hard Look at the Tories“. It’s the kind of thing that will excite Labour’s netroots and twitterati but is hardly election campaign launch material.

3. Council elections in London, all the metropolitan boroughs, and some unitary authorities will take place on May 6th regardless. Labour is hoping to win back many of the seats they lost in 2006 with the election increasing the turnout. The party would also struggle to fight two elections in six weeks.

4. Calling a March 25th election would result in criticism that Labour had avoided either both holding a Budget and facing the Q1 growth figures which come out in late April.

5. The Tories have been trying to stir it up. As well as Iain Dale’s intervention, Sam Coates from Tory social media team tweeted at lunch “The parliamentary rules on what happens when the election is called, if you’re interested: http://j.mp/aLzAzc”

Now I may end up with egg on my face but my advice is: don’t believe the hype.

The Conservative’s use of the term “death tax” was first ridiculed when the Tory Tombstone poster urged “Don’t vote for Labour’s new death tax.” But a recent press release, titled “Lansley: Labour need to come clean over the death tax”, continued the Conservative party’s controversial use of the terminology.

The shadow health secretary is quoted saying:

“But what are the Labour Party proposing? They talk about a National Care Service but won’t say how it’s to be funded. They plan a death tax in private but put up a smokescreen in public. They say they will publish a white paper in weeks but the election is imminent. The public have a right to a clear choice.

Amanda Terkel, Managing Editor of Think Progress – Left Foot Forward’s sister blog – told us:

“In the United States last summer, distractions about whether the government would ‘pull the plug on grandma’ hijacked the debate on health care reform. Instead of substantively discussing how to save taxpayers money, increase coverage, and improve service, conservatives were playing on people’s fears.

“Now, not surprisingly, polls here show the American public is fed up with the delay tactics and demanding progress from its elected officials. Terms like ‘death tax’ and ‘death panel’ are dishonest and dangerous, pushed by right-wing propagandists and big-money constituencies who want to scare the public into voting against its best interests.”

In August last year, Sarah Palin used her facebook account to claim that healthcare reform could result in an Obama-created “death panel” killing her infant son with Down Syndrome. The term “death tax” was popularised in the 1990s by opponents of the US estate tax.

Picture credit: Political Scrapbook

But not according to the mainstream media. The same statistics were reported in yesterday’s Evening Standard as “Ministers Fail To Meet Target“:

“Ministers were criticised today over their failure to achieve a steeper fall in teenage pregnancies after new figures showed a four per cent drop …

“The statistics also reveal that 40.6 out of every 1,000 girls aged 15 to 17 become pregnant. That means a Government pledge from 1998 to halve the rate, which then stood at 46.6, within 10 years will be missed.”

While Brenda Almond in the Daily Mail extraordinarily claimed:

“Indeed, far from promoting restraint or commitment, the entire emphasis of this politically correct system is on the so- called ‘sexual rights’ of young people.

“And the dreadful consequences are there for all to see in rising rates of both teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.”

Not wanting to let facts get in the way of a message, it seems the anti-sex education lobby has managed to persuade the media to paint a pretty consistent downward trend as being a “failure” and “a disaster”. But it’s unclear how this chart tallies with these invectives:

But all is not lost. The Guardian deserve praise for quoting Dr Claire Alexander who puts the stats in proper context:

“Overall, teenage birthrates are now at around the same level as in the 1950s, that supposed ‘golden age’ of family.”

Still, the Government has some responsibility for setting the nation’s teenagers such a ridiculous target in the first place. Changing social trends is notoriously difficult and aiming to reverse and halve what was between 1995 and 1998 a rising trend would have required a huge change in social behaviour over which public services, let alone Government itself, has little power.

Achieving a halving of the rate would have required the full weight of target-based infrastructure with big government chastity inspectors and wholescale bans on teenagers having parties, drinking alcohol, using the Internet, watching the Discovery Channel, reading Laurence, and passing puberty. We watch with interest.

Reflecting on Labour’s time in government so far there are many areas of policy in which we might ask ‘how has it come to this?’ But none more than immigration. Labour ends its third term with one of the most comprehensive regimes for the management and control of immigration in the world – and its rhetoric on the subject is relentlessly tuned to appeasing those who would like to see even more restrictions. It is a far cry from the early days of government when the prevailing view was that migration was generally good for the UK economy and our society. So what caused the change?

In a recent Analysis programme on BBC Radio 4 – with a companion piece published in the latest issue of Prospect magazine – David Goodhart has tried to answer that question. He has been spurred to do so by some rash comments in the Evening Standard by a former junior Number Ten insider, Andrew Neather, which have been picked up and exaggerated out of all proportion by MigrationWatch UK and their allies in the right wing media. According to them, Labour’s early approach was in fact a sinister grand plan to transform the racial make up of the UK through mass immigration with the aim of freezing the Tories out of power. Since the Neather article, more memos have been obtained through FOI requests, which the conspiracy theorists believe further strengthen their case.

Goodhart, though no great fan of high immigration himself, has the good sense to dismiss these wild notions. But based on a number of interviews with key Labour figures and other experts he does argue that Labour was ill-prepared for the surge in immigration that accompanied the economic boom and that it was very slow to react to public concern. In the end the political damage caused was such that the volte face was inevitable – which is why we have a Labour government acting and talking so tough on immigration.

Here I must confess an interest because I was one of Goodhart’s interviewees and was among those that suggested to him why Labour lost control of the political agenda on migration. First, many key Labour figures were veterans in the anti-racist struggles of the 1970s and 1980s and were concerned at immigration controls were inherently racist. Second, those same figures (reflecting the general attitudes of metropolitan liberals) were relaxed about a growing multi-ethnic society which they personally enjoyed. Third – and most importantly – well into the second term what might be termed the ‘Treasury view’ on the economic benefits of an open approach to migration generally prevailed over the Home Office that much greater control was needed. Fourth and finally, Labour inherited from the Conservatives an immigration system that was hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with the high numbers coming in.

Now, of course, the picture is very different, and our concern at ippr is that Labour has veered too far in the opposite direction. Labour were wrong to ignore public concern about immigration,  and nobody should ever suggest that it is racist to talk about  immigration controls. It is good to see the current Home Secretary saying that we need honest and open debate – and that mistakes have been made in the past.  But acknowledging the critics is one thing, pandering to them is another. The prevailing tone of Labour speeches on migration these days is miserably sour and negative – with almost no attempt made to put across the case for migration – which is still strong. Moreover, our own research on public attitudes suggests that this defeatism is misplaced– that with a credible system of management and control in place Labour can win public support for a positive approach to immigration.

It is also true, of course, that although immigration has overall benefits, there are costs – and these need to be acknowledged and addressed. A particular problem here has been that some of the costs have tended to fall on the poorest in our community, while the rich have reaped the benefits. But what this really tells us that is that Labour has not done enough to tackle the scourge of inequality in our society, not that a savage clampdown on immigration is needed. At the same time it is important to draw a distinction between real and perceived impacts (something Goodhart and others sometimes fail to do).  High levels of immigration have caused some problems, but migration is not the source of all society’s ills –  far from it. Progressives, however, should take seriously the fact that a significant segment of the population seems to feel worse off because of immigration – this is one impact of a political failure to engage effectively with the public on this issue.

Goodhart says in his Prospect article that Labour is now planning to unveil a population policy to counter the Conservative’s flagship policy of a cap on migration numbers.  The former is certainly more sensible than the  latter, although it’s hard to see how a policy that targets national population or population growth will have real impacts on the ground, given how unevenly spread the UK population is. Despite the political problems immigration has caused,  Labour must resist a fight with the Tories  based on who can more restrictive on immigration.  There is a middle way between the ‘laissez faire’ approach of the early years and the ‘clampdown’ approach which seems to be so often signalled now. Indeed the policy is largely in place already. What Labour needs to do now is  to take credit for its hard work and to show courage in putting a positive case  to the public .

As the “climategate” news cycle creaks on, pundits are busily delivering advice on how scientists can do their jobs better.

Ann Widdecombe, writing in the Express, says:

“It is time for the IPCC to be disbanded and replaced by a group of open-minded, fact-orientated, cautious scientists who are interested in truth, however inconvenient.”

Simon Jenkins, in the Guardian, writes:

“Scientists, you are fallible … no different from bankers, politicians, lawyers, estate agents and perhaps even journalists. They cheat. They make mistakes. They suppress truth and suggest falsity.”

These are strange statements, given that climatologists have meanwhile willingly acknowledged and corrected genuine errors, and offered suggestions on improving IPCC processes.

The journal Nature published a series of suggestions from five prominent climate scientists on ways forward for the IPCC and The Guardian ran a similar story full of scientists suggesting reforms.

Climate modeler William Connolley critiqued the thoroughness of IPCC Working Group II, while defending its use of “grey” literature.

Other scientists suggested separating the IPCC’s working groups. The evidence suggests the scientific profession puts reflection, doubt and criticism at the heart of its practice.

By contrast, the media’s reluctance to address its own failings is stark.

Recent weeks have seen a deluge of “inaccurate, misleading or distorted information” in climate change reporting – precisely the kind of material it is the Press Complaints Commission’s (PCC’s) stated role to guard against.

But, as its exoneration of Jan Moir’s falsehoods over Stephen Gately’s death has highlighted, this “self-regulatory” industry body remains toothless.

On climate change, various recent journalistic performances have been particularly outrageous. Jonathan Leake of The Sunday Times attacked the IPCC over a “bogus” and “unsubstantiated” claim on the Amazon’s sensitivity to reductions in rainfall.

Yet Leake was well aware – having been informed by two leading experts, one of whom he went on to selectively quote – that the IPCC had got its facts right.

Leake later accused the IPCC of inaccurately connecting climate change to more frequent extreme weather events – citing its allegedly problematic treatment of a single economic study. Leake’s headline screamed:

“UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters.”

Barack Obama had mentioned the link. The issue of developing countries’ adaptation funding was predicated on it. This was transparent nonsense.

The group behind the study exonerated the IPCC’s “fair” and “appropriate” treatment, which included “suitable caveats”.

The IPCC had obviously not based all future projections of extreme weather events on one economic study – as it quickly pointed out. Adaptation funding – which covers impacts of all kinds – was obviously not founded on one study on extreme weather.

Then there is the infamous David Rose – a journalist who persistently promoted the fictitious Iraq-Al-Qaeda connection in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Rose recently mangled the work of climate scientist Mojib Latif in the Mail, portraying him as dissenting from the scientific consensus – a claim Latif said he “cannot understand”.

Rose conflated Latif’s climate forecasts with spells of cold weather that, he said, “are not related at all … you cannot compare the two.”

Latif’s work suggested that climate change might be offset by short-term variations up to 2015 – not a “mini ice age” lasting up to 30 years. “I don’t know what to do”, added Latif. “They just make these things up.”

Rose subsequently smeared the IPCC. On its Himalayan glaciers error, lead author Murari Lal, he claimed, “admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders”. Rose quoted Lal directly:

“We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.”

Both claims, Lal revealed, were simply false.

These are not isolated mistakes: the press have bent over backwards to misrepresent climate scientists in recent weeks. The Times claimed Bob Watson had identified an “apparent bias” in the IPCC’s errors.

Watson stated:

“I was interviewed for an hour, and it was obvious that the reporter wanted me to say that the authors were biased – I said I did not believe that.”

The mistaken Himalayan glacier melt forecast repeatedly described as a “central claim” of the IPCC was barely reported at all when its report was released – unsurprisingly, since it appears nowhere in the summaries where its “central claims” can be found.

Rajendra Pachauri was excoriated for calling criticism of this error “voodoo science”. He was criticising a report that mentions neither the 2035 claim nor the IPCC.

These are egregious journalistic failings, well within the PCC’s remit. Sadly, its handling of similar complaints has been woeful.

Nine months after the Telegraph’s Christopher Booker penned an article calling sea-level rise “a colossal scare story” – prompting a complaint from Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute – the Commission ruled that:

“It is not of course for the PCC to make findings of fact on where the truth about climate change lies.”

The body is obliged to make judgments on clear factual inaccuracies, and Ward had exposed a whole selection – yet Booker was exonerated, and his article remains.

In effect the PCC relieves columnists of the obligation to base articles on facts. This tendency reached absurd heights recently, when – despite requiring newspapers “to distinguish between comment, conjecture and fact”, the body ruled that the words “the fact is” – prefacing a review of published research findings – did not indicate a statement of fact.

A shocking betrayal of readers – but fortunate for papers. Fundamental inaccuracies permeate innumerable comment pieces on climate science – and not just climate science. Far from deterring “inaccurate, misleading or distorted information”, the PCC acts as a rubber stamp.

The UK desperately needs a press that does not defraud the public on matters of basic science. A responsible media requires accountability.

Without effective regulation, through the enforcement of legally binding standards by a genuinely independent body, this will inevitably remain a distant prospect. Sure, the IPCC could arguably use some reforms. But the PCC needs to be replaced.

The Culture, Media and Sports committe report calls for the overhaul of libel laws, press standards and an overhaul of the Press Complaints Commission, describing it as “toothless compared to other regulators”.

On the actions of the News of the World, the report finds:

“It is likely that the number of victims of illegal phone-hacking will never be known, not least because of the silence of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire [the paper's royal editor and a PI, both jailed for Royal phone taps], their confidentiality settlements with the News of the World and the ‘collective amnesia’ at the newspaper group which we encountered during our inquiry.

“It is certainly more than the ‘handful’, however, cited by both the newspaper and the police.

“There is no doubt that there were a significant number of people whose voice messages were intercepted, most of whom would have been of little interest to Clive Goodman as the paper’s royal editor. The evidence, we find, makes it inconceivable that no-one else at the News of the World, bar Mr Goodman, was aware of the activity.

“We have, however, not seen any evidence that the then Editor, Andy Coulson, knew, but consider he was right to resign. We find, however, that the newspaper group did not carry out a full and rigorous inquiry, as it assured us and the Press Complaints Commission it had.

“The circumstances of pay-offs made to Messrs Goodman and Mulcaire, as well as the civil settlements with Gordon Taylor and others, also invite the conclusion that silence was effectively bought.

“The readiness of all concerned – News International, the police and the PCC – to leave Mr Goodman as the sole scapegoat without carrying out full investigations is striking. The verdict of the PCC’s latest inquiry, announced last November, we consider to be simplistic, surprising and a further failure of self-regulation.

“In seeking to discover precisely who knew what among the staff of the News of the World we have questioned a number of present and former executives of News International.

“Throughout we have repeatedly encountered an unwillingness to provide the detailed information that we sought, claims of ignorance or lack of recall, and deliberate obfuscation. We strongly condemn this behaviour which reinforces the widely held impression that the press generally regard themselves as unaccountable and that News International in particular has sought to conceal the truth about what really occurred.”

On the failings of the Press Complaints Commission and its future role, the report says:

“The PCC should be renamed the Press Complaints and Standards Commission, reflecting its role as a regulator, not just a complaints handling service, and that it should appoint a deputy director for standards.

“The regulator should have the power to fine its members where it believes that the departure from the Code of Practice is serious enough to warrant a financial penalty, including, in the most serious of cases, suspending the printing of the offending publication for one issue.

“The Committee concludes that there must be some incentive for newspapers to subscribe to the self-regulatory system. It recommends that the Government should consider whether proposals to reduce the cost burden in defamation cases should only be made available to those publications which provide the public with an alternative route of redress through their membership of the PCC.”

In a final, stinging rebuke, it adds:

“We remain of the view that self-regulation of the press is greatly preferable to statutory regulation, and should continue. However for confidence to be maintained, the industry regulator must actually effectively regulate, not just mediate. The powers of the PCC must be enhanced, as it is toothless compared to other regulators.”

Left Foot Forward will have more analysis of the report throughout the day.

Last week, the PCC chose not to uphold a complaint about Jan Moir’s Daily Mail article in October titled, ‘A strange, lonely and troubling death.’ On the CPBF website, Professor Julian Petley writes:

“The clear moral of this story is that it is the nature of the Code itself, coupled with the way in which the Commission deals with complaints arising from alleged breaches of it, which allows poisonous journalism of this kind to flourish. Pundits such as Moir know exactly what they can get away with, and are past-masters at staying just within the limits of the permissible, which are anyway generous. Until a system of effective press self-regulation can be established, one which is respected by newspapers, their readers and the general public alike, there will be many more Stephen Gatelys.”

Professor Petley of Brunel University also turns on the PCC for their hypocrisy over press freedom:

“And please, can we be spared any more posturing by the PCC about freedom of expression being ‘a fundamental part of an open and democratic society’? Indeed it is, but where is the PCC in the current campaigns against our oppressive libel laws and in the growing agitation about judges throwing injunctions around like confetti? Where was the PCC last time the Official Secrets Act was used against journalists to suppress information which was merely embarrassing to government? Protecting freedom of expression means a great deal more than protecting the freedom of newspaper owners and their hired editors to do as they damn well like with their property in the pursuit of profit – including trampling over people’s lives at a time of terrible grief and loss.

Writing for the Media Guardian today, Ian Mayes calls for a “resident ombudsman” within national newspapers as complement to the PCC.

UPDATE 4:45

Joy Johnson, lecturer in journalism and a former political journalist, adds:

Professor Julian Petley from Brunel University who as chair of the (CPBF) has taken a close interest the self regulation of the press by the Press Complaints Commission, hits the nail on the head in his article.

The PCC’s judgement on Jan Moir’s article published on the eve of Gately’s funeral was, as Petley writes, to be expected from a body that has lost credibility. There was absolutely no evidence that Gately’s death was anything other than natural yet Moir, as Petley says, drenched her article with sensationalist innuendo.

Only a few weeks ago former director of public prosecutions Sir Ken Macdonald, speaking at a conference, called for independent regulation of the press, and for “all credible media organisations” to withdraw from the “farcical” Press Complaints Commission. Sir Ken told his audience of lawyers and editors:

“The press may think the PCC works, but they are living in a dream world. Nobody else does.”

The CPBF has made clear that the consequence of an unreformed PCC is that those whose complaints can be dealt with by the courts will simply have increasing recourse to the law. This will then be developed by judges rather than by Parliament.

This Wednesday the Culture, Media and Sports select committee delivers its verdict on the press when it publishes its 2nd Report of Session 2009-10, “Press Standards, Privacy and Libel”.

It comes at a time when politicians are even more denigrated than the press but, according to The Independent, after a year taking evidence it is not going to pull any punches and nor should it.

• Left Foot Forward will have detailed analysis on the findings of the committee on Wednesday.