The Daily Fail - again

The Daily Mail (remember, it supported Hitler, Mussolini and the British Union of Fascists) play another blinder: it found an NHS doctor who earned £380,000 in a year, and it's horrified.

One small problem. This doctor didn't earn that much at all. When the NHS was founded in 1948, the doctors hated it, and so deals were struck. Aneurin Bevan said he'd persuaded them to accept the NHS by 'stuffing their mouths with gold'. The General Practitioners, you may be surprised to learn, aren't salaried NHS staff. Instead, they own their businesses, which they don't mention very often.

So - this £380,000 per year doctor doesn't 'earn' it at all. He receives it, and uses some of it to pay secretaries, rent, nurses, bills, etc. etc. I'm sure he isn't living on beans, but equally, he isn't taking home the same as a lawyer, to draw an appropriate parallel.

Now, how much does the editor of the Daily Mail get for pouring out a daily spume of racism, hatred and inaccuracy? Well, last year it was £1.6m: rather more than four of this doctor's sum and twice the BBC Director-General's salary. It's also over ten times the Prime Minister's pay. Has Dacre saved many lives recently?

Meanwhile, speculation is rife that The Observer might be closed, as the Guardian Media Group is losing lots of money. The Guardian bought the Observer a few years ago, and it looked like a decent fit, as the Observer was a decent liberal paper which had been treated appallingly by some very shady owners. It hasn't worked: although it looks very good, the Observer was drifted further and further to the right, while also becoming quite boring, with some exceptions such as Andrew Rawnsley. I hoped it would become a Sunday version of the Guardian under a different name, but that hasn't happened.

Sunday newspapers are difficult, especially now that Saturday ones are so huge. They used to be run completely separately from the weekdays, and had nice long deadlines so that substantial journalism could be conducted (the model was the Sunday Times and its Insight team before Murdoch ruined it) - now they're acres of fashion and navel-gazing. I'll miss the Observer because it's the best of a bad bunch, but not as much as I might.

Why Paul Dacre should commit hara-kiri, pt. 93

Headline in today's Daily Nazi: 'Coffee May Raise Child Cancer Risk: New Evidence that Caffeine Could Damage Babies' DNA'. 

Incredibly irresponsible (though packed with conditionals) and unscientific headline anyway (which is why BadScience.net sells a t-shirt reading 'I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that' - I've bought one), but if you steel yourself and plunge deeper into the cesspool, you find in the third paragraph that the research hasn't actually been done! There's a lot of 'doctors believe' and 'scientists think', but Dr. Marcus Cooke thinks that he might find a link when the study starts - hardly 'evidence' (and he's careful to say that ruling it out is equally plausible). The poor lamb seems a bit confused though: 'Although there's no evidence at all of a link between caffeine and cancer…' he says - which somehow translates as "Coffee May Cause Child Cancer risk". I wonder exactly how much caffeine might 'raise the risk' and how much may 'damage babies' DNA'. A shovelful? A truckful? Let's not be picky - it's a great scare story. Back to water for you, mums.

Hazel Blears: shut up and feck off

Oh goody, Hazel Blears is in The Guardian telling us that it's the fault of the 'commentariat' that public political discourse has been weakened. Now as it happens, I've met Hazel twice this year, once at a party policy forum, and once randomly at Birmingham New Street Station. At the forum, she and her henchmen refused to acknowledge any dissent and made it clear that mere party members were there to support the government and nothing more, and when I talked to her at New Street she was astonishingly disloyal to Gordon and suggested we should get Alastair Campbell back (how prophetic). 

What really annoys me about this is that New Labour took several outdated lessons from the Democrats: that party members are less important than donors, that opinion polls serve only to help repackage predetermined policies, and that debate should revolve solely around marketing rather than ideology. Think on this: Howard Dean's 50 state strategy has won today. He said that Democrats should get activists out on the street in every state, not the 5 or 6 which were seen as battlegrounds. For that, you need enthusiastic volunteers and party members who aren't treated as embarrassing relics to be tapped for cash when your favourite hedge fund managers are short of a bob or two.

She also says that 'commentary has taken over from investigation or news reporting' - hardly surprising given politicians' reluctance to face anybody less cuddly than Richard and Judy. I'm so bored with Radio 4 having to say 'no minister was available for comment'. Let's be honest, Hazel. You'd rather have your awful ministerial blog and David Cameron would far rather concentrate on the toe-curlingly embarrassing Webcameron than be filletted by a decent interviewer or reporter - any defence of the political high ground from you is sheer cant.

I know I'm starting to rant now, but this got to me even more. Remember, she's having a go at journalists: 'And if you can wield influence and even power, without ever standing for office or being held to account by an electorate, it further undermines our democracy'.

Er… Peter Mandelson - Baron of Foy and Hartlepool. Now has a senior ministerial position without ever facing the electorate. He has a vote in a legislative chamber for the rest of his life, and never has to face MPs. Lord Adonis - the most malign influence on education since Margaret Thatcher snatched free milk from little children when she was an education minister. He's there for ever too. Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre appear to have their own keys to Downing Street: not much accountability there. The list goes on and on and on - so it's a bit rich of this appalling representative of the worst clique the party has ever seen to tell us that it's the journalists who are distorting the public sphere. 

Most astoundingly, Hazel doesn't know what she's talking about. She declares that the vast majority of political blogs are rightwing Tory sites (when actually they're just the ones that rightwing newspapers cite a lot). She's clearly not familiar with the blogosphere at all. 'Mostly', she writes, 'political blogs are written by people with a disdain for the political system and for politicians…'. She got that right: her useless and no doubt adviser-written blog lacks any passion or any sign of ideological commitment. I despise the Tory bloggers she names (Iain Dale, Guido Fawkes etc), but her rant is just the eternal cry of the know-nothing. She could start here