Now I know the video is a month old, but if the tabloids can resort to pulling up articles from 8 years ago in order to slur Nick Clegg I see no reason why I can’t bring this up now.

This is really an update to my previous blog post Are the Tories Homophobic and shows David Cameron responding to his Party’s voting record on gay rights. This video alongside Cameron’s rabbit in the headlights look during the previous leaders debate raise doubts that transcend just the usual criticism about Tory policies. 

I am starting to have serious doubts about Cameron’s ability to deal with pressurised situations and questions.  If this is how he responds to a little bit of pressure from a magazine journalist what is he going to be like should he ever get to govern this country?

These are legitimate concerns, unlike the vitriolic criticism we have seen recently of Nick Clegg and The Liberal Democrats in the tabloids which has prompted even Conservative bloggers to  reel in disgust.

That’s right millions of people are changing their voting allegiances to the Liberal Democrats after Vince Cable and Nick Clegg’s fantastic performance at the Chancellors’ and Leaders’ debate. The tabloids have gone on the offensive, heaven forbid the public decide to vote for someone against the wishes of the tabloid press, manipulating and lying to the public in order to get their own way.

A recent Daily Mail article tries to first undermine the nature of the leaders’ debate and then undermines the public’s motives.

“There can be only one credible explanation for the utterly irrational outpouring of support for the Liberal Democrats after a mere 90 minutes of X Factor-style TV politics: the public, disgusted by the near moral bankruptcy of the last Parliament, is looking for revenge.”

Apparently the public aren’t smart enough to make rational decisions for themselves, no the only ‘utterly irrational’ reason anyone could want to vote for the Liberal Democrats according to the Daily Mail is out of revenge. The article reads a bit like a child complaining when it hasn’t got its own way. “But MUM, its not fair. The public don’t want to vote with me! They must be poo poo heads or something, that’s the only rational explanation.”

This kind of comment makes me sick, how fucking dare they! How can they get off telling us why we are choosing to support someone? Since when did “Daily Mail Comment”, I presume they couldn’t get a real person to say exactly what they wanted, get a hotline to the public consciousness and know each and every one of our motivations? Spin it how you like but you can’t hide the fact that the public didn’t turn their vote in some fit of pique, but after watching a debate in which only one of the leaders of the political parties seemed the right man for the job. The tabloids can fuck off for all the public seem to care about what they think.

The Daily Mail doesn’t stop there though, in its usual style it goes on to make shit up in order to defend its political alliances.

As this paper reveals today, Mr Clegg and many of his MPs have been some of the worst expenses offenders.

Now they are making quite a specific claim there, one that we can check. During the expenses scandal the Telegraph, who broke the story, wrote an article revealing the worst expenses offenders. According to them ten of the worst offenders were Labour and six were Conservative MPs, none of them were Liberal Democrats. None.

This fantastic graphic in the Guardian shows that although the Liberal Democrats expense claims were the highest of the parties on average, they also had to pay back the least suggesting that these claims were legitimate. In fact the average Conservative repayment was £4,227 more than DOUBLE the average Liberal Democrat repayment of £1,910 and nearly £1000 more than the average Labour repayment of £3,237. Now I am not great with numbers but even an idiot can see that it takes nothing short of a massive manipulation of the truth to imply that the Liberal Democrats were some of the worst expenses offenders.

This is the kind of tactics that we can expect to see across the tabloid newspapers in the coming weeks as they try to influence and lie to the public in order to get their own way. It is almost laughable that The Daily Mail accuses the BBC of having a “risible lack of objectivity” within the words of such a bias and manipulative article but nothing should surprise you when you are left in the hands of a tabloid hack. You have been warned.

I really hope they cleaned all that rubbish up afterwards though.

I’m sorry for finishing last in the race, I’ll try harder next time Mom and Pa I promise.

So the election race is heating up and you know it was only a matter of time before one of the horses went and fell over a big science hurdle. It came as no surprise to me that it was David Cameron. In his comments in The Catholic Herald he said “I think that the way medical science and technology have developed in the past few decades does mean that an upper limit of 20 or 22 weeks would be sensible” about the upper limit for abortions.

Don’t you just love it when politicians offer their opinions about something they have absolutely no clue about? No? I thought not.

Has David Cameron been taking night classes in paediatrics? No? Didn’t think so.

Perhaps I am being a little harsh, maybe the science is open to debate? The Select Committee on Science and Technology’s last review of the Upper Gestational Limit in 2007 makes for sober reading, especially if Cameron gets his way.

The national EPICure study from 1995 reports that at 20-22 weeks 89% of babies are born dead.

That is born dead, not died after being in care. I don’t know what medical breakthroughs there have been in this field in the past 15 years any more than Cameron but I would hazard a guess that they haven’t been able to cure death. Of those 11% that survived not 1 child went on to survive with no impairments.

The report went on to say that although the survival rates are becoming out of date “survival in the last 10 years has risen to 40% of neonatal intensive care admissions at 24 weeks, although there has been little improvement in survival at gestations below this”.

Basically improvements have been made but not at the 20-22 week age that Cameron is proposing. Basically he is doing what he has always done, telling people what they want to hear. He is commenting to a Catholic readership to which abortion has always been a hot topic and he is telling them what they want to hear with little regard for the actual evidence or the repercussions of his proposals. He keeps banging on about the ‘unheard’ and ‘broken Britain’ when it is exactly these sorts of ideas that are part of the problem.

Darinka Aleksic, Campaign Co-ordinator at Abortion Rights in a blog post for Left Foot Forward summed this up perfectly;   

The vast majority of abortions in the UK are carried out before 13 weeks of pregnancy (90% in 2008) and 73% take place below 10 weeks. Only 1.5% of the total are carried out later than 20 weeks. Later abortion is disproportionately likely to involve teenage or vulnerable women. Typically it is requested after delayed recognition of pregnancy, after family or relationship breakdown or the onset of domestic violence. Fear of parents’ or partners’ reactions or the trauma of sexual assault or rape sometimes result in the ‘denial’ of pregnancy. Sometimes a woman simply does not know where to ask for help, her referral is delayed or she receives a late diagnosis of a serious foetal abnormality. In all these circumstances, the right to access an abortion is critical for a woman’s health and well-being.

David Cameron might be running the country in a few months time happy to condemn hundreds of families to needless suffering in order to appease some misguided Catholics and win a few votes. This is cynical electioneering at its very worst; I hope the Tories are proud.