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.

First of all there is nothing progressive about religion; it is fundamentally dogmatic. It seems evident that the more religious a society then the less progressive the politics and the society is, so for someone to say that religions are essential in building a progressive society is, frankly, bollocks.

Mr Denham said in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph that “Faith is a strong and powerful source of honesty, solidarity, generosity – the very values which are essential to politics, to our economy and our society.”

Oh really! Faith as a source of honesty, like the honesty the Catholic Church has shown to the victims of child abuse? Solidarity? Like the solidarity the church shows homosexuals, or women who want to be bishops? Generosity? I’m not so sure that religious people are any more generous than atheists but even if they were generosity is hardly a trait I we should be basing public policy on.

“I don’t like the strand of secularism that says that faith is inherently a bad thing to have and should be kept out of public life,” Mr Denham said.

This completely misses the point. That secularists consider faith an inherently bad thing is not the reason it should be kept out of public life (policy), it is that faith is inherently bias. It is based on a set of scriptures which according to their institution, translation and interpretation tell you how to live your life and so inform its disciple’s opinions. I dread to think of some unelected ill-informed priest informing government policy about stem cell research or abortion laws.  

In the shadow of the undermining of an objective scientific panel this story spits in the face of evidence based policy making and secularism.

Toxicology, illicit drugs and their effects on individuals and the wider community is an incredibly complex subject, one that needs an advisory council to help guide policy. This is why the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) was formed in the first place to provide rational, objective, unbiased evidence in an area that is rife with emotive anecdotal scaremongering and personal bias. While Professor David Nutt’s opinions are perhaps a little provocative these not based on his random musings they are based on the wealth of evidence the ACMD have reviewed since he has been a part of it. Alan Johnson says that he disagrees with his view although offers bugger all in terms of evidence as to why. 

Alan Johnson can claim that Professor Nutt was sacked for campaigning against policy all he wants no-one is buying it. He was sacked because he drew attention to the misinformation this government is peddling; it was an Orwellian move by an Orwellian Party. The public have a right to know the truth and if the government are attempting to mislead the public through their archaic drug classification system and comments then who better to let us know than the head of the ACMD?

This Labour government has become power obsessed and megalomaniac, they have been in a position of power for so long they think they can get away with anything, including lying to the public and ignoring evidence. They think they know better than experts and if an expert speaks out against them they don’t attack the criticism itself they attack the source of the criticism and sack them. I can think of a few other groups that do this; Creationalists, The British Chiropractic Association and Scientologists. 

Alan Johnson now has a revolt on his hands, but don’t worry I predict Labour will do what any good Creationalist would do. Call the independent board up for review and then find a new bunch of people to run it that will agree with current government policy.

Ohh look they’ve already started.