Verbal

While I'm inclined to vote to stay in I've been tempted by a no vote. However, whenever I get close to that thought I'm confronted with the utter drivel of the pram-launched toy brigade of the no camp. I'm not singling this post out, but it is somewhat characteristic of contradictory, knee-jerking waffle I read elsewhere. So for the sake of everyone's sanity over the next four months, and for some decent debate, can the Brexitites please make at least some effort to come up with a coherent, evidence-based argument?

The pragmatic decision is obvious. Vote to remain. It's the Brexit option that's quixotic. Playing hit-and-hope with the entire economy is breathtakingly stupid. And take a look at what's happened to Brexit's supposedly most charismatic advocate. The day after he announces he's an outer, he says it's only because we can then ask to be inners on a rerun of the referendum. Go Agent Boris!

The butter mountains and wine lakes are largely things of the past because the link was broken some time ago between subsidies and farm output. Whereas in the bad old days farmers were guaranteed a price no matter how much they produced, now they're paid for stewardship for the land, which has increased environmental diversity, which in turn has increased diversity in food production. Odd that you want to have a debate about what's already been reformed. It's as if you had a blind spot about the EU. May I recommend a ukippectomy?

Six words that sum up the lunacy of the No/Leave/Little England campaign. Who knows what will be negotiated - for 50% of the UK's entire trade?! This morning's sharp drop in the pound's value against the dollar is just a small taste of what will come if the naysayers win.

Sod Boris. Which way is trousers voting? If he's joining the political gargoyles the stay/in vote is lost.

The problem is it might be won by the wilful denial of reality. There's no 'misjudging' about it. If we leave, they can do pretty much what the hell they like given the balance of economic power. It's not as if a UK government would have any leverage, having thrown its toys out of the pram, and I can well imagine the French and Germans in particular wanting to seize the spoils. Another fantasy conjured up by the out/no campaign is that Norway and Switzerland offer some sort of model of how to deal with the EU while remaining outside it. They don't, because they were never members in the first place. Unlike them, we will be going cap in hand for similar preferential access while having royally ****ed off pretty much all other members states. I'm sure they'd love nothing more than to do exactly as suggested in that article. Wouldn't you?

I thought the article explained the balance of power very well - especially this one: half of British trade is with the EU but only 11% of EU trade is with Britain. Who's going to lose with that equation, do you think? And here's another: our net contribution to the EU is £6.7bn. According to the CBI, the net economic benefit from Britain's EU membership is over ten times that - up to £78bn. Again, who's really in the driving seat if the UK votes no to membership?

Which reminds me of James Cameron's description of the British right-wing press (Express, Mail, Telegraph, Sun) as "warhorses ridden by grocers." Their posturing on the EU referendum is a case in point...

But who leads the respective campaigns is highly relevant to the tenor of the debate before June and the outcome. The out brigade's leading advocates are a bunch of marginalised idiots with approval public ratings down the pan. If you're going to side with Farage, Galloway and Iain Duncan Smith, you may be tempted to ask what's wrong with you. These are widely despised individuals, and with good reason. Even Gove, the darling of certain sections of the Tory party, has dreadful approval ratings in opinion polls. On the yes side, Alan Johnson, for Labour, and Theresa May, for the Tories, have a much wider popularity and political weight. And Cameron has the advantage of the incumbency of office to make the balance even more for the impression of a level-headed Yes campaign against a swivel-eyed loon-led No vote. Corbyn is really a yes-no fence-sitter, as ever considering his 'options', so he doesn't count. There will be plenty of voters who will think they don't want to get into the arcane legalities of the debate but will weigh up their vote based on a judgement of relative sanity among the lading advocates On that basis alone, the Yes vote wins by a mile.

He's made many mistakes, most driven by the longstanding schism within the Tory party itself over Europe. This referendum, in an important sense, is a sledgehammer to crush a Tory-sceptic nut. Win a yes vote, shut up the Tory awkward squad. Only it seems to awkward squad may well win. But a no vote is also a huge problem for the rest of Europe, and may lead to its implosion. It'll be a game of chicken between Cameron and other European leaders if the polls leading up to the vote show a decisive no majority. I wouldn't be surprised if there were last minute concessions much closer to the vote, in which case Cameron may come out of it (electorally) well. Not that there's any realistic opposition...

My guess, based on this week's shenanigans, is the referendum campaign will go very badly for Cameron and the EU, and in the weeks leading up to the vote itself there may be some mad scramble to cobble together a reworked deal that may sway voters. If not, I see this heading for a narrow no majority - so the constitutional disaster Cameron narrowly and rather luckily avoided with the Scottish referendum will this time come to pass.

A ComRes poll at the weekend gives the Tories an astonishing 14 point lead over Labour, with Labour now at 27% - all this at a time when Cameron and the Tories are in several godawful messes at the same time. So well done, Corbynistas! Keep up the excellent work.

As the GDP of the entire British economy is just a shade over £3 trillion, how many trillions exactly are 'avoided'?

That's not the point I was making. As a public we're almost always do nothing much more than reacting to politicians 'tinkering' - saying 'no' to this or that hospital closure, or 'no' to radical change in contracts (GPs, junior doctors, etc) . We say no so much we never get around to having a proper debate about what we actually want. We're the ones treating the NHS as untouchable, not the constantly 'reforming' politicians. ('Reform' is what politicians do which makes them think they're managing. Mostly they're not). Your solution of nationalising it all wasn't even possible for Aneurin Bevan in far more favourable circumstances, so that's out - unless I'm missing something and you can make an argued case for its working in practice. I'm not aware of even Corbynists making the case for this.

One of the great problems with the NHS and public debate about it is that it's a hall of mirrors. You'd never know from current debates, especially from the Left, but the most invasive privatisation of the NHS was done at its inception, when the BMA flat-out refused to support its creation without the ability of its senior members to continue their private practice within the NHS itself - hence private beds, still the most visible evidence of privation within the service. Since then, the politics of the NHS gave been buried in a Byzantine maze of accounting procedures and obscure reorganisations, many concealing hugely powerful interests - the BMA, the drugs companies, health providers (including private hospitals), PFI financiers, medical-technology corporations - all extracting huge charges from the NHS for their inclusion and cooperation. That these interests, unlike in the US, are able to operate mostly off the radar in public debates about health provision is made possible in part by a largely uncritical adoration of the NHS. Whenever anyone raises criticisms they risk being cast as surreptitious privateers, and the political damage just isn't worth it. If we perhaps treated the NHS a little less like an untouchable jewel we might get something that worked a lot better, including for junior doctors.

Yes, true. Ad blockers are doing a lot of damage to the online model though, and then there's the annoying discovery that a lot of online ads simply don't deliver. In any case, the main driver over the years of lower prices in TV advertising has been competition from multiplying channels. Before November 1982 there were just three territorial channels. Now there are hundreds of cable, satellite, online and digital (including formerly terrestrial) channels, most of which are competing for the same-ish business (some TV advertising is decidedly 'niche'). In any case, ITV, which still takes the largest slice of TV advertising in the UK, is doing rather well, especially in ad spend. At least a good part of the reason is the huge, new-money spending by online companies (from the cost-comparison and internet-of-things sites to Apple and Google). Without the kind of brand-building that ad spending on TV does, and does in a way that digital advertising does much less well, a lot of new tech companies, for example, would struggle to get critical mass. Besides, try booking an ad slot around Coronation Street - or in the US the Super Bowl - and you'll find out it's really not so cheap when TV is doing its water-cooler thing.

So Corbyn wears a "I heart unions" badge to PMQs but doesn't even bring up the junior doctors' strike - on which he would have the government easily on the ropes. Brilliant.

Party political balance is much harder to achieve than you might imagine. Given that the preponderance of (largely false, it seems) sex abuse allegations aimed at MPs have involved Tories, does it mean the "media" has to find an equal number of sex abuse allegations against Labour MPs? On the flip side, the most explicit attempt I know of to produce consistent party balance, the audience selection on BBC's Question Time, often invokes acres of rage and accusations of bias among BTL "commentators". That's because political issues polarise in often unpredictable ways. You're as likely to find a skin-deep UKIP supporter among traditional Labour voters as you are to find opponents of the Snooper's Charter among Tory voters. Aside from all that, I always think the complaints of "bias" come from the source of bias itself. In a liberal democracy it's incumbent on us all, as a civic duty, to take on board opposing views, even if the effect of doing so is to reinforce one's own position (you can for example argue more strongly for your own POV having absorbed your opponent's views). It's one of the reasons I think Corbynists are self-obsessed whiners, because they resort to such pathetic bleating about the "bias" (especially on the Guardian, of all papers), rather than understanding the opposite POV and coming back stronger. But this can be applied to other political streams as well. We'd all be more "balanced" if we looked a little harder at the issues, rather than grandstanding our virtues. In that way, we'd probably be better at separating out the professional and ethical standards that drive journalists to uncover and report on issues that may run counter to the newspaper owner's political interests, from those political interests themselves. It's the lazy equation of those interests and the actual reporting that is so muddle-headed. So yes, of course, newspapers are owned by a bunch of right-wing tyrants (for the most part). Does that mean that the Telegraph isn't worth reading - or the Guardian isn't worn reading for a Corbynist (as they endlessly tell us)? Of course not. Does any of this mean we'd be better off with a more "balanced" ownership structure? I'm really not so sure. We live in a vibrant political culture - all the more so when you hear condemnations of how enfeebled that political culture is. It's the mark of its relative security that you get these complaints. Part of that culture is a noisy national press, and part of it is the new world of Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Vice, etc., etc. If we tend to think of our press as right-wing, it's down to that vibrant political culture. It would actually be a bad thing if the politics of a public culture accorded with the political views of media ownership - it would feel like some version of totalitarianism.

Rise to what? I asked you a question about balance. How does balance not have relevance in a discussion about bias? On the question of "media" vs "press", aside from your own thread title, YouGov themselves seem to have got themselves into an awful tangle. Their headline specifies "press" and they illustrate it exclusively with a pack shot of newspapers. When you dig into the actual questions asked, you're right, they do ask about "media". I suspect respondents were thinking "press" when asked about "media" because people receive information from a media that's today more diverse than at any point in history. But who knows...the research seems a bit unfocused when it could have been more useful and informative. So YouGov's own reporting hardly inspires confidence. But what of YouGov's "balance"? Not only has it been found putting a left-wing spin on its election polling, which it has admitted to; it's run at least partly by Kellner, the former editor of the "unbalanced" New Statesman.

"Most people" are not saying they "feel the media is too right wing." The respondents are being asked about British newspapers, not the media generally - and the results are hardly surprising. There's also some countervailing research saying that people feel the BBC is too left-wing. You keep talking about "balance" as if there's some magic formula for arriving at something that's perfectly weighted and objective. How do you define that? I suspect it's something that accords exactly with your own political views, such as they are. Some of the very best journalism is decidedly "unbalanced", such as Harold Evans' famous Thalidomide campaign, in which he hit the drug company week after week until they reached something like a just settlement with the victims. Or anything researched and written by the investigative journalist par excellence Seymour Hersch - no one's ever accused him of being "balanced", thank goodness. Nor Woodward and Bernstein, or the excellent and persistent (running against the "balanced" and PC grain) Andrew Norfolk of the Times. "Balance" would rule most of these journalists' work out of court - or at least neuter it. Imagine the Watergate scandal in which Nixon apologists are given equal time (as they would now in the media white noise), or the Abu Ghraib scandal, in which the US military is given equal time to whitewash the famous torture photos. And if it's not "equal time" for opposing views, what is it? Do we just run an ownership ready-reckoner on any journalism, so that Norfolk's tireless expose of Asian abuse gangs is written off as right-wing "media" bias?

Yes, of course. You're probably right: the press completely made up the fraud conviction. Good that you can rise above the very foolish idea that such criminal acts are anything more than "meaningless nonsense," and that you think faking voters by the bucketload "doesn't imply something bad". Jesus H Christ...

You're clearly not up to speed with Corbyn central's modus operandum. Here's another example. A "key member" of Crobyn's campaign team, Momentum, has, it turns out, a conviction for electoral fraud - she pleaded guilty to registering more than a hundred voters. Here's the Corbynists' response: "Marsha-Jane Thompson does excellent work for Momentum as a social media manager. Over a decade ago, she plead guilty to an offence and completed community service. Marshajane's conviction is now spent. She has always been open about the conviction, which she still deeply regrets, with her employers." Leaving aside the fact that the conviction was on March 29 2006 - so actually less than a decade, rather than "over a decade" - you have to read very carefully to catch the nuance of "the conviction, which she deeply regreets." I'm sure she does regret the conviction. It would be better, would it not, if she regretted the criminal acts? This is relevant for two reasons. Firstly, she committed the fraud while working as a housing officer at Newham council - so an officer of the authority some of whose members she was trying to fraudulently get reelected. Secondly, in 2010, four years after her "deeply regretted" conviction, she became a very vocal defender of the corrupt former mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman. She led protests to Labour's NEC after it sacked Rahman for allegedly doing exactly what she was convicted for in 2006. It doesn't seem she regrets vote rigging per se, from this - merely getting caught and acquiring a criminal record. And as she's so valuable to the Corbynists, they appear to take exactly the same view. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/12144213/Key-member-of-Jeremy-Corbyns-campaign-team-has-conviction-for-election-fraud.html At the heart of both these stories - the Corbynist's electoral fraud and the pressure on Asian women candidates - is a deeper problem of (mostly postal) voting fraud and coercion among South Asian communities in Britain. But when Corbynists start not only benefitting from it but actively participating in it, it's not exactly a good look for the "new politics". Old New Labour - the 'Tory-lites' - did at least disown Rahman and his corrupt little fiefdom. It seems Corbynists revel in this corruption and actively take part in it.

Wrong again. Uncharacteristically, Corbyn central have responded clearly and quickly - to slap the women's complaint down. From the article you didn't read: In a statement on Friday evening, a Labour spokesman made no attempt to address the specific allegations and gave no hint the issue would be looked at any further, saying the party had “selection procedures [that] include strong positive action procedures such as all-women shortlists and rules to ensure women are selected in winnable council seats”. Labour had “the best record of any party in selecting women and [black, asian and minority ethnic] candidates” the spokesman said, adding that those candidates who were unsuccessful had the right to appeal. Corbyn's gang could have said they'd look into it, as most political machines would do, if only to deflect - but no.

So now the Corbynists are turning a blind eye to the exclusion of Muslim women from Labour party candidature. How not surprising. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/feb/06/activist-condemns-labour-response-to-jeremy-corbyn-letter-charges-of-bias-against-muslim-women

Is there a plot you've recently mislaid? Or is this the natural progression among Corbynists of a devoted doe-eye to a gimlet-eyed Stalinist? This is merely confirmation of what was said earlier - that Corbynists regard all voters to the right of them as terminally stupid or, worse, actually murderers of poor and disabled people. Welcome to the new politics, as George Orwell might have said.