Last week, when I was writing Daily View hours later than I should, I linked to Mark Pack’s piece linking to Malcolm Cole’s piece about Google search results about the cervical cancer jab. Caron Lindsay has also written about this.

Last week, Malcolm Cole was warning that those worried about the cancer jab being given to teenage girls were getting misleading and inaccurate advice if they ran an internet search for more information.

Scary stories have legs, and it’s still the case, a week later, that if you search for information on this story, the leading results are the stories in the Daily Mail and other tabloids erroneously linking the tragic death of a schoolgirl with the vaccine she’d received hours earlier.

The difference between a causal link and an unfortunate coincidence is best highlighted by this satirical article on a slightly rude website “News Arse”: Panic spreads as hundreds die after reading Daily Mail.

It’s probably true that every day, tens or hundreds of Daily Mail readers die. It’s not remotely true that the Daily Mail causes the deaths. It is true that one young person has died shortly after receiving the HPV jab. It’s not true that the jab was in any way linked to her death. And yet thanks to scaremongering from tabloid newspapers and other news outlets, the idea that the HPV jab is implicated in a death will persist in people’s minds. And anyone who searches the internet at the moment to try and clear up this issue for themselves will currently only see the false information by the tabloids, and not the legitimate, researched-based information from the NHS.

So if you have written about the issue yourself, or if you plan to do so in the future, please don’t link to the stories in the irresponsible press. But do link to the pages on the NHS websites that have the real story.

Clear instructions on how to do this are all to be found in Malcolm Cole’s post.

UPDATE: I thought this was important when I wrote it over lunch time – since then, I’ve been pointed at a survey by Ofcom.

The latest study by regulatory body Ofcom, shows that children aged between 12 and 15, believe Google’s search engine ranks websites by truthfulness, rather than relevance or random selection.

Results from the study show that 32 per cent of children support the idea that Google displays search results by the most truthful website first. While 37 per cent of children are aware that the search engine revelas the most relevant site first.

A tip off from a reader asks us to highlight a growing number of people who support our policy on raising the basic personal income tax allowance to £10,000, taking the lowest paid out of income tax altogether.

I understand crossbencher Lord Digby Jones supported this on Question Time, since it helps those on low incomes, and also helps get people back to work. One of the biggest disbenefits of moving from benefits to low paid work is the high rate of marginal tax you pay. You don’t just lose the income, and all the benefits in kind such as free prescriptions, you also face bringing less in from employment than you did on benefits.

From the Lib Dem blogging community, Charlotte Gore sees the tax policy as “our most important policy“:

Now, I’ll be honest, I love this policy for a number of reasons. First, it’s a tax cut, which I like. I’m against anything that punishes people for working or being successful, because working and being successful are actually good things that provide jobs and wealth and in doing that improves our health, increases our free time for leisure and personal pursuits and generally improves our quality of life.

It’s also a tax cut that does something about the problems faced by people moving from benefits into work, where, thanks to tax if you’ve got 2 kids you’re actually better off on benefits than a minimum wage job. That is, unless you’re willing to risk the tax credits system. Its painfully obvious that if you don’t take tax off people in the first place, you don’t need a monolithic, incompetent bureaucracy to then give it back again, wasting money for the sheer hell of it. Redistributing wealth from one group of poor people (those without kids) to another group of poor people is a whole new level of messed up politics, and one that people seem to blindly support.

Charlotte’s the least strange of the three supporters of this policy that I’m quoting here – but from her to the most strange – Norman Tebbit!

Speaking to the Bury Free Press (I’m not making this up!) Lord Tebbit said,

Lord Tebbit feels[…] that the current benefits system penalises couples for living together and mothers for going back out to work.

“It’s absolute madness. We put large barriers in the way of people going back to work,” he said.

He added that he backed Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg’s idea to double the tax threshold and raise taxes on the rich, helping to get more people into work and off welfare.

So – who else have you seen who supports our policy in this area?

Jo Swinson MP has called for less talk and more action from the Conservative Party on proposals for public involvement in making laws.

Speaking at the Conservative Conference this week, William Hague announced his plans for a ‘Public Reading Stage’ for proposed legislation. The idea is that this would enable the public to become involved in the process of making laws by using an online system to make comments and spot potential problems. And it’s all a part of the Tory “Google Government” idea that I’ve covered for the Voice in a review of Cameron’s speech to the LGA earlier this year, and in the debate over whether Web 2.0 represents value for money for taxpayers.

However, the proposal for a public reading stage of new bills is not new, and earlier initiatives attempting to introduce a similar system have received little support from Conservative MPs. In December last year, Jo Swinson tabled a Parliamentary Motion supporting the Free Our Bills Campaign which seeks to reform the way Bills are published electronically to make it easier for the public to scrutinise them.

The campaign calls for the public to be able to reject or rewrite clauses of a Bill, just as in the US ‘Mixedink’ website on which William Hague’s proposal is based. The motion has been signed by 83 MPs – but only 10 of the signatories are Conservative. And none of them is William Hague.

Jo’s view?

Whilst it is positive that the Tories are now considering Parliament’s need to engage with the public online, there is little evidence yet that this is more than empty rhetoric.

The Free Our Bills campaign, which is run by the excellent team of volunteers at My Society, has long been campaigning for measures which would do exactly what William Hague is suggesting, and yet only 10 Conservative MPs have signed my motion supporting it. If Conservative MPs really mean what they say about moving politics into the 21st Century then I would urge them to sign the motion in support of the Free Our Bills campaign.

You can hear more of Jo Swinson’s views on campaigning on the internet in our podcast “Beyond Twitter” – a recording of our fringe meeting at the 2009 Bournemouth Lib Dem conference

Welcome to Daily View on this, Independence Day in Croatia, the anniversary of the death of German  Bundeskanzler Willy Brandt, and the birthday of DJ Q Ball from the Bloodhound Gang. So, while he’s doing it like they do on the Discovery Channel, let’s get on with our selections.

Two big news stories

Ex-army chief General Sir Richard Dannatt to advise Tories on defence (Guardian)

David Cameron will […] announce that ex-army chief General Sir Richard Dannatt is to become an adviser to the party on defence. […]

The announcement was almost immediately undermined by an embarrassing frontbench gaffe when Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, appeared to mistakenly believe Dannatt was to advise the Labour government, rather than Cameron.

Whoops.

Royal Mail strike set to see postal services grind to a halt (Telegraph)

The results from a ballot of 121,000 postmen, delivery drivers and delivery office workers will be announced by the Communication Workers Union on Thursday afternoon.
Although the results are closely guarded, union sources said they expected strong backing for their call for a national stoppage.

Two must-read blog posts

Jewish Letter to Cameron (Stephen’s Linlithgow Journal)

Yesterday I covered the anti-homophobes letter from amongst others Stephen Fry, Partick Stewart, Eddie Izzard and Jo Brand. Today there is news that the he president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Vivian Wineman, has also sent a letter to the Conservative leader over his alliance with far-right groups in Poland and Latvia.

Blair for President? (Chris Davies MEP)

Chris looks at what the post of the President of the Council of Ministers actually entails.

The reality is that it amounts to no more than than being chairman of the European Council, the gathering of the 27 Prime Ministers. The holder of the post will sit alongside whoever is Prime Minister of the country holding the EU presidency, a role that rotates every six months. No job description has been prepared and there are plenty of Prime Ministers who want to keep it strictly limited.

Last month at conference, in two of our conference fringes, speakers highlighted useful online services set to revolutionise politics.

At our first fringe, “Campaigning after Rennard,” James Graham thought that TheStraightChoice (reviewed by LDV here), a website that allows members of the public to upload the leaflets they have received through their letterbox, had the potential to revolutionise politics. No more would politicos be able to put out close-to-the-knuckle material in relative obscurity. From now on, James argued, we’d all have to assume that at least one blogger would read our leaflet, and at least one journalist would read the blogger, and eventually, our campaigning infelicities would make a short hop to haunt us via front page local news.

Later in the week, at our “Beyond Twitter” fringe, we were very pleased to welcome Richard Pope to our platform to talk about the work he does as a programmer with MySociety. Quite by chance, it transpired that one of his side projects is indeed The Straight Choice. At the fringe meeting he confided that the website, and a number of similarly public spirited sites, were vulnerable to cease and desist notices. They all shared a post-code lookup service that hadn’t forked out the requisite money to Royal Mail PLC for permission to use the national post-code database.

Now Richard writes:

As you know I run TheStraightChoice. The website has been effectively shut down today, along with PlanningAlerts.com and various other sites, by the Royal Mail. They have served a cease-and-desist notice to the postcode lookup service ErnestMarpes.com (I help run EM) which powers both sites.

And he points us at a number of other websites with further information, including

• EarnestMarples.com
• Open Rights Group
• Tom Watson
• The Guardian

A goodly number of them point out the particular folly of the Royal Mail simultaneously trying to shut down a service that helps you find jobs, whilst trying to make a sizeable number of their workforce redundant.

With postcodes so increasingly important to national life, it’s ridiculous that they are not public data that is, as a minimum, free to use for non-profit organisations.

I’m happy to extend t’Voice’s muscle to backing the campaign to bring back these useful websites. Tell all your friends.