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.

It’s Thursday, it’s 10.35 pm … it’s BBC1’s Question Time.

For the Liberal Democrats, perennial favourite former party leader Charles Kennedy will be responding to public questions Joining Charlie will be Ben Bradshaw, Theresa May, Dr David Starkey and Dambisa Moyo

If you’re tuning in, you can join the simultanous online Twitter debate here at #bbcqt, or the LDV debate in the thread below. Meanwhile Lib Dem blogger Mark Thompson will be liveblogging events via CoverItLive at his own blog.

Welcome to a belated Daily View on this fine first day of the month. 1st October marks the 166th anniversary of the News of the World; the anniversary of the death of Ned Sherrin; and we say happy birthday to comedian Harry Hill.

Two big news stories

Earthquake hits stricken Sumatra (Guardian)

A second powerful earthquake has hit the Indonesian island of Sumatra, a day after the first devastating quake left more than 500 dead, thousands of people buried in rubble and a major city cut off from the outside world.

Today’s quake, of magnitude 6.9, struck in the early hours about 180 miles from the epicentre of yesterday’s more powerful tremor out at sea.

Cervical cancer jab girl Natalie Morton died from large chest tumour

You can’t help but feel sorry for this poor young woman who dropped dead from a chest tumour at school, not something you wish on anyone. But the unsavoury tabloid scramble to link her death to a vaguely controversial vaccination programme has been deeply unedifying, and hasn’t helped anyone, least of all the family and friends. The ensuing comments on all the news articles I’ve seen have been a scary eye-opening experience.

Natalie Morton, the schoolgirl who died after receiving a vaccine as part of a national immunisation campaign, died from a large malignant tumour in her chest.

Her sudden death was unconnected with her cervical cancer jab, an inquest in Coventry was told today.

See also: Mark Pack on SEO and cancer jabs.

Two must-read blog posts

Charlotte Gore on the bin strike in Leeds

I’m getting in touch with the people involved to write more about this, but in the meantime I’m drawing attention to a new Facebook group: Leeds Tax Payers against the Bin Strike. If you live in Leeds and you want people to actually take your bins away, please join up and spread the word.

(Interesting to my mind for the long battle in the comments – How does Charlotte know what she says she knows – and where she is being accused of ultra-loyalism. Also interesting because Councils across the country are facing issues similar to this as a result of “single status” campaigns to make sure that women’s work in local government is remunerated at the same rate as men’s work – which, to grossly oversimplify, means massive pay rises for dinner ladies and cleaners and pay cuts for binmen and street sweepers.

Stuart Bonar’s cut out’n’keep guide to Labour’s unfunded pledges

I’m not saying I oppose the idea of these policies, but money doesn’t grow on trees… when Lib Dems announce a new policy we spell out how it will be funded – Labour cannot just list a whole raft of costly new policies without explaining how it will be paid for.

Seen a good post lately? Why not give a link and a review in the comments.

I’ll confess I am not actually listening to the Prime Minister’s speech to Labour conference, as I have far more important things to do, including biting my nails and feeding the cats.

However, a quick refresh of Twitter shows that quite a lot of my friends are. And some of them have even been a little taken in by Brown’s ID card commitment.

If Twitter is right – and I can’t be bothered to check – he said, “there will be no compulsory ID cards for British citizens in the next parliament”

My goodness, but you can drive a double decker bus through the wiggle room in the loopholes there!

• There will be no compulsory ID cards for British citizens in the next parliament

So there will still be pointless, wasteful ID cards then?

• There will be no compulsory ID cards for British citizens in the next parliament

All those here on visas and work permits will still have to queue up to give more personal data to the UK government than is currently demanded from sex offenders, then?

• There will be no compulsory ID cards for British citizens in the next parliament

They’re not ruling out compulsory ID cards at all – just putting them on hold for a wee while.

This entirely disastrous Government IT project has wasted millions already and threatens to waste billions more. It will eventually require the entire population to travel then queue up one at a time to hand personal data to a Government that doesn’t know why it wants it, but is misguided in its belief as to exactly what problem this solution will cure. And it requires technologies that don’t exist yet.

It’s a massive (sorry Millennium) White elephant, and only one party has consistently opposed it (it was a Tory idea in the first place, even though they’ve now come around to our way of thinking). Vote Lib Dem for an end to them!

So, dear reader, what did you think of our dear leader’s speech?

A message arrives from the Conference people asking for our feedback on all matters Conference.

Conference is important to the Liberal Democrats. Your input, debates and votes are vital in shaping the Party’s policies and campaigns, and ensuring that we remain the only truly democratic party in British politics.

So we want to make sure you come back! Your views are important to us, as they help us improve conference year after year. If you attended autumn conference this year, please take the time to give us your feedback. By clicking on the link below and filling out our online questionnaire, you’ll be helping us to improve future conferences.

http://survey.libdems.org.uk/take/634

And as an extra incentive, you’ll be entered into a prize draw to win free registration to your next federal conference!

We look forward to hearing your views.

This is your opportunity to get anything that bugged you off your chest or to commend and praise good practice as you saw it. What do you think about the new timing arrangements? Leader’s speech at 4pm on a Wednesday OK by you? How about the prices at the snack bar? All good questions – and plenty of opportunity for free form responses too, if you want to have a go at some of the bad elements of Conference. Our vox-poppers were not too impressed at the number or cost of the internet PCs or conference Wifi service. Perhaps you’d like to mention that too.

And if you particularly enjoyed the LDV events, such as our two fringe meetings on Campaigning after Rennard (shame the rally over-ran and took all our audience!) and Beyond Twitter – as well as the Blog of the Year awards and the Liberal Drinks meeting – why not mention them in your feedback form?

Unfortunately, if you weren’t at conference, you can’t complete the form – the final question is your name, so that they can check whether you were there or not. Which slightly disenfranchises all those who would have gone if it hadn’t been all the way down there on the South Coast. (I’m much more looking forward to a few conferences up in my neck of the woods in Liverpool and Birmingham next year.) Feel free in that case to leave your thoughts in the comments below.

We’d also be very keen to hear from our readers about the LDV coverage of conference. How do you think we did? Did you listen to the podcasts – if so, what did you think? Where you following our twitter coverage of our events? Was that useful? Anything you’d like to see more – or less – of?