While nobody should pretend a Tory lead is a good thing, I’ve not really taken any interest in opinion polls, until I realised how easily Tories wobble when their lead falls into single figures.

There are still many Conservatives who fear that Cameron’s moderate rhetoric would translate into a moderate government and are desperate to seize the agenda. So every dip in the polls is an opportunity to offer him some advice, like come clean and admit you want to slash and burn public services, saying you won’t is a ‘gaffe’.

The truth is that Cameron is very reluctant to let us know what he’d do in power. And given that so many of his shadow cabinet — William Hague, George Osborne, Chris Grayling, Michael Gove, Liam Fox — are so close to the US tobacco, anti-healthcare and anti-green lobbies we should not be surprised he’s so keen to keep his agenda hidden.

Nevertheless, he can clearly rely on Sky News to exaggerate on his behalf. Just check out that graphic and see how the Tories nine point lead over Labour is so much bigger than Labour’s twelve point lead over the Lib Dems. In the graphic above, the Tory lead over Labour is 95 pixels, while Labour’s lead over the Lib Dems is just 73 pixels.

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Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science is one of the most important columns published in any newspaper. It almost always lives up to its promise to ‘skewer the enemies of reason’ through the dogged pursuit of those who corruptly misrepresent science, make false claims and mislead the vulnerable, while promoting rigorous evidence based solutions.

All of which makes it disappointing when Ben Goldacre suddenly makes an appeal to emotion and leaves all that reason behind, as he did when discussing vivisection. The point Ben wishes to make – that, regardless of the ethical debate, much animal research is poorly conducted – is important, but he lets himself down.

Ben Goldacre lets us know he fears entering a bear pit – ‘you don’t want anyone digging up your grandmother’s grave, or setting fire to your house, or stuff like that’ – then quickly follows up with the all important, but unsubstantiated, claim that ‘animal experiments are necessary’.

It would be foolish to deny that vivisection has done some good. We could do even more good by experimenting on humans, but we decide that the ends do not justify the means. We make value judgements – ‘animal experiments are necessary… experimenting on humans is evil’ – and should always be ready to question our values.

While Ben Goldacre acknowledges that poorly conducted, badly communicated research causes animals to suffer in vain, he can’t help but question the validity of that suffering; ‘whatever you believe that might mean for an animal’. No individual wishes to suffer, but suffering is an unpleasant fact and there is no evidence that it actually matters beyond the individual. No matter how many people suffer and die, the world just carries on. In another billion years the sun will have heated up to such an extent that all life Earth will end. Nature is indifferent.

The notion that suffering is bad is a value judgement. But where do our values come from and if suffering is bad for humans, then why not for other animals? Indeed, some humans perpetrate acts so heinous we may judge they deserve to suffer. Those of us who aspire to a life guided by reason, informed by Darwin, understand that we are animals too. Those who follow the main creationist faiths (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) believe that humans, created through a different process, are fundamentally different from the beasts over whom humans have been given dominion, that only humans have a soul and that only humans will rise up and enter the Kingdom of God.

To casually judge that ‘animal experiments are necessary’ is to demonstrate a value system that owes much more to creationism than to reason.

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Sana Krasikov’s One More Year is a melancholy book of gentle stories of disconnected people. Krasikov’s rounded, complex characters have left their homeland for an America in which they hardly fit or – perhaps worse – have returned to a Russia that has moved on too far, leaving them forgotten and bereft.

All have made a compromise too far and found themselves in a place that is best described as purgatory. Here they wait, for the most part, while those who make a break for freedom merely find themselves in another room.

Yet it is also a sometimes inaccessible read, somehow tired and devoid of passion. There is little reward for sticky with it.

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I’ve been a quiet blogger of late, but those of you who have taken an interest in the Charity Commission’s investigation of the Atlantic Bridge need not assume that I’ve let things go. You may recall that this organisation consists of at least two entities – a UK-based charity and a US-based charity – dedicated to ‘the simple aim of “Strengthening the Special Relationship” exemplified by the Reagan-Thatcher partnership of the 1980s.’

The Atlantic Bridge diverts money that would otherwise be collected as tax — and help pay for health, education, national debt or equipping troops in Afghanistan — to support the Thatcherite wing of the British Conservative Party and its US allies; US allies drawn from that country’s pro-tobacco, anti-healthcare and anti-environmentalist lobbies.

November saw the UK charity submit its annual report to the Charity Commission, which normally publishes such documents on its website. At time of writing it’s still not landed there and the commission was very reluctant indeed to let me have a copy (even though the Charities Act obliges the commission to make it available for public inspection). In the end they caved in, but not before I’d received a copy from another source.

Indeed, the Charity Commission has been incredibly soft on the Atlantic Bridge. When Andrew Lloyd Webber borrowed art from a charity in his name he was rightly slapped down because you are not allowed to benefit from any charities you have established or manage (and Lloyd Webber is hardly a charity case). But when Tory MP Liam Fox established a charity to subsidise the cost of flying himself, other senior Tories and their US allies back and forth across the Atlantic nothing happened. And when William Hague, a member of the Atlantic Bridge advisory board, got help with cost of his US book launch, nobody seemed bothered (although it’s most likely lucky US taxpayers helped out with that one).

Anyway. For the period of these accounts, the Atlantic Bridge spent more than £80,000 on just three substantial events, two of which were in partnership with the American Legislative Exchange Council.

ALEC was exposed in 1998 when the US tobacco industry made a multi-billion dollar settlement of dozens of lawsuits which included releasing thousands of internal documents. These documents prove beyond doubt that the tobacco industry used ALEC to launder favours and donations to US legislators.

Incredibly, ALEC survived to continue this work — it continues to receive funding from tobacco — but today it is at least as well known for opposing healthcare and for its anti-environmentalism. It is well funded by the oil and pharmaceutical industries, including Pfizer who have directly supported the Atlantic Bridge.

Dr Liam Fox MP established the Atlantic Bridge as a think-tank in 1997, but Fox is no intellectual and so ten years on it had still to publish a single thought. ALEC decided it was time for a relaunch and employed a Conservative Party activist to organise ‘a series of events aimed at conservative leaders from the field of politics, media, business, and academia – exposing them to innovative conservative thinking from the U.S. and Great Britain and helping them forge new transatlantic relationships.’ All subsidised by British and American taxpayers thanks to the organisation’s charitable status.

Despite all this, the Charity Commission has decided to allow the Atlantic Bridge to continue to enjoy the benefits of charitable status. The commission has merely asked the Atlantic Bridge to conform with the UK’s tough sounding laws on public benefit from this point on. If they can do that, they will be allowed to keep the many thousands of pounds, that would otherwise have been collected in taxes, that they have accrued since registering as a charity in 2003.

Yet even this is something the Atlantic Bridge has struggled with. Initially, it posted a vague statement on its website. Now it’s given up and taken the site down altogether.
Posts on the Atlantic Bridge are collected here.

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