Dorries on Question Time, and those 2.2 million illegal immigrants

On BBC Question Time last night (available here for a limited time, 24 mins in), Nadine Dorries was trying to defend the work done by the coalition government to protect our borders (see: Theresa May refuses to resign over border checks scandal).

She started off very well by objecting to the question:

"Let me actually focus on what DID happen. What happened was... (pause)... that there were... (pause)... two things happened."

The host tried to get her back on track, when Dorries arrived at her 'point' with this assertion:

"Shorter queues delivered an increase in the number of illegal immigrants that were protected, I mean detected..."

This border checks pilot "protected" illegal immigrants? Oops, bit of a Freudian slip there... but I must ask that you focus on those shorter queues she speaks of, as they will come up again.

Dorries went on to rattle out a series of statistics that, in her eyes, showed Theresa May's pilot scheme of selective scanning to be a success

"10% increase in number of illegal immigrants [detected]... 100% increase in illegal firearms [detected]... 48% increase in forged documents [detected]..."

These statistics are unsubstantiated at present, but even if they were accurate and (almost) accurately put, they do not cover the periods when nothing was being detected at all. But we're told things ran more efficiently on those occasions when the gate wasn't swinging wide open, and Dorries declared the pilot a success on this basis. Oh, and on the basis that the queues were shorter. Or were they...?

"If the queues were shorter... I have no idea actually if the queues were shorter... but the objective of the exercise was..."

Yes, so long as we keep our eyes on the objective of the exercise, there's no risk of a perceived success being marred by any actual outcome.

But Dorries wasn't finished yet.

Labour MP Rachel Reeves was invited by the host to voice her opinion on this pilot scheme of cutting back on some checks and if it was a success. Dorries quickly jumped in and answered the question for her:

"It INCREASED security."

Then Dorries kindly let Reeves speak... for about 20 seconds. Reeves made the point that we had no idea how many people were let in without due authorisation during the 'downtime' periods, but she was quickly confronted by the following statistic from Dorries:

"You let 2.2 million in, Rachel."

In the context of what was being said, many people understood this to be a claim by Nadine Dorries that the Labour government (i.e. not Rachel Reeves personally) had allowed 2.2 million illegal immigrants into the country.

This is an outburst comparable to her claim that cannabis was fifty times more potent that is was a mere 12 months ago:

1. We do not know and cannot know the number of people that have entered this country illegally, because they are here illegally.

2. This pilot scheme of Theresa May's actually increased our uncertainty about the number of people who entered the country without appropriate documentation/authorisation in recent months, because there were periods where relevant checks were not being conducted at all.

3. The "2.2 million" figure Dorries gave refers to the net immigration figure from 1997 to 2009; the number of people who entered the country (legally) minus the number who had migrated to other countries in the same period.

4. And it comes from a speech by David Cameron, but at this stage we cannot know if Dorries is responding to the dog whistle in his speech, or blowing her own:

"... for too long, immigration has been too high. Between 1997 and 2009, 2.2 million more people came to live in this country than left to live abroad. That's the largest influx of people Britain has ever had..." - David Cameron (source)

By the way, I'm one of the 2.2 million people Dorries has branded an illegal immigrant, but I'm sure it's nothing personal.

Nadine Dorries interview in Glamour magazine

Glamour magazine! It's not my thing, really. But no matter. Actually, that's why this little number is here. Glamour magazine isn't for everybody, but everybody who cares about anybody with a uterus will want to read this. Think of it as a neato time capsule of the best Dorries has to support a range of recent arguments.

Click to make bigger and read.

It is quite plain for most party/political/punditry people that Dorries is having us on. Her main campaign revolves a recycled ploy from a similarly cynical campaign by a deeply religious anti-abortionist movement in the United States. When Dorries went to the House with her version of this package, it had already been widely discredited. She was thrown a lifeline by Anne Milton, a minister from her own party trying very hard to help her, but still Dorries persisted, wasting the House's time with highly distorted accounts, entirely unsupported hearsay, plus - most alarming of all - deliberate and darkly cynical emotional devices both in support of her 'argument', and in defence of her many refusals to openly debate it, or even produce evidence to support it.

Nadine Dorries even pretended to be independent of her own damn campaign and activists, because it was the only way for her to avoid discussion of the deeply religious roots of her efforts and those of her supporters. This is something Dorries has repeatedly tried to hide, but she keeps revealing herself in her language and her aims, and her belief in Bible passages that are so strong, it makes her call the Church of England "cowards" when they do not interpret them as literally as she does. There really is no hiding this kind of thing, and yet Dorries persists. I do hope you'll excuse my amazement.

The Nadine Dorries Manifesto

Nadine Dorries had an... interesting outburst today with the usual distortions about harassment and other criminal activity where there is none. She then followed this up with a slight misreading of what was obviously a joke, causing her to express her core aims and beliefs in third-person. This has resulted in a neat Dorries-specific manifesto, which is mirrored below for future reference:

Nadine Dorries wants a referendum on EU membership very soon, to stop right now sending English £s to support failing European economies, to introduce a Bill of Rights, to scrap the Human Rights Act, to lower overall taxation in order to stimulate growth, to cut harder and faster on public services in order to reduce spending, to bring the upper limit at which abortion takes place down to 20 weeks, to remove Local Authority control over education, to free the NHS from Whitehall and to open up free market provision within the NHS, to dramatically reduce inward immigration, to embrace our special relationship with the USA, to make prison mean hard work and life to mean life, to increase our defence budget and support our troops, and she belives green taxes are damaging to elderly people who can barely afford to heat their homes. (source)

The less said about yesterday's lashing out at Tim Farron the better, but it should be pointed out that Dorries must have known this man was recently smeared as 'secretly gay' when she wrote this headline, or she should at least have thought better of it after the fact if she actually had to be told about this yesterday. Instead, she has let it stand.

It's as ugly as the claim so foul she pretends it projectile vomits from a mouth other than her own:

Tim (Farron) is playing to the left. The left are strongly pro-abortion and Tim knows this. Some with a stronger faith than Tim may say he’s been blinded by ambition and sold his soul to the devil. I would describe him as a typical Lib Dem. (source)

Charming.

Nadine Dorries: a warning

Nadine Dorries, Conservative MP for Mid Bedfordshire, set Twitter alight today with some poorly-received comments about 'obsessive' use of blogs on her, erm... blog*.

There is detail about Dorries' post that needs documenting (it is a thinly veiled attack on one of her critics, and Dorries is ably supported in this task by Paul 'Guido Fawkes' Staines, and not for the first time) but this important warning must come first.

Nadine is most frequently under fire on Twitter today for this passage:

"In the meantime, do you know of anyone else who has Tweeted more than 35,000 times in less than six months? If so, email my office and let me know. Or, better still, if it's someone you know is on benefits, contact the DWP." - Nadine Dorries (source)

You need to be aware that Nadine Dorries is most likely only adopting this position in order to attack one of her critics with a smear (something she does often). She may not genuinely think, for example, that those who are on benefits due to mental health problems should be reported to authorities for daring to engage in conversation on Twitter.

However, because she is trying to smear this particular critic as mentally damaged (i.e. as well as fraudulent), she certainly gives this impression, and as a result, there are bloggers who are brave enough to write about their own mental health issues who wish to complain about this.

I am here to warn people that if you write to Andy Rayment, the Chairman of the Mid Bedfordshire Conservative Association [admin@midbedsconservatives.com], to complain about the conduct of Nadine Dorries, you can expect an answer like this...

"I do not waste my time communicating with nutters so do not expect me to respond to any of your communications, electronic or otherwise" - Andy Rayment (source)

... and when this happens, you can most probably count on Dorries chuckling along like it's the wittiest thing said since Churchill popped his clogs:

"... when a 'nutter' began bombarding my association with telephone calls and emails, this made me laugh out loud." - Nadine Dorries (source)

Finally, I should add that if you dare to press the matter, you will most likely end up getting smeared yourself. You have been warned.

-

[NOTE - What Dorries describes as a 'bombardment' is less than half a dozen emails and calls over a 6 month period, none of which earned a civil reply. You can read the background on this here and here. It should also be noted for the purpose of transparency that the two main targets of Dorries' smears referred to in this post are editors of this site.]

[*She calls it a blog, but don't be thinking you can leave comments on it. That would be a foolish expectation.]

-

UPDATE - And here's that detail that needed to be documented:

Nadine Dorries Takes Revenge on Twitter Critic: Uses Paul Staines to Push Smear

Thank you, Richard Bartholomew.

Readers may also be interested in this round-up of related posts by the lovely Ms Cushion.

For the record, there have been minor outbreaks of support for Nadine Dorries on Twitter (a few people versus a few hundred, no exaggeration), but so far all they amount to are assurances that she is a lovely person, really and/or repeats of Nadine's smears (i.e. outright lies) that somehow prove in their mind that she's a lovely person, really.

Truth is, Nadine Dorries is the type of person who knowingly publishes and publicises malicious, damaging lies about people she perceives to be her political enemies.

Liar

I can't add anything new to what's happened recently, so this post is more of a round up, an update. If you like, a 'for the record' post. Which, I suppose, is what this blog is mainly about.

So what's new then, huh?

On 23 May this year the paper Bedfordshire on Sunday ran an article about Nadine Dorries and her reasons for why she closed her blog and Twitter account.

Here it is...


There is nothing really new in the story that hasn't been covered elsewhere, including the Flitwick er, episode. What is more interesting is what was left out of the article.

Keeley Knowles, the writer of the piece, gave Tim the right of reply by telling him what Nadine had said about him.

The one piece of Nadines' statement that didn't make the page was this bit...

Following the Stephen Timms incident last week I have decided that I should pay attention to the police advice and have therefore closed down both Twitter and my blog for the time being.

For over a year Nadine has been, apparently, been receiving advice on how to deal with a stalker. (You would've thought that if someone was stalking, harassing or threatening in anyway towards an MP, the police would take it seriously and at the very least warn the accused. Tim has had no such encounter with the police and has been talking to them himself...



The advice the police supposedly gave to Nadine was to not give the 'stalker' the oxygen of for his 'obsession' and close her blog and Twitter account. Nadine being a feisty woman who refuses to let people dictate what she can and can't do kept going with her online endeavours. Until, that is, Labour MP Stephen Timms got stabbed.

Apparently.

This is where that line omitted from the paper comes in. Never mind all that it implies, that Tim is a violent person, and all that comes with it, but it is a factual lie.

For Nadine to have closed her blog and Twitter account because of fearing what happened to Stephen Timms could happen to her, those online presences' would have to have been up and running until the 14th May, the day Stephen Timms got stabbed.

Thanks to Chris Paul, we have this little bit of information...

Nadine closed her Twitter account May 7th. The day after the general election. A full week before the attack on Stephen Timms. Her blog went on the same day.

Not only does Nadine smear and defame someone that is critical of her behaviour, she is quite happy to use an attempted murder on someone to do it.

Links:
Bloggerheads - To: Nadine Dorries
Labour of Love (Chris Paul) - Nadine Dorries Mum-P: Liar! Liar! Your Pants Are On Fire
Bartholomews' Notes on Religion - Nadine Dorries Explains Why She Deleted Blog: Cites “Police Advice” over On-Line Critic

Nadine Dorries campaign video

A special message from everyone's favourite MP. Full episode here.

Apparently...

After expecting to find a promised post about her appearance on the Channel 4 show Tower Block of Commons we are treated to a more serious piece about assisted suicide.

I'm not going to knock Nadine for her actual views on assisted suicide, everyone has their own and they're welcome to it. How good of me, eh?

But, and there is always a but, there are some things that are not quite right with her post.

Tomorrow the DPP, Kier Starmer will publish a new guidance regarding policy on prosecuting assisted suicide cases.

The report follows a period of consultation, which was apparently nudged into action by the Debbie Purdy case.

'Apparently'? The consultation was forced on the Director of Public Prosecutions by the Law Lords ruling on the case involving Debbie Purdy who wanted to know if her husband would face prosecution if he helped her to kill herself.

The inclusion of the word 'apparently' implies that the Debbie Purdy case was used as an excuse. It wasn't. The DPP had no choice. The Law Lords made him. Without the Debbie Purdy case, Kier Starmer would not have had to issue guidelines about the the prosecution of people that help others to take their own life. There is no 'apparently' about it.

Prior to the consultation process, Kier Starmer said,

‘Assessing the public interest is not simply a matter of adding up the number of factors on each side and seeing which side of the scales has the greater number. Each case must be considered on its own facts and its own merits. Prosecutors must decide the importance of each public interest factor in the circumstances of each case and go on to make an overall assessment.

In that one paragraph, Kier Starmer has implied that the law is no longer relevant and if Parliament refuses to change the law, he will make it up himself.

OMG! People not being prosecuted for committing crimes!

People are not prosecuted all the time. The police have something that is called 'using their judgement'. The Crown Prosecution Service can decide not to prosecute because of something called 'not in the public interest'. There is nothing new happening here at all.

After that Nadine goes on to have a pop at the one of the Tories favourite punchbags, the BBC...

The BBC has possibly been one of the worst offenders in terms of pushing an agenda of ‘normalising' attitudes towards assisted suicide.

Has it? Is there an example given? I'm not asking for pages and pages. Just the one will do. But no.

It sounds to me like reality didn't quite go the right way for Nadine so she is reduced to throwing in uncertainties and unfounded accusations in the hope that they will stick and gain some traction in the hope of removing autonomy of people over their own bodies... again.

BTW, the DPP press release is here and contains the public interest factors for and against prosecution.