I promised you all another venture in the realms of MadNaddery and here it is…

First of all, to pick up the weekend’s events let me direct you to Bookdrunk who’s nicely covered all the relevant ground vis-a-vis the bullshit that’s appeared in the Daily Mail over the weekend…

nadine dorries: age shall not wither her (problem with telling the truth)

nadine dorries: in defeat, smear your enemies (updated)

Also well worth a visit, not least for the piss-poor astroturfing attempt, is Tom Harris’s blog.

Let it go, Nadine

Strong arguments don’t require this kind of duplicity

Tom, who’s a a Labour MP actually voted for a reduction in the upper time limit for abortion, but on this occasion I’ll not hold that against him, just suggest that he take the time to read through the material I’ve already put together on here and see if any of that challenges his thinking.

Meanwhile, getting back to Mid-Narnia for a moment, Mad Nad’s latest foray into the realms of fiction comes in the form of a piss-poor attempt to suggest that the abortion vote might have been a factor in the result of last week’s Crewe and Nantwich by-election:

Over the weekend I have had feedback from people who canvassed in Crewe and Nantwich. Apparently – and this is only what I have been told – the abortion vote played a part in the last few days.

Crewe has a very large Irish Catholic population as a result of the historic railway building programme.

If this information is correct, then the impact could play out in many other seats.

Wilted Rose has a very good blog on it .

Let me be the first to call bullshit on this whole idea, followed by ‘very large Irish Catholic population’ my arse…

This is really simple.

For starters the census data for the constituency for 2001 give the number of people identifying themselves as ethnic Irish as 769.

Now, that’s not the whole story – the census data on religion for the area doesn’t distinguish between different brands of Christianity and there is a persistent issue with some Irish communities of second, third and greater generation individuals putting themselves down as white British, which obscures their family  heritage.

So, we need another means of getting a snapshot of the likely size of the Catholic vote in the area and perhaps the best indicator we can use is to look at the local school provision for Catholic children, which in the case of Crewe and Nantwich amounts to two primary schools and one secondary school with a total number of inmates of just shy of 1,400 kids and after bit of back of the fag packet figuring out to allow for the ratio of kids to parents, grandparents etc. a fair estimate of the number of Catholic voters would be no more than a couple of thousand, maybe 2,500 thousand tops, which is worth maybe 1,300 votes based on turnout in the election, and that assumes they all voted according their conscience as determined by the Catholic Church rather than demonstrating a mind of their own.

So there is a Catholic vote in the area, just not one that would have made the slightest difference to the result.

On a personal note, can I just take the time to say that, speaking as a democrat, if religionists of any particular stripe wish to suggest that people vote according to their religious views rather than any of the many other factors that may come into play when its just them and the ballot box then they are entirely free, and indeed welcome, to set up their own fucking theocratic parties and canvass for votes the same as everyone else.

The clue’s the name, folks – we live in a democracy not a theocracy and if you’d genuinely prefer the latter then please feel free to fuck off and move to Iran, or the Vatican, or anywhere else where your personal predilection for holy rollers can be satisfied without bothering the rest of us.

This message has been brought to you by the letters F, U, C, K, O, F and F.