How to get a Tory to agree with Laurie Penny

Nadine Dorries' amendments stem from her own anti-abortion prejudice and don't even deliver what they claim. They are an insidious attempt to restrict access to a service that helps thousands of women every year.

Over the last couple of days Nadine Dories has achieved a remarkable feat. As a result of her activities in the House of Commons and lobbying on the Health and Social Care Bill I find myself appalled by Government policy and in complete agreement Laurie Penny of the New Statesman - something I never really thought would happen.

Now I've never been a tremendous fan of the MP for Mid-Bedfordshire. She has campaigned to reduce the time limit on abortion and is a member of the socially conservative Cornerstone Group (motto: Faith, Flag, Family - creepy or what?). I don't think we're going to see eye to eye on a huge range of issues. Nevertheless, this week she has surpassed even her own chequered history.

Dorries worries that women seeking abortions don't have access to proper counselling before going through with the procedure. Some of the principal sources of this counselling are the abortion providers themselves. Since these providers receive money from the NHS every time they perform an abortion, they are financially incentivised to counsel vulnerable women to have abortions.

This is where the nonsense starts.

It paints abortion providers as institutions not that exist not to furnish women with the ability to choose, but to perform as many abortions as they can. This is mental! How would Dorries react to the suggestion that midwives should be prevented from advising pregnant women? After all, they depend on women giving birth for their livelihoods!

But, I hear you cry, surely you can't really object to ensuring the counselling we provide is independent? It should help women make the decision that's right for them not just provide a justification. Fine. But there are two responses to this:

1. There's no evidence that the current system doesn't provide independent advice already.
2. THAT'S NOT WHAT THE AMENDMENT DOES.

When you read Dorries' amendments, available here, they don't create a framework for ensuring abortion counselling is independent. Oh, they use the word "independent", sure, but their definition is intriguing:

Information, advice and counselling on abortion is independent where it is provided by:

"either a private organisation that does not itself provide for the termination of pregnancies or a statutory body".

In other words, counselling provided by the Catholic Church is independent. An evangelical Christian telling a teenage girl that she will burn in Hell if she terminates her pregnancy is independent. A professional counsellor employed by Marie Stopes explaining the pros, cons and risks of abortion cannot be independent.

I'll leave it to the experts to tell you the ways in which this will harm vulnerable women. However, I am happy to denounce it as a cynical attempt to manipulate thousands of women into making the decision Dorries wants them to make. It shouldn't be Tory policy and it certainly shouldn't be government policy.

If you agree, you can contact your MP through the Abortion Rights organisation.

An explanation, but not an excuse

The riots in London (and elsewhere in the UK) this week have presented us with a highly uncomfortable truth. A large proportion of our youth are willing, given the opportunity, to commit crime on an unprecedented scale. Faced with a police force unwilling or unable to stop them, they will rampage through their own communities, destroying everything that friends and neighbours have worked hard to build up.

These have been crimes perpetrated almost exclusively by apparently feral youths. Worse still, the victims have been those who should bear the least blame and most credit in these communities. The victims are honest and hardworking, providing important jobs and services where few of either exist. Many of them have risked a great deal to start businesses in difficult areas in the hope of a better future. That these people should have that hope trampled on for ephemeral consumer goods or the momentary high of a thieved bottle of vodka disturbs us all. Their dispassionate willingness to ruin livelihoods chills the blood of those anxiously watching through their own windows, praying the mob does not come for them. The victims were not bankers claiming massive bonuses while presiding over huge losses or politicians fiddling expenses. Neither were these attacks directed at the notoriously trigger-happy police officers of SO19, whatever the rights or wrongs of Mark Duggan's death may be.

All this has contributed to calls for a brand of policing more reminiscent of Cairo or Tehran than London; it has become fashionable, among people as well as politicians, to denounce the rioters as "mindless" and "purely criminal". Meanwhile, some on the left have bent over backwards to justify the looting. At one stage, the Guardian even quoted an historian describing the looting as "a political act". Both of these perspectives misread the truth of the situation.

For years, urban communities across the country have struggled with crime, poverty and drug use. They have been left behind by an economy that has disproportionately rewarded the richest whilst leaving the rest to pick up the scraps. At the same time, the inexorable march of technology has beamed the wealth of the rich into the front rooms of the poor. Quality of life is measured by the clothes you wear, TV's you own and money you can spend above all else.

Politicians have sought to seize the centre ground with policies that appeal to the middle classes. They have rewarded home ownership while shrouding the failure of inner-city education in the cloak of inflated exam results. Drug policies have incarcerated parents in need of treatment, leaving children without role models and resentful of the state. Our adoption laws force willing parents to wait while channelling desperate children into an overstretched care system that abuses and dehumanises them. Too many youth and mental health workers have been dismissed as unnecessary ancillaries rather than key components of the fabric of society.

All of this has served to create a group with a smaller stake in society than any since before the First World War. Children grow up in areas bereft of opportunities in families where few have worked in years. The unchecked march of drug abuse (and pathetically dogmatic response to it) has created a huge number of teenagers for whom law-breaking is the norm. In this context, should we really be surprised that, convinced that the police won't intervene, they go on the rampage?

At the same time, parents seem to have abrogated their responsibilities on a scale hitherto unimagined. The suggestion that perhaps they should have control of their children has too often been greeted with a shrug and a gesture at how few services the state provides for young people. The state has convinced too many people that raising children is its responsibility and not theirs. This has led them to abandon their responsibilities and leave their children to find entertainment on the street. Our benefits system rewards bad choices by funnelling money to teenage mothers and pushing the long-term unemployed onto incapacity benefit. Too often entering the workforce is a foolishly uneconomic decision. For those who do seek work criminal records, drug use and a lack of education has probably permanently excluded them from employment. The only way out exists through crime and many are accustomed to criminality at a young age by their peers and older siblings.

As a result, there is now a group that has little stake in society and no hope of establishing one. They grow up knowing that when the opportunity to profit through crime appears, it should be taken and over the last few days, a myriad of opportunities have opened up in front of them.

These communities have been ignored by politicians of all stripes - Labour because they will vote for nobody else, so why bother? and Conservatives for the same reason. Politicians have hid from the problems - they are too many and too difficult - and left communities disenfranchised and disenchanted.

This is part of the reason why we had riots and looting in London this week. A group of people who society had tried to ignore were given an opportunity and took it. That is an explanation, but it is not an excuse. After Saturday, people looted because they thought they could get away with it and they wanted to. We must not forget the livelihoods they willingly and knowingly destroyed. Nor must we forget the people made to feel unsafe in their own homes, afraid that their street would be next. We must not forget that these criminals were callous and destroyed the very communities they lived in.

We must think carefully about how we address the reasons why they are in a position where looting makes sense; but we must not lose sight of the fact that they chose to loot because they thought nobody would stop them or punish them. They must be proved wrong.