Talk:Jonathan Sayeed

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Sources

Are there any better sources for BBC Bias in Coverage of Jonathan's Ruin. I've tagged it with {{citecheck}} because the current source is a blog, which is not a reliable source. --h2g2bob (talk) 17:51, 3 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Presumably the BBC News Online is a reliable source about news coverage on BBC News Online? I have listed all the stories about both scandals.

The reason for quoting the source you describe as a blog is that I searched for sources on the Sayeed scandal. Having checked and quoted sources in the article, it does seem that this source has a fair point.--Toddy1 19:12, 3 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The blog is not a reliable source, and the rest is original research, synthesing BBC reports to reach a novel conclusion not referenced in reliable sources. -BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:12, 3 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

changes to the Nuclear non proliferation treaty

The old version of this article claimed that Jonathan Sayeed "proposed sweeping changes to the Nuclear non proliferation treaty - some of which were subsequently adopted". No sources were given for this assertion, and I have been unable to verify it, so I have deleted it.--Toddy1 19:56, 3 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Article needs cleanup

I'm afraid that the major expansion of this article being done by today by Toddy1 (talk · contribs) has introduced a huge number of problems. It is going to take a while to list them all, but they include:

WP:MOS prolems, such as referring to him as Jonathan rather than as Sayeed; making wikilinks in headlines
Listing all his parliamentary election results; those belong in the articles on the comnstituencies

However, the big problem is the section headed BBC Bias in Coverage of Jonathan's Ruin. It's based on a combination of original research and reporting in an blog (which is not a WP:reliable source). The section should be deleted entirely.

Similarly, the table of his expenses appears to be WP:OR designed to contradict the findings of the standards committee. If a reliable source make criticisms of the committee or its findings, it';s fine to report those, but original research in defence of the subject of an article is no more acceptable than research designed to discredit him. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:03, 3 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Comments on Alleged Faults

(1) WP:MOS problems, such as referring to him as Jonathan rather than as Sayeed

fixed--Toddy1 21:32, 3 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

(2) making wikilinks in headlines

fixed--Toddy1 21:35, 3 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

(3) Listing all his parliamentary election results; those belong in the articles on the constituencies

They are listed in the articles on the constituencies. In the case of the 1997 election result, it was missing in the constituency article, so I added it, quoting sources. Given that sources looked at claimed Jonathan increased his majority, it seems appropriate to quote the election results.--Toddy1 21:32, 3 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well done adding the 1997 result to the constit article, but it should have stayed in that article :) It's one thing to quote a bare summary of the results, such "his majorty doubled to x votes, a y% share" but reproducing the whole set results merely duplicates info. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:31, 3 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

(4) Bias in BBC.

The idea that is original research to check the sources quoted by a possibly unreliable source is bizarre. Especially as the sources consist of an internet site that anyone can look at without much effort.--Toddy1 21:32, 3 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It's not the checking of the sources that is the problem, but the fact that you used that checking to create a synthesis and a set of value judgments which are not reported in any reliable source. Please do re-read WP:OR#Reliable_sources: "Producing a reliable published source that advances the same claim taken in context is the only way to disprove an assertion that a claim constitutes original research". --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:31, 3 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

(5) the table of his expenses appears to be WP:OR

It is not original research. It is quoted from a reliable source, which is quoted in the article.--Toddy1 21:32, 3 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I have checked again, and I'm sorry: it's a straight copy of the table at http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/jonathan_sayeed/mid_bedfordshire#expenses , which is probably a copyvio (the actual data is almost certainly crown copyright, but theyworkforyou has a copyright in presentation and in compilation, and I see no disclaimer of that on their site). However, it was also bring used as evidence for a WP:OR conclusion, that Sayeed's expenses were "fairly typical" ... and my OR suggests that this is wrong, since his 2002/3 expenses were 18th out of 650 MPs and his Additional Costs Allowance was top the class that year. (But since both our views are OR, neither should be used in the article)

The committee made a judgment on Sayeed's expenses, and it would be fine to quote a balanced selection of the reactions to that judgment, and probably to link the table of expenses. But there was no reliable source for the conclusions offered.

Sorry that so much of the above was negative; I thought that it was important to draw your attention to the problems quickly. But comparing the article now with its state before you started, it's also clear that you have added a heck of a lot of well-sourced materail and expanded the article enormously. Well done! :) --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:46, 3 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Expenses. I have added a listing of total amounts and how these compared with other MPs.--Toddy1 00:14, 4 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

That's better, but I am afraid that it's still not there, and I have reinstated the POV tags which I removed over-hastily last night, and specifically tagged the two problematic sections.

I am concerned firstly that the purpose of including the table of expenses is to offer some sort of mitigation to the issues for which he was force to apologise, by contrasting the misdemeanours with an allegedly moderate level of expense claims. But it seems to me that this is an irrelevance: the issue at stake was not the total amount of his expenses, but the fact that he claimed expenses for things which he was not entitled to be reimbursed for. I think taht ven the list of expense total should be removed as a distraction.

However, the expenses sections just notes that he was "criticised by the House of Commons Committee on Standards and Privileges for his use of allowances and Parliament's stationary". Crucially, it also does not say that he was required to make a second apology to the House of Commons, and that he was asked to withdraw the criticisms which he had made of the committee in his previous apology (see [[1]]). Those criticisms are reported earlier in the article, but I don't see any note of whether that retraction was made.

I'm sure that this tangle arose in good faith, and I think that some of the missing bit may be a consequence of the article's structure. It seesm to me that the story of Sayeed's two sets of dealings with the standards commissioner and the Standards and Privileges Committee in late 2004/early 2005 should be kept together. There is a lot of detail in the "ruin" section, and I don't feel that it yet explains clearly what happened. It might be helpful to draw up a timeline here on the talk page, to illustrate the flow of events, and check that all the bits are in place.

Hope this helps. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:29, 4 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The Expenses Section was originally intended as a copy of the table showing his expenses for the last 4 years as an MP, and his retirement expenses. I found it shocking that they were so high, and equally shocking that they seemed to be typical figures. I take your point about his 2002/3 expenses being 18th out of 657 MPs, but as his expenses for the next few years were about the same, these merely seems to show that this level of expenses has become typical, and that Jonathan Sayeed merely reached this level a year earlier.

After adding the table, I added some text in front of the table to add context.

I do not see that the total amount of his expenses in any way rebuts the criticisms made about his expenses by the House of Commons Committee on Standards and Privileges. (Though clearly you do.)

I do feel that knowing the total amount of his expenses is useful for several reasons:

The article is a biography of Mr Sayeed. It helps to understand him.
Mr Sayeed was criticised for some of his expenses. It adds context to know what the total amount is.

I have put the article on his ruin in time order. Yes I know that the announcement made on 14th March 2005 about his retiring was made before the announcement on 17th March that the Conservative whip had been withdrawn. I assume that Mr Sayeed was told this was going to happen some days before the announcement, and that his 'retirement' on 'grounds of ill health' was a face-saving gesture. (You would expect it to be that way. Very few organisations are so cruel as to make public announcements about their members without telling the members concerned first.)

Suggestion. What if I created a Section called Annex - Expenses after the references. This could have the full table. However it is difficult to find neutral words to reference this from the section on his ruin. One way of doing this might be to say that the expenses criticised were £XX,XXX, compared with his total annual expenses of £XXX,XXX.

If we adopted the Annex structure, this would also have annexes listing the information published in the Register of Interests, and one listing the four different people he had as assistants/researchers. Though the published information on his assistants/researchers does not give dates - it seems that Miss Wolf and Mrs Messervy were paid assistants all the time he was MP for Mid-Beds. The other two seem to have been temporary - I do not know how long he employed them.

Please advise on what you think best.--Toddy1 11:05, 4 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think that you offer an interesting set of opinions about the expenses, and it would be interesting to sit down some day and chat about it. But in the context of this article, your thoughts or mine on the total amount of his expenses or the relationship between those totals and the sums misused is relevant only if it is flagged as a relevant issue in a reliable source, in which case we can use primary sources to verify the amount. That's central to WP:NOR and WP:RS; wikipedia is a tertiary source, not a secondary one, and as such it doesn't seek to draw conclusions from primary sources, just to record the balance of conclusions which others have drawn from them. I think that a general link to theyworkforyou.com in the external links section is as far as it's safe to go on that issue.

Similarly, I would think that a list of his staff would be inappropriate, unless the list itself was judged as significant in a reliable source. I have missed something, but it seems that the only staff member relevant to the article was Alexandra Messervy, because of her two sets of conflict of interest (through the company and as constituency chair).

I have not see anything in WP:MOS or WP:MOSHEAD supporting the use of an "annex" structure for an article; my understanding is that the idea is to tell a story not to write a structured report, and that annexes would be seen as something belonging in a report. Do you want to check and see if I have missed anything? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:57, 4 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Context

On the subject of context, Mr Sayeed's replacement as MP for Mid-Bedfordshire (Nadine Dorries) used House of Commons stationary in support of the Conservative candidate in a council by-election. To me this seems a far more serious offence than sending letters to members of the constituency party explaining why he was in trouble with the House of Commons Committee on Standards and Privileges.--Toddy1 11:05, 4 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

You may be right, but again per WP:RS and WP:OR, we have to rely on any comparisons made in secondary sources, such as reports of the Standards Commissioner or the Standards+Privelige ctte, or newspaper reports. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:01, 4 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Information Deleted from the Article by Editors

The following information was deleted from the article by editors for reasons explained above.--80.254.147.68 (talk) 14:32, 29 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Jonathan Sayeed's Parliamentary Election Results

	Bristol East			Mid Bedfordshire
	1983	1987	1992	1997	2001
Conservative	19,844	21,906	19,726	24,176	22,109
Labour	18,055 Tony Benn	17,783 R.R. Thomas	22,418 Jean Corston	17,086 Neil Mallett	14,043 James Valentine
Liberal	10,404 P.E. Tyrer	10,247 Don Foster	7,903 John Kiely	8,823 Tim J. Hill	9,205 Graham Mabbutt
Other	343 E.H. Andrews NF (UK)	286 P.M. Kingston Ind NF	270 I.H.M. Anderson NF	2,257 Shirley Marler Referendum	1,281 Chris Laurence UKIP
Other	311 G.A. Dorey Ecology			174 Marek J. Lorys Natural Law
Turnout	73.9%	78.7%	80.3%	78.9%	65.9%
Result	Con Gain	Con Hold	Lab Gain	Con Hold	Con Hold
Source				1997 Election 1997 & 2001 elections

BBC Bias in Coverage of Jonathan Sayeed's Ruin

BBC News Online's coverage of the scandal involving Jonathan Sayeed was "fulsome and detailed, leaving no doubt that Sayeed was, to use their term, a Tory."^[1] "It had headlines such as Sayeed to stand down as Tory MP and Tour row MP loses Tory party whip."^[1]

At about the same time there was a scandal involving a Labour Government minister, Chris Pond who was "arrested after launching a violent attack on a young mother's house".^[2] BBC News Online's coverage was sparse; it had a story MP cautioned for criminal damage. "Nowhere in the headline or even in the story is it mentioned that Chris Pond is a Labour MP. Nor is it mentioned in the headline that Pond is a government minister".^[1]

"As with much BBC bias, either of these stories, Sayeed or Pond, taken in isolation, would be fine. It is when you put them together and compare the detailed coverage of 'Tory' Sayeed with the bland coverage of 'MP' Pond that the BBC's 'angle' becomes apparent. If Pond were a Conservative Minister in a Conservative government in the run up to a general election you could bet that the BBC, along with much of Fleet Street, would be much more interested in his story, leading bulletins with it and generally baying for his head. Lucky for Pond that he's not a 'Tory'."^[1]

The following table lists all the stories on BBC News Online about both the Sayeed and Pond scandals, together with their dates and headlines.

Stories on BBC News on:
Jonathan Sayeed scandal	Cris Pond scandal
2 Feb 2005 Tory MP awaits standards inquiry	MP cautioned for criminal damage
3 Feb 2005 MP to be suspended from Commons
8 Feb 2005 Commons suspends Tory MP Sayeed
18 Feb 2005 Commons tour row MP survives vote
14 Mar 2005 Sayeed to stand down as Tory MP
18 Mar 2005 Tour row MP loses Tory party whip
23 Mar 2005 Tour row Tory MP says sorry again
3 Apr 2005 Candidate chosen for Sayeed seat
10 Apr 2005 End of Commons road for four MPs
20 Jul 2005 Ex-Tory MP 'deplored' by watchdog
10 stories 6 mention "Tory" in headline	1 story None mention "Labour" in headline

References

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Biased BBC: March 2005
This source is regarded by some people as a 'Blog', and therefore unreliable. However, its content have been verified against original sources, which are listed in this wikipedia article.
^ The Mail on Sunday, 20 Mar 2005 Minister arrested for attack on young mother

Jonathan_Sayeed#Back_to_Business

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[BiasedBBC-1] Biased BBC: March 2005
This source is regarded by some people as a 'Blog', and therefore unreliable. However, its content have been verified against original sources, which are listed in this wikipedia article.

[2] The Mail on Sunday, 20 Mar 2005 Minister arrested for attack on young mother

[1]

[2]