Recent Articles

UK gets its first written constitution

by Sunny Hundal     October 30, 2009 at 8:07 am

Until last week, the UK was one of only three parliamentary democracies in the world not to have a written constitution, together with New Zealand and Israel.

But now, a publication of the draft constitution comes just months after Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, noted that significant constitutional changes introduced by Labour since 1997 might be a justification for ‘codification’ of the UK’s political arrangements.

Answering questions at the House of Commons Justice Committee on 14 July, the Secretary of State dismissed the idea of establishing a ‘constitutional convention’ to draft a constitution for the UK, but added, “I think however seeing whether we can get to a single text which better describes our arrangements would be a good thing.”

Taking this as an open invitation to submit a draft constitution, the research organisation Democratic Audit opted to try to stick as faithfully as possible to describing how the UK constitution works in practice.

The draft text begins with a preamble which describes the UK constitution as:

(…) a collection of laws, fictions, powers left over from the old monarchy and powers that we make up as we go along. It allows us to decide what governments can do; and best of all, only we have the power to change it.

The somewhat satirical document also seeks to draw a line under the ‘blue skies’ thinking about constitutional reform in recent months, pointing out that:

We know from long experience how to manage the public and withstand both popular agitations and the blandishments of democratic reformers and civil liberties lobbies alike. We are able generally to ride out popular storms, such as the unfortunate revelations about Parliament’s expenses regime which was after all only put in place to make up for MPs’ low salaries.

The UK’s last written constitution, ‘The Humble Petition and Advice’ of 1657 was overturned following the fall of Richard Cromwell in 1660.

Carrot and sticks: getting people back to work

by Don Paskini     October 30, 2009 at 8:03 am

The digested DWP evaluation of Provider-led Pathways to Work:

What worked well:
• finding provider staff pleasant and helpful;

• feeling that the environment within provider premises was hospitable, and a
more inviting place than Jobcentre Plus;

• meeting needs, where people felt the support received was beneficial and
appropriate;

• challenging people to think differently about their employment prospects;

• contributing to people’s progress and movements into work, by providing
encouragement, financial support and access to other helpful provision.

What didn’t work well:
• the way that provider staff are incentivised to focus on people who are considered
job ready and leave those furthest from work inadequately supported, because
of the way providers are contracted to deliver job outcomes and are paid
according to the number achieved;
continue reading… »

Guido benefits from Dorries-McBride case

by Sunny Hundal     October 29, 2009 at 4:06 pm

A couple of months ago I asked who was actually acting on behalf of Nadine Dorries MP when the “writ” was served on Damian McBride.

Was it their friend Donal Blaney? It turns out today it was.

Paul Waugh reports that, “the costs (agreed to by Mr McBride) are in the region of £2,500, so the grand total will be £3,500.”

Paul Waugh also says:

It also seems that no writs, as such, have been served.

Although, at the time, Guido Fawkes himself claimed he had served a writ and then quickly withdrew the claim.

Paul Waugh also adds that some of Mr McBride’s money will end up in Guido’s pocket.

As part of the £2,500 costs, it seems that Paul Staines (the man behind the beard) charged Ms Dorries’ lawyer Donal Blaney £75/hour for serving the legal letter on the former Number 10 man.

£75/hour is a rather tidy sum. Although it seems to contradict Guido’s own claim, when referring to damages awarded to Tom Watson MP, that: “Guido, alas, did Smeargate for pleasure…”

Perhaps what Staines meant was that he released the initial emails for pleasure but then wanted to get paid when doing some work on behalf of Tory MP Nadine Dorries.

In April Paul Staines published this cartoon referring to Nadine Dorries.

Teachers and classrooms: blaming inclusion

by Neil Robertson     October 29, 2009 at 2:28 pm

When set against the context of the number of children you’ll teach throughout a school year, incidents of violent, abusive or threatening behaviour are actually quite rare. The occasions when a pupil dreams up allegations of abuse by a teacher are rarer still, and the occasions when those false allegations result in disciplinary action or a criminal conviction are even more infrequent.

That said, everyone’s heard at least one horror story about a teacher who’s been the victim to a malicious allegation. It does happen, and more can be done at school, local authority & central government level to ensure that good and safe teachers are protected from career-destroying fairy tales. Ending the atrocious policy of isolating accused teachers from contact with their colleagues would be a good place to start.

So it’s not like I’m ambivelent to or dismissive of a problem which does prey on a lot of teachers’ minds, and the general thrust of Jenni Russell’s piece on the topic is generally correct. Still, it is a Jenni Russell piece, and so every article must contain at least one moment of eye-watering idiocy:

Classrooms are becoming more difficult to manage because the policy of inclusion means that children with emotional, mental or physical difficulties are being put into mainstream schools without the extra support they need to cope.

Whether Russell is basing this on any actual evidence is unclear, but unlikely.
continue reading… »

Tories try to salvage Kaminski again

by Newswire     October 29, 2009 at 1:20 pm

The Jewish Chronicle and various blogs are claiming today that the Chief Rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich, has criticised the New Statesman, on the row over Michal Kaminski and his links with the Conservative party.

Schudrich is quoted as saying that “it is a grotesque distortion that people are quoting me to prove that Kaminski is an anti-Semite” and “portraying Kaminski as a neo Nazi plays into the painful and false stereotype that all Poles are anti-Semitic.”

He also says that the “headline of James Macintyre article of July 29, 2009…does not represent what I said to the author”.

The New Statesman say the Chief Rabbi has never withdrawn or contested his original remarks as quoted by James Macintyre in the article dated July 29, 2009.

The Chief Rabbi wrote at the time:

Dear James,

I do not comment on political decisions. However, it is clear that Mr Kaminski was a member of NOP, a group that is openly far right and neo-nazi.

Anyone who would want to align himself with a person who was an active member of NOP and the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne (which was established to deny historical facts of the massacre at Jedwabne) needs to understand with what and by whom he is being represented.

Michael Schudrich

This was also posted to the New Statesman blog here, with more comments from other Jewish leaders.

Toby Helm writes in the Guardian today:

This is fascinating because I recently emailed Schudrich, too, and he assured me he had not retracted remarks he had made to the New Statesman some weeks ago. In those remarks he talked about the Jedwabne massacre of Jews in 1941, which is at the centre of this row.
…
This stops short of accusing Kami?ski of being an antisemite or being a neo-Nazi. But it is damning nonetheless.

What I understand is that Schudrich has been under the most enormous pressure from the highest authorities in Poland to retract the remarks, but has refused to do so. The pressure, I am told, came from Kami?ski’s Law and Justice party, the party of the Polish president.

Sunder Katwala at Next Left weighs in:

The evidence that Michal Kaminski made at least opportunistic use of anti-semitic sentiments remains strong, and efforts to refute this have unravelled. (I have not seen his response to reports that he was among those involved in the 1995 campaign against Kasniewski’s presidential bid who were pushing the story that Kasniewski’s grandmother was Jewish). As over the campaign against the massacre apology, at key moments in his career Kaminski does appear to have made an opportunist bid to use and play to quite widespread anti-semitic opinion.

Mail caught out on ‘playground paedophiles’

by Sunny Hundal     October 29, 2009 at 12:18 pm

The Daily Mail yesterday ran a story by journalist Laura Clark headlined: Parents banned from watching their children in playgrounds… in case they are paedophiles

It said:

Parents are being banned from playing with their children in council recreation areas because they have not been vetted by police.
Mothers and fathers are being forced to watch their children from outside perimeter fences because of fears they could be paedophiles.
Watford Council was branded a ‘disgrace’ yesterday after excluding parents from two fenced-off adventure playgrounds unless they first undergo criminal record checks.

Children as young as five will instead be supervised by council ‘play rangers’ who have been cleared by the Criminal Records Bureau.
Councillors insist they are merely following Government regulations and cannot allow adults to walk around playgrounds ‘unchecked’.

This prompted over 400 comments, including some gems such as:

The trouble with England now is there are too many culture’s, too many religions and too many different laws. Which culture’s laws do we follow.
Oh how i miss Henry and Queen Vic and what about Elizabeth 1
- R Pearce, Fort Lauderdale, Florida,

Naturally a Daily Mail ‘PC gone mad’ story always has something that does not quite check out.

Watford Council released a statement in response:

Contrary to reports in the media, Watford Borough Council has not banned parents from public parks and playgrounds in the town!

We have simply reiterated that the fully supervised play sessions we run at our adventure playgrounds – Harebreaks and Harwoods – are for children aged 5 -15 years old, and that parents/carers of children and young people who visit these play sessions are not able to stay on site with their children during play sessions. This reduces any potential risks to children and ensures they are able to play freely.

The adventure playground play sessions are fully supervised and we employ CRB checked staff to run the facilities in the best way they see fit.

This is no different to other fully supervised facilities, like schools, playgroups or nurseries – where adults are not allowed to stay.

Hat-tip to Angry Mob and MailWatch

Update: The Mayor releases a statement pointing out media inaccuracies:

What has happened is that at Harwoods a handful of parents have been staying on, not just dropping their kids off. After a number of incidents, staff that run the facility felt that the presence of these parents was hampering their ability to supervise the kids properly – who remember are engaging in risky play and do need to be given full attention. They’ve now brought the site in line with Harebreaks, where parents don’t stay on and they have no problems.
Quotes attributed to me have been taken out of context – I’m not saying adults shouldn’t be allowed on playgrounds – I’d go out and shoot myself if this was the case – only on these specialised play facilities! We have 40 other playgrounds elsewhere in the Borough where parents are welcome to stay.

In other news, Iain Dale in churnalism shock!

Right-wingers attack FT’s stance on Tories

by Sunny Hundal     October 29, 2009 at 9:12 am

I wrote earlier about how various Tories including ConservativeHome and Guido Fawkes had started briefing against and criticising The Daily Telegraph for not slavishly sucking up to the Cameroon project.

It seems now it’s the turn of the Financial Times to face the heat.

The Financial Times has along drawn the ire of Daniel Hannan MEP for its pro-Euro stance. He wrote in April:

I’ve mentioned before that the FT, the Eurocrats’ paper of choice, rarely deviates from its pro-Brussels line, even when this requires blatant partiality. There’s a classic example in today’s edition. The paper runs what is effect an opinion piece on its news pages, intended to discredit Declan Ganley, who led the (”some would say disingenuous”) campaign against the European Constitution Lison Treaty in Ireland.

Hannan has attacked the newspaper repeatedly.

This week, Iain Martin at the rival Wall Street Journal started ‘FT Watch’, a look at political stories in the paper that coincidentally highlight the FT’s criticism of the Conservative Party.

This was excitedly picked up by Tim Montgomerie at ConservativeHome, who added:

Iain can of course be dismissed as working for the Wall Street Journal – a big rival of the FT – but he may be on to something. We must never forget that the ‘pink one’ has backed Labour at the last FOUR General Elections, including Neil Kinnock in 1992. Dan Hannan has blogged on how the FT is Britain’s most Europhile newspaper.

The narrative gets picked up by Guido Fawkes who claims that: City Boycotting the Lefties at the Pink ‘Un, by citing some old circulation figures.

He says:

Two refugees from the Labourgraph, Patience Wheatcroft and Iain Martin,* have been drafted into the Wall Street Journal in London to strengthen the European edition. They don’t insult their readers, decry their investment banking and hedge fund employers or call for socialist solutions to our economic problems. Murdoch has consequently propelled the WSJ into becoming what is now the single biggest selling newspaper in America and also the only growing newspaper in America. As the FT’s circulation shrinks further perhaps it will decide not to support the Labour Party for a fifth general election in a row. Yes, the Pink ‘Un even backed Neil Kinnock to the huge annoyance of the readership.

The whole charade is so transparent it’s amusing. Even the talking points are the same.

Iain Dale predictably joined the bandwagon with: “[Iain Martin] has launched a one man campaign to hold the Financial Times to account for its apparent anti-Tory bias.”

No doubt the Spectator will latch on soon and the circle will be complete.

A newspaper not convinced by the Tories? How dare they…

What will Fraser Nelson go for next?

by Unity     October 29, 2009 at 8:30 am

It was the question that The Spectator’s recent foray in HIV-AIDS denialism was bound to spawn: “What next by the Spectator? ‘Questioning the evolution consensus‘ perhaps?”

Next? Not exactly….try ‘Been there, done that’

Creating an insult to intelligence

Listening to the Today programme this morning, I was irritated once again by yet another misrepresentation of Intelligent Design as a form of Creationism. In an item on the growing popularity of Intelligent Design, John Humphrys interviewed Professor Ken Miller of Brown University in the US who spoke on the subject last evening at the Faraday Institute, Cambridge. Humphrys suggested that Intelligent Design might be considered a kind of middle ground between Darwinism and Creationism. Miller agreed but went further, saying that Intelligent Design was nothing more than an attempt to repackage good old-fashioned Creationism and make it more palatable.

But this is totally untrue.

Melanie Phillips – Coffeehouse, 29th April 2009

Few could be said to have Mel’s expertise in the field of insulting people’s intelligence, she does it so regularly and with so little effort. But it’s worth putting a bit of context to her remarks if only to drive home a couple of important points.
continue reading… »

TUC calls for £6 an hour minimum wage

by Newswire     October 29, 2009 at 7:49 am

The TUC has called for raising the adult National Minimum Wage (NMW) by 20p to £6 an hour today.

It will meet the Low Pay Commission today, which advises Government on the NMW, and is currently considering the rates for the period from October 2010 to September 2011.

The TUC will recommend that this 3.5 per cent rise in the adult NMW is both sensible and affordable.

The adult minimum wage is currently £5.80. Workers aged 18-20 get £4.83 and those aged 16 and 17 will get £3.57. The TUC recommends those rates are raised to £6, £5 and £3.69.

The TUC says it believes that:

an increase in the NMW is required to ensure that the earnings of low paid workers do not fall behind the rest of the country. Average earnings are expected to increase during the period that will be covered by the next LPC recommendation, so too small a rise in the NMW would leave working families in poverty;

the 20p increase would benefit around one million vulnerable workers and help address the gender pay gap, as two in three (66 per cent) of those benefitting will be female. Women workers, workers from ethnic minority backgrounds, those with disabilities, and younger and older workers are among the groups who will benefit most;

a boost in the NMW would help to stimulate consumer spending, as low paid workers tend to spend nearly all of their NMW increases in the local economy. The 20p per hour increase in the NMW would generate around £400 million worth of extra spending, which would help offset the cost of the increase;

TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said: “It is predictable that some employer groups are saying that any increase in the minimum wage will threaten jobs and that £6 is too much.”

“However, raising the minimum wage has already helped thousands of families without causing significant job losses. The effect of a further reasonable increase on employer pay bills will be modest, and companies should find them easy to absorb.”

More on their website

Tories rewarded for misconduct and greed

by Newswire     October 28, 2009 at 3:55 pm

There have been two stories in this past week that neatly sum up the current state of play in Tory London.

Last week a Conservative member of Boris Johnson’s Fire Authority was suspended from Brent council for serious misconduct.

Understandably there were immediate calls for her to stand down from her position on LFEPA.

However, rather than stand down, it soon became clear that the Tories actually wanted to promote her to a new role as Deputy Chair.

…more at Tory Troll