Recent Articles

What would the Tories say about this?

by Claude Carpentieri     January 29, 2010 at 11:32 am

Yesterday it emerged that a former city worker living in a £500,000 home in East Sussex may have killed her own two children aged 2 and 3. They were found locked in the back of her Nissan and the post-mortem said they asphyxiated.

But the main point is this. According to the Daily Mail, Mrs Donnison and her husband had just split up. In fact, “the couple’s marriage had been falling apart for a long time”, adding extra strains on the woman.

No doubt if Iain Duncan Smith’s tax break for married couples had been already in place the two would still be together. Under the Tories’ proposals, with children under 3 the Donnisons would have been entitled to a tax allowance.

And surely an extra twenty or thirty quid extra a month would have helped them patch their differences and nipped family arguments in the bud.

Yesterday I wrote about a similarly disturbing case.
continue reading… »

Liberty: Defenders of Free Speech or Free Publicity?

by Unity     January 28, 2010 at 4:45 pm

It’s often said that pride comes/goes before a fall.

In the case of public figures, it’s always struck me that the thing that most often seems lead to their downfall is that, over time, they come to believe in their own publicity. Margaret Thatcher is, perhaps, a case in point. Could the obvious inflexibility and intransigence she demonstrated during the latter part of her period of office, even with her own Cabinet ministers, have arisen simply because she had come to believe in her own public image as the ‘Iron Lady’.

That’s really a question for historians and future biographers to speculate on. For our purposes its enough to take the view that such things are possible and that the effort it takes to live up to a carefully constructed public image may well have untended and unfortunate consequences and side-effects.

Bearing that in mind, I’m becoming just a little worried that Liberty is starting to head down that same route and that its increasingly trying just a little bit too hard to live up to a public image that has, for the most part, been built up simply by picking the bushels of low-hanging fruit created for it by New Labour. continue reading… »

Lefties – stop chasing the Chilcot farce

by Flying Rodent     January 28, 2010 at 2:33 pm

I haven’t been paying too much attention to the ongoing Chilcot Inquiry, largely because I’m cynically assuming it’s going to return a verdict of Whoops, 100% Accidental Bloodbath, Tut-Tut.

I am, however, loving the reactions it’s bringing out around the internet.

Twittering anti-war lefty types seem to veer from cold suspicion to outbursts of wild optimism every time generic civil servant (x) makes a vague admission that yes, the case for war may possibly have been full of bullshit.

Why this should be, I have no idea. Obviously the case for war was crammed to bursting with bullshit, bulging and groaning at the seams. Hilariously though, this inquiry marks at least the third time that the British state has told the anti-war left that the word gullible isn’t in the dictionary, and the third instance of enthusiastic, puppy-eyed lefties saying Really? Surely not, rushing off to check the OED.

I imagine that Chilcot will cast Tony Blair as a shifty, pompous, dishonest twerp who sent the armed forces into a boiling disaster, much as an inquiry into Myra Hindley’s behaviour would probably raise doubts over her suitability for childminding duties. Sadly, the chances of it finding criminal culpability in the former PM’s aggressive warmaking are somewhere between jack and shit, and Jack just nipped into Ladbrokes to put a whopping great bet on a whitewash.

I guess this is my point – the question of the war’s legality is an enticing carrot for anti-war types to chase in perpetuity. I’m working on the assumption that for some, a fiery official condemnation would prove them right once and for all and force the nation to face reality, as if the last seven years weren’t quite real enough.

Whether Chilcot nails Blair’s balls to the floor or not, the war’s defenders are not about to throw up their hands in horror and join in the massive bout of Bodysnatchers-style finger-pointing and howling. There will be no Thank you protestors for being right about this epic clusterfuck after-show party.

A sizeable number of the war’s cheerleaders have cheerfully blown off its horrific consequences, from the Iraqi insurgents’ bloodbaths, through the sectarian death squads and the ensuing civil war and micro-partitioning of the country, by waving their hands and chanting the magical exculpatory incantation, Al-Qaeda terrorists ate our homework!

These people would rather cram their scrotums down their own throats than give an inch to Chilcot, and the odds of say, the Times, running a Sorry we fed you all lies editorial are woeful.

Further, regardless of the outcome, the former PM isn’t going to be clapped in irons, chained to a heavy radiator and thrown into the Thames. He’s going to continue shambling around the world jamming great fistfuls of dollars into his pockets in the full glare of the public eye.

No, the only service the inquiry can perform is to utterly expose the lunacy at the heart of our decision to join the Americans in their deranged Iraq enterprise, and to make sure the lesson is drummed into the public one more time, hard enough to prevent even partial repeats. Here’s a brief recap of exactly how we wound up taking part…

Let’s recall that the Americans invaded Iraq to fend off Iraqi aggression.

I’ll write that again, for clarity. The United States – the world’s only remaining superpower, with a defence budget of five hundred billion dollars per annum – invaded the castrated, two-soldiers-in-a-Fiat-Panda dictatorship of Iraq in self-defence.

Now, I can already hear the objections about Tony Blair’s humanitarian agenda, but none of that matters at all. Tony wasn’t in charge – the US was deploying the most terrifying military machine in history, and made it clear they could squash the Iraqi military like an asthmatic beetle without our help.

This was the Bush White House’s war, and they wouldn’t start babbling about painting schools and helping those poor women vote until the collapse of Iraq had turned the country into the Hammer House of Horror. Their justifications were the terrifying, anthrax-filled model planes that Saddam might use to genocide Dogdick, Alabama and those awful mushroom clouds that would be shaped like smoking guns, or whatever.

And the plan? The plan went like this – Invade Iraq = Freedom!

You know when you’ve got a suitcase that’s so full you can’t shut it, and you wedge everything down and shove a fork through the zipper and pull to no avail, and eventually two of your mates have to sit on the damn thing until you eventually get the bulging, straining case shut?

That is just how full of bullshit the case for war was.

The Americans were standing, pumped-up and raring to dive into the new Vietnam they’ve been looking for ever since they fled the original with their tails between their legs, loudly bellowing that they would totally have kicked those skinny pyjama guys asses, if their buddies hadn’t stopped them…

…And the former Prime Minister looked at this situation and thought, This looks like the kind of ultraviolent dipshit escapade I could really get my teeth into!

So there’s your one and only question for the PM on Friday – What the hell were you thinking, numbnuts?

Of course, we know the answer to that one, but I don’t think it’ll do the country any harm to hear Tony Blair spell out his reasoning, one more time.

How social media will affect politics: at Progressive London

by Sunny Hundal     January 28, 2010 at 10:30 am

I’ve been asked to speak at the Progressive London conference this Saturday, on the subject of how blogs and social media will affect the political climate and maybe even the upcoming election.

You may have read a fair bit on the growing prominence of leftwing blogs recently and, where the analysis has come from right-wing bloggers, most of it has been horse-shit. Lefties have been making a lot of noise recently on blogs and Twitter – I won’t deny that. But much has been speculation and back-scratching rather than straightforward strategic planning and thinking.

My talk at Progressive London will be the first attempt to lay out some thoughts on where LibCon could go and how. Next week from Monday I’m going to write some thoughts here on our editorial policy, how the left needs to do things differently and how we could prepare for a Tory government.

New Labour may be in power and the Tories may think lefties control the establishment, but make no mistake: we are on the outskirts. We are not the establishment. We face a tightly organised conservative machine, aided by a growing group of front organisations, that further the Tory agenda. It’s time we became more unashamedly partisan about our agenda.

I don’t know of any other blog that gets so many right-wingers coming on to say what they think should be published or what we shouldn’t write about. This blog isn’t for a “balanced debate” and neither is it for right-whingers. It is here to reflect the broad range of left-wing thinking and to promote others to build a new left-wing movement. More on this on Saturday and next week.

Constituent harassed by Telegraph readers after sending email to Tory PPC

by Unity     January 27, 2010 at 4:51 pm

Let’s try a bit of word association… James Delingpole..?

I’m guessing that ‘climate change denier’ was probably the first thing that came to mind, although having read George Monbiot’s latest missive on CiF, ‘vicious douchebag’ seems rather more apt.

On Sunday, Delingpole posted this on his blog at the Telegraph:

The Warmists are looking increasingly foolish and wrong. But they aren’t going to go down without a fight. Consider, Exhibit A, this nauseating email currently being sent out to Conservative candidates. It seems that in the last week a couple of hundred Tory candidates have received variations on the theme below. Note that these emails do not come from a named organisation but from individual voters in each of the different prospective parliamentary candidates’ constituencies.

The text of the email in question, which he also posted, goes like this:

Dear Edwin Northover

I was concerned to note the results of a survey of 140 Conservative candidates for parliament that suggested that climate change came right at the bottom of their priorities for government action.

I hope you can reassure me that you recognise the importance and success of climate change action by the UK government at home and internationally.

Can you clarify that:

You accept that climate change is caused by human activity?

Do you support the target to achieve 15% renewable energy by 2020?

Do you support the EU imposing tougher regulation to combat climate change?

Kind Regards, *** ***”.

Not only does that look to be a perfectly polite and reasonable enquiry but it looks, to me at least, very much like the kind of  simple fill-in-the-blanks form email that’s pretty much a staple tool of internet-based campaigning.

In other words, it about as far from ‘stalking’ – the term Delingpole used in the title of his post – as its possible to get. continue reading… »

The press and impossibility of legal highs

by Guest     January 27, 2010 at 3:46 pm

contribution by Left Outside

Last year a girl died following allegedly consuming a mixture of Ketamine and Mephedrone.

A following coroner’s report established that there were no drugs in her system and that she died of broncho-pneumonia following a streptococcal A infection.

The reporting of this at the time should have been described as scandalously irresponsible by any sensible definition of the term.

continue reading… »

S. Times article on blonde warriors “fabricated”

by Sunny Hundal     January 27, 2010 at 2:19 pm

The Sunday Times published an article last week with the headline: ‘Blonde women born to be warrior princesses‘.

It claimed:

Researchers claim that blondes are more likely to display a “warlike” streak because they attract more attention than other women and are used to getting their own way — the so-called “princess effect”.
…
The findings about aggression are contained in research by the University of California, Santa Barbara, to discover whether women who are judged more attractive than others are also more likely to lose their tempers to get what they want.

“We expected blondes to feel more entitled than other young women — this is southern California, the natural habitat of the privileged blonde,” said Aaron Sell, who led the study which has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. “What we did not expect to find was how much more warlike they are than their peers on campus.

However, the professor named in the study, Dr. Aaron Sell, has claimed that the article was completely “fabricated” and has demanded the Sunday Times take it down.

In a letter posted on his website he said:

Journalistic ethics requires, at a minimum, that you remove from this article all references to me, and to the research I and my collaborators have conducted. This article consists almost entirely of empirical claims and quotes about blonde women that Mr. Harlow fabricated, and then attributed to me. Please take the article offline immediately. Once your investigation is completed, please issue a retraction. I trust that the Times is committed to being accurate, and the clearest measure of this is the speed with which it removes obvious and demonstrable falsehoods. I have appended the research article, so you can see for yourself.

To be clear, I have _never_ published any research about blonde women, nor have I ever conducted any research on blonde women, or about their supposed differences from other women. Yet I am quoted throughout Harlow’s article as having done research showing that blonde women are more aggressive, are more determined to get their own way, are more militaristic, are less likely to get into fights, are more prone to anger, are more confident, are more entitled, and feel more attractive. None of this is true. The article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that he cites as establishing these claims has no data whatsoever about women with blonde versus non-blonde hair. You can confirm this in 15 seconds by searching on the word “blonde” in the .pdfs I have attached.

Ouch!

The response was picked up by other websites, one of which angrily said:

I hope American and British readers (and readers throughout the world) will finally wake up to the reality of British journalism: You just cannot believe what you read in British newspapers. I’d further call on my academic colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic never to speak to British reporters. You have absolutely no control over what they say about you and your scientific research.

The story by the Sunday Times was also picked up by the BBC, which presumably failed to do any extra fact-checking and was forced to issue a retraction at the end of the article.

The Sunday Times however hasn’t even bothered to amend the original article, let alone taking it down as Aaron Sell demanded.

He is still attributed to having conducted research and making statements he denies doing.

(via Ben Goldacre on Twitter)

Americans vote for higher taxes on rich, business

by Don Paskini     January 27, 2010 at 1:40 pm

Voters in the American state of Oregon voted yesterday on two ballot initiatives to raise the minimum taxes paid by corporations and increase marginal tax rates on people earning more than $250,000 per year.

Both proposals passed, with 54% support for higher taxes on the rich and 53.4% support for higher taxes on corporations. Apparently, this is the first time that voters in the state have supported a tax increase by ballot initiative since the 1930s.

It is a victory for local Democrats and their union allies, thanks to large turnout by traditional Democratic supports.

It means that rather than planning for spending cuts, the state legislature can focus on new spending priorities.

I’ll be interested to hear how the great and the good analysts who have been telling us that the Democrats have been losing because they have been too ‘liberal’ and ‘big government’ explain this results.

More information here and here.

Boris too busy for police but not Telegraph column

by Sunny Hundal     January 27, 2010 at 12:58 pm

London’s occasional Mayor Boris Johnson today announced he was stepping down from the Metropolitan Police Authority as chair.

This is despite the fact he campaigned for Mayor on the issue of crime, saying he would take charge and make policing his top priority.

According to The Times he made the decision due to time commitments.

He said:

I think in view of the changes that are coming to the MPA, in view of the reforms that are under way, it would be a good thing if we changed the chair of the MPA, and I am proposing to stand down.

I can reassure you and reassure members of the MPA that my links with the commissioner [Sir Paul Stephenson] are as strong and as robust as ever.

However, Boris Johnson is not giving up his weekly column for the Daily Telegraph, worth an annual £250,000.

Jenny Jones, who sits on the London assembly as a Green party member, today said:

The mayor made a clear commitment to Londoners in his election manifesto to personally take charge of the police authority. He has now gone back on his word, realising that being both mayor and chair of the MPA is just too much for one person to do properly.

It was an ill thought-out promise, and one that showed his lack of experience. The Met are facing difficult times ahead, with budgets being cut in all areas. The chair of the MPA needs to take the time to understand this complex organisation to provide effective leadership.

Blogger Jim Jepps asks: “What’s worse, making a promise and breaking it or making a stupid promise that you could never keep in the first place? I can’t quite make up my mind.”

Update: Adam Bienkov at Tory Troll adds:

Quite where that leaves the Tories’ reported plans to make Boris police commissioner is anyone’s guess.

But with their other plan to scrap the MPA altogether, this could all just be a move to distance Boris from it ahead of time.

Also on Boris Watch and Left Foot Forward.

Boris Watch also points out Boris has consigned other roles to the dust too. The Telegraph column remains though.

Immigrants getting the VIP treatment?

by Septicisle     January 27, 2010 at 12:39 pm

Here’s one of those especially crass Sun articles written with the type of feigned ignorance so prevalent in the tabloids:

ILLEGAL immigrants are getting the VIP treatment when booted out of Britain – with personal security escorts costing almost £500 each.

Yes, you read that right – the VIP treatment. I don’t know what VIP means to you, but I somehow doubt that those who considered themselves such would put up for long with what the average failed asylum seeker or illegal immigrant faces prior to their deportation, often provided by the same private security firms.

The last report into Colnbrook (PDF) immigration removal centre, ran by Serco (glossy corporate, touchy-feely everything is wonderful page), where many are held prior to their deportation due to its location near to Heathrow, found that it was struggling to cope and that safety was a significant concern.

The reason why “personal security escorts” are used is twofold – firstly because there are few officials and staff within the UK Border Agency who are authorised to use force and as result many first attempts to deport individuals are abandoned because those whose time has come dare to resist – and secondly as many within the UKBA are not prepared to actually see the policies which they implement put into effect.
continue reading… »