Recent Articles

Does the British media hate the NHS?

by Guest     November 29, 2010 at 11:05 am

contribution by ‘AlienfromZOG‘

Yesterday saw the release of the Dr Foster 2010 Hospital Guide. This is an interesting piece of research, done by an independent agency which gives a lot of information as to how the NHS is functioning.

Here’s a representative sample of how it is being reported:
BBC: ‘Deaths concern for NHS Trusts‘
Sky News: ‘Alarm over high NHS hospital death rates‘
The Telegraph: ‘Death rates at 19 hospitals alarmingly high‘
The Guardian: ‘Exposed: the hospitals whose high death rates are failing the NHS‘
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Report: auditors propped up bad banks

by Paul Cotterill     November 29, 2010 at 10:00 am

The leftie blogosphere has been somewhat taken up recently with coverage and analysis of the student protests, and rightly so.

But in so doing this potentially huge story of rank corruption at the heart of the world’s banking industry risks being relegated to the obscure inside pages of the financial press, when it could do with being on the front pages of the papers that the occupying students hopefully get given by helpers from the outside.

It’s certainly educational, and may help with the formulation of demands……

Hats off to Nigel Lawson, the closet revolutionary. Get it? The auditors didn’t say the banks might go bust, because they knew the taxpayer would bail them out anyway.

The riches of bankers, the bankers would have us believe, are in keeping with their roles as go-getting risk takers and entrepreneurs who bring wealth. This is a lie.

And why didn’t the auditors do their job?

Well, just like the Credit Rating Agencies, the way they make their money best is by not doing their job, because they depend on those same banks for their lucrative contracts.

As Francice at the brilliantly forensic Re The Auditors blog says:

Their complacency is calculated. They are much too tied into the work, and the millions in fees, that have been generated by the aftermath of the crisis.

And just like the Credit Rating Agencies, the audit firms might make a suitable target for what it is increasingly obvious is legitimate peaceful protest.

You hear that, you students?

A response to Politburo chief Sayeeda Warsi

by Guest     November 29, 2010 at 9:00 am

contribution by Adam White

Ed Miliband will by now have received a letter from Baroness Warsi, Tory Party Chairman, and current front-runner for most irritating person in British politics.

In said letter, she flags up comments made by Hayes and Harlington MP, and LRC Chair John McDonnell, at this weekend’s Coalition of Resistance Conference in London. John noted that when the formation of a Government requires its participants to blatantly ignore one of their key election pledges, people have little other choice than to utilise their democratic rights to protest.
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Senior academics call for Commission on uni fees

by Sunny Hundal     November 29, 2010 at 8:27 am

The Daily Telegraph will today publish a letter signed by senior academics (see below) calling upon the government to abandon its plans to reform higher education funding on the basis of the Browne report.

Intsead, they say, the Coalition should establish a Public Commission of Enquiry to examine the entire structure of higher education from first principles.

The Telegraph is running a front page news story to complement the letter.

The academics say they are are deeply concerned about the further marketisation of higher education and believe that the government is being reckless in seeking to push through a vote on this matter, even before a White Paper has been properly considered.

The letter has been organised by Dr Michael Collin, UCL Department of History

The full letter is here.

The signatories include:

Sir Harold Kroto KCB FRS, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry, University of Sussex (Nobel Prize 1996)
Sir Christopher Bayly FBA FRSL, Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial History, University of Cambridge
Hermione Lee CBE FBA FRSL, Goldsmith’s Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford (1998-2008)
Linda Colley CBE FBA, Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History, Princeton University
John Dainton FRSA FRS, Sir James Chadwick Professor of Physics, University of Liverpool
Christopher Pelling FBA, Regius Professor of Greek, University of Oxford
Quentin Skinner FBA, Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities, University of London
Jonathan Tennyson FRS, Massey Professor of Physics, University College London
Christopher Wickham FBA, Chair of the Faculty of History, University of Oxford
Richard Carwardine FBA, Rhodes Professor of American History, University of Oxford (2002-2009)
Mary Beard FBA, Professor of Classics, University of Cambridge
Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics, University College London
Stefan Collini FBA, Professor of English Literature, University of Cambridge
David Colquhoun FRS, Professor of Pharmacology, University College London
Robert Gildea FBA, Professor of Modern History, University of Oxford

Since when did rape become funny?

by Guest     November 28, 2010 at 11:28 am

contribution by Emma Poole

I watched a recorded episode of ‘Russell Howard’s Good News’ this week – I couldn’t even enjoy the funny bits. The show was fragmented by the host’s jokes about rape and paedophilia. I don’t find them funny. They make me feel sick. They give me nightmares.

This show is not alone, I can name many, ‘QI’, ‘Mock The Week’, ‘My Name Is Earl’, ‘Desperate Housewives’. Many films too now have jokes about rape, either male or female.

I am guessing there are many in the public who find this hilarious.
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The politics of England’s surviving windmills

by Mark Pack     November 28, 2010 at 9:49 am

I recently spent a couple of days visiting some of England’s surviving windmills with a couple of friends. Though it was a holiday rather than a deliberate exercise in political education, two political points came out clearly.

One, which I’ve blogged about previously, is how the windmill not only used to be a key part of the English landscape but also, in its horizontal axis / vertical sail form, is an English invention.
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Gambling on Blackjack is how our food supplies are priced

by Guest     November 27, 2010 at 1:12 pm

The financial crisis has exposed the danger of unregulated financial markets and bankers getting it incredibly wrong, and how we suffer the consequences of those actions.

But what happens when people gamble with food?

Since the 1990s, the architecture of regulation set up by Franklin Roosevelt to prevent financial speculation on food has been systematically torn down by recent governments in thrall to lobbyists from Wall Street and the City of London.
continue reading… »

Richard North makes racial slur; scrubs it

by Sunny Hundal     November 27, 2010 at 12:09 pm

You may have heard of Richard North if you follow the debates around global warming and climate science.

North has been near the forefront of peddling climate change denying rubbish in the British media.

• He co-authored an article with Jonathan Leake of the Sunday Times stating the global body IPCC had made an “unsubstantiated claim” that up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest could be sensitive to future changes in rainfall. The Sunday Times was eventually forced to make a major apology for the article.
• North also co-authored an article for the Sunday Telegraph with false claims about the IPCC’s (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) chief Rajendra Pachauri. The newspaper was forced to issue a retraction and an apology there too.

Earlier this week, North went off on a wild rant.

He first deliberately mixes the weather with long term climate change, and then says:

This is the third consecutive winter where we have had snowfall before Christmas and we’re fresh out of riot shields. We’ll have to use the central heating.

Despite that, it is only a matter of time before some fool (many fools) tell us that it is the warmest year since Noah built his ark, warning that we are going to fry unless we pay zillion of dollars into the kitty for jungle bunnies and development corporations such as Oxfam. [emphasis mine]

Jungle bunnies is of course a racial slur aimed at black people.

Joss Garman at Left Foot Forward highlighted this (and captured a screenshot).

But hilariously, Richard North then hurriedly deleted his words and changed them. And rather than issue an apology for the racial slur, says: “Up yours LFF.”

Nice.

Despite his pathetic attempt at covering up his tracks, the mask has fallen and laid bare. It exposes the real thinking behind his obsessive zeal to undermine the science behind climate change.

Why we need a Public Commission to decide the future of our education

by Guest     November 27, 2010 at 10:47 am

contribution by Michael Collins

There are three vital points to make on Lord Browne’s report on higher education.

First, there is a growing sense of unease in academic circles about what the Browne report’s plans to increase undergraduate tuition fees by almost six thousand pounds per year will mean. More specifically, how will a marketised ‘supply and demand’ model for arts and humanities funding really function in practice?

Education and research institutions cannot be set up, shut down and restarted according to the vagaries of market demand. British universities do not benefit from the enormous endowments of American institutions, which can help them adapt to change.

As many of us have argued, it is essential to restate the wider social, intellectual, moral and political values of the arts and humanities, as well as point out the falsity of any division between arts and humanities on the one side and supposedly economically valuable sciences on the other.

In short, we must recognise that humanities matter, just as we have acknowledged that ‘science is vital’.

Second, in its response to the Browne report the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) – a respected independent think tank – has pointed out that “in cash terms the proposals will increase public expenditure through this parliament and into the next”. This is a very obvious fact that is too frequently ignored.

The fee that students pay is not ‘up front’, but has to be funded by the government. They will effectively be given a loan to purchase a higher education product. The income stream from repayments – which is supposed to form the long term basis for higher education funding – will not come back to the treasury for many years to come.

This completely demolishes the argument that current changes to higher education funding are concurrent with a deficit reduction strategy in the spirit of “we are all in this together”.

There is no economic case to be made that these reforms are part of an urgent solution to reducing Britain’s budget deficit.

Third, an alternative idea is to draw back from reform based on the Browne report and opt for a Public Commission. This may be politically difficult, but will become more palatable if opposition to the coalition’s plans is increased from all sides.

It is unfortunate that public money has already been spent on producing a report into this matter, but Browne is a wholly inadequate basis on which to move forward. It is also clear that all three major political parties need to take more time to re-think their positions on higher education funding.

The government should therefore set up a Public Commission to examine the function and funding of higher education from first principles. Only such a move could produce the kind of consensus required to make reform deliverable and place the future of UK higher education on a sustainable footing.

—-
Michael Collins is lecturer in twentieth century British history at UCL. This was first posted at openDemocracy

New Sky video raises doubts about #baitvan

by Sunny Hundal     November 26, 2010 at 11:53 pm

New video footage by Sky News has raised questions about the alleged ‘baitvan’ – the vehicle parked right in the middle of the students protests on Wednesday.

On Wednesday the Met Police said the van had been left there because “officers felt vulnerable and decided the best course of action was to leave the van”.

But video footage obtained by Sky News shows that the van was abandoned before the first signs of aggression or vandalism took place.

The video clearly shows that officers were quire relaxed and standing around even while the van was abandoned.

Its Home Affairs producer Tom Rayner says:

The pictures seem to show that the scene at 12:48pm was not obviously threatening. Indeed a group of Territorial Support Group officers can be seen first looking at the carrier and then walking past it. They are attracting little attention from the crowds.

So why did they leave it there? From 12:58pm protesters are picked up on the microphones of Sky News cameras asking ‘why has that van been left there?’.

He points out that most conspiracy theories on the web regarding the van didn’t stand up either. The van’s markings were not out-of-date; license plates had been ripped off rather than deliberately left off; the rust merely indicated it was an old vehicle.

But he adds:

There is however a legitimate question of why the vehicle was not moved when, as our video seems to suggest, there was an opportunity to do so.

We’ve put that question to the Met and we’re now awaiting a response.

We await the response too.

Update: The video is encoded in Microsoft Silverlight, so it might not display on Google Chrome and Safari browsers. Try Firefox or IE.