Recent Articles

Royals asked to back living wage for cleaners

Royal watchers will be asked by the Public and Commercial and Services union to support a campaign to pay cleaners in the Royal Household a living wage.

The union will be outside the gates to Buckingham Palace from 12 noon to 2pm today (28 Apr) with a giant ‘fair pay for royal cleaners’ card for members of the public to sign.

Cleaners in Buckingham Palace, St James’s Palace and Clarence House who are paid just £6.45 an hour are campaigning for an increase to the ‘London living wage’ of £7.85 an hour.

The London living wage, introduced by previous Mayor of London Ken Livingstone and endorsed by current mayor Boris Johnson, is paid to cleaners in the houses of parliament.

The royal cleaners are employed by two private contractors, KGB Holdings and Greenzone, but the union believes ultimate responsibility rests with the Royal Household, which receives around £30 million a year from taxpayers – half of which is for upkeep of the occupied palaces.

PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka said:

As the royals prepare for the prince’s lavish wedding on Friday, our members are being treated like paupers.

The royal family is seen as a major contributor to the tourist industry and many people visit London specifically to see the palaces. We’ll be asking them to show their support for the people on poverty pay who keep these palaces clean.

From a press release

BBC and Clarence House ban satirical takes on Royal Wedding

contribution by Paul Canning

Lightly covered in the UK media has been a Clarence House decision to ban any satirical use of footage of tomorrow’s Royal Wedding.

This has kabooshed the Friday show planned by Australia’s leading satirical troupe The Chaser’s War On Everything, who some may recall from an all too brief outing on BBC4.
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More bad news: confidence keeps falling

Well, what do you know? Turns out promising austerity, deep cuts and threats of high unemployment doesn’t make people feel confident about the future.

New figures out today by GfK NOP show consumer confidence fell sharply during April.

They say all five of the measures of consumer confidence they track dropped, sliding to -31. It was at -16 in April last year.

The graph below shows how confidence had fallen up to March. The numbers for April are worse.

GfK NOP say it is only the third time the index has dropped below minus 30 in the survey’s 37-year history, with the previous two occasions being in early 1990 and mid-2008.

Nick Moon, managing director of GfK NOP Social Research, says:

Coming after six months of stagnant economic growth, this is a significant drop – one that is bad news for the Government and bad news for the economy.

It suggests that the attempts to spur growth in last month’s Budget have failed to convince the public, and this may well be sorely felt on the already beleaguered high street.

It is particularly striking that all five areas of the index fell this month, pointing towards growing gloom as we head into summer. These figures must make the possibility of a double dip recession increasingly real.

Partly from a press release

The EDL and Islamophobia should have no place in the LGBT community

contribution by Pav Akhtar

Last month sympathisers of the English Defence League (EDL), including a founder member of the far right group, were the core initiators of a proposed ‘East End Gay Pride’ march through Tower Hamlets.

LGBT GROUPS in the local area and BME LGBT groups and SAFRA statement, were united in opposing them. These responses were pivotal in preventing the far right from organising under the Pride flag to progress an entirely different goal – of isolating and demonising Muslim communities.
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Do Libdem u-turns make it harder for others?

The Green Party leader Caroline Lucas will be on air tonight with the local elections broadcast (5.55pm on BBC2, 6.25pm on ITV1 & 6.55pm on BBC1)

Here is the short ad below.

What struck me when watching this first is that while Lucas is being honest and down to earth, the “no more broken promises” line still grates.

We’ve heard it before: Nick Clegg used the same narrative just before the General Election. Now, hardly anyone believes him.

Will that disillusionment affect the smaller parties too? It remains to be seen, but I think it is highly unlikely. Thoughts?

Top Libdem attacks Thatcher’s “wickedness”

I completely missed this earlier.

The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg reported this morning:

Tim Farron says FPTP let Thatcher govt to carry out ‘organised wickedness’ + sustained slavery – losing count in lib-tory slanging match!

That the Libdem President is willing to admit Thatcher carried out “organised wickedness” while many of his colleagues have to work with people who still worship the ground she walks on is rather startling.

And “sustained slavery”? Wow.

Who says all Libdems had lost the fire in their belly?

What I would focus on if I were the Shadow Chancellor

Chancellor George Osborne knows the economic growth figures out today are terrible, even if the spin says otherwise. But this isn’t just bad news for the economy and millions of people, it is also vindication for the left.

We’ve kept on saying that the best way out of the economic crisis and the fastest way to cut national debt is to push for economic growth rather than austerity. The Labour party however is having particular difficulty in getting that message across.
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Calls for Andrew Marr to go grow louder

The BBC’s former political editor Andrew Marr is coming under fire, even from journalists, for eventually admitting he took out a super-injunction to protest his privacy.

But Marr’s decision to go public only came about after Private Eye launched a challenge to the injunction last week.

On the Today programme on Tuesday, Private Eye editor Ian Hislop said:

As a leading BBC interviewer who is asking politicians about failures in judgment, failures in their private lives, inconsistencies, it was pretty rank of him to have an injunction while working as an active journalist.

A similar point is made by Charlie Beckett, who heads up the LSE’s journalism think-tank Polis.

Like any citizen Marr had a perfect right to defend his privacy. But as a journalist he must have realised his legal actions would reduce his credibility as someone who can interrogate the powerful and famous about their personalities as well as their policies and actions.
…
Marr now admits that his actions were hypocritical, but I think it’s worse than that and that’s why he shouldn’t really be doing political interviews anymore.

Blogger and tweeter Fleet Street Fox is a lot more brutal and to the point:

As a result of all this Marr can never question a politician about their private life, however legitimate the enquiry could be. He cannot comment or ask about fatherhood, paternity rights, the legal system, the creeping privacy law no-one in this country has voted for, or even raising a child when arguably his actions will have harmed the one involved in this story.

Andrew Marr should never work as a journalist again. He probably will, because the BBC can be very stupid like that, but his credibility is shot, his impartiality is gone and his reputation is ruined.

It’s time for Marr to go.

Why isn’t the Royal Wedding also a day of protest?

contribution by Adam Grace

In the build up to the big day even the police have designated as one only for “pageantry and joy”, the lack of even the slightest stirring of a republican protest movement is surprising.

The increasingly ferocious anti government protests in the capital and around the country have taken many by surprise in the last 8 months. There are undeniably a burgeoning number of people who have found it necessary to push at the boundaries of political dissent as they hear their democratic voice being reduced to a muffled murmur.
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Shocking: Met charges student they injured with ‘violent disorder’

In December last year, student Alfie Meadows developed bleeding on his brain when he was hit by a police baton during the student protests.

He fell unconscious on the way to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where he underwent a three-hour operation to save his life.

As his mother said at the time, Alfie Meadows was not getting involved in any rioting, but merely trying to leave the police kettle.

And yet the Metropolitan Policeannounced yesterday that he will be among 11 people charged over the 9th December event.

The news release says he is charged with violent disorder contrary to Section 2 Public Order Act 1986.

It is a sentence that carries a maximum sentence of five years.

As Richard Seymour at Lenin’s Tomb says:

Yes, they beat someone’s skull in. Yes, this was part of a series of violent tactics deployed by police, which included assaults on young boys, and teenaged girls. Yes, if the protests had continued, and the police had continued with their tactics, they probably would have killed someone just as they killed Ian Tomlinson.

We’ll be lucky if, in the next few years, they don’t kill another protester. And their very clear message is that whatever happens, just as they did with Jean Charles de Menezes and the Koyair brothers, they will always find a way to blame the victim, exonerate or protect the guilty, and continue as before.

Unbelievable.