Recent Articles

But who will think about the kids?

What’s not to love about this story?

A Toronto couple are defending their decision to keep their infant’s sex a secret in order to allow the child to develop his or her own gender identity… The boys are encouraged to choose their own clothing and hairstyles – even if that means wearing girls’ clothes – and to challenge gender norms.

Now, the caveat – people are free to raise their rugrats as they see fit. If Mum and Dad want to encourage junior to develop his or her own gender identity, it’s certainly not for me to interfere. That said, why not go the whole hog and name the poor kid Gaylord MacWoofter, then spend the next eighteen years flushing its head in the toilet themselves?
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Labour prepares to oppose Euro bailouts

I’ve said a few times that Labour should start talking seriously about opposing the Eurozone bailouts.

They are not only a waste of money (since defaults are now clearly on the horizon), but a political disaster waiting to happen.

Labour MPs such as John Cryer have also warned in the past that it could turn nasty if Labour’s own base starts to balk:

From my point of view – I’m a life-long trade unionist and I’m a union MP – you will start to see trade union members and trade union leaderships start taking an interest in this when they see taxpayers – their members – are being told ‘you’ve got to pay out for bailing out other countries’.

The position taken by Ed Balls has been a bit muddled, though somewhat sceptical.

But now it seems Labour is grabbing the bull by its horns and preparing to signal broader opposition to bailouts.

The Guardian reports:

The Labour party said on Sunday it was willing to work with Eurosceptic Tories to reduce the size of UK contributions to the bailout of troubled eurozone nations and to cut the timescale of UK liability.

The decision puts the coalition government’s parliamentary support for its handling of the crisis under explicit threat for the first time.

The potential alliance may reveal a slow shift towards a more Eurosceptic thinking since Labour went into opposition a year ago. The shift is, in part, political opportunism, but also represents a long-standing belief inside the party that the European commission’s reaction to the euro crisis has been too deflationary.

I believe this is the right direction… though I have a feeling Duncan Weldon will disagree.

Will Cameron cut Lansley loose over the NHS? I doubt it

The Sunday Telegraph today has an extraordinary report today that David Cameron is planning to drop Andrew Lansley over the NHS Bill.

But it looks to me like the conflict between Lansley and Cameron is being played up by the media.
The Telegraph says:
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Why the Libdems won’t last in the Coalition until 2015

So each of the Coalition parties are currently entertaining the theory that they would be better off dividing a good way before the short election campaign. But it is less obvious that they can both be right.

The shared problem for each is the threat of a General Election.

The Conservatives are more nervous about the path to a Parliamentary majority than they appear in public – not least because none of their leadership team shared the confidence of the party and its press supporters that it was heading for a clear victory next time.
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Live: UKuncut actions on NHS, with union support

The campaign group UKuncut will tomorrow occupy high-street banks in at least 35 towns and cities across the country, in the biggest display so far of direct action against proposed NHS cuts.

It will be their first major action since the arrests of 145 protesters during the sit-in at Fortnum & Mason on March 26th.

Last week the PCS Union encouraged its members to join in the peaceful actions. Yesterday, Unite the union also expressed its support for the actions.

Rachael Maskell, Unite’s national officer for the health sector, said:

The greed of a few and the failure to regulate brought our banking system and the economy to their knees but government expects the ordinary people of this country to pick up the tab. We must not allow the profit-first value to destroy our NHS.

Follow the action on Twitter below. The action kicks off from 11am

Without collective-bargaining, wages will only stagnate further

contribution by Tim Page

We had an interesting couple of hours at the Resolution Foundation launch yesterday morning, trying to address the problem of falling living standards for low and middle income earners. The foundation’s report, ‘Growth without gain?’, pulls no punches in highlighting the scale of the problem.

The report points out that whilst less chronic than in the US, where median earnings have been stagnant for a generation, leading economies such as the UK, Germany and Canada have seen median wages either remain stagnant or falling during long periods of growth, prior to the 2008-09 global recession.
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Police investigation finds attack on Jody McIntyre “justifiable”

Scotland Yard today released a statement saying that an internal investigation found their aggressive man-handling of activist Jody McIntyre was “justifiable” and “lawful”.

20 year old McIntyre, who has cerebral palsy, was aggressively pulled out of his wheelchair in December last year during the student protests.

A statement by the Met’s head of the Directorate of Professional Standards said:

The allegations made by Jody McIntyre were extremely concerning and we have carried out a very thorough investigation under the supervision of the IPCC to establish the facts.

The investigation did not find evidence to substantiate any of the complaints and given how damaging these allegations were to the reputation of the MPS and relationship with both protestors and London’s disabled community, it is only right that we report back and therefore publically account on what occurred.

But the inquiry admitted that a police officer may have “inadvertently” hit him with a baton and this was not going to be investigated further.

McIntyre had complained that he was assaulted by an officer with a baton and then by officers who removed him from his wheelchair and carried him from the demonstration.

He also complained that later an officer tipped him out of his wheelchair onto the ground then dragged him across the road onto the pavement. He said the treatment amounted to discrimination on the basis of his disability.

But a statement by the IPCC says this is not the end of the matter.

This case was supervised by the IPCC, which means the IPCC Head of Casework monitored its progress and has agreed that the terms of reference set out at the beginning of the investigation have been met. The IPCC does not endorse the findings and conclusions of a supervised investigation, as these will be considered if the complainant exercises his right of appeal.

In other words, while the IPCC monitored this investigation, it was not independently conducted.

Jody McIntyre now has 28 days to appeal directly to the IPCC, as is likely.

On Twitter today he said:

This is yet another example of the corruption and complete ineptitude of the Metropolitan Police.

He also said the Met had not informed his solicitor of the statement before releasing it, as stated in the press release.

Watch the original incident

McIntyre was subsequently subjected to an extremely distasteful interview on the BBC.

He will be interviewed on Channel 4 News tonight.

Why the TPA report on BBC’s healthcare bill falls flat

Today brings new “research” from the array of non-job holders at the Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA). And this is no ordinary “research”: it bears the imprimatur of its head Matthew Sinclair. It is also dishonest.

The story, claiming that the BBC, and Welsh language channel S4C, ‘Spend Millions on Private Healthcare’, is based on FOI requests. And the TPA slip up even before they’ve done with the heading: putting the spend for the Beeb in 2010 together with that for S4C in 2010-11 gives a total of just under £810,000. So “Spend Millions” [present tense] is plain flat wrong.
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Amnesty shows how ‘clicktivism’ can work too

Some good news: Eynulla Fatullayev has been released in Azerbaijan. I reported last month on the demonstrations I have attended on his behalf.

An immediate tweet discussion of the news caught my eye. From @dontgetfooled

Wow. So “clicktivism” can work after all?

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‘No pay rises for millions until 2015′

Living standards for over 11 million workers on low and middle incomes in the UK are unlikely to improve even when the economy begins to grow again, a new report out today says.

Today the Resolution Foundation launches the first report for the Commission on Living Standards, ‘Growth without gain?: The faltering living standards of people on low-to-middle incomes’.

The report reveals that average pay is set to be no higher in 2015 than in 2001.

James Plunkett, the report’s author, says:

We all know that the recession has hit living standards hard. But something deeper has changed in our economy. Even during the boom years, ordinary workers weren’t seeing their living standards rise.

The big question now is what will happen when growth resumes. Will ordinary workers reap any of the benefits? It is far from certain.

The report is significant because it encapsulates the ‘squeezed middle’ hypothesis that Ed Miliband has increasingly been talking about.

The Resolution Foundation think-tank is increasingly cited by Labour ministers in their speeches when suggesting the economy needs to be re-balanced and needs a focus on closing the inequality gap.