In the end, all the angry gnashing of teeth by Telegraph and Daily Mail columnists did nothing to stop Chris Grayling being forced into a humiliating u-turn today.
Their calls for big companies to “get a backbone” fell on deaf ears as it turned out they preferred avoiding damage to their reputations.
Two questions now arise: will the government change its approach now? And what happens to the campaign against Workfare?
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Emily Wilding Davison famously threw herself under the King’s horse at the 1913 Derby, in order to publicise the suffragette cause. She died in hospital a few days later. I truly hope her bravery will be suitably commemorated on its centenary next year.
But even at this distance in time, her name lives on, Emily’s List – the New Labour women’s network that helped around a dozen shoulder padded Blairites make it to Westminster – chose the appellation at least in part in Ms Davison’s honour.
On Nov 25th 2011, the Department for Work and Pensions issued a press release about the new Youth Contract, announced with great fanfare by Nick Clegg.
The press release included this statement:
An extra 250,000 Work Experience places over the next three years, taking the total to at least 100,000 a year. This will come with an offer of a Work Experience place for every 18 to 24 year-old who wants one, before they enter the Work Programme.
Channel 4′s Cathy Newman caught out out Chris Grayling on whether the workfare scheme is mandatory or not, last night.
It’s the first time Grayling has been caught out on this by the media (via @markthomasinfo and @latentexistence).
But Grayling has a history of being caught out on his statements.
Watch
Nothing more epitomises how damaging the collusion between the Met Police and News International than the case of private investigator Jonathan Rees. He was cleared last year of the murder of Daniel Morgan, his then partner in the PI agency Southern Investigations, after the prosecution offered no evidence.
As the former Crimewatch presenter Jacqui Hames detailed in her statement to Leveson yesterday, the initial investigation into Morgan’s murder was compromised by how the Met had been corruptly involved with the agency, as well as how Rees was a friend of Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery.
Rees went on to become one of the chief PIs used by the red-tops, as was detailed when the Met planted a bug in his office.
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Creating parodies goes to the heart of comedy and is one of the most effective ways to highlight social issues.
But parodies of films and music aren’t allowed under UK copyright law, unless you have explicit permission of the copyright owner. I didn’t know this either until this week.
Below is a satirical video leaked to Liberal Conspiracy that parodies the London 2012 Olympics using 3D animation. It is a political video that may have infringed copyright.
It got over 90,000 views when published last year by Mother’s Best Child, before being abruptly taken down thanks to the Olympics Committee.
We are publishing this video to highlight UK’s highly restrictive laws on parodies.
If it gets taken down we’ll upload it to a different site
Other examples
Remember the song ‘Newport State of Mind’ – parodying the Jay-Z version? Yes, taken down for the same reason.
Greenpeace UK was also challenged over its highly successful parody of Volkswagon’s Star Wars commercial.
There’s a website trying to highlight this issue: http://www.righttoparody.org.uk – sign their petition!
This, from yesterday (via @glinner)
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And no negligible mention on the main BBC bulletins too. It was briefly covered on the 10pm news.
Should the BBC allow politicians onto its programmes? I’m prompted to ask by Michael Portillo’s appearance on Broadcasting House on Sunday.
He claimed that the fact that 1% of taxpayers pay 28% of income tax is evidence that the tax system is progressive.
This is just plain wrong - not as a matter of opinion, but of fact and logic. Yes there’s other evidence that income tax is mildly progressive, but the share of tax paid by the top 1% is irrelevant.
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contribution by Abi Ramanan
Theo has two degrees. “Last year I had a job in commerce and a salary. Now I am selling my possessions on the street and living day-to-day after my wage was reduced to €3 an hour due to cuts. I quit my job due to the degradation of such a low wage but many of my colleagues are still working under those conditions.”
Most of his friends have left Greece for Italy and Switzerland. The government is now calling for a further 22% cut to the minimum wage.
The austerity measures being imposed on Greece are hard to argue for, from a social, political or financial point of view.
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Last August, I noted that Private Eye had turned its attention to the bear pit that is Maily Telegraph blogs, and made the assertion that contributors were ranked according to the number of hits their posts garnered each month
This did not go down at all well with Damian Thompson, editor of Telegraph blogs, who took issue with, well, the whole article.
But now it turns out ranking contributors was exactly what was being done, and Thompson was the one doing it, although the practice has recently been abandoned.
We know this because of an uncharacteristic bout of candour from one of those contributors.
Step forward the loathsome Toby Young, who has announced his departure from providing nourishment to those drifting around the comments sewer of Telegraph blogs and joined Rupe’s downmarket troops as a pundit.
In his valedictory post, Tobes tells of being a Telegraph blogger
The prospect was a little daunting, not helped by the fact that, at the end of each week, Damian would email all the other bloggers with a kind of league table, ranking us according to how many hits our posts had got in the past seven days
I soon learned one of the perennial facts about Telegraph Blogs: no matter how prolific or fascinating you are, you will never be as popular as James Delingpole. He always comes first
Perhaps it was someone else and not Toby Young who told the Eye: “He’s always number one, because he really is batshit mad”.
There are, for Toby Young and his now former colleagues, limits to the outpouring of candour.