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Osborne’s ‘shares for rights’ is trashed by employers

by Nicola Smith     January 29, 2013 at 11:10 am

Yesterday, to little fanfare, BIS has published in full all responses to their recent consultation on shares for employment rights. A very brief read through the results reveals very little business support for the plans. A few choice excerpts below:

From the British Chambers of Commerce

We do not expect take-up of the new status to be high and we believe it will only be attractive to a small minority of workers….there are significant disadvantages which put most off using it

Employers have regularly expressed their concern that employees may decide not to apply for a role if forced to accept EO status…employers were universally concerned that only offering EO status would mean limiting the pool of talent from which they were recruiting.

Most small businesses believed that the bureaucracy and cost of offering shares to employees would put them off using the EO status. There was also concern that it might make it more difficult to attract future investment or to sell the business, and that existing shareholders might object.

So, small businesses aren’t too keen on the proposals. But what about larger firms, such as the CBI’s members. Sadly for the Chancellor, there’s not a lot of support here either, with their responses claiming that:

Employee-owner status is a niche idea likely to be of interest to some growing businesses…it is probable that the proposed set of rights and flexibilities will find favour amongst certain sectors of the business community

The cost to firms – in terms of adminstration, time and external advice – to set up such a scheme is not insignificant….for those without publically available shares the costs are opaque….the uncertainties around what a ‘reasonable’ price for illiquid shares will be when they are realised, as well as around the valuation that HMRC will place on the shares at the point they are received are likely to be daunting.

What about CIPD – the organisation that represents the HR professionals who the Chancellor hoped would benefit from making this flexible new status available to potential recruits:

The suggestion that employers or employees will find it helpful is wholly implausible…there is no evidence to suggest that removing employees’ right to claim unfair dismissal….will have any positive effect on growth or jobs.

There is a danger that it opens up, or is percieved to open up, a tax avoidance loop at a time when the Government has been trying to close these.

The suggestion that fast growing companies might be the prime beneficiaries of the proposed new status is highly implausible. Such companies are likely to be well run, successful and attractive to potential employees. They are less likely than other companies to have difficulty recruiting employees and unlikely to see major problems in offering them the full range of employment rights.

Another significant issue is the complexity facing an employers who might wish to consider taking advantage of the proposals….these proposals are ill-thought out and address a problem that doesn’t exist.

So no luck there.

And our equalities watchdog also has significant concerns:

The proposal could also potentially lead to potentially expensive and complicated employment tribunal claims. Employee owners who request flexible working but are refused might use the discrimination provisions in the Equality Act 2010 to challenge the refusal.

As does the UK’s main organisation that promotes employee ownership (the employee ownership association) who state that:

Our member businesses and the employee owners within them are alarmed at this Government proposal that seeks to redefine the term employee owner…our members are alarmed partly because these proposals are so disconnected from the advice Government received via the Nuttall Review about how to grow the number of employee owners in the UK and risk appear to have ignored that advice

The return on investment in terms of numbers of employee owners created would be dramatically higher if the estimated £100m of cost associated with these proposals was more widely invested in initiatives to increase employee ownership in the UK.

There are far more negative responses than these to choose from. The Institute for Chartered Accountants are strongly opposed, the IoD (who at first gave support to the proposals) say:

There are some complexities and drawbacks to the current proposals which we believe mean that it is unlikely to be taken up in great numbers by either companies or individuals. There is also some scope for misuse against vulnerable workers.

We also suspect that upfront income tax and NIC liability inherent in being given shares by the company – and shares that may prove to have a limited resale value – will put the great majority of individuals off the idea.

And the Forum for Private Business say that:

The message from our members is that it seems contrary to the model of engaging employees in shared ownership whilst at the same time reducing many employment rights.

Ernst and Young point out potential costs of share valuation and the EEF say ‘there will be no direct benefit for start-up businesses’ . There is hours of reading here, but as yet I have failed to find a positive endorsement – do let me know when you come across one.

Using libel laws to deal with internet trolls is a terrible idea

by Robert Sharp     January 29, 2013 at 9:20 am

In the Daily Telegraph, Alasdair Palmer laments trolling and the unpleasant tone of online discourse. He recommends a toughening of the libel laws to deal with this problem.

I think Palmer is mistaken on three counts.

First, he fails to recognise that trolling, anonymity and defamation are three distinct concepts. It is perfectly possible to be an indentifiable ‘troll’. Many newspaper columnists write weekly articles that are almost indistinguishable from trolling, and I am always surprised at just how much hate and bile people are prepared to post in their own names.

Second, most trolling is not defamatory. It is just insulting. The Defamation Bill is exactly the wrong place to deal with trolls and online bullying.

Third, Palmer allows the trolls to become a synedoche for the Internet. As a journalist and columnist writing for a national broadsheet, I am sure that Palmer’s experience of online discourse is pretty unpleasant. But he mistakes a part for the whole. If one were to fly a rocket to Mercury (or even just take a trip to Death Valley) one might induce that “the Universe is very hot”… when in fact these are just pockets of extreme temperatures in a Universe that is on average very cold.

So it is with the Internet, which feels as infinite as the Universe in its breath and depth. The message boards on national newspaper websites are the equivalent of stars in our galaxy – extremes of heat. But as soon as one visits a specialist, local, niche, hobbyist or personal website, the conversation cools. The tone of comments on this blog, for example, is consistently civil.

If we really want to raise the tone of the debate on the Internet, we need not abolish anonymity. We just need to turn off the comment functionality on the big news media websites! They are too big and unweildy to have a proper conversation on anyway. Personally, though, I would advise against such a manoevre: Like big hot stars, the large news sites have a gravitational pull, and draw all the trolls into their orbit, leaving the rest of the Internet a calmer place to explore.

Funny, Boris forgets own u-turn on EU referendum

by Sunny Hundal     January 29, 2013 at 8:46 am

Yesterday, London’s Mayor Boris Johnson published his weekly column in the Telegraph, titled ‘Only a coward would deny the people their voice on Europe‘.

Funny, anyone remember this?

Whether you have In/Out referendum now, you know, in the run-up to 2015, I can’t, I have to say I can’t quite see why it would be necessary. What is happening, though, John, is that… the thing that worries me, and I’m going to be making a speech about this pretty soon, the thing that worries me is basically the European Union is changing from what it was initially constituted to be: it is becoming the eurozone de facto, and the eurozone is not something we participate in, and I think it’s becoming a little unfair on us that we are endlessly belaboured and criticised for being the back marker, when actually this project is not one that we think is well-founded or well-thought through.

That emphasis is mine. It was, of course, Boris Johnson in an interview.

At the time, the Spectator’s Isabel Hardman reported on Boris’s comments as ‘Boris Johnson rejects In/Out referendum call‘.

Curiously, Boris is now on the EU Referendum bandwagon again, pretending he was in favour all along. The Labour party hasn’t ruled out a Referendum entirely (though I wish they’d promise it too) – but that hasn’t stopped Boris trying to mis-characterise the party’s position and whitewash his own.

Three brilliant short films about poverty in the UK

by Newswire     January 26, 2013 at 10:37 am

Some months ago, Mosaic Films got together with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation
and BBC Storyville to see if we could make some films about poverty in the UK for the global Why Poverty? project.

Holiday from Poverty tells the story of those for whom even having a holiday is an unaffordable luxury. Open spaces, free time, and the ability to relax away from daily drudgery are seen as wholly inaccessible, without the aid of specific charities who facilitate the process.

The Car’s Got to Go is a film about the permeability of poverty thresholds, and how both the fall-out from the recession and the ensuing debt crisis is pushing people into poverty, forcing them into redundancy, and in some instances bringing out the debt collectors in droves.

Camden Calling, a musical documentary, shines a light on the pathways that can lead to being homeless. A group of articulate homeless Londoners share their experiences, and show how music has helped give a sense of hope, created social networks, and improved self-esteem for a group of people in this corner of the capital.

More on all of them here.

Why Ed was right to stay out of Dave’s bed

by Guest     January 25, 2013 at 11:50 am

by Giselle Green

Tory euro sceptics must be wandering around Westminster this week with that post-tantric glow. “It was worth the wait” gasped Douglas Carswell. “We’re all in this [bed?] together!” tweeted rebel MP Mark Pritchard, presumably with Dave lying next to him.

But they probably should have opened the blinds before taking leave of their lover, because in the cold light of day they would have seen a whole pile of shagged-out bodies.

How dastardly Dave thought he could get away with such scurrilous behaviour is beyond me. But for some inexplicable reason everyone in the deficit-sized bed decided they’d just turn a blind eye to his infidelity and claim he was their man. But for how long will Dave’s lovers carry on the charade?

Cameron’s former speech writer Ian Birrell said his ex-boss’s words “could have been reduced to a couple of lines on the referendum emailed out to newsrooms; the rest is padding wrapped around a stick of political dynamite”. How long before that stick of dynamite starts fizzing?

During the short gap between ‘that speech’ and PMQs , there were feverish suggestions that Ed Miliband should perform his own E U-turn and jump into bed with Dave, with a promise to hold his own referendum, possibly at the same time as the general election.

I’m delighted he clearly read my tweet hashtagged #eddontcave.

Europe barely registers as an issue with voters and latest polls show that most people would vote to stay IN Europe, even without a renegotiated treaty. I think the public will applaud Ed for not being bounced into an overtly opportunistic move by a Prime Minister clearly acting out of party political expediency rather than national interests.

We already have a referendum enshrined in law if we are asked to cede more powers to Europe. Why on earth do we need a referendum if powers flow in the opposite direction?

Rather than waste his time banging on about Europe (like the Prime Minister claimed he wouldn’t) Ed should focus on fixing the economy – or on convincing voters his party can fix the economy.

He was given a helping hand this week by the IMF which criticised the government’s austerity measures. Presumably Dave was too busy day dreaming about his tantric exploits to care.

—
Giselle Green ran Siobhan Benita’s media campaign in the London Mayoral election

The big NHS speech by Burnham the media ignored

by Sunny Hundal     January 25, 2013 at 10:24 am

Yesterday, the shadow health secretary Andy Burnham gave a very important speech on the Labour’s party vision for health and social care in the future.

You can’t say Labour is failing to develop important policy, but it is obvious that they find it difficult to get heard. The national media barely paid attention to it.

The speech, titled ‘Whole Person Care‘ was to open Labour’s health and care policy review.

Burnham said that historically there had been three systems to deal with differing aspects of health and care: physical health in hospitals, mental health often in separate services on the fringes of the NHS, and social care led by council run services.

He said the consultation would look at full integration of health and social care within a single pooled budget.

Provision for the barriers between mental and physical health would be tackled by giving them equal priority, families would have a single point of contact when seeking care, and streamlining resources will allow the NHS to invest in more preventative measures.

In his speech he reiterated that Labour was committed to repealing the NHS Bill as far as possible, without pushing the NHs through another costly and time-consuming re-organisation.

Health and Well-Being Boards could come to the fore, with CCGs supporting them with technical advice. While we retain the organisations, we will repeal the Health and Social Care Act 2012 and the rules of the market.

It is a confused, sub-optimal piece of legislation not worthy of the NHS and which fails to give the clarity respective bodies need about their role.

Dan Holden at Shifting Grounds says of the speech:

Throughout his speech Burnham took care to describe the financial benefits of his plans, as well as the health benefits. Specifically, with elderly care, he described how the facilitation of care at home and an increase of social care workers on wards would both decrease costs, free up hospital beds and provide more comfortable care for many frail and unwell elderly patients.

You can read the whole speech here.

It’s about time Labour came out with some bold new ideas on health and social care, and this was a good start. Burnham deserves a lot of credit for continually pounding the government’s failures on the NHS; it’s just a shame not more attention* was paid to the speech.

[* the Telegraph wrote it up briefly as ‘reviving the spectre of a death tax‘, though they have published a more favourable editorial.

Four lessons for the Labour Party from Barack Obama’s win

by Sunny Hundal     January 25, 2013 at 8:45 am

People sometimes assume it must be glamorous to work on a huge presidential election campaign. In reality it is mostly a series of repetitive, arduous, tiring and sometimes even frustrating set of tasks like knocking on doors, collecting data and actually getting people to get out there and vote on Election Day.

In October last year, I persuaded an anti-Mexican racist to vote for Obama, had to put the phone down on a woman who insisted on describing the process of ‘partial-birth abortion’ as “Obama is killing those babies”, and had to persuade one Catholic woman that, despite what her local church says, she wouldn’t go to hell for voting for Obama. Only the victory party makes the long, frustrating pleas worth it.

I can’t claim to have the definitive set of lessons for the Labour party from the election, but I think these four mattered perhaps the most.

We can win the ‘class war’

For the Democrat Third Way and New Labour generation, raising taxes on the richest and asking them to pay their fair share of taxes, in proportion to how much income they earned, had become a taboo. But no longer does this have to be the case. President Obama didn’t just want to raise taxes: his entire campaign was based on what Republicans referred to as ‘class war’. And significantly he won.

In a country where the rich are deified and almost everyone wants to be rich, Obama waged war with one narrative: that America’s problems would not be solved by simply letting the rich keep more of their taxes in the hope the rest will benefit. In a speech in April he said “trickle-down economics doesn’t work” and made that central to his campaign.

Voters across the United States, even fiscal conservatives who wanted a focus on reducing the national debt over other priorities, called for big tax rises on the top 2%. On election night Obama underscored this point by saying, “this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations.” 

Ed Miliband faces a similar situation. The Conservatives have shown themselves to be out of touch by cutting taxes at the top. His Labour party have to appeal to voters who are worried about the national debt. The national mood overwhelmingly favours raising taxes on the richest to pay their fair share. The idea that such an electoral strategy can’t work because it’s “against aspiration” is no longer valid – times have changed.

We can win ‘culture wars’ too

Earlier this year, when President Obama mandated that religious institutions would now have to offer contraceptives to women under Obamacare, Catholic bishops and Evangelicals stridently opposed him. Democrats fretted that they would lose the ‘Culture Wars’ again, but it was Obama who won. In fact Obama won 55% of women voters according to exit polls, while Romney attracted only 44%.

Unlike previous Democrats, President Obama didn’t avoid women’s health; he made it a centrepiece of his agenda. Right until the end Obama and Biden reiterated their support for abortion rights while Romney dodged questions about equal pay legislation and pledged to defund Planned Parenthood. 

Labour and the Democrats have historically avoided contraception, women’s health and sex education as issues about ‘conscience’ and avoided taking sides. But the coalition of the socially liberal – not just women but younger voters – has reached past the tipping point. Even George Osborne conceded this point in The Times last month when he said Conservatives would lose significant blocks of voters if they tried to restrict gay marriage or make abortion harder.

Ed Miliband can and should seize the agenda, not just because it is electorally popular but because it the right thing to do. On the list should be: improving sex education provision, extending the Abortion Act to Northern Ireland and making it easier for women to get access to contraception and abortion in England. For a start he can scrap the redundant and patronising two-doctors-rule.

Being more sophisticated about swing voters

Conventional thinking states that independent voters, aka swing voters, decide elections and should be courted relentlessly. After all, your base will turn out for you anyway, right? Wrong. One of the key strengths of the Obama campaign was to look at the data rather than just make assumptions about people’s behaviour. They found that two major discoveries stood out.

First, most self-declared independents are fairly partisan in their politics but coy about revealing that. They found that independents who leaned Democrat voted for Obama in almost as high proportions as self-identified Democrats who voted for the President. That’s the first category of swing voters: people who lean a particular way but don’t explicitly identify as such. The second discovery was that this group of voters are mixed in with another group of actual ‘independents’ who rarely go and vote. And it’s debateable whether any campaign has the resources to get them to turn out.

But the Obama campaign went further. In their list of every registered voter in swing states, they assigned a score to each voter on aspects such as their likelihood of supporting the President, likelihood of voting and how open to persuasion they were. They conducted experiments to see which demographics of voters responded to which pitches about policies, and employed behavioural scientists to try and predict their behaviour.

Much of the analytics and behaviour modelling is beyond the reach of the Labour party for financial reasons. But the key lesson for Labour is to approach swing voters much more intelligently. They are not always centrists; they may be looking for signals that also appeal to ‘core voters’, and it may be futile to try and appeal to some groups entirely. At the last election this strategy amounted to assuming core Labour voters would turn out anyway and they just needed to tack to the centre to win. In the event, both ‘core’ and ‘swing’ voters who leaned towards Labour were repelled enough not to turn out.

Social media matters… in certain ways.

Our politicians don’t seem to know what to do with social media. Many of them spend an inordinate amount of time on Twitter posting pictures with references to wonderful people they met on the doorstep. Others regard all of social media as a waste of time that only appeals to the Westminster bubble than their constituents.

The Obama campaign used social media for specific and strategic purposes. The first was to build his personal brand as an empathetic, down-to-earth President who had a good sense of humour and would be fun to have a drink with. The second objective was to give his followers ways in which to spread his campaign messages. When a campaign staffer was asked why Obama chose to host an ‘Ask Me Anything’ debate on the popular website Reddit, the response was, “Because a whole bunch of our turnout targets were on Reddit.”

A study by Pew Internet found that 30% of registered voters had been encouraged to vote for Obama or Romney by family and friends via posts on social media such as Facebook or Twitter. Clearly it can have an impact, but the trick is to figure out how to best leverage the power of social media. 

The problem for Labour is that it uses social media as an extension of its press operation: to get information out about statements and speeches made by the shadow cabinet. There is no attempt to build a personal brand – particularly of Ed Miliband himself – nor is there an attempt to offer materials that ordinary people would want to share, not just Labour party members.

To put it simply, there are a few key elements to an election campaign: identifying voters, reaching them with information about issues they’re concerned about, and getting them to vote. Of course, the candidate, the policies, the opponent and the state of the economy matter greatly but the Obama campaign has simply been better than anyone else at executing these basics. To not learn from the best, despite our obvious limitations and differences, would be a travesty for the Labour movement.

—
Thie article was first published in Anticipations, the Young Fabians magazine.

Why are LFI working against a two-state solution?

by Sunny Hundal     January 24, 2013 at 4:08 pm

This week the foreign secretary William Hague announced in FCO questions that the two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and Palestine is slipping away, largely as a result of settlement construction.

He also talked about exploring “incentives and disincentives” to settlement construction, but failed to elaborate on what these might be.

Meanwhile, as Israelis went to the polls to elect their next parliament, the UK’s largest pro-Israel lobby group BICOM (Britain-Israel Communications and Research Centre) hosted an election night party for the Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem Friends of Israel at Skyloft in Millbank tower.

Organisers of the event were publicising the Israeli company SodaStream (a fizzy drinks makers), having the company’s carbonators on hand to provide soft drinks. Sodastream was name-checked by Israeli Ambassador Daniel Taub from the platform and BICOM was thanked for promoting a great Israeli export.

Except that Sodastream’s ‘principal manufacturing facility’ is located in Mishor Adumim, which is the industrial zone of one of the largest illegal settlements on the West Bank, Ma’ale Adumim.

Last October, 22 European NGOs published a report on the effects of settlement construction on the Palestinian economy and prospects for statehood.

That report included a section on Sodastream and how it pays taxes directly back into the settlement enterprise and intentionally mislabels its products ‘Made in Israel’.

BICOM has form on not caring a great deal about illegal settlement construction on the Palestinian West Bank. They have repeatedly played down the importance of settlements in articles on their site and at the Telegraph and Huffington Post.

Furthemore, BICOM’s Chairman and primary funder, Poju Zabludowicz has significant investments in a mall in Ma’ale Adumim settlement – and has property on the West Bank himself.

But Labour Friends of Israel prides itself on the slogan “working towards a two-state solution”.

So how can anyone claim to be working towards a two-state solution in Israel while supporting the very settler economy which makes such a solution impossible? Labour Friends of Israel are contributing towards greater instability in the region with such alliances.

The IF Campaign is important but the TUC is not signing up to it

by Owen Tudor     January 24, 2013 at 11:10 am

It’s undoubtedly unfortunate timing that British international development charities chose yesterday for the launch of their new campaign which has coincided with the Prime Minister’s big speech on Europe.

The IF campaign is being run by a group of charities with which the TUC and unions have worked closely for years. We co-operated over Make Poverty History in 2005, helped run the Put People First campaign around the G20 in 2009, and we’ve been working for three years on the Robin Hood Tax campaign (all three of these were broad coalitions that went beyond the international development community, with green groups and unions playing a leading role, while IF is a rather more sector-only campaign.)

Many of the specific policy demands of the IF campaign are ones the TUC agrees with, such as legislating for spending 0.7% of Gross National Income on overseas aid; tackling tax havens; and making transnational corporations act openly and honestly.

So I should perhaps explain why the TUC isn’t part of the IF campaign. It’s because there are too many “buts”. Here are three.

One big ‘but’ is that the IF campaign wants global hunger to be the big campaign of 2013, focusing in particular on the G8 leaders’ summit being hosted by David Cameron in Northern Ireland this June. Unions agree that hunger is a big issue and a terrible tragedy (it’s part of the manifesto global unions have issued at the Davos World Economic Forum this week.)

But this year, we think the priority should be fighting the austerity that G8 leaders like David Cameron are forcing on their own people and also on the rest of the global economy (this week the ILO revealed that only a quarter of the rise in global unemployment in 2012 had been in the industrialised world – three times as many were thrown out of work in developing and emerging economies.)

Secondly, the IF campaign has identified four key areas for the campaign – aid, tax, transparency and land. But they haven’t addressed one of the main causes of hunger, which is poverty, both at home or abroad. The world produces enough food for everyone to be fed, but too many people simply can’t afford it, and that applies (albeit to a lesser extent, and rarely to the point of starvation) in developed economies like Greece and, yes, even in Britain. Oxfam was started 70 years ago to help feed the hungry in Greece under Nazi occupation, and they have done fantastic work to highlight the scandal of how many people in Britain rely on food banks. People in Europe go hungry because of poverty and unemployment, and in reality the same issues apply around the world, even in famine-hit countries in Africa. But the IF campaign doesn’t cover this crucial issue.

And thirdly, well, we would say this, wouldn’t we? But what about the workers? The campaign focuses on defending smallholders against corporate land grabs, which is fair enough. But it has little to say about the millions of people who are employed in the food industry, not just growing food but processing and distributing it, including the many smallholders who supplement the produce of their own land with work in part-time or seasonal employment. As long ago as 2005, 40% of the 1.1 billion agricultural workers were employed. Decent work in rural areas is obviously a key element in ensuring people have the income necessary to support themselves, as well as pay for social protection, public services and so on, and decent work is the only sustainable route out of poverty, where aid is often only a sticking plaster solution, vital though it is.

Overall, unions are also concerned about the lack of southern voices leading the campaign, and we’re concerned that a campaign that focuses on hunger – despite the underlying demands that go much further in challenging the way the global economy works – will merely reinforce popular images of starving African babies, and reinforce popular misconceptions that people in the global south are powerless victims and that endless charity is the only solution.

So, while we will work with the IF campaign on specific elements of their campaign, the TUC won’t be signing up, and we’ll continue to argue the case for tackling inequality and injustice globally, at home as well as abroad.

Telegraph fakes a plot by the EU to control British press

by Tim Fenton     January 24, 2013 at 9:53 am

Leveson: EU wants power to sack journalists proclaimed the Telegraph’s point man in Brussels, Bruno Waterfield, on Tuesday.

The idea that those meddling Brussels bureaucrats were going to take control of press regulation was a dream come true for the anti-EU brigade.

Because not only is there no Leveson connection, there is also no move to give the EU power over hiring and firing of hacks: Waterfield’s talk of “setting up state regulators with draconian powers” is scaremongering baloney of the crudest kind.

So what has actually happened? Well, a “high-level group to discuss freedom and pluralism of the media across the EU” has been established.

Yes, the “freedom and pluralism” got filtered out by the Europhobes. But what has this group achieved? That question is answered by its report submitted on Monday to the European Commission (EC) [.pdf]. Note that the report has not been issued by the EC: the EC has not responded to it, so there are no proposals to implement part or all of its recommendations.

But let’s just address some of the flagrantly dishonest claims made by Waterfield in his Tel piece: there is no proposal to “rein in the press” (note that the report quotes Article 11.2 of the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, “the freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected”, on its first page), and nor is there any urging of “tight press regulation”, or “state regulation”.

The EC has not taken a position on the Leveson recommendations, and as these are a matter for the UK, does not intend to do so. There is no proposal to put “Brussels”, or indeed any EU body, in control of press regulation in any member state.

So what has been suggested? EC Vice President Neelie Kroes gives a hint with “Ensuring the independence of regulators across the member states and their cooperation”.

The recommendations talk of acting “to protect media freedom and pluralism”. And “The EU should raise the issue of journalistic freedom in all
international fora where human rights and democracy are discussed”. Plus the one the Tel doesn’t like: “All EU countries should have independent media councils”.

Thus the freedom of the UK press:to peddle any old rubbish it can get away with.