Recent Articles

Major defeat in case claiming union was anti-semitic

by Ben White     March 27, 2013 at 3:34 pm

Pro-Israel pressure groups in the UK have suffered a major defeat in efforts to repress Palestine solidarity activity within the trade unions, as an Employment Tribunal dismissed a high-profile case brought against the University and College Union (UCU).

Academic Friends of Israel director Ronnie Fraser, represented by leading lawyer Anthony Julius, claimed he suffered antisemitic harassment in the UCU, complaints judged by the tribunal to be “without substance” and “devoid of any merit”.

Fraser called dozens of witnesses, including MP John Mann, former MP Denis Macshane, the Jewish Leadership Council’s Jeremy Newmark, Harry’s Place blogger Sarah AB, and Michael Whine of the Community Security Trust (CST).

Newmark was found to have given partly “untrue” evidence, as well as making a “preposterous claim” while “playing to the gallery”. Both Mann and Macshane were deemed to have given “glib evidence, appearing supremely confident of the rightness of their positions”.

The tribunal’s conclusions were damning:

Lessons should be learned from this sorry saga. We greatly regret that the case was ever brought. At heart, it represents an impermissible attempt to achieve a political end by litigious means. It would be very unfortunate if an exercise of this sort were ever repeated…

We are also troubled by the implications of the claim. Underlying it we sense a worrying disregard for pluralism, tolerance and freedom of expression.

While the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP) welcomed the ruling and its implications for trade unionists wishing to pursue boycott campaigns, anti-boycott activist David Hirsh claimed the Employment Tribunal’s decision was itself anti-semitic.

Revealingly, Israel advocates had been hoping for a “huge victory“, and the likes of Martin Bright hailed Ronnie Fraser for “an act of considerable personal courage”. An editorial in The Jewish Chronicle called it “this decade’s version of the Irving trial“.

Was the Israeli government involved too? A senior official at Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs recently revealed that, “over the last six months Israel has taken on two (court) cases in partnership with UK Jewry” in fighting Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS). This very likely includes Fraser’s case, yet Anthony Julius had previously denied any such links, saying that to assume the case was “being supported by the Israeli government” is a “fantasy”.

Last autumn, Jews for Justice for Palestinians called Fraser’s demands “bizarre and undemocratic”, and described the case as a “ludicrous, bullying and dictatorial attempt at shutting down debate”. They were right.

Govt’s figures say tourists cost NHS only £7m a year

by Sunny Hundal     March 27, 2013 at 1:30 pm

In his immigration speech earlier this week, David Cameron said he wanted to “stop the expectation” the NHS is “free to the entire world” and would take steps to ensure the NHS can claim back money owed by those not entitled to it.

How much did they cost then? Cameron put the figure at £20m, and Jeremy Hunt then randomly upped it to £200m.

But the true figure may be less than £7 million – and this is the Coalition government’s own figure.

In March 2011, the Tory MP Priti Patel asked the health minister Anne Milton:

…. how many residents of each (a) EU member state and (b) non-EU country were treated by the NHS in each of the last five years; and what the cost to the public purse was of such treatment in each such year.

The response: For 2009-10 the figure was put at £6,967,780.

This figure doesn’t not include the benefits from those health tourists coming here and spending money.

Update: And just to be clear, that £7m figure includes the costs to the NHS of EU and non-EU citizens treated in the UK. So where did Cameron get his £20m figure from, and where did Jeremy Hunt get his £200m figure from?

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This article’s headline was changed from ‘immigrants’ to ‘health tourists’ to offer more clarity.

Only the City-backed Tories oppose the Robinhood Tax

by Owen Tudor     March 27, 2013 at 12:42 pm

Yesterday, senior Liberal Democrat Minister Vince Cable went beyond Government policy in backing the Robin Hood Tax to crack down on short-termism. He told a select committee:

“I have got no objection to the… well, I would put it more positively – I think there is a case if you are trying to change behaviour from using a market instrument of that kind to make it happen.

“I think there is a case and I’m in some ways quite disposed to it.”

The immediate slap down from anonymous Treasury sources – they said he wasn’t responsible for tax policy – shows how important Vince’s statement is.

As Business Secretary, Cable is ideally placed to see the damage done to the real economy by the high frequency trading and speculation that dominates the finance sector.

TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady said:

“Most European governments – apart from our own – can see the value in a Robin Hood tax on the banks’ financial transactions and a cap on the sky-high bonuses they’ve been awarding their senior staff.

“We welcome the Business Secretary’s acknowledgement that there is a case for a financial transactions tax and hope that some of his more sceptical colleagues may soon realise its worth too.

“The banks helped make the mess we’re in, yet it’s ordinary families who are paying the price. A tax on the banks would raise much-needed revenue for the Exchequer and hopefully persuade ministers that the time has come to put austerity economics back in its box.”

Vince was also backed by Simon Chouffot, spokesman for the Robin Hood Tax campaign, which represents organisations including Barnardo’s, Oxfam and Friends of the Earth as well as the TUC, who said:

“It’s good news that Vince Cable has broken ranks with his Cabinet colleagues over the Robin Hood Tax.

“As Business Secretary, he should know better than most that defending the City fat cats is bad for Britain and bad for business. The banks are protecting the status quo of gambling and bonuses at the expense of investment in jobs and growth.

“The Government should drop its ideological opposition to a tax most voters back, and make sure Britain gets its fair share of the European FTT to help protect public services and rebuild our economy.”

A statement like this from a senior Liberal Democrat politician – in line with Labour Leader Ed Miliband’s call for responsible capitalism – adds to the tension in the coalition.

In most European countries, the Robin Hood Tax is supported across the left and the centre-right, and that could spread to Britain, leaving the City-backing Conservatives isolated again.

Man who suffered heart-attack declared ‘fit for work’

by Shantel Burns     March 27, 2013 at 12:11 pm

A 55-year-old man who complained of chest pains during an Atos assessment – and then suffered a heart attack the following day – has been found ‘fit for work’ by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

Jim Elliot, a father from Cambuslang near Glasgow, says as well as suffering from chest pains, he was also struggling to breathe during the 20-minute interview. The assessors provided Mr Elliot with a glass of water but persisted on with the assessment.

Jim, who had formerly been a welder for his entire adult working life, had to cease work 18-months-ago after he suffered a heart attack. Speaking to the Daily Record Jim said: “All they seemed to care about was getting through the ridiculous list of questions they have […] ‘Can you walk 200m and can you raise your arm up in the air?’”

Jim added: “I was sweating profusely, my breath was very laboured and I had been confused during the interview.”

The next day, whilst walking down Glasgow’s west end, he suffered a heart attack.

Mr Elliot was rushed to the Golden Jubilee hospital in Clydebank where he spent the next several days recovering.

During his stay in hospital a letter from the DWP arrived at his home stating that he had been found ‘fit for work’ as he had scored zero points. An individual is only deemed as unfit to work if they score 15 points or more.

Atos has previously (and continuously) been the subject of criticism for its flawed work capability assessments, the high rate of cases that go on to tribunal (41%) and the number which have the decision overturned in their favour (38%).

The government’s own figures reveal that 1,300 people had died after they had been told they should start preparing to go back work, and a further 2,200 had died before their assessment was completed.

An Atos Healthcare spokesman, in response to Mr Elliot’s case said: “The role of our doctors and nurses is to carry out work capability assessments on behalf of the DWP under their guidelines and not to conduct a thorough medical examination.”

Would Richard Littlejohn really have to be invented if he didn’t exist?

by Sunny Hundal     March 26, 2013 at 4:01 pm

Martin Robbins at the New Statesman writes, If Richard Littlejohn didn’t exist, you’d have to make him up.

An excerpt:

I’d like nothing more than to see him sacked, but Littlejohn is the melting, mildew-infested tip of a giant iceberg of piss. His behaviour has been fairly mild in comparison to other journalists, let alone the wider internet. As a focal point for public anger, he is little more than a convenient avatar; a man who embodies the essence of the right-wing tabloids we hate. If Richard Littlejohn didn’t exist, you’d have to make him up.

I’m afraid this is not how things work and I’m writing a blog post only because it’s too long to explain in a tweet.

Take racism as an example. Since the 1930s overt racism in British society has melted away considerably and continues to decline. My parents had it much worse than me and so on.

The key to that process was making racism unacceptable in polite society. Right-whingers call this ‘political correctness gone mad’ – and while I can see why they’re mad about it, we both know they’ve lost the war. Calling people racist epithets in public is just no longer acceptable as it once was.

But racism still exists in society. So does that mean newspapers should hire someone from the BNP or Stormfront to represent those views? NO.

And not giving those people a prominent national platform has impact: it sends out a signal to the public on what is polite and what isn’t. Slowly that permeates through the national conciousness and attitudes change as older people who enjoyed making racist jokes die out, and youngsters who didn’t grow up with racism being acceptable get mortgages.

Firing Richard Littlejohn would send out a powerful signal: it’s time these attitudes were not acceptable in polite society.

I neither want Littlejohn nor Julie Burchill arrested over their articles, but sending a signal that transphobia is also a form of vile bigotry is a perfectly acceptable aim. Over time that would have an impact on popular opinion. That’s why the anger and the petitions matter.

BBC edits article to remove mention of police brutality

by Newswire     March 26, 2013 at 2:34 pm

A BBC article on protests at Sussex University over out=-sourcing plans has edited out a quote mention police brutality.

The rally featured a speech by student Alfie Meadows, who suffered life-threatening injuries after being hit on the head by a police baton during the student protests in 2010.

A screenshot of how the BBC article in question was changed was posted to Twitter by @bunnyrabble

Richard Branson hits at Maldives over rape lashings

by Newswire     March 26, 2013 at 12:18 pm

Richard Branson has become the latest voice to criticise the Maldives for sentencing a 15-year-old rape victim to be flogged with 100 lashes.

A juvenile court in Maldives last month handed her the sentence after convicting her of ‘having premarital sex’ – sparking outrage across the world.

The global campaign site Avaaz.org quickly set up a petition calling on supporters to, “threaten the islands’ reputation through hard-hitting ads in travel magazines and online until [the President] steps in to save her and abolish this outrageous law.”

The petition quickly amassed over a million signatures and led to the government of Maldives expressing concern over the sentence.

Now the 62-year-old British entrepreneur has added his voice, saying the episode is doing “enormous damage” to the reputation of the Maldives.

I have written to Maldives President Waheed, who has promised to review the case and ensure that similar cases are not repeated.

The Attorney General in Maldives has now appealed the case on behalf of the child.

Caption Competition! Boris starts busking

by Sunny Hundal     March 26, 2013 at 11:47 am

The picture was posted by the @SE1 account today.

Update: here’s the video, via london-se1.co.uk

George Osborne’s new growth model is the one he argued against

by Duncan Weldon     March 26, 2013 at 11:31 am

Last week I argued that the new OBR forecasts signalled an apparent abandoning of rebalancing by the Chancellor in favour of a strategy based on house price inflation and consumer spending:

in the June 2010 Budget, the Chancellor expected 57% of all growth to come from his preferred (and ‘sustainable’) sources of business investment and net trade. By this time last year, that contribution had fallen to around 52%, lower but still more than half of all growth.

Yesterday’s forecasts have business investment and net trade contributing only 31% of all growth to 2017…

Three years ago George Osborne argued that “that we cannot go back to the last decade’s debt-fuelled model of growth”. As I listened to his housing market announcements yesterday, I thought “it sounds like he is going to try”.

Chris Dillow echoed this point over at Investor’s Chronicle and, in today’s Guardian, Aditya Chakraborrty makes the point even more forcibly:

The estate agency Knight Frank estimates that it will take until at least 2019 before property prices are back to the levels of 2007. Add to that the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecast that real wages in Britain in 2015 will be 9% lower than they were in 2010. So the housing market looks less of a sure thing than at any time since 1994, and Britons’ personal finances are a wreck. Osborne may think he’s found an update of right-to-buy, but it looks more like right-to-be-repossessed.

Still, back to that coalition catechism. Government borrowing to build council housing: forbidden. Individual borrowing to buy an overpriced two-bed flat: encouraged. The way to make the economy stronger is to make it more fragile. And we’re all in it together, except really, when it comes to managing your way through this depression, you’re on your own.

Perhaps the finest analysis came from satirical news-site the Daily Mash:

[Osborne] told MPs: “The key difference this time is that I am making it much easier for people with no money to get a mortgage.

“So then, right, they will have a house and the value of that house will just keep going up and up and so every few years they will borrow a bit more money against the value of their house and then spend it in the shops.

“The value of the houses will always go up because most of them will be those lovely new red brick ones that will be built next to dual carriageways on the outskirts of provincial towns.”

As Conservative MPs cheered, he added: “I know. And it’s actually a bit weird that no-one has thought of it until now.”

On a more serious note, NIESR’s Jonathan Portes & Angus Armstrong wrote last week that:

The economic rationale for designing a mortgage market intervention in this way is almost impossible to understand. There are well-known market failures in both the retail and wholesale markets for mortgages, so there’s plenty of scope for radical reform. But, instead of explaining what problem it is trying to solve and how, the Treasury has created yet another subsidy for banks. Worse still, the structure of the subsidy will weaken competition even further by propping up incumbent banks and perpetuating an unreconstructed housing finance market with fundamental weaknesses.

What about housebuyers? To the extent that they see any benefits, it will push up demand and hence prices, resulting in further distortions in an already distorted market. This will redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich and from those who don’t own houses to those who do. It will neither build any new houses nor make existing ones more “affordable” in any meaningful sense.

Their criticisms add to a long chorus of economists who generally argue that the scheme is at best ‘good politics but bad economics’.

But perhaps the best attack on the Government’s growth strategy, it’s lack of rebalancing and the role of house prices was not made last week. In was made in November 2003 by one Dr Vince Cable:

On the housing market, is not the brutal truth that with investment, exports and manufacturing output stagnating or falling, the growth of the British economy is sustained by consumer spending pinned against record levels of personal debt, which is secured, if at all, against house prices that the Bank of England describes as well above equilibrium level? If the Bank of England is correct in its expectations of a market correction and rising interest rates, what action will the Chancellor take on the problem of consumer debt, which is rapidly rising, with 8 million annual visits from the bailiff?

10 years on, there is a lot of truth in that statement.

In February 2010 George Osbonre argued we need a ‘new economic model’.

Now it seems he is happy to return to the old one.

The press regulation poll the media deliberately ignored

by Tim Fenton     March 26, 2013 at 8:55 am

The Fourth Estate has found itself in a state of total agreement over one subject: the lack of inclination to report the latest Sunday Times YouGov poll, which in addition to the usual popularity questions, also asked about last week’s Budget.

It also asked about press regulation.

And the responses obtained showed that the public were not just supportive of the moves last week to establish a new independent regulator underpinned by statute, but were supportive by a larger margin than previously.

That suggests all the abuse and other personal attacks by those same papers has not turned their beloved readership against the new regime the editors don’t want.

So they just decide not to report it – not even the paper that commissioned it. And when you look at the numbers, that is no surprise. Here’s the first four questions.

Do you support or oppose the proposed new press regulation system? Support 52%, Oppose 23%. By a 5 to 2 majority.

Do you think the proposed new regulation system is or is not a threat to press freedom? Is a threat 27%, is not a threat 53%. By a 2 to 1 majority.

Do you think it is right or wrong that newspapers who choose not to join the new regulator should face larger damages if they are taken to court over libel, privacy or other civil matters? Right 55%, wrong 23%. By a 5 to 2 majority.

Do you think the new system will or will not give politicians too much influence in what news the papers report? Will give too much 31%, will not 41%. By a 4 to 3 majority.

One group which has reported the poll results is Hacked Off, carrying analysis from the Media Standards Trust’s Gordon Ramsay, who wasted no time in pointing out that support for the new system of regulation has increased over the past week from 43% to 52%, and that the percentage responding that the new setup would not threaten press freedom had gone from 38 to 53 – both now commanding a majority.

Yet still the ranting continues, with swivel-eyed ranter in chief Peter Hitchens going off the end of the pier in style in the Mail On Sunday yesterday, followed by the lame blethering of Trevor Kavanagh in today’s Sun. Both keep pushing the meme that press freedom is being either threatened, or that its termination is imminent. But it’s not having the desired effect.

The public is probably getting less reliable information on this subject than any other being reported right now. But it can clearly see through the fog of falsehood and misinformation, which would suggest, once more, that the game may be up.