Recent Articles

Behind Osborne’s smoke and mirrors today on transport spending

by Guest     June 26, 2013 at 4:44 pm

by Andrew Allen

In his spending round statement, the Chancellor has pretty much done what we feared he would.

First and foremost, he has shifted a huge chunk of government spending from revenue to capital. That’s right – despite the Coalition Government’s poor record in getting anything built, the Chancellor’s big idea for kick starting the economy is to spend £300bn on infrastructure by 2020.

Although we won’t get the detail until Danny Alexander speaks tomorrow, it appears certain that a huge tranche of money will go on new road projects.

Schemes like the A14 in Cambridgeshire and Mersey Gateway Bridge will doubtless be announced yet again and be joined by zombie schemes resurrected from the infamous 1989 Roads to Prosperity White Paper. All this will be highly controversial, lighting the blue touch paper for a new wave roads protests.

It won’t help the economy either. The likelihood of any new scheme being under construction and creating jobs by the time of the next election is minimal. All while the backlog of road maintenance continues to grow.

Now approaching £11bn, tackling this backlog would not only do more to help business than new road plans, it would also create jobs more quickly.

Another thing the Government could do to help more people get back to work would be to invest in the bus network.

While the Department for Transport’s bus support appears to have been saved from the axe, local authorities budget have been hit.

Their buses support is primarily aimed at those on lower income – exactly the people who have no other way of getting around, and certainly won’t benefit from shifting transport spending to road building.

—
Andrew Allen is from the charity Campaign for Better Transport – which calls for affordable green transport for all.

US hate-bloggers banned from UK for EDL rally

by Sunny Hundal     June 26, 2013 at 4:14 pm

Both Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer have been banned from entering the UK by the Home Office, after a campaign by the anti-racist group Hope Not Hate.

Both bloggers posted letters to their websites today, from the Home Office, stating that they had been banned from entering.

Letter to Robert Spencer

Letter to Pamela Geller

The duo were invited to speak at a rally by the English Defence League.

The letter stated:

After careful consideration, she [the Home Secretary] personally directed that you should be excluded from the United Kingdom on the grounds that your presence here is not conducive to the public good.

The Home Secretary has reached this decision because you have brought yourself within the scope of the list of unacceptable behaviours by making statements that may foster hatred which might lead to inter-community violence in the UK.

Pamela Geller has been exposed as repeatedly publishing false stories about Muslims in order to stir up hatred.

Geller and Spencer also co-founded ‘Stop The Islamization of America’ – which ran ads on American buses that many say referred to Muslims as “savages”

Previous people banned from the UK include Muslim preachers Al-Qaradawi and Zakir Naik.

How Osborne tried to mislead us today about boosting capital spending

by Duncan Weldon     June 26, 2013 at 2:22 pm

George Osborne just made a great deal of fuss about his plans to increase capital spending from 2015/16. The immediate question is – how big is this boost?

The short answer is – there isn’t really one.

Osborne spoke repeatedly about investing £50bn a year and given current public sector net investment is around £25bn a year – these seems like an awful lot, a doubling of investment spend.

However, it appears Osborne was talking about increasing gross rather than net investment spending.

To clarify: the difference is that Depreciation is running at approximately 25bn a year. Osborne just started talking about a different measure, misleadingly.

Gross public sector net investment is around £47bn a year and was previously expected to be £50.4bn in 2015/16 according to the OBR (table 4.18).

In other words there doesn’t actually appear to be an increase in capital spending.

How very misleading.

This isn’t a real increase and it is not even scheduled to start for two years, the economy needs a boost now – not smoke and mirrors about the future.

Has overseas anger sunk Cameron’s plan to charge certain immigrants bond money?

by Natalie Bennett     June 26, 2013 at 11:54 am

From a British perspective, this news story looks like a familiar model: government floats trial balloon that it hopes will become policy in Sunday papers, it is shot down by Tuesday night, and it is remembered at most as an incidental footnote in political history.

That’s the obvious fate of the proposal, presented with the backing of Theresa May and Nick Clegg in the Sunday Times (paywall), to force visitors from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Ghana to pay a £3,000 bond before they can get a visa, to be repaid after they leave the country within the limits of its term. These states were labelled “high-risk” for over-stayers. (Labour had twice suggested similar schemes when it was in government, but they never came into being.)

David Cameron last night “slammed the brakes on the proposal”, in the terms of the Financial Times (partial paywall), on the basis that he doesn’t want to undermine “his growth agenda or the ‘open for business’ message he delivered on a recent trip to India”.

Outside the UK, in particular in the countries affected, however, the impact will, however, I’m afraid last a lot longer than the Sunday papers. That was clear to me after an appearance on Indian television last night (from London) to speak about the visa plan, when I was almost buried at times under giant gushes of anger, driven a sense of humiliation and ingratitude, from representatives of the business community, commentators and the host.

That’s widely reflected in the Indian media and blogosphere – the well-known FirstPost calling for matching retaliatory action against UK visitors. Discussion on the television show focused particularly on how the British economy could be damaged, with India being the fifth-largest source of foreign investment into Britain, and its home firm Tata the largest private-sector employer. “It seems that Britain is no longer interested [in trade],” The Economic Times quoted an unidentified CEO as saying.

Unsurprisingly, there seems to be similar anger in Nigeria, Ghana, and I’ve no doubt the other states.

I had a clear message that I hope got through to what I was told was up to 100 million viewers on The Newshour – that despite the stance of the British Government and Labour Party, both chasing after UKIP voters with astonishing desperation – the visa bond did not reflect the general view of the British public.

I was clearly stating that the Green Party is utterly opposed to the idea of the bonds – and more broadly to the government’s approach to immigration, and its attempts to drive down number of immigrants based on a single blunt target of a immigration cap, despite the damage the tactics employed are doing to industry and business, to our universities and colleges, to tourism, to the family life of many Britons, and to our international reputation.

On the specific bond idea, I pointed out that Canada had considered a similar proposal and discarded it as discriminatory, as it undoubtedly is. I understood why the Indian commentators to whom I was speaking were focusing on their own nationals’ treatment, but the selection of six predominately non-white Commonwealth countries for this special treatment – not the US or Australia or any Latin American state deserves to be highlighted.

The story by tomorrow in Britain will have disappeared. Its impact around the globe will take a lot longer to fade.

Climate change denial is less popular than abolishing the monarchy

by Leo Barasi     June 26, 2013 at 8:55 am

I said in my previous post that talking about climate denial is a mistake for campaigners, for various reasons, including that doubts about climate science are far less widespread than usually seems to be imagined.

Without wanting to labour the point, a new international Pew poll has just shown this again. The poll listed various possible global threats, and for each asked whether respondents consider them to be major or minor threats, or not to be threats.

For UK perceptions of climate change, the poll found the biggest group to be those who consider it a major threat (about half), followed by those who say it’s a minor threat (about a third), with only a small group saying it’s not a threat:

That 13% is about the same as the proportion in the Carbon Brief poll who said “climate change will probably never be a serious problem”.

To put this in perspective, about 18% want Britain to become a republic. So the view that climate change isn’t a threat is significantly less widespread than the desire to abolish the monarchy.

From the way rejection of climate science is treated as a major phenomenon, you might not have guessed.

How EDL members reacted to a Mosque attack

by Newswire     June 25, 2013 at 7:14 pm

Via @EDLnewsXtra, who says these messages were posted after the Somali community centre was burnt down in Muswell Hill.

UKuncut to stage food bank protests in HSBC branches

by Newswire     June 25, 2013 at 6:41 pm

UK uncut, the direct action network, says it will transform HSBC branches into food banks over how welfare spending cuts have affected poverty in the UK.

Campaigners have highlighted research which has shown that 500,000 people now rely on food banks on a regular basis.

The number of people relying on food banks has risen by 170% in the last year alone. Nearly half of those relying on food banks did so because of cuts or delays in benefit payments, while one in five turned to food banks due to low pay.

HSBC, the UK’s largest bank, has been targeted primarily for its links to tax havens and its role in facilitating tax avoidance.

Recent research has shown that HSBC uses tax havens more than another UK bank, with 496 subsidiaries in tax havens.

Only two other companies on the FTSE 100 have more links to tax havens.

The bank has also been rocked by major tax avoidance scandals, with a Swiss subsidiary alleged to have helped UK tax payers evade £200 million as well as running thousands of offshore accounts in the tax haven of Jersey.

The protests will take place on 20 July.

It will be UK Uncut’s first national day of action since the group targeted Starbucks in December 2012.

Lord Freud’s letter warning councils on Bedroom Tax

by Sunny Hundal     June 25, 2013 at 4:49 pm

Welfare minister Lord Freud has written to all councils warning them of consequences if they re-classify properties so that their occupants avoid the Bedroom Tax.

Here is the letter (via @camdentheo)

Re-designation of properties and the removal of the Spare Room Subsidy

As you may be aware there have been a number of reported cases of local authorities re-designating their properties, without reducing the rent to reflect the loss of a bedroom. Such action could lead to incorrect Housing Benefit subsidy claims being submitted to my Department at the end of the financial year.

In principle my Department has no objections to re-designating properties where there is good cause to do so, for example where a property is significantly adapted to cater for a disabled persons needs. However, we would expect the designation of a property to be consistent for both Housing Benefit and rent purposes. Blanket redesignations without a clear and justifiable reason, and without reductions in rent, are inappropriate and do not fall within the spirit of the policy.

Between 2000 and 2010 expenditure had doubled in cash terms, reaching £21 billion. Unreformed, by 2014-15 Housing Benefit would cost over £25 billion. By removing the Spare Room Subsidy £500 million a year can be saved through greater efficiency and better use of social housing stock. It is therefore vital that local authorities adhere to their statutory responsibility to implement this policy on behalf of the Department.

I would like to stress that if it is shown properties are being re-designated inappropriately this will be viewed very seriously. If the Department has cause to believe this is the case we will commission an independent audit to ascertain whether correct and appropriate procedures have been followed. I wish to state clearly that these audits would be separate from the subsidy audits already undertaken, which carry out sample checks on the assessment of Housing Benefit.

Where it is found that a local authority has re-designated properties without reasonable grounds and without reducing rents, my Department would consider either restricting or not paying their Housing Benefit subsidy.

Lord Freud, Minister for Welfare Reform

Theo Blackwell from Camden Labour says the restriction or non-payment of the subsidy in Camden would mean anything up to a £150m loss. It may also affect councils in Leeds and Nottingham, along with others.

Lord Freud cannot be more despicable even if he tried.

Why has it taken this long for a call to look at the Police’s undercover activities?

by Jenny Jones AM     June 25, 2013 at 3:28 pm

I hope the news that the Metropolitan Police sent undercover police to spy on the Stephen Lawrence family becomes the turning point in the on-going spy cops scandal.

It’s surprising it has taken until now for broad calls for a public inquiry. Why not when we first discovered undercover police officers had been having long-term intimate relationships with activists as a tool for gathering information? What about all the other victims of police spies?

The Met had a unit that stole the identities of dead babies, apparently withheld information from a judicial inquiry and used sex as a tool to gain information and cover from innocent women.

Plus, we already have a fresh set of allegations that police spies infiltrated campaigns against police corruption. The sorry saga of perverted and possibly illegal undercover policing needs a public inquiry to get to the truth, or as much of it as we can.

There are currently between 12 to 15 inquiries or reviews looking into different aspects of the murky world of police spies.

The time has come for one judicial inquiry to look at all the allegations, including the crimes Mark Kennedy committed in Germany, Bob Lambert authoring the McLibel leaflet, fathering children with the women they spied on and the allegations about the firebombing of Debenhams raised under Parliamentary privilege.

There must be senior Ministers who are open to the inquiry idea, in the same way that the Met Commissioner appears to be.

It’s been 20 months since the Met launched Operation Herne, their own investigation into undercover policing, but the Assembly’s Police and Crime Committee are yet to be told how many matters have been referred to the IPCC for investigation, how many cases the CPS are looking at, if any disciplinary action has been taken against officers, or if these officers are still supervising undercover operations.

There are 23 officers and 10 staff working on the case, but there have been no arrests and the Home Secretary only heard about the alleged smearing of the Lawrence family via the media.

A judicial inquiry, unlike the internal police investigation and Tom Ellison QC’s review, would allow the victims of undercover operations – the women, the children of officers, the parents whose children’s identities were stolen and the Lawrences – a voice in this process.

They could tell their side of the story and see those responsible held to account in public for their actions and decisions.

PS, I will be questioning the Commissioner about undercover policing at Thursday’s meeting of the Assembly’s Police and Crime Committee.
I will also be speaking in the Speakers Forum, Green Futures Field of Glastonbury at 3pm on Saturday.

What if the police infiltrated left groups not for the state but for corporations?

by Guest     June 25, 2013 at 9:20 am

by Jonathan Kent

So the leaflet at the centre of the McDonalds libel trial was co-written by Bob Lambert, an undercover police officer who later apologised to the “law abiding members of London Greenpeace,” which he described as a peaceful campaigning group.

Likewise Mark Kennedy/Stone, who couldn’t fathom what threat the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station protesters he’d infiltrated posed. The judge trying one group of Ratcliffe protesters praised their public spiritedness. Doesn’t anyone else think it odd that the state spends millions of pounds infiltrating annoying, but mostly harmless, groups of hippies?

It makes no sense, until you stop to consider what happens to the surveillance data.

Simon Jenkins, in The Guardian, noted that Stone/Kennedy was working for the National Public Order Intelligence Unit whose chain of command lead to the Association of Chief Police Officers.

But ACPO isn’t a statutory body. It’s a private company and, according to Jenkins, it sold data to other private companies. It’s when you start to think about surveillance as a business that infiltrating peaceful, democratic green / leftist / anti-capitalist groups starts to make sense. There’s a market for surveillance data and demand drives supply.

Ask yourself this: who might buy data about far-right groups or militant ‘Islamists’ who represent a threat to public safety and the state? The answer, surely, is the state, and the state has tight budgets and a security apparatus of its own.

But who would buy information about greens, democratic leftists and assorted anti-capitalists? Big business has limited security apparatus of its own, deep pockets and, if protesters threaten the bottom line, the corporation’s motive-of-motives; money.

So the question is not ‘why spend so much infiltrating peaceful protest groups?’ but ‘just how far have our security priorities been distorted by the market for information?’ The more it becomes about money the less it becomes about national security and the more about protecting financial interests.

Now think about all this in the context of the Snowden revelations about PRISM and GCHQ.

Once we stood up for our liberties. Indeed millions donned uniforms and fought, were wounded or were killed in their defence. Now all it takes is one or two savage attacks on our streets and we’re prepared to throw away everything our forebears gave their lives for.

But we live in a different world where power is inexorably seeping away from our elected representatives who, however flawed they may be, are ultimately accountable to us. And power is flowing equally inexorably towards corporations – unaccountable, faceless and legally constituted to be amoral; uninterested in right and wrong only in serving their shareholders’ interests. PRISM benefits them.

What is at stake is not different ideas of right and wrong, right-wing morality versus left-wing morality, it’s whether we have a world in which morality plays any significant part at all.

Overwrought? Two weeks ago suggestions of an all-seeing, all-encompassing surveillance state across the Western democracies might have seemed equally so. But PRISM exists and so do real threats to the very fabric of society.

Our forebears were prepared to give their lives to stop this sort of thing. What are we prepared to give?

—
Jonathan Kent blogs here.