Moving on from the miners’ strike
It’s about midday on a glum, sunless Saturday. On Cheapside, there’s the usual obstacle course of street traders, buskers and charity fundraisers: a BNP stand stocked with parka-clad pampleteers and studied scowls, a bunch of trade unionists pushing anti-fascist leaflets into the palms of passers-by, and a group of pan pipe players whistling – of all things – the tune to My Heart Will Go On.
Turn left onto Mayday Green, and among the pound shops, charity shops and pasty-picking pigeons, there’s a boarded-up store front carrying a proud advertisement from the council: Barnsley is Changing.
In a sense, they’re absolutely right.
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Against ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ on teenage pregnancy
We’ll begin, as is the vogue when writing about this topic, with some of those tiresome anedotes which somehow prove the observations which follow.
Back when I was still lugging crates of cheap pop around a newsagents in Meadowhall, I worked with a girl named Claire*. Claire was sexually active well before the age of consent, was pregnant by the age of sixteen and had only a handful of GCSEs to her name. So far, so ‘Shameless ‘. Except, as soon as her maternity leave was up, Claire returned to work whatever hours she could manage whilst still looking after her newborn. Some two years after giving birth, she enrolled on a part-time hairdressing course, which she squeezed-in between her paid work and all the hours where she simply had to be a mum. She finally qualified last year and, last I heard, was working in a hair salon with dreams of one day opening her own.
Which Taliban was responsible?
Once we’ve set aside the horror and revulsion one inevitably feels in the wake of these latest attacks in Pakistan, I’m more inclined than ever to think there’s some truth to the Terrorists-Are-Dumb theory of international politics. I mean, if your idea of jihad is striking a possibly fatal blow to your country’s favourite sport, I think it’s safe to say that you’re going to suffer a major recruitment problem.
Beyond that, I think it’s important to avoid either jumping to rash conclusions, or merging Pakistan’s many militant factions into one slimy gloop called ‘Taliban’, as a guest contributor to Harry’s Place seems to do here. Shiraz Maher links the tragedy in Lahore with the recently-brokered ceasefire between the national government and the thugs who control the North-Western Province (or Swat Valley).
I think this is a mistake.
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Our failed war on drugs
For a politician, I’m not sure there’s anything more humiliating than defending your own failures. A few days ago the President of Mexico was forced to deny that he was presiding over a failed state. As his country prepared to send two thousand more troops into the troubled city of Ciudad Juarez, Felipe Calderon insisted that he wasn’t losing control of his country and that victory was just around the corner – contrary to growing fears in the United States that their neighbour is close to becoming a narco-state.
In a technical sense, Mr Calderon is correct that Mexico isn’t yet a failed state, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t failing. Since assuming office in December 2006 and immediately escalating the doomed ‘war on drugs’, there have been over 8,000 drug-related executions.
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How do we deal with poverty?
Over at CentreRight, Jill Kirby eviscerates the ’shamelessly cheerful’ Harriet Harman for attending the launch of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s report into poverty, inequality & government policy.
She interprets the report like so:
As we stare into the pit of a plunging labour market, there is not much for the Government to be proud of. While she wages war on Mandy, staking out her place as the true champion of equality, Hattie would do well to apologise – on behalf of all her colleagues and especially her erstwhile friend and mentor Gordon Brown – for the wasted years, the wasted billions and the wasted opportunities. Opportunites to create a pro-work, pro-family welfare system with reduced dependency and genuine (not grade-inflated) educational opportunities for all. It’s no good telling us you cared, or asking us to let you try more of the same. You had your chance (and our money) and you blew it. You might at least say sorry.
There’s a little too much tubthumping here for this to be a fair analysis.
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“You can fly to Holland”
I’ve watched this debate on the Geert Wilders farce twice now and I still can’t decide whether Keith Vaz was so ill-prepared for it that he completely self-destructed, or whether he was just obliterated by the other members of the panel. Either way, his performance in trying to defend the government’s decision is pretty pathetic:
Nick Cohen on ‘Liberal Fascism’
Depending on what sort of mood you’re in, Nick Cohen’s rather obsequious endorsement of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism will either inspire outrage, derision or mere pity. As it’s a Sunday night, and his review isn’t really worth more than a warm bucket of spit, I’ll limit my comments and link to this excellent demolition of Goldberg’s hatchet job book by David Neiwert – a journalist who’s spent decades investigating fascist, neo-Nazi and far-right groups in American politics. Both Goldberg and Cohen could learn a thing or two from his forensic approach.
(Also here and here)
How do we deal with these casualties?
In 2002 Amrit Bhandari was walking through the centre of Chester when two women asked him for money. He refused, but the beggars persisted and one threatened to accuse the 72-year-old of rape if he didn’t hand something over. They never assaulted him, but Mr Bhandari was so panicked by the harrassment that he suffered a heart attack. Rather than try to help the man they had literally frightened to death, the girls took his briefcase and wallet, and fled.
One of the girls sentenced for the manslaughter of Amrit Bhandri was Sarah Campbell. Sarah’s short life was one filled with horrors few of us can imagine; sexually abused throughout her childhood and raped at 15, she became clinically depressed, sought escape through drugs and, by the age of 16, was enslaved by an addiction to heroin. Just one day into her three year sentence, Sarah swallowed a lethal quantity of prescription drugs. She was eighteen years old.
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Domestic violence: whose problem is it?
In a previous post, which suggested a few measures government could take to reduce domestic violence (or at the very least improve care for its victims), I mentioned the necessity for greater provision of refuges where women could seek shelter from their tormentors.
Conveniently, this survey by the Equality and Human Rights Commission details the extent of the current provision – or lack thereof – and produces some quite troubling figures.
The commission found that one in four local authorities in Britain has no specialised support services whatsoever, that a quarter of the rape crisis centres which do exist fear closure or cuts in funding, and that ethnic minority women – whose circumstances can be slightly different due to the intersection of culture, relgion and misogyny – are particularly poorly-served by current provision. In short, we’re just not doing enough to care for victims.
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British jobs for British workers, in practice
A few weeks ago, Chris Dillow warned of some of the nasty social side-effects of the recession. He noted that “the main effect of recession is not to cause poverty, but insecurity. And when people are insecure and anxious, they care less for others.” In short, fear makes us all more selfish.
On one level, what’s transpired in Immingham over the last few days has been the opposite of that stark prediction.
The unofficial walk-out by employees at an oil refinery – protesting their company’s decision to employ foreign labour – was an act of solidarity, not selfishness.
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Nick Cohen plays the blame game
So when I read this, my first thought was: is there anything Nick Cohen hasn’t blamed the left for recently? Let’s face it, if the guy’s taking up more column inches than usual, it’s normally because he’s found an inventive way of trashing his former comrades.
Anyway, aside from decrying the lifestyles of the super-rich and the increased polarisation of wealth in Blair/Brown’s Britain, Cohen’s substantive argument is that New Labour could’ve moved Britain away from the Thatcherite consensus, been less lavish in its spending and cultivated an economy less reliant on financial services. Cohen posits that New Labour’s legacy will be a self-harming slavishness to lawless, reckless financiers to the expense of us all.
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We still need a coherent foreign policy
David Miliband’s sudden recalibration of British foreign policy has been widely – and rightly – interpreted as a make-over to match the more refined tastes of the Obama administration. By abandoning the brutish, unloved ‘war on terror’ and embracing complexity, pragmatism and an acceptance that our enemies can’t be thwarted by force alone, Miliband’s Guardian piece bore a striking resemblance to the language of ’smart power’ that Hillary Clinton promised in her appearance before the Senate.
However, the question of whether or not this is ‘change you can believe in’ is up for debate. James Hooper declares himself “reassured”, but Claude at Hagley Road catches a whiff of opportunism. Aaron just wants to know: what the hell took you so long?
There are some good points in each of these posts, but what I think’s been missed about Miliband’s rather blatant fawning is that he seems to think that by mirroring the rhetoric of the incoming administration, Britain will be the same kind of sidekick to President Obama as Tony Blair was to President Bush. In my view, that seems unlikely.
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Governing by tabloid headlines
Yesterday, Polly Toynbee dismissed David Cameron’s new tax proposals as “part populism, part poison”. If that’s so, then I hope she’ll react with similar disgust to Hazel Blears’ latest belch of blame-the-poor prattle:
Hit-squads will make early-morning calls to make sure parents are out of bed to get their kids ready for school before heading out to look for work. They will even turn up with rubber gloves to get families to clean up filthy homes. Communities Secretary Hazel Blears said: “In a recession, there’s no space for freeloaders. We need a more muscular approach to ways the state intervenes into deliberately-unemployed people’s lives. Young people are often capable of much more than signing on the dole like their parents.”
Let us be clear; these aren’t serious proposals.
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Why Obama is silent on Israel
As Israeli tanks thunder into Gaza towards an outcome where the only certainty is the loss of yet more innocent life, the demands for Obama to publicly address the crisis get louder and more numerous, as do the interpretations of his silence. Is he implicitly condoning Israel’s actions? Is it a sign that he’s reluctant to criticise Israel until he’s in office? Or is it an example of what some critics have long thought to be a fence-straddling cautiousness that his soaring rhetoric manages to disguise as unifying leadership?
My hunch, which is based partly on observing his positions for the past two years and partly on the methods of the Clinton era, is that a President Obama would’ve supported limited, intelligence-based air assaults on known military targets, most probably Hamas’ rocket-launching sites. That would’ve been too hawkish for my liking, particularly as the civilian casualties involved would’ve been considerable and the chances of destroying Hamas’ rocket-launching capability from the air would’ve been slim.
Daft conservatives
We’ve approached the time of year when grown adults like to set aside large parts of the day just to make lists. We list the best/worst things to have happened to us, the best/worst things we have bought, our top 10 love/hate figures or our highest/lowest expectations for the year to come. In this same spirit, ToryHome have decided to list what makes a conservative. It’s a fairly innocuous, predictable read, but alongside statements which veer from vague (”Taxation has dynamic effects”) to platitudinous (”Love of country is fundamental to all conservatism”) to downright cryptic (”Man is a fallen creature”), they include this:
Economic liberalism needs social conservatism
Well, I can understand why, in the interests of coalition building, you’d want the flat-taxers in the same boat as the flat-earthers, but their agendas are far less aligned than this five word declaration makes out.
In its fullest expression, social conservatism is restrictive and censorious: it burns ‘heretical’ literature, pickets outside theatres, demands the banning of video games and enforces prohibition of gambling and recreational substances. Classic economic liberals would balk at such authoritarian measures because people should be allowed the freedom to consume what the market provides. No true classicist would want the state to subsidise marriage, and some would even consider abandoning the expensive, losing ‘war on drugs’.
At their core, social conservatives believe unfettered markets can be damaging, and economic liberals stand against against restrictions on markets. Sure, with lashings of compromise and a moderate, piecemeal application of both sides’ agendas, they can often play along nicely, but to suggest some kind of symbiotic relationship between the two is just daft.
Christopher Booker’s scientific credentials
Rejoice, people! Whatever you may’ve read, however many chilling predictions you may have heard, however frequently Al Gore might haunt your dreams, telling you that the world will end in a torrent of fire because YOU don’t use energy-saving lightbulbs, I can promise that all those fears are unfounded. For as people across the world glance at 2009 with such foreboding and dread, Christopher Booker has made the jolly discovery that instead of getting much, much worse, climate change doesn’t actually exist all!
Now, I understand that there’s a great deal of misinformation out there in BlogLand, and since I’m not a scientist (well, neither is he, but he sure seems to know a lot more than ‘real scientists’), I have to make sure that all my sources are of the highest calibre. So I did whatever any forensic time-deprived blogger would do, and checked him out on Wikipedia. Without further ado, and just to show how seriously you should take his scientific acumen, here are some of Booker’s greatest hits:
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Our asylum seekers shame
You’ll have to forgive the wonkish legalese, but there’s a principle in international law called non-refoulement, which forbids the expulsion of refugees back to states where they might be subjected to persecution. Deeply ingrained within the 1951 UN convention (of which Britain is a signatory), it arose from the widely-felt shame of failing to provide an adequate safehaven from Nazi genocide, and a resolve that it must never happen again.
Increasingly, though, it’s hard to reconcile our country’s commitment to this deeply important principle with the reality of our actions.
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Suggestions to reduce domestic violence
All we know are the facts. We know that domestic violence accounts for 16% of all violent crime and that a quarter of women & 15% of men will suffer abuse in their lifetimes. We know that women are overwhelmingly more likely to suffer repeated abuse, that two women a week are killed by a current or former partner and that one incident of abuse is reported to the police every minute of the day. Sadly, we also know that these reports only account for a fraction of the true number of attacks, many of which go unreported.
We know, too, that no government, no matter how active or intrusive, could stop partners from being violent to each other, and as the goal of eradicating domestic violence will always be unreachable, the question we must ask is whether we – as a state, as a society, and as individuals – are doing the most we can to condemn, prosecute and punish its perpatrators, and protect, counsel and care for its victims.
That question has been raised again this week as Labour and the Conservatives lock horns over who has the better policies to reduce domestic violence and improve care for those who’ve suffered from it.
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The ‘inspiring’ David Blunkett
When Martin Kettle tells his friends & colleagues that he still ‘rates’ David Blunkett, they apparently react with shock, even surprise. Sure, he can understand why people didn’t like the ‘lapses of judgement’ which forced him to resign from the cabinet (twice), he can sympathise with people turned-off by his sneering arrogance and he even concedes that he might’ve been a little ‘populist’ when he was Home Secretary. But shouldn’t we forgive all this and welcome back a ‘genuine thinker’ who is ‘one of the most inspirational leaders that Labour has got’?
*Cue the sound of crickets*
This is Kettle at his most cloyingly euphemistic. When he admits to Blunkett’s ‘lapses of judgement’, he means that on one occasion he abused his power by giving his ex-lover a taxpayer-funded train ticket & speeding up her nanny’s visa application, and on another failed to disclose a potential conflict of interest and ignored three seperate requests to make himself accountable.
Who’s winning the war on welfare?
There has never been a better – or a worse – time to reform the welfare system. Aided by a recession which has made public spending the top political issue, and the deep anger caused by the tragedies of Baby P and Shannon Matthews, the public have become far more receptive to the idea of a tougher, sanction-based system than they were in the halcyon days of summer.
Short of a Labour rebellion on the scale of the 10p tax fiasco, our increasing antipathy towards the terminally jobless will probably see Purnell’s pet project sail through the Commons. And yet, as some are painfully aware, in days when the jobless figures keep rising, it’s hard to find jobs for the short-term unemployed, let alone those who have never worked in their lives.
The problem with trying to write about welfare reform is so much of the rhetoric tends to merge economic issues (the amount of money the state spends on the poorest in society) with social problems (the crime, poor education, family breakdown and general dysfunction which can be found in impoverished communities).The two are heavily linked, of course, but the mistake politicians often make is assuming that by producing policies to tackle the former, the latter will somehow fix itself.
The chief perpetrators of this mistake are the Labour government.
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You can read articles through the front page, via Twitter or rss feeds.
» How bad is the feline obesity crisis?
» Why don’t MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours?
» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
» Why does Phillip Blond see civic cohesion as a security issue?
» So what if the Labour candidates went to Oxbridge?
» Last night’s Labour hustings: will it get interesting or turn to torture?
» It’s now down to Ken to win London for Labour
» The Labour people need
» Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed?
» The Labour leadership’s token contender.. and it’s not Diane Abbott
» In defence of these fraternal nominations
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