Damn French and Germans
France and Germany have both respectively pulled out of recession, by a whopping 0.3%. Keeping in mind that these are preliminary figures, which could yet be revised in either direction, this can either prove everything or absolutely nothing.
Those predisposed (like myself) to further stimulus measures will note that both France and Germany have had far larger such packages than we have, although both also had more room for manoeuvre than we did in terms of borrowing and less personal debt to consider.
Neither was as predisposed and reliant on the financial sector as we were, although there’s certainly an argument that Germany is too reliant on its own manufacturing base, although it seems for now as if it’s just that base which has helped it pull clear. Vince Cable is also pushing this argument.
Then there’s the Conservatives (such as George Osborne) who are quite naturally crowing about how Gordon Brown was telling us all about how well placed we were and how we’d be one of the first out.
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MI6 and collusion over torture
One of the more cutting criticisms made by the Joint Committee on Human Rights last week was that while the head of MI5 had no problems in talking to the media, he seemed to regard it as an unacceptable chore to have to appear in front of a few jumped-up parliamentarians.
This week the head of MI6, “Sir” John Scarlett appeared on a Radio 4 documentary into the Secret Intelligence Service, where he naturally denied that MI6 had ever so much as hurt a hair on anyone’s head, or more or less the equivalent, as Spy Blog sets out.
This would of course be the same MI6 that passed on information to the CIA regarding Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil el-Banna which resulted in their arrest in Gambia and subsequent rendition to Guantanamo Bay, and indeed the same MI6 which along with MI5 interviewed Binyam Mohamed while he was being detained in Pakistan, where we now know he was being tortured.
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The Sun: a hypocrisy machine
The Sun’s exclusive on Theresa Winters, the woman from Luton who has had all thirteen of her children taken into care and is now pregnant with her fourteenth, ticks all the paper’s buttons. Broken Britain, scrounging feckless layabouts and of course the bourgeois journalists working for a “working class” newspaper sneering at their own target market.
It doesn’t really make much difference that I can’t think of anything less feckless than being perpetually pregnant, and that yet again the paper is pushing for benefit reform by finding the most extreme case it can, regardless of how the kind of reform it demands would punish those who are deserving as well as those who “aren’t”.
Combine this with the casual dehumanisation which infects all such stories, with Winters described as the “Baby Machine”, leeches and slobs and you have a classic example of a newspaper providing its readers with a target they can hate without feeling bad about doing so.
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Allowing the right to die
There’s more than a certain irony in the law lords finally doing the decent thing and ruling in favour of Debbie Purdy’s right to know under what circumstances her husband might be prosecuted were he to accompany her to Dignitas in Switzerland to die.
Less than a month ago the House of Lords rejected the latest attempt to change the law, to allow relatives to accompany a person with terminal illness to places like Dignitas without the threat of prosecution, by a majority of 53.
All this though is still skirting around the issue.
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The media execs who apparently knew nothing
After the statement from News International over a week ago, and last Sunday’s News of the World editorial, you might have expected that Tom Crone, Colin Myler, Stuart Kuttner and Andy Coulson might have came out defiant and dismissive to the Commons culture committee, especially after last week’s bravura performance from Nick Davies.
The News of the World stance appears to have now changed three times. First it was to deny nothing; then it was to deny everything; now it seems to be know nothing.
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The neo-nazi “threat”
What are we to make then of Neil Lewington, the latest in a string of neo-Nazis to be convicted of terrorism offences?
There is one constant between Robert Cottage, Martyn Gilleard and Lewington, which is either reassuring or worrying, depending on your view: despite their world view, whether it be imminent race war, or the intention to try to start one, all were only interested in “small” explosive devices.
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The News of the Screws is screwed
At the weekend the News of the World was unequivocal in stating the the phone hacking story was almost completely baseless. In an act of extreme chutzpah, it even called on the Guardian to practice what it preached when it said that “decent journalism had never been more necessary”.
All eyes were then on the Commons culture committee yesterday, where first Tim Toulmin of the Press Complaints Commission, then Nick Davies and Paul Johnson, Guardian News and Media’s deputy editor, were to give evidence. Toulmin hardly did the PCC any favours. It seems remarkably relaxed by the allegations made by the Graun, as it has been from the beginning.
Davies then did the equivalent of setting the session alight.
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The dark arts come back to haunt Coulson
While most are only following this News of the World story back to when Clive Goodman was found, with the help of the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, to have intercepted the messages of Prince William, as well as other flunkies in the royal household, it in fact goes further back to the arrest of Stephen Whittamore, a private detective who was used by almost every national tabloid, as well as a few broadsheets, to gain information not just from cracking into mobile phones but also from national databases which he had more than a knack of blagging into.
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The toothless PCC strikes again
To get an idea of just how useless the Press Complaints Commission is, you only have to look at its non-investigation into the Alfie Patten disaster.
You would have thought that they might just have something to say about how the Sun, the People and the Sunday Mail had almost certainly paid his family for personal interviews which led to some of the most invasive and potentially damaging intrusion into the private lives of children for some years, only for it to subsequently turn out that, oops, Alfie wasn’t the father after all.
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Legislation that amounts to nothing
One of the more cutting attacks of recent months on the government came not from the Conservatives but from that other continual provider of friendly fire, Frank Field. Writing about government business which was slowly winding its way towards conclusion, he said: “week after week MPs have been turning up but with almost no serious work to do. There is the odd bill to be sure. But there is no legislative programme to speak of … the whole exercise is vacuous.”
This misses the point that it is not the quantity of bills which are passed, and New Labour has in the past been rightly accused of legislative mania, but rather the quality, on which Labour again falls down on. The immediate answer to passing frenzies and quick to evaporate moral panics is always to get something on the statute book, regardless of how those laws will end up being used and the overall effect they will have.
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The faux-outrage over BBC expenses
As non-stories go, BBC executives claim hardly anything on expenses over five year period is a pretty high ranking one. Director-General claims for flight back to Britain to deal with manufactured newspaper scandal, as any other business would accept in an instant, creative director claims on insurance for stolen handbag, and a £100 bottle of champagne for someone regarded by many as a national treasure is about as weak as it gets.
To give an idea of just how removed these are from the MPs expenses, Radio 1’s controller Andy Parfitt claimed £340.43 on meals last year (PDF), the highest such claim. That’s £60 less than most MPs were claiming in a single month on food.
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An election now is the worst of possible worlds
Gordon Brown didn’t exactly cover himself in glory when he said that calling an election now would cause “chaos”, which he elaborated on later to mean, rather disingenuously, that it would cause chaos for the public services to suddenly have to adjust to the Conservatives’ planned cuts.
It isn’t an entirely unjustified claim however.
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Mummy, what’s a Sex Pistol?
I don’t know a lot about art, but I know what I like. You can’t help but think that’s exactly what four supermarkets thought when they saw the cover art for the Manic Street Preachers’ new album, Journal for Plague Lovers, above. 15 years on from the release of their opus, The Holy Bible, the vast majority of the lyrics for which were written by Richey Edwards, who went missing less than a year later, the band have finally had the courage to return to the remaining lyrics which he left behind for them.
Appropriately, they decided upon using a painting by the artist Jenny Saville, who also provided a confrontational cover for the THB, a triptych of an obese woman in white underwear. The art for JFPL is undoubtedly striking; it’s also quite clearly one of the best album covers in years.
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Who’s to blame for the accidental death?
Both Shuggy and Chris Dillow are right in pointing out that the police treatment of Ian Tomlinson was far from shocking, as some others have claimed.
If anything, the officer who violently pushed him over when there was no need whatsoever to do so was taking part in some of the less dangerous action with the protesters that day. As long as Tomlinson didn’t hit his head, and from the video it seems that he didn’t, a push like that is only likely to result in grazed or cut knees and hands, along with the temporary shock that comes from being bundled over when you’re not expecting it. The cracking of heads which other officers were engaged in all day, causes far more potential for concern.
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The media and killing sprees
There’s now been at least six killings sprees in the space of less than a month .
For the most part I tend to be sceptical about claims of media influence, especially to the extent to which it might by itself trigger copycat behaviour or violence, but there does seem to be some reasonable evidence, at least where it comes to suicide, that sensationalistic coverage and especially emphasis on methods can lead to an increase in the number of attempts by those who already contemplating doing so or are otherwise depressed.
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Will the Afghanistan strategy work?
In one sense, the claim of responsibility from the Pakistani Taliban for Monday’s attack on the police school, is something of a relief; it means, that as yet, Lashkar-e-Toiba, another group founded by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, has not declared war on the Pakistani state itself.
The other sort of good news from the attack was that a complete bloodbath was avoided thanks to the relatively swift intervention of the Pakistani security forces, those who had been criticised, probably unfairly, after the first Lahore attack. “Only” 11 dead, when there were up to 800 police recruits in the attacked compound, can be seen as something of a success.
But there is much to fear from the continuing spiral into proactive insurgency in Pakistan.
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Counter-terrorism, an improved stance
Whenever the government hypes something up, you can almost guarantee that the end result will be less than the sum of its parts. So it is with the latest attempt by the Home Office to get to grips with something approaching an anti-terrorism strategy.
While in the past such doom-mongering was regular, both from politicians and police, this latest document mainly eschews scaremongering, as have the politicians promoting it. With the exception of the potentially worse than useless training of up to 60,000 people in how to act should they suddenly find themselves in the middle of a terrorist attack, which in reality amounts to an around 3 hour seminar session for business people, and the emphasis that has been put on the threat of some variety of “dirty” attack being launched increasing, it mostly keeps things in something approaching perspective.
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Will Barclays’ scam create public anger?
It would be nice to think that with various tax havens having to promise to be rather more transparent in their operations than they have been previously, that the actual businesses which exploit such havens would be following a similar trajectory. The sad reality is that both will continue to get away with it just as they have in the past: when the economy eventually recovers, they will go back to doing what they do best, letting the rich and powerful get away it while castigating the scum at the bottom who dare to fiddle their benefits.
Barclays however hasn’t even bothered with letting it all blow other.
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Gun control and school shootings
While I tend to be for the most part as socially libertarian as you can get, one of the things I tend to disagree with the actual libertarians on is gun control. One of the undoubted major reasons why gun crime in this country is for the most part incredibly rare, especially when compared to other countries is thanks to the draconian nature of our laws; you could argue that we’ve never been major gun lovers over the last century in any case, and that we’ve never had the sort of constitutional protection like in the United States which has encouraged mass gun ownership.
But it’s almost certainly a factor as to why we thankfully haven’t experienced the school shooting massacres that the US has become notorious for and which Germany experienced its second of earlier this week.
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It’s not easy being a protester
When it comes to protests like Leila Deen’s yesterday morning, it’s difficult to know where exactly to draw the line. Undoubtedly, having any liquid substance thrown over you is unpleasant, yet unless it’s something spectacularly nasty, such as the far more available urine rather than the “acid” mentioned by the likes of John Prescott, there really shouldn’t be any repercussions for such rare political statements, and Peter Mandelson doesn’t seem to want to take it any further.
In fact, if anything I’d further support the sliming of politicians, or the throwing of custard pies in some circumstances: a politician that can’t take the odd act of direct action is one that really ought to get over themselves. The power they wield, especially someone unelected like Mandelson, is out of all proportion to that of the humble protester; sometimes you have to take your cause to the next level. Deen might have came out of this looking slightly infantile, and her arguments are not as convincing as she might believe, but she succeeded in getting her own personal message across.
It would also be nice if some people could digest such events without restorting to straw men, as the noble Martin Kettle just had to. The greening of Mandelson proves that we don’t live in a police state, even though only those addicted to hyperbole have said we do. Sleepwalking towards one potentially, already in one no. Still, it seems to have been good timing for Kettle to say just that, as the Guardian today has an exclusive on… the police building databases on peaceful protesters.
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