In defence of Archbishop Rowan Williams
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, is in trouble over his comments on the incorporation of Sharia law into UK law.
It is my opinion that Dr Williams’ suggestions deserve reasoned consideration; that they do not require a change in the nature of the law; and that much of the opposition to them, implicitly, requires a very grave change in the law from defining what is illegal to defining what is legal.
I think it’s important to work out exactly what the most reverend Primate is saying. It has generally been reported as ’sharia law is unavoidable’ along with cries of Londonistan and dhimmitude.
According to this transcript of an interview between the Archbishop and Jonathan Landau, what Dr Williams believes is that
“the application of Sharia in certain circumstances if we want to achieve this cohesion and take seriously peoples’ religion seems unavoidable”
What I intend to do in this post is briefly to sum up Dr Williams’ argument before giving my reasons for supporting it. I will then seek to show not only that the arguments used to oppose his comments are based on misconceptions, accidental or otherwise, of his opinions and that they, in fact, to a great deal to damage community relations in the UK. Finally, I will reflect on the implications of Dr Williams’ comments and the reaction they have provoked.
Campaign against 42 days extension
The government will try and push its Counter Terrorism Bill through parliament in the next few weeks. This bill includes the provision to hold someone in detention, without charging them, for 42 days – a two week increase on the current limit of 28 days. Unsurprisingly, New Labour has been trying to paint this extension of police powers in benign terms. But we should not be fooled. Why? Because:
Despite vague allusions to ‘emergencies,’ the reality of the new proposals is that the Home Secretary can activate these powers at any time. There is no need for a public emergency of the type often drawn upon by government ministers; the ‘nightmare scenario’ of police overwhelmed by multiple terror plots. Indeed, an individual case can be trigger enough. Parliamentary safeguards proposed are anything but. The Home Secretary only has to inform Parliament that she has triggered the 42-day limit. Parliament will only be allowed to a vote up to 30 days later and then only if the government is seeking to renew the powers for another 30 days – by which time suspects could have already been held for six weeks. Further, even if used unlawfully, the decision to trigger the 42-day limit cannot be challenged and the power could not be struck down.
We have to try and oppose this draconian piece of legislation by:
1) Raising awareness that the vote is coming to parliament soon
2) Encouraging people to write to their MPs opposing this bill.
3) Informing of events, protests or publicity stunts on the issue.
4) Generate and share ideas on what we can do.
So far, we have: a Facebook group designed to raise awareness; a Downing St. petition against it; a basic list of public figures opposing it. Clearly, this is not enough.
The problem is that the home secretary has been doing a lot of arm-twisting over the past few weeks and there’s a threat going around to Labour MPs who dare to help the government lose its first big vote. I have a bad feeling this will go through.
If we are serious about opposing this latest attack on our civil liberties, we have to do more. So, here goes:
1) We are going to blog this issue regularly (from now until the vote) along with OurKingdom. Please join our campaign by doing the same!
2) Compass is asking for submissions to a consultation. Add your views (until 15th).
3) I’ll soon publish a list of MPs who opposed the 90 days extention. It’s best we put pressure on them specifically.
4) Ideas or suggestions for a publicity stunt later this month welcome!
5) An event is planned later this month at City Circle. Will let you know more soon.
Pipe down, Christian soldiers
A little preamble: There is nothing in this world that winds yours truly up like political and/or religious opportunists banging on about restricting access to legal abortion, and foetus rights, and 40 years of legal abortion delivering Britain of two generations of conscience-free sluts, etc.
The truth is that pro-lifers drive me BANANAS. I have frothed about them all over the internet and most social events I’ve attended. Alas, the pro-life contingent and their political backers witter on, undaunted by the fact that the great majority of the British public supports a woman’s right to choose.
——-
About 300 women (and a small cluster of blokes) turned up at the Houses of Parliament last week for an Abortion Rights meeting about the threat posed to the 1967 Abortion Act by proposed – and opportunistic – anti-abortion amendments to the government’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. Pro-lifers are particularly keen to lower the present 24-week gestational limit for abortion.
The bill – as you doubtless have guessed – has absolutely nothing to do with abortion law (it’s about reforming the regulation of human embryology as the sciences of fertilisation and embryology move on at pace). Sadly, complete irrelevance ain’t putting the god-squad off.
One Baroness Masham has already attempted to perpetrate an amendment to reduce access to abortion for women who discover their babies have severe disabilities. Her notion was to force women in that situation to see their pregnancies to term – to give birth, as renowned pro-choice doctor Wendy Savage said at the abortion rights meeting – to children they know are doomed.
MPs might be crazy, but they’re not all stupid, and the brighter ones know very well how women instinctively respond to the thought of being trapped by an unwanted pregnancy.
continue reading… »
Monkeys and the organ minder
The complaining about Gordon Brown proposing an opt-out organ donation system is great. Selfish, pig-headed and self-contradictory whining is always a joy.
Needless to say most of the umbrage is coming from the Right. They might as well be saying ‘Gordon Brown can pry my liver from my cold dead hand’ for all the sense they’re making. They bang on about the ‘murder’ of foetuses by the ‘abortion industry’ but are seemingly willing to stand by and let walking, talking people die because their politics have been offended.
What it boils down to is putting your principles before the lives of dying people. And what’s more, you’ll be dead anyway and won’t even get to enjoy the smug satisfaction of putting one over on Gordon Brown with your clever principles. Because you’ll be dead (did I mention that?).
Unless you believe in heaven, obviously, in which case I suppose you could look down and blow raspberries in Gordon’s direction. If they let, smug, selfish, gloating pricks into heaven, that is. And unless you’re expecting an Assumption, you can’t take your guts to heaven either.
continue reading… »
Guantanamo Bay’s 6th birthday
Why I’m supporting John Edwards – an appeal to the Left
At both the last US Presidential election, I took a stance that is not popular on the UK left – one of support for a critical Democratic vote. For those of you who are unaware of my political heritage and who may be surprised that such an apparently uncontroversial stance would excite any kind of debate at all on the liberal-left, allow me to explain. The political background from which I come is one of the left in union and wider labour movement politics, where Trotskyist groups, all of which have a visceral loathing for the Democrats, have loomed large. Indeed, they were only ever really willing to call for a vote for the Labour Party in the UK based on a combination of recruitment raiding, and Byzantine theorising that attached an almost religious significance to the never-exercised trade union link with Labour.
Both of these factors having withered on the vine over the past ten years, most of the left (barring a few real no-hopers) have pulled back from automatic support for Labour, and indeed have ended up in many cases in something of a state of confused hopelessness as a consequence. Some indeed have ended up wandering down blind alleys such as the laughably misnamed “Respect” coalition, following quixotic figures such as George Galloway in the desperate hope of being led to a new dawn. Of course, that dawn will transpire to be a mirage, and most have already seen it. But such is the myopic faith even of ex-trotskyists in their will to follow a “line” that some will continue to do so – even as they spend every passing day tearing each other to pieces and opening themselves up for widespread mockery on this blog amongst others. It’s hardly an edifying spectacle.
So in light of such an extraordinary fiasco, what on earth could a refugee from such a risible political community possibly have to contribute to a debate being held on a far larger arena, in the USA? One of the reasons is because I like to think that people can and do learn lessons, and that therefore they are not doomed to carry on repeating the mistakes of the past. continue reading… »
Against ContactPoint: To Be Continued
Before I become blissfully chained to my sumptuous new cooker for at least the next ten days, a quick update on ContactPoint (the “children’s index”) and related “database state” issues. I’ve written here (and here and here) about this forthcoming information sharing e-system and why I – and others – fear it may have the opposite effect to that the government desires
In theory, ContactPoint will enable public sector professionals to better anticipate when children are at risk of harm and to respond in a more coordinated way when intervention is required. In practice, say its critics, such professionals will spend an awful lot of time at computer terminals following false trails of misleading information while the fear of breach of privacy – of up to around 300 people they’ve never met “knowing their business” online – will deter the very children and families most in need of help from seeking or accepting it
In my last piece on this subject for Liberal Conspiracy I reported that ministers might be adjusting their sales pitch for ContactPoint, replacing vaguely shroud-waving references to the Victoria Climbie tragedy with less emotive talk of general practitioner efficiency. However, during her damage limitation exercise over the latest disappearing data embarrassment – those British learner drivers’ details that got lost across the pond – Ruth Kelly directly invoked Climbie when appearing on Newsnight (thank you, ARCH blog) and I heard her on Five Live asserting that the public would rightly be appalled if information wasn’t shared in relation to child protection.
Well, her last point is indisputable taken in isolation: of course relevant child welfare professionals working on the same case need to know what each other are doing. But, whatever the top brass of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services claim, a national database of dubious reliability and questionable security, compulsorily compiled and run by local authorities without parental consent being required seems precisely the wrong way of going about it.
How can we best mobilise opinion against ContactPoint? It seems to me that simply howling “Big Brother” isn’t enough. We need to show that e-government in all its form risks creating greater dangers to individuals and to society than it prevents. ContactPoint is a good example of this, and I urge readers to join the Facebook group I’ve formed to oppose it. Lobby your MP too, and lend your support to Annette Brookes MP, the Liberal Democrats’ spokesperson on children’s issues.
But let’s look at the wider picture as well. Guardian technology correspondent Michael Cross has recently argued for a far more open and political debate about e-government, taking in everything from ID cards to NHS records. He rightly observes that the public has been given no clear idea about the growth of e-government, how best to make it work and what its true implications might be. One of my New Year resolutions will be to encourage that debate in 2008. Maybe it will be one of yours too.
The lump of indignation fallacy
Once more, Polly Toynbee steps in to protect the helpless state against the bullying individual:
The Porter view has become fashionable because it allows the middle classes to pretend to be victims, too. But it is decadence for mainly privileged people to obsess over imaginary Big Brother attacks on themselves, when others all around them are suffering badly from neglect by the state – or sometimes from real aggression by government. Indignation is precious, not to be squandered on illusory threats, but saved for real injustices.
Blimey: how to unpick this lot? I like the idea that there’s a finite lump of indignation which has to be saved for special occasions, non-renewable and somehow outside the self. The lump of indignation fallacy, you might say. I like the idea as well that you’re supposed to balance your income against your freedom.
continue reading… »
The problem with liberalism
What do you think the word ‘liberal’ means?
Perhaps if you are American, you are thinking of what Europeans call social democrats. Maybe some Europeans think of it as some kind of wishy-washy centrism that can’t decide between left and right. In certain countries it may have something to do with a pro-business approach. If you’re Australian it probably means the same as conservative.
A pre-condition of liberalism might be the existence of free markets. Or maybe liberalism is to do with equality of some kind or another. Animal rights? Environmentalism? [insert trendy cause here]? Smith, Mill or Kant? Etc, etc. It seems to me that the word ‘liberal’ is about as useful as words like ‘that’ and ‘thingy’.
As such, it wasn’t really a surprise that Liberal Conspiracy provoked some debate about the nature of liberalism when it was launched a month or so back. “My liberalism is more liberal than yours” and that type of thing.
continue reading… »
28 days: Can a Labour revolt work?
Jacqui Smith’s campaign may yet hit some hurdles if this works:
The former health secretary Frank Dobson is rallying opposition among Labour MPs for a full-scale revolt against Gordon Brown’s proposal to allow suspected terrorists to be detained without charge for up to 42 days. [hat tip: Leon]
Frank Dobson is leading 49 Labour MPs in revolt; can anyone get us their names? There are still people in the party with a conscience, at least. Even the head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, doesn’t see the need to extend past 28 days. The home secretary can’t get anyone to support her plans and yet she soldiers on. Why is this Labour government hell-bent on generating ill-will with its supporters? Friday’s Indy was spot-on when it called this an “unhealthy obsession with counting the days“.
The Facebook group we launched on Friday has grown to over 1,300 1,400 over the weekend. Use that or this blog to throw out ideas, links or other ways to contribute to this campaign. And if you haven’t already, please sign the Amnesty International petition on the Downing st website and spread the word. Blogger Liam has made some blog buttons which you can see / use from here. If you have more ideas for buttons or raising awareness of this campaign, get in touch or leave a message underneath.
A Downing St petition
Amnesty International have launched an e-petition against government plans to extend pre-charge detention from 28 days. Do take out 10 seconds and sign it..
The Facebook group has grown by over 500 members since yesterday and AI haven’t even begun promoting it yet. Yesterday, Nick Clegg condemned Jacqui Smith’s plans to extend it to 42 days. I hope the Libdems and Tories join forces on this one to defeat the government.
So, what can we do and what is the point of a Facebook group where Liberty’s lobbying failed? Well, this campaign isn’t over yet simply because the home secretary has scaled down her plans from 56 to 42 days. The bill still has to be passed doesn’t it? Secondly, the point of our online campaign on Facebook and blogs is to raise awareness of this issue and get like-minded people together on an issue. From there, we have to find ways to break out of this small world and take the campaign out there in innovative ways. In other words, getting people to join a Facebook group is not an end in itself, but a potentially useful space to bring people together and see if anyone has innovative ideas to take this further.
Campaign page
28 days: The campaign gathers pace
I’ve written quite a few times on our campaign to try and stop the government from extending the 28 days pre-charge detention period. From today this campaign moves into second gear.
We’re starting with Facebook. For that, we’ve teamed up with Amnesty International, OurKingdom and City Circle to raise awareness of the issue and spread the word. Please join the group and invite your friends!
Update: The home secretary has today backed away from 56/58 days and now wants to push for 42 days. Without convincing anyone or having the evidence for it. It’s a farce.
Against ContactPoint: Latest
The 10 Downing Street petition against the planned database on children – which I wrote about here on Monday – now has over 1,000 names. It’s open until 20th December. Sign now and while you’re in fighting mood urge your MP to sign the Early Day Motion of Annette Brooke MP, Lib Dem spokesperson on children, asking the government to “reconsider its decision to proceed” with the scheme. You could raise the matter with your local schoolteachers too.
I’ve had an indication that the government may be adjusting its defence of ContactPoint. A correspondent tells me of a colleague who wrote to Ed Balls mentioning the invoking by ministers of the Victoria Climbie case as the primary reason for the database being set up. Beverley Hughes has been especially quick to do this as a way of countering critics. I’m told Balls’s reply included the following;
“In your letter, you assert the Government is introducing ContactPoint chiefly to prevent another terrible case like that of Victoria Climbie. This is not the case. The chief purpose of ContactPoint is to improve the efficiency of children’s services by freeing up practitioner time.”
My correspondent remarks that offering bureaucratic convenience as justification for reducing family privacy is unacceptable. Agreed. The same source also remarks:
“The government comments fail to mention that if you want to know a child’s GP school, etc YOU CAN ASK THE CHILD OR PARENT. They keep talking as if there were no other route than IT. It’s worth reminding people that the old fashioned low-tech solution of being polite and asking is still a viable option. Some LAs [local authorities] report [during pilot schemes] that users don’t know who they are in contact with. We should not ask families to give up privacy to compensate for incompetent professional practice.”
Agreed again. ContactPoint is a dud. And I haven’t even mentioned E-Caf yet.
Campaign page
28 days: Select committee not in favour either
The Guardian is reporting today that the home affairs select committee is broadly not in favour of extending pre-charge detention past 28 days either!
“It’s not going to be supportive of the suggestion of an extension of 28 days,” a source close to the confidential report told Guardian Unlimited. “The general gist is that there is no evidence suggesting we can go beyond 28 days.”
The Financial Times broke the story. I have I’ll have more updates on this campaign in a day or two.
Dump The ContactPoint Database
ContactPoint is a government database-in-waiting. It is bad news for all eleven million children in England and their families, especially those in need of public service professionals’ help or protection. Formerly known as the Information Sharing Index and (colloquially) “the Children’s Index”, it is officially described as, “The quick way for a practitioner to find out who else is working with the same child or young person making it easier to deliver more coordinated support.” Others see it differently. Far from being a “basic online directory” helping teachers, social workers, doctors, youth offending teams and others keep in touch more efficiently, they believe that the very existence of ContactPoint risks making it not more but less likely that children in danger of neglect or abuse will get the support they need.
Why? A group comprising experts in child protection, children’s rights and IT security produced a report for the Information Commissioner. The core of their case against ContactPoint and other databases for the logging of information about kids is that such screening and sharing of social indicators – family circumstances, health records, school performance etc – is an unreliable predictor of children being “at risk” of harm or engaging in antisocial behaviour. What’s more, it might generate self-fulfilling prophecies by putting poorer children and their families under unwarranted scrutiny. Also, it is likely to work against creating the bonds of trust that are so vital if effective help is to be accepted by and given to those who genuinely need it. They also doubt that ContactPoint would be secure – an argument likely to carry greater force in view of recent cases of discs disappearing from HMRC and the DWP.
Last week I wrote here that campaigns against erosions of civil liberties are more likely to gain widespread support if connections are made between every day “common good” issues and the principle of protecting the citizen from state intrusion. It’s not enough to be affronted by government “nannying” or to mutter darkly about Big Brother. We need to show that the database state and other curbs on privacy and freedom do more harm – possibly serious harm – than good. ContactPoint is a clear example of this. At best the system will result in professionals whose job it is to keep vulnerable children and families safe spending more and more time chasing false leads on computer screens. At worst, it will damage those most in need.
My slightly longer piece on this subject appeared on Cif last week and I wrote about it in detail about a year ago (the latter is now slightly out of date, but the key arguments still hold). The good news is that a review into ContactPoint’s security has been ordered, enabling the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives to ask more fundamental questions about the scheme. I think it’s a dud. If you agree, sign this Downing Street petition and spread the word.
Mob rule at Oxford university
The disgraceful scenes at the Oxford Union last night are a salutary reminder of the decay of free speech in this country. Not only the illiberal ‘hard Left’ [what a misnomer!], Islamist and Zionist protesters – a curious coalition – and their rowdy hangers-on, but the mainstream political parties and the various semi-official organs of Political Correctness such as the ludicrously titled ‘Equality and Human Rights Commission’, pay lip-service to freedom of speech as in duty bound; but in practice they attack and undermine it wherever it clashes with their own opinions and prejudices.
If we are to continue to be in any sense an open democracy and a pluralistic society, free speech should be sacrosanct and indivisible. But it is far from being so in the mealy-mouthed Britain of today, where unpopular and obnoxious opinions are not merely frowned upon and derailed from public expression – increasingly and ominously by scenes such as last night’s gratuitous violence at Oxford – but are curbed by an ever growing array of new laws against ‘hate speech’ deemed offensive to those criticised.
This attempt to shelter the allegedly ‘vulnerable’ from honest criticism as well as from poisonous prejudice strikes me as totally undemocratic and wrong.
continue reading… »
Talking About Freedom
I’ve long had certain misgivings about boarding the civil liberties freedom train. It’s not that I object to its destination, more that the tone and emphasis of many of the arguments made for opposing the great gamut of dubious developments under Labour, from Asbos to ID cards to the proposed (or not) extension of pre-charge detention beyond 28 days, seem to be missing something.
Henry Porter’s campaigning pieces in The Observer have been a good example. The extended thread applause they unfailingly receive seems to me to be won too easily. Henry’s doggedness is admirable but his unfortunate joining in with the government’s crass campaign of last year to tick off veiled women for not being British properly exemplified how he sometimes comes at his subject in the manner of an affronted Tory, in this case seemingly unimpressed by the inconvenient assertion by some Muslim women at the time that to be veiled is be liberated rather than downtrodden. Similarly, it’s one thing to be appalled that Big Brother is everywhere but it will take more than quoting Voltaire to persuade a lot of people living on crime-riddled council estates that they’d be freer without CCTV than they, rightly or wrongly, feel with it.
Robert’s piece here earlier today argued that resistance to ID cards should major on the moral case against the state hoarding information about us rather than the practical one that it’s not safe or reliable, as demonstrated by those disappearing CDs. “The political relationship between citizen and state does not change when the state buys a better computer system,” he wrote. I agree. But might it not also be true that unless we are able to show that the various monitoring and “database state” schemes are unlikely to solve the problems the government claims they will, we risk coming over like high-minded, even scare-mongering idealists and leave ourselves susceptible to the predictable charge of not respecting the fears of real people about crime, terrorism and so on?
The only part of this vast territory I’ve ventured into has been the so-called Children’s Index, now repackaged as Contact Point. This is the database intended to hold personal details – some of them very personal – about all 11 million children in England. The government claims that this aspect of its Every Child Matters strategy will help protect children “at risk” of harm, but some very good judges have serious doubts. Their arguments are about practicalities insofar as they claim that the scheme is unsound both technologically and administratively. But they are also about efficacy – moral efficacy –in that they seek to show that Contact Point will make it harder rather than easier to detect and protect the vulnerable.
This is a genuinely liberal-left pro-civil liberties position demonstrating that the welfare of the weak – and hence the health of society at large – is more likely to be enhanced if there is less computer-based sharing of personal information by state agencies rather than more. It connects the defence of individual privacy to the pursuit of the common good by way of everyday issues people care about. The more connections of this kind we can make in relation to all civil liberty erosions, the more support we will secure for our opposition to them.
28 days: Two new reports against extending
As you can probably gather I am actively trying to build up resources, gather information and be more pro-active in the campaign against extending the 28 days pre-charge detention period. Feel free to use this button on your blog or change it around. I’ll be posting more buttons soon.
Today, two new reports will put more pressure on the government.
In separate reports, Amnesty International [here] and Justice [here] both said there was no case for extending the current limit of 28 days — higher than any other European Union state or the United States — for the detention of terrorism suspects. Amnesty set out 10 reasons why extending pre-charge detention was unjustified while Justice said that U.S. laws limiting detention to 48 hours have not stymied terrorism investigations there.
I can’t find either report though, anyone have links? In the Guardian today Marcel Berlins calls Brown’s obsession with extending the 28 days “increasingly incomprehensible”.
Yesterday, Henry Porter’s latest column was bang on the money:
What is needed – and here I hope someone is listening – is a mass movement on the lines of the Countryside Alliance, which goes across all parties and absorbs the skills and expertise of countless activists. Now is the moment to create a movement in defence of our privacy, security and freedom.
He’s referring to campaigning against ID cards but this equally applies to this. Anthony Barnett from OurKingdom and Lynne Featherstone MP are willing to sign up. Are you?
Campaign page
Guantánamo Files: stories from America’s illegal prison
(Book launch info at the end)
We are just seven weeks away from a particularly disturbing anniversary. On January 11, 2008, the Bush administration’s notorious “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay will have been open for six years. For all this time, the prisoners – or “detainees,” as the government insists on describing them – have been held without charge or trial, and with no sign of when, if ever, they will be released from what Lord Steyn, the British law lord, memorably described as a “legal black hole.”
Although 464 of these men have now been released – or, in rather fewer cases, transferred to the custody of their home governments – their stories remain largely unknown, as do those of the majority of the 310 detainees still held at Guantánamo.
In February 2006, when I first began researching the detainees’ stories, it was this combination of factors – the exceptional flight from domestic and international law on the part of US administration, and the fact that almost nothing was known about the men imprisoned in Guantánamo – that first prompted me to action.
In the first weeks of my research I was restricted, like everyone else who had attempted to answer the question, “Who is in Guantánamo?” to news reports and interviews with released detainees, and trawls for information that were often based on little more than gossip and rumour.
continue reading… »
ID Cards and the moral battlefield
For those opposed to the ID card scheme, it is easy to see the silver lining to the recent news that the taxman has lost 25 million records in the post. While the disappearance of these CDs causes grave concern for the people who’s data has gone missing, the incompetence does undermine the case for ID Cards: “We cannot afford a similar error on the national ID database,” (the argument goes) “… so, lets scrap the scheme”. Tactically, yes, I think it is an argument we in the anti-ID card lobby should be making loudly… but let us never forget that the administration of the system is a practical reason to oppose the scheme, and not a moral or ideological reason.
Even if (in some thought experiment world, some Cloud Number 10) the government could 100% guarantee the security of the data, I would still be opposed to the scheme, because the political relationship between citizen and state does not change when the State buys a better computer system. Nor, for that matter, would it change if the cost of the scheme were to rise or fall. Brighton blogger Neil Harding recently changed his mind on ID cards, based on these practical reasons. While his interlocutors crowed at his volte-face, it seemed an empty victory to me. The moral argument was sidelined.
This matters, because arguments for ID cards seem to be made up exclusively of practical reasons. Advocates in Government and the security services play down the costs, and instead cite ‘convenience’ and ‘efficiency’. The moral aspect to their argument – that the cards will offer a measure of safety from terror and crime – is unproven and untested, and has the unmistakeable allure of the post hoc about it.
Meanwhile, here in the anti-camp, the opposite is true. The moral resistance to any change in the relationship between individual and state is conceptually prior to, and transcends, the concern over costs or data-security. If we successfully communicate this to our fellow citizens, we shall win the debate. Are you reading, op-ed writers?
You can read articles through the front page, via Twitter or rss feeds.
» 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 civil 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
» Is this the end for the socialist left?
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