VAT should be cut even further
In 1990, tens of thousands of angry Britons protested against the Poll Tax. Their objection was simple: it is wrong to levy a flat tax on all individuals regardless of income. That a worker barely scraping together £10,000 a year should pay the same contribution as a millionaire was so manifestly wrong that men and women took to the streets – and in some cases, rioted – to voice their discontent.
Yet the Thatcher government which proposed the Poll Tax also oversaw drastic increases in another tax, one which is arguably as regressive as the Poll Tax: the Value Added Tax (VAT). The Tories knew when they increased VAT rates that it affects the poor more than the rich, deliberately employing it as an alternative to progressive taxation.
Labour’s record on VAT thus looks – compared to its record on many other things – comparatively good. The decision to reinstate a reduced rate of 5% in 2001 was arguably an act of progressive taxation. The decision to cut the standard rate last December was also a progressive move – whatever Labour’s motives for the cut.
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Police, Camera, Action
David at Minority Report offers some words of warning, regarding the slow trickle of citizen generated footage of alleged brutality at the G20 protests earlier this month:
Reconstructing events by using any number of restricted viewpoints is no replacement for vital missing facts. If I present you with a black box that contains a photo I made of a scene, I’ll happily let you make as many pin holes as you like – you will still struggle to make out whats going on. Especially if I choose the image.
Different circumstances, but I felt this way after Saddam Hussein was executed. There is a real danger in allowing snippets of grainy amateur footage to act as the definitive account of an event. The result in this case has been yet another trial by media, only this time the police seem to be on the receiving end. In reality, we have no way of knowing precisely what killed Ian Tomlinson, and the account of the Nicky Fisher assault makes me uneasy (although admittedly this feeling is entirely based on her sightly spaced-out media interviews). continue reading… »
Smearing is such a nasty thing to do
video by Tim Ireland
More at Bloggerheads. (and earlier at Paul Linford and Tory Troll)
Meanwhile, Staines also gets Osborne’s wife very angry.
Building citizen journalism bit by bit
I think there’s more to Adrian Short’s Mash the State project (which he wrote of yesterday) that deserves exploring. I played a part in the project when I first laid eyes on this post by Adrian on how he’d managed to build a local news ‘mashup’ using Twitter, del.icio.us, RSS and other feeds. I thought to myself: hang on, if people wanted to build their own websites which featured a whole range of local news sources, including local council news, then this was the template they needed. I contacted Adrian about it, we talked about its potential and he ran with the project entirely by himself.
I think this is the future of local and citizen journalism: people building their own hyper-local portals with whatever news they want (from councils, local police forces, national organisations etc). Then it becomes a lot easier to learn what government authorities are doing and hold them to account. But for that we need easily accessible information. Adrian’s had some coverage in Guardian Technology already, and even been mentioned on the official Tory blog.
You can help by either contributing to the project, or contacting your council to ask why they don’t have an RSS feed for their news if they don’t already.
Statement: Our ethic of progressive blogging
This post speaks for those who have signed it, and not every contributor to Liberal Conspiracy.
We are a group of Labour party members and supporters who believe that blogging can make an increasingly important contribution to progressive politics. We are seeking, in different ways, to make our own individual contributions to that, and wish to set out the ethic which informs our blogging and the broader politics we are working for within the Labour Party and beyond it.
Many of these are truths which should be self-evident. We are well aware that the broad spirit which we seek to articulate has long informed what most Labour bloggers do, as it also does most of those who blog in other parties and in non-partisan civic activism.
So we do not claim any particular originality; still less do we seek to impose our views as a new regulatory code, or to attempt to police others.
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Hidden tiger – the Tamil protests in London
A few thoughts on the ongoing Tamil protest in London that the mainstream media has largely ignored. Here’s a report written over the last week:
Tuesday 14 April, 6pm:
Down at parliament square, a small marquee has been pitched – probably less than 300m from the place where our mighty prime minister and his various hangers-on bitch about the consequences of hiring Derek Draper and other vital matters of state, etc.
A young man called Prarameswaran Subramaniyam sits at the back of the marquee, wrapped in a pile of blankets. Subramaniyam is 28 and a Tamil. He’s in the eighth day of a hunger strike that he hopes will draw world attention to the plight of Tamil civilians being slaughtered by the Sri Lankan government in northern Sri Lanka – the latest awful chapter in the famously horrific 60-year-old conflict between Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority.
Anyway – the publicity returns of Subramaniyam’s hunger strike remained disappointing at the time of writing. The protestors have yet to be offered a substantive UK government statement on the conflict, and – apart from a handful of reports last week when Tamil protestors occupied Westminster bridge at rush hour and started chucking themselves into the Thames – mainstream journalism has managed to ignore the fact of this loud eight-day-old protest almost entirely. Alas for UK Tamils, journalism has been at full stretch on important topics such as measuring the gap between Susan Boyle’s looks and talent, and probing Dolly and Damian McBride.
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The Christian lobby strikes back
I’ve been doing a bit of digging on a curious story a couple of weeks ago that simultaneously appeared in the Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Times and the next day in the Daily Mail.
The newspaper reports essentially said: a Channel 4 programmes commissioner has been tipped as the “front-runner” as the new Head of Religion at the BBC. But oh no, he’s Muslim! Oh, and a Sikh guy makes Songs of Praise for the BBC! Ethnics are taking over! Who will think of the poor Christians?
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Danson buys New Statesman
New Statesman have sent over this press release
Geoffrey Robinson MP is delighted to announce that Mike Danson, founder of Datamonitor, is the new owner of the New Statesman magazine.
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Does Iain Dale know much about blogs?
A couple of days ago Tory blogger Iain Dale wrote an article for the Sunday Telegraph which repeated the same meme that left-wing blogs are boring and right-wing blogs is where the impact and numbers are at.
Usually I let it go because it seems to be a psychological condition amongst right-wingers that they have to continually pat themselves on the back in fear of looking inadequate. As the latest amusing example, here’s Daniel Hannan MEP desperately pleading to be let into the club. I don’t even have the heart to give him a primer about blog ‘hits’ versus ‘absolute unique users’. Anyway, Iain Dale said:
Over the last few years, Right-of-centre blogs such as my own (Iain Dale’s Diary), Guido Fawkes, ConservativeHome, Dizzy Thinks, Nadine Dorries MP, Donal Blaney, Devil’s Kitchen and John Redwood’s Diary have come into their own. Several are now read by more than 100,000 individuals every month.
…
Bloggers like me, Tim Montgomerie of ConservativeHome and Guido Fawkes have become part of the media punditry circuit. But on the Left-of-centre, tumbleweed still blows around the blogosphere.
Gotta love the ‘media punditry circuit’ quote. But tumbleweed, really?
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‘Smear-gate’ has no impact on seats
Mike Smithson on Political Betting:
However much excitement there has been over the past four days it’s perhaps worth reminding ourselves that “Smear-gate”, or whatever you want to call it, has failed to persuade the serious political punters who play the spread markets to pile onto the Tories or to sell Labour seats.
Oh dear.
So what’s this ‘blogosphere’ thing anyway?
Readers from the real world may have been perplexed by the attention given to the so-called ‘blogosphere’ this past weekend, and left wondering why they should care about it. The short answer is they shouldn’t.
The British blogosphere is comprised entirely of frustrated writers bitter about their inability to land jobs at real newspapers, sitting in their mother’s basement, stabbing endlessly away at their computer keyboards in the middle of the night writing cretinous, infantile forums of abuse dressed up as argument in the hope that people will read their inconsequential, misinformed diatribe.
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Smears: down memory lane
Paul Linford, 3rd October 2006:
It wasn’t all Osbourne’s fault. The word was put into his mouth by the Blairite journalist Mary Ann Sieghart who has penned her own piece justicative HERE. Sieghart, who was once so close to Mr Tony as to aspire to a job in the No 10 policy unit, gaily reassures us that “autistic” is an epithet that “plenty of politicians and journalists” have used about the Chancellor. “He does, after all, have an obsessive personality and rather low emotional intelligence. That is why the audience laughed: Mr Osborne’s joke resonated with them.”
In other words, because it’s Gordon Brown we’re attacking, that’s okay then.
Iain Dale, 6th October 2006:
I have finally found a column by Mary Ann Sieghart that I can’t disagree with. It was she who interviewed George Osborne at the Tory conference when he made his quip about Gordon Brown and autism. Read her column HERE. Paul Linford, however, seems to have had a sense of humour failure HERE.
Anyone who knows George Osborne knows he has a wicked sense of humour and is also a great mimic. Let’s hope this experience won’t have put him off being spontaneous. This whole episode was manufactured by bored journalists wh had nothing better to write and love a bit of faux outrage. Again, the lesson for the Conservatives is to keep the media beast fed and watered. If you don’t, don’t be surprised if it turns round and bites you.
Iain Dale, 13th April 2009:
Some may see this as a schoolboy spat between two bloggers with egos the size of a mountain. Maybe. But my experience is important as it demonstrates how the Number Ten lie machine will target anyone whose reputation it wishes to damage.
…
Perhaps this sort of affair is symptomatic of something more deep-rooted at the heart of government. All administrations flag after a while. They become gaffe- prone. People go off-message more frequently. A sense of malaise is almost palpable. It’s what happens when empires crumble.
hat/tip: Chicken Yoghurt
Blogging will only increase the sleaze – unless we stop it
It is undeniable that many within the Westminster bubble use Guido Fawkes to push their agendas by sending in tips and rumours. It is also undeniable that Paul Staines has an anti-politics libertarian bent that is pro-Conservative party. He shamelessly campaigned for Boris Johnson as Mayor for example, regardless of the poor barbs he threw at Caroline Spelman during ‘nannygate’.
A lot of newspapers have focused on how New Labour has always been about spin and briefings and back-stabbings. Perhaps. But it’s naive to pretend the Conservative party is immune from this – after all they’ve always looked towards the Republicans for strategic and ideological guidance and they are the original masters of this strategy.
Blogs, you could say, will only accelerate this deterioration of civility in the political culture. During the American election we saw right-wing bloggers (and Melanie Phillips in the UK) continuously try and throw mud at Obama by raising questions about his religion, his birth certificate, his family, his ‘heritage’ and more. Some were even convinced there was a Michelle Obama ‘whitey tape’ that would kill the campaign a week before election. The Democrats had to fight back online: Fights the smears & Truth fights back, and relied heavily on supporters to fight those rumours.
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Derek Draper is poisonous for the Labour party
If there’s one lesson for the Labour party to be learned from smeargate – it’s that if Derek Draper is leading your online operations then you may as well give up politics.
The antics of Damian McBride and Derek Draper, the latter now beyond redemption (again), epitomise all that has gone wrong with the Labour Party. That Alastair Campbell, John Prescott and others at cabinet level put their faith in Draper to bolster their online operations has now shown to be stupidity of near epic proportions.
But in case it isn’t already clear to the party why we are angry, it’s because we expect more of the left. We expect more of a party that claims to represent the left. We understand the need for pragmatism, for building narratives, and sometimes the need for discipline. But this episode serves to highlight all that has gone wrong with the Labour party.
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Thoughts on Damian McBride and Guido
Adam Bienkov / Tory Troll (on Twitter):
Manufactured outrage of the day: http://tinyurl.com/c39l75 A spin doctor trying to spin stories about his opponents? Shocking stuff.
…
Labour planning a smear campaign? Oh it’s terrible claims Staines. Absolutely shameful bleats Bright. “Absurd” claims Coulson.
Jamie Sport / Daily Quail (on Twitter)
It’s this kind of small-town gossiping and mock outrage that makes everyone think blogging about politics is stupid inconsequential shit.
…
@derekdraper attracts shit like an industrial electromagnet in a swimming pool of iron filings. http://is.gd/rVxW Time to go Dolly
Bob Piper:
Poor Iain. The man who likes to think of himself as the Westminster insider, is definitely feeling left out. Late last night Paul Staines published his story about the McBride smear website. A desperate Dale tries to say… it is all about me, me me.
Sadie’s Tavern:
“It’s an important breakthrough,” said Gudio commentator IShaggedYourMum. “Far bigger than Watergate – there were no blogs in Watergate.”
Another commentator, GBrownSucksTheFatOne, agrees but added darkly, “I really hope They don’t get him before the next election. Be careful out there Guido, especially near protests.”
Conservative blogger and inventor of the internet, Iain Dale said of the surprising developments, “I’m available to all television networks for comment.”
The Public:
Who the fuck is this Damian McBride twat and why is news so boring and shit?
News journalists:
ZOMG! We love fellating Guido Fawkes because he disses us day in and day out and this proves how independent and cool we are! This is completely front-page news!
Does that sum everything up?
So what if religion is irrational?
This piece by Madeleine Bunting has attracted much criticism, but I suspect the outline of her argument can be revived.
Oliver Kamm provides the starting point: “religious faith is…a species of irrationalism.” This is not so much an insight as a tautology. Faith, by definition, is irrational. However – and here Bunting is right and the new atheists mistaken – irrationality is a ubiquitous and in some ways desirable aspect of life.
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Iain Dale stirs the pot against Lammy
Occasionally, Tory blogger Iain Dale goes from straight Conservative party cheerleading to partisan stupidity. Today we find another such example. Cabinet Minister David Lammy has written a good blog for OurKingdom, sympathising with attempts by British Tamils to raise awareness of the civil war in Sri Lanka and the massacre of Tamils by the SL government. He also writes of the relatively miniscule coverage offered to the people protesting in Westminister – organised entirely by text messages and local radio stations I’ve heard.
But rather than expressing sympathy with the cause, or applauding a minister of trying to engage with blogs through what is a genuinely thoughtful post, Dale can’t help try and stir the pot by saying: “It is yet another sign of a government in decay when Ministers feel free to freelance in this way.” Honestly. The self-declared top Tory blogger keeps up his slide into parody.
The BBC and Lonely Planet: it will never happen again
So, the waiting’s over. The Select Committee Report on BBC Commercial Operations was published on Tuesday. And the verdict is clear: the kind of acquisition that the BBC purchase of Lonely Planet represents should never happen again (pdf, p. 10, para. 22):
There is clearly a balancing act between allowing Worldwide to expand and potentially generate greater returns for the BBC, and limiting its operations in order to ensure it upholds the BBC’s reputation and does not unfairly distort the market… We recommend that the commercial criteria and fair trading guidelines should be returned to the pre-2007 position, whereby all commercial activity must have a clear link with core BBC programming. continue reading… »
Protests and ‘trustafarians’
You know, I was watching that G20 protest on TV this week, and I found myself filled with inexplicable, blinding white rage.
At first, I struggled to explain the feeling. It certainly wasn’t caused by the epic outburst of fiscal fuckery the big banks used to accidentally tank the world’s economy. Nor is it the fact that the deranged self-confidence of this tiny oligarchy has inadvertently transformed British and American democracy – your birth-right and mine – into a fierce contest to see which political party can keep them the happiest.
It’s not as if this situation is new, after all. The idea that democracy is about representing the interests of 1) the super wealthy for the supposed benefit of… 2) everybody else has been at the heart of UK politics for at least thirty years… So no, that wasn’t the reason for my rage.
continue reading… »
Ex-leftist rightists: why turncoats switch sides
It is usually found that the most articulate and convincing rightwingers have never been anything but out-and-out rightwingers. Such people – the native language speakers of conservatism, if you will – are those best equipped to deliver mellifluous little platoons of uninterrupted Burkean platitudes in an immaculate RP accent.
I am not here discussing the comfortable drift from the hard left to the right wing of the labour movement that has characterised the career of so many New Labour politicians. This is, in some sense at least, staying within the family. Nor do I have in mind those that adopt de facto neocon positions but still regard themselves as somehow ‘being on the left’.
continue reading… »
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» 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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