Our democracy | Liberal Conspiracy

1SECTION

How Tory bloggers spun Coulson

by Carl Packman
July 15, 2009 at 3:38 pm

There has been an intriguing side-show to Coulsongate / NotW blagging story: the speed at which many Tory bloggers came out to distance themselves from Coulson, to Guido Fawkes who insisted that the Guardian were wasting their time with the whole issue. Yesterday showed that not to be the case at all.

And indeed the affair raises some very important questions about the context of bloggers versus lobby journalists.
continue reading… »

48 Comments ¦ 15th July

The News of the Screws is screwed

by Septicisle
July 15, 2009 at 2:10 am

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.
continue reading… »

75 Comments ¦ 15th July

Why do people get involved in politics?

by Dave Osler
July 13, 2009 at 5:38 pm

Most people initially get involved in politics not out of any desire to blag duck islands or pay-per-view adult movies at taxpayer expense, but because they have a vision of the good society, and are genuinely idealistic enough to want to bring the vision about.

Activism is almost always healthier when premised on ideological commitment rather than personal advancement. Problems normally set in when positions offering power, remuneration, or both, are at stake. Only then do we get the spectacle of people knifing each other to secure factional advantage on the allotment allocation subcommittee.
continue reading… »

21 Comments ¦ 13th July

The dark arts come back to haunt Coulson

by Septicisle
July 11, 2009 at 1:02 pm

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.
continue reading… »

8 Comments ¦ 11th July

How can we bring about real change?

by Anthony Barnett
July 11, 2009 at 10:41 am

There will, finally, be a general election within a year. It could well prove to be yet again a fight between the two main parties for control over the dictatorial authority of the British state, now as ‘modernised’ by New Labour, with total victory once more provided by a minority of the vote.

While if the electorate feels there is no realistic offer of a choice to open up the system, continuing negative feedback of massive abstention will confirm popular revulsion yet make the problem worse.
continue reading… »

13 Comments ¦ 11th July

The phone-hacking scandal no-one wants to talk about

by Sunny Hundal
July 10, 2009 at 5:06 pm

If there was ever the evidence needed that much of our press operate in a world where different rules apply, and how other national institutions cooperate in that process, then the phone-hacking scandal is a brilliant example.

Let’s go over some facts again here.
continue reading… »

20 Comments ¦ 10th July

Right-whingers and Newsnight

by Don Paskini
July 10, 2009 at 9:01 am

Tim Montgomerie on Conservative Home is very angry about Newsnight having four “lefties” and no “righties” on its new ‘Politics Pen’ show.

These “lefties” are: Deborah Mattison, Gordon Brown’s opinion pollster. Matthew Taylor, Tony Blair’s former adviser on political strategy Greg Dyke, who voted Liberal Democrat in 2005, warned that if Labour were elected then ‘democracy was under threat’, and is currently an adviser to the Conservative Party on the UK’s creative sector

Digby Jones, the former Director General of the CBI, who was approached by the Conservative Party about being their candidate for Mayor of London, who described trade unions as ‘backward looking and not on today’s agenda’ and Labour as ‘always in thrall to the unions’, and who wouldn’t join the Labour Party even when Gordon Brown appointed him as a minister
continue reading… »

44 Comments ¦ 10th July

Fairer access to policing at protests promised

by Jamie Sport
July 9, 2009 at 4:34 pm

Protestors are to be given the chance to ‘opt in’ to kettling at demonstrations, after an ACPO report on policing at the G20 demonstrations recommended forewarning that the controversial containment tactic would be employed.

Senior police strategists are anticipating a positive response to the scheme, whereby demonstrators will be given the chance to stand in a confined space for several hours without access to food, water or toilet facilities, while Territorial Support Group officers hit them in the face with batons – or if they’re lucky, shields.
continue reading… »

33 Comments ¦ 9th July

Coulsongate: a huge indictment of our system

by Sunny Hundal
July 9, 2009 at 9:45 am

It’s amusing to watch Tories try and dismiss this massive bombshell so easily. According to the BBC, a spokeswoman for David Cameron said he was “very relaxed” about the story. “The ramping up of this story is ridiculous – this is about a payment made well after Andy (Coulson) left the News of the World.”

But the focus on what payments were made and when is besides the point. Here’s the crux of the matter: it is alleged that while Andy Coulson was deputy editor and editor at the News of the World thousands of people were being illegally spied on and their data tapped into by a big network of journalists at News International.
continue reading… »

62 Comments ¦ 9th July

David Cameron’s McBride moment is here, but Tories remain silent

by Sunny Hundal
July 8, 2009 at 11:45 pm

The Conservatives milked the Damian McBride affair for all its worth – turning up on television almost everyday in faux-outrage at how someone could be so nasty in politics. Every day a succession of outraged right-wing bloggers and backbench politicians said they expected better standards from Parliament.

If that is the case, what will they now say about the allegations levelled at Andy Coulson – David Cameron’s director of communications.
The Media Guardian reports:

The paperwork from the Information Commission revealed the names of 31 journalists working for the News of the World and the Sun, together with the precise details of government agencies, banks, phone companies and others who were conned into handing over confidential information on politicians, actors, sportsmen and women, musicians and television presenters, all of whom are named in the paperwork. This is an offence under the Data Protection Act unless it is justified by public interest. Senior editors are among the journalists who are implicated.

A certain Andy Coulson was first deputy editor and later editor of the News of the World while all this was going on.
continue reading… »

35 Comments ¦ 8th July

Supporting a cut in our defence budget

by Guest
July 6, 2009 at 9:12 am

post by regular commenter pagar

An IPPR report on defence procurement, published last week, questioned spending on resources used to fight wars against conventional armed forces and suggests a defence strategy concentrating on combating unconventional, terrorist and economic threats.

It questioned spending £10 billion on new aircraft carriers and £20 billion on Trident and says that the UK should stop trying to “punch above it’s weight” in international affairs.
continue reading… »

20 Comments ¦ 6th July

Vote for a Change launches 9th

by Newswire
July 6, 2009 at 12:59 am

Vote for Change is a new organisation that’s pulling together a coalition of organisations to campaign for a change in the way we elect our politicians.
continue reading… »

5 Comments ¦ 6th July

The toothless PCC strikes again

by Septicisle
July 5, 2009 at 9:30 am

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.
continue reading… »

9 Comments ¦ 5th July

Tory machine making excuses for second jobs

by Tamasin Cave
July 3, 2009 at 1:14 pm

Second jobs, so we are told, help MPs to stay in touch with the real world and the needs of constituents.

David Cameron was quick to claim he is “relaxed” about more details of his shadow Cabinet’s outside earnings being made public this week under new transparency rules: “I do not think that a chamber full of professional politicians with no outside experience is a good thing,” he said.
continue reading… »

13 Comments ¦ 3rd July

Does your MP really want to end deception in politics ?

by Guest
July 3, 2009 at 12:48 pm

a guest article by The Professor

There’s an easy way to find out – ask them if they support a law which enforces it. A cross party coalition of MPs are petitioning the House of Commons to introduce the Elected Representatives (Prohibition of Deception) Bill for debate.

Our film “The Ministry of Truth” charted the birth of the Bill for the BBC in 2007 – it proved to be an incredibly revealing (and very entertaining) exercise.
continue reading… »

27 Comments ¦ 3rd July

Our criminal justice system is in crisis

by Anthony Painter
July 3, 2009 at 10:01 am

The Commission on English Prisons Today- presided over by Cherie Booth QC- launched its final report yesterday – with a demand to cut prison numbers and reinvest money in communities.

It is unequivocal. Our criminal justice system is in crisis. A decade and a half of penal excess means that we lock up too many people with too little impact and consequently we are failing make communities safer.
continue reading… »

52 Comments ¦ 3rd July

Can liberalism be illiberal?

by Sunny Hundal
July 2, 2009 at 6:06 pm

Phillip Blond, in response to Sunder Katwala, says:

My main point is a philosophical and historical one that liberty (which I believe in) is not produced from liberalism. Indeed my intellectual argument is that that pure liberalism or liberalism as first philosophy cannot produce liberty – indeed it produces an anarchic individualism that requires a surveillance state.

Thus liberalism produces the very thing it seeks to avoid: an authoritarian individual and an absolutist state. This is a serious point and to have it charactured as anti-liberal is either an inane misreading or an outright misrepresentation. In fact liberalism is not liberal at all.

Phillip Blond is the driver of the ‘Red Toryism’ project and recently left the think-tank Demos to found his own Progressive Conservatism project. So how would you respond to this view?
continue reading… »

85 Comments ¦ 2nd July

Should religion have a role in British politics?

by Mike Ion
June 28, 2009 at 6:15 pm

Last week Michael Sandel delivered his second Reith Lecture and looked at the relationship between morality and politics, more specifically the interaction between religiously inspired morality and politics.

He argued, correctly in my view, that you cannot remove morality from political discourse and so it is far better to have it out in public.

In the UK we tend to discourage our politicians from talking about faith, we famously ‘don’t do God.’ Why?
continue reading… »

60 Comments ¦ 28th June

Will they really hand back power to the people?

by Sunny Hundal
June 27, 2009 at 10:10 pm

Last week I attended a Fabian round-table debate with Liam Byrne MP leading a discussion on the Equality Bill. Bryne talked of how we wanted to build a more civic identity and give power back to the people and let them make the decisions. He saw that as a solidarity building exercise. He quoted a book that made my ears perked up – Rules For Radicals, by Saul Alinsky.

As a disciple of the book I had to get my two-pence in. So at the end I made two points.
continue reading… »

29 Comments ¦ 27th June