Tuesday, March 30, 2010 

In defence (somewhat) of George Osborne.

The best, and therefore almost certainly inaccurate story about George Osborne's formative years concerns his entrance to the now world famous Bullingdon club. His initiation, so legend has it, involved his both being called "oik", allegedly because rather than attending Eton or Harrow he instead had patronised the only slightly less posh and exclusive, not to mention less expensive St. Paul's, and him being held upside down, his head being bashed into the floor until he uttered the required words: "I am a despicable cunt".

As initiations go, not just to the Bullingdon but to other similar clubs, one suspects that was actually fairly tame. While the referring to him as "oik" was probably more of a joke than meant seriously, it probably reflects the attitudes which Osborne has encountered for most of his life. Far too upper class for the vast majority of the population to instantly warm to him, yet still not rarefied enough for him to be automatically welcomed into the even more exclusive establishments. You only have to look at how the City, where you'll never come across such a wide variety of stuffed shirts, has reacted towards him: with something approaching utter horror, despite the fact we currently have a Labour chancellor, a member of a party whom they've been taught all their lives to instinctively loathe. Admittedly, this might partly be down to New Labour's complete subservience to the financial sector, for which they have been rewarded in kind, yet you'd still think that getting back to what they know best would be attractive.

The class warrior in me wants to loathe Osborne for all the reasons which have been outlined ever since he became shadow chancellor, almost none of which are based on actual substance. The Heresiarch, writing on why David Cameron should get rid of Osborne while he still has a chance, openly admits that at least partly his reasoning is based on Osborne's manner and appearance. When natural Conservatives feel this way, you can't even begin to imagine what the general public thinks. In the Graun today both Lucy Mangan and Michael White, commenting not entirely seriously, but as the old saying (or cliché) goes, there's many a truth spoken in jest, voice just some of the unveiled insults thrown Osborne's way. Mangan suggests that he's a "walking justification for all the schoolyard bullying there ever was, is, or ever shall be", which is an especially unpleasant comment, not least for those who have suffered from bullying, for which there is never any justification. White, meanwhile, went instead for a startling funny joke about how this was the most momentous day for him since he "was first allowed to travel alone on the school bus". Never mind that you suspect Osborne has never had to travel on a school bus, which rather undermines the gag, it's just another riff on Osborne being a boy amongst men.

To be fair, I have myself slipped into this casual abuse, as in this post from a couple of years back:
Take as a further example George Osborne, who ought to be on an absolute hiding to nothing. He's young, resembles a caricature of the smarmy, upper-class snob that spent his tender years smashing up restaurants when he wasn't shovelling white powder up his nostrils, with a face so punchable it's a marvel that he hasn't got a broken nose and a good number of teeth missing, knows next to nothing about economics, and has all the charm (to this writer at least) of a self-portrait of Kate Moss drawn in lipstick and Pete Doherty's blood.

This is though partially what the objection to Osborne rests on. That he's young, and therefore inexperienced, something which isn't said anywhere near as often about Cameron despite the Tory leader only being a few years older, that what he did as a young man matters when it categorically shouldn't, even if he did indulge in taking wanker powder and may have used escorts as the more lurid allegations have it, and that he should be judged on what he looks like, which can't be helped, and on how much charisma he radiates, which is very little. Osborne's main problem with relating to voters is that he does seem too much of the toff, that he comes across as patronising, and that he just has that eminently punchable quality mentioned above. None of these things are barriers to being a "successful" politician; just look at the far more patronising Patricia Hewitt and Margaret Beckett, both of whom have had decent careers, even if they're not exactly the individuals Osborne himself would like to be compared to. He has absolutely nothing in the "toff" stakes compared to the offspring of William Rees-Mogg, both of whom are trying to be elected (Cameron supposedly asked whether Annunziata would consider calling herself "Nancy" in a bid to get down with the proles) as Conservative MPs, nor those featured in that now notorious issue of Tatler, and as for punchable, well, I personally would much rather lamp the egregious Phil Woolas, perhaps the most disgusting politician to have emerged from the Labour party in recent times.


When it comes to challenging Osborne on substance, the case against him is much slimmer. Yes, he was a distant third in the chancellor's debate yesterday, but he wasn't a disaster either, and he was always likely to find it difficult to compete with the sainted Vince Cable and the currently supremely confident Alistair Darling. It has to be remembered that it was Osborne's wheeze on inheritance tax three years ago which almost certainly stopped Gordon Brown from calling a snap election; that policy sticks in my personal political craw, and it was a promise which was only so popular because "middle England" thinks that IHT is going to hit them when it almost certainly won't, but it did the business. Yesterday's pledge to not raise national insurance contributions was hardly the most robust policy, exposed completely by Vince Cable in the debate as being costed by even more inefficiency savings, the same ones Osborne had lambasted the previous week, but that must have been debated at far more senior levels of the party and OKed rather just being Osborne's initiative.

The question then if Osborne was to be removed is who would replace him. The obvious answer is Ken Clarke, but the reasons for why he hasn't been given a post more senior than business secretary are apparent: the Cameroons don't trust him, and he's not prepared to temper his own views on Europe and even IHT enough to be given a more senior role without even more unwelcome stories on splits being written. Apart from Ken, just who is there ready to step in? It's not as if Osborne is also the only weak link in the Tory front bench line-up. What about the gaffe prone Chris Grayling, who when he isn't claiming that parts of Britain are like the Wire is defending using completely inaccurate crime statistics, and whose department claimed that 54% of teenage girls in the most deprived areas were getting pregnant when the true figure was 5.4%? Then there's Michael Gove at education, another eminently punchable figure, whose campaign against Unite's involvement with Labour plumbed new depths of union-baiting, is a confirmed Tony Blair lover, an unapologetic foreign policy neo-conservative and rubs people up the wrong way just as much as Osborne. Osborne may be unloved, and that might even be justifiable, but to move him now would be a sign of absolute weakness on the part of Cameron, which would be rightly seized on by the other parties. Ultimately, Cameron and Osborne were promoted together, and they should fall together.

Labels: , , , , ,

Share |

Monday, March 29, 2010 

Fear, panic and politics win yet again.

If ever there was a purer example of how fear, panic and politics will always win out against rationality, cold reflection and research, it's in the proposed fast-track criminalisation of Mephedrone, "Meow Meow" or 4-MMC, or whatever you want to call it. It also marks the final capitulation of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, which having previously argued against the government's reclassification of cannabis from Class C to Class B, and having urged that Ecstasy be downgraded to C now seems to have decided under its new leadership to simply act as the pseudo-scientific justificatory rubber stamp that the government needs.

On the face of it, the ACMD is justifying its quick decision on the grounds that 4-MMC, rather than being an actual new drug, is rather more simply an amphetamine masquerading as a designer drug. The precedent for classifying it more quickly than it usually would was last year's ban on "Spice", marketed somewhat similarly to how 4-MMC has been, but which has definitively been identified as containing synthetic cannabinoids. This is in difference to 4-MMC, which has been identified as being based on cathinone compounds found in khat, but as yet has not been so conclusively independently examined. Khat is also not illegal in this country, having been considered by the ACMD for possible criminalisation in the past, but felt to be "safe" enough for it be left outside classification, although cathinone and cathine themselves are classified as Class C. Spice has also been around for a lot longer than 4-MMC, having first been sold back in 2002, while 4-MMC dates only from three years ago.

A far more appropriate response from a council interested in actual evidence rather than anecdote would have been to delay making a recommendation until more research had been conducted. Indeed, it's almost certainly what the previous head of the ACMD, Professor David Nutt, sacked by Alan Johnson for criticising the government over their failure to reclassify Ecstasy following the committee's advice would have recommended. Nutt has also suggested that a new classification, a so-called Class D, should be introduced under which "new" drugs like 4-MMC could be temporarily classified until more is known about them. This would allow them to be sold but place such substances under far stricter regulation than the current free-for-all, which will incidentally continue if it is criminalised but instead mean that it will be organised crime rather than legitimate businesses in control of the supply. It's not just Nutt calling for such a change, but also the UK Drug Policy Commission, which is referring to its similar suggestion for a new emergency classification as "Category X".

With the resignation of so many members of the ACMD in protest at the sacking of Nutt and the government's general attitude towards its previous advice, the latest coming only this morning, it's difficult not to wonder whether those being pushed forward as replacements are not already more in tune with the government's favoured point of view. Even if this is a slur on their characters, then the pressure on them to make a quick decision could hardly be greater. The last month has seen what was already a stream of concern about Mephedrone turn into a veritable torrent, with the tabloids seemingly determined to whip up a moral panic, as hopefully this blog has identified. Not content with just further promoting the drug, as those supplying 4-MMC have themselves made clear the media's coverage has done, regardless of its tone, they've been actively lying about how schools supposedly couldn't confiscate it from students, selectively quoting from ministerial letters in order to continue the charade. Combined with the relatives of loved ones who believe their children have died as a result of taking 4-MMC, ignoring that almost all those who have died after using it were also taking other (illegal) drugs at the same time, politicians have had to make clear That Something Must Be Done, and will be done. Gordon Brown last week actively described an inanimate substance as "evil"; under such an atmosphere, and with an election only just over a month away, it's difficult to believe that even if the ACMD has asked for more time the government would have agreed. Instead, 4-MMC's criminalisation is to be rushed onto the statute books, and with Conservative support, seems certain to become law before the election.

This is the worst of all possible worlds. The very first step of criminalisation is that the price of the drug, which has been relative low, will sky rocket. Those that have become somewhat dependent on it, although again the evidence for this is only anecdotal, and if the drug is closer to amphetamine than methamphetamine addiction tends to be mental rather than physical (although withdrawal doesn't care which is which) will have to find the extra money to pay for it, which usually leads to acquisitive crime, or to switching to a substitute, the most likely of which are either speed or crystal meth. Due to their illegality, drugs which may well have previously been "pure" are far more likely to be doctored or watered down, potentially with far more harmful substances in the case of the former, or leading to the user needing even more in the case of the latter. As mentioned above, where previously "legal high" and drug paraphernalia shops as well as "entrepreneurs" have been supplying and selling 4-MMC, the usual lowlife will now be moving into the breach. Far be it from me to defend capitalism, but where previously the legitimate economy has at least been somewhat benefiting from the rise in popularity of 4-MMC, we're now going to see all of that growth cut off, which is clearly just the government should be doing when we're trying to pull fully clear of recession. Lastly, as 4-MMC is a so-called designer drug, there's nothing to stop a replacement being developed and appearing on the streets potentially within months, with this entire cycle repeating.

All we're doing is moving from a state of affairs where there was little known about the dangers of the drug but it was legal is to one where the position is the same but the drug is illegal. Even while the police claim that they'll be targeting "dealers", which until the criminalisation becomes law are perfectly legitimate businesses and individuals, there will still certainly be cases where recreational users will be charged and prosecuted simply for wanting to make their weekends slightly better. The very same politicians that would never argue for the prohibition of alcohol or tobacco, not just because they enjoy it themselves but also because history shows us that it doesn't work are perfectly prepared to criminalise others for their different choice of psychoactive substances. The policy of drug prohibition will one day be seen in exactly the same terms as that of alcohol prohibition, but it won't be until at least the last generation either retires or is removed from power.

Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

Share |

Saturday, March 27, 2010 

Alternative pledge card.

Now that we've seen Labour's 5 election pledges, a collection of the vacuous, the obvious, the reactionary and the piss-poor, all about as inspiring, innovative and and forward-thinking as the large amounts of vomit which will duly be deposited on the pavements of the nation's towns and cities tonight, I can't help thinking that the party would be better off going with this alternative, featured in the latest Viz:

Labels: , , , , ,

Share |

Friday, March 26, 2010 

Reporting according to your own biases.

Considering that this blog often focuses on general tabloid mendacity, it's worth taking a look at the reporting of the broadsheets on exactly the same release from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which features a graph on how the personal tax and benefit changes since 1997 have affected different incomes groups (PDF).

According to the Guardian, this shows that Labour's strategy has closed the income gap. The Indie says that "Labour 'has cost the rich £25,000 every year'", the FT went with "Rich hit hard by 13 years of Labour budgets", while the Telegraph decided upon "10m families have lost out in Labour's tax changes", with a subtitle claiming that "Ten million middle-income households have lost out because of Gordon Brown’s repeated tax rises, a study has indicated."

Admittedly, part of the reason for why the papers are likely to have gone with such different interpretations of the same material is that while a briefing accompanied the release of the report, the report itself doesn't directly explain the graphs in any great detail, although it does point out that it doesn't show how household incomes have changed over the same time period. This is the crucial part, and only the Independent gives (unless the FT goes into more detail in its actual report rather than just the cut-off us plebs are allowed to view without paying) the extra detail concerning these changes which provide the context in which to understand the IFS report:

However, taking into account all changes in income since 1997 – including growth in salaries, bonuses, rents and investment incomes – the UK is still a very unequal society, despite the Treasury's efforts, the IFS points out. Income inequality has risen in each of the past three years and is now at its highest level since at least 1961, according to the IFS.

Sevillista in the comments on Left Foot Forward furthers this:

It is being misleadingly reported.

What it is saying that the bottom 60% are paying less tax then they would have done if 1996-97 tax structures and rates were left in place, the upper middle are paying slightly more and the very top are paying significantly more.

What it is not saying is the rich are worse of – they are far better-off and have gained far more than everyone else (inequality measured by Gini has slightly worsened, post-tax incomes
of the top 1% have raced away).

Shoddy reporting. Labour in taxing rich more than Tories chose to do shock, but unable to stop inequality increasing


Newspapers in reporting the news according to their own political bias isn't perhaps the most shocking revelation, but that even the supposed serious press fails, with the exception of the Indie, to put it into actual context should be a concern to those who imagine they're being treated with anything approaching respect.

Labels: , , , , ,

Share |

Thursday, March 25, 2010 

The Gaza protest prosecutions and assorted thoughts.

The dropping of the prosecution case against Jake Smith, charged with two counts of violent disorder after taking part in the protests outside the Israeli embassy in January of last year, only hints at the potential mendacity of the Metropolitan police and the collusion of the Crown Prosecution Service in the out of all proportion criminal crackdown on those alleged to have taken part in the confrontation late into the Saturday evening. Smith's lawyers happened by chance to find footage of their client being beaten by riot police on YouTube, video which the police denied they had until the very last working day before his trial, when they suddenly discovered they had a full seven and a half hours of footage from the day which might be of use to Smith's defence.

Quite why the police decided to arrest Smith after the event is unclear from the footage, especially when there are almost certainly others who on the day took part in far worse confrontations with the police. Smith is clearly seen pushing the barriers to protect himself from the riot police, being bated by other protesters. Despite this attempt at blocking the police from being able to get to him, when the police next charge the protesters Smith is seen by hit by at least one officer with both a riot shield and a baton, despite posing no apparent threat to the officers. This all happened after the "kettle" had been put into place, preventing any of the protesters from being able to leave; Smith it seems was trapped and not involved with the group of other protesters who were set on confrontation. Perhaps he was picked on because he, unlike some of the others, was positively identified or gave accurate information to the police when the protesters were finally allowed to leave, albeit only after they were photographed and their details were demanded.

Smith is undoubtedly one of the lucky ones: others who took part in the protests that day have been given custodial sentences for the heinous crimes of throwing sticks (broken parts of the many placards) or empty plastic bottles in the general direction of the Israeli embassy, the police often claiming that they were thrown at them. The police presumably felt threatened by these flimsy bits of balsa wood coming towards them, being fully equipped in riot gear as they were and therefore completely unable to defend themselves.

As you might recall, I was on the protest and march that day, although I left before the "kettle" was put in place outside the embassy. What was clear then and is even more apparent now is that there was a fundamental lack of preparation by both sides. Both the Stop the War Coalition and the police themselves were not expecting the sheer number of people who turned out, and as a direct result from the moment the march itself started there were small groups who had turned up looking for trouble who were out of control, as shown by the video which featured a group all but rampaging along at the very front of the march (which I can't incidentally find at the moment). Much of the trouble which occurred later could have been prevented if they had either been arrested then or separated away from the rest of the march. The confrontation which I did personally witness outside the North Gate into Kensington Gardens, where eggs and paint were thrown at police officers who were not yet in riot gear was probably far more frightening for those in uniform than it was those who were deployed later, and yet probably because there were no specific FIT officers there from what I could see monitoring the crowd, none of those who attacked them, almost certainly unprovoked, are likely to have been prosecuted.

I can far more understand the reactions and fighting which occurred in Kensington High Street, outside the embassy's main gates as even while I was there it was becoming difficult to move, a crush developing, a direct result of the police shutting off all the other roads and leaving only one exit, which to get to you had to push past everyone else. Even then though the mood for the most part was jovial, apart from the few idiots at the very front who were pushing the barriers towards the police who were guarding the embassy's gates. Undoubtedly why some who at this point threw items towards the embassy have since been picked up was because a FIT team was set-up on the roof of a building to the right of the embassy's gates, filming the entire protest.

Once the riot police had fully moved in, kettling those remaining and not letting anyone leave even if they had done nothing except continue to peacefully protest, it's not surprising that sticks or worse was thrown at them; for Judge John Denniss, who has been passing sentences on those brought before the court for what have mainly been trivial offences, many of whom have pleaded guilty after being advised that they would receive either community sentences or fines, to then claim that he's doing so to "deter others" is ridiculous. Firstly because those who were determined to cause trouble from the outset will not be deterred from doing so, just as there is a minority of police officers who enjoy such occasions as an opportunity to hit people have not been deterred by the pathetic response from the Met to G20 protests, and secondly because those trapped in the "kettles" are always going to express their discontent, potentially in a physical way when the police themselves are acting in a completely unreasonable and violent manner, as shown in the video featuring Jake Smith.

Equally clear is that the police take protesters taking them on in such a way as a personal affront: there is no other explanation for the early morning raids on the family homes which some who took part in the demonstration have suffered. These are ostensibly justified on the grounds that they are most likely to find those they're looking for by calling early in the morning, but handcuffing the entire family and taking computers and mobile phones for evidence is out of all proportion to the offences allegedly committed. Even if it isn't intended, these are the tactics of humiliation and act as far more of a warning to those potentially willing to protest than any sentence a judge could give. While there is some hyperbole involved, there is the danger that this only encourages the view amongst Muslims already inclined towards a radical viewpoint that the British state is determined that they not be allowed to put their point across, and with that the path to full radicalisation follows. What shouldn't be obscured by all this is that despite the battles, the day's protests was angry, inclusive but overwhelmingly peaceful, unlike the target of the protests which were at the time, according to the United Nations, committing war crimes. Protests are messy, but they are also cathartic, and the police, CPS and the courts would do well to recognise that. The alternative is unthinkable.

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Share |

Wednesday, March 24, 2010 

Tomorrow never comes until it's too late (or, the Budget).

Amidst the knockabout and the political dividing lines, there was a budget attempting to break out from Alistair Darling's speech. The one thing you can always depend upon is that those on both sides will respond with plenty of vitriol and very little on what they would do instead, as David Cameron did, in almost certainly one of his very weakest performances at the dispatch box. He, or almost certainly rather his writers probably thought that their football metaphor was clever while being easy to understand for all the plebs out there, describing the country as having gone from the top of the Premier League in 1997 to the Conference in 2010 after 13 wasted years. Supposedly meant to refer to Brown wanting to appear on Match of the Day, it instead just struck you as a politician resorting to hyperbole when he has absolutely nothing else to add, and which falls apart on first examination: was the country really in such fantastic shape in 97? Is it really so desperate now? What exactly would the Conservatives have done to make such a dramatic difference when in 2005 the spending pledges from the Conservatives were only £4 billion short of Labour's?

On the opposite side, you have the supposedly "non-partisan" Left Foot Forward doing the equivalent of trying to thrust their collective tongue down Darling's throat, celebrating almost every separate investment decision taken while downplaying the taking away with the other hand. Sally Hunt rather undermines the "welcome news" that the government will fund 200,00 "extra" university places when she notes that the £270m in extra funding doesn't even begin to make up for the cuts which have already been announced. She also doesn't mention that the government is to sell off the student loan book to the highest bidder, something you think might be of concern to the general secretary of the University and College Union.

Budgets tend to begin falling apart the following day or even the day after that once all the details have sunk in, the sums have been done by the likes of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Treasury red book has been thoroughly examined. It didn't even last that long when it came to the headline raising of the stamp duty threshold to £250,000 for first time buyers. The cost of doing so, heavily cheered by the Labour benches, is meant to be covered by raising the stamp duty on properties over a million from 4% to 5%, except it doesn't. It's estimated that will bring in £90m, while raising the threshold to £250k will cost £230m. Why bother to raise it by such a measly amount when it doesn't even begin to cover it? We're not talking about the so-called "squeezed middle" here, but the very well off who can comfortably afford to pay more. It is essentially a trick, used throughout the budget and especially by Brown since his ascension to prime minister: giving the appearance of soaking the rich while doing nothing of the sort. How much further Labour could have gone has been aptly illustrated by the one-off banker bonus tax: despite all the screams from the City, it raised more than double the predicted amount, helping to fund the "giveaways" which we had been told weren't going to happen.

Even if the real cuts are being postponed to after the election or until the next fiscal year, which is incidentally the right thing to do, we still have the cuts masquerading as "efficiency savings" which were announced afterwards. A staggering £4.3bn is apparently to be saved from the Department of Health budget, of which £555m is due to come by reducing "sickness absence", which translated means forcing nurses and doctors to go into work when they themselves are unwell, an idea with absolutely no drawbacks whatsoever. Another £100m will be saved from the disastrous IT programme, which even by this government's standards of waste has broken new records in terms of misuse of public money. Speaking of which, another £4bn is to be thrown into the spending chasm known as Afghanistan, a war without end and which only gets crazier as the years inexorably pass.

If the budget and the responses to it were designed to further cement the votes if not the themes on which the election campaign is going to be fought, then both could be classed as relative successes. Toby Helm describes it as anything but a boring budget, but I beg to differ, as I presume Darling himself would. The surprises were so few as to be non-existent, and away from the Ashcroft-bashing, this was hardly the budget on which any governing party would like to be going into an election. The deficit and borrowing figures prevented it being any sort of giveaway, but it also focused on the short-term at the expense of anything approaching a vision. We had a stamp duty cut for those who can already afford to buy, but nothing for those who can't or who can't even find anywhere to live. From both sides we were offered a continuation of the same old politics even when they supposedly thirst to offer everyone change, and a tomorrow which they deeply seem to hope will never come.

Labels: , , , , , ,

Share |

Tuesday, March 23, 2010 

Insert rhyme or "joke" about labour here.

Westminster was rocked to its foundations yesterday after the revelation that a woman is expecting a baby in September.

One source, speaking to Obsolete through a speculum, raved: "This changes absolutely everything. Never before has a woman been pregnant during a general election campaign. The manifestos of all the main parties will have to be completely rewritten as a result. How can Gordon Brown possibly continue with his message of Labour investment against Tory cuts now?"

The nation's press were equally awestruck by the developments. Many were so stunned that they genuinely thought that rhyming Sam Cam with "mam" was amusing, while the Daily Mail settled upon "SAM'S HAVING A BABYCAM!", in an apparent reference to Babycham, which absolutely no one got. Pages were filled with the political implications of the leader of the opposition's wife having a child, the Guardian noting in a by no means pretentious aside that "the fact she will be pregnant will give her presence on the campaign trail greater piquancy". This unfortunately resulted in the news about small matters like parliamentary corruption being shifted to page 94, to give space to Zoe Williams to write about how this changes everything in an entertaining and certainly not interminable fashion.

There was also certainly no ulterior motives in the announcement being made yesterday. That on Sunday there was an embarrassing photoshoot featuring Glam Sam Cam (soon to be mam) in the tabloids, something knocked entirely off the news agenda with the news of the pregnancy, was just a coincidence, and an unintended side effect. No one would ever be so cynical with such happy news.

One thing was however cleared up yesterday. Everyone had previously assumed that David Cameron was referring to his wife when he discussed his "secret weapon". It's now apparent that he was in fact talking about his cock.

Labels: , , , ,

Share |

Monday, March 22, 2010 

Intensely relaxed about getting filthy rich comes full circle.

As scandals go, Stephen Byers declaring to an undercover reporter that he was the equivalent of a "cab for hire", albeit for a sum which even most taxi drivers would blanch at demanding, isn't even close to the worst that Labour have suffered over the past 13 years. It's also hardly a repeat of "Cash for Questions", let alone the far more dramatic downfall of Jonathan Aitken. The closest comparison is in fact an almost identical operation by the Sunday Times last year, which successfully ensnared four Labour MPs with mouths equally as large as Byers'. In that instance they too also later said that they had played fast and loose with the truth of their fantastic ability to influence, although they didn't go so far in their attempt to don the sackcloth and ashes as Byers undoubtedly has.

The denials of Tesco and National Express also has echoes of that infamous scandal, or what would these days quite rightly be a non-scandal, the Profumo affair. As Mandy Rice-Davies didn't quite tell the court, they would [say that], wouldn't they? It's impossible to know without an investigation whether Byers was in fact telling the truth to begin with and then, either in an attack of conscience or fear that he'd been nobbled decided to retract what he'd said, but the attempt by Labour to shut the whole thing down, even after Byers referred himself to the parliamentary standards committee was never likely to put an end to things. The response tonight, to suspend Byers, Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon from the party while understandable, is only likely to infer guilt on all three. Equally Downing Street must be enjoying the schadenfreude, despite the damage to the party, of being able to cut down to size the two architects of the attempted coup earlier in the year.

This has though been a scandal waiting to happen; the only real surprise is that it's happened now, and that all three of those to most cover themselves in ordure have been or were Blairites. That might seem counter-intuitive: after all, while you can say plenty about the Brownites and their own use of the tactics of spin and smear, it's always been those on the Blair wing of the party that have found themselves at the centre of scandals. Why though, when parliament is so close to the end of term, were all three so willing to advertise themselves as available to lobbyists? There might be an element of all three being demob happy, as all are standing down at the election, hence their last chance to get some lucre before descending back into absolute obscurity, but it's not as if either Byers or Hewitt are broke: Byers is the non-executive chairman of two companies while Hewitt earns almost as much if not more than she does as an MP through her directorship at BT, having formerly been a trade minister, and slightly less through her role as a special consultant to Alliance Boots, having formerly been health secretary. Only Hoon has no such interests to declare, and he suggested that his quest for cash was down to having two children at university, and seeing as he was in cabinet when tuition fees were pushed through the Commons, he only has himself to blame.

As Justin astutely notes, corruption, lobbying and Mandelson's oft-quoted riff on how they were "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich" have all been hallmarks of New Labour, or most certainly the Blair side of the party since 1997. In the first term alone there was the Ecclestone affair, when very mysteriously it was decided the Formula 1 would be exempt from the rules banning tobacco sponsorship after little Bernie had donated a million to the party, then Lobbygate, when Derek Draper (yes, him) informed Greg Palast that he was "intimate" with the 17 people who "count". As alluded to above, it's odd that this has only just come up again now: after all, party conferences these days are just one long lobbying session, when charities and companies buy up fringe events and meetings, and as ex-ministers openly flog themselves to those that formerly were lobbying them, as most egregiously Hewitt and Lord Warner have done. Labour are hardly the only offenders though, as was illustrated when Cameron attempted earlier in the year to associate Gordon Brown with those charged with offences over their expenses, commenting at the time on lobbying. Back then we still didn't know about Lord Ashcroft's tax status, while we did know that Cameron has a "leader's group", where if you donate £50,000 to the party you get behind the scenes access to all the party's luminaries. At least you know what Labour's union backers want, and equally know that they very, very rarely get it, despite the millions donated.

Whether this will have any great effect on either support for Labour, or further disillusion those still to decide whether to vote or not is unclear. Labour most be hoping that the relatively quick suspension of three MPs already due to stand down will have next to no effect on those already likely to vote for them, but far more important is that the integrity of our politics has been once again brought into question. While the lowest point has probably been reached, thanks to the expenses scandal, where it was everyone's money involved rather than that of politicians personally profiting thanks to their influence, it's those that are politically engaged who this time are most likely to be disgusted. Even then, it's not the money involved, or that any of three would besmirch their entirely spotless reputations (snigger), but the downright stupidity and way in which they walked into such a trap. Politicians are human, something we sometimes fail to make allowances for, but hopefully not completely ignorant and lacking in inquisitiveness. The Sunday Times/Dispatches scoop suggests otherwise.

Labels: , , , , , , ,

Share |

Saturday, March 20, 2010 

Scum-watch: A great victory for liars.

How then do you respond when it turns out you've been telling ludicrous lies, claiming that teachers couldn't confiscate 4-MMC when any actual teacher would have told you the absolute opposite?

Easy. Claim that the rules have been changed because of your highlighting of the problem:

TEACHERS were given the power to confiscate killer drug meow meow yesterday - in a victory for The Sun.

After dithering for days, Mr Coaker wrote to every head in England, saying: "Schools do have the power to confiscate inappropriate items, including a substance they believe to be mephedrone (or any other drug whatever its legal status). They do not have to return such confiscated substances."

As is abundantly clear, this is Coaker just reiterating what the current rules are. Here's part of his letter to schools unedited:

Some questions have been raised as to whether teachers can confiscate such substances, given that they are not prohibited substances. As current guidance makes clear, schools do have the power to confiscate inappropriate items, including a substance they believe to be mephedrone (or any other drug whatever its legal status) in line with the schools behaviour policy. They do not have to return such confiscated substances. As School discipline and pupil behaviour policies: Guidance for schools makes clear, schools may choose not to return an item to the pupil, including

  • Items of value which the pupil should not have brought to school or has misused in some way might – if the school judges this appropriate and reasonable – be stored safely at the school until a responsible family adult can come and retrieve them.
  • Items which the pupil should not have had in their possession – particularly of an unlawful or hazardous nature – may be given by the school to an external agency for disposal or further action as necessary. This should always be followed by a letter to the parents confirming that this has taken place and the reasons for such an action.

The Sun's claims that teachers had to give back 4-MMC to students as it isn't yet illegal have thus been utter nonsense from the very beginning, and their editing of Coaker's letter is cynical and misleading in the extreme.

Nonetheless, the paper's leader continues to claim that it's all thanks to them:

IN a victory for The Sun, teachers are told they DON'T have to give back a deadly drug seized from pupils...What's surprising is that there was a millisecond's doubt.

Day was when school heads could dictate what their pupils wore, how they behaved and whether they could use mobile phones during class.

Never mind not handing back meow meow because it is technically legal.

Makes you wonder precisely what those who run our schools these days are taking.


Or rather, it makes you wonder what those who write the newspapers are taking these days. The idea that heads don't decide on what pupils wear, how they behave or whether they can use mobile phones isn't just beyond ignorant, it's an outright lie. It really is impossible not to absolutely hate the scaremongering liars who write for the Sun, and to be incredibly fearful of the power which they continue to wield, both over this government and the one likely to come.

Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Share |

Friday, March 19, 2010 

Scum-watch: The anti-Conservative bias of Basil Brush.

Has the BBC done something I haven't noticed to upset the Murdoch stable? I know there doesn't generally need to be a reason for the Sun to attack the corporation, only it seems rather odd to suddenly decide to "investigate" the inherent "bias" that the Beeb has against the Tories, especially when the evidence produced is so completely laughable. In fact, laughable really doesn't do justice to the dossier they've produced to prove that the BBC favours Labour over the Tories: pathetic, hilarious and carpet-chewingly insane only begin to describe the scraping of barrels involved.

This apparently is the best that Tom Newton Dunn and Kevin Schofield could come up with:

BBC News gave disproportionate coverage to the row over Tory donor Lord Ashcroft's tax status;

...

The BBC's Lord Ashcroft coverage alone triggered 104 complaints.

When the row over his "non-dom" status broke three weeks ago it led the Beeb's TV and radio bulletins for up to six days - long after commercial broadcasters dropped it.

But controversy over the similar status of up to eight Labour donors got just a fraction of the coverage.


Taking the Sun's word for it that it did lead broadcasts for up to six days, that doesn't seem "disproportionate" when compared to the coverage not just on other "commercial broadcasters" but to that in newspapers, another prism through which it should be judged. It certainly is however disproportionate when compared to the Sun's coverage of the Ashcroft affair, which to judge by the reports on their website was a complete non-story. There are only three reports dedicated to the revelations concerning Ashcroft's non-dom status, all of which are either favourable or overwhelmingly favourable to the Tories: the first is headlined Tory Lord vows to pay full tax, the second is a report on the spat between Labour and the Tories over non-doms, and the third is on Ashcroft being cleared over the donations to the Tories through his Bearwood Corporate Services company.

Next, and we're already onto hardly the most convincing of evidence:

LABOUR panellists were given more time to speak on flagship political show Question Time;

...

The Sun's analysis showed Labour politicians on Question Time were allowed to speak for a full minute longer than Tory counterparts.

On March 11 ex-Labour minister Caroline Flint got SIX minutes more than Tory Justine Greenings.

And on February 18 Labour veteran Roy Hattersley spoke for nearly three minutes longer than Tory Rory Stewart.


This couldn't possibly be anything to do with the Tory politicians giving shorter answers rather than not being allowed to speak, could it? There's also the minor point that if you're not the first to be called on, the others can rather steal your thunder with their answers, hence there being no point going over the same ground. Also worth keeping in mind is that as Labour are in government the audience often directly ask questions of them, and are sometimes also given an opportunity to respond to a criticism of the government either from a member of the panel or the audience. None of this is evidence of bias, and if the politicians themselves are annoyed with how much time they've been given they can take it up with the producers afterwards, which there has been no indication of them doing, or even during the show if they so wish by complaining to David Dimbleby. Incidentally, there is no such politician as Justine Greenings; there is however a Justine Greening.

A POLL on The One Show ignored issues with Gordon Brown to ask only, Is David Cameron too much of a toff to be PM?

...

A total of 219 viewers complained about The One Show poll, which followed a five-minute piece about Mr Cameron's "posh" upbringing.

Dozens more wrote on the show's blog.

One said: "The BBC should be ashamed of its blatant electioneering."

That would be the One Show which is renowned for its high standard of investigative journalism, would it? For those imagining that this happened recently, it was in fact screened over two months ago, and the BBC said that the piece wasn't good enough at the time. They have since ran in-depth looks at all of the political parties. In any case, why isn't Cameron's background a reasonable topic for discussion? As the New Statesman points out, Cameron hasn't received anywhere near the same amount of scrutiny as Brown.

THE Tory leader was stitched up when footage of him adjusting his hair was sneakily fed to all broadcasters;

...

Last week bosses tried to make Mr Cameron look a laughing stock by putting out footage of him checking his hair in the wind before making a serious statement on Northern Ireland.

Party chiefs complained.

And who was it that initially shot this footage? Why, that would be Sky News, who may themselves have "sneakily fed" it to all broadcasters, or they could have picked it up from YouTube. Sky News we should point out, has absolutely no connection to the Sun whatsoever. They just provide the video on the Sun's website. Oh, and the ultimate parent company of the Sun controls a third of the shares in Sky. Apart from that they're completely separate entities.

Lastly, the real clincher:

THE Basil Brush Show featured a school election with a cheat called Dave wearing a blue rosette.

...

Then last Sunday BBC2's Basil Brush Show featured nasty "Dave" - complete with blue rosette.

He beat nice Rosie, with a purple rosette, by promising free ice cream but was arrested because it was out of date.


No, I'm not making this up. The Sun really is trying to suggest that Basil Brush is biased against the Conservatives. Then again, perhaps it isn't so ridiculous: after all, the Tories have promised to bring back fox hunting. To be serious when perhaps it doesn't deserve it, when you start seeing political bias in a children's programme featuring a puppet fox, it really might be time to start questioning your own sanity. In any case, and because I'm truly sad, I went and looked to see when this episode was made: surprise, surprise, it was first broadcast on the 22nd of October 2004, before the last election, let alone this one. Unless the Sun is suggesting that the writers of Basil Brush are so prescient that months before David Cameron became Conservative party leader they were already out to get him, this really can be dismissed as the mouth-frothing madness that it is. They also got the girl's name wrong: she's Molly, not Rosie.

Away from ludicrous accusations of bias, the paper is still trying to claim that teachers are having to give 4-MMC back to students they confiscate it from:

DEADLY drug meow meow is rife in prisons, warns the Justice Department.

An urgent memo urges governors to stop inmates getting hold of it.

Yet while the Government protects convicts, it won't save schoolchildren. Teachers must return confiscated meow meow to pupils even though it may kill them.


Just in case you didn't take my own word for it, some actual journalists as opposed to scaremongering tabloid hacks bothered to ask both teachers and police what their real approach to 4-MMC is:

Despite national reports claiming teachers would be forced to hand back seized packets of mephedrone at the final bell, Plymouth police and the vice-chair of the Association of Secondary Head Teachers in Plymouth, Andy Birkett, have insisted it will not happen here.

"We already have effective policies to deal with substances found in schools; if we're in any doubt we ask the expert's opinion," said Mr Birkett.

"The police have always advised us that if we don't know what we've seized, regardless of what the child tells us, then call the police. We seek to put the child's safety and the safety of the school first and will hand over such items to police.

"As far as we're concerned, nothing has changed. We'll deal with this drug in the same way we always have."

Drug liaison officer Det Con Stuart Payne said: "The advice we have given schools is if they seize a suspected item, then they can give it to us to deal with.

"The school may wish to deal with the matter in-house or they may wish to tell us who it came from. People should note that current force policy is that those found in possession of the suspect powder will be arrested.

"It should be remembered that samples of mephedrone we have already seized have been mixed with controlled drugs, including cocaine and amphetamine, or legal drugs such as benzocaine, which is used by dentists. It emphasises that you don't know what you're taking."

Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Share |

Thursday, March 18, 2010 

Scum-watch: Fuelling a moral panic over Mephedrone.

This whole post comes with a very hefty hat-tip to Carl, a crime reporter on a local newspaper.

If yesterday's reporting on Mephedrone or 4-MMC was slightly hysterical, then we now seem to be moving into full moral panic territory. Moral panics are not just driven by exaggeration and overreaction through fear, but directly fuelled by downright lies, obfuscation and completely inaccurate media reporting, all of which has come together in today's Sun in a quite remarkable fashion.

Not content with just wanting 4-MMC to be banned, it seems determined to inflate the number of deaths associated with it, claiming that there have been 5 while only 1 has today been directly linked to the drug, but also spreading likely myths. The paper is suggesting that "dealers" are adding Crystal Meth to it, which seems highly unlikely on two grounds: firstly that Meth is not a popular drug in this country, especially when compared to the US; and secondly that the most popular methods of taking it are different. Meth is almost always either injected or smoked, whereas 4-MMC is mainly taken either by snorting it, by swallowing it in capsule form, "bombing it" or mixing it into a drink. Meth can be snorted, and it can potentially be mixed with 4-MMC, but if anyone is doing so, my bet would be only those who consider themselves truly "hardcore" are likely to chance it.

The paper's main claim today though is that teachers are having to hand 4-MMC back to pupils who have it in their possession, as it has no age restriction and isn't illegal. The paper here seems to be using a typical tabloid short cut: what it does definitively report is the comments made by Mike Stewart, head of Westlands School in Torquay:

Mr Stewart said: "Both teachers and police are powerless to do anything about it.

"Items can be confiscated, but because this drug is still legal it would have to be given back at the end of the day and that's disturbing.

"This drug is highly dangerous and must be banned."


Note that Stewart doesn't actually say that he has had to give 4-MMC back to a student after it's been confiscated, because in all likelihood he hasn't. He does though seem to be one of these teachers that love to talk to the media, as this video on the BBC shows. From this the paper has directly taken the line that teachers are having to give it back, which there is absolutely no evidence for whatsoever.

My school days aren't that long behind me, and teachers then were all too confiscate happy, and the time the item was kept was often far longer than just until the end of the day. The idea that a teacher would confiscate a white powder, even if told that it was 4-MMC and still hand it back to a student is ludicrous. The very first thing that would happen is that a higher authority (probably up to head of year, deputy head, even head level) would be brought in for something so potentially serious, and then almost certainly the police as well. After all, you can't take a student's word for it that the white powder they have in their possession isn't cocaine or speed. The Devon and Cornwall police themselves issued a press release today which ought to fully debunk this claim (Update: .doc, thanks again to Carl):

"If the seized drugs are found to be mephedrone no charges will follow under the Misuse of Drugs Act, but it is possible that other offences such as those under Intoxicating Substances Act 1985 could be brought. If, after testing, the seized substance is identified as mephedrone the Force will retain and destroy the product."

No chance whatsoever then that teachers or even police would have to give it back. The Sun could have checked this themselves, but instead thought that scaring people would be a better option.

Having then created a nightmarish picture of teachers having to give potentially deadly drugs back to their students, the paper moves on to lambasting the government, its other favourite popular past-time :

Home Secretary Alan Johnson was blasted as it emerged that a decision on a ban had been delayed SIX MONTHS.

An official review was launched last October, then postponed when the scientist in charge quit in protest at the sacking of chief drugs adviser Prof David Nutt.

The committee has still not reported, meaning any ban is still months away.


Not true - the ACMD is due to give advice to ministers at the end of the month, regardless of the problems caused by the sacking of Prof David Nutt, whom the Sun previously smeared by association, targeting his own children. The government has said it will take "immediate action" upon receiving that advice, although how much they can do considering parliament will have to rise on the 6th for an election on May 6th is difficult to see. The best plan to deal with it in a prohibitive fashion, as pointed out yesterday, was to stick it in a "Class D" classification, age-restricting and taking control of the supply until more research and studies had been carried out. This though simply isn't good enough for those who have already lost loved ones, even if they don't yet know whether it was 4-MMC itself that killed them, newspapers which are determined to use any stick to beat the government and other politicians who are equally set on proving their law and order credentials.

The paper's leader has all of this and more besides:

SCHOOL heads are furious at the Government shambles over killer party drug meow meow.

Teachers seize stashes but have to return them because there is no law against the lethal substance.

Nonsense, as we've established above.

Instead of acting, Labour cobble up plans to microchip puppies - in an attempt to divert attention from the Jon Venables scandal.

Yes, that policy was directly cooked up to distract everyone. Do they really expect anyone to believe such utter rot?

Lord Mandelson admits he's never HEARD of meow meow. Shouldn't a senior minister be better informed?

When it has absolutely nothing to do with his own ministerial duties, no, he doesn't necessarily have to be.

America can ban drugs instantly for a year pending investigation.

Why can't we? Labour mumble about a decision by the summer.


Even if 4-MMC was to be banned immediately, does the paper really think that'll either solve anything or decrease the dangers of taking it? Of course it won't, it's just the same old "sending a message" nonsense which has failed now for over half a century.

Tackling meow meow is urgent.

The Government must wake up or have more deaths on its conscience.


More deaths on their conscience? Is the paper really suggesting that the government bears some responsibility for those who die as a result of taking potentially dangerous substances? This is the equivalent of claiming that the government bears responsibility for everyone who dies as a result of alcohol poisoning because that's legal, or through lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking. For a newspaper that repeatedly stresses personal responsibility, this is the complete antitheses of that philosophy. By the same yardstick you could claim that the media could have deaths on their conscience through the hype and hysteria which they're spreading about 4-MMC; you can bet that there'll be more inquisitive and inclined to try it this weekend as a result of all the coverage, regardless of the panic associated with it. If the government has a responsibility, then so does the media. The Sun has resolutely failed that test.

Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

Share |

Wednesday, March 17, 2010 

Mephedrone - what a fucking disgrace.

It's fairly obvious to compare the current hype/hysteria over Mephedrone (Q&A PDF here), a new "legal" high to the seminal Brass Eye episode on drugs where Chris Morris invented the fictional drug Cake, and got celebrities and politicians to rail against it, but then this blog is nothing if not obvious. It really does seem almost too good to be possibly be true - sold as "plant food", called in slang, ridiculously, "Meow Meow", "Miaow" or supposedly "Bubbles", and now we have the deaths linked to it in which everyone seems to be completely ignoring the fact that the two men in Scunthorpe who died mixed it with alcohol and then apparently, and we say apparently, as it's impossible to know yet what killed them until the toxicology reports come back, used Methadone of all things to try and make the comedown smoother. Methadone has all the dangers of heroin, and is incredibly easy to overdose on, especially when you have no tolerance to it and are unable to therefore know what a "safe" dose is. Slight update: as Carl points out in the comments, while it's possible they may have overdosed on just the Methadone, it's also possible that the mixture of the three could just have well have caused their deaths.

As a drug that only emerged in 2007 as a "recreational" substance, much about Mephedrone or 2-methylamino-1-p-tolylpropan-1-one to give it its proper systematic name is unknown, including the true dangers involved in taking it and the long-term side effects. What is known is that so far only one death has been definitively linked to the drug, and that also involved the taking of it with another drug, in that case cannabis. An earlier reported death in this country of a 14-year-old girl was found to have been caused by bronchial pneumonia, and not 4-MMC, as we'll call it from here. We don't then have any solid evidence whatsoever, let alone any scientific studies, to show that the drug is inherently dangerous on its own; what we do have is reports from users that suggest that it has unpleasant side-effects, and also isolated reports that some have become addicted to it, although those have to be treated with the usual scepticism.

To put this somewhat in context, the rise of 4-MMC doesn't seem to be just because its legal status is currently in limbo, nor that it can currently be obtained easily and acquired for relatively trivial amounts of money, but because of both the relative scarcity of Ecstasy, and the perceived drop of quality in both MDMA and cocaine. 4-MMC is currently felt to be far more likely to be purer in quality because of its legality, in difference to the aforementioned drugs, although there have been rumours that some batches could have been contaminated. The other drug to rise hugely in popularity in the last few years has been Ketamine: it's no coincidence that while Ket is a controlled drug, its use as an anaesthetic in both humans and animals means that it is relatively easy to obtain, and that its quality is somewhat assured as a result.

It hardly then follows that making 4-MMC illegal, as demanded by all the usual suspects, will either halt its growth in popularity or reduce the risks associated with it. Indeed, as the ever excellent Transform blog points out, the ban on importing it into Guernsey has had two predictable effects: pushing up the price, fuelling acquisitive crime, with organised crime gangs filling in where previously dodgy if legal outfits had been supplying it. Making a substance illegal only increases the possibility of contamination when the ingredients are more difficult to get hold of (the quality of the ingredients is also bound to suffer) - witness the recent deaths of heroin users who found their supply had been contaminated with anthrax. Lastly, as the equally reasoned Prof. David Nutt makes clear, that 4-MMC is a "designer" drug only makes the possibility of a replacement substance coming along relatively quickly after a ban is put in place all the more likely.

Nutt also offers the best "prohibitive" short-term solution, a so called "Class D" classification:

This is a holding category where drugs can be put before they are well understood: sales are limited to over-18s; the product is quality-controlled so users know what they are getting, at doses limited as far as possible to safe levels; and it comes with health education messages. Society can limit sales and collect data on use.

Unfortunately this would never be close to acceptable to the "usual suspects" mentioned above. In fact, they'd consider it the government openly sanctioning the use of such dangerous substances, and if someone was to die in circumstances similar to that of the two young men in Scunthorpe where it hasn't yet been proved that their deaths were anything to do with 4-MMC, then they'd declare that the government had blood on its hands. Like the Private Eye taxi driver stereotype where hanging and flogging is the only thing that "they" understand, so in this instance only a ban is acceptable or likely to be understood. That drug prohibition has almost certainly been the most destructive political orthodoxy of the post-war years in terms of lives destroyed and lives lost continues to be completely ignored by the entire mainstream.

Where we then need knowledge, understanding and time to make informed decisions of just what harms drug pose, we instead have the equivalent of the celebrity in Brass Eye declaring that Cake could make you throw-up your own pelvis bone. What a fucking disgrace.

Labels: , , , , , , ,

Share |

Tuesday, March 16, 2010 

American foreign policy explained.

It tells you something about the moral compass of America and Israel that what is being described as the biggest crisis in relations between the two in 35 years has not occurred over say, a war in which nearly 1,2000 Lebanese civilians were killed, or the attack on Gaza last year in which almost 1,000 civilians were killed, but instead over the snub given to vice-president Joe Biden on his visit to Israel last week, which was the perfect day to announce that another 1,600 households would be built in East Jerusalem, exactly the policy of continuing to build settlements which the US has called for an end to. It's hardly the first time which Israel has acted in such a fashion, despite it supposedly being the the lesser partner in the relationship, and while the response of the US in this case has been the angriest and most forceful in recent memory, it will doubtless be forgotten as usual in a couple of months.

Equally instructive is what happens when a war which America urged an ally to fight suddenly comes back and hits too close to home. Obama is "outraged" that three people associated with the US consulate in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez were murdered, a direct result of the war launched by the Mexican government on the drug cartels which attempt to satisfy the insatiable American hunger, mainly for cocaine but also for other narcotics. Mexico itself has somewhat seen the light, realised that the war against drugs itself cannot possibly be won and ostensibly legalised the possession of small amounts of almost all soft and hard drugs. The war against the cartels however continues, with horrific results: more than 6,500 drug-related killings last year, and barbarity which has come close to that of the likes of al-Qaida in Iraq. While Foreign Policy puts this somewhat into context, only Colombia is fighting a comparable drug war with the complete support, or indeed at least partially on the behalf of the United States. The difference is clear: it's only when those killed are Americans that there is the possibility of any change. The only thing that comes close is when the vice-president is made to look a fool.

Labels: , , , , ,

Share |

 

Theme tune.

As Jamie, Justin and Mike have all decided on what the theme tune for their blogs is, I simply have to follow suit. You can find it here.

Labels: , ,

Share |

Monday, March 15, 2010 

The political wife as a commodity.

A couple of years back Siôn Simon inadvisedly made a pretty poor spoof of David Cameron's video blogs, offering in his guise as Dave the chance to sleep with his wife, or if you preferred, to take his children. I'm probably one of the few to find it vaguely amusing, both because he thought it was a good idea and due to the bad taste involved, which is always welcome, from MPs especially, as well as just how ridiculous he looks. He also had something of a point, even if it was put across with all the eloquence and subtlety of Carol Vorderman on Question Time.

Looking at it from the vantage point of early 2010, having already been treated to a prime minister almost shedding tears during a "personal" interview with Piers Morgan, with helpful juxtaposed cuts to his wife who most certainly was crying, and now to the "first" casual, cosy talk between Glam Sam Cam, as the Tories seem to wish us to see her, and Trevor McDonald, it doesn't really seem so ludicrous. Admittedly, Cameron isn't exactly offering us the opportunity to go further than just a informative chat with her, and Brown was presumably strong-armed by the spin doctors into the Morgan interview, although Sarah Brown has previously appeared at the party conferences almost as ballast, but it is treating the wives almost as a commodity, as if they are inseparable from their husbands and that they are somehow more important, or even as equally important as the actual policies which they offer.

In one sense, you could say they're being brave by deciding to go public in such a way. After all, Cherie Blair (or Booth) made the mistake to not just be content to be the prime minister's wife; she carried on as a lawyer and then a judge, which was doubtless in a influence in certain sections of the press on how she came to be treated. Up until now Samantha Cameron has mostly been treated as a clothes horse by the media at large, even though she's been far more successful in her own right as a designer than Cameron himself ever was as a PR for Carlton. In none of these interviews or appearances though do we actually learn what their own political views are, only the qualities of their husbands and how they met. Again, this could be an attempt to avoid being the next Cherie, who was always felt to be the left of her husband and made the mistake of working for the human rights lawyers Matrix Chambers, always likely to be seen as a conscious snub. Ed Vaizey attempted to invoke the uncertainty of those wobbling over whether to vote Tory or not by suggesting that Samantha might have voted for Labour in 1997, but we were quickly informed that she had never voted for the party. That the closest we've had to any actual indication of political inclination is a denial of a past vote is a rather sad state of affairs.

Admittedly, the purpose of these interviews is nothing to do with politics: it's all to do with those self-same publicists who are convinced that the wider public, unable to make their mind up purely on the back of the different policies on offer, also need to know just what kind of a person the man is when he's the one in the kitchen. At the same time though these attempts at showing the "real" person behind the public politician are self-defeating: they are distinctly "unreal", intrusive and spun just as much as any policy is. Hence the biggest revelations from Samantha Cameron's tête-a-tête with McDonald was that Dave likes the Godfather films and tends to channel-hop. At worst, they're not just uninformative, but mawkish, creepy and uncomfortable, as sections of Morgan's session with Brown were. They're also patronising: they imagine that there are voters out there, and you get the feeling they're thinking especially of so-called "Take a Break woman" who are so thick and backward that need to be informed by members of the leader's personal family of just how great they are to earn their support. Always looking for another angle, the media loves it, and it all adds to the soap opera feel which politics increasingly seems to be gaining.

The contradiction inherent of all this is that the more politics becomes like a family affair, or even part of the celebrity culture, where someone cannot be seen out without someone without rumours about splits and worse being whispered around, the more you turn off not just the purists, but also those who don't want their politicians to be like those that fill the scandal sheets and gossip rags, which by my feeble reckoning is just about everyone. Gordon Brown said shortly before becoming prime minister that he felt "the country was turning away from celebrity culture", back in those carefree days prior to the break up of Peter and Katie and before the death of Jade. Instead our politicians haven't just embraced it, it has become them.

Labels: , , , , , ,

Share |

 

Celebrity endorsements.

Is there, or can you think of a less exciting celebrity endorsement of a political party than that of today's quite brilliant Sun front page, announcing to the world Andy McNab has switched his support to the Conservatives? I've been racking my brains, but I can only mainly come up with slightly contentious or potentially offensive endorsements, such as Michael Barrymore pledging his vote to Labour, or just naff ones, such as Noel Edmonds bigging up the Lib Dems.

Then again, perhaps this is just part of the way in which political programmes have tried to get down with the kids or have non-political but "normal" guests, hence the appearance of Monty Don on Question Time or Lady Sovereign deciding she didn't want to be on This Week after all (She says she had a panic attack, which is fair enough). Closer to May the 6th, can we look forward to learning who Maggot from Goldie Lookin' Chain is going to put an x in the box for, or whether Daniella Westbrook is going to use her vote?

(I mean, that's presuming that actually is Andy McNab behind the porn-like obscuring black block with Dave; after all, it could be some bloke that was wandering around Westminster that they got to pose with him for a fiver. How do we even know that Andy McNab exists, or that he really is voting for the Tories? Why am I writing this unfunny crap?)

Labels: , , , ,

Share |

Saturday, March 13, 2010 

Forced to die alone and without dignity.

An especially powerful letter in today's Graun on the subject of assisted suicide, well worth republishing:

As I read yet another news piece about someone travelling to Dignitasto die (Vicki Wood), I am consumed by sadness (Woman who attempted husband's mercy killing takes her own life in Dignitas clinic, 12 March). Nearly five years ago, my grandfather travelled to Zurich to die. Unable to face months of pain, coupled with physical and mental degradation, he elected to end his life while he could still make the journey. Alone.

Ever the gentleman, my grandfather declined the offer of companionship from my father, for fear of his son's potential prosecution. There were no updated guidelines from the director of public prosecutions – to have such clarity would have been a luxury. Instead, my grandfather took his final journey abroad, alone. He ate his last meal, alone. And his last words were uttered to medical staff. I have no idea what those words may have been, or, indeed, how he felt.

Too often I hear talk of dignity at work or dignity in life generally, but where is our right to dignity in death? In the eyes of Westminster, my grandfather is simply one of 100; another statistic lost in the reams of data that fills the corridors of Whitehall. But to me, he was a brave man forced to leave his homeland in order to die with dignity.

I appreciate the issue is complex, and would be naive to state otherwise, but a sensible resolution is required. How many more Britons have to voyage to Switzerland, before the government seeks a solution? In criminalising assisted suicide, are we not overlooking – undermining? – the right to articulate our own views on life? May Vicki Wood rest in peace.

Name and address supplied

Labels: , , ,

Share |

Friday, March 12, 2010 

The Liberal Democrat dilemma.

If nothing else, the Liberal Democrats can claim at the election that they're the only party to have an "adult" film director standing for them as an MP. It does say something about the Libs though that they're both mature and open-minded enough for Anna "Span" Arrowsmith to be their candidate in Gravesham; you can hardly imagine Labour, let alone the Tories and their so-called "Turnip Taliban" being prepared to face the attention and controversy which such a career is always going to bring. In fact, it's probably down to the fact she is representing the Lib Dems and that she has no chance of actually winning the seat, which was an almost dead heat between Labour and the Tories in 2005, that she's had such a favourable and reasonable response to her candidacy, rather than the country (or perhaps the media) developing a more open attitude towards sexuality. Being female instead of male also probably helps, as the Heresiarch concludes in his usual fine style, but the party also makes an important difference. That Adam Holloway, the Tory MP she's standing against has voted against equal gay rights might also be a debate starter.

As for the Liberal Democrats as a whole, they continue to confuse and perplex rather than inspire confidence in those who are flirting with voting for them. Nick Clegg's latest disastrous decision was to give an interview this week to the Spectator, presumably in a dubious attempt to appeal to those still unsure about the Tories, although you somehow doubt that Speccie readers and subscribers are anything but true blue. Maybe it was a stalking exercise in convincing the Tories that the Libs can be trusted should there be a hung parliament, but even if it was, they must have known that Clegg issuing a paean to Margaret Thatcher over her dismantling of the unions, as well as pledging to cut the deficit wholly through cuts rather than tax rises was hardly going to go down well with committed supporters, nor Labour-leaning floating voters. Perhaps Clegg was thinking that considering the SDP helped split the vote in the crucial 83 election he was on sure ground in praising Thatcher, but the rifts which her reign has left are still with us, and will be for a generation yet.

Clegg himself, and those advising him increasingly seem to the major problem with the party as a whole. He and they don't know what they want to be, and with it what the party is meant to stand for. Even those only slightly interested in politics knew that the main Lib Dem policy of old was a 50% tax rate for those earning over £100,000 a year, and while Labour has introduced something similar as a result of the financial deficit, there's been no similar replacement. The closest the party had was to scrap tuition fees, yet even that is now an "aspiration" rather than a promise.

It's this indecision, reflected in the woeful slogan the party has decided on for for its election campaign, "Change that works for you. Building a fairer Britain", that is more than anything holding the party back. The leadership wants to have it both ways, taking the Tories' crap "vote for change" and combining it with Labour's better but hardly sparkling "A future fair for all". That they couldn't think up anything even slightly original, let alone inspiring is never a good sign for what is yet to come. It already threatens to be a dismal, depressing, underhand and dirty campaign, something which the Lib Dems usually manage to rise above. Not this time it seems.

The conundrum for those of us who've abandoned Labour just as it has abandoned us is that the Liberal Democrats, much as we agree with them on most things, just don't seem to really want to make us truly welcome. In my case it doesn't really make any difference: my constituency is a straight fight between the Tories and Labour, with the Libs a distant third, and the boundary changes seem destined to make it an even safer Tory seat. Whether I vote Lib Dem or Green (although I might be persuaded to waste my vote even further by a far-left grouping, if one stands) isn't going to matter, and increasingly I think I'm going to plump for the latter. Others though will be in a position to make a difference, and beyond a doubt the best possible electoral outcome will be a hung parliament. The leadership and their incompetence are helping to ensure that we have exactly what we don't deserve: either a Labour or Tory outright victory.

Labels: , , ,

Share |

Thursday, March 11, 2010 

Boycotting boycotts.

There are times when I wonder just what some of my blogging comrades have been smoking. Why else would some respond in such a vehement fashion to the decision of Total Politics magazine to interview Nick Griffin, of which they have a perfect right to do and which really ought to cause no ructions whatsoever?

To call the justifications and calls for a boycott of TP's blog awards piss-poor would be putting it far too kindly. As an extension of the "no platform" position, it errs on being arguable, until you note that "no platform" has been an ignoble failure. No platform not only fails to confront the BNP for what it is, it also gives them carte blanche to claim that they're persecuted simply for who they are and for what they stand for; adhered to not just by Labour but by others, it's doubtless helped to result in two BNP MEPs and their highest ever number of local councillors. Just what do those proposing a boycott of TP's blog awards hope to achieve through doing so?

It equally doesn't follow that allowing Griffin to appear in TP will be a "further acquiescence to the BNP message being accepted as a normal part of British political discourse". We don't know how TP is going to approach the interviewing of Griffin: one suspects that he's hardly going to be given a soft soap interview. It's also an attempt to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted: unfortunately, Griffin and the BNP now are a normal part of British political discourse, and that they haven't been before has only added to their lustre in any case.

Lastly, it's claimed that this doesn't fit with TP's mission statement to be “unremittingly positive about the political process”. Even if you don't accept that bringing the BNP into the political process to expose them for what they are is a good idea, then why shouldn't a magazine which is dedicated to politics interview the leader of what is a major political party even if it isn't necessarily positive? The grouping continues by arguing "[L]est we forget, this is a party which abuses that process". As opposed to our current representatives, held in the highest esteem by everyone, and whom would never sink to such levels of political skulduggery. Rather than getting involved in daft, half-baked boycotts, we'd be better putting our collective efforts into exposing the BNP's manifesto for the general election when it arrives, which might just achieve something. Letting Iain Dale hang himself with his own rope is in any event a far better option.

Labels: , , , , ,

Share |

 

Social networking refuseniks.

I suspect, although I might be wrong, that I'm one of the few regular bloggers (not to mention also of a certain age) that hasn't also embraced the wonders of Facebook and/or Twitter. There are a few reasons behind this, especially the way that I'm not comfortable with revealing who I actually am, both in terms of my name and in posting photographs, which I loathe taking of myself in any event. I also dislike the whole erosion of privacy which comes with both, regardless of whether you hide behind a false identity or not; nor do I understand why other people would care what I'm doing at any precise moment. For those that have plenty of friends, or even just online friends, and are completely at ease with the past, I'm sure they're great and a wonderful way to keep in touch, I just don't think they'd add anything to the already pristine brilliance of my existence.

Are there then any other social networking refuseniks out there that do pretty much everything else on the net, including blogging, and yet don't get involved with these sites? I'd be genuinely interested to know, or even if you're just a refusenik that doesn't blog, with your reasons why, or just an acknowledgement. And no, I don't want persuading of just how fabulous Facebook and Twitter are. I'm not alone, right?

Labels: , , ,

Share |

Wednesday, March 10, 2010 

Eliza Manningham-Bullshitter.

Becoming a member of the security services is a little like converting to Islam - once you're in, you're in for life, unless you decide to turn whistleblower, ala, Peter Wright or David Shayler, although in the case of the latter it seems to have done little to help his state of mind. Most though stay a spook for the rest of their life, and even after retirement continue to deny reports about the antics of agents which are known to be true, and in the case of Eliza Manningham-Buller, continue to be at the very least economical with the truth.

According to the previous head of MI5, "the Americans were very keen that people like us did not discover what they were doing". Really? How then does that square with the "seven paragraphs" which very clearly show that the Americans were at the least indulging in "cruel and unusual punishment" when interviewing Binyam Mohamed, and which they were more than prepared to share with their friends in 5/6 back in 2002? How is Buller's claim not contradicted directly by the evidence of Craig Murray, who sent back evidence in 2002 and 03 that showed the CIA was using evidence obtained from the torture of dissidents and others in Uzbekistan, and which the government and security services already knew about in any case? Previously MI5/6 have claimed that they didn't properly realise that the US policy of mistreatment had extended as far as it had until the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, although they knew about the "ghost sites", which even then was stretching the realms of feasibility. Now Manningham-Buller claims that she didn't know why Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been so talkative until after her retirement when she discovered that he had been "waterboarded" 160 times.

If you were to believe Manningham-Buller, you'd also have to accept that the same people who are meant to be keeping us safe are also some of the most gullible and least inquisitive individuals around. There's plenty of things that you can call the security services, but those that rise to the top are not idiots, nor are they easily led or deceived. Did she really ask her underlings why KSM was talking and not even have an inkling that it might have something to do with the fact that the US was subjecting him to simulated drowning on a frighteningly regular basis? That's of course if this whole recollected conversation actually took place at all, which is itself unlikely. Why else after all were certain "high-value" detainees disappearing if they weren't being taken to "black sites", which MI5 and 6 have said they knew about? Then there's the little matter of Guantanamo Bay, established in December 2001, and where from the very beginning there were allegations of mistreatment. The only reasonable conclusion that can be reached is that Eliza Manningham-Buller is lying, and lying in a feeble attempt to protect both herself and MI5. Then again, why should we be surprised? When lying is what you do for a living, why stop when you retire?

Labels: , , , , , ,

Share |

 

The electoral war over crime.

Up until now there's been something of a phony war instead of anything approaching all-out combat between Labour and the Conservatives in the fledgling election campaign. Sure, there have been skirmishes over Ashcroft which have involved plenty of claim and counter-claim, as well as more than a little obfuscation, and individual launches on policy from both parties, especially from the Tories, which for the most part seem to have failed miserably but we've thankfully yet to see anything on the scale of say, Jennifer's ear, although there's still more than enough time for such low skulduggery masquerading as a serious issue to come to the fore yet.

The closest we've probably come has been the Tory insistence on using statistics on violent crime which are strictly non-comparable. This started when Tory candidates were sent information from Conservative Central Office which compared the number of recorded violence against the person stats of a decade ago with those of 2008-09. These packs failed to make clear that the way the police recorded violent crime changed in 2002 - whereas then the police decided what was and what wasn't a violent crime, which led to accusations that they were fiddling the figures, this was changed to the victim deciding whether or not the incident they were subject to was a violent offence. This, predictably, has led to a huge inflation in the number of recorded violent offences, as any such subjective change is likely to. According to the stats given to the local media by Tory MP Mark Lancaster, there had been a 236% rise in violence against the person in Milton Keynes, going from 1,790 offences in 1999-2000 to a staggering 6,015 in 2008-2009, or as Mark Easton noted, a violent attack every 90 minutes. Thames Valley police themselves objected to this crude comparison, pointing out that the figures were now incomparable, as well as illustrating how the change in recording has ludicrously boosted the figures: they judged that there had been just 81 victims of serious violence in MK, with around 2,000 victims of low-level assaults where a minor injury had occurred, while the violence against the person stats quoted by Lancaster included a dog being out of control in a public area.

Despite a reprimand from the UK Statistics Authority that using incomparable statistics in such a way was "likely to mislead the public", the Conservative shadow home secretary Chris Grayling was unrepentant and has come up with a novel way to get around such minor quibbling: he asked the Commons library to take the violent crime stats from 1998-99 and apply the new counting methods, which he then compared with those from 2008-09. Quite how they performed such a trick when, as noted above, it's the public themselves that now decide what is and what isn't a violent offence is unclear, and it seems destined to remain opaque as the Tories have failed to publish their research in full, instead giving it only to sympathetic newspapers. The library's conclusion was that the new figure for 1998-99 would be 618,417, as compared to 2008-09's 887,942, or a rise of 44%. Certainly not as startling a rise as the 236% in Milton Keynes or the previously claimed 77%, which was also based on statistics which expressly said they were not to be compared and which were also misleading, but still a very serious one.

Naturally, these figures have been ridiculed by Alan Johnson during Labour's own press conference today on crime policy, but it's hard not to conclude that both parties are, as usual, equally guilty. This is after all the same Labour party which produced the knife crime figures just over a year ago which were heavily criticised by the same UK Statistics Authority which has lambasted Chris Grayling. While the British Crime Survey is by far the most authoratitive source on crime statistics with its huge 40,000+ sample, and which the Tories almost never quote from because it suggests that crime and especially violent crime has dropped off a cliff since a peak in the early 90s, both sides only cherry-pick the figures which suit their needs best. There are flaws in the BCS, such as only recently specifically recording incidents with knives, and how again it has only just started interviewing 10 to 15-year-olds, but it remains superior to the police recorded stats both because it records offences which were never reported to the police or which they missed, while also remaining almost completely free of potential bias. It may rely on the honesty of the respondents, but with a sample the size of 40,000 any attempts to deliberately interfere with it are hardly likely to be significant. After exchanging more letters with Grayling over his newly obtained figures, the UKSA pointed out that while his new research is from a body which provides "professional statistical advice", he'd still be advised to make reference to the BCS, something which Grayling has not done when sharing his new findings.

If however Tory crime policy is indicative of Grayling's approach to statistics, being dishonest, crude and punitive, then as we've suffered over the past close to 13 years, Labour's reign of authoritarian solutions to far more subtle and complicated problems seems forever destined to continue. Johnson was today defending the government's indefensible position on the keeping of the genetic profiles of those arrested but not charged or found innocent of any offence for 6 years on the DNA database, the government's attempt at reaching a compromise following the European Court of Human Rights' ruling on the case of S and Marper. They claim that if the Tory policy of only 3 years was in place that 23 murderers and rapists "would have gone" free, a ludicrous and risible position to take which ignores that old fashioned police work would have had to have been used rather than just relying immediately on DNA records, and which does nothing to prove the efficacy of a database which is now the largest in the world. Alongside the ridiculous proposals to chip all dogs and make all owners insure their animals to tackle what is a tiny problem of dangerous breeds, a statist overreaction which only a Labour government which has been in power too long could possibly think was appropriate, the unworkable fantasy that there could be some sort of "alarm" when a known paedophile goes online, and the cynical ending of the early release scheme just before the election, the choice between one group of authoritarians and another, one of which will sadly gain power, is just one of the low points in what is shaping up to be a truly dismal couple of months.

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Share |

Monday, March 08, 2010 

Ricin you say? Oh, he's white, we're not interested.

Remember the "ricin plot" where there was no ricin, where the recipe which Kamel Bourgass had could not have produced ricin and where his plan, to smear it on doorknobs and car door handles wouldn't have killed anyone as the poison needs to be either injected, ingested or inhaled to work? It was the first real "terror plot" post-9/11 in this country, came two months before the invasion of Iraq (in the context of which it was used by Colin Powell during his now notorious presentation to the UN), and the press coverage was massive in both response and in its hyperbole, the government doing its best to help it along by not bothering to inform anyone until Bourgass' trial was over that there had been no ricin after all.

You would then expect a case where ricin actually was found to provoke a similar media response. After all, while ricin is not the most deadly of potential "biological/chemical" warfare poisons, it is still usually deadly when used "properly", as in the assassination of Georgi Markov, a cold war precursor to the murder of Alexander Litvinenko.

It's strange then that almost no coverage whatsoever has been given to the case of Ian Davison, although perhaps that name itself somewhat gives the game away. Unlike Bourgass, Davison actually produced ricin, which was found in a jam jar in a cupboard in his kitchen. He today pleaded guilty to producing a chemical weapon, possessing the usual array of explosives manuals, including the Anarchist's Handbook and the Mudgahein's (sic) Explosives Handbook and preparing for acts of terrorism. It seems, if indeed you needed telling, that Davison is the latest in a string of extreme right-wingers to be brought before the courts on explosive or terrorist charges, although little seems to be known in this instance about what groups, if any Davison was associated with, with the police only hinting when he was arrested that it could be related to "a worldwide terror plot targeting ethnic minorities", something which we should probably take with a pinch of salt. Davison's son is also to face charges of "possessing material containing information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing acts of terrorism", after which he'll be sentenced.

Our old friend Kamel Bourgass was sentenced to a quite incredible 17 years for his impossible and implausible plot to kill using the ricin which he didn't have, on top of the life imprisonment he received for murdering PC Stephen Oake. One wonders what sentence will be passed on Davison, considering he actually had ricin in his possession, even if he didn't have the flawed plan which Bourgass has. The Met's then head of anti-terrorism Peter Clarke claimed after Bourgass' conviction, with a straight face, that a "real and deadly threat" had been averted. If it had then, one wonders in what terms a police chief with a similar agenda and a sense for exaggeration would describe Davison's conviction.

Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

Share |

Saturday, March 06, 2010 

Venables, anonymity and tabloid retribution part 3.

We know now then that contrary to earlier claims by the Daily Mirror, Venables has most likely been returned to prison after allegations were made that he has committed some sort of sexual offence. It doesn't yet seem that he has been charged with any offence, although the Sun suggests that he shortly will be.

This changes absolutely nothing, and in fact if anything further undermines the calls from various newspapers, individuals and politicians for them to be told what Venables has done to be recalled on licence. In no other circumstances are those that have only been alleged to have committed an offence named; only after they have been charged are the details made public. Even then the reasons for why Venables wouldn't necessarily be named are obvious: the fact that his past notoriety might influence a jury and make any trial potentially unfair would be uppermost in the minds of the Crown Prosecution Service. While the past record of the offender can now be cited in certain cases on the judge's approval, it would be certainly doubtful whether this would happen in the eventuality of Venables going before a jury on any charge. It appears that many seem to have decided that when it comes to notorious past offenders, guilt is presumed rather than innocence, regardless of how far away any actual charges are.

Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

Share |

Friday, March 05, 2010 

Blair before Brown.

To call Gordon Brown's appearance before the Chilcot inquiry deeply underwhelming would be putting it too kindly. Boring, mundane, and mind-numbing would all be more suitable. While Blair's sessions were compelling if not always electrifying, they were indicative of his overall character: defiant, certain, convinced of his own righteousness. Brown merely had all his bases covered, and was incredibly well prepared, as you'd expect.

The one thing we've never learned, and which Andrew Rawnsley's book hasn't touched on, is just how much Brown really did believe in the Iraq war. He naturally defended it today, even if he did so on the equally spurious grounds that Iraq wasn't living up to its international commitments, rather than on its non-existent WMD and the intelligence as presented then, although why he continued on insisting that there was no possibility of a second resolution because of Chirac's intransigence, the classic Downing Street smear from the time, was a moment of dishonesty. As we know from Clare Short's evidence, this was happening at a time when Brown was being shut out from the Blair circle, which goes some way to explaining why he hadn't seen many of the documents from the time which the committee asked him about. Equally though there is more than a reminder of Brown's similarity with Macavity, the mystery cat, who isn't there when there's dirty work to be done. It always helped Brown to not be associated personally with the war, even if he was the one writing the cheques. His evidence didn't shed any light on this, but that was to be expected.

While Brown shares responsibility with Blair, as indeed the whole cabinet at the time does, and if you want to stretch it even further, all those in parliament who voted for the war, it's Blair that is always going to remain the one person associated with the decision, for either good or bad, and whatever conclusion the Chilcot inquiry eventually comes to, that also is unlikely to change.

Labels: , , , , ,

Share |

 

Venables, anonymity and tabloid retribution part 2.

This blog doesn't often focus on the journalistic deficiencies of the Daily Mirror, which is somewhat unfair on the other tabloid purveyors of much the same material, especially considering the way in which the paper often reports on David Cameron with just as much subtlety and fair play as the Sun does on Gordon Brown. Its latest report on the alleged activities of Jon Venables is though, as the Heresiarch points out, just as bad as the very worst Sun equivalent:

Skulking into Liverpool under his new identity, James Bulgers killer Jon Venables cynically flouted his strict parole rules to go on wild benders with mates.

In a cruel snub to the memory of the innocent toddler he and Robert Thompson battered to death, the 27-year-old hit the nightclubs to get smashed on cider and cocktails while snorting cocaine and popping ecstasy pills.

Sources revealed Venables has also slipped into Goodison Park to watch Everton play football in the nine years since he was freed from jail, despite being banned from Merseyside.

The barbaric thug even clumsily chatted up women in clubs not too far away from where he and Thompson killed two-year-old James in 1993. During his sessions he would down Cheeky Vimtos, a lethal cocktail made up of two shots of port and a bottle of blue WKD.


Yes, how dare Venables act in the same way as the vast majority of his peers do? Clearly this sets him out as fundamentally unreformed, causing only further anguish and heartache to the relatives of the boy he killed. It doesn't matter that going by their description of his apparent brazenness that he didn't "skulk" anywhere, nor that the paper has provided no evidence whatsoever that any of this actually happened, apart from the word of their "well-placed sources", being conveniently prevented from doing so by the injunction that also blocks the revealing of his new identity. It is though instructive that the passing of 17 years hasn't diminished even slightly the casual demonisation of someone who committed a crime, albeit a truly terrible one, as a child, and one which he will be paying for the rest of his life as this latest episode more than illustrates.

It was always going to be next to impossible for Venables' new identity to stay hidden once he'd been recalled to prison, and the Sun reports that it has been compromised, while the Mail adds that officials are already resigned to having to give him a new one. How long it will be before the former identity begins to circle on the net, as it almost certainly will, is anyone's guess.

The Sun, like the Mirror, is making the most of his recall. According to them, he's been "gorging [on] burgers and chips in his cell", as only the truly evil and most loathed individuals in the prison estate do. To add to it, it provides the fantastically enlightened views of Anthony Daniels, a former prison doctor, who at least has some credentials with which to comment, and Tom Crone, the Sun and News of the World's execrable chief lawyer, who has absolutely none. According to Daniels a Martian might imagine that we reward a child for killing a toddler, and that "he lived a life of luxury". Venables may well have had it easier than someone put in a young offenders' institution, but I'm not exactly sure that you can call 8 years of imprisonment, regardless of where it was and under what conditions, as a life of luxury or as anything even approaching a normal upbringing.

It's Crone however who really extracts the Michael. Crone you might remember was one of the News International higher-ups who appeared before the culture, media and sport committee's investigation into phone-hacking at the News of the World, where like his colleagues, he failed to recall absolutely anything about absolutely anyone. He had never heard of Glenn Mulcaire, never heard of phones being hacked, and had never heard of payments for illegal activity. It's difficult not to imagine that the committee was referring to some of his deeply unconvincing evidence when they concluded that the NotW was suffering from "collective amnesia" and that they had indulged in "deliberate obfuscation". For this same man to then declare that "Jon Venables owes us big time" and that his "crime redefined the extremes of evil" is the utter height of cant. He claims that Venables has "breached the bond of trust" by not living a crime-free life, even when it seems that Venables has not been charged with any crime, and that all the allegations made about his life are just that, allegations. He concludes by claiming that he's "forfeited any right to protection". Crone felt the same way about Max Mosley when he endorsed the publication of the NotW report which led to his action on privacy, just as he endorsed the NotW going to trial rather than settling, which led to the paper's utter humiliation. Mosley was described by the NotW as a "vain deviant with no sense of truth or honour." As someone else recently said in response to a hypocrite, those in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.


As for the Sun's editorial, it seems to deliberately misunderstand the nature of what a life sentence entails, with the life licence which hangs over someone after they've been given parole:

And we cannot secretly throw people in prison as if we were some medieval tyranny. If someone is jailed, there must be transparency.

Well, err, yes we can, and since when has that bothered the Sun in the past? As the ministers have pointed out, there will be transparency once the proceedings have reached a conclusion and when Venables' identity is presumably no longer in jeopardy. The tabloid media almost as a whole are pretending that the former doesn't matter when it involves someone as notorious as Venables and only regarding the fact that he has anonymity as a historical outrage, hence why they're pretending that it has nothing to do with why the information hasn't already been given. Venables might well be all the things that the tabloids are alleging and more besides, but to pretend that this to do with transparency in the criminal justice system, let alone to do with Labour's record on law and order is absurd. The Sun will undoubtedly use it to give Labour an extra kicking, but this remains all about a press that hasn't forgiven the government for not allowing it to hound the two young men from the moment they were released.

Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

Share |

Thursday, March 04, 2010 

Venables, anonymity and tabloid retribution.

There's a glaringly obvious reason why that as yet no further details have been released concerning the recall of Jon Venables to prison. Given life-long anonymity and a new identity, both to ensure his safety from potential vigilantes and to also give him the opportunity to try to start afresh, something which admittedly James Bulger never received, this puts all of that into absolute jeopardy. Venables has probably only entrusted those very closest to him with the details of the crime he committed, something which would exclude most work-mates and even friends. They will however either know that someone in their acquaintance with a different name has been arrested, or has suddenly disappeared, put two and two together and in most cases make five, but also might equally discover the truth. There's also, as ministers have been more quick to point out, the potential for prejudicing any future criminal proceedings involving his recall, but which is also something of a cop-out, considering how others accused of crimes have no similar protection.

That's the short answer as to why ministers have been determined not to release why he's been recalled, that to do so at this precise moment would both ensure that his identity does become known to those people, and also make life extremely dangerous for him during what might well be a short stay in prison. The hope presumably is that the parole board will decide at the end of the month, as he doesn't actually seem to be facing criminal charges, that this was just a blip or that it's still safe for him to be released, both for himself and the wider public and that then the details of why can be made clear. This still may well reveal his identity, and he could have to be moved and given another one as a result, but going through this torturous and politically damaging process is in the best interests of Venables himself.

It certainly isn't however in the interests of the media, especially the tabloids, who are in one of their irregular tedious rages at not being allowed to know why he's been recalled at least for now. They know equally as well as everyone else that this is for the reasons as detailed above, if indeed they don't know anyway why he's been recalled, considering how some of them seem to know so much about Venables' life since he's been released. The Mirror, which apparently had the scoop before the Ministry of Justice released it to the PA, claims that he's a raging cokehead, for example, and that he's been recalled after what seems a relatively minor bust-up at work, but which a complaint was made about. The real reason for their fury though is apparent: the tabloids opposed at every turn the forced anonymity of both Venables and Robert Thompson, and this gives them the perfect opportunity both to rake over that and also to potentially, perhaps "accidentally", reveal the new identity of at least Venables. They also loathed how both were released "early", having had their minimum terms reduced by the Lord Chief Justice, not to mention how the European Court of Human Rights had ruled that they were denied a fair hearing during their trial. The whole way in which the boys were treated during their incarceration, not serving any of their time in actual young offenders' institutions, has also always rankled. That boys who were denounced and demonised as beyond redemption and evil had been treated with, well, kids' gloves, only heightened the outrage.

The Sun, as per usual, is the one making the most noise, already launching an e-petition demanding to know now why Venables has been recalled, under the headline "Justice for James", more than just an allusion to the repeated allegation that Venables and Thompson weren't dealt with harshly enough. The paper's leader column has also already made up its mind, saying that

WHATEVER Jon Venables did to be sent back to prison, it had to be bad.

before going on to link the incredibly tenuously connected issues of Peter Sutcliffe asking for his jail term to be set out, the privacy battles in the courts and how inquests can now be held in secret. It doesn't once set out, let alone admit that Venables' anonymity is the key issue.

Whether or not the initial decision by Justice Morland to allow the boys' identities to be known was correct, as usual the very reason why they had to be given anonymity to ensure their safety from potential vigilantes was helped along by the role of the tabloid media in whipping up even further hatred against them. Richard Littlejohn, typically, wrote:

"This is no time for calm. It is a time for rage, for blood-boiling anger, for furious venting of spleen."

It was completely forgotten that, despite the truly shocking aspects of their crime, this was a case of children killing a child. Indeed, if anything, the fact that they were children only added to the lurid coverage, and politicians, especially the then in opposition New Labour used it for their own ends. Since Bulger the debate on crime and punishment has not questioned whether prison works, as Michael Howard notoriously stated, but on how many additional places should be built


Which leads us to just why the tabloids are so cock-a-hoop at Venables' recall. It brings into doubt that their rehabilitation was so successful, although if the Mirror's report is right it doesn't involve anything nearly as serious as some had clearly hoped. That two boys who committed such a terrible crime at such a young age, who were dismissed in such brutal terms, seem to have been able to rebuild their lives, albeit with major help from the state, and apart from alleged minor drug offences not re-offended is to undermine everything which was originally written about them, and if there's one thing that the tabloids hate more than anything, it's to be contradicted and proved categorically wrong. The events of this week mean there has to be a reassessment of that presumption, and it's one which they'll take as much as they possibly can from. For all their calls for "Justice for James", it is and always will be about them.

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Share |

Wednesday, March 03, 2010 

Michael Foot, 1913-2010.

It's become a cliché to say when someone truly great or stratospheric passes away that we'll never see their like again, yet I challenge anyone to say that it isn't true of Michael Foot, who has died aged 96. Not only was he the last socialist to lead the Labour party, something which will certainly never happen again, but he was also the last great, genuinely principled leader of any mass political party. In an age where presentation and pretence trump integrity and honesty every time, we've lost one of the few remaining reminders of why politics truly matters, something which challenges even the most committed and well-meaning of us at times.

Foot will partially be so fondly remembered because he lost, and as a nation there's little we love more than a romantic loser. Who knows what kind of prime minister he would have made had history been different, but he could hardly have been worse than the alternative. It was as a parliamentarian though that he truly excelled, and he's bequeathed us one of the greatest insults in the House of Commons during the 20th century, accusing Norman Tebbit of imitating a semi-trained polecat every time he rose to speak. Nigel Farage take note. He was never more right than when he made the unquestionable point that "most liberties have been won by people who broke the law", something completely anathema to today's generation of Labour politicians to whom the state in all its guises is never wrong.

As a 17-18-year-old it was Foot's even more left-wing nephew Paul who I wanted to emulate: the investigative journalist who through his campaigns freed more innocent people than almost any other in this country. When he died back in 2004 it was the tribute and image painted of the two men in Private Eye which has always stayed with me: the comedic vision of the two Feet, walking down a London street, arguing and debating as they went, both gesticulating to make a point with their sticks, other pedestrians fleeing from their path. That both have now left us is deeply sad, but the memory of these two great contributors to British cultural and political life will live on for a very long time yet. As the Guardian's obituary finishes:

Michael gave love and earned love as few politicians do in any age. He was wonderful company, a marvellous comrade, a magnificent man, a great socialist and libertarian. The only tribute that he would want, the only memorial that would do him justice, is enduring application of his values in the cause of progress.

Let us give him that.

Labels: , ,

Share |

Tuesday, March 02, 2010 

Putting quality last.

There really is no institution quite like the British Broadcasting Corporation. Here is, as polls attest, one of the most trusted and liked large organisations in the country, which you would imagine should exude confidence as a result; instead, it presents itself as troubled and insecure, prone to self-flagellation at the slightest criticism, and unable to defend itself anywhere near adequately when attacked. It should be able to approach its strategy review, which has been effectively forced upon it both by the Conservatives, who have made no secret of their plans should they be elected to cut the corporation, and by the "opposition" as it were, led by the egregious James Murdoch, from a position of strength; instead it seems almost panicked, clutching at what it thinks it can throw to the pack of dogs pursuing it without causing a backlash amongst its supporters.

When I suggested that the recent report by Policy Exchange was a step by step guide on how to emasculate the BBC without mentioning the dreaded M name, I wasn't expecting that the BBC themselves would take a look at it and decide that much of it was worth stealing. In reality, the two reviews have likely ran side by side, but it's still difficult not to think there might have been some last minute changes after the PE report came out, such is the similarity in some of what they propose. While PE didn't recommend the most eye-catching cuts which the BBC's strategy review has outlined, the closure of the 6 Music and Asian Network radio stations, much of the rest is almost a carbon copy. The strategy review intends to cap spending on sport rights, slash it on foreign imports, close Switch and Blast! and cut back extremely heavily on web content, all recommended by Mark Oliver.

All of this is quite clearly, as alluded to above, a pre-emptive attempt at out manoeuvring the BBC's enemies before they have a chance of actually suggesting, let alone implementing their own ideas on how the corporation should be cut. Yet while it's a half-hearted effort, it's also one which suggests the BBC simply doesn't understand why the likes of 6 Music and Asian Network have found their own niche and why their closure is likely to be so vigorously opposed: it's because they offer something so radically different and which no commercial rival has the resources or nous to deliver. On the face of it 6 Music is ostensibly an indie music station, but it goes far beyond that through the relationship it cultivates with its listeners, and through the genuine love of music which the vast majority of the presenters on it have and want to share. Asian Network, even if its audience has been declining, offers a voice to those who otherwise find it difficult to make themselves heard, even if it can be seen as self-defeating through the ghettoising of the content. Plainly, the BBC thinks it can do away with both mainly because middle Britain is interested in neither, and only cares about Radio 2 and Radio 4, a sacrifice which it can justify to itself easily. Some cynics are suggesting that it's chosen 6 Music and Asian Network specifically because it knows that they have such a dedicated following that the uproar at their disappearance will ensure the BBC Trust intervenes, and while it's difficult to dismiss entirely, the other parts of the report are just as apparently ignorant of why it remains popular.

Why else would the BBC so bizarrely ignore BBC3 when it was considering what could be cut? Here's a station that costs a staggering £115m a year and which has in its years of broadcast created at best 5 programmes which have been either critical or commercial successes, the latest of which is Being Human. The BBC openly admits that Channel 4 has been better than them at reaching the 16-25 market, hence the closure of Switch and Blast, so why not chuck the execrable BBC3 on the bonfire as well? It does nothing which BBC2 or BBC4 couldn't commission instead, and would be a statement of intent which would reverberate far beyond the shutting of 6 Music and the Asian Network. Extend it further and you could also justify the privatising of Radio 1 or/and the closure of 1Xtra. 1Xtra looks an especially expensive and slow to react indulgence when compared to say, the vibrancy with which the pirate stations in London, Rinse FM especially, have all while under the threat of raids and imminent closure. This would still leave the BBC able to target the 16-35 demographic which the PE report wanted the BBC to leave to others, but with a respectable budget and without patronising them on their "own" stations, as it has done for years with the utterly crass comedies BBC3 has mostly offered.

Along with the emasculation of BBC4, with the removal of "entertainment" and comedy, which presumably means Charlie Brooker is out of a job unless a home is found for him on BBC2, the whole report is the BBC retreating to what it thinks it's good at it and what it thinks others think it's good at. It seems to be a report which falls directly into how the BBC is stereotyped abroad: all those worthy costume dramas and as bias free journalism as it's possible to produce without realising that as admired the corporation is for those things, it's also liked because the licence fee means it can do things that others would never imagine doing or could never justify. As much as we love the HD nature documentaries, we'd like some bite and the unusual along with it. This report is likely to be the first step in a retrenchment strategy which leads to the Kelvin MacKenzie and Murdoch-approved final solution of a BBC consisting of BBC1, BBC2 and Radio 4, all thoroughly non-threatening and all as dull as dishwater. Why else, after all, unless you were seeking Murdoch approval, would you leak a draft of the report to the Times, which then savaged it as not going anywhere near far enough? When the BBC stops caring what rivals think about it and becomes comfortable and confident enough to defend itself on its own terms, then the programmes might also reflect that strength and purpose. Until then it seems that death by a thousands cuts is the way of the future.

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Share |

Monday, March 01, 2010 

Patriotic duty and Michael Ashcroft.

Yesterday David Cameron said that it was the party's "patriotic duty" to to win the general election. Strange then that this patriotic duty doesn't actually extend to the party's deputy chairman paying his full dues in this country, despite the Tories' then leader William Hague promising back in 2000 that he would become a "permanent resident" in order to ascend to the Lords. Here's Billy with another pearl:

This decision will cost him (and benefit the Treasury) tens of millions a year in tax, yet he considers it worthwhile.

How much has Lord Ashcroft in reality paid to the Treasury thanks to his non-domiciled status since 2000? One suspects next to nothing.

There is some truly exceptional spin going on here: it turns out that when Ashcroft said he would become a "permanent resident", he actually meant that he was only going to become a "long-term resident". This seems to be somewhat different to the assurances which were given to the Lords' scrutiny committee, which asked Downing Street to ensure that Ashcroft became a resident before he could become a peer, and indeed the statement that Downing Street issued after his ennoblement was confirmed, which said they had been given a "clear and unequivocal assurance" that he would take up "permanent residence". Either Ashcroft at the time had a completely different definition of what "permanent residence" meant, or he had no intention whatsoever of keeping his promises.

Ignore the obsfucatory nonsense being raised by the Tories about donations to Labour or the Liberal Democrat donations from non-domiciles. None of them gave such cast-iron assurances that they would become permanent residents in order to enter the Lords. Neither have they ascended to such positions of personal influence over the parties they've donated to, as Ashcroft has. Ashcroft for a time was essentially keeping the Tories afloat with his donations and loans, the latter of which were almost as large as the total amount he's donated over the years, at one point as high as £3.6m. When he isn't funnelling money to the party, then he's personally transporting the party's nobility around in his private jet, via his Flying Lion company, registered, typically, in Bermuda. Compare and contrast the treatment of Ashcroft with that of Zac Goldsmith, who also admitted recently that he was a non-dom: Goldsmith was quickly slapped down and told to become a UK taxpayer as "rapidly as can be done", while Ashcroft, despite promising almost 10 years ago that he was going to become a permanent resident is only now getting around to it, all while the Tories have been repeatedly saying in response to any questions that Ashcroft's tax status was a private matter between him and HMRC. Did Cameron know that Ashcroft was a non-dom, or did he purposefully ensure that he didn't know until very recently? Sir George Young said a month back on Newsnight that Ashcroft had the same status as some Labour peers, with Tory sources later saying that Young had "misspoke". Misspoke in the sense that he had inadvertently told the truth when he wasn't meant to.

If it hadn't been for the freedom of information request that forced Ashcroft into making today's statement, would Cameron have actually followed through on his sudden conversion to parliamentarians of both varieties being fully domiciled for tax purposes by ensuring that his deputy chairman was resident here? It doesn't seem so, to judge by his strange refusal to accept, even now, that Ashcroft's tax status is a matter for anyone other than himself. All the parties may be guilty in accepting funds from donors who are not full taxpayers, but none have elevated those individuals to such a position of power and authority in the party. It's this kind of cynicism, of double standards, of turning a blind eye, that so angers the public and turns them off politics. And who can blame them when someone like Ashcroft decides "permanent residency" means something entirely different to what everyone else does and essentially lives a lie for almost a whole decade?

Labels: , , , , , , ,

Share |

About

  • This is septicisle
profile

Links

Powered by Blogger
and Blogger Templates