A left-wing case against the BBC

The BBC’s decision not to show the Gaza appeal illustrates what I’ve been saying for 18 months: that the BBC has lost its marbles. Or to put it another way it has lost its journalistic courage and is now found constantly cowering in face of right-wing whining of bias, as I say in The Times today.

This poses a problem for lefties because we want an independent media that isn’t always being swayed by commercial pressures. But if the BBC is constantly appeasing the right-wing whiners that see a conspiracy in everything, then there’s no point supporting its existence as a powerful broadcaster. The license fee is not only a regressive tax that hurts the poor most, it drowns out independent liberal-left media because most of us at least want some form of an independent media organisation.
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Top Stories and Blog Review – 27th Jan

80,000 Jobs in One Day

Nationwide
Revealed: 139 peers act as paid consultants
Tories regain lost ground as faith in Brown wanes
Tougher regulation call for peers
Public gives £600,000 to Gaza appeal

International
Gaza war gives bigger lift to Israel’s right than left
US envoy starts Middle East push
America goes green
Japanese workers get time off to procreate

DAILY BLOG REVIEW / by Lee Griffin

Matt Wardman is playing like a mad scientist in the world of web statistics, and finds that the first place for news about Tory MPs is Lib Dem Voice.

Obsolete on why appointing Sarah Payne as “victim’s champion” is a despicable move for safety and justice.

Jock Coats isn’t so sure we should join the Euro in our time of need.

Ros Scott gives her view from the inside on the “Cash for Amendments” scandal.

Political Betting can’t imagine the Prime Minister is enjoying his breakfast.

CiF/Hugh FW continues his campaign against intensively bred chicken.

Shiraz Socialist succinctly details why the new extreme porn law is a load of whipped balls.

Whipped Senseless reports on the latest press release from the Obama camp about negotiations with Iran.

Who’s Lobbying Whom?

Event notice: Why the UK needs a register of lobbying activity

This weekend, allegations were made in the Sunday Times that four peers said they would consider accepting money for amending laws for clients. More than ever, it seems lobbying in the UK needs to be exposed to greater public scrutiny.
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Nick Cohen plays the blame game

So when I read this, my first thought was: is there anything Nick Cohen hasn’t blamed the left for recently? Let’s face it, if the guy’s taking up more column inches than usual, it’s normally because he’s found an inventive way of trashing his former comrades.

Anyway, aside from decrying the lifestyles of the super-rich and the increased polarisation of wealth in Blair/Brown’s Britain, Cohen’s substantive  argument is that New Labour could’ve moved Britain away from the Thatcherite consensus, been less lavish in its spending and cultivated an economy less reliant on financial services. Cohen posits that New Labour’s legacy will be a self-harming slavishness to lawless, reckless financiers to the expense of us all.
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Top Stories and Blog Review – 26th Jan

11,000 COMPLAINTS

Nationwide
Ken Clarke clashes with Cameron over crisis
Darling plans new rescue package for economy
Cannabis law change ‘illogical’
Extreme porn becomes illegal from today

International
Israeli PM in war crimes pledge
Boycotting Israel is doomed to fail
In Pakistan, radio amplifies terror of Taliban
Obama to reverse Bush’s climate change policies

DAILY BLOG REVIEW / by Jennie Rigg

Lynne Featherstone wants geeks and techies to help her out. Go on, you know you’ll get a sense of smug satisfaction from it

Speaking of geekery, Chris Ball has helped to make remote desktop co-operative (entry complete with geek-squee-inducing video)

President Ros Scott, the Blogging Baroness has an insider’s view of the Cash for Amendments allegations. Web of Evil also has some thoughts on this.

Catherine Townsend talks about what women want in the bedroom.

Mark Pack wonders if Progressive London is a front to get Ken Livingstone re-elected.

UK Polling Report discusses another double digit Tory poll lead.

Stephen Glenn welcomes in the Chinese New Year.

Mark Easton examines the recent NEF survey and finds it worrying.

EU in ‘not about to lock us all up forever’ shock

One of the most popular sports played by politicans across Europe is ‘blaming unpopular things on the EU’. The specific unpopular thing varies across countries: here, it tends to be Rules And Regulations; in France, it tends to be the ability to buy things without enormous tarrifs; while pretty much everywhere it’s immigration.

However, it’s only in the UK where we have a large, or at least vociferous, group of utter maniacs and obsessives who’re willing to blame absolutely everything that happens on the EU, and to view the organisation as a tool of the Devil, or possibly Hitler, to bring about a communist Hell, or possibly a Fourth Reich.

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How Gordon Brown should deal with the financial crisis

The Independent’s ComRes poll today, showing a big 15% lead for Conservatives over Labour, given it was only 1% two months ago, will cause more than a few in government to cry over their cereal.

What’s leading the “Brown backlash”? It’s not that most people blame Labour for this mess, as Anthony King said in December, because a recent Times poll flatly contradicted that. Moreover, Britons aren’t wary of state intervention, so its unlikely to be a backlash to recent nationalisations.

I said two months ago that Brown had not yet sealed the deal and I think its time to reiterate that again. The problem is that they still haven’t managed to convince the electorate they know what they’re doing and whether there is a long-term strategy behind it all.
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Not informing the drugs debate

Today Programme. 7.10am slot. The Deputy Chair of the Magistrates Association, a John Fasselfelt, is on.

The Association has fully welcomed – indeed, vocally campaigned for – the government’s decision to upgrade cannabis to a plan B drug, which comes into effect today. But their complaint is about the sentencing guidelines which come with this. They aren’t as serious for possession as for other class B drugs. Less cases will get into a court setting, he complains. That’s unfair. What if you were caught with cannabis and I had some other class B drug, he asks James Naughtie.

Who reasonably asks what, for information, are those other Class B drugs with which he is sure cannabis must be treated identically.

“You’ve got me there”. He hasn’t got the foggiest. Not a clue.

“I’m not a big user of Class B drugs”, he says. (No, just an expert advocate on what drugs should and should not be in that class). Well done.

Here they are.

The lesson: perhaps the government might listen a little more to its scientific advisors (whose advice was ignored in this case), and a little less to the chuntering magistrates.

Cross-posted from Next Left

McTaggart: Prostitution bill ‘rag-tag’

The Policing and Crime Bill 2008 is, as Fiona McTaggart MP admitted to me on Wednesday, ‘a rag-tag bill.’ Everyone has come to the table determined to force their own agenda through, and spurious amendments have been twatted onto every clause of the final document. There are some extremely dodgy new rules on kerbcrawling and police brothel closure in there. Somehow, though, the main bit of the new prostitution legislation has been pushed and pulled and wrangled into a shape that makes no one entirely happy but that somehow – maybe – just might bring us closer to social justice than any of the hard-liners would advocate.

The new law will make it a criminal offence – punishable by a fine of up to £1,000 and a criminal record – to pay to have sex with someone who is “controlled for another person’s gain”. This would target the market for abuse within prostitution – making it an offence to buy sex with a trafficked person or with a person who is forced into prostutition by pimps, drug-dealers or violent gang leaders.
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The first Carnival on Modern Liberty

Welcome to the first edition of the Carnival on Modern Liberty. This has been an interesting week to begin this carnival. We’ve had the rise and fall of the government’s latest attempt to exempt MPs’ expenses from the Freedom of Information Act, the inauguration of President Barack Obama and the launch of the Guardian’s new Liberty Central. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves…

Winning the Right to Know

Is freedom of information a civil liberties issue? We could debate that for hours, but as (my, ahem, boss) Peter Facey says in Yes, Democracy Works (Comment is Free):

…a significant swath of the establishment fears and distrusts the public, treating us as compliant subjects rather than citizens. We are regarded as a problem to be controlled and managed and our fundamental rights and freedoms are paid lip service but considered ultimately to be an inconvenience. The impulse which has lead us to a national identity database, identity cards, the DNA database, photographers being detained for taking pictures in the street, parents being spied on to check if they live in the appropriate school catchment area, the drive to marginalise trial by duty and hold inquests in secret and suspending/habeas corpus, is the same impulse that assumes the public is neither entitled nor interested in knowing how MPs spend their expenses.

The plan to exempt MPs’ expenses from the Freedom on Information Act caused an uproar. The Campaign for Freedom of Information, Unlock Democracy and mySociety moved swiftly.
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