Top Stories and Blog Review – 9th February
Nationwide
Lib Dems to unveil spending plans
Treasury’s bank bonus team to get own payout
UK homes to be offered a green makeover
A call for end to fighting over Darwin’s legacy
International
A hard-liner gains ground in Israel
Sri Lanka says 10,000 civilians flee fighting
Already back on trail, Obama sells a stimulus plan
Attack on Indian women intensifies a clash of cultures
DAILY BLOG REVIEW / by Jennie Rigg
David Semple has a brilliant post on discrimination.
Lizbee has an Aussie perspective on the bush fires.
Smash Boredom wants you to join in the Climate Camp on the 1st of April.
The Honourable Lady Mark has an interesting idea for direct action, too.
Lib Dem Voice congratulates Dr Evan Harris, MP for winning secularist of the year.
Hagley Road to Ladywood wonders why the press are giving the bankers such an easy ride?
Costigan Quist has made it into the top 100 Politics Blogs on Wikio (I link to this merely because he has chosen the Best.Tag.Evar. for the post).
And the Scottish Roundup for this week is up if you hanker after more linkage (or even if you don’t 
)
Nick Cohen on ‘Liberal Fascism’
Depending on what sort of mood you’re in, Nick Cohen’s rather obsequious endorsement of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism will either inspire outrage, derision or mere pity. As it’s a Sunday night, and his review isn’t really worth more than a warm bucket of spit, I’ll limit my comments and link to this excellent demolition of Goldberg’s hatchet job book by David Neiwert – a journalist who’s spent decades investigating fascist, neo-Nazi and far-right groups in American politics. Both Goldberg and Cohen could learn a thing or two from his forensic approach.
(Also here and here)
More jobs and better jobs
The Observer today reported that Labour’s ‘key employment plan’ is close to collapse, as private welfare service contractors clamour for more government handouts, and the private companies which chose not to bid for these contracts last year threaten to sue if the government doesn’t give them the chance to grab their share. All of which means that the ‘Flexible New Deal’ programme may not be able to start in October, as is currently planned.
One fundamental problem now I think universally acknowledged is that there aren’t enough jobs for all the people who are looking for work. So as Will Hutton and the Bevan Foundation amongst others suggest, the priority now should be less about refining a system which is ‘not fit for purpose’ and more about directly creating new jobs – hundreds of thousands of them. Instead of bringing greater competition amongst providers into the provision of welfare services, using the market to correct the flaws of the state, over the next six months the government needs to create the jobs doing useful and important work which aren’t being created in the private sector.
Which begs the question – if we’re going to create lots of new jobs, what would be the most useful kinds of work for people to do? continue reading… »
Polls: Good news for Labour on economic crisis
Forget the headline polling figures, what’s more interesting are the other results from Channel 4′s YouGov poll on the economic crisis.
A few points out of the way first. I think we’re going through a potentially huge economic crisis that is crippling our banks, the high street and hence jobs. The Tories have no policy to deal with this and Osborne is widely seen as a lightweight (see numbers at end). So I want the government to get off its butt and formulate a coherent and wide-ranging strategy. So far it’s done almost nothing useful apart from the bailout of overpaid WBankers, who should be fired enmasse, and announce some haphazard initiatives.
On the centre left, especially on blogs (apart from Chris Dillow), I see no serious attempt at reviewing the situation, watch opinion polls, and develop a broader narrative for the future. I keep highlighting polls because they illustrate that most right-wing assumptions about public opinion in the UK being peddled about are rubbish.
The public still wants to give Labour a chance to lift our economy and forge a new economic consensus that forces political winds to the left. But he’s not doing it. I’d at least like to ensure the Tory majority at the next election isn’t huge.
So, on to the poll numbers, which are quite surprising:
continue reading… »
Top Stories and Blog Review – 8th February
Nationwide
Hidden records show MMR/Autism truth
Spy centre will track you on holiday
Cover-up in Iraq: Shooting the messenger
Support for Brown’s Labour falls to 28%
International
United on climate change: Obama’s Chinese revolution
Israeli elections: Be afraid. Be very afraid
Biden signals U.S. deal with Russia on missiles
Sri Lankan rebel leader missing, thousands flee war
DAILY BLOG REVIEW / by Jennie Rigg
Peter Black, AM, points out the flaws in the government’s PFI Welfare to Work schemes.
Amused Cynicism, meanwhile, highlights more problems at the DWP: their benefit-cheat-catching scheme doesn’t work.
Jane Merrick has some bears-are-catholic, pope-shits-in-the-woods news: the MOD are lying to people.
Political Betting wonders if Jacqui Smith is toast.
Ben Goldacre helps us all to spot the flaws in polling data.
Rhetorically Speaking has a great example of nowtrage in (surprise surprise) the Fail on Sunday.
Hagley Road to Ladywood accuses Silvio Berlusconi of necrophilia.
And, as ever, head on over to Septicisle for more. My pick of his picks is definitely the one from 5 Chinese Crackers about the Drunken Sailor nowtrage.
Support Pamela and her two daughters against deportation
Pamela Izevbekhai and her two daughters are under threat of deportation by the Irish government. They fled Nigeria after another daughter died following female genital mutilation and Pamela’s husband’s family planned to forcibly mutilate her remaining two girls. The husband remains in Nigeria but supports his wife and does not want his daughters cut.
Check out ‘Let them stay‘ for how you can support this family .
Below is a you tube telling the families story. Pamela explains the process of FGM and how she tried to get help for her daughter who bled to death after being butchered, all in the name of controlling women’s sexuality.
continue reading… »
Ben Goldacre legally threatened by LBC
Writer of the popular Guardian ‘Bad Science’ column, Ben Goldacre, has been threatened with legal action by LBC radio. As Ben explains, the controversy arose when he took part in a debate on LBC radio around the MMR vaccine scare – a hoax that the media keep running with. He says the whole discussion was so bad, and the presenter Jeni Barnett’s behaviour on air so atrocious, that he posted the radio segment on his blog.
That invited legal threats by LBC radio, which in itself is outrageous. How is a radio segment (now on WikiLeaks) broadcast on air property of LBC? Furthermore, doesn’t it fall under the ‘fair usage’ criteria (or is that only applicable in the US?).
Ben says: “If you felt that this was an irresponsible piece of broadcasting, and an inappropriate use of the public bandwidth – which is licensed to companies such as Global Audio as a privilege by the nation – you may wish to complain about Jeni Barnett’s MMR show of 7th January 2009 to OFCOM.”
A complaint against Jeni Barnett is definitely in order, but what about LBC’s appalling behaviour in not allowing their output to be reproduced elsewhere?
Update: A Sunday Times investigation has now found Wakefield altered the MMR data. What will Melanie Phillips say now?
Has the VAT cut worked?
Does Nicolas Sarkozy have a clue? He says the VAT cut had “absolutely not worked”:
Britain is cutting taxes. That will bring them nothing. Consumption continues to decrease.
However, official figures (pdf) flatly contradict this. They show that the volume of sales actually rose by 1.6 per cent in December, to stand 3.9 per cent higher than last December. Of course, there are all sorts of ways to quibble with this data – ordinary noise is magnified by uncertainties about seasonal adjustment processes and the fact that the statisticians’ definition of “December” actually stretched to January 3.
continue reading… »
For once, punishment fits crime
It’s good to see that good sense has prevailed in the case of Robert Holding, the 72-year-old milkman who also supplied his elderly customers with cannabis resin as a sideline, with Judge Lunt suspending the custodial sentence, despite him warning that he was likely to go to prison.
The ostensible reason is that Holding’s wife, who has Alzheimer’s, has gone into a care home and that in an “act of mercy”, the judge suspended the sentence so he could continue to visit her. It would however be nice to think that perhaps he was influenced by some of the reporting of the case, with even the right-wing virulently anti-drug papers taking a quite apparent dim view of him being sent to prison for trying to help people with their pains, however misguided.
Further evidence to his “crime” being purely to help was that he was selling the drug at well below street prices, making more money on his milk round itself. If all dealers were so publicly spirited, the war on drugs would be even more of a clusterfuck.
Top Stories and Blog Review – 7th February
Nationwide
UK prepares for the big freezing weekend
Guinness to label pint glasses with unit count
HBOS staff received goodbyes in cash
Miliband faces tough questions over torture case
International
US Senators reach deal to cut stimulus bill to $780bn
Israeli vote goes down to wire
Russia rattles sabres in Obama’s direction
Hundreds more flee as Sri Lanka war races
WEEKEND VIDEO / by Sunny
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» Revealed: govt to restrict abortion counselling despite Nadine Dorries vote
» Would raising the tax threshold actually help the poorest?
» To win London, Ken Livingstone has to step outside his comfort zone
» This trade agreement with India will destroy thousands of lives
» UK debt hasn’t hit £1 trillion – mostly because of QE
» The benefits of being a “burden” on society
» Today’s economic figures will simply confirm UK’s “lost decade”
» Have Labour realised the election is more than three years away?
» Violence in the office
» Want a more responsible capitalism? Reform how pensions work
» The world is entering the third phase of the crisis, warns ILO
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