Phil Woolas defends his expenses claim
Minister attacks Telegraph ‘smear’ as ‘homophobic’
A junior health minister today attacked the Daily Telegraph as “homophobic” over the way it reported a story concerning his expenses.
Ben Bradshaw MP said on Twitter that the Telegraph “smear” was “factually wrong and homophobic”.
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First Tory caught duping taxpayers
Greg Barker has became the first Tory MP shamed in the expenses scandal, using the controversial second homes allowance for personal gain.
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Guilty, until proven guilty
Post by: Denny
In December last year, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the current legal framework for the UK DNA database was a violation of fundamental rights. The judges said they had been “struck by the blanket and indiscriminate nature” of the government’s powers to take and keep DNA samples from anyone arrested (including those who are subsequently released without charge, or found not guilty in court).
This ruling does not seem to have concerned our government a great deal.
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Newspapers feeding the anti-politics mood
Nine formidable broadsheet pages in the Daily Telegraph yesterday morning were devoted to forensic analysis of the expenses claims of cabinet members. Only the most diehard political anoraks will read every last line; this is hardly a subject of much intrinsic fascination.
At one level, this is propaganda directed against Labour, and highly effective propaganda, too, coming as the culmination of months of revelations about spare bedrooms, bath plugs and cable television porno flicks.
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Amnesty’s new video: ‘defy them’
Amnesty International has launched a hard-hitting online film about torture, showing activists intervening to prevent a torture victim being further abused.
The 90-second film, entitled ‘Defy them’ (available at www.amnesty.org.uk/defythem), initially depicts a person being subjected to a distressing form of partial-drowning torture similar to ‘waterboarding’.
short film
We should welcome the expenses scandal
And so the party that came to power promising a clean-up is caught in the stench of its own ministers playing fast and loose with public money.
“Our expenses are THIS big!”
Not that the Tories will prove to be any better of course. When it comes to disregard for the people they’re meant to representing, they go even further by having part-time jobs on the go as well. How many jobs does Boris Johnson have now?
For New Labour this isn’t just embarassing, it’s a pattern of behaviour they’ve exhibited for a while: a sense of complete isolation from the public mood and the values they are meant to be upholding. Now it’s blow-back time for the Westminster classes and frankly I can’t say I have much sympathy.
For left-wingers worried that this will further destroy trust in the political system – I say we should rejoice. We need a much more responsive political system and unless the politicians are really deep in shit, they won’t have the incentive to change their ways. So if it takes, as someone said to be last week, repeatedly slamming their face in the dirt, then I don’t have a problem with it. It’s about time they realised the contempt in which they’re held.
Update: I join Mike Smithson in congratulating Heather Brooke, who has been pursuing MPs expenses for yonks and spoke at our bloggers summit at the CoML. And apparently the Tory shadow cabinet is next.
Update 2: I also think Unlock Democracy and MySociety deserve credit for all this.
The hidden costs of Thatcherism
In a piece arguing why Labour should hold firm to its criticisms of the Thatcher era, Anthony Painter makes an extremely important point:
The argument that Thatcherism was economically good but socially bad doesn’t really hold any more. A more accurate description would be that it was economically more likely to produce growth but contained hidden risks and had enormous social cost.
Exactly right, and those social costs created a financial burden on the state which the Conservatives were supposed to reduce.
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Two good policies by New Labour
All credit to this government for fulfilling two policy promises they wavered on for a bit, but have now fulfilled. First, was the announcement yesterday that restaurants and cafés will be banned from using tips to pay basic wages.
The second, announced today, is that agency workers will receive equal rights after 12 weeks in job. They could have shouted about this a bit louder perhaps – both policies will positively help hundreds of thousands of people across the country. Still won’t make me vote Labour yet, you know, but this is still good news. And well done to the unions for pursuing these campaigns.
What should liberalism say about equality?
A New Hampshire man won a Supreme Court case in the 1970s, successfully challenging the obligation to display the state motto ‘Live Free or Die’ on his car numberplate. Faced with the choice of death or a life in servitude, he would rather live, believing on both religious and political grounds that life is more precious than liberty.
Even if Richard Reeves and Phil Collins would be disappointed by his choice, they would strongly promote his autonomy to make it.
And their own new Demos pamphlet ‘The Liberal Republic’ is a considerable improvement on their own ‘Liberalise or Die‘ injunction to Labour and the left published in a controversial Prospect article a couple of years ago. The article cast a caricatured Fabianism as a ‘poisoned well’ and the source of all of the left’s intellectual difficulties, yet its weakest argument was a purist and strangely anti-pluralist dismissal of the idea that the liberal-left might seek to fuse the insights of liberalism and social democracy.
It is not just that the authors are in less combative mood. Their substantive position now appears to me to be a different, rather deeper and more attractive one. (And I think Sunny Hundal may be rather too quick to suggest it repositions Demos to the centre-right, even if much of the media mood music might suggest that).
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» The real agenda behind Telegraph’s abortion investigation
» How Scotland Yard monitors prying bloggers and journalists
» When disabled people want to work – employers can hold the back
» Revealed: the reality behind Workfare and why it doesn’t work
» Job snob? No, I’ve got the T-shirt
» Why country-by-country reporting matters to our wellbeing
» If Unions want to become stronger, they need to modernise
» Why work “reforms” in Spain are a warning for workers across Europe
» Five things you need to know about the NHS bill
» Bigger. Fatter. Gypsier. More Racist.
» Laziness levels in Britain getting lazier, wails government
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