Iran: neither Ahmadinejad nor Mousavi
One of the most striking aspects of the commentary provided by the British left on events following the Iranian election is a marked and muddleheaded lack of clarity. Whether this is motivated by reluctance to criticise a regime sometimes characterised as anti-imperialist, or the generous subventions available for hosting programmes on Press TV, I am not sure.
Even where these factors are not obviously at work, generous resort to qualifying adjectives is certainly notable. Thus the election is described not as rigged but as ‘widely seen to be rigged’. Ahmadinejad is not confidently proclaimed the winner; instead it is noted that he ‘was declared the winner’. Protesters are described as ‘fearing the election had been rigged’.
A degree of prevarication is perhaps justified. Even Robert Fisk – who probably knows as much about the Middle East as any Briton – has yet to pronounce definitively one way of the other. Let us therefore suspend disbelief and admit it is logically possible that – just maybe, however unlikely it looks – this was a fair fight and the incumbent won. That still leaves the left having to decide where its sympathies lie.
The Unbearable Pointlessness of Guido
From the file marked ‘Get a life you bunch of sad bastards’…
Both The Guardian and The Times are running MPs expenses ‘live blogs’, documenting the febrile ravings of a few bloggers with way too much time on their hands as they trawl through all the newly released (and heavily redacted) information published, this morning, on the House of Commons website.
Unfortunately, some four hours into this utterly banal exercise, its already becoming perfectly apparent that the Telegraph has long since published pretty much all the genuinely juicy material, leaving our merry of band of would-be investigative bloggers to scrabble over the few meagre scraps that the paper left behind due to lack of interest. continue reading… »
Regulating Home Education
This article is by author missdisco.
Elizabeth Mills response to the regulation of Home Education seemed to echo the common response from home-educators. Another opportunity for the state to control how we treat our children. And so on. It’s something I find an increasingly tiresome argument, as I seem to be one of the few people viewing regulation of home education as a positive thing.
I was home-educated between 1993-2001. It was an appalling experience. My mother was, in the most polite terms, a manipulative bitch, who actually never bothered to teach us at all. It was a whim for her for about a year, but then I think she just lost it and just couldn’t be bothered with anything, except keeping us in the house. As a child I barely left the house except maybe once a week to help do the shopping in Morrisons. I didn’t do science, languages, PE, art, music, or anything interesting. My interest in English Literature arose out of being a Manics fan, otherwise I suspect I would have never had that.
Only once did someone come round to inspect us. Once in eight years. The night before that inspection is something I try to forget. Essentially an hours beating to make sure when they ask how me and my sisters felt our response was that we were happier. My memories of the inspection were that he had no problem with our basic skills – from the few rushed examples of work pushed at him – but that he was concerned by our mothers Irish nationalist stance in everything and the lack of PE, language or music. Mostly though, he disliked that none of our work was dated, because that meant he had no idea when what he saw was produced.
Top Stories – Thursday 18th June
Kitty Ussher leaves the Government, as TheTelegraph’s Augean project continues…
NATIONAL
Governor seeks more powers for Bank of England
Belfast Romanians rehoused after race attacks
Terror law used to stop thousands ‘just to balance racial statistics’
INTERNATIONAL
Mousavi urges more demonstrations for Thursday
New financial rules in the USA too…
Cricket attacker arrested in Pakistan
British ambassador attacked for supporting gay march in Bulgaria
It’s not just the message, Gordon.
Michael Ellam, the current spokesman to Gordon Brown, declared the news on Tuesday that he is being replaced by Simon Lewis – the former spokesperson to the Queen. Good communications with the public is the sine qua non for an incumbent whose party’s latest ICM polls show that they are 15% behind the main opposition on the question of cleaning up the political system.
But communications is not the sum total of Brown’s problems.
On Sunday morning I thought everything would be OK. I had started to read the Observer and on the inlay page saw that Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman had told Will Hutton in an interview that the UK economy was the best in Europe, and that not only are we seeing off the last dregs of the financial crisis, but Brown and Darling may well have beaten the city analysts predictions of long turmoil.
Well, I thought, aren’t we glad that the rebels bailed out last minute, that Blears apologised for leaving the way she did, that Miliband had a change of heart 9 days previous, and that despite all its talk, Compass effectively did nothing to start a ruckus with the right wing of the Labour Party.
Those FibDems…
Earlier this month, I was narrowly beaten in my quest for a seat representing Eastern England in the European Parliament. The Green Party vote rose massively, by 60,000, to 140,000 (9%) – but this was still 1% short of what was needed to win a seat.
This was obviously very disappointing; but what made it worse was the knowledge that a systematic campaign by the LibDems to stop me from winning may have been what made the difference between me winning and not. Of course, there is nothing wrong with one Party trying to stop another Party from winning; to some extent, one might even say that that is what Parties are for (though it is unfortunate, to say the least, that the ‘FibDems’ did this when they had little prospect either of losing their seat nor of gaining a second seat – and when the all-too-predictable consequence of what they did was letting in a second kooky climate-denying UKIP MEP, instead of a Green…). But what is wrong is to stop another Party from winning by systematically misrepresenting the facts about the electoral arithmetic…
If only he’d been Justice Nightjack…
If bloggers are not to be afforded a right to privacy and anonymity, the same cannot be said for certain members of judiciary…
The government and the judiciary can continue to conceal the names of more than 170 misbehaving judges, a freedom of information tribunal has ruled.
The judge heading the tribunal decided that some members of the judiciary who have been sacked or reprimanded for misconduct would suffer “great distress” if details of their misdemeanours were made public.
The judges’ authority in the courtroom would be undermined, and their privacy unjustifiably invaded, if the public were allowed to know how they had been disciplined, according to the tribunal.
The ruling came out in favour of justice secretary, Jack Straw, and the judiciary as they have fought a four-year battle to hide the identities of miscreants.
The Iraq inquiry should be conducted in secret
“The Iraq war was a disaster” is a familiar refrain. Unfortunately, that doesn’t tell us very much. Do we mean the concept, the planning, the implementation, the strategy, the tactics, what? Or do we want an official stick with which to beat the government?
Were the problems with the Iraq war just the basis on which we went to war, or inappropriate equipment necessitating lots of UORs ?
Do we just want to know that the whole enterprise was a bad idea, or do we want to see where and why things were done badly or well?
If we put aside the hysterical, the more reasoned problems come under three heads; timing, secrecy and outputs.
BA to move into the voluntary sector
This article is by author Sim-O
BA are asking 40,000 staff to work for sod all for a month. Just like the the boss, Willie Walsh and his Chief Financial Officer, Keith Williams…
The call for unpaid work is set out in individual letters to staff, and in the BA in-house newspaper British Airways News under the headline Action Time.
It says bluntly: ‘Colleagues are being urged to help the airline’s cash-saving drive by signing up for unpaid leave or unpaid work.
‘From tomorrow, people will be able to opt for blocks of unpaid leave or unpaid work, with salary deductions spread over three to six months, wherever possible.’
It is a hell of a lot easier to forego a months pay if a months pay is £61,000 than it is if your pay is only a grand or two a month. Should a company that is in that much shite that it’s asking it’s staff to work for nothing really be paying its’ boss more a month than most of its’ staff be paid in 3 years?
Could this be the new mantra for capitalism? Work for nothing or you won’t have a job to go to.
—————–
Sim-O blogs at his eponymous blog.
Blogosphere versus The Times: the outing of Night Jack
The Times is taking a lot of flak over its decision to out (and end) the Orwell-prize winning Night Jack blog.
Here is the ruling The Author of a Blog v Times Newspapers Limited.
But the legal ruling and The Times decision to out the blogger are separate issues.
This could turn into an ‘old versus new media’ debate. Or perhaps not, as the arguments about anonymous authors, sources and whistleblowers cut both ways. The Independent was among newspapers to know the blogger’s identity but to agree not to reveal it, in this interview with the author, in which he discussed the approach he has taken to blogging anonymously and the consequences of being outed.
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