‘Local homes for local people’ is meaningless
contribution by Tim Finch from ippr
After shooting himself in the foot with “British jobs for British workers” you would have thought the Prime Minister had learnt his lesson. But no, just last week we had a story headlined in The Sun as “Local Homes for Local People”.
It was trailing an announcement by Gordon Brown that the government was going to change the rules on how social housing is allocated. It was made clear that councils were to be given more scope to prioritise the housing needs of local people – in other words, the white working class who deserted Labour in droves in the recent elections.
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The government prevented me from stopping tax avoidance
The need for a general anti-tax avoidance principle (GANTIP) to be enshrined in the British finance system is now overwhelming.
The totality of tax avoided by super-rich individuals and big corporations has been estimated by independent research at some £25bn a year, and even by the Treasury at up to £13bn a year.
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Tory sticks up two fingers at Boris, amidst cronyism
Tory Assembly Member Brian Coleman refuses to publish his expenses while at the GLA. But will Boris Johnson have the guts to fire him?
Yesterday the full expenses for 24 London Assembly Members were revealed. But one remained – Coleman. He not only refused to publish them but the declared that because Boris asked him to publish them, he wouldn’t! He also said he would not help the “mad, bad and the sad, the bloggers on the internet” by publishing his expenses.
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Sri Lanka – the suffering continues
‘The latter stages of the war in Sri Lanka have been carefully choreographed and hidden from the outside world, with the voices of victims silenced through fear and insecurity.
There are allegations of war crimes, rape and torture, summary executions and prolonged bombardments by a government which, it is believed by human rights organisations, killed thousands of its own civilian citizens.
Al Jazeera has conducted its own investigation into the conflict and spoken to Tamils who have suffered and aid workers who have remained silent until now, revealing testimonies that call into question the version of events Sri Lanka’s government wants the world to believe.’
There is a link to the full article here and a vidoe report here The government’s response is here.
When I was working in Sri Lanka a few months ago it was very difficult to get news out about the situation, but everything in these reports matches what I saw and heard. For several months government forces repeatedly bombarded around 200,000 people crammed into an area the size of New York’s central park, creating the worst humanitarian crisis that I have ever witnessed in my life.
There are now up to a quarter of a million people being held in what can best be described as concentration camps. China and Russia have blocked attempts by the UN Security Council to put pressure on the Sri Lankan government to close the camps – which are taking on an increasing air of permanence. Unfortunately, the non-aligned group of countries, led by Brazil, have also accepted the principle of ‘non-interference’ in Sri Lanka’s internal affairs.
Internal server errors on LC
Is anyone other than me getting a ’500 Internal Server Error’ when they reach LC? If you refresh your screen then this error should go away. Anyway, apologies if you do – we’ve moved to a new server because of growing computing needs. Still some teething problems.
Xinjiang is burning. Will anyone care?
One of the world’s least-known and yet most obvious cases of the oppression of a minority group by a powerful state, China’s brutal hegemony over the Uyghur people of Xinjiang province, should be more widely known to western progressives.
It isn’t, partly because of the effectiveness of the Chinese state in blacking out mainstream media coverage of the region, but also because of residual left-wing quietism when it comes to criticising a stalinist state: one could safely assume that there would be far more banner headlines if the oppressor state involved was the USA.
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The tyranny of the gay agenda
Iain Duncan Smith and his band of super Tories at the Centre for Social Justice are to issue a report which will shape Conservative policy on the family. It is widely expected to put the God-given sanctity of marriage at the heart of family life, make divorce more difficult and promote marriage preparation classes and ‘family relationship centres’, as well as tax breaks for married couples.
The report comes not a minute too late, following countless years of social engineering designed by Labour to do nothing but obliterate traditional familial values of a mother, father and two children sitting round a stone fireplace telling ripping tales of Grandad’s adventures in the Great War.
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Our MPs are very unrepresentative
In the bad old days of not that long ago, single trade unions controlled constituency parties in dozens of Labour strongholds. Secure the nomination from the NUM or the GMB, and you had a seat for life, son.
Such practices were undemocratic, obviously conducive to machine politics, and invariably worked to the disadvantage of lefties. But in a rough and ready way, it at least it resulted a cohort of Labour MPs with some sort of demographic resemblance to their electoral base.
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The Tories and Section 28
You know those people who say ‘Labour and Tories, they are just the same’? They should read CentreRight, the voice of the Tory grassroots, more often. Here’s a topical article called, “I don’t apologize for Section 28″.
It begins “I am entirely comfortable in the presence of homosexuals” and then goes on to explain that “alas, tedious though it is, I shall be forced to defend Section 28 as the liberal Conservative measure that it was”.
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His Master’s Voice
David Cameron is pledging to cut the number of unelected quangos to save money and increase accountability.
A Tory government would close one schools quango, while another – media regulator Ofcom – would be stripped of its policy-making role, he will say.
Ofcom is to be stripped of its policy-making role, eh?
I wonder what kind of policies Ofcom are currently considering..? continue reading… »
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