Gang culture, territory & fear
Nothing brings Britain’s social problems into focus like seeing them on your doorstep. What might seem abstract when described in Home Office documents or reported from unfamiliar places becomes a lot more intimate when it’s set somewhere you know: full of landmarks you’ve visited, people you might’ve met, folks who speak with the same accent or walk the same streets as you.
So when I read Mark Townsend’s report on the rise of gun & gang culture around the Burngreave & Pitsmoor areas of Sheffield, I was always going to react to it differently than if it’d been set in somewhere like Manchester, Liverpool or the North East. I can’t claim to know these neighbourhoods intimately, but my emotional attachment to the city means I probably can’t react as impartially or dispassionately as I would if it were set somewhere else.
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Is this James Purnell’s leadership vehicle?
Having failed in his attempt to knife Gordon Brown, it looks like James Purnell is positioning himself as the intellectual driver of the left. The think-tank Demos has given Purnell the space to develop an off-shoot: Open Left.
It’s nice to know Purnell has been thinking about “the left” outside the intellectually bankrupt Labour Party, especially given he tried his best to junk all left-wing ideals while in the cabinet. This is the same minister who: constructed a welfare-to-work programme that didn’t actually work; gave the go-ahead to an unworkable plan to force benefit claimants to lie-detector tests; had this silly plan for alcoholics. Don Paskini also tore apart the DWP’s plans for welfare reform here.
But in the spirit of comraderie, and avoiding the temptation to pour cold water over the project just because its run by James Purnell, here is their website. It features a sort of usual suspects outlining some ideas on what it means to be on the left. Do any catch your imagination? They also have a launch event today at 6pm. (via @josephlaking)
Obama and gays – No Change?
A few days ago, to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the NAACP , Barack Obama stood before a room packed with African American supporters and reflected on how far the civil rights movement – and the country as a whole – had come in such a short century:
From the beginning, these founders understood how change would come — just as King and all the civil rights giants did later. They understood that unjust laws needed to be overturned; that legislation needed to be passed; and that Presidents needed to be pressured into action. They knew that the stain of slavery and the sin of segregation had to be lifted in the courtroom, and in the legislature, and in the hearts and the minds of Americans. They also knew that here, in America, change would have to come from the people.
Protestors to mock Boris’s “chickenfeed”
Unison members at the Greater London Authority (GLA) will be inviting the public to chuck feed at a chicken man representing Boris Johnson during a protest over job cuts. Tuesday’s picnic protest will kick off a series of events leading up to a rally in October.
Regional Officer, Shirley Mills, said: “Boris ‘two jobs’ Johnson described his £250,000 second job as “chicken feed”, while slashing jobs of low-paid workers. Leo Boland, the GLA Chief Executive, is also earning over £205,000, £10,000 more than the Prime Minister. It is disgusting that these two wallow in their huge wages while low paid staff face the axe.”
Protest: 12.20pm on Tuesday (21 July) at Potters Field, City Hall, The Queens Walk, SE1 2AA.
Coulson to face MPs as Tory support cracks
Former News of the World editor Andy Coulson will face the culture select committee at the House of Commons tomorrow.
Perhaps MPs could ask him whether he was completely unaware that NotW journalists other than Clive Goodman were involved in illegal phone blagging activity. They could also ask him if the NotW had ever paid private investigators to hack into people’s voicemails or to obtain information illegally. Perhaps MPs could also ask Rebekah Wade, who will also be giving evidence, why News International paid off people to keep silent, while telling the world that only the royals had their phones hacked, and that too only by Goodman.
On Friday former Sun editor Rebekah Wade confirmed the out-of-court settlement with Gordon Taylor. It was the first time News International has admitted those allegations. Yesterday the Independent on Sunday reported that shadow chancellor George Osborne refused to repeat Coulson’s denial he knew of the pay-offs.
A political strategy for Conspirators
The political outlook for progressives in Britain is, arguably, bleaker to-day than at any time in recent – or not-so-recent – history. Even in the heyday of Thatcherism the Labour Party offered a clear alternative vision of what society could and should be. The intellectual energy of the left is sapped: the generation of iconoclasts who came to the fore in the ’70s and ’80s appear to be childless.
The only exception is the Internet, which has enabled us all to connect and debate to an extent that was the stuff of dreams a generation ago. Yet nothing similar has happened here. If the political power of the Internet is to be realised in Britain, it will have to come from beyond the existing parties themselves.
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How the government started owning our pubs
It hadn’t occurred to me, though it really should have, that the British Government is now a considerable player in the pub trade. It was pretty much inevitable, given that the financial crisis is derived from an artificially inflated and then over-exploited property boom, that at least one of the failed banks was going to be a pubco owner.
So, my hat is tipped to Private Eye (1240, p29) who have had a good look at the ridiculous and incestuous relationships between the PubCos, the government, and the Government’s “independent” body of pub valuers, RICS. This Labour administration has continued the trend established in the 80s of setting thieves to encourage thieves when it comes to regulation. In the process, they managed to create the conditions for a scam even more ridiculous than the brewery-tied lease.
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How crap is our right-wing media?
This article in the Washington Independent focuses on the “birther movement”, obsessed by the view that Barack Obama was not born in the United States:
Ironically, the ‘birther’ movement began in response to Obama’s own efforts to debunk rumors. One year ago this week, the presidential campaign of then-Sen. Barack Obama launched FightTheSmears.com, a web site designed to push back against false rumors about the first African-American presidential nominee. To push back against rumors that he was not born in Hawaii, the campaign reproduced a Certificate of Live Birth from the state’s Health Department. Instead of terminating the conspiracy theories, that inspired new theories — that the certificate had been forged or that even if it hadn’t been forged it was the sort of certificate that could be given to someone born outside of the United States.
Guess who is part of their British contingent? It’s Melanie Phillips. What’s notable isn’t just that Phillips perpetuates these conspiracy theories – but that mainstream right-wing publications such as Spectator Magazine are happy to publish it. It wasn’t long ago that Phillips revealed Obama’s plan to turn the US into a Muslim country.
Mainstream lefty publications may be somewhat dull but at least they don’t publish front-page editorials that are pure unadulterated rubbish.
(h/t: @mjrobbins) Update: Now with video!
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Does the Jury Team have more potential?
contribution by Josh Plotkin
Following the European elections, it appears that this new please-don’t call-us-a-party party didn’t manage more than a handful of votes. But while the rag-tag bunch of retirees and borderline weirdos recruited as candidates are clearly unelectable, we shouldn’t be so hasty to junk the concept with the candidates.
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The marginalisation of dissent
contribution by Kumi Naidoo
Since the 9/11,terror attacks in the USA and the subsequent ill-conceived and ill-named War on Terror we have witnessed an erosion of democracy, human rights and civil liberties.
In long-standing democracies as well as newer and emerging democracies there has been a growing marginalisation, suppression and in some cases repression of dissenting voices. This has manifested itself in many different ways. The hardest to measure are the levels of self-suppression in a climate of fear.
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