Only 1/16 rapes reported end in conviction
Fewer than one in 16 rapes reported to the police results in a conviction in court, research by the Liberal Democrats has revealed.
In a response to a Parliamentary question by Lynne Featherstone Chris Huhne found that conviction rate has fallen from less than one in 13 in 1998.
The Liberal Democrats today called for up to 15 more Rape Crisis Centres to be opened across the country, and for more money to be invested in centres that provide medical care and counselling to the victims of sexual assaults.
Their other proposals to prevent violence against women, unveiled today, include:
- Investing more in Sexual Assault Referral Centres to provide forensic medical examinations and counselling.
- Rolling out classes about rights and fair treatment in relationships in schools with organisations like Relate
- Providing better systems in schools and social services for children and adults to report abuse
- Ensuring that women living in refuges can continue to work
Liberal Democrat women’s spokesperson Lynne Featherstone said:
The low conviction rates across the country in rape cases are nothing short of a national disgrace. We the worst rape conviction record in Europe.
Victims of sexual violence need the help and support offered by Rape Crisis Centres to help them come to terms with their ordeal and to increase the chances of successfully prosecuting their attackers.
The system for dealing with rape is rotten at every level. It is little wonder that women have so little confidence that their attacker will ever be punished.
The proposals form part of the Liberal Democrat Policy Paper ‘Real Women’.
The paper also recommends that airbrushing in children’s adverts should be banned.
The Tory approach to International Development is a farce
by Left Outside
9.2 million children die before the age of five each year. Two million die on the day they are born – and 500,000 women die at childbirth. A third of children in Africa suffer brain damage as a result of malnutrition. 72 million children are missing out on an education. Every day 30,000 children die from easily-preventable diseases. That’s 21 children every minute. 33 million people are infected with HIV/AIDS. There are 11 million AIDS orphans in Africa. Every hour, 300 people become infected with HIV and 225 people die from AIDS…and 25 of these are children.
These bald facts are an insult to our humanity. Every life is precious. Everyone has unique talents and abilities. Every time the candle of life is snuffed out by disease, we all suffer. Every time ignorance triumphs over enlightenment, we are all injured. Every time a child is born into a cycle of poverty, we are all made poorer.
So opens the Conservative Party new Green Paper on International Development, One World Conservatism.
These two paragraphs read like an accusation. They are contrasted with the Millennium Development Goals set out by the UN. With the 2015 deadline looming they seem wildly ambitious contrasted with such continued suffering.
The Conservatives pledge a new approach to International Development should they win the next election. As this looks almost inevitable, it is important to examine what they propose as it will affect millions of lives. In this blog post I highlight some of the main points of the report and explain why it’s fundamentally a ‘failure’.
continue reading… »
Save the Observer? Why exactly?
There’s a campaign to save the Observer newspaper after reports over the weekend that GMG might shut down the loss-making paper. Other than just sheer sentimentality what reason is there to support its existence?
The Observer isn’t a left-wing paper. It has a few somewhat vaguely left-liberal columnists. And then it has people like Andrew Anthony and Nick Cohen who spend half their time saying the left is in bed with Islamists. And don’t forget its shamelessly cheer-leading for the Iraq war. Any apologies forthcoming?
That doesn’t mean I want it to shut down. Sunder asks if I would be ok, “if sunday press were to shake out to Times, Mail, Telegraph and News of the World?” — not really, but then the Observer doesn’t really offer itself as a left-wing counterbalance. I don’t read any of these Sunday papers anyway – I stick with the American press and blogs.
The point is: if there was a choice between the Guardian and the Observer, and there seems to be, then I’ll take the Guardian any day. That is a paper I can be loyal too, especially with its stellar work recently on tax justice (Barclays), the G20 riots and fingering News International. Can anyone remember the Observer breaking something so big recently it dominated the news agenda for days? I can’t. Supporting the Observer for it’s own sake, while making life worse for the Guardian, doesn’t look like a sensible proposition to me.
More on other blogs
Paperhouse: Save the Observer, 2003 edition
The Third Estate: Save the Observer?
Blood and Treasure: unlamented death of a newspaper
Media Blog: Times readers choose Shadenfreude over reason as Observer wavers
Charlie Beckett: The Observer: why bin it?
CCTV in every home? Not likely
Ed Balls MP has hit back at claims that thousands of families in England were to be put under 24-hour CCTV surveillance to change their bad behaviour.
A report in the Sunday Express newspaper said:
Thousands of the worst families in England are to be put in “sin bins” in a bid to change their bad behaviour, Ed Balls announced yesterday.
The Children’s Secretary set out £400million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV super-vision in their own homes. They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.
Asked on Twitter if this was true, cabinet minister Ed Balls said it was “complete and total nonsense”.
When prompted further, Kerry McCarthy MP replied on twitter saying: “We already have the Family Intervention Project in Bristol. No CCTV cameras in their homes! Have a look at this: http://bit.ly/Rzgjz”
In other words the government has launched a Family Intervention project which is currently being trialled in Bristol.
She added later: “Yes if you read Express report, that’s what it says. Scheme already exists, Bristol was one of earliest pilots.”
And then: “It’s the same project The first comment on Express site says it all – these are families from hell. No CCTV as Ed said.”
And finally: “If u write off such families, it continues thru generations, downwards spiral – only intensive intervention works.”
It’s unclear where the Sunday Express got the idea that families were to be put under 24 hours CCTV surveillance.
Campaign to ‘save the Obs’ gathers pace
A campaign has been kicked off by former Observer journalists and supporters to save the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper.
Yesterday morning the @savetheobserver Twitter account had a hundred followers. By the end of the day it had accumulated over 1,500 followers.
On Facebook, a group too has been set up to ‘save the Observer’.
The threat to the newspaper was covered last night in Newsnight, with former home affairs editor Martin Bright defending the paper.
You can watch that episode on BBC iPlayer.
Writing on the Next Left blog, former employee and Fabian general-secretary Sunder Katwala said:
There are many broader issues here about the future viability of news journalism, the future of British newspapers and what happens to the public interest if an effective business model can not be found for the internet age. I much enjoyed Will Davies’ incisive, sceptical review of Chris Anderson’s Free in Prospect. A heartfelt rallying cry from the traditionalists has been published by David Simon (of ‘The Wire’ fame) in the Columbia Journalism Review, arguing for the New York Times and Washington Post to become fully pay-only products online to save professional journalism. The barriers to this are enormous, yet viable alternatives remain unclear.But the immediate message is much simpler – Save the Obs!
Declaration of interest: I worked for The Observer a few years ago. But, before and since, I have had an irrational level of addiction to newspapers in general, and Sunday newspapers in particular. And, whatever their faults, I think they are more important to our democracy than we realise.
Yesterday a story on the Media Guardian website said parent company GMG was, “considering options for the future of its Sunday newspaper, the Observer, as part of a strategic company review.”
More transparency on lobbying needed
Taxpayer funded lobbying is only the tip of the iceberg a group claimed today, in response to a report by the TaxPayers Alliance.
The Alliance for Lobbying Transparency issued a press release today saying:
The UK [lobbying] industry is worth £1.9bn, the vast majority of which is spent by business lobbying government. We think the public has a right to know about everyone trying to influence our politicians, not just those in the public sector.
The report by the Taxpayers Alliance today comes ahead of the government’s response to the Public Administration Committee’s recommendation in January for a mandatory register of lobbyists in the UK.
A decision by the Cabinet Office is expected imminently.
David Miller from the ALT added:
By its own admission, the report is incomplete because so many lobbying consultancies simply choose not to voluntary disclose their clients. This is just one reason why a mandatory register of lobbyists and their clients is necessary – to show precisely who is lobbying whom, whether nuclear power companies, or environmental groups, and which areas of policy they are seeking to influence.
The spending figures by groups such as Action on Smoking and Health or Alcohol Concern are absolutely dwarfed by the amount spent by the tobacco and alcohol industry on influencing government, as well as advertising and marketing their products. Until we have real transparency, we have no way of knowing how much industry is spending or who they are talking to in government.
Shorter Taxpayer’s Alliance
Shorter Taxpayer’s Alliance report on political lobbying:
1. Taxpayer funding of lobbying and political campaigning should be entirely abolished, building on the example set by the Byrd Amendment in the United States.
2. Full transparency of all public spending should be implemented, to reassure taxpayers that none of their money is being diverted by stealth.
3. Lobbying and campaigning groups which claim to represent taxpayers should have to reveal who their funders are.
4. Campaigning by Friends of the Earth and the Local Government Association distorts the public policy process in favour of the interests and perspectives of a narrow political elite. Corporate lobbying and PR represents an actual economic interest, employers and employees who will lose out if a decision doesn’t go their way. It may improve decision making by ensuring that political decisions better reflect a balance of economic costs.
Sunny adds: More embarrassing mistakes by the TPA uncovered. Mick Fealty rightly asks:
…how did a pressure group (ie private lobbyists) get to be treated as a respectable, peer reviewed research institute by a whole swathe of the British press corps. Fairly embarrassing when the group did not bother to check the veracity of the information.
Exploitation right under our noses
Last Thursday’s Newsnight was a stunning piece of investigative journalism. Hotelcare, one of the leading agencies for hotel cleaners in the country, was caught red-handed with serious exploitation of foreign workers at some of London’s top hotels.
To say that the revelations were a surprise would be on a par with feigning shock at the recent MPs’ expenses scandal. The rumours that some London hotels are paying less than the minium wage had been circulating for a while. Indeed, back in 2005 hospitality website Caterersearch was already pointing the finger at Hotelcare’s dubious employment practices but failed to cause the stir that it should have.
Taking advantage of the foreign workers’ poor grasp of English and the fact that they’re often unaware of their rights, those workers are led to believe that they would only earn the minimum wage (£5.73 an hour) if they clean two and a half rooms per hour.
continue reading… »
A government in turmoil
Over at the Guardian politics blog Andrew Sparrow wonders if Labour discipline is breaking down. There’s no doubt that many on the left who would hope there was less loyality and more speaking ‘truth to power’ going on, but frankly that would never work. A government needs discipline and loyalty otherwise it breaks down very quickly, thanks to the nature of the environment it operates in. That isn’t just Blair-speak – that is just a fact of life.
But that should apply only to the government rather than all MPs. So it’s rather ironic that John Prescott, who has license to speak his mind, is the one attacking Harriet Harman even though he’s always telling people off for Labour in-fighting.
[To clarify a point. I've said already I'm interested in minimising Tory gains at the next election - hence the discussion of government strategy. Regardless of the rights or wrongs of Harriet Harman's views, and I agree with Laurie Penny on that, they should have still tried to force the Tories into a debate rather than run away from it.]
continue reading… »
Trouble in Paradise, for Lord Ashcroft
It’s interesting to see that Iain Dale has finally picked up on a story that’s been bubbling under the media’s radar for at least the last twelve months…
I wonder if THIS threatens to become a big story during August. Apparently Britain is imposing direct rule on the Turks & Caicos islands and suspending its constitution. Last week, the former PM of the Turks & Caicos, Michael Misick launched a legal challenge to the government’s decision. It has all arisen after a corruption investigation revealed “a high probability of systemic corruption and/or serious dishonesty”.
As a quick synopsis of the situation that’s a pretty fair reflection of the events that have taken place over the last couple of years.
Serious concerns about the possibility of systematic corruption in the Turks and Caicos Islands first emerged in 2007 during the course of a parliamentary review of the UK’s remaining overseas territories, prompting the Foreign Affairs Committee to issue a call for a formal inquiry into the stream of allegations it received from concerned islanders.
continue reading… »
You can read articles through the front page, via Twitter or RSS feed. You can also get them by email and through our Facebook group.
» 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
|
62 Comments 15 Comments 23 Comments 8 Comments 24 Comments 19 Comments 16 Comments 83 Comments 203 Comments 85 Comments |
|
LATEST COMMENTS » the a&e charge nurse posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » Chaise Guevara posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » Chaise Guevara posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » Oliver posted on Job snob? No, I've got the T-shirt » the a&e charge nurse posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » Hannah posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » mr_hopkinson posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » Amy Finlayson posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » the a&e charge nurse posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » pagar posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » Oliver Conner posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » pjt posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » Lee Griffin posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » JIm posted on Workfare - what does the evidence show? » BendyGirl posted on Workfare - what does the evidence show? |
