Boris accused of letting women down again
London Mayor Boris Johnson was today slammed for announcing just one Rape Crisis centre, and not the three promised in his original manifesto.
In a video (below) he offered just £635,000 over three years to support women suffering from rape and domestic abuse. He had originally promised £744,000 a year for four years – a cut of nearly 2 million pounds.
BBC News report
Responding to the Mayor’s announcement, Boris Keep Your Promise campaign spokesperson Matilda Mitford said:
While any amount of Rape Crisis funding is always welcome, today’s announcement is in truth a huge £2 million cut, cynically spun by the Mayor as a funding announcement. Since his election Boris Johnson has made repeated changes to his original Rape Crisis pledge and when confronted by our campaigners only a few weeks ago, Boris reaffirmed his manifesto commitment to fund an extra 3 rape crisis centres showing himself as Mayor of Spin.
She added:
According to today’s announcement, each year he will have given less to Rape Crisis than his ‘chicken feed’ yearly second income, a far cry from his grand promises during election time. Until Mr Johnson makes good on his original manifesto commitment of £744,000 a year and three new centres, we can only assume that he is giving as little as he can get away with. Trying to score political points at the cost of some of societies most vulnerable women is no way to defuse this row.
More:
Tory Troll: Boris Johnson and Rape Crisis Centres: The Facts
Mind The Gap: Boris finally announces funding for Croydon…
Boris announcement
Macintyre blasts Hannan over Kaminski’s past
Why is he so keen to defend anti-Semites? asks James Macintyre of Tory MEP Daniel Hannan.
The row kicked off when the New Statesman’s political editor wrote in last week’s edition that Jewish leaders had turn on Tories after Cameron made an alliance with Polish MEP Michal Kaminski.
He belongs to Poland’s Law and Justice party, one of whose MPs, Artur Górski, described the election of Barack Obama in the US as “a disaster” and “the end of the civilisation of the white man”. Kaminski is a former member of the neo-Nazi National Revival of Poland party (NOP), which, in a direct quotation from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, says in its manifesto that “Jews will be removed from Poland, and their possessions will be confiscated”. In 2001, he condemned his own president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, for apologising over the Polish massacre of hundreds of Jews in Jedwabne in July 1941.
…
Also in Poland, Rafal Pankowski of the Holocaust campaign group Never Again said: “Kaminski has an extreme-right background. To have him, of all people, the chairman of a group that legitimises far-right tendencies across Europe, is somewhat ironic. [Especially] for a leader like Cameron, who domestically opposed the BNP, for example . . . I would call on David Cameron to sever links with Kaminski.”
The only response from the Tory has been from Dan Hannan MEP, who wrote an extended diatribe attacking those making the accusations and defending Kaminski.
He also used Guido to support his own assertion that Macintyre was a “Labour spin doctor”:
Before turning to the substance of the allegations, it’s worth considering who is making them and why. Three pieces have appeared within the past 24 hours, all making a similar point: this one in The Independent by the Labour MP Denis Macshane; this in The Guardian by Tim Garton-Ash; and this in The New Statesman by James Macintyre. None of these authors would pretend to be disinterested. Denis Macshane is a thoroughly likeable sort: one of those rare pro-Europeans who genuinely knows about other countries. He is also, as he would be the first to own, a Euro-zealot, who has a particular bee in his bonnet about the Tories being “xenophobic“. I’ve never met Professor Garton Ash, but I read him every week. He’s plainly a clever and knowledgeable man – he must, for example, know how unfounded are his constant digs about David Cameron’s “Latvian legion”. But he wouldn’t pretend, either, to be impartial about European integration. James Macintyre is the only one of the three who is a journalist, and he is widely recognised as, first and foremost, a Labour spin-doctor: Guido has the full charge-sheet here.
Writing on his blog, Macintyre hits back at Hannan:
I reported on-the-record complaints about this man from various leading Jewish figures across Europe, including the Chief Rabbi of Poland. For this, I am accused of "the most shameful tactic yet", and of being a "first and foremost Labour spin doctor". Quite apart from the fact that Hannan has spent his career posing as a journalist, a leader writer and a columnist while desperately seeking elected office as an official Conservative candidate (while I have never sought office, frequently written critically of Labour and never been a member of a political party), I am amused that his "journalistic" source for this smear is the Tory blogger "Guido Fawkes". Conservative fanatics such as Hannan and "Fawkes" have never forgiven me for reporting President Obama’s verdict on David Cameron: that he is a "lightweight"; a claim which I have had confirmed by a number of officials and which I know to be as true as it is upsetting to some.
…
I am sorry that Hannan does not share the verdict of a real journalist on my piece: that of his superior Telegraph colleague George Pitcher, the paper’s highly respected religion editor. Or, say, his former ally in Brussels Edward McMillan-Scott, who told my colleague Daniel Trilling that “I regard [Kaminski] as completely unsuitable for the post of vice-president and also therefore unsuitable as the leader of the new group. It doesn’t take long to find out his past is pretty dodgy”.
Hannan has yet to reply.
Welcoming industrial militancy
Britain ‘could return to crippling 1970s strikes’, according to a headline in Britain’s biggest-selling rightwing broadsheet on Saturday. And note how the Daily Telegraph says that like it’s a bad thing.
My first response is not to get my hopes up too high. Newspaper commentators have been predicting an imminent rerun of the Winter of Discontent every year for at least the last two decades, and have somehow managed to get it wrong every single sodding time.
Even today, the mere mention of trade unionism can still evoke Dirty Harry-style responses from the Heir to Blair, who only days ago told one interviewer:
Mr Cameron added: “My message to union leaders who think they can take me on is simple: don’t do it.
Force the Tories into a sexism debate
I see that John Prescott has criticised Harriet Harman’s comments on women being needed at the top of Labour leadership. But if he had any political sense he’d support the opening up of the debate because it will inevitably put Tories on the back foot.
David Cameron, as we all know, is very anxious to promote women within the Conservative Party. He needs to, as part of his re-branding efforts. For that reason CCHQ has adopted unprecedented powers over candidate shortlists. That power was then exercised in the candidate selection process in Dudley North, leading to some internal fighting.
continue reading… »
Watch: Why on the left?
Video from the Open Left launch – asking people why they self-identified with being on the left.
Boris to talk on Rape Crisis centres?
London Mayor Boris Johnson is expected to make an announcement on the future of London’s Rape Crisis funding on Monday morning.
He has been continually harassed by the Boris Keep Your Promise Campaign in recent weeks. During the run-up to his election Boris Johnson promised, with much PR fanfare, to pay for three new centres and fund the only remaining centre for at least 4 years. But that promise is now seriously in doubt.
He was also recently ambushed over his campaign pledges by campaigners (video).
The campaign sent out a campaign alert today to keep up the pressure on Boris.
1. Invite your friends to the Facebook group
and ask them to do the same. The more people we can tell about what our campaign, the harder City Hall has to work to cover up their funding cuts!2. We’ve made a film explaining what Boris Keeps Your Promise stands for (video below) and what we want from him. Get it out there for us!
3. We are about to launch our fundraising campaign. We’re want to get 2000 people donating as little as £2 a month. For more see our website at http://www.boriskeepyourpromise.org.uk.
No Comments ¦ 2nd AugustHarman’s foot-in-mouth feminism
Harriet Harman is right to suggest that having the top jobs in the Labour party filled exclusively by men is a terrible and outdated idea, as it would be for any political party. But her reasoning is flawed and ridiculous.
She explains her objection to “a men only team of leadership” by suggesting that “men cannot be left to run things on their own”. Which is, of course, entirely untrue, not to mention lazily misandrist.
Men can be left to run things on their own – indeed, they managed to run central government all by themselves for a number of centuries without setting the Commons on fire or leaving the Civil Service strewn with empty kegs, takeaway pizza-boxes and porn.
What Harman totally fails to do is to make a case for why we should not be satisfied with having men in sole charge of government, even if they’re competent.
continue reading… »47 Comments ¦ 2nd AugustTories remain confused on tax credits
The Tory right is, yet again, showing its ignorance of the income distribution and tax system. The Speccie’s leader says:
Mr Cameron has been criticised for telling Mr Marr that he would remove tax credits for households which earn more than £50,000 a year. This…would hit 130,000 families immediately and unsettle many more. It is a proposal that would undoubtedly hurt Middle Britain. Considered in isolation, this would indeed be an objectionable and vindictive proposal.
The first flaw here is an albeit mild version of the middle England/Britain error – the notion that the well-off are just ordinary folk. In truth, a two parent household with two children and earnings of £50,000 a year is better off than almost two-thirds of the population.
continue reading… »6 Comments ¦ 2nd August“Killed by a tawdry dream”
[This article has now been deleted following the Daily Mail taking their article down and the PCC requesting we stop quoting it]
26 Comments ¦ 2nd AugustThe Sun: a hypocrisy machine
The Sun’s exclusive on Theresa Winters, the woman from Luton who has had all thirteen of her children taken into care and is now pregnant with her fourteenth, ticks all the paper’s buttons. Broken Britain, scrounging feckless layabouts and of course the bourgeois journalists working for a “working class” newspaper sneering at their own target market.
It doesn’t really make much difference that I can’t think of anything less feckless than being perpetually pregnant, and that yet again the paper is pushing for benefit reform by finding the most extreme case it can, regardless of how the kind of reform it demands would punish those who are deserving as well as those who “aren’t”.
Combine this with the casual dehumanisation which infects all such stories, with Winters described as the “Baby Machine”, leeches and slobs and you have a classic example of a newspaper providing its readers with a target they can hate without feeling bad about doing so.
continue reading… »39 Comments ¦ 1st August¦ ¦ Newer Entries »
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