Americans call for a boycott of Scotland
A group of Americans have launched a website and petition calling for the boycott of Scotland over the release of Libyan bomber al-Megrahi.
On the website they say:
Constantly we are bombarded with emails from those who claim that this act of terrorism occurred on Scottish soil and thus the choice to release al-Megrahi rested solely with Scottish authorities democratically elected by the people of Scotland.
That is all very fine and well. But the vast majority of the victims were Americans on an American airliner headed for the United States. One would think that at the very least, the Scottish government would have enough respect for the American victims to take into account the American perspective, which was to not grant al-Megrahi a “compassionate” release.
…
Why did MacAskill and the Scottish National Party desire so strongly to show compassion for al-Megrahi, but not for the American victims? Why have the concerns of the American families been so routinely dismissed and discarded? Why have we been shown such an incredible level of disrespect by the Scottish authorities?
But the decision was attacked on other liberal American blogs. A popular post on Daily Kos pointed out:
Boycott Scotland? Go F**k Yourself
There is a rule in the Scottish Jusice System. Anyone who is terminally ill with three or less months to live is released on compassionate grounds to die at home. This is the rule now and has been the rule in the past.Now because of the release of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi which now means that his appeal against his conviction will not take place as he agreed to drop it so he could die at home (this is something that seems to have been ommitted in all the reporting that has reached US shores, though judging by the quality of reporting on the NHS l really shouldn’t be surprised).
Visitors from the US accounted for 340,000 trips to Scotland in 2008, and spent £260m in the country, according to figures published by VisitScotland.
This accounted for 21% of spending by people from outside the UK.
VisitScotland spokeswoman Alison Robb told the BBC: “We have had e-mails from people in America saying they’re going to cancel their holidays but have had no cancellations through our booking engine.
“We have alerted our staff and made them aware of the situation.”
Climate Camp issue open letter to Met police
Organisers of Climate Camp, due to start this week from Wednesday, have issued an open letter to the Met Police.
Watch the video below or read the text.
Open Letter
FAO Chief Superintendent Ian Thomas,
New Scotland Yard
London SW1H 0BGDear Chief Superintendent Thomas,
On August 17th, you wrote to the Camp for Climate Action, requesting further information on the location of our next Camp, which will take place from August 27th to September 2nd, somewhere in the London area. You say that you require this information in order to help with “community liaison”, to ensure the Camp is a “safe and healthy” event, and to help you put a “pre-planned and proportionate policing operation” in place. We are writing this open letter in order to alleviate your concerns, and to make our position clear both to yourself and to the public.
Community liaison has been a vital part of every Climate Camp. At Drax in 2006, Heathrow in 2007 and Kingsnorth in 2008, we put a lot of time and effort into spending time with local residents and allaying people’s concerns, and this year will be no different. We have a good track record of building community support for the Camp and for climate change campaigning, we’ve already been in touch with local Councils across London, and our friendly outreach volunteers will be chatting to the locals from the moment we arrive on site. We plan to be excellent neighbours for as long as we’re there, we’ll be open and welcoming to any local residents with questions or concerns, and we’ll leave the site spotless when it’s time to go.
As regards health and safety – thanks for your concern, but again we’ve got it under control. As with previous Camps, we’ll have great food, water, compost toilets, a team of medics, a wellbeing space, excellent on-site communication, emergency vehicle access, and a family space. We also have a “Safer Spaces” policy and a “Tranquillity Team” to help keep the site free from oppressive behaviour or aggro. Anyone who’s spent time at past Camps will tell you how friendly and safe the atmosphere is – better than most mainstream festivals.
Of course, there is one unfortunate exception to all of this. While most visitors to previous Camps have had an inspiring and positive experience, some of us have had to suffer violence, intimidation, theft, sleep deprivation and harassment, thanks to past examples of “pre-planned and proportionate policing operations”. Local communities have been disrupted by police road closures and indiscriminate stops-and-searches. Members of the public have been attacked with batons or arrested on trumped-up charges simply for standing on the perimeter of a campsite (nearly all of them have now been acquitted or had their charges dropped). Judging from past experience, the best thing the police could do to ensure the health and safety of the public at Climate Camp 2009 would be to stay as far away from it as possible.
Bearing all of this in mind, I hope that you, and the public, understand why we don’t feel able to reveal the precise location of the Camp at this time. Every other aspect of the Camp has been organised in an open, accountable and democratic way, via monthly public meetings. The only secret is the location. There’s a simple reason for this: I’m afraid we just don’t trust the police. Why? Because it seems as though every time we have a protest, the police turn up and start hitting people. Look what happened at the G20. That’s not really a very good way to win people over.
Just because you’ve started using friendlier language and talking about “lighter-touch” policing, do you really think we’re suddenly going to believe you’re our friends? Just a few weeks back the Big Green Gathering was shut down by the police on spurious grounds, for “political” reasons. If the police are really trying to build up trust within the climate action movement, then that’s a funny way to go about it.
The precise location of the Camp for Climate Action 2009 will be announced via mass text as part of the exciting August 26th “Swoop”. I’m afraid you’ll just have to sign up on our website, and wait for the updates just like everybody else!
Yours sincerely,
The Camp for Climate Action Media Team
Update: Swoop locations now revealed
65% of public support a High Pay Commission
Ordinary hard-working people want a better life for their families and not to be exploited. My guess is very few of them subscribe to limiting the wages of the people at the opposite end of the spectrum.
Sunny Hundal at Liberal Conspiracy, in particular, accuses me of seeking rightwing adulation by seeking to protect the rich. He’s not entirely wrong. I want the Labour party to continue to win the support, not just of our core vote, but of those Thatcher and Major supporters who switched to us in 1997 and who stuck with us for another one-and-a-half elections.
ComRes opinion polling this Sunday:
A High Pay Commission should be set up to curb excessive pay and bonuses:
Agree 65%
Disagree 31%
- Surprisingly there is little variance among different social groups
- Even 63% of Tories agree compared with 66% of Labour voters and 75% of Lib Dems
—–
So it seems that Tom and Luke’s ideas of what “ordinary hard-working people” and “Thatcher and Major supporters who switched to us in 1997 and who stuck with us for another one-and-a-half elections” might favour isn’t supported by the polling evidence.
That’s not to say that there aren’t good arguments against a High Pay Commission. But the argument that it isn’t popular is not one of them.
100k sign NHS petition aimed at Americans
Over hundred thousand people have signed a petition aimed at Americans to stop them spreading lies about the NHS.
Organised by the campaign group Avaaz.org – it exhorts American legislators to “ignore the myths about health systems in our country and others that are being pushed by US healthcare companies”.
So far the group has collected over 100,000 signatures that will be sent to the US Congress.
The British health care system isn’t perfect, but we would never trade it for the one in the US.
Yet conservative US politicians and greedy insurance companies are pushing lies about the NHS as a way to scare the American public off national health care – risking Obama’s whole movement for change and threatening his majority in Congress.
Sign the petition below and tell friends – huge numbers of us will cause a stir in the US media and affect the debate, and Avaaz will deliver our message to wavering US Senators this month before they cast their vote in Congress.
Click here to read and sign the petition
Real face of the BNP ‘family festival’ exposed
Yeah I know its the News of The World, but they have done an undercover expose of the real nature of the ‘family’ Red White and Blue festival.
Demos against the BNP event are good, but the numbers won’t match those that voted for them . What is needed is to take apart their arguments, policies and expose what they really stand for and seems like the NOTW has done a good job of that last element.
It’s not enough to shout racist, we need to argue why they are wrong to blame immigrants for a lack of decent social housing and jobs if we are to counter their hate filled message.
Although I’m saying its good the NOTW has exposed this, I’m in not in anyway saying the Murdoch press are on our side, but lets use what they have discovered in our arguments and campaigns.
continue reading… »
Dependency culture and bonus culture
Apparently there are at least 164 definitions of the word ‘culture’, according to one 1950s tome on anthropology that was well-known in its day. But in current popular British usage, the term conjurs up a notion of an internally coherent set of beliefs that justify given social arrangements to participants within a particular social structure.
That must be why the systematic trend to towards paying astronomical rewards to selected players in the financial services sector has become elevated into something called ‘bonus culture’. The suggestion here is of some kind of permanence, regularity and legitimation.
By elevating current City practice to the status of a bona fide culture, we are implicitly saying we should leave well alone . It’s a banker thing, baby, you wouldn’t understand.
The logic works in the same direction as when applied to ethnic minorities, giving rise to occasions when many on the left find themselves – uneasily or otherwise – defending practices they would regard as sexist or homophobic in other contexts.
continue reading… »
True Tory colours revealed in new book
LibdemVoice highlights a Guardian diary column which has extracts from the book True Blue: Strange Tales from a Tory Nation, by Chris Horrie and David Matthews.
The Guardian diary relates two incidents from the book.
The first from a campaign effort in Richmond:
during the election campaign of 2005, when the book’s undercover authors were canvassing for the local Tory candidate against the Lib Dems’ Susan Kramer. Given a telephone cold-calling script, they were puzzled to find instructions to tell voters that Kramer was an “outsider” and, perplexingly, Hungarian (Kramer was born and raised in London). Why? “She’s a Jewess,” said a party activist, “but we aren’t allowed to say that. We get told off if we say that. So all we can say is that she got off the train from Hungary.”
Nice. Very nice. Who says anti-semitism is dead?
And then from the London Mayoral offices:
[Ray] Lewis insisted he had a good idea of what the new job would involve, “which is more than you can say about Boris!”, before doing an impression of his new boss: “Crikey, Ray! What are we going to do? Gosh! Crumbs! Have you got any ideas? Golly!” Cue raucous hilarity, topped only when Lewis joked about a conversation about the local Conservative candidate, Shaun Bailey, who was also present and, like Lewis, is black. “I’ve just been speaking to a lady and she asked: ‘Which one is Shaun and which one is Ray – it’s hard to tell you apart.’”
Oh dear… And yet they keep telling us the Tory party has modernised.
Can the Met police change its stripes?
contribution by Helen
Last August, thousands of people camped out at Kingsnorth power station to protest against the continued use of coal power in the UK. There were eye-witness reports and video evidence that police abused stop and search powers, removed their badge numbers, employed sleep deprivation tactics, harassed journalists, arrested any protesters who tried to demand their legal rights, and engaged in unprovoked violence against peaceful protesters and their private property.
But the police were not meaningfully challenged by anyone with the authority to do so. In fact, it wasn’t until after events were repeated at the G20 protests in April 2009 that official questions were asked about the policing of dissent in the UK.
Early this year, cyber-liberties activist Cory Doctorow covered all this in the Guardian about Kingsnorth camp.
Ironically, the article was delayed due to an administrative error, resulting in its publication shortly after the G20 protests. It was already true, even before the same mistakes were made all over again: and in April, it could just as easily have been talking about the events earlier that month.
continue reading… »
BKYP join forces with 38 Degrees
Campaigners from Boris Keep Your Promise, who want the London Mayor to keep fund Rape Crisis centres as promised, have joined forces with online campaigners 38 Degrees.
On the page where you can sign the petition, they say:
During Boris Johnson’s campaign to be elected Mayor of London, he promised big improvements to rape crisis provision. He promised to cut the amount he spent on media relations and spend the savings on guaranteed funding to increase the number of centres serving the capital from one to four.
Over a year later, the funding commitment over 4 years is £830,000 short of what he promised and we have only heard about plans for one of the three new centres. At the same time, reported rapes increased by 14.5% last year, while convictions remain very low at 6.5%.
Matty Mitford from BKYP sent out an email saying:
38 Degrees have a sight more lobbying experience than we do, so we’re confident that if anyone can get a petition to have an effect, it’s them. So please sign and forward if you can. Putting the URL in a Facebook/Twitter/blog etc status update would be awesome too. We’d like to get this out to as many people as we can.
For the sake of transparency (a big deal to us) we’d like to make it clear that once you sign the petition you will be added to 38 Degrees mailing list. We’re only condoning the petition as it’s so easy to opt out of their mailings if you want to.
Click here to sign the petition
New migration figures butchered by Daily Mail
Journalism and statistics go together like Dog the Bounty Hunter on a dinner date with Tolstoy.
Usually, tabloid statistics come from some press release sent out by a company with a vested interest, from a “report” by the TaxPayers’ Alliance, or from an NGO, quango, or think-tank.
Sometimes, though, an ambitious journalist will tire of rewriting pre-compiled reports and studies and decide to go and look at the statistics for themselves. This is a risky thing to do because the journo is well aware of their lack of training in stats and the potential for time-consuming redrafts if they make a mistake.
Such is the case with Sue Reid’s “SPECIAL INVESTIGATION” on migrant workers and unemployment in yesterday’s Mail, headlined “Revealed: The areas where there are more migrants chasing jobs than locals“. Sue seems quite proud of her data-mining, as there’s a little photo of her looking pleased with herself next to the words “SPECIAL INVESTIGATION”.
continue reading… »
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