Racism creeping up in Italy
Anyone still of the opinion Italy’s not going through a fascist comeback?
This is unbelievable. After a wave of ugly rhetoric and dubious policies, a number of northern Italian councils run by the far-right Northern League (Silvio Berlusconi’s biggest coalition partner in government) have gone on the rampage against anything foreign.
Top of the list, the town of Capriate, 20 miles from Milan, where the council announced a ban on kebab and ‘ethnic’ shops from the town centre. The news hasn’t reached the foreign press yet, so you’ll have to be able to understand Italian if you want to find out more here and here.
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Watch: Cameron squirms over Lord McColl
David Cameron was today caught off-guard over revelations in The Times that shadow health minister Lord McColl has close links to a private GP firm.
Watch: Charlie Brooker on Dan Hannan
via badjournalism
Baby P coverage was both sexist and misandrist
contribution by Lara Williams
Now identified – the woman who stood aside as her partner and his brother subjected her son, Peter, to an unparalleled and disturbing, sustained abuse and torture – Tracy Connelly is woman who’s face will be burned into the public conscious for years to come. And it seems – so will the outrage, anger and hatred of the abuse suffered by ‘Baby P’ – which has fallen almost exclusively on her shoulders.
Described as everything from a ‘sex obsessed slob’ and ‘evil mother’ to a ‘woman defined by abuse’ – Tracey Connelly has been the chief focus of the story – whilst her partner Steven Barker and his brother (and their lodger) Jason Owen have bafflingly played second fiddle in the ongoing media saga.
The lack of equality attributed to all involved in this case is both sexist and misandristic.
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Why I support a high pay commission
I’ve written a short article for the New Statesman about why the idea for a High Pay Commission, mooted by Compass this week, isn’t a bad idea. I’m expanding on some of the arguments here.
I’m going to start by noting that a ‘High Pay Commission’ isn’t necessarily about setting a maximum wage limit but about reviewing pay at the top and considering capping “excessive remuneration”.
Greed creates instability
There’s an article from the New Yorker magazine that is passed around to Bloomberg interns and employees as the article to read on the financial crisis. I can’t locate it for now. Found it, but the full version isn’t available online. But the basic gist is: you can blame the sub-prime crisis, confusing government regulation and increasingly complicated derivatives for the financial crisis, but actually it comes down to two things: excessive, unchecked greed and disregard for shareholder returns.
The financial crisis exposed the fallacy of the assumption that remuneration is closely linked to performance, especially at the top. The system not only hid deep losses in the financial sector but failed to penalise executives when their failures came to light.
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London council introduces ID cards
Has Hillingdon Borough managed to find a way to introduce an ID card scheme that is non-intrusive, respects civil liberties – and is actually welcomed by local residents?
According to pressure group NO2ID, the answer is….no.
In June, Hillingdon started to issue “HillingdonFirst” cards to residents, offering “access to services and privileges not available to non-residents”. The council began sending cards out to residents over 18 on 15th June. According to the Hillingdon council website: “We will only store and print your name and card number. No address or financial information will be stored or printed on the card”.
The card is a key to a backend database that links through to other data stored.
Sky News runs churnalism bashing NHS – updated
Sky News today has a story saying that nearly a third of people do not believe any major political party can run the NHS properly.
That is suggested by a poll of 2,000 people commissioned by the private health insurers AXA PPP.
But not only was the poll data released over a month ago, but there are questions over the polling company OnePoll.
According to Slugger O’Toole, One Poll states on it’s website that it offers: “Assistance with drafting questions – to gain news angles and get the results you’re looking for.”
The company doesn’t not seem to be a member of the British Polling Council either.
The Guardian columnist Ben Goldacre wrote this week about OnePoll here, saying:
Most if not all of these surveys are conducted by OnePoll. They won’t tell me anything about the questions they asked, the responses they got, or the people responding, so I couldn’t possibly assess whether their results are sound, but I doubt it. To gather a representative and scientific sample of the UK population giving thoughtful responses they have a website which says: “Register using our simple sign-up form and start earning cash right now.”
To companies, they offer a “no coverage, no fee price structure”, with tailored seduction for journalists, and other services which include “mining the data”.
Churnalism at it’s best.
Update: Sky News has responded.
I mentioned this story on Twitter, to which Cheryl Smith from Sky News responded by saying the story had now been removed from the site.
She later clarified by saying the story was no longer linked from the politics section but was still available to read if searched by Google.
Our Afghanistan Problem
The War in Afghanistan: what exactly is the plan?
I’ve always had issues with invading Afghanistan. Yeah, I hated the Taliban as much as the next person (and yeah, I knew about them before 2001), but I couldn’t see the sense in a ground-war in a country so completely conditioned for decentralised guerrilla combat.
The plan, if it was to be violent (let’s face it, military retaliation was exactly what 9/11 was intended to provoke), should have been intelligence-gathering, air-strikes and hardware support for anti-Taliban forces. Not that I’m a military expert of course.
The one thing democratic governments can’t suffer is an endless war of attrition in a faraway land. Any conflict in Afghanistan, that involved regular infantry on the ground, was always going to be one.
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Hannan hates it so much, he’s going there
Daniel Hannan is well known as a notoriously Euro-skeptic MP. So much so, in fact, that he regularly says that up to 84% of our laws come from Europe, even though this claim is rubbish.
Now it turns out that the MEP is planning to move to and live in Brussels. He hates it so much he’s actually planning to move out there. I’m surprised he hasn’t told his blog readers about the good news.
Making Gaza even worse
When Israel launched its military offensive against Hamas last year, critics of the operation made a number of important points.
First, we argued that it was a fantasy to believe these raids would do anything more than briefly reduce its ability to toss rockets into Israel, and that there would be no prospect of either destroying the group, or fatally weakening its grip over the Gaza Strip. But more importantly than that, we also insisted that it was a mistake to think Hamas’ defeat would end Israel’s security problems.
Whilst there’s always a (very slight) possibility that Hamas could implode or that the people of Gaza will eventually turn to the more moderate & cuddly Fatah, given the amount of poverty & raw despair in the territories, it’s far more likely that whatever did replace the militant group would be even more extreme, more reactionary and more likely to render peace between Israel & Palestine as impossible.
We’ve seen some evidence of that in recent days, as a deadly shootout between members of Hamas and a militant splinter group demonstrates that some of the alternatives to Hamas are even uglier.
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» Revealed: govt to restrict abortion counselling despite Nadine Dorries vote
» Would raising the tax threshold actually help the poorest?
» To win London, Ken Livingstone has to step outside his comfort zone
» This trade agreement with India will destroy thousands of lives
» UK debt hasn’t hit £1 trillion – mostly because of QE
» The benefits of being a “burden” on society
» Today’s economic figures will simply confirm UK’s “lost decade”
» Have Labour realised the election is more than three years away?
» Violence in the office
» Want a more responsible capitalism? Reform how pensions work
» The world is entering the third phase of the crisis, warns ILO
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