Tory MP Mercer ditches ‘anti-terror’ expert links
Tory MP Patrick Mercer has tried to put further distance between himself and the former anti-terrorism experts from Vigil, in particular Glen Jenvey.
This week the Sun half-apologised, for the first time, regarding its false story that British Muslims were targeting prominent Jews through a ‘hit list’.
The story was exposed by Tim Ireland from Bloggerheads and ended with ‘anti-terror expert’ Glen Jenvey, who fabricated the story, having a nervous breakdown and converting to Islam.
The Tory MP Patrick Mercer had earlier described Glen Jenvey as “an extremely capable and knowledgeable analyst”.
Yesterday the Guardian’s Hugh Muir quizzed him further on the issue:
So far, so reprehensible. But where does this leave the Conservative security guru Patrick Mercer MP, chairman of the parliamentary subcommittee on counter-terrorism?
As 5 Live pointed out, he was foolish enough to use his gravitas to bolster Jenvey’s reputation. “An extremely capable and knowledgeable analyst who needs to be listened to,” he said of Jenvey two years ago.
Mercer told us yesterday: “My office certainly received information from him but never worked with him. This was a damaging lie. I have had nothing more to do with Glen Jenvey.”
Libdems are rejecting getting in bed with Labour
Nick Clegg today published a paper by Demos called ‘The Liberal Moment‘ which, at 92 pages, is not exactly light reading alongside your afternoon tea. But I’ve skimmed through it. And unlike Dave Osler I have a few positive things to say about it.
First, the political positioning. I agree with James Graham in thinking that Nick Clegg is ending Lib Dem equidistance. About time too. With many on the progressive left arguing, with the impending wipe-out of Labour power, that Libdems and Labour should join forces to defeat the Tories, Nick Clegg points out why he won’t do so. But at the same time pointing out why ‘progressive’ (meaning leftwing) voters should support the Libdems.
Liberalism, he says, is about the distribution of power. That is music to my ears because I’ve always seen the left as more obsessed about the distribution of power than simply liberty (on the basis that there is little liberty without power). And it is with good reason that’s he making a pitch for former Labour voters: he points out that despite its stated intentions to help the weakest and poorest many of Labour’s policies has hurt them most, especially on tax. His points seems to be to tell Polly Toynbee at el: look, you have to understand where I’m coming from ideologically before you think I’m going to jump in bed with Labour to ward off the Tories.
continue reading… »
Nick Clegg: the strange resurrection of Liberal England?
Go back to your constituencies and prepare for government. Or something like that. The leader of the Liberal Democrats believes that Britain is about to enter a ‘new era of Liberal politics’, with the use of a capital L here presumably deliberate.
Nick Clegg’s contention is that we are about to witness the strange resurrection of Liberal England, to paraphrase the title of the most famous book on Liberalism’s decline. After all, the Lib Dems now run councils in many traditionally Labour-controlled big cities; ergo, Westminster must be up for grabs.
I’m not quite sure how this follows. Local authority gains look to me to come on the back of the decay of municipal Labourism, which as recently as the early 1980s appeared relatively vibrant.
Social change, such as the decline of heavily unionised manufacturing industry and the middle class reclamation of every available urban living space, is bound to take its toll. How hard can turfing a bunch of pissed Freemasons with GMB cards out of Tammany Hall truly be? Even the BNP can make headway in such situations.
Daily Mail joins the US lunatic fringe
…the Daily Mail is still carrying a factually inaccurate story published the previous Sunday morning.
And it’s not like they haven’t been told it’s inaccurate, comment after comment in the 279 thus far point out exactly why they are wrong.
What’s interesting is exactly how come they are wrong.
Inaccuracies often come about because one newspaper is mugged or fed a line, believes it and then, like lemmings, everyone else falls off the cliff. This is often the case with crowd numbers, someone will carry an organisers claim and that gets reproduced.
…more at the Online Journalism Blog
Can Cameron meet his own “honesty” test on cuts?
Let me make it clear: they are not wrong to be planning cuts but they are wrong to try to cover up their plans for cuts. This is about honesty, it is about trust. This is about not taking people for fools.
So said David Cameron at his news conference yesterday, excitedly promoting leaked Treasury documents about possible spending cuts. Yet Cameron refused to offer any substantive answer to questions from Nick Robinson and others about what the Conservatives are planning, as Andrew Sparrow’s liveblog for The Guardian captures.
But what is sauce for the goose … especially if there are already secret Tory plans for cuts already under discussion in the Treasury too. The senior and well respected Daily Mail journalist Peter Oborne seemed pretty confident in his report that the Tories have asked the Treasury to officially investigate much deeper cuts of 30% of departmental spending, as Next Left noted on Saturday.
The truth is that Osborne will be forced to implement swingeing cuts after the election. Indeed, I can reveal he has ordered the Treasury’s permanent secretary, Nick Macpherson, to find savings of nearly 30 per cent in departmental budgets which would come into effect immediately if the Tories gain power.
Brixton launches its own local currency
London’s Brixton has become the first urban town to launch its own local currency. The B£ will be unveiled at Brixton Town Hall tonight, the fourth complementary currency to emerge in the UK since the launch of the Totnes pound in 2007.
The Brixton Pound (B£) will support local shops, encourage local trade and production and keep money working for Brixton for longer.
It follows hot on the heels of the Stroud ‘teasle’ launched on 12th September 2009, and rumours that Canterbury may also issue its own currency.
Because the B£ can’t leave the area, nor be ‘banked’ to earn interest, customers using it know they will be putting money in to circulation, supporting local shops and jobs.
The aim of the scheme is to maintain the diversity of the Brixton high street and preventing it becoming just another ‘clone town’ in the face of the credit crunch and fierce competition from chain stores.
Josh Ryan-Collins, expert in local currencies at nef (the new economics foundation) and one of the team who has helped to develop the B£, says:
The Brixton Pound is a community currency that will enable local people to vote with their wallets for a strong and diverse Brixton economy. If you spend with a large chain retailer, over 80 per cent of your money leaves the area almost immediately. With the B£ we know that our money will stay working for Brixton. This puts Brixton at the heart of a powerful local renaissance that is fast gathering pace around the world.
So far:
• 60 Brixton businesses and 700 local people had signed up to the currency
• Over £10,000 pounds had been pledged to be converted in to B£s
• Morleys of Brixton, a family owned high street department store, will issue B£s and accept B£s at 20 of its tills
Each of the new Brixton notes will commemorate a local hero, voted on by the people of Brixton and celebrating the diversity of the South London suburb:
• B£1 – Olive Morris, a radical political activist and community organiser who established the Brixton Black Women’s Group, and played a pivotal role in the squatters’ rights campaigns of the 1970s; Olive was born in Jamaica in 1952 and moved with her family to Britain aged 9. She was a Brixton resident from 1961-1975 and died at the age of 27 from cancer
• B£5 – James Lovelock, the independent scientist and environmentalist who, whilst working for NASA, first developed the ‘Gaia’ theory, that the earth is in a delicate but dynamic steady-state that human activity is disturbing, in particular through global warming. James was a Brixton resident from 1925-1933
• B£10 – C L R James, the Trinidadian journalist, historian, socialist thinker and anti-colonialist who chose to spend his final years on the ‘front line’ of Brixton
• B£20 – Vincent Van Gogh, who moved to Brixton aged 20, reportedly returning to Holland a changed man, having seen first hand, the impacts of poverty on his daily walk from Brixton to Covent Garden
The B£ team hope that the currency will mirror the success of a growing number of local currencies around the world that are proving that local home-grown solutions are powerful antidotes to the corrosive impacts of big-chain retailers and profit-hungry banks that have become ‘too big to fail’.
———
Taken from a press release
Why is Jenni Russell praising Cameron Come Lately?
Jenni Russell has written an article attacking ContactPoint, the much maligned national children’s database that the government are still insisting on trotting out. The only problem is, she has written it as a piece of Tory hagiography.
We might be able to let her off the title – Another invasion of liberty. And only the Tories are alert – as a bit of subbing hyperbole. I’ve written enough articles for newspapers over the years to know this happens. But she can’t blame the sub for the final paragraph:
Labour will not reverse this; only the Tories might. They promise to review CAF database, ditch ContactPoint for a small, targeted database, and invest in strengthening people’s relationships instead. It’s depressing that Labour supporters who believe in liberties, privacy and humanity should find themselves having to cheer the Tories on this issue.
Londoners ignore Boris cycle scheme
Boris Johnson launched “Cycle Friday” last month as a means to encourage nervous cyclists onto London’s roads.
Commuters were told to meet at one of six starting points.
They were then led to one of four different finishing points (where by some chance they would all hopefully want to go.)
But here’s the number of people who have taken part in the first month… (and it is pitiful)
Public spending cuts: ineffective, unnecessary, dangerous
contribution by Adam Lent
Politics seems to be on a collision course with economics at the moment. With the right-wing press screaming for cuts and the polls showing a majority of voters agreeing, the main parties are now positioning themselves as cutters.
But there are three main arguments against public spending cuts.
1. Cuts are ineffective; they will not reduce the deficit and may actually increase it. As I pointed out in a previous post, this was the experience of the early 1980s. Margaret Thatcher’s attempts at cuts in the early 1980s created a deep recession which seriously damaged the public finances. The deficit only began to reduce in 1985 when the economy recovered.
continue reading… »
Why’s the media giving Dorries an easy ride?
I pointed out not long ago that the TUC was not looking to ban high heels, only to stop employers forcing women to wear them. The medical evidence is clearly against employers. Now that the TUc conference is taking place, the motion is in the news agenda again.But you can’t even rely on left-wing newspapers to make this clear or call out Nadine Dorries.
I applaud the society of Chiropodists for pointing out to me the dangers of this; however, having done so I now respectfully ask them to leave it me and every other high heel wearing woman in the land to decide whether or not we wear high heels in the workplace..
Of course this isn’t the first time Nadine Dorries MP has chosen to disregard medical evidence. Now, she wants women to have the choice to wear high heels, but apparently not to avoid wearing them.
The Independent today, while clarifying that the TUC motion is not to ban high heels, still lets her get away with the last word without asking her, who has actually demanded that high heels be banned?
It’s typical of right-wing politicians that when they don’t like a debate they simply change the way they frame it. It’s more annoying to see that left-wing newspapers can’t even bring themselves to call out those Tory MPs.
More reading
Left Outside: High Heels, Low Politics
John Innit: Et tu Konnie? The stilettos go in
Byrne’s Tofferings: TUC, High Heels, and Nadine Dorries
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