Jon Stewart slams Fox News protests hypocrisy
From the newly returned Daily Show.
Lefties surrendering to the conservative movement
The Observer recently reported that ‘a senior government aide’ told them that, “I personally think we have got to look at universal benefits. It is unsustainable.”
Jackie Ashley wrote, “if there have to be cuts, then taking away child benefit from the better off, and the winter fuel payment from richer pensioners, would seem sensible ideas and are on Labour’s agenda.”
Comically, these are described as measures for Labour to shore up ‘the core vote’. They are nothing of the sort. The proposals to get rid of universal benefits are quite simply an unconditional surrender to people who loathe and despise left-wing values.
It has been a long term project of the conservative movement in this country to undermine the welfare state, and reduce it to a low cost, low quality residuum for poor people.
It is sad and pathetic to see government advisers and leftie journalists buying into the values and assumptions of the conservative movement and trying to undermine these achievements.
continue reading… »
Sun finally apologises over Jewish ‘hit-list’ story
The Sun Newspaper has today finally issued an apology over its front page story, published earlier this year, that extremist Muslims in the UK had drawn up a ‘hit-list’ of prominent Jews in retaliation for Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
The story was fed to the newspaper by an ‘anti-terrorism’ expert Glen Jenvey, but was twisted and sensationalised by the tabloid paper.
The story unravelled after the blogger Tim Ireland investigated it further and found that Glen Jenvey was the person posting messages on Muslim messageboards and pretending to be an extremist Muslim.
The Sun has still tried to twist the story to its own advantage. In an apology published today it stated:
A PHONEY terrorism “expert” has confessed to duping newspapers and a senior politician.
Glen Jenvey has admitted making up stories about Islamic fundamentalism, including a faked list of prominent Jewish “targets”, which included Lord Alan Sugar.He revealed his scheming in an interview with BBC reporter Tom Mangold, aired on Sunday’s edition of Donal MacIntyre’s Radio Five Live show.
Jenvey told how he fabricated the list of Jewish targets by posing as a fundamentalist on an extremist website where he urged others to suggest names.
He then leaked the made-up list to a trusted news agency, used by The Sun, and online forum Ummah.com was wrongly accused of being used to prepare a backlash against UK Jews.
Jenvey – who had been described as “an extremely capable and knowledgeable analyst” by Tory MP Patrick Mercer – said: “I’m fully responsible for the story. The Sun was deceived.
“The Sun did not know that I was behind the postings.
“I would like to apologise to all the British Jews who we scared and I’d like to apologise to The Sun newspaper.”
There is background to the story by Richard Bartholomew here, with a link to the 5 Live programme.
There is more on Bloggerheads, where Tim Ireland is wrapping up the story.
The bank bailout: prospects for the hard right
TWELVE months to the day since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, it is starting to look horribly like the bankers of the world are not only entirely unchastened but, well, laughing all the way to the bank.
The City and Wall Street are currently telling themselves that they have gotten away with the most monumental con trick in the history of political economy. Not even pausing for penance or reflection after a three-decade party came crashing to a halt, they simply got the state to clean up the beer cans strewn all over the floor and the overflowing ashtrays, and have now kicked off festivities all over again.
Governments the world over have meekly acquiesced in sustaining rapacity. Lectures will inevitably prove ineffectual. Obama can urge ‘common sense’ all he likes; this is about the one commodity to which the average investment bank has no exposure.
In this country, a new dividing line has appeared between New Labour and the Tories, with the voters to be asked to choose between caring cuts and nasty cuts. As a Labour Party member, I can only urge readers and voters to back the guys who will chop schools and hospitals with reluctance rather than with gusto; I suspect it is going to be a hard sell on the doorstep.
Why I keep saying Gordon Brown has to go
Research by the Fabians showing the Labour party is losing women voters has elicited predictable comment. On Guardian CIF Rowenna Davis says ‘Brown must start listening to women‘, while over at Next Left Sally Gimson says ‘Labour needs to be less macho to win women voters‘. I don’t use “predictable” in a derogatory way because both make good points. But I fear they’re misunderstanding the problem.
The public are no longer interested in Labour policies. They have switched off and Gordon Brown is suffering from deep voter fatigue. This is partly because the government has nothing new to say, partly because there is no coherent message and partly because they’re tired. It’s not about policies; it’s probably no longer even about the message.
Labourites insist: ‘We must take on the fight harder and we must drive home how bad Tories are on public services‘. But it won’t work.
How shall I put this?
continue reading… »
Johnson rejects sharing platform with BNP
Home secretary Alan Johnson has rejected the idea of sharing a platform with the British National Party.
The Guardian politics blog reports that he told the BBC Politics Show he had not changed his mind.
I’ve gone 59 years without sharing a platform with a fascist, and I don’t intend to start doing it now.
The Labour Party is mullng over whether to reverse its ‘no platform’ policy against the BNP.
The question arose over recent reports that the BBC was considering a representative on Question Time after the party had two representative elected as MEPs.
But the New Statesman’s James Macintyre wrote recently that the election decision had little to do with the BNP’s success at the EU elections – the broadcaster had been mulling over the decision two years earlier.
Power2010 campaign launches today
A new campaign hoping to inspire collective action to ensure the next Parliament makes a commitment to fix our political system launches today.
Power2010, formed from the 2006 Power Inquiry, will use mass campaign tactics and voting to identify the five changes to the UK political system the public most want to see.
Between now and next spring, they aim to build a nationwide movement for changing politics that will see publicly-backed priorities such as Party funding and fairer voting put directly to every candidate standing in the General Election.
Helena Kennedy QC, Chair of Power2010, and of the original Power Inquiry, said:
What is different about Power2010 is that – apart from changing politics – there is no agenda. We’re not asking the public to back POWER2010’s calls. We’re asking the public to create them. From fairer voting, cleaner funding, protecting privacy to the right to ‘sack’ MPs, it will be the public that decides what the next Parliament must do.
People have not forgotten how angry they were at finding out their taxes were paying for moats, dry rot and second homes. But whilst public confidence is at an all time low, the expenses scandal is only a symptom of a wider problem.
According to organisers, from today the campaign moves into 5 distinct phases:
1. The public and organisations submit their ideas for fixing politics via the website by Thursday 5 November
2. Power2010 will bring together citizens from across the UK to decide the shortlist of reforms to go to the public vote
3. On November 18th – the day of the Queen’s Speech – public voting begins.
4. The voting ends at midnight on 31st January. The five top reforms voted by the public are announced in February 2010 – creating the Power2010 Pledge
5. In the months to the General Election every candidate is pressed to back the Power2010 Pledge at hustings, via email, letters and the media.
Sign up here: http://www.power2010.org.uk
Republican slams ‘vague’ Tory foreign policy
David Cameron’s foreign policy has come under attack from one of his own side from across the pond.
William Inboden, senior vice-president of the right-wing Legatum Institute and a former senior director for strategic planning on the National Security Council (for the Bush administration), offered scathing criticism on the Foreign Policy website.
He said the administration’s foreign policy plans “remain elusively vague”.
Under different headers he offered scathing words for the shadow administration, saying at one point:
Also thus far lacking among Tory leaders is any substantial geo-strategic analysis of the state of the world. There are the usual platitudes about globalization, the challenge of failing states, balancing interests and ideals, etc. But there is little of sophistication said about the underlying shifts in balances of power, the tension between the nation-state and sub- and trans-national actors, the salience of ideology, or the tectonic forces of history.
Ouch.
Mr Inboden also advises that Michael Gove should take a lead on counter-terrorism. This may placate the neo-conservative wing of the Tories, though it might clash with Cameron’s more pragmatic approach (he admonished Israel last year when it invaded Gaza in a way, which Gove would not do).
He adds:
One gets the inescapable sense that British Conservatives (like Labour) still look to the United States to set much of the foreign policy agenda, irrespective of which president occupies the White House.
Which is unsurprising. It’s likely that Tory foreign policy will be more dictated by Obama’s priorities than Cameron’s.
But he adds, rather cuttingly,
Yet nor are there any Conservative ideas yet advanced that seem compelling in the face of the profound challenges of today’s world, or that inspire hope for a landmark new era in British foreign policy.
Over at the Financial Times, Gideon Rachman says of the article:
Inboden strives to be polite and positive; the Tories are the Republicans’ sister party, after all. But his critique of Conservative thinking on foreign policy is, I think, fairly devastating. Tory thinking comes across as “anemic”, empty and – even – defeatist.
The bubble is coming back
contribution by Josh Ryan-Collins
The recession is over claim the newspapers. Growth has returned. House prices are definitely on the up. Let the good times role.
But we are probably entering in to another credit bubble, of exactly the kind that caused the last financial meltdown. If you neglect a child and let them eat so many sweets they get sick, the general advice is to set some pretty strict rules afterwards to limit further sweet bingeing. In contrast, the financial sector has just had billions of pounds thrown at it by governments (and taxpayers) and, in return, it has been asked to change very little about how it operates.
As this astonishing interactive graph from the New York Times shows, big finance, after shrinking from $1.87 trillion dollars market capitalisation in the summer of 2007 to just $290 billion in March 2009, has now tripled in size from this low back to to $947 billion.
Some of the banks got knocked off along the way of course, meaning some of the survivors – such as JP Morgan Chase – are even bigger than they were before the crash. And the sector as a whole is even more concentrated and, arguably, poses more of a systemic risk.
continue reading… »
ISA vetting scheme under fire; re-reviewed
The BBC reports that the government’s ISA vetting scheme is going to be reviewed again following widespread outrage over its implementation.
England’s Children’s Secretary, Ed Balls, said it was “tremendously important” to define “frequent or intensive” contact correctly.
He has asked the chair of the new Independent Safeguarding Authority to review this and report by December. Critics including the NSPCC have said the scheme could stop normal behaviour such as giving lifts to sports clubs.
Mr Balls stressed that it would not apply where, for example, parents agreed to give friends’ children “a lift to school or to Cubs”. “Nor will it cover instances where parents work with children at school or a youth club on ‘an occasional or one-off basis’.”
Libdem shadow home secretary Chris Huhne released a statement saying:
The safety of children must always be paramount, but when a scheme designed to protect them is criticised from all quarters, including children’s charities, it is clear that it has gone too far.
The Government is in danger of creating a world in which we think every adult who approaches children means to do them harm.
There must be a balance and the system as it stands clearly gets that balance wrong.
The Guardian adds that the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), which had voiced its concerns at the weekend that the scheme jeopardised some “perfectly safe and normal activities”, had now confirmed its support for the scheme.
Update: Matthew Taylor has posted on his blog: ‘Draft letter to local MPs regarding the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006‘
You can use that to write to your MP.
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