Boris Johnson will kill children
Boris Johnson is threatening to kill some children and worsen the educational outcomes of many more.
The reason for this is straightforward. He intends to remove the western extension zone of the congestion charge, and delay phase three of the low emission zone, which would charge polluting vans more for entering London.
The effects of these will be to increase congestion and emissions of carbon and nitrogen oxide. Such emissions, however, are quite strongly associated with pre-natal health, as a new paper by Janet Currie and Reed Walker demonstrate.
They studied the impact of the introduction of E-Z Pass in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. This system allows cars to travel onto toll roads without stopping to pay manually. They therefore greatly reduce congestion and emissions around the toll plazas.
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Carter-Ruck:0 Guardian: 1… but what next?
It is a happy thought that the finest legal minds at Carter-Ruck solicitors will have spent most of today explaining to the equally well-renumerated suits at Trafigura why their tried and tested writ happy playbook has overnight caused the firm even more reputational damage even than dumping that waste off the Ivory Coast and trying to avoid making any settlement for ages did.
And given how blogosphere versus mainstream media debates so often go around in circles while missing the point, it is good to see us all working together on the side of the angels this time.
So I not sure whether it is Carter-Ruck 0 Guardian 1 (own goal; blogosphere assist) or Blogosphere 1 Trafigura 0 but its pretty clear that they are lucky to get nil.
Now, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger tweets:
Now support BBC Newsnight which is being sued by #Trafigura and #carterRuck over toxic waste expose.
Good thinking! Let’s get those writs flying again. But at least we’re all watching closely now. But, more broadly, wouldn’t it be a good idea to use this enjoyable moment of consciousness-raising to think about how we might sustain our attention and sort out a few deeper issues out too. Others may have a range of ideas. Here are three modest proposals of my own:
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Guardian editorial attacks Tory EU allies
The Guardian newspaper today has published an editorial attacking the Conservative party over its EU allies.
It said the issue would resurface “every time Mr Kaminski gets to his feet in the European parliament,” and would haunt David Cameron “every time the Tories open their mouths about the EU.”
The editorial focuses on Tory allies in Latvia over their alleged commemoration of the Waffen SS and on Mr Kaminski himself – the leader of the new EU grouping.
It goes on to say:
This issue will not die a media death. It will resurface every time Mr Kaminski gets to his feet in the European parliament. It will haunt Mr Cameron every time the Tories open their mouths about the EU, an organisation fashioned to make sure Europe never again repeats the events of 1939-45.
Beyond the events themselves, the arguments the Tories are marshalling in defence, especially in the Latvian case, are troubling. They were conscripts, they were faced with Hobson’s choice, they were only fighting for their country. Sound familiar?
It ends by asking: “Is Holocaust revisionism really part of Mr Cameron’s vision of modern conservatism?”
Not to mention the Lithuanian member of new alliance who has been condemned for supporting deeply homophobic legislation.
Poll: Tory lead down to 10%
Conservative attacks on the state and plans to cut spending may be deeply hurting its support.
The Times reports today:
The Conservatives have failed to get any boost from their party conference last week, according to a new poll for The Times that shows they are relying heavily on support from retired people.
The Populus poll, undertaken over the weekend, reveals that the Tories have slipped one percentage point since mid-September to 40 per cent, while Labour is up three points at 30 per cent. This is the highest Labour rating since April and the smallest gap between the parties since last January.
The poll also showed that 36% in the public sector back the Tories, 41% in the private sector but 49% of the retired.
The morality of the Brighton bombing
The bomb went off in Brighton, just before three o’clock in the morning; the radio alarm went off in some student digs in Leytonstone, only four hours and a few minutes later.
I was still half awake, perhaps reflecting on that day’s lectures, or maybe panicking about some still unfinished essay or simply thinking about cleaning my teeth. But I still recall the shock I felt that day in October 1984, as they newsreader described what had happened at the Grand Hotel while I had been sleeping.
Nobody had yet claimed responsibility. But whoever the perpetrator, it was clear that somebody had tried to wipe out a sizeable proportion of the Conservative Party with a massive improvised explosive device. Ultimately, five people died and 34 were injured, some of them crippled for life.
No rule of thumb singles out which politicians fall to the assassin’s bullet or the madman’s frenzied knife attack. It has happened to Lincoln, Ghandi, Kennedy, Allende and Palme, and it has happened to Dollfuss and Sadat and numerous minor league caudillos and miscellaneous military strongmen. Good guys, bad guys, right, left and centre.
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Why was Radio 1′s BNPgate ignored earlier?
Why did the BBC’s soft BNP interview take so long to become a national story? – asks Roy Greenslade at the Guardian.
A bit of background. Last week or so Radio 1 ran an amazingly soft and pathetic interview with two BNP members. It was helpfully titled ‘Young BNP members explain beliefs‘, but later hurriedly changed to ‘BNP members challenged on beliefs‘, once it became a bit obvious the first headline wouldn’t do them any favours (h/t Sarah).
There was outrage on many blogs over the interview, and the editor of the programme published a pathetic defence of the show which was further taken apart.
Greenslade has, helpfully, a good run-down of how the story slowly evolved until it went all over the press once the Mail on Sunday picked it up and ran a three-page splash. So why didn’t it happen earlier?
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High Court in Contempt of Democracy (Updated)
If you’ve been anywhere near Twitter or any one of numerous high profile British political blogs this morning then you’ll already know that the blogosphere is uproar over the gagging of the Guardian by law firm Carter-Ruck.
Out of deference to Sunny’s blood pressure, I’ll leave it to him to decide exactly how far LibCon will go into the detail of this story, but if you’re at all confused as to what this is all about then try try searching Google or Twitter for the words/hashtags ‘Trafigura’, “Guardian’ and ‘Carter-Ruck’, or just head over to any one of number of established blogs including my own Ministry of Truth, Chicken Yoghurt, Iain Dale, Guido, Mr Eugenides, Devil’s Kitchen, Longrider, Lib Dem Voice, NextLeft, LeftFootForward, Matt Wardman, Spyblog…
…and those are just the one’s I can recall off the top of my head.
What’s got everyone steamed up here is that the injunction served on The Guardian by Carter-Ruck prevents it from reporting the contents of a parliamentary question, tabled yesterday by a member of parliament, as it appear on the order papers published on the parliamentary website.
The injunction, as it stands, prevents The Guardian from:
…identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.
It’s also not allowed to tell us why its been gagged in this fashion, or identify the company that instructed Carter-Ruck to obtain this injunction:
Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.
We’re not even allowed to know exactly who the judge is who handed down this injunction, but for brevity we’ll refer to him/her here as Justice Kafka. continue reading… »
Back through the looking-glass
On 17 March 2003, the British Attorney General published a short statement, in response to a parliamentary question, claiming that the forthcoming invasion of Iraq was legal under international law. This legal opinion was sufficient to head off a major rebellion within the British government against the war.
It was also enough for Sir Admiral Michael Boyce, the Chief of Defence, who had demanded a clear assurance of the war’s legality to ensure military chiefs and their soldiers would not be “put through the mill” at the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Ten days before his opinion was published the Attorney General had sent a longer, private and secret, memorandum to the Prime Minister setting out the legal arguments in more detail.
This was shared with the Foreign Office and Defence Chiefs and appears to have been what alarmed Boyce into demanding the clarification. In it he noted that the three legal grounds for the use of force were “a) self-defence (which may include collective self-defence); b) exceptionally to avert overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe; and c) authorisation by the Security Council acting under Chapter VII of the UN Charter.” He stated that he did not believe that the invasion could be justified on either of the first two grounds, but that an arguable case could be made for it on the third.
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Whatever happened to ‘God will provide’?
When a Religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its Professors are obliged to call for help of the Civil Power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”
The great enlightenment scientist and political philosopher Benjamin Franklin wrote those words in a letter to a friend, Richard Price, in 1780 as part of a commentary on an attempt, by preachers in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, to obtain a stipend from the state that would, had their efforts not failed, have been funded from general taxation.
That Franklin felt compelled to make that particular remark tells us pretty much everything we need to know about the mindset of organised religion. The letter to Richard Price was written only four years on from the Declaration of Independence and a full three years before the American War of Independence reached its conclusion and yet what else do we find other than that, during this tumultuous period of history, the number one priority of the clerical classes of Massachusetts was that of getting their grubby hands on a portion of the public purse.
A little over two hundred years on and things remain much they same as they were in Franklin’s day. Several of the Church of England’s most obscenely ostentatious monuments to medieval vanity are looking a little the worse for wear these days, and its prelates want us to pick up the tab for the repairs to the tune of some £200 million over the next ten years.
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How to make excuses for your nasty friends
So, you’ve gone and formed a new grouping in the European Parliament, forsaking your moderate allies in a desperate attempt to stop haemorrhaging votes to frothing right-wing lunatics in the Home Counties (led by a nonsense-spouting twit).
But there’s a catch! Your new alliance is full of frothing far-right loons, and if this becomes a point of mainstream discussion, people might stop moaning about the guy your grassroots keep smearing as “mental” and start to wonder if they really want you in power after all.
But never fear! There are 5 easy steps that your party can take to make this all go away! Do it right and you’ll be laughing all the way into Downing Street…
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