Hate Crime Vigil: Friday 30th Oct
In response to this recent attack, the rise in the number of homophobic attacks in London, and previous hate attacks, a vigil has been organised in Trafalgar Square for this Friday 30th October 2009, 8pm.
The event is being organised by 17-24-30. Their aim for the vigil is to show the world that this anti-sociable behaviour is unacceptable.
Dr Petra Boynton adds:
Many of you will have read about the horrific attack on Ian Baynham in Trafalgar Square and how this is now treated as a murder following the decision to turn off life support. Any attack is horrific but this took place in Trafalgar Square which one would imagine to be one of the safest places in London.
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An additional vigil will be held in Liverpool on Sunday 1 November for James Parks, a trainee police officer aged 22, currently in hospital in a serious condition following a homophobic attack at the weekend.
You can join the 17-24-30 group on Facebook. More details about the event are here.
Joe Glenton: ordinary soldiers should be heard
It took a bollocking administered in person by Billy Bragg to teach me the lesson, but these days I know better than to make the automatic assumption that anyone serving in the armed forces is necessarily a braindead reactionary.
At a small business meeting in London attended by some prominent lefties about a decade or so ago, I did make a contribution to that general effect. The man who famously bought himself out of the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars and went on to become a fully fledged rock star angrily turned on me and rightly put me in my sorry little ultraleftist place.
Attitudes such as those I expressed then are deeply rooted on the far left. In my case, they go back to my teenage years as a member of Youth CND in the late seventies. Some of the lads I was at school with signed up to the services, and in the small town in which I lived, I used to bump into them in the pubs when they were back home on leave.
continue reading… »
Top Tory blogs all global warming deniers
None of the top ten Conservative bloggers believes the theory that man-made global warming is an established fact; all ten reject David Cameron’s view that the issue should be an urgent priority if the party were in government.
Party leader David Cameron has said that “the dangers of climate change are stark and very real. If we don’t act now, and act quickly, we could face disaster”.
The Tory blogs could hardly disagree more. The scale of the Tory netroots revolt over climate change is revealed by Next Left’s survey of the climate change views of this year’s top 10 Conservative blogs, as identified by Total Politics magazine’s blog awards poll.
Indeed, Next Left can now declare that the unlikely winner of ‘greenest top Tory blogger’ is John Redwood MP, who had never previously been mistaken for Zac Goldsmith. Redwood’s combines his own scepticism with the argument that it would be prudent to take some steps to adapt to possible negative consequences, while welcoming the benefits of global warming too. This would appear to mark Redwood out as a deep green when compared to his fellow Tory top bloggers.
Don’t believe your eyes
Two different comments on different subjects reveal a common error in thinking about social affairs.
First, in response to my claim that much of the gender pay gap is due to women having children, Toto says: “you didn't consult any childless women before writing this, did you?” You’re damn right, I didn’t.
Second, a commenter on a post by DK says: Both commenters make the same mistake – they think we can trust the evidence of our own eyes. We can’t.
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The Kaminski questions Cameron didn’t answer
David Cameron yesterday said of the man the Conservatives have chosen to lead their new European grouping, Michal Kaminski:
“I see this as a totally politically-driven campaign and particular nonsense.
“In terms of Michal Kaminski, who I have met, he is not a homophobe, he’s not a racist, he’s not an anti-semite. When he came to the Conservative conference the one event I know of he had lunch with the Israeli ambassador.
But there remain many serious and contested questions about Kaminski.
Does David Cameron think Michal Kaminski told the truth about his political history when questioned about it before and after becoming leader of the ECR? If not, why not?
Following our earlier post, here is a recap on just some of the claims made since becoming leader of the ECR which have fallen apart.
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Spectator tries to airbrush out AIDS denialism screening
Yesterday I revealed that Spectator magazine had hastily cancelled its screening of the film House of Numbers.
In the spirit of openness and transparency that they constantly demand of others, the Spectator abruptly deleted the event page off their website (see the Google cache) and remained very quiet about it on their blog.
No mention of the cancelled debate and no explanation. Complete silence. Although you can still watch the video on the ‘AIDS debate’ on their website.
Last night I emailed its editor Fraser Nelson with the following questions:
Do you regret hosting the screening of the film?
Should the Spectator really be giving space to films that have been contradicted with so much evidence? Isn’t this reminiscent of the MMR stuff? I’m just curious as to what prompted you guys to screen the film.
No response at all.
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Karadzic and Blair: morally equivalent
THE trial started yesterday, but somehow Radovan Karadzic doesn’t fancy standing in the dock before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, and is boycotting the proceedings.
Little wonder. The former Bosnian Serb leader faces 11 charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia. The most serious of them are the massacre of more than 7,000 Muslims in Srebrenica, and the three-and-a-half year siege of Sarajevo that resulted in more than 10,000 deaths.
Nor is there any serious question as to his guilt. Karadzic put his name to the now infamous de facto mass death warrant by the innocuous name of Directive 7, a document which explicitly commissions mass murder.
Comparisons to Hitler – advanced by Clinton era diplomat Richard Holbrooke, the main architect of the Dayton Accords – are ludicrously overblown, of course. But Karadzic’s crimes surely rank alongside those of such famous paper-shuffling predecessors such as Adolf Eichmann.
Did BNP’ers game YouGov to inflate support?
The British National Party is well-known for urging supporters to go to messageboards, blogs and BBC HaveYourSay pages to fight their corner.
But are they doing the same with online polling companies to artificially inflate their own support?
One of the admins at the BNP website recently set up a page on its social network to encourage people to game YouGov. It is titled: ‘YOUGOV – Let’s increase BNP’s support in polls, and raise money at the same time!.‘ (link to BNP site).
The admin British Patriot writes:
Despite recently getting two MEPs elected our support in Yougov polls has recently dropped to 3% (just 1% in Scotland).
One of the main reasons people don’t vote for us is because they believe we are a wasted vote, and it’s online polls such as Yougov that give them this impression!If EVERY BNP supporter joined Yougov, we could put our support on a par with the Lib Dems and possibly higher!
On top of this we could actually raise money for the Party via Yougov as you actually get paid for participating in surveys.
I have already been sent a £50 cheque by Yougov which I donated to the party.Imagine if every BNP supporter signed up to Yougov and every few weeks, raised £50 which was donated to the party.
The party could potentially get £100,000’s per year via Yougov!!!
The page mentions the rise in the BNP’s support in the recent YouGov poll. To date it has over 650 members.
The Lancaster Unity blog points out:
Apart from the fact that BNP members are being encouraged to obtain money by false pretenses which will then be donated to the party, the party is also deliberately loading the YouGov member base with numerous BNP members, thus skewing any survey or poll result in, where relevant, the BNP’s favou
Several members on BNP forums claim to have joined YouGov after hearing of the group.
We’ve contacted YouGov for a statement on this issue.
Update: YouGov have released a statement in response to our concerns, saying the impact is likely to be negligible.
Trojan Horse of Tory localism: open letter to John Denham MP
Localism is such a hard thing to argue against. Either you’re genuinely in favour of devolving power and resources, or you can’t really say you’re not.
That’s why the Tories are using it as cover for their plans to introduce, ‘within weeks of coming to power’, says Cameron, sweeping legislation that will allow councils to sweep away a raft of commitments to their residents, and start to compete gleefully with each other for which one can deliver the LEAST services.
I’ve been banging on about this for a bit. Fortunately, John Denham MP has heard my faint call, and we may still be saved.
In that spirit, I have written to John, and this is what I’ve said.
continue reading… »
They hate our prosperity
The Legatum Prosperity Index is a free market think tank which ranks 104 countries according to nine different measures of prosperity.
There are some predictable results – four of the top five countries are in Scandinavia, and Zimbabwe is last, just behind Sudan. But it is interesting to see what they say about the UK.
The Daily Mail writes on a daily basis about a UK where business is stifled by regulation, the economy is burdened by a bloated public sector, we are run by a corrupt politicial elite, terrorists and violent criminals menace the law abiding public, the traditional family is under assault, ancient freedoms have been taken away, our universities teach ‘mickey mouse degrees’ and our health service is inefficient.
The research suggests that every single one of these are right-wing myths.
continue reading… »
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» The real agenda behind Telegraph’s abortion investigation
» How Scotland Yard monitors prying bloggers and journalists
» When disabled people want to work – employers can hold the back
» Revealed: the reality behind Workfare and why it doesn’t work
» Job snob? No, I’ve got the T-shirt
» Why country-by-country reporting matters to our wellbeing
» If Unions want to become stronger, they need to modernise
» Why work “reforms” in Spain are a warning for workers across Europe
» Five things you need to know about the NHS bill
» Bigger. Fatter. Gypsier. More Racist.
» Laziness levels in Britain getting lazier, wails government
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