Public support hugely for Mail workers over mgmt
A poll for Newsnight found that twice as many people sympathise with postal workers rather than the Royal Mail management in the postal dispute.
Media coverage however has been sympathetic towards Royal Mail management or companies affected by the strike.
But over half of those surveyed (50%) sympathised with the postal workers and the unions as opposed to the Royal Mail management (25%).
The poll carried out by ComRes for BBC Two’s Newsnight.
The vast majority of people also think that Royal Mail should not be privatised (68%), with only 22% thinking that it should be.
You can download details from the opinion poll here.
March against Islamists organisers release video
The organiser of the march, Shaaz Mahboob, has also written an article about it.
Spot the difference…
The Daily Mail‘s support of the BNP policies is descending into parody. Sod subtle machinations, spotting their strategy is as easy as piss.
Step 1. Its top columnists write entire tirades about the immigrants swamping the country, “ZaNu Labour” inflicting social engineering upon Britain, the nasty Muslims, the welfare state and all the rest.
Step 2. As suspicions of inflammatory content begin to surface, any of the above mentioned opinionators writes a token word or two against “the racist BNP”- better if garnished with adjectives such as vile, ogre and odious. Because: how can you say that the Daily Mail is racist when they’ve just badmouthed the BNP?
Step 3. See Step 1, only more virulent, with three quarters of the paper’s content resembling Nick Griffin’s shopping list.
Look no further than today’s paper for evidence. While the entire country saluted the way Question Time exposed the fascists’ appalling ideas, Nick Griffin complained that:
- the BBC is “hard left“;
- Question Time was “a lynch mob“;
- The programme should have been filmed elsewhere as London is “not my country anymore” and [the audience was] “dominated by ethnic minorities“.
We’re marching against Islamists
contribution by Shaaz Mahboob
I was a little shocked – and delighted – to find Inayat Bunglawala announcing that he is going to organise a counter-demonstration to Anjem Choudary‘s group Islam4UK, which is planning to call for the implementation of their version of sharia law at a rally on Saturday 31 October.
My organisation, British Muslims for Secular Democracy (BMSD), had been working closely with likeminded British Muslim and non-Muslim democrats in planning a demonstration to coincide with Anjem’s anti-democracy march and protest against freedom.
Last week a Facebook group was also set up to float the idea and ignite people’s interest. We had planned to make a formal announcement on Monday, but it makes sense, in the circumstances, to bring that announcement forward.
Our counter-demonstration is based on our belief in, and commitment to, those liberal values that define the British state, including legal and constitutional equality for all, equal rights for women and minorities, and religious freedom, including the right to be free of faith. We are turning out to defend all of these virtues of a secular democracy that Islam4UK so despises and daydream of taking away from the British public.
continue reading… »
Using the Blair Babes as an excuse
I’ve already commented frequently about the fact of gender inequality in our society, but also of the fact most people just don’t see it.
But it’s always good to have up-to-date examples.
Take Amanda Platell, writing in the Daily Mail, for example:
“All the more so when Labour’s own experiment with female shortlists proved to be so disastrous. Has Cameron learned nothing from the catastrophe that was Blair’s Babes – the female intake of the 1997 election? Remember Ruth Kelly? Jacqui Smith? Caroline Flint? As with so many Labour ladies, they turned out to be stunningly incompetent or ill-suited for high office. It was a national embarrassment.”
As Sunder at Next Left points out (h/t owed for the above), neither Kelly, Smith nor Flint were actually selected via women-only shortlists. So Platell’s article commits a basic error of fact, if her argument is that all-women shortlists returned particular examples of bad MPs.
Imagine the logic, applied to men:
“All the more when the United Kingdom’s centuries-old practice of either only – or overwhelmingly (in recent years) – selecting men to be MPs has proved to be so disastrous. Has Cameron learned nothing from the catastrophe that was the last 400 years of Parliamentary supremacy? Remember Anthony Eden? Neil Hamilton? David Amess? As with so many Tory gentlemen, they turned out to be stunningly incompetent or ill-suited for high office. It was a national embarrassment.”
Did Griffin lie about his father’s ‘war’ record?
On last night’s Question Time, Nick Griffin twice made the claim that his father, former Conservative councillor Edgar Griffin, had served in the RAF during World War II.
Griffin’s exact comments were:
Finally my father was in the RAF during the second World War while Mr Straw’s father was in prison for refusing to fight Adolf Hitler.
“Mr Straw was attacking me and I’ve been relentlessly attacked over the last few days, my father was in the RAF during the second World War, I am not a Nazi. I never have been.”
However, yesterday’s Suffolk Evening Star carried an interview with Griffin’s father in which its stated that:
Mr Griffin, who moved to Suffolk shortly after Nick was born in Hertfordshire in 1959, joined the Conservative Party when he returned from two years national service with the RAF in India.
Although the reintroduction of conscription into the armed forces was reintroduced, in 1939, by the National Service (Armed Forces) Act service during World War II, and in any armed conflict, is always referred to as either ‘War Service’ or ‘Military Service’.
The term ‘National Service’ did not come into use until 1948, three years after the end of World War II and ceased to be used, at all, with the end of conscription in 1960.
If, as the Evening Star’s article suggests, Griffin’s father undertook National Service, rather than War Service or Military Service, then he cannot have served in the RAF in World War II.
UPDATE – THE PLOT THICKENS
First things first – we can rule out the suggestion that Griffin’s father served in the RAF in India under, specifically, National Service (i.e. later than 1947)
The one concrete fact that I have been able to establish is Edgar Griffin was in the UK on 13 May 1947, the date on which he was invested a Freemason in Barnet.
Given that RAF AHQ India was disbanded on 15 August 1947, this would preclude Edgar Griffin serving in India during the period of National Service, which would indicate that he was in India at some point during the period from 1945-47.
As far as wartime RAF activity in India, by the beginning of 1945 the majority of RAF India squadrons were operating from forward bases in Burma, but for two squadrons based on Cox’s Bazaar and one base at Kumira, near Chittagong in what is, today Bangladesh.
What we also have, via Cath in comments, is a 2001 article from the Independent which gives this description of Edgar Griffin’s time in the RAF.
Edgar Griffin served in the dying days of the British Raj in India, in charge of 20 local aircraft mechanics. “I got on very well with them,” he says. “The Indian ladies also used to invite us to tea and were most kind to us.” How, he asks, could he possibly be racist with such a splendid record of racial integration?
On the basis of that description, if Griffin was in India with the RAF before the end of WWII (August 1945) then its highly unlikely that he was stationed with any of the RAF squadrons that played an active part in the final stages of the Burma Campaign.
The brief picture that the Indy paints is, however, consistent with the ‘Indianisation’ of those elements of RAF AHQ India that were due to be transferred to the Royal Indian Air Force on India becoming an independent state in August 1947., during which British personnel trained their Indian counterparts to take over control of the airforce.
Now it gets very interesting because this helps us to date Griffin’s service in the RAF in India specifically to 1946 – before that things remain uncertain – which could place Griffin’s father into some very interesting historical events.
Churchill, as is well known, was implacably opposed to Indian independence and even after the 1945 General Election, the new Attlee government resisted moves towards independence.
This stance began to change in January 1946, when RAF servicemen stationed in India mutinied – they actually went on strike – in protest at the slow pace of demobilisation and the use of British shipping facilities for transporting American G.I.s, although papers released later, under the 30 year rule indicate that the government were deliberately keeping troops in India to control civil unrest should this break out in connection with the independence movement.
This mutiny/strike helped to precipitate the Bombay Mutiny of February 1946 which, in turn, led to the British Cabinet Mission 0f 1946 and to an agreement that India would become an independent state in 1947.
The Indianisation of the facilities and aircraft of RAF AHQ India could therefore not have started until May 1946.
That leaves a couple of sizeable but as yet unanswered questions.
Edgar Griffin was born in 1922, and would have been 17 years old at the start of WWII and ordinarily would have been eligible for conscription at the age of 18 unless he declared himself a conscientious objector, as Jack Straw’s father did, entered a reserved occupation – and many conscientious objectors took that route out of military service to avoid the stigma of being openly labelled a ‘conshie’ – became a clergyman, or was deemed medically or mentally unfit for service.
By 1942, when he would have been 21, he would have been eligible not only for conscription but for a posting overseas.
Yet, it would appear that Edgar Griffin may no have entered military service until 1945 – so what exactly was he doing during the other five years of the war when he could easily have been called up?
Then there’s business of his actual service history, where Griffin claims to have served for two years but was also definitely back in England by May 1947 and could, therefore, have left India no later than April 1947 in order to make the four week journey, by sea, via the Suez canal.
If we take this two years as accurate, then Edgar Griffin must have been in India by April 1945 at the latest (which means that he did manage to serve in the RAF for all of four months of WWII) but also that he must have been stationed in India in January 1946, during the time of the RAF mutiny, which began at an base near Karachi but, according to a Channel 4 Secret History documentary broadcast in 1996, spread to 60 bases, including bases in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Burma and Singapore – the Air Ministry, however, only ever admitted to 22 bases having gone on strike.
So was Edgar Griffin, perhaps, one of the RAF mutineers?
Right now, we can’t be sure because we lack access to the kind of military records that would enable us to fill in the blanks although what we can say is that Griffin’s my dad was in the RAF jibe at Jack Straw looks likely to be considerably less impressive, once the facts are known, than Nick Griffin would like us to believe.
Edgar Griffin was certainly not a pilot, does not appear to have seen service anywhere near the front-line, even if he was stationed in India while the Burma campaign was still under way and may even have taken part in the second largest mutiny in the history of the British Armed Forces, one topped only by the Indian rebellion of 1857.
NATIONAL SERVICE
To reiterate the point about the date on which National Service began the British Armed Force and National Service website notes that:
The requirement for a peacetime force larger than that made possible by purely voluntary recruitment led the post-war Labour Government to move towards establishing a national service system in 1946. The National Service Act was passed in July 1947 after considerable opposition from some Labour and Liberal politicians. The Act was to come into force at the beginning of 1949. The Act initially required a period of one year to be served in the Armed Forces followed by a liability for a possible five years in the Reserve. Financial crises, the advent of the Cold War and the Malaya emergency led to the National Service Amendment Act in December 1948, increasing the period of service to 18 months. This enabled National Servicemen to be used more efficiently and effectively, particularly overseas.
The demands of the Korean War (1950-1953) led to the length of service being extended to two years, surpassing even the Service Chiefs’ original wishes. Liability to further service in the Reserve was reduced with each of these extensions. The period of service remained at two years until the end of National Service.
So the earliest date at which Griffin’s father could have joined the RAF under National Service, and served two years, was around 1950.
HIV – AIDS denialism at the Spectator
The new editor of Spectator magazine, Fraser Nelson has a blog-post on the magazine’s website titled ‘Questioning the Aids consensus‘.
Like a true right-wing maverick who questions the consensus and asks why people are so “vociferous” in the discussion:
Is it legitimate to discuss the strength of the link between HIV and Aids? It’s one of these hugely emotive subjects, with a fairly strong and vociferous lobby saying that any open discussion is deplorable and tantamount to Aids denialism. Whenever any debate hits this level, I get deeply suspicious.
Which is why the below clip – from a documentary which The Spectator Events division is screening next week, called House of Numbers – aroused my interest. The film picked up awards at various American film festivals, but has since been denounced as backing Aids denialism. Yet the footage shows Luc Montagnier – who won a Nobel prize last year for his work on Aids – saying that many HIV infections can be shrugged off by a healthy immune system.
He finishes with: “let’s have your thoughts”, and promptly gets eviscerated in the comments.
continue reading… »
Griffin Question Time mashup video
How much will the BNP vote drop by?
For many years, people have argued that if only the BNP were taken on and debated against in public, they would be exposed and their support would collapse. We can now start to do a bit of an evaluation of how this approach is working.
In 2007, a team of debating champions, by their own fantastically modest account, defeated Nick Griffin in debate in the Oxford Union by forcing him to speak “the angry, racist language of demogoguery”. And last night, 8 million people watched him debate on Question Time, in a performance which every single newspaper reported on their front page today was a complete disaster for him.
According to the theory, this should lead to a fall in support for the BNP. Admittedly, there is weak evidence so far for this, in that the BNP got nearly 1 million votes a year and a bit after their arguments were “demolished” in the Oxford Union. But that only reached a tiny audience, and presumably the effect of Question Time will be much greater.
So would anyone like to venture a prediction about how we could measure the damage that this has done to the BNP?
continue reading… »
SuperFreakonomics – How to lose friends and irritate people
If there really is no such thing as bad publicity then Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner will surely be laughing all the way to the bank as sales of their new book ‘SuperFreakonomics’, the follow-up to their 2005 bestseller ‘Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything‘, head through the ceiling.
In a little under a fortnight since the book’s release, Levitt and Dubner have already walked straight into one major shitstorm by, seemingly tweaking the noses of a prominent environmental blogger and a well-known environmental advocacy group with their chapter on climate change.
And if Anna North’s article at Jezebel.com is anything to go by, their chapter on the economics of prostitution looks set to have a few feminists chewing the furniture as well, in very short order.
Controversy sells, even if its misplaced, which seems to at least partially the case here as neither chapter looks to be anything like as contentious as some of the book’s more vocal critics are trying to make out.
So what exactly, have Levitt and Dubner done to piss these people off.
Climate Change
Taking the climate change chapter first [pdf no longer available], and with the caveat that I’ve not yet had time to exhaustively examine all the claimed examples of misrepresentation and/or technical errors cited by its critics, what Levitt and Dubner have done is poke a stick at what is by far the largest and most intractable problem facing climate scientists working on global warming; their inability to make anything that remotely approaches a reliable prediction of its likely impact on the global climate. 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
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