Immigration and next-door neighbours
The house next to mine is up for rent. But I have no say over who the tenant should be. Is this right?
I’m prompted to ask by Martin Wolf’s argument for immigration controls.
He points out that immigrants add to congestion. But if next door is rented out to a three-car family, I’ll suffer from extra congestion. Why do supporters of immigration controls think I should have no say over this, and yet should be able to control the numbers of people moving into areas I never visit?
Wolf goes on:
Diversity brings social benefits. But it also brings costs. These costs arise from declining trust and erosion of a sense of shared values. Such costs are likely to be particularly high when immigrants congregate in communities that reject some values of the wider community, not least over the role of women in society.
Now, leave aside the dog whistle he’s blowing here.
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Offensive Language?
Its been yet another one of those in weeks in which the use of ‘offensive’ language has been making headlines in both the press and with at least one prominent blogger.
The story that captured the media’s attention was, of course, Pierre Lellouche’s description of the Conservative Party’s attitude towards the European Union:
“They have one line and they just repeat one line. It is a very bizarre sense of autism,”
Curiously that comment failed to generate any real sense of outrage in the one place you might have expected it to – the Daily Mail seems to have been far too preoccupied with laying into Cameron for backing away from a referendum on Europe to indulge in the usual round of sneering at the ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ leaving the field open, for once, to someone with a genuine reason for taking offence, Charlotte Moore, to frame the debate in terms of whether its acceptable to use the term ‘autism’ as a casual insult.
Elsewhere, the Press Complaints Commission decided that its okay to refer Iain Dale as an ‘overtly gay Tory blogger’ in a ruling that leaves me wondering whether Iain’s mistake might have been to complain under clause 12 of the PCC’ Code (discrimination) rather than under clause 1 (accuracy). While Iain makes no secret of his sexual orientation I wouldn’t have said that he was ‘overtly gay’, not in the commonly understood sense of the term, which implies that someone is camping it up to the point that their sexual orientation is blatantly obvious. ‘Honestly’ is, strictly speaking, a synonym of ‘overtly’ but colloquially the two words carry very different connotations in the same way that acknowledging that homosexuality is part of the normal spectrum of human sexual behaviour is a very different thing to promoting homosexuality, despite some people having a marked propensity for conflating the two.
Iain also points the way to another interesting article on language, offence and disability, by Ian Birrell, in which the bone of contention is the use of ‘retard’ and ‘retarded’ as casual insults. That article is, again, written from the perspective of the parent of a child/children with a disability and carries all the more weight for it. continue reading… »
Have we no shame?
I was struck by this article, in which American journalist Penelope Trunk defends her decision, despite an unanticipated global barrage of hate mail, to post the following to her Twitter feed:
“I’m in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there’s a fucked-up three-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.”
That right there, in >140 characters, is possibly the most succinct and effective piece of feminist gonzo journalism I have ever read.
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Why EU President Blair isn’t a bad idea
The Tories have finally found an issue to unite them with the mainstream European right: their shared loathing of Tony Blair.
Angela Merkel was never keen on the idea of President Blair; now Nicolas Sarkozy, who first mooted it, has decided that he, too, would rather have someone whose guts his voters don’t already hate.
Back in blighty, David Cameron is thundering that the British people would find whole notion of Blair 2: Attack of the Clones “completely unacceptable.”
On that, I suspect, he’s probably right. People were sick of Blair three years ago; they’re sick of unelected EU technocrats; and they’re sick of politicians living it large on their money. Bring those things together and you get a perfect storm of mutual contempt between the political classes and everybody else.
Except, I actually think that – from a pro-European perspective – President Blair is a rather neat idea.
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BBC admits excessively plugging TPA
A BBC editor has admitted that a news report excessively plugged the TPA and its sister-organisations without telling readers that the various organisations were related.
In a recent news story the BBC mentioned a report by the TaxPayers Alliance and the Drivers Alliance without, incredibly, pointing out that they were sister organisations.
A reader complained and the Other TaxPayers Alliance has now published the response:
I accept your point that we should have picked up on the link between the two alliances we quoted in our story. But, while the Taxpayers Alliance can be accused of many things, this was a legitimate report, carrying a rebuttal from another voice.
I do not think that all Taxpayers Alliance stories have to be balanced by comments from The Other Taxpayers Alliance. However I have asked staff to avoid reporting stories which are generated solely by the Taxpayers Alliance and, where we do quote them, that we supply some context as to who they are.
Media organisations have been repeatedly criticised for not pointing out that the TPA is a partisan lobby group that has very close links with the Conservative Party.
And yet it is repeatedly cited as an independent think-tank without the context.
Clifford Singer from the Other TaxPayers Alliance says:
So it’s good to hear the BBC will now “supply some context as to who they are” when they quote the TPA. And I won’t quibble with Pat Heery’s remark that “[not] all Taxpayers Alliance stories have to be balanced by comments from The Other Taxpayers Alliance” – if only because our part-time and volunteer nature means we aren’t in a position to rebut everything that needs rebutting.
But the onus remains on the BBC to balance TPA statements with other voices – and in the case of the roads vs rail report, the corporation should have quoted an environmental group like Friends of the Earth rather than just rail lobbyists Greengauge21.
Rally to support Prof. Nutt tomorrow
A rally is being held for Professor David Nutt tomorrow. Called by the group Students for Sensible Drugs Policy UK, they say it is being held in support of evidence based drugs policy.
They say in an email:
We are calling on members of the academic community, parents, young people, students and concerned members of the public to join us at 1pm on Saturday the 7th of November outside Downing Street.
We will be there to show our support for Professor Nutt and to call on the government to back evidence based drugs policy by respecting and upholding the independence of the ACMD.
This protest is not about the legalisation of drugs: It is very important that all protestors attending stick to the message. This is about the government listening to their own advisers.
There is also a petition at: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Back-Prof-Nutt/
Confessions of a leftwing Islamophobe
To describe someone as an ‘Islamophobe’ is effectively to brand them an ugly and virulent racist, which is no small accusation for one leftist to throw at another. Yet that sort of thing seems par for the course on the major British far left blogs.
Lenin’s Tomb, for example, has no problem in carrying an article under the title ‘Tatchell and pink-veiled Islamophobia’, just in case anyone was unaware that the leading green left activist is a bit of a Nancy Boy on the quiet.
Now Socialist Unity has taken up the theme, with a guest post by one Barry Kade, which we must presume to be a pseudonym. His contribution, ‘The intersections between homophobia and Islamophobia’, is pegged on the recent smears against Tatchell by a number of academics, who have accused him of ‘gay imperialism’. The mind boggles.
I could make any number of tasteless jokes at this point, but will restrict myself to the observation that Tatchell’s detractors are probably not insinuating that he has fused the state and finance capital to facilitate the export of surplus cottaging venues. Go back and read some Lenin, guys.
Is this the only solution to Afghanistan?
There’s a distinct air of unreality which must around hang around newspaper offices and also the realms of Whitehall. The reaction to the killing of 5 British soldiers by an Afghan police officer was one of a still aloof nation that regards it as unbelievable that it can be so apparently easy to kill Our Boys, while also perplexed at how “Terry Taliban” isn’t prepared to play by good old fashioned Queensbury rules.
It wasn’t so long ago that IEDs were being described as “new” and “asymmetrical” tactics, as if guerilla warfare was some new concept, and that it was perfectly beastly that the other side weren’t allowing themselves to be shot out in the open like the clearly inferior fighters that they are. How dare they make the greatest, best trained army the world has ever seen look bad?
The problem the attack poses though is obvious: when our policy is to train the Afghan army and police and then get out, or at least that’s what it’s meant to be, that this officer was apparently not a new recruit and had been in the police for three years raises the nightmare that there may be many more “cells” where we have in fact trained those will then turn on us when the chance arises.
This isn’t exactly new either though: the Iraqi police and army were and probably still are riddled with those with their own distinct agendas, and that was in a country where there are only two major sects in conflict with each other.
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Loony Trots on Mars
My mis-reading of the headline of Dave’s piece yesterday brought back some wonderful memories of the maddest moments of the ultra-left. These days, of course, they just write silly manifestos about reforming international law, call for random invasions of foreign countries, attack human rights organisations or give support to reactionary, homophobic, misogynist, antisemites.
But back in the old days Trots had a far grander perspective.
J. Posadas (1912–1981) (occasionally referred to as Juan Posadas), was the pseudonym of Homero Rómulo Cristalli Frasnelli, an Argentine Trotskyist whose personal vision is usually described as Posadism. Posadas became the leader of the Latin America Bureau of the Fourth International and, under his guidance, the movement gained some influence in the region, particularly among Cuban railway workers, Bolivian tin miners and agricultural workers in Brazil.
When the Fourth International split in 1953, Posadas and his followers sided with Michel Pablo and the International Secretariat of the Fourth International. By 1959, however, he and his followers were quarrelling with the leadership of the ISFI accusing them of lacking confidence in the possibility of revolution. They also differed over the issue of nuclear war with Posadas taking the view that “War–Revolution” would “settle the hash of Stalinism and Capitalism” and that nuclear war was inevitable and desirable as a socialist society would rise from the ashes. Posadas and his international followers, who were concentrated in Latin America, split from the ISFI in 1962 prior to its rectification of the 1953 split with the International Committee of the Fourth International.
Posadas wrote that “Nuclear war [equals] revolutionary war. It will damage humanity but it will not – it cannot – destroy the level of consciousness reached by it… Humanity will pass quickly through a nuclear war into a new human society – Socialism.” J. Posadas’ enthusiasm for nuclear war and “worker’s bombs” escalated in the 1970s with the Posadist movement issuing demands that the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China begin a “preventative war” against the United States in order to finish off capitalism.
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Let’s talk about sex
The Government has announced plans today to make sex education in schools compulsory for all pupils between the ages of 15 and 16. Under the new proposals, all schools will have to teach personal, social, health and economic education to pupils from the age of five, but until those pupils reach 15 their parents will retain the right to withdraw them from classes. Staggeringly, considering the age of consent in this country is actually 16, that right currently exists for parents right up until their children hit 19.
Predictably, a good proportion of the commenters over at the Daily Mail have got their knickers in a twist about all this, as has Norman Wells, the director of the Family Education Trust, a group which believes that “behind the plausible-sounding arguments and innocuous-sounding words there is a specific agenda at work to undermine the role of parents and to tear down traditional moral standards” and that “Sex education is an ideological battlefield on which a war is being waged for the hearts and minds of our children.”
And equally as predictably, I wholeheartedly disagree. In fact I think sex education, or PSHE (or is it PSHEE now?) should be compulsory for all pupils, including those still at primary school.
That’s not to say that I think children as young as five should be learning about sex, but I do believe that even the very youngest children have a right to know some basics, like the correct terminology for parts of the human anatomy for instance, or the fact that it’s perfectly normal for both boys and girls to feel emotions and to cry. (I also believe it’s tantamount to neglect that in this day and age a girl of 16 can find herself pregnant because she “only did it the once and everyone told me I couldn’t get pregnant the first time,” as happened to a friend’s daughter.)
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