The break-up of Bosnia
They found another mass grave outside Srebrenica this week. But that’s not a particularly unusual event; some 70 such makeshift cemeteries have come to light since the massacre of thousands of Muslim men and boys by Serb irredentists in July 1995.
The Balkans is famously a part of the world where history impacts on the present, and in that context, the 14 years that have elapsed since the Dayton Accords stilled a conflict that claimed more than 100,000 lives will count for little.
But such a convoluted structure as that concocted by the peace deal was never likely to last. Increasingly there is talk that the centre cannot hold, and that post-Dayton Bosnia is just about to fall apart.
Fighters and Believers
At their conference, the Labour Party showed a video of some of Labour’s past achievements. After a grassroots campaign by ordinary members, they decided to re-show it as their Party Political Broadcast.
There’s been dispute about some of the claims in the broadcast doing the rounds of right-wing blogs – there is a ‘no holds barred fisking’ here, though my personal view is that the criticisms don’t stand up to scrutiny.
Would be interested in what people here think of the broadcast, you can see it here. Does it just appeal to Labour activists or to other liberal-lefties? Is this kind of grassroots campaigning something we can learn from? Why on earth did they choose to call it ‘fighters and believers’? And are critics right that Labour should have used this video instead?
The PCC still want to regulate blogs (the Baroness responds)
In response to Unity’s letter and petition posted earlier this week on LibCon, the PCC’s new chair Baroness Peta Buscombe has already responded to me by email. I publish the full letter below and a response below that.
It’s worth emphasising that at this point we haven’t yet sent off the letter. You can still sign it on the earlier thread and make suggestions.
* * * * * *
18th November 2009
Dear Mr Hundal
Thank you for your letter about my apparent proposal to regulate the blogosphere. I know you are intending to send it to me on Friday, but – given that it is already being commented on – I thought I’d respond right away. It is useful to have the chance to clarify what I was saying to Ian Burrell.
continue reading… »
The Queen’s speech: political ventriloquism
I am not a fan of the political ventriloquism of how the Queen’s speech works.
It is a good thing to have some pomp, ceremony and history associated with the opening of Parliament. But a better approach would be for the Queen to be able to speak as Head of State about the value of Parliament and the democratic process, with her government’s substantive programme of legislation then set out by the Prime Minister and government ministers whose words these are.
The opening line today “my government’s overriding priority is to ensure sustained growth to deliver a fair and prosperous economy for families and businesses” – captures how the speech is inevitably caught awkwardly between jarring effects if it gets any closer to the language of a political manifesto (“my government will govern for the many not, the few”) and being unable to say anything at all about why the measures are being introduced, so that the Queen must simply read out a staccato shopping list of legislation.
Still, it is very good to hear the Queen set out that her government will push on to “enshrine in law its commitment to abolish child poverty by 2020”.
That is a reminder too that the legislative ambitions set out in the Queen’s speech need to be combined with choices on priorities for spending and taxation in the pre-budget report and budget to show how to values of fairness can best combine continued commitments to tackle poverty and reduce inequality with the commitment to halve the current budget deficit across the next Parliament.
continue reading… »
Atheist Bus launches new ad campaign
The organisers of the extremely popular Atheist Bus ads launched the second part to their campaign today.
While the first ad campaign stated: ‘There’s probably no god. So stop worrying and enjoy your life’.
The new one states: ‘Please don’t label me. Let me grow up and choose for myself’.
On Guardian CIF Ariane Sherine explained the reasoning behind the new campaign:
However, rather than using adverts to try and campaign politically, we thought it would be more beneficial to try and change the current public perception that it is acceptable to label children with a religion. As Richard Dawkins states, “Nobody would seriously describe a tiny child as a ‘Marxist child’ or an ‘Anarchist child’ or a ‘Post-modernist child’.”
“Yet children are routinely labelled with the religion of their parents. We need to encourage people to think carefully before labelling any child too young to know their own opinions, and our adverts will help to do that.”
…
We hope the advert’s message will encourage the government, media and general public to see children as individuals, free to make their own choices as soon as they are old enough to fully understand what these choices mean, and that they will think twice before describing children in terms of their parents’ religion in the future.
The adverts will go across billboards and buses from 20th November to coincide with Universal Children’s Day.
The campaign has a Facebook page here.
Tory MEP hosts ‘climate sceptics’ conference
The Conservative MEP Roger Helmer is leading the Tory charge on global warming denialism this week by hosting a ‘climate sceptics’ conference in Brussels.
It is titled: ‘Have Humans Changed the Climate?’
The Left Foot Forward blog, which highlighted the conference, adds:
The climate sceptics conference comes in the same week as the warnings from the UN’s Global Carbon Project study of a six-degree rise in the Earth’s temperature this century, which could lead to a climate not seen for 100 million years, extinctising almost all life and reducing humanity to a few struggling groups living near the poles
This statement will, no doubt, concern David Cameron who said in his conference speech, “The dangers of climate change are stark and very real. If we don’t act now, and act quickly, we could face disaster.”
But despite Conservative Party high-command attempts to signal that they understand the dangers of global warming, it seems most of the party is still rabidly sticking to the denialism line.
A recent survey of the top Tory blogs by Next Left found that all of them were global warming ‘sceptics’.
Another survey by Lay Scientist blog found similar levels of ignorance among (some) Tory, (most) UKIP and (all) BNP MEPs.
Roger Helmer previously said he did not believe that homophobia existed and was a “propaganda device”.
He has also been criticised for claiming to be libertarian while having very narrow view of what that means.
Update: More has emerged on speakers at the conference.
Political Scrapbook reports that the star of Tory climate change conference was paid to deny effects of passive smoking
[Fred] Singer may well have built his reputation as an atmospheric physicist but by the 1990s he was working for a front group run by a PR company and funded by tobacco giant Philip Morris. The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition was established in 1993 to hang the label of “junk science” round research on the effects of passive smoking – including a Royal College of Physicians study showing that 17,000 under fives were hospitalised each year in the UK by second hand smoke.
…
As for the link between smoking and cancer, his involvement with a campaign claiming that the relationship between passive smoking and cancer was one of ”The Top Five Environmental Myths” speaks for itself.
Over at Taking Out the Trash, Phil Chamberlain points out that one of the ‘Dr’ has his main qualification from a: School of Sport and Exercise Sciences.
The conference also lists the Telegraph columnist and well known climate change denier James Delingpole as a ‘Dr’, though he can’t find any record of what that relates to.
More on the other attendees can be found at SourceWatch: Anthony Watts, Ross McKitrick, Fred Goldberg and Benny Peiser
A Straight White Men’s Officer at SOAS..?
London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) was established in 1916 as the School of Oriental Studies, with the specific remit of training future colonial administrators in the language and culture of the people they were destined to rule.
Nearly a century later, at this institution founded on racist, patriarchal principles, straight white males account for less than 20 percent of the SOAS student body – a fact that has prompted calls for them to be recognised as a minority group by the students’ union, and granted their own exclusive welfare strategy. On Thursday 19th November, as part of their Diversity Week, SOAS will debate whether or not to appoint a ‘Straight White Men’s Officer’.
University life often comes as a shock to the privileged sons of this country. Higher education is the time in their lives when young men are most likely to experience minority status; white men may dominate the world of work, top-level management, politics, administration, the arts, culture, the military and the media, but as undergraduates they make up only 36 percent of the student population. White males are also less likely to graduate with a first or upper second class degree and find immediate employment than their female classmates, where by contrast, less than thirty years ago, white males appeared to dominate every mixed-gender campus. At university, unlike in other environments, straight, white young men cannot pretend that they represent the standard for normal humanity – instead, they are required to confront their roles as members of a privileged minority on the world stage. Nowhere is this sea-change more evident than at SOAS. continue reading… »
These are The Tories at Ground Zero
There’s a revelatory short post at the Adam Smith Institute yesterday. Here’s the most salient part:
You will never streamline the public sector by Treasury ministers bullying departments over money. Instead, you need a complete review of what government does, what it has to do, what it can do better, and what can be done better by other people and by the public. All departments need to buy into that, and it needs a reform, not a finance minister in charge if everyone is going to trust the process and be a part of it. After all, the process may find that spending in some areas should be increased, even if other departments are found to be doing a lot of pointless stuff.
In other words, the influential Adam Smith Institute wants to see an immediate post-election push towards savage public spending reductions in every single government department.
In one respect, of course, none of this is new. We know that the Conservative will cut public services, even if they are not as explicit as the Adam Smith Institute about the range of cuts.
continue reading… »
UK Twitterers more left & liberal than average
Often seen as little more than a harmless waste of time, the much-hyped online social network site Twitter is increasingly being used as a tool by liberal and left-wing political campaigners. Twitter users are among the most liberal groups in Britain, a new national poll of 2000+ people by Prospect magazine and pollsters YouGov reveals.
The poll tested Britain’s 5.5m Twitter users and compared them to the rest of the country — revealing that British Twitterers actually have a strongly liberal and civil libertarian bias. This is in contrast to the popular view that David Cameron’s Conservatives and their blogging supporters are the most adept online force in politics.
The poll shows that while 57 per cent of Britons think greater police powers to tackle terrorism are more important than protecting civil liberties, less than half of Twitter users agree. Fifty-six per cent of the public agree that “the greatest victims of discrimination in Britain these days are often ordinary white men,” compared to only 45 per cent of Twitter users.
More on the Prospect magazine site
Blogging and PCC Regulation – A Collective Response
As you may have either seen on the Indy’s website, or picked up on from Mark’s commentary on her speech to the Society of Editors, Baroness Buscombe, the new Chair of the Press Complaints Commission, has been making noises about extending the PCC’s remit to cover blogs and blogging.
In the past, when this kind of thing has been mooted, the typical response has been one of lots of blog-shouting of the ‘you’ll have to take my blog out of my cold dead hands’ variety. This time around I thought we might take a different approach and write directly to the PCC setting out one of the key practical reasons why PCC regulation would be a bad idea – which of, us, after all, wants to be seen to working to the ethical standards of the MSM when, with a few exceptions, these are so much lower than our own.
So, with that firmly in mind, I’ve drafted a collective response to the Baroness’s suggestion for you all to chew over, one that any active bloggers can sign-up to by leaving your name (real or online) and details of the your blog (title/link) in comments.
Comments on the text and any suggestions for amendments or additional matters to include are, of course, welcome – this is a blog not a newspaper after all.
At the end of this week, I’ll transfer any sign-ups to the letter and get it shipped off to the PCC, DCMS and Commons CMS committee.
UPDATE – Oh, and don’t pay too much attention to the time-stamp on this post – it was actually posted at 11:49am on 17th November but will be time-shifted, over next few days to, keep it visible in the left-hand side bar on the front page, so don’t worry that a lot of comments might appear to pre-date the post.
<— Letter Starts Here —>
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