Shooting at immigrants: an Italian tragedy
Last week the Southern Italian region of Calabria (‘the toe of the boot’) became the theatre of a depressing anti-immigrant witchhunt eerily reminiscent of last century’s Ku Klux Klan violence in the US.
First off, the background. Like in most of Europe, fruit-picking is carried out by immigrants, except that in the South of Italy, those are largely underpaid and illegal – under the ruthless watch of the local mafia (n’drangheta), one of the most powerful groups of organised crime in the country.
Reports suggest that up to twenty thousand illegal immigrants in the region are paid £20 for a 12 or 14-hour working day minus a £5 ‘fee’ handed to their gangmasters for transport and “protection”.
They live in appalling conditions, amassed in rat-infested warehouses with no light and poor sanitation and with nothing to do but work and sleep – effectively becoming profit fodder for the n’drangheta. Every morning they are rounded up together, packed into rusty trucks and driven to orange or olive groves.
Last month, a report by Italian daily la Repubblica highlighted a ticking bomb, comparing the migrants’ living conditions to concentration camps. “About seven hundred of them live jam-packed into a derelict paper mill”, wrote reporter Carlo Ciavoni.
continue reading… »
Torygraph angry on police cuts; won’t mention Boris
The Telegraph newspaper thundered on Sunday:
At least 12 of the 43 forces in England and Wales are reducing the number of full-time officers they employ, despite a pledge by the Government to protect law and order from the impact of public sector cuts.
This year alone will see a net decline of nearly 900 officers. Many of the affected forces will turn to special constables – who are unpaid volunteers – to plug the gaps.
Forces which will see officer numbers decline include Greater Manchester Police, where the total will fall by 300 this year according to a leaked document obtained by The Sunday Telegraph, and Britain’s largest force, the Metropolitan Police, which will shed 189 officers this year and a further 445 over the following two years.
The newspaper mentions the Met Police, but fails to mention London’s occasional Mayor Boris Johnson’s role in all this.
In fact, London politics blogger Adam Bienkov has pointed out that Boris was responsible for removing hundreds of police officers.
The policy was announced quietly as far back as December 2008 but the right-wing press has almost entirely failed to mention it.
Curiously, a Telegraph columnist who gets paid £250,000 a year and goes by the name of Boris Johnson was omitted from the story.
via Adam Bienkov
Snow offers a case for big government
‘Big government’ is often attacked as political rhetoric. In the abstract, we all like to be agin it.
Yet, on every specific issue, from child protection to the collapse of the banks, most of the public calls are very often for government to do more.
Especially when it snows.
I would suppose that a ‘big government’ approach to heavy snowfall would place a good deal of emphasis on local Councils as having the taxpayer-financed responsibility for clearing the roads, and letting business and life carry on as far as possible, and paying particular attention to vital emergency services.
Mightn’t a ‘social responsibility’ approach suggest we should rally around and sort it out for ourselves?
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How can Rod Liddle be stopped becoming Indy editor?
Since the Guardian revealed on Friday afternoon that Rod Liddle was seen as Alexander Lebedev’s main choice as editor, there has been a flurry of emails and tweets in horror.
It’s not absolutely certain Lebedev will take over the Indy, and neither is it certain Liddle will be appointed. But more than one writer/journalist at the newspaper has been in touch with me saying it is a serious prospect and they are very worried.
A Facebook group entitled ‘If Rod Liddle becomes editor of The Independent, I will not buy it again‘ has started – and accumulated over 1,400 followers in a short space of time. I tweeted the same on Friday – I’d never buy it again nor link to it if Liddle becomes editor.
The Indy is Britain’s only other progressive/liberal/left newspaper. Rod Liddle is the anti-thesis of all that (quotes by Liddle at the end).
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Westminster: All Women Shortlists ‘the only way’
Mandatory quotas for the number of female parliamentary candidates could be set unless there is a significant increase in the number of women MPs at the next election.
A cross-party review concludes that legislation may become necessary to force political parties to field more female candidates. The Speaker’s Conference also called for the law to be changed to allow parties to exclude white candidates when drawing up shortlists.
The conference, chaired by John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons, was commissioned by Gordon Brown to investigate the under-representation in the House of women, ethnic minorities and the disabled.
The report says: “If the political parties fail to make significant progress on women’s representation at the 2010 general election, Parliament should give serious consideration to the introduction of prescriptive quotas, ensuring that all political parties adopt some form of equality guarantee in time for the following general election.”
The committee also calls for the equivalent of all-women shortlists to be introduced for black and ethnic minority candidates. It acknowledged that all-BME (black and minority ethnic) shortlists were “controversial”.
Liddle hope for the Indy
There can’t be many people with any affection for the Independent who are happy about the idea of Rod Liddle becoming editor, however premature the rumours might be.
But there probably aren’t very many people left with much affection for the Indy at all, because the brand seems to have specialised in weird and reputation-squandering reversals. Its Sunday version campaigns for the legalisation of cannabis, but then decides that skunk is actually a deadly menace.
It doesn’t support the Iraq war, but then recruits the Observer editor who put the made-up case for war on his front page.
Appropriately, Liddle was indirectly behind one of the other great journalistic screw-ups of the Iraq war – as editor of Today, he recruited Andrew Gilligan, who both found an internal source to blow the whistle on the exaggerations and bad intelligence in the “45 minutes” dossier, and then ruined the story’s credibility by mishandling his quotes and revealing his source.
continue reading… »
Nuclear job creation numbers fail to live up to the hype
Back in September when he announced the UK’s nuclear ‘renaissance’, Gordon Brown’s government insisted it would create 100,000 new jobs. ‘Building a new generation of nuclear power stations will create thousands of jobs in manufacturing in the UK,’ said Derek Simpson, the joint leader of Unite. That figure has since fallen to by 10% to 90,000 but that’s still a big promise.
Thanks to French nuclear company AREVA, however, we’re now getting an idea of how those numbers break down and the spin around nuclear job creation is revealed. AREVA’s EPR reactor is one of two designs the UK government is looking at building and is also being considered in the US…
…a new U.S. EPR™ would create up to 11,000 direct and indirect jobs during component manufacturing (including AREVA’s Newport News heavy component facility in Virginia) and plant construction. On top if this, construction and operation would also create more than 400 permanent jobs and spur billion of dollars in investment in the local economy.
The UK government wants ten new reactors, so that would create 110,000 ‘direct and indirect’ jobs according to AREVA’s numbers, wouldn’t it? Well, it might. That number is in the same ballpark as the UK government’s figures of 90,000-100,000 but it assumes that all ten reactors are built at the same time. continue reading… »
Unions are propping up the Labour Party
George Eaton at the New Statesman illustrates how dependent the Labour Party has become on money from the unions.
As donations from the rich have dried up, the party has become increasingly dependent on trade union money (see graph).
In the first nine months of 2009, trade unions accounted for 72 per cent of the total £10.9m in donations to Labour, up from 52 per cent in 2008. Back in 1994, when Tony Blair became Labour leader, trade unions accounted for just a third of the party’s annual income.
While such dependency is an issue for New Labour, it is also an issue for the trade unions who will increasingly ask whether it is worth their while to prop up the Labour Party when it is doing little to support workers’ rights, or build a broad membership base.
Meanwhile, the unions may begin to question whether they are getting value for money. The tightest squeeze on public spending since the 1970s and a cap on public-sector pay rises may lead members to challenge union heads over donations.
All the full lol-plot pics (32!), with new ‘Mandelkitteh’
Thanks to all of you who made these pics and sent them in (or tweeted them). I think this joke has run its course now, although ‘Mandelkitteh’ seems to have become a favourite for most of you.
Now doubt we’ll be seeing more of him in the future.
In the meantime here is the full collection. If you create any more please just link them from the comments section.
(made by Political Scrapbook)
How not to do schadenfreude
I’ve made a concious effort to stay out of the recent spate of blogspats with Iain Dale, despite the obvious temptation to respond to the bullshit he posted after getting ribbed on Twitter about his inability to cope with a bit of GCSE-level statistics. What I can’t let pass without comment is, however, is this rather snide and ill-considered commentary on the emerging story of Northern Ireland MP, MLA and councillor, Iris Robinson and her husband and Northern Ireland First Minister, Peter Robinson.
To summarise the back story here, shortly before the turn of the new year Iris Robinson announced, somewhat surprisingly, that she would be quitting politics on health grounds, citing long-term health problems including an ongoing ‘battle; with severe depression. It’s since emerged that, in late 2008/early 2009, Robinson had a brief extra-marital affair with a 19 year old man and allegedly used her position as councillor to pull off a couple of dubious-looking looking financial transactions with property developers in order to raise the funds necessary to set her lover up in his own business – a café – only for the relationship to rapidly sour shortly afterwards. Having already allegedly committed several breaches of the councillor’s code of conduct, she then compounded her error by failing to declare any of these transactions on the register of interest at both Stormont and Westminster.
According to BBC Northern Ireland’s flagship ‘Spotlight’ current affairs programme, which has a pretty solid track record of hard-hitting investigative journalism, things came to head last March, at which point her husband, Peter Robinson, became aware of both the affair and his wife’s apparent financial misconduct. At around this time, Iris Robinson disappeared from public life for several months and has now admitted that she attempted to take her own life after her husband was told of her affair.
As for Peter Robinson, its alleged that he too broke the ministerial code of conduct by failing to report his wife’s alleged misconduct to the relevant parliamentary authorities on becoming aware of it, last year, although in mitigation he does appear to have pushed his wife to clean up some of the mess she created by repaying the £50,000 she obtained from a couple of property developers.
Neither of the Robinsons could be considered to be attractive political figures. continue reading… »
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» Revealed: govt to restrict abortion counselling despite Nadine Dorries vote
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» Violence in the office
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