Who scooped the Hoon – Hewitt plot?
Who actually broke the story that Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon were planning to rebel against Gordon Brown? Sure, it’s not a big issue but I’m interested in it as a matter of record.
Rumours last night that Tessa Jowell was planning to leave were of course unfounded. So go to the real names first?
It did look like the first person to have tweeted it was Andrew Sparrow at the Guardian. But it doesn’t list the exact time.
Guido Fawkes claims he was not long after that, but actually he was third in line.
By 12:17pm James Macintyre at the New Statesman had published the story on his blog, before the Guardian did.
The New Statesman tweeted it immediately too.
So even if Andrew tweeted it first, he wrote the story after. James on the other hand wrote the story first and then tweeted it.
So it looks like the New Statesman’s James Macintyre got that scoop, and Guido’s inference that he was second is wrong.
LIVE! Pictures from the Labour plot! (updated)
Please send in your own pics as well! You can make them from here.
(Now with 18 pics!)
(made by @lukewaterfield)
Hewitt, Hoon and hubris
(image via @HopiSen)
What Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon have done today strikes me as one of the most obvious putsch bids since the events in Moscow in August 1991. Ms Hewitt’s insistence on the World at One that ‘this is not an attempted coup’ carries about as much weight as a similar denial from Gennady Yanayev.
Frankly, I am only surprised that she did not seize control of the state broadcaster, in order to declare that Gordon Brown is standing down ‘on grounds of health’ and that Britain is henceforth under martial law. That seems to be the way these things usually go.
Obviously I do not count myself among Brown’s strongest political supporters. Even so, as a Labour Party member, I am dismayed at the endless succession of half-arsed efforts to topple the best prime minister Britain has got.
continue reading… »
Zac Goldsmith: Dense About Science
It looks like being a long, drawn-out general election campaign and that mean plenty of opportunities for politicians to demonstrate their scientific illiteracy and statistical ineptitude.
This is a field in which, as might readily be expected, the Tories have already taken an early lead courtesy of Cameron’s Greenwash Guru and ex-Non-Dom, Zac Goldsmith, who’s clearly failed to take to heart the first rule of writing fact-check articles; make absolutely sure your own facts are correct before you publish:
Every few months, an organisation called Sense About Science (SAS) issues a pamphlet that makes fun of celebrities getting their science wrong. It is full of what it regards to be false assertions by celebrities about the benefits of homeopathy and so on, and ends with an offer by the organisation to act as a fact-checking service.
Actually, Sense About Science’s Science for Celebrities series is an annual publication but that’s the least of Zac’s problems when compared to the abject intellectual dishonesty and general ineptitude of the rest of his commentary. continue reading… »
How immigrants created a national dish
contribution by Left Outside
Up until the 19th century we were not a particularly piscivorious nation.
In the United Kingdom, fish and chips became a cheap food popular among the working classes with the rapid development of trawl fishing in the North Sea in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1860 The first fish and chip shop was opened in London by Jewish proprietor Joseph Malin who married together “fish fried in the Jewish fashion” with chips.
Consisting on a diet of mostly meat and one veg – two if you were lucky – the idea that a national dish – the national dish – would be fried fish and fried potatoes would be confusing to our 19th century forebears.
But then some Jews came along from Eastern Europe, fleeing terror or just seeking a better life. With their funny ways, keeping mostly to themselves, making cabinets and clothes and eating odd un-British things like fish, they didn’t do much harm.
This fish eating slowly dispersed throughout the nation and became more and more popular via market stalls and street hawkers until ventures like our Mr Malin’s became profitable.
It is no exaggeration to say that the marvellously, almost quintessentially, English dish fish and chips is an immigrant dish. With the disdain modern migrants are held in its a little hard to believe, but we owe a lot of what Gordon Brown calls “Britishness” to immigrants.
Funny old world, eh?
Iceland is ripping us off
Just for the avoidance of doubt:
1) The democratically elected Icelandic government, under EU/EFTA financial regulation equivalence rules, agreed long before the crisis even began that it would guarantee compensation of the first EUR20887 of deposit to retail depositors in Icelandic banks from other EU/EFTA countries.
2) The Icelandic banks, with explicit permission from the democratically elected Icelandic government (as part of the economic boom that vastly enriched Icelanders for many years), actively marketed their savings accounts to depositors from other EU/EFTA countries.
3) The Icelandic banks then went bust and lost their depositors’ money.
4) This means that, unequivocally and in every possible sense, the Icelandic government is responsible for paying the first EUR20887 of compensation to retail depositors in Icelandic banks from other EU/EFTA countries. They agreed to take on that debt, and retail depositors in the Icelandic banks made the deposits on the basis that the Icelandic government weren’t a bunch of ropey shysters who’d refuse to pay debt that they owed.
5) For understandable reasons of domestic harmony, the governments of the UK and Netherlands (where the majority of Iceland’s victims were located) agreed to pay the compensation themselves, and subsequently chase the Icelandic government for the money it owed.
6) Today’s populist refusal by Iceland’s president to pay the UK and Netherlands government the US$5bn it owes as a result, despite the extremely generous payment terms they’d been offered, represents every single Icelandic person nicking more than US$10,000 from British and Dutch taxpayers.
If that’s democracy, screw it.
Update: Dsquared in the comments has a good summary of the Iceland situation:
The basic story here is that a small and wildly self-regarding Nordic nation, with a history of electing right-wing governments on the back of get-rich quick schemes, did so. Then that right-wing government proceeded to deal with its creditors in an amazingly stupid and dishonest manner because it wanted to pretend that something close to boom levels of consumption could be sustained. Then it all fell apart and a left-wing government was elected and started trying to clean up the mess. Then the elected President (from the same party as said right-wing government) decided to veto the solution. And this is, in some way, Gordon Brown’s fault.
He’s also written the whole, erm, saga up as a morality play. Well worth a read.
How many new Quangos has Cameron announced?
David Cameron promised a ‘bonfire of the Quangos’ last year when he attacked Labour for making people “feel so powerless”.
This week on Liberal Conspiracy we’re launching Cameron’s Quango Watch, given the party has finally started announcing some policies.
“We will introduce a [supermarket] ombudsman to curb abuses of power which undermine our farmers and act against the long-term interest of consumers,” Nick Herbert, shadow minister for farming and environment told a farming conference here.
Sounds like a good idea, but it’s still a new quango.
To make sure the NHS is funded on the basis of clinical need, not political expediency, we will create an independent NHS board to allocate resources to different parts of the country and make access to the NHS more equal. (Page
Only yesterday the Conservatives were arguing for more political interference just before they argued against it.
So that’s two new quangos so far. Please let us know if you spot any more.
Update: New Quango no. 3
“George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, outlined plans on Tuesday to keep a future Tory government on a strict path to cutting the £178bn deficit, including the creation of a new three-person “budget responsibility committee” to police his plans… The Tory plan would see the creation of an office of budget responsibility, producing medium-term borrowing forecasts, making official recommendations for fiscal policy and assessing the UK’s fiscal sustainability over 50 years.” – FT
(via Rosie in the comments)
Sun forced into crushing apology over Prof. Nutt
Back in November the Sun decided that it was time to resort to the old tabloid trick of attacking someone by association when they couldn’t lay a finger on the target himself personally.
David Nutt, a senior adviser on drugs to the ACMD, had just been defenestrated by Alan Johnson for daring to argue again that cannabis isn’t as dangerous as either the government claims or its classification suggests.
So naturally it was time to go scouting around his children’s social networking pages to see if they could find any pay dirt.
The result, an article which accused his son Stephen of partaking in cannabis because he was smoking what was clearly a roll-up and not a normal, honest, cigarette, his daughter Lydia of drinking underage, and the by no means hypocritical sneering at his eldest son for appearing naked in the snow in Sweden, ended up being removed with days of it appearing.
Yesterday the Press Complaints Commission published Stephen Nutt’s letter of complaint on their website (h/t Tabloid Watch):
The complaint was resolved when the newspaper removed the article from the website, undertook not to repeat the story and published the following letter:
FURTHER to your article about photographs of me on my Facebook site, (November 14) I would like to make clear the pictures were not posted by me and while I had been drinking I was smoking a rolled-up cigarette which did not contain cannabis as the article insinuated. My younger sister Lydia was not intoxicated, so was not drinking under age.
My older brother lives in Sweden where it is custom to use a sauna followed by a ‘romp’ in the snow in winter. He was neither drunk nor under the influence of intoxicants. Innocuous photographs were taken out of context in an attempt to discredit my father’s work.
Which is about as comprehensive and wounding a clarification as ever gets published in the Sun.
The article was so obviously in breach of the PCC’s code on privacy, not to mention accuracy, that it should never have been published in the first place though; why then should the paper get away without making anything approaching an apology, only having to print a clarification buried away on the letters page?
Reasons why Tory family tax-breaks won’t work
(image by Beau Bo D’Or)
The Conservative Party is debating whether marriages should be ‘recognised in the tax system‘ as a means to encourage marriage and give further tax breaks to middle-class parents.
The Financial Times’ economics editor Chris Giles outlines several reasons why these won’t work:
Simplicity. Transferable tax allowance further complicate the income tax system.
Independence. Recognising marriage in the tax system undermines a woman’s (or a man’s) ability to keep her income separate from that of her spouse. Women’s legitimate irritation at being treated by the state as an appendage to their husbands was one of the main reasons the tax system became increasingly blind to marriage under the last Conservative government in the 1980s and 1990s.Misunderstanding history. It wasn’t nutty progressives who got rid of the married man’s allowance and undermined the married couples’ allowance in the tax system. It was a combination of those awful lefties (Nigel Lawson, John Major, Norman Lamont and Kenneth Clarke) who were Conservative chancellors between 1983 and 1997. Gordon Brown took the last bit of the married couples allowance and called it the children’s tax allowance in 2001. It now has a new and horrible name: ‘the family element of the child tax credit’ and it is assessed on joint family income.
Incoherence 1. George Osborne wants to get rid of the family element of the child tax credit – ie the one part of the tax system that is a remnant of the old married man’s allowance. In his 2009 Party Conference speech, he said: “We can no longer justify paying means-tested tax credits to families with incomes over £50,000.” This passage came just six paragraphs after he said: “That is why we are going to support marriage in the tax and benefit system.”
Incoherence 2. The standard argument for a marriage tax break goes like this. Children of married parents have better and more stable lives, therefore marriage is good, therefore the tax system should support marriage. While the correlation is true, there is no evidence that proves the causality runs in this direction. Only the most bone-headed reject the possibility that stable, well-meaning couples are likely both to marry and to raise children well. This wilful confusion of correlation with causation is really worrying in politicians that seek to govern.
Incoherence 3. Is the world really a better place if a couple who would have chosen not to marry decide to tie the knot because they would pay a little less tax? It strikes me as perhaps the most morally dubious reason possible for marriage.
The full blog post with more reasons is here.
[via Paul Sagar]
Why Goldman Sachs isn’t going anywhere
The usual suspects are in full-on froth mode about the non-news on Goldman Sachs allegedly moving to somewhere godawful to escape a small, one-off tax on salaries.
Obviously, like nearly all right-wing frothers nearly all the time, they’re talking complete and utter bollocks.
US culture site the Awl nails it on why:
Goldman Sachs “is understood to be considering its options in the wake of the UK’s windfall tax on bankers’ bonuses, a new 50pc top income tax rate, and increased banking regulations” is hilarious, and it is also a dead giveaway that the Telegraph uses the phrasing “is understood” to introduce this idea. Let’s see: here’s an incredibly-secretive, super-private financial institution of which it can be “understood” that they’re going directly to the papers as the first volley in a bargaining plan. But: hilarious! They’re going to pretend that they’re willing to leave London? They’re going to offshore the London office? To where? Glamorous downtown Sofia? Belfast? Tallinn or Toronto?
Think it through, boys. Nobody who works in that office will leave London! What’s the point of being rich if you have to live somewhere crappy? It just doesn’t work like that. You can near-shore and off-shore the jobs no one wants to Salt Lake City or wherever—but you can’t move the income producers to a town where they can’t get a cab and a fat steak. If you give Goldman Sachs anything at all to stay put, it means you both are huge morons, just like New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg was when GS pretended it was going to move from downtown Manhattan to more expensive quarters in midtown, and they wouldn’t even have done that. Ever.
Word.
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