Winston Silcott and tabloid rough justice
contribution by Tim Fenton
Tucked away on the Beeb website this week was the news that an arrest has been made in connection with the brutal murder 25 years ago of PC Keith Blakelock, hacked to death at the height of rioting on Tottenham’s Broadwater Farm estate.
Blakelock was a beat bobby in Muswell Hill, but had been drafted in to provide cover for the London Fire Brigade, who had been called out to tackle a fire on the estate. As the rioting intensified, the firefighters withdrew, followed by the police. Blakelock tripped and fell, and was overtaken by a large mob.
A generation ago, the behaviour of the police, and the methods they employed, were rather different to today: put simply, under pressure to solve the murder of one of their own, the Met fitted up three men for the crime: Mark Braithwaite, Engin Raghip and most notoriously Winston Silcott, who was already on bail for murder.
Silcott was effectively convicted on the basis of an unsigned confession, given in the absence of a solicitor.
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ConHome get dire over MyToryTombstone
This one comes straight from the file marked ‘It’s our willy and we’ll wave it if we want to’…
If they can mess with our posters, shouldn’t we have fun with theirs?
On Monday Labour launched this poster and Tory Rascal hit back with this…
Fun???
Having given it a bit of thought, I’ve decided to spare Tory Rascal the humiliation of reposting their desperately unfunny attempt to spoof this Labour poster…
…but if you do happen to have a bit of masochistic streak then the links are already there, so you can go see for yourself.
Not that’s a recommendation, of course.
We are talking here about a party that considers Guido’s nose-picking video to be the height of comedic sophistication, so…
…if you’ve got a strong stomach and can manage to picture Barry Chuckle reciting the contents of Stan Boardman’s Big Book of German Knob Gags then you’ll have already got a clear idea of the level that ConHome are operating at and can safely save yourself a few minutes of your life that you might otherwise have wasted.
Seriously, if you are going to try and take the piss out of a poster then at least make the effort to do it properly…
UPDATE
This is fantastic…
Protest against UBS taking cleaners’ money
As Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) announce quarterly profits of £772 million this week, cleaning workers and their supporters will be demonstrating at their London offices on Friday 12th February.
The demonstration is in protest at attacks on workers’ pay and the dismissal of Alberto Durango, the cleaners’ now former shop-steward.
Alberto and his supporters believe his sacking is directly related to his workplace union organising and campaigning work.
Many of the cleaners – who are members of the Unite trade union and are predominately migrants from West Africa, Latin America and some European countries – were involved in a campaign in 2008 to win the “London Living Wage” at UBS, currently £7.60 per hour.
Despite this victory, most workers still have to work multiple shifts in order to make ends meet. UBS has encouraged a race to the bottom resulting in their cleaning contractors cutting cleaning staff hours – therefore pay – or make redundancies.
This in contrast to UBS’ announcement on 9th February reporting a 34% increase in their bonus pool to £1.72 billion and their decision last year to increase their London banking staff wages by 15% – 20%.
“Maria” has been cleaning desks and toilets at the UBS Lombard Street offices for over 3 years.
She said:
The Company has broken their promise that they would not change our hours or conditions after we won the ‘Justice for Cleaners’ campaign. A year after getting an agreement on the living wage, we are still fighting. I just want to earn enough to be able to spend time with my family during the weekend.
Union representative Chris Ford said
The public are outraged by the continued and undeserved bankers’ bonuses since banks like UBS, Goldman Sachs and Royal Bank of Scotland have been bailed out by public money across the world.What’s the bankers’ excuse for attacking the subsistence wages of the people who wipe their computer screens and clean their toilets?
Friday 12th February’s “Defend Living Wage – Justice for UBS Cleaners” demonstration is at 1pm outside UBS Capital, 100 Liverpool Street, London EC2M 2RH.
Why progressives should back the Robin Hood Tax
contribution by Sargon Nissan
As you’ve probably already seen, yesterday saw the launch of a major campaign to introduce a Robin Hood tax on financial transactions by a host of organisations working on issues of global and domestic poverty, international economic reform and social justice.
The Robin Hood tax would impose a very small fee for every financial transaction between financial institutions. That means it is not a tax on the financial services you or I would use.
It is intended to make those who brought our economy to its knees, massive multi-national financial institutions, pay for the $20,000,000,000,000 (that’s twenty trillion dollars or a third of global GDP) of bailouts, guarantees and quantitative easing they have benefitted from.
Here in the UK we’ve spent more than $ 1 trillion (£635 billion) to bail out our banking sector.
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Racist Daily Mail cartoon equates immigrants with animals
Yesterday the Daily Mail regurgitated an old story about how New Labour had apparently engineered a “secret plot” to encourage immigration into the UK.
It originated last year from an article by the Evening Standard’s Andrew Neather, whose words were twisted out of all context to create “a secret plot”. He later explained the context of the policy paper:
Multiculturalism was not the primary point of the report or the speech. The main goal was to allow in more migrant workers at a point when – hard as it is to imagine now – the booming economy was running up against skills shortages.
On the basis of that regurgitated story yesterday, the Daily Mail today published this cartoon.
The cartoon is here. Yes, it’s really a man marrying a sheep in the name of “multiculturalism”. Because, you know, immigrants are clearly no different to animals.
Fucking disgusting, even by usual Daily Mail standards.
Update: Additional comment from: New Statesman / Left Foot Forward / whatistigerbalm / Enemies of Reason / Operation Black Vote
The worst journalist in Britain.
contribution by BenSix
Yes, yes, I know I said I’d stop hectoring columnists for effect, so I want to make it clear that when I dub Con Coughlin Britain’s worst journalist it’s not theatre, it’s the result of a rigorous and entirely objective assessment of the facts. The Telegraph “reporter” has been merrily regurgitating MI6 and CIA propaganda for years – distorting news on Libya, Iran and, most notoriously, Iraq.
His 45 minutes of shame were enough to land him in ignominy, but no, he’s still here, and he’s turned his hand to blogging…
Why don’t our judges just come clean and sign up with the Taliban?
Better pay?
Perhaps it’s because me lerned friends are too grand to travel by public transport, but the only reason I can think of to explain their egregious behaviour is that they somehow feel immune from the threat posed by Islamist terror groups.
Then, Mr Coughlin, allow me to aid your imagination!
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Tombstone mania! More spoofs of new Tory ad
We here at Liberal Conspiracy thank the lord that the Tories have unleashed another lame poster campaign we can spoof.
Here are some attempts by various bloggers.
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by Alex at Yorkshire Ranter (who has more)
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by Tom at BorisWatch (who has more)
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by Dave Semple at Though Cowards Flinch
by Paul at Bad Conscience (who has more)
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by Spencer Norris
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by Septicisle (who has more)
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Create and send in your own at AndyBarefoot or MyToryTombstone
Boris’s climate and transport strategy fails miserably
The Mayor of London’s climate change mitigation strategy (launched Monday) rightly recognises that to get to his target of a 60% reduction in carbon emissions in London by 2025, government policy and money will have to play a major part.
But he’s scaled back reductions made through his own programmes to the extent that government policy plus mayoral policy still leave a 5m tonne CO2 gap in what needs to be done.
In particular, the Mayor’s energy efficiency programmes rely on a major injection of government funding beyond 2012.
For example:
- He is relying on attracting £200m of public money to take forward his homes energy efficiency programme.
- He is also reliant on national policy to introduce new measures to help householders and businesses finance energy efficiency improvements.
How denialists misrepresented an IPCC scientist
Sir John Houghton, who played a critical role in establishing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC), was roundly condemned after it emerged that he was an apparent advocate of scary propaganda to frighten the public into believing the dangers of global warming.
“Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen,” Sir John was supposed to have said in 1994.
The quotation has since become the iconic smoking gun of the climate sceptic community. The words are the very first to appear in the “manual” of climate denialism written by the journalist and arch-sceptic Christopher Booker.
They get more than a million hits on Google, and are wheeled out almost every time a climate sceptic has a point to make, the last occasion being in a Sunday newspaper article last weekend written by the social anthropologist and climate sceptic Benny Peiser.
The trouble is, Sir John Houghton has never said what he is quoted as saying. The words do not appear in his own book on global warming, first published in 1994, despite statements to the contrary.
In fact, he denies emphatically that he ever said it at any time, either verbally or in writing.
Political blogs and their influence
I haven’t gotten around to starting my long-planned debate on the future of LibCon and unveil some new parts of the site as I promised. Hopefully later this week.
But I wanted to repeat one or two quick points I made the other night at the debate at Westminster Skeptics event on political blogging.
Put aside the false dichotomy that Nick Cohen set up by saying bloggers don’t do any proper investigations. I gave about 6 examples and had plenty more to offer. Nick Cohen talking on a subject he clearly knows little about shock. The real debate is actually about how differently the more popular blogs view their ‘model’.
Here is how I see it.
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