Posters worth a thousand words
As is well-known enough, I have no sense of humour to speak of. Indeed, Cllr Bob Piper contends that I am a “dour humourless git who can’t take a joke”. And he’s in the same party so I must be a right prattish killjoy.
So I’m perhaps not the best person to judge whether the Conservatives’ new foray into humorous anti-Labour posters (pictured) hits the spot, or not.
But as a self-important, pseudo-intellectual twat of a leftie analyst, I am in an excellent position to point out the following key aspect to the new campaign.
continue reading… »
Green Party conference kicks off today
The Green Party’s Spring Conference kicks off today at the Arts Depot in North London.
Today’s events will include debates on Low Wages (hosted by London AM Darren Johnson) as well as: ‘Co-operatives and the Green Party’, climate change and ‘Green Party Women’ (hosted by Natalie Bennett, Green Party PPC for Holborn and St Pancras).
Tomorrow, the conference will be addressed by Caroline Lucas MEP in the morning.
It will also hold a session on civil liberties and blogging / new media (hosted by Jim Jepps) later in the day.
Jim Jepps adds on his blog:
There’s some interesting stuff on the agenda, including an over-haul of our health policy, the beginnings of our science and technology review, blogging workshop and technical constitutional reforms of which I’m probably a thousand times more interested in that you are.
A full time-table of the conference is here.
You can also follow the debate on Twitter at the #gpconf hashtag.
Japan joins global call for Robin Hood tax
A Japanese Finance Minister has called for the country to impose a tax on financial transactions to curb market volatility, also dubbed the ‘Robin Hood tax’.
Naoki Minezaki said market volatility threatened economic growth.
Bloomberg reports him saying::
“We’re seeing speculative funds flowing carelessly around the world — one day in stocks and real estate other times in oil and grains — and this is destroying the lives of ordinary people,” Minezaki wrote in an e-mail to supporters and reporters on Feb. 15. “We have to implement the Tobin Tax as part of international solidarity,” he said, adding that the levy could also boost revenue.
Japan is now fourth in the seven richest countries on the planet to endorse the Tobin, a.k.a. Robin Hood tax. It joins the leaders of Britain, France and Germany.
Owen Tudor at the ToUChstone blog welcomed the news, adding:
Four out of seven. Er, that’s a majority isn’t it? Of course, the US administration is yet to be convinced, but we are getting closer to the tipping point.For those who don’t like decisions being made by the richest countries in the world, the G7 does actually have traction on this issue, because most financial transactions do take place in those richest countries.
Over 70% of the value of global transactions are in just three: Britain, Germany and the USA. And there isn’t actually a mechanism to introduce a global tax, so in reality what a global tax means is the co-ordinated introduction of taxes by the countries where the financial transactions take place.
Japan’s move is likely to put pressure on the US to move in the same direction.
Resignations, rivalry and the future of the left.
Radical politics, like romance, inevitably disappoints. It has become a cliché that liberal infighting gets in the way of liberal action, but this week has been a flashpoint for the British left, struggling to organise itself in the face of an upcoming election which may well bring greater gains for its enemies on the right and the far-right than the country has seen for a generation.
Fifty core members of provocative far-left group The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) resigned their membership yesterday in a dramatic public walkout that has sent shockwaves through the British far-left.
The catalyst for the walkout was the resignation of party stalwart and recent Mayoral candidate Lindsey German after members attempted to block her appearance at a local Stop The War meeting, amid ferocious internal debates.
continue reading… »
Liberals/Media to blame for Catholic child abuse
A senior German Bishop has responded to the latest child abuse scandal to hit the Catholic Church by suggesting to a local daily newspaper that the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s and 70s was at fault for abuse by priests.
According to German news website ‘The Local‘, Walter Mixa, the Bishop of Augsberg, told the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung that “The so-called sexual revolution, in which some especially progressive moral critics supported the legalisation of sexual contact between adults and children, is certainly not innocent,” before adding that the media was also at fault.
The article from which these comments are taken can be viewed in slightly mangled English via Google Translate, which gives this version of the Bishop’s remarks
Bishop Mixa emphasized in these “heinous crime” was the “so-called sexual revolution, certainly not innocent.”We have seen in recent decades, especially in the media, an increasing sexualisation of the public, which also promotes abnormal sexual preference rather than limited,” said Mixa.”Especially progressive morality critics had” even the legalization of sexual contact between adults and minors required.
If anyone come up with better translation then the original German language version of this article is here and please do feel free to post your efforts in comments.
The Bishop was commenting on a scandal that engulfed an elite Catholic school in Berlin at the beginning of the year, which kicked off, in January after a former priest who’d taught at the school between 1975 and 1983 admitted to forcing boys into having sex.
Canisius College, which is operated by the Jesuits, has since admitted that systematic sexual abuse did take place during this period and that it undertaken by at least two priests, although one is reported to have denied having had any part in such activities.
In keeping with previous scandals of this kind, these admissions have opened up a sizeable can of worms for the Catholic Church. It’s now thought that more than a hundred former pupils of Canisius have either contacted lawyers, or the school itself, with complaints of sexual abuse, while the Jesuits have issued an apology and admitted to covering up case of abuse at schools in Berlin, Hamburg, St. Blasien, Goettingen and Hildesheim.
The worldwide Jesuit order has also confirmed the existence of similar cases in Spain and Chile.
Earlier this month, Der Spiegel published a report which suggested that at least 10 church employees in Germany are currently facing accusations of sexual abuse and that at least 94 clerics and church laymen have been suspected of abuse since 1995, only 30 of which were prosecuted due to legal time constraints on pursuing cases.
Clearly, the Bishop is hoping that the timing of these cases, which date from the mid to late 1970s and early eighties, will lend some credibility to his efforts to blame clerical involvement in acts of schoolboy buggery on the media and on the liberalisation of wider society.
This is, however, entirely at odds with the evidence of abuse that emerged as a result of similar scandals in both the US and Irish Republic.
In the US, the John Jay report found evidence of sexual abuse within the American Catholic Church dating back as far as 1950, whiles Ireland’s Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA), which published its finding only last year, uncovered evidence of systematic abuse in Ireland’s state funded but church-run reformatory and industrial schools stretching back to the 1930s. CICA found that sexual abuse, ranging from improper touching and fondling to rape with violence, was endemic in boys’ institutions through the entire period covered by the inquiry, although not so in girls’ schools, where the main risks of sexual abuse came from predatory male employees/visitors and from outside placements.
More importantly, in terms of Bishop Mixa’s comments, much of the evidence, from Ireland in particular, dates from a time long before the ‘swinging sixties’ and the so-called ‘sexual revolution’, leaving him- and other members of his church – desperately short of a cop out.
Tory blogger ditches Cam because of his ‘confusion’
Letters From A Tory may have to soon find a new name for his blog.
In a blog post yesterday he starts off by saying:
As a conservative voter approaching a General Election, I would like to think that my confidence in the Conservative Party would be fairly secure by now. What we have seen over the past few weeks, though, is a painful combination of naivety, incompetence, stupidity and inappropriateness that has dragged the party down in the polls and brought a hung parliament sharply into focus. Furthermore, the individual incidents bode extremely badly for a future Conservative government.
Oh dear. And it doesn’t get any better from there on. He lists four reasons.
The first is ‘naivety’ – not realising that the posters would be mercilessly mocked and parodied across the web.
LFAT is one of the few Tories to actually admit the depth of Tory incompetence, because he goes on to list two more reasons:
Second, incompetence. I would have thought that with your vast teams of research and media chumps that getting statistics right would not have been that difficult. Unfortunately, Chris Grayling was publicly rebuked by the head of the UK Statistics Authority Sir Michael Scholar for using non-comparable crime statistics to suggest rises in violent crime which Scholar warned were likely to damage public trust in official statistics. Yesterday the embarrassment was cranked up a couple of notches at the launch of your ’Two Nations’ report, which tried to show a rise in inequalities under the current government. It claimed – three times – that women under 18 are “three times more likely to fall pregnant in the most deprived areas compared to the least deprived areas. In the most deprived areas 54% are likely to fall pregnant before the age of 18, compared to just 19% in the least deprived areas”, when in actual fact the rate of conception was an average of 5.4% in the most deprived areas. A decimal point doesn’t take up much ink, but it still left your party’s credibility in a mess.
Third, stupidity. Marriage tax breaks, tackling the deficit, your ‘emergency budget’ within 50 days of taking office – it’s all fallen apart because you couldn’t hold your nerve. Of all the things to show the electorate a few weeks before a General Election, dithering and a lack of confidence in your own policies should not have been top of the list. Ironically, your decision to soften your line on spending cuts – which was done to placate swing voters – has made these voters very nervous about your flip-flopping and has probably done far more damage than any spending cuts rhetoric ever could. If you can’t even keep a simple promise like making tackling the deficit your number one priority, why should swing voters rush over to the blue side? For a potential PM to be so easily swayed from your direction of travel is extremely alarming.
He also criticises the sordid affair around Joanne Cash in Westminster North.
He ends by saying:
Even so, when my party membership next comes up for renewal, I suspect that my direct debit may well slip by the wayside.
Let the recriminations begin!
Read the whole post here. It’s very damning.
Meanwhile, other Tory bloggers are still getting angry over nasty Tweets.
James Purnell’s confusion on markets
It’s common for some people to have excessive faith in the power of markets. It’s also common for others to be excessively hostile to them.
Congratulations, then, to James Purnell – because, in a fantastic example of triangulation, he has committed both these errors. He says:
Markets are a wonderful tool: innovative, wealth-generating and elite-busting. But sometimes they don’t serve society. We should bring back the old usury laws so no one need fall victim to loan sharks. We should campaign for a living wage so that no one who works hard ends up in poverty.
These are silly proposals. If we outlaw usury, we won’t abolish loan sharks, but encourage them. Banning usury means that legitimate lenders won’t lend to bad risks because they‘ll not be able to charge a high enough interest rate to cover the risk of default. Such people will therefore turn, as Joe did, to loan sharks. If you criminalize sub-prime lending, criminals will become sub-prime lenders.
continue reading… »
Tories and gay rights: championing equality?
‘Conservatives champion gay equality,’ according to the title of a speech Tory frontbencher Nick Herbert will deliver in Washington today. If he was being entirely honest, he would add the words ‘but only after Labour actually delivered it and didn’t leave us any choice in the matter’.
Of course nobody can credibly argue that David Cameron and his Notting Hill Set coterie personally harbour the type of crude homophobia that was dominant during the hey-day of Thatcherism.
But it remains a fact that the Tories are the party of Section 28 and Labour are the party of equalised age of consent, civil partnership, gay adoption rights and a prohibition on anti-gay discrimination in the provision of goods and services. And don’t forget that it was Labour that decriminalised homosexual acts between consenting adults in private in the first place.
In short, every single advance for gay rights in this country has occurred under a Labour government. Labour has set the agenda for decade after decade, often in the face of concerted opposition from the Tory right.
The Spectator’s Brown Shirt Poster Gaffe
It’s not just Conservative Central Office who’re having a few graphic design problems at the moment.
This is the actual poster that The Spectator are using to promote an upcoming education conference called ‘The Schools Revolution’ at which the Tories Education spokesman, Michael Gove, is the headline act:
Does it remind you of anything? Like, say, this…?
Or perhaps this…?
Maybe this makes things a bit more explicit…?
Memo to the Spectator’s design department… not the best choice of colour scheme there guys, D’oh!
Channel 4 fails to reveal origins of NF racist
Last week, on Friday evening (Feb 12) at prime time, Channel 4 broadcast a programme that was little more than a half-hour party political broadcast for the National Front.
“Young, Angry and White” purported to give insight into the political ideas of a disaffected young man, let down by the established political parties, who was considering joining the BNP.
Yet the programme failed to reveal that “Kieren” – the subject of the documentary – is the national organiser for the youth wing of the extreme right National Front.
“Young, Angry and White” showed the trained and experienced young racist Kieren in an extraordinarily positive light, allowing him unchallenged to insist on the “racial purity” of his girlfriend, accuse his friend of “genocide” because he had a black girlfriend and was therefore guilty of “racial mixing”, and to introduce his masked, far-right associates, who spoke about the “filth flooding through our streets” – non-white people.
The programme failed to inform viewers about the political nature of the National Front, its history of racial motivated violence, and the criminal convictions of its past and present leaders, and its close links to the BNP.
It failed to confront Kieren with any of these facts about either the National Front or the BNP. It failed to investigate Kieren’s activity as a leading National Front member.
For confirmation of Kieren’s status, see the National Front’s website (NSFW).
David Crouch, press officer for the campaign Expose the BNP, said:
A pattern is emerging of public service broadcasters presenting soft interviews with leading far-right extremists. The latest example after a similar fiasco on Radio 1′s Newsbeat. This is very poor journalism – Channel 4 should be ashamed.
The Channel 4 shambles comes as media workers prepare to launch a new campaign to challenge weak coverage of the BNP.
Watch “Young, Angry and White” here:
Expose the BNP launch rally:
Tuesday February 23, 7pm
Amnesty International Human Rights Centre, EC2A 3EA
www.exposethebnp.com
From a press release
You can read articles through the front page, via Twitter or RSS feed. You can also get them by email and through our Facebook group.
» The real agenda behind Telegraph’s abortion investigation
» How Scotland Yard monitors prying bloggers and journalists
» When disabled people want to work – employers can hold the back
» Revealed: the reality behind Workfare and why it doesn’t work
» Job snob? No, I’ve got the T-shirt
» Why country-by-country reporting matters to our wellbeing
» If Unions want to become stronger, they need to modernise
» Why work “reforms” in Spain are a warning for workers across Europe
» Five things you need to know about the NHS bill
» Bigger. Fatter. Gypsier. More Racist.
» Laziness levels in Britain getting lazier, wails government
|
62 Comments 15 Comments 23 Comments 8 Comments 24 Comments 16 Comments 16 Comments 83 Comments 203 Comments 85 Comments |
|
LATEST COMMENTS » Chaise Guevara posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » TimJ posted on How Scotland Yard monitors prying bloggers and journalists » Shatterface posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » Cylux posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » pagar posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » pjt posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » nothingspecial posted on Workfare - what does the evidence show? » Chaise Guevara posted on How Scotland Yard monitors prying bloggers and journalists » Patron Press - #P2 posted on Workfare - what does the evidence show? » karl meyer posted on Workfare - what does the evidence show? » BevR posted on Workfare - what does the evidence show? » bob woods posted on Workfare - what does the evidence show? » Alex Young posted on Workfare - what does the evidence show? » malcolm posted on Workfare - what does the evidence show? » BevR posted on Workfare - what does the evidence show? |
