Student activism growing

by Guest    
March 9, 2010 at 10:45 am

Guest post by Adam Ramsay

Last week, around 7000 students voted in their union elections at Southampton. This broke the UK student union turnout record set at Edinburgh last year. Not to be outdone, Edinburgh students came back on Thursday night, and re-broke the record. Around 7,200 cast ballots – four times as many as eight years ago.

This trend has continued in the other campus elections that have taken place so far this term: both Reading and Queens Belfast have broken their own records.

This time last year, I wrote a piece for The Herald pointing out how university after university had smashed turnout records, how Britain had seen the first wave of lecture theatre occupations in 30 years, how students were fast becoming the backbone of many of Britain’s progressive movements: how politicians should take notice. continue reading… »

Hannan: most people disagree with me on tax

by Sunder Katwala    
March 9, 2010 at 10:30 am

He is the leading advocate of the British Tea Party vanguard, yet Daniel Hannan MEP may be slipping sensibly down the Palin-o-Meter scale this morning.

Hannan makes a series of partisan points in his paean of praise to Eric Pickles, but he also offers a rare acknowledgement from the right that wanting lower spending and less government as a matter of principle is a minority pursuit, quietly admitting that “the country” can not be convinced on that basis.

If the Conservatives win the next election – and I remain convinced that they will – there will need to be drastic action to restore order and sanity to our public finances. In order to win that argument, ministers will need to convince the country, not just that large minority who want spending reductions on principle. It is perfectly possible to have voted Labour in 1997, wanting the government to spend more on public services, but to feel that things have gone too far. It is perfectly possible to have been satisifed with the level of taxation and borrowing as recently as 2008, but to be horrified by our Greek-level deficit today.

You could call this the ‘most taxpayers don’t agree with the taxpayers alliance’ insight.

It may be churlish to quibble with this tacitly centrist advocacy – but you could question “large minority” a bit too.

Findings depend on what question is put and how. But the longest established British Social Attitudes academic series, offered lower spending and lower taxes against either the status quo, or more spending with higher taxes, then even moderate moves in favour of the “populist” Taxpayers Alliance/Tea Party mission win the support of 8%.

With most of the party base believing the answer is more more Tory Red Meat, this apparent outbreak of centrist sensiblism from Daniel Hannan may come as some small measure of relief.

Beat the BNP, help their supporters

by Don Paskini    
March 9, 2010 at 7:00 am

Both the ‘Hope not Hate’ campaign and the ‘Nothing British’ campaign aim to defeat the British National Party. Hope not Hate draws on the leftie tradition of mobilising opponents to fascism, and protesting wherever fascists try to march, inspired by the ‘Battle of Cable Street’ in the 1930s. Nothing British aims to defeat the arguments of the BNP, and win back ‘patriotic’ voters to mainstream politics, just as Maggie Thatcher did in the 1980s.

In the history of successful anti-fascist tactics which campaigners draw on for inspiration, there is one very important one which doesn’t always get the profile it deserves. If you want to beat the BNP, it’s not enough to expose their arguments, or to mobilise anti-fascists for demos or elections, important though all those things are. We also need to help their supporters. continue reading… »

Redwood wrong on borrowing

by Chris Dillow    
March 8, 2010 at 5:45 pm

This effort from John Redwood seems to contain many of the errors that arise when economic thinking is subordinated to party political motives: confusion, lack of empirical evidence, and an over-emphasis upon the importance of policy.

He says:

Borrowing is deferred taxation…
Taxpayers will have to help repay all that debt with interest in the years ahead. They know that means tax increases to do so. More borrowing can make people more negative about spending up to their current incomes.

A reasonable hypothesis – though he doesn’t provide any hard evidence that this is actually happening. But then he says:

Much of the money the government is borrowing will be lent by banks. This is money the banks will not then be able to lend to the private sector…No wonder money supply growth is weak, and no wonder the private sector finds it difficult to borrow enough at a sensible rate.

There are two problems with this claim. continue reading… »

Massacre in Nigeria: why secularism matters

by Dave Osler    
March 8, 2010 at 2:51 pm

If you are even momentarily persuaded by the crazily mendacious thesis that ‘secular fundamentalists are the new totalitarians’, reflect for a moment or two on why 500 people were slaughtered in Nigeria over the weekend.

The victims were Christians, those who hacked them to pieces with machetes were Muslims, and it’s a safe bet that none of them had even heard of Richard Dawkins. The brutality was in retaliation for an equally grisly Christian attack on Muslims earlier this year. Now run that stuff about ‘interfaith dialogue’ past me one more time.

There’s a lot more to the story than that, of course, and some of it will be said below. But only the wilfully blind will seek to airbrush the undeniable truth out of the picture; believers in Allah perpetrated the mass murder of believers in God, seemingly oblivious to the recent Indonesian high court ruling that the two are in fact the same deity.

continue reading… »

Tebbit: Ashcroft failed the “Daily Mail test”

by Don Paskini    
March 8, 2010 at 1:48 pm

In his attack on Lord Ashcroft today, Norman Tebbit explained the Daily Mail test.

“Many, many years ago the Daily Mail Question was explained to me by Harry Legge-Bourke, then chairman of the 1922 committee, when he said of a certain course of action that was being discussed: ‘If you would not be happy to read that in tomorrow’s Daily Mail, then don’t do it.’ That Daily Mail test is the one that matters above all in politics.”

Tebbit became one of an increasing number of Tories to criticise Lord Ashcroft publicly.

No word yet from Tebbit on whether he felt that Ashcroft, a dual national, also failed the “cricket test”.

The first local internet general election

by Mark Pack    
March 8, 2010 at 12:00 pm

For the third general election in a row, the run-up is seeing numerous meetings and articles asking whether this election will be the first internet general election.

However, much – in fact, nearly all – of the discussion falls into two traps which are common across political journalism in the UK. First, an undue focus on the central, national picture and, second, an undue focus on the novel.

Ask those involved in organising internet campaigning for any of the major parties about what really matters and you’ll get two answers repeated. They repeatedly – and rightly – emphasise the importance of the internet for local campaigning and they also emphasise its importance for the equivalent of plumbing and sewage systems in a political party – that mostly hidden infrastructure which is vital to effective operation. continue reading… »

PCS workers start two day strike against cuts

by Newswire    
March 8, 2010 at 10:00 am

From the PCS website:

Courts, jobcentres, driving tests, tax offices, border controls and passports are amongst some of the services that will be affected today (8 March) as up to 270,000 civil and public servants from across the UK begin a 48 hour stoppage over cuts to redundancy terms.

The strike, called by the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), will also see civilian staff working for the Met Police and security staff working in the House of Parliament taking strike action for the first time in over 25 years.

The dispute is over changes to the civil service compensation scheme which will see staff robbed of up to a third of their entitlements and see loyal civil and public servants lose tens of thousands of pounds if they are forced out of a job. The union fears that the government wants to make it easier for whoever wins the general election to cut low paid civil and public servants on the cheap.

What if the world were different for a day?

by Laurie Penny    
March 8, 2010 at 9:00 am

Picture this. You open the newspaper one grey morning, and there in a bright pixel smear on the third page is a full-length photograph of a young man. The young man is almost naked; a flesh-coloured thong clings tightly to his hairless cock and balls; he looks over his shoulder at you, his jaw a perfect masculine square, his dark eyes smouldering. Everywhere, this young man is hard, smooth, impenetrable and yet submissive, wanting you to consume him. You turn the page.

There are more young men on each of the pages that follow, naked or scantily clothed, poreless, flawless, with broad shoulders and rock-hard arses and muscles that bunch and gleam under oiled skin. You are used to the sight of these young men; these days, they hardly even arouse you. Their glassy eyes follow you on public transport, on the internet, on television, in the fashion spreads of magazines.

Picture this. Every one of the men and boys whose images you see repeated thousands of times a day is impossibly perfect, hewn from some arcane piece of rock on the platonic plane. Not one of them is over thirty-three. In the shadow of their hard, robotic masculinity, the possibility of paunches and puppy fat and male-pattern balding is unthinkable . They rarely speak, and when they do speak, they ventriloquise; they implore you to look at them, to understand their silent semiotics of commercial masculinity; they threaten and seduce you in a boring parade of billboards, adverts, music videos.

These men don’t seem to be doing very much. Usually, they are moronically thrusting and jerking around cereal boxes, insurance packages, bottles of shampoo and soap. They seem to beg to be penetrated, but it is they who have invaded your body and brain, as if the images were trying to force themselves out through your skin. Some of them are known to you by name or sobriquet, as singers or actors, or as the sons or lovers of powerful women. They grimace beautifully as they drape their impossible bodies over stages and sets, showing off watches and shoes and beautiful clothing that hangs from their perfect torsos in artful folds and flutters in artificial winds. Their images cluster in everywhere , unseeing, bored, as if they can’t quite decide whether to fuck you or punch you.

You know that it’s not real, of course. continue reading… »

Women’s rights manifesto to reduce global poverty

by Don Paskini    
March 8, 2010 at 7:00 am

Thanks to our friends at the F Word for news of the UK Gender and Development Network’s women’s rights manifesto. It has been endorsed by organizations including the Women’s Resource Centre, the Fawcett Society, the Women’s Environmental Network (WEN), Amnesty International and ActionAid.

Realising the potential of women and girls is critical to reducing global poverty and achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Promoting equality between women and men is also a matter of justice.

The UK Gender and Development Network (GADN) calls on the next UK Government to put gender equality and women’s empowerment at the heart of its international development agenda, and ensure the UK’s existing commitments on gender equality become a reality for women and girls across the world.

In particular, we ask that all political parties and candidates commit to:

1. End violence against women and girls worldwide by making it a foreign and development policy priority and appointing a Minister on violence against women and girls whose brief covers FCO, DfID and MoD.

2. Increase women’s political participation and leadership by making this a key component of FCO, DfID and MoD governance policies and programmes, supported by robust funding, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation
mechanisms.

3. Champion gender-sensitive responses to climate change by mainstreaming gender across all climate change policies, programmes and budgets, and calling for the participation of women in decisions related to climate change locally, nationally and internationally.

4. Empower women and girls to take full control of their sexual and reproductive lives by scaling up FCO and DfID investment in affordable services and comprehensive sexuality education and information, and reducing barriers that
prevent women and girls from accessing these.

5. Implement the UK’s international commitments on gender equality by continuing to invest in DfID’s capacity to deliver – building on the current Gender Equality Action Plan – focusing on strong leadership, systems of accountability and
monitoring, and staff knowledge and skills.

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