Ed Balls explains his support for gay marriage
What convinced Labour leadership contender Ed Balls to support gay marriage?
A member of his team emailed us this explanation:
He had an uncle, the youngest of 7 kids, who eventually came out to the family, after many years, very difficult for him.
He was in a long term relationship, but died of cancer a few years ago, before civil partnerships were introduced. (The family is still in touch with his partner).
The uncle was a very religious man, a Christian, and Ed says it was really sad that he didn’t get to have a civil partnership but also, why should he have been denied the chance to have a proper marriage too, especially given his religious faith?
So it’s something he feels quite strongly about on a personal level.
He’s only told his story once before, when he was on Question Time and they were doing the warm-up Q, off camera. Tebbitt was up first and said some vile things about gays and Ed told this in response.
I thank him for sharing this story.
Building a campaign against Tory cuts – here is our plan
If the left does not and cannot use the Tory ideological war against the state to organise, mobilise and strengthen ourselves, then frankly we may as well give up politics.
The anger, and the hunger to do something, is obviously there. I’ve lost count of how many mailing lists I’ve been included on to try and organise a response.
Are we approaching the most fertile and interesting time since the Iraq war in activism and ideas? It feels like it. But lots needs to be done.
Yesterday a small group of us met in central London to discuss where we could take this, and I’m reporting from the meeting as well as inviting you to get involved.
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BNP in turmoil as Richard Barnbrook sacked
The Hope Not Hate blog reports on the extraordinary development that the BNP’s only London Assembly Member, Richard Barnbrook, has been sacked.
He is being blamed for the party’s defeat in east London but in truth he’s been targeted because of his close association to Eddy Butler who is challenging Nick Griffin for the party leadership.
It seems pretty certain that London, the Eastern region and large chunks of the South West are in open revolt against Griffin. Eddy Butler’s challenge is the most serious to date but with the rules heavily stacked against him perhaps the future for Griffin’s opponents is a new party.
That’s certainly what increasing numbers of BNP members are now starting to say.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
Richard Barnbrook was earlier found guilty of making up murders from his local constituency in order to score political points. He was suspended from the local council for one month for bringing it into disrepute.
He then launched a campaign to become the MP for Barking, but was ousted by Nick Griffin who wanted to run instead.
Here’s a video of Barnbrook dancing, always worth a good chuckle.
The BNP Crusaders are here!
Ever since I signed up on the British National Party website to harangue someone linking to my blog, I’ve had the pleasure of irregularly having all the latest missives from the Fuhrer himself, Nick Griffin, arrive in my inbox.
Here’s the opening paragraphs of the most recent example:
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Child Benefit Hotline Scam Exposed
Over the last couple of days, I’ve been on the trail of a particular nasty and elaborate premium rate telephone/callback scam which deliberately targets parents on low incomes.
The fraudsters are promoting a premium rate telephone service as a ‘Child Benefit Hotline’ and using a callback service regulated by PhonePayPlus, on the same number, to bill telephone users £1.50 simply for answering a call and listening to the phone ring at the other end.
The same scammers have also succeeded in placing false information onto at least two school websites in an effort to con parents who are looking to take advantage of a government-funded scheme to get low income families online into calling their fake hotline number.
Facebook and Raoul Moat – censorship not needed
David Cameron took a swipe at Facebook users yesterday when he spoke of his disgust that people had been expressing admiration for the wife beating, misogynist murderer Raoul Moat.
I’m all for attempting to understand Moat’s motives but some have bordered on sympathy.
Empathising with a perpetrator of domestic violence without any but the most cursory nod towards the victims of that violence is to place the importance of Moat’s feelings above those of his victims.
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‘Cameron damaging our trust in crime figures’
Whitehall’s statistical watchdog has upbraided David Cameron over claims at prime minister’s question time that violent crime and gun crime had “nearly doubled” under Labour.
Sir Michael Scholar, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority, said the prime minister’s accusation was based on an “impossible” comparison of recorded crime data whose use was “likely to damage public trust” in the crime figures.
Scholar, in a letter to Alan Johnson, the shadow home secretary, said that his authority’s view remained that the annual British Crime Survey, which is to be published tomorrow, “provides a more reliable measure of the national trend in violent crime.
The evidence from the BCS is that there has not been an increase in respondents’ experience of violent crime between the late 1990s and 2008/09.”
How long before IDS realises his dreams are dead?
So it begins.
Gary Gibbon – Channel 4 news, yesterday.
Elsewhere in the Whitehall jungle I hear that IDS is having a rough time of it at DWP. The Treasury isn’t buying any of his expensive proposals, carefully worked out in opposition. He’s baulking at even bigger, straight, old-fashioned cuts to benefits than those already announced. The perpetual conflict between tighter means-testing and disincentives to work is at the heart of all this.
Some Whitehall old hands say IDS is the senior civil servants’ top tip as “minister most likely to walk”…
Of course, this was all foretold.
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Global warming making polar bears extinct
Polar bears in the Hudson Bay area of Canada are likely to die out in the next three decades, possibly sooner, as global warming melts more Arctic ice and thus reduces their hunting opportunities, according to Canadian biologists.
The animals in western Hudson Bay, one of 19 discrete sub-populations of the species around the Arctic, are losing fat and body mass as their time on the floating sea ice gets shorter and shorter, according to the researchers from the University of Alberta.
The sea ice is where the bears hunt ringed and bearded seals, their main prey, and they have to build up enough fat in the winter, when the ice is at its greatest, to get through the summer, when the ice retreats from the shoreline and the bears can find no food.
Tory dismissal of rape victims is only the start
contribution by Jaine Doe
This week the leader of Croydon Council, has announced his decision to cut Croydon’s Rape and Sexual Abuse Support Centre budget by £27,000 a year, while awarding themselves a big pay-rise.
Firstly, it’s outrageous and almost unbelievable that Croydon’s RASASC is one of only two in the whole of London, the other being newly established in Ealing, meaning that, for however long, Croydon’s RASASC has been the only one of its kind in the capital.
All the story really serves to do is to foreground an emerging trend that has gathered haste since the election in May.
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» The real agenda behind Telegraph’s abortion investigation
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