Tom Watson’s powerful speech on hacking
Watch the video
Castro criticising Ahmedinijad – has political balance been restored?
The world has turned upside down, at least that was what we thought. Tony Blair and George Bush were liberal heroes in the Middle East while some on the left back home were doing their best to excuse Islamic fanaticism as a response to imperialism.
More sense was being spoken by Sarkozy on the economy than many of our left-leaning economist MPs.
And while radicals such as Hugo Chavez and that Scottish hottie George Galloway were cuddling up to an Iranian president so seemingly nonchalant that a woman in his country could be stoned to death for a crime, proof of which would not fool a duck on acid, one wondered whether the world would soon burn up and implode.
But, behold, some sense has been restored.
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Ed Balls: We can’t buy flawed Tory consensus
In an interview with the Independent yesterday, Ed Balls laid out his differences from David Miliband’s plans to cut the deficit.
Some excerpts:
“In the 1992 election [which Labour lost] we allowed ourselves to be drawn into a flawed consensus about the virtues of the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Margaret Thatcher and John Major had taken us into ERM for the sake of a half per cent cut in interest rates and were supported by the CBI, trade unions Neil Kinnock and John Smith. Labour never escaped from joining the consensus. All the time Gordon Brown was shadow Chancellor from 1992 he could not escape from the straitjacket of that decision. Now this is the time to say there is an economic alternative.”
But he is opposed by Labour’s former chancellor Alistair Darling and David Miliband. Both are adamant Labour should stick to its pre-election commitment to halve the deficit in this Parliament. In response Balls quotes his favourite economist. “Keynes says when the facts change I change my mind. The facts have been changing fast. The concerns of the financial markets are increasingly about growth…”
…
Again we were worried about being outside the consensus… I’m afraid it sounded like saying our cuts will be fairer, but that’s not enough to win an argument. The Coalition says there’s no choice and that it is Labour’s fault. If you are driven by opinion polls that is not leadership. We have got to change perceptions.
The point on the economy and changing perceptions is spot on. He is of course criticising Alistair Darling’s plans at the last election (who is now advising D Miliband on the economy).
This is what he says on the 1992 hangover:
In fairness to Gordon he did take big risks but he agonised about them… I am much less scarred by the 1980s and early 1990s. Tony and Gordon were always refighting the 1992 election. Early on after our win in 1997 Gordon couldn’t say the tax burden was rising when it obviously was because he feared the Daily Mail headline… that defensiveness was an overhang from 1992 and very debilitating for him and Tony because in the end people don’t know what you stand for… for sure you can’t face in different directions in the 21st-century media climate.
Bloody hell. How long have we waited for a Labour politician to say that?
As world media starts to report on Coulson, new witnesses come forward
MPs will today hold a debate on the phone-hacking allegations, no doubt keeping media momentum going for another day (it kicked off over 7 days ago).
But the Guardian’s report today is pretty damning:
Paul McMullan, a former features executive and then member of the newspaper’s investigations team, says that he personally commissioned private investigators to commit several hundred acts which could be regarded as unlawful, that the use of illegal techniques was no secret at the paper and that senior editors, including Coulson, were aware that this was going on. “How can Coulson possibly say he didn’t know what was going on with the private investigators?” he said.
How’s that for new allegations, Tories?
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MPs call for lending rate cap to stop loan sharks
A growing number of backbench MPs believe pawnbrokers and pay day loans must be curbed to avoid Britain becoming a nation ‘in hock to pawnbrokers and legal loan sharks’
Yesterday the ‘End Legal Loan Sharking’ campaign launched a parliamentary motion calling for a cap on the cost of credit. Well over 100 MPs are expected to sign EDM 660 in coming weeks.
At the end of September the End Legal Loan Sharking campaign will meet with key advisers at Number 10 Downing Street to make the case for lending rate caps to cover all consumer credit.
Lisa Nandy, Labour MP for Wigan (who tabled the Early Day Motion) said:
There is mounting evidence that the lack of affordable credit is reaching a crisis point for the most vulnerable in our communities. It’s time the government stepped in and protected them rather than allowing them to be exploited.
Helen Goodman, Labour MP for Bishop Auckland said:
This kind of lending – where avaricious loan companies prey on the financially excluded by offering easy credit at extortionate rates – is affecting more and more people across the country… We need a cap on the amount of interest that can be charged by loan companies accompanied by the extension of affordable lending through the Post Office, credit unions and other responsible lenders.
The payday loan and pawnbroker business is now worth £2 billion per year, money which is being extracted from our poorest communities
The number of pawnbrokers has trebled over the past seven years. More than half of the users of pawn broking services report that they use them to pay for daily living expenses such as food and groceries.
EDM 660 reads:
That this house believes that the government should end ‘legal loan sharking’ by capping the cost of credit for the whole sector (not just for credit and store cards) and provide alternative affordable sources of credit through the Post Office network, local credit unions, CDFIs, co-operatives and mutuals; acknowledges that the UK’s poorest borrowers pay the highest price for credit in Europe; further acknowledges that to £16,000 of excess profit is made every hour from the sector and that this is extracting wealth from the poorest communities; is concerned that that the OFT’s recommendations including industry codes of practice and financial education – won’t work, and certainly won’t work quickly to reduce prices for consumers.
www.endleagalloansharks.org.uk
From a press release
War and emotion
The publication of Tony Blair’s memoirs last week prompted a flurry of debate on face-book (is it just me or has face-book become the new blogging?) and even the creation of a special page in his honour.
I got drawn into a couple of comments threads of a couple of people’s pages, one of which was eventually deleted by its owner after Nick Cohen and I started abusing one another (to be fair to him, I started it).
Before we went down into the gutter, though, I had an exchange with another blogger, who posts at one of the Liberal Conspiracy’s sister sites, and who quite pointedly asked me why I drew so heavily on my personal experiences when writing. At one level this is quite an odd question.
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The ABC of Qu’ran desecration
Heinrich Heine’s famous aphorism has it that ‘wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings’. But because those words are a classic soundbite and not a literal truth, there remains in a liberal democracy the right to burn books.
Dove World Outreach Center – a tiny hardline pentecostal sect in Gainsville, Florida - will put the proposition to the test this Saturday, when it is set to incinerate several hundred copies of the Qu’ran.
As someone who was raised in a similar religious tradition, I perhaps appreciate the symbolism involved here more than many readers will. The doctrine of ‘Biblical inerrancy’ to which fundamentalists of this stripe adhere is the only true parallel within Christianity to the veneration in which Muslims hold their sacred text. They know exactly what they are doing.
SureStart is proven to work for everyone
A majority of Ofsted evaluations of Sure Start centres indicate that their outreach efforts are successful at reaching the most vulnerable families.
A study of Ofsted reports by children’s charity 4Children found that 57% had had a “highly positive” report and another 32% were “adequate”.
The future of Sure Start in the CSR is far from certain, and these findings will build support for 4Children’s “Shout Out for a Sure Start” campaign.
continue reading… »
How Labour and Coalition deficit reduction plans match up
The table below, which I’ve been playing around with, might be helpful to people when thinking about deficit reduction.
It summarises the tax rises and spending cuts planned by Osborne, planned by Darling and what would happen if Labour adopted a 50/50 tax and spending programme, but stuck to a 4 year timetable.
We can see that under the “Darling Plan”, Labour would be able to oppose £9bn of spending cuts in 2011/12, rising to £31bn by the end of the Parliament.
continue reading… »
Boris: Coalition cuts will be ‘disastrous’
I missed this from Monday, but here is London’s occasional Mayor Boris Johnson in the Evening Standard:
We are facing the toughest spending round in living memory. Transport Secretary Philip Hammond has been asked by the Treasury to accept astonishing cuts — of between 25 and 40 per cent.
As I have repeatedly made clear to the Coalition government, I believe cuts of that order would be disastrous for London transport network.
I cannot and will not accept them, and am therefore fighting to preserve and improve our transport infrastructure.
That means defeating the sceptics and ensuring that Crossrail is built. It means fighting for Thameslink and a world-class bus network. Above all it means driving on with the upgrades of the Tube.
Dave Hill thinks Boris is positioning himself so he doesn’t lose popularity along with the Coalition government as the cuts start to bite.
Why isn’t more made about how Boris is going on the offensive against the Coalition’s cuts?
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» Revealed: govt to restrict abortion counselling despite Nadine Dorries vote
» Would raising the tax threshold actually help the poorest?
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» Violence in the office
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» The world is entering the third phase of the crisis, warns ILO
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