The Shoah and the Righteous Muslims
Today is Holocaust Memorial Day. It is a day that honours our pledge to never forget. And so we don’t. But it is also a time for remembrance and learning.
In Britain anti-Semitism has been on the rise for some time. This has been driven by prolific ignorance and mendacity, predicated on libels levied against the Jewish people for centuries.
And it is also a time of huge anti-Muslim sentiment. Even on the Left we’ve seen idiots equating Muslims or proxy groups with terrorists/ predatory paedophiles/ whatever they fancy that day. As the son of Muslims I genuinely feel more worried about their safety than ever before.
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A clampdown on sexism in the media? Pull the other one
contribution by MediaInsider
I can’t help but think BSkyB and News International slamming its employees for sexism is a bit like George Osborne complaining that his weekly food shopping bill has increased- they both only have themselves to blame.
Sky Sports News openly flaunts its sex appeal (see recent advert), and has a history of employing young, attractive female presenters to work alongside middle-aged male pundits, hardly sending a message that sexism in the work place is dead.
Its Saturday morning show Soccer AM even trades off its image as ‘Men and Motors’ style trashy TV.
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Tory MP: cut taxes for castle owners
“OWNERS of historic homes open to the public should get better tax breaks, according to North Oxfordshire MP Tony Baldry.
In a debate in the House of Commons, Mr Baldry highlighted the struggle families who owned properties such as Broughton Castle, near Banbury, faced in maintaining and repairing buildings.
He said changes to heritage maintenance funds would also give the country’s tourism a boost.
Mr Baldry said: “The owners of historic houses in no way wish to be rentiers on the state, but in consideration of the fact that they continue to provide public access to their homes, and of the broader community and national benefit of historic houses, we have an interest in trying to get the balance right.”
But Bernard Bovingdon, who is campaigning to save services at Bicester Day Centre, said Mr Baldry should devote his time to supporting the young and old who were being hit by council cuts.
He said: “The bloke in the castle, that’s tough life on him, he’s in a minority. I personally don’t think MPs should be wasting their time pandering to the rich.””
Why the Big Society failed
So how’s David Cameron’s “Big Society” going at the moment?
Its critics mock it, volunteers and charity workers despise it, its creators are briefing against each other, and its core supporters in the Tory Party and the think tanks are turning against it.
The only remaining question about the Big Society is not whether or not it will succeed, but how long it will be before the government quietly drops the term. John Major’s Traffic Cones Hotline lasted three years and three months, and it would be a surprise if the Big Society staggered on much longer than that.
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The Libdem ‘miserable little compromise’ on Control Orders
Don’t settle for low politics and broken promises: be more demanding. So intones Nick Clegg in his introduction to the ever increasing barrel of laughs which is the Liberal Democrat manifesto of 2010.
Hidden away, appropriately enough on page 94, is another of those promises which has since become a miserable little compromise: the proposed abolition of control orders.
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BMJ ferociously attacks Tory NHS changes
The British Medical Journal is running an editorial this about NHS reform, called “Dr Lansley’s Monster”.
It is accompanied by a picture of Frankenstein’s laboratory.
Here are some passsages:
What do you call a government that embarks on the biggest upheaval of the NHS in its 63 year history, at breakneck speed, while simultaneously trying to make unprecedented financial savings? The politically correct answer has got to be: mad.
The scale of ambition should ring alarm bells. Sir David Nicholson, the NHS chief executive, has described the proposals as the biggest change management programme in the world—the only one so large “that you can actually see it from space.” (More ominously, he added that one of the lessons of change management is that “most big change management systems fail.”)
Of the annual 4% efficiency savings expected of the NHS over the next four years, the Commons health select committee said, “The scale of this is without precedent in NHS history; and there is no known example of such a feat being achieved by any other healthcare system in the world.” To pull off either of these challenges would therefore be breathtaking; to believe that you could manage both of them at once is deluded.
Like all the other structural reorganisations of the NHS, this one aims to improve health outcomes. What’s lacking is any coherent account of how these particular reforms will produce the desired effects, a point only underlined by the prime minister’s attempts to justify the reforms earlier this week.
On GP commissioning:
Whatever the eventual outcome, such radical reorganisations adversely affect service performance. As Kieran Walshe wrote, they are “a huge distraction from the real mission of the NHS—to deliver and improve the quality of healthcare” that can absorb a massive amount of managerial and clinical time and effort. Even the earliest days of the transition have proved disruptive, with employees of the doomed primary care trusts and strategic health authorities choosing to jump ship rather than to go down with it.
With an estimated one billion pounds of redundancy money in their pockets, many of the survivors are likely to be employed by the new GP consortiums in much their same roles. It raises the question: if GP commissioning turns out to be simply primary care trust commissioning done by GPs, aren’t there less disruptive routes to this destination?
It ends:
Given their scale, securing these efficiency savings should take priority over the massive upheaval proposed in the new bill. For the time being, we agree with the King’s Fund that those GPs who are successfully involved in practice based commissioning should be given real rather than indicative budgets for some services and their performance monitored closely.
All other proposals should be kept on hold, pending an evaluation of whether this iteration of GP commissioning can bear the responsibility that the new bill seeks to place on it. If it turns out that it can, then the full introduction of the government’s ambitious health reforms will have been delayed a few years. If it can’t, then the country—and its government—will have got off lightly.
When what is essentially the official mouthpiece for British doctors is expressing this kind of alarm at government policy, it indicates that a dispositionally conservative body is very out of step with the present administration.
Which reinforces a point I’ve already made: that this is a government of radicals, led by some most unconservative Conservatives.
–
Hat-tip to Stuart White
Raab is right about discrimination against men, but wrong to blame feminists
contribution by Laura Nelson
In a sweeping, scathing tirade, Tory MP Dominic Raab this week attacked the ‘obnoxious bigotry’ of feminists.
Feminists are individuals, and don’t all share the same views. But, in general, we aspire to the very opposite of bigotry. Feminists aspire to equality for men and women, which is just what Raab says he wants too.
And this is the interesting point. Raab wants equality. Feminists want equality.
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Labour 10pts ahead in new Reuters poll
The Labour party pulled 10 pts ahead of the Conservatives in a new poll by Ipsos-Mori out today. It is the biggest lead the party has shown for nearly four years.
The Ipsos-Mori monthly political monitor for Reuters showed: Con 33%(-5), Lab 43%(+4), LD 13%(+2).
“Satisfaction with the government and its leaders has declined significantly since December,” said Ipsos MORI’s Helen Cleary, adding that the approval rating of Prime Minister David Cameron was at its lowest since he took office in May.
Labour has consistently been showing around a 5pt lead in daily polling for YouGov too.
It’s worth noting too that the changes are beyond the margin of error, so they do reflect underlying shifts in public opinion.
The poll was conducted before the GDP figures were released yesterday, says UK Polling Report.
Posh and Posher: grammar schools are not the answer
Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg is the Old Etonian son of a former editor of The Times. But don’t go running away with the idea that he is in any sense a member of a privileged class, he tells a television programme that will be broadcast on BBC 2 this evening. ‘I’m a man of the people,’ he says to the camera, apparently keeping a straight face.
Andrew Neil’s documentary ‘Posh and Posher: Why Public School Boys Run Britain’ highlights one of the few questions on which the editorial lines of Socialist Worker and the Daily Mail are strangely in sync.
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A tale of two cities: Cairo and Davos
contribution by David Malone
Things are looking up in the world economy. That’s what we’re told. In Davos they certainly are.
According to the Bloomberg article entitled, “Wall Street Partying in Davos as Bankers Overcome Crisis“, JP Morgan made its highest ever profits last year Citi has returned to profit. The year of ‘mea culpa’ is apparently over as bankers return to beating their chests and sneering at the very idea that the little people should have imagined they could really interfere.
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