In defence of Education Maintenance Allowance
Sixth formers are spending their Education Maintenance Allowance on ‘booze, cigarettes, CDs, music festivals and clothes’, commenter jenny50 indignantly maintains in a one-sided debate on a Telegraph discussion board this morning. And she should know, having ‘worked in a large comprehensive for many years’.
Well Jenny, if you are reading this, brace yourself for a shock. I suspect that much of the dosh goes on skunk weed, make-up, computer games, cinema tickets, nose piercing, dating unsuitable boys, jeans that hang halfway down their arses, tattoos, KFC Wicked Zinger Boxes, monumentally stupid hairstyles and all the other absolute essentials of teenage existence. I guess there are only so many pencil cases a young person can use.
The French scandal that could come here thanks to NHS changes
contribution by David Nowell Smith
Those who are still unsure whether Andrew Lansley’s ‘bottom-up’ top-down reforms of the NHS are going to have disastrous consequences would be well advised to look to a scandal currently engulfing the French health service.
It centres around an anti-diabetes medicine called Mediator, which is believed to have caused between 500 and 2000 deaths (and over 30,000 hospitalisations) in its 33 years on the market (it was belatedly rescinded in November 2009).
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BT criticised over Israeli settlements deal
Israeli activists have written to telecoms company BT about their complicity in breaches of international law and human rights abuses today.
The letter comes on the anniversary of BT partnering with an Israeli company that provides services to illegal settlements in Israel.
A campaign called ‘Disconnect Now‘ publishes the letter, which states:
Dear British Telecom,
We, Israeli citizens devoted to the promotion of a just peace and a true democracy in the Middle East, are deeply concerned about the potentially irreversible damage inflicted on Palestinians by the brutal Israeli occupation, and about the outrageous international support of such policies.
We are saddened and dismayed by your company’s complicity in severe breaches of international law and the violation of human rights through your relationship with Bezeq International, and call on you to end this relationship at once. While BT has repeatedly stated its commitment to ensuring that it is “not complicit in human rights abuses,” its partnership with Bezeq International proves differently. By partnering with Bezeq, BT is supporting the infrastructure which enables illegal Israeli settlements, built in violation of international law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, to exist. We maintain that such wilful blindness to Israeli crimes is not only immoral, but is also in contrast to BT’s fiduciary responsibility to its investors, as it may put the company’s high-regard in the international community at risk.
Furthermore, we wish to emphasize that a critical stance against the occupation, including explicit calls and actions taken by individuals and organizations to divest or sanction companies or institutions complicit in such atrocities, are not Anti-Semitic. On the contrary, only resistance of this kind, as part of the struggle for peace based on justice and equality, will enable a common future for Arabs and Jews in the region.
Inspired by the struggle of South Africans against apartheid, and following the footsteps of other non-violent struggles against discrimination and repression across the world, we call on you to live up to your professed ethical standards and cut all ties with Israel’s occupation.
Sincerely yours,
Boycott From Within- Israelis supporting the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions.
Update: An earlier headline stated the campaign called for a ‘boycott’ of BT, which is not the case. We have now amended the headline.
Why an ‘umbrella group’ to oppose cuts is unlikely to work
How do we approach the Tory cuts tactically? Obviously most of us are opposed to them, but do we take a broad position and oppose them entirely or should there be another approach?
On the Facebook page for today’s march to defend EMAs, I came across this comment:
Tens of thousands of public sector workers made unemployed across the country, benifits [sic] to the disabled cut, VAT rises. You are really complaining that certain students aren’t going to get £40 a week? Really?
And what if you support one campaign to oppose cuts – does that mean you don’t support the rest?
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Libdem activist resigns; hacks site with rant
A Libdem activist for the Keighley and Ilkley Libdems has resigned, taking their entire website with him.
Yesterday evening he posted a long rant at the Libdems on the front page of their site, explaining why he left the party in disgust.
I created this web site in the days that the Liberal Democrats had principles. I think many local ones, Judith Brooksbank as a shining example, still have them.
However, the issue of fees for university students made me fall out of love with Nick Clegg and other ‘Economic Liberals’. In consequence, I resigned from the Party.
The Party doesn’t seem to have noticed, and sent me (and my wife) a Member’s mailing. That includes a summarry of an interview with Nick Clegg about the issue of student fees. His responses, reported there, enraged me so much that I decided that it was just to call him to question here. Let me explain why…
via Political Scrapbook.
You can view the page here. Presumably he has taken the site details with him, making it very difficult for them to change it!
He ends by saying:
With Christmas so recently past, we should remember the words of the carol, Good King Wenceslas. He went out to help someone more in need than he was. That’s what I thought the Liberal Democrats were about. Nick Clegg seems to have a different inspiration!
On an entirely unrelated note, a Sun/YouGov poll today reports that Conservative voters prefer Nick Clegg to all of their own cabinet ministers except William Hague.
The Sun Twitter feed added, “…proving more and more Tories are agreeing with Nick, even if nobody else does any longer.”
Update: They’ve taken down the page now
The sheer scale and breadth of Coalition u-turns is staggering
The sheer scale and breadth of the present government’s pre-election lying and post-election u-turning is quite something to behold.
Let’s trot through the big ones, that we actually know about.
1. The stupendous Lib Dem betrayal on tuition fees. From categorical pledges to oppose all fee rises, to backing a lifting of the cap to £9,000 a year. Quite spectacular, and utterly impossible to hide.
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Bankers are paid too much admits RBS chief
The chairman of Royal Bank of Scotland has conceded that bankers get paid too much, mostly because of what he calls a “gangmaster” culture in investment banking.
The comments were made to the BBC’s Robert Peston and will be broadcast tonight at 9pm on BBC 2.
Sir Philip Hampton says:
The star quality, as it were, seems to filter down to people who don’t seem so star quality. There is, if I can use the expression, a sort of gangmaster cultural phenomenon in this, that you recruit top people who really do make a difference, who really do move markets and get business and are really high achievers.
But they do tend to associate themselves with people who aren’t such stars, but they want them around and they trust them, sometimes they move with them and there is a team associated with it. And the disparities between the top stars in the team and some of the journeymen players, if you like, is probably not as marked as it should be.
Sir Hampton also says that the ballooning of salaries has not been accompanied by better results:
The most peculiar thing about it all, actually, if you look at the last ten years of massive increases in pay is that the performance for shareholders has been pretty disastrous really across most banks. Some of them have gone out of business altogether and most banks have had a relatively poor performance for shareholders.
RBS is expected to award just under £1bn of bonuses in total this year, down from around £1.3bn last year.
Why RBS should be the next target for activists
The Royal Bank of Scotland is owned by me and you: the public. We collectively own 84% of the bank and saved it from collapsing during the financial crisis.
At the very least, we have the right to know what went wrong at the bank, right? Wrong. RBS is refusing to release a report on the only City-wide investigation into what went wrong during the financial crisis.
This means that even now, no one in the UK has yet been prosecuted for taking our banks to the brink of collapse and causing the crisis.
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Department of Health not saying where NHS ‘savings’ come from
Yesterday David Cameron told the Today programme:
We are spending £1.4 billion which will save £1.7 billion within two years … We will actually be making net savings within two years in terms of this change
So where has that savings estimate come from?
Fact-checking website Full Fact rang up the Department of Health to ask.
Sadly when we heard back we were told the breakdown of these costs will not be published until later in the week.
Its more staggering that the Today programme itself did not ask where these figures came from.
It seems Cameron has been allowed to quote figures from research not in the public domain.
Full Fact has previously raised concerns about the ability of ministers to quote from research that only they are privy to, which means that claims cannot be scrutinised by either members of the press or public.
The Department for Work and Pensions has withheld information and research on several occasions while allowing it to be quoted by ministers, perhaps selectively.
Unless it is clear how David Cameron has produced those figures, they cannot and should not be taken seriously until they are available for all to see.
David Cameron on the NHS – in his own words
Following Cameron’s lovely foray onto BBC Radio 4′s today, in which he waxed lyrical about the NHS; I thought I’d share some choice quotes with you, dear reader:
I believe the creation of the NHS is one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century. I always believed this.
David Cameron, 2006
Our PM was moved to utter the above during a party conference speech in 2006.
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» Revealed: govt to restrict abortion counselling despite Nadine Dorries vote
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