Why on earth is Anjem Choudary invited to speak at Hay philosophy festival?

by Guest    
May 10, 2011 at 7:17 pm

contribution by Lucy James

Over the last week a few complaints have been levelled against the invitation of Anjem Choudary, a founding member of the banned Islamist organisations al-Muhajiroun and Islam4UK, by How the Lights Get In, the philosophy and music festival at Hay.

They have, unbelievably, invited him to speak at two of their philosophy sessions at the end of this month.
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Willetts’ £28,000 uni places won’t boost social mobility

by Dave Osler    
May 10, 2011 at 2:04 pm

Suppose a Tory cabinet minister suggested helping rough sleepers by increasing the availability of £2,000,000 homes, the better to ease the pressure on the market for £1,000,000 homes. I mean, any increase in the housing stock will ultimately help get people off the streets, right?

Such a policy would strain the credulity of even the most diehard proponent of supply side economics. But today we have something very like it from David Willetts, who purports genuinely to believe that auctioning off places at top universities for cash up front is actually part of a clandestine plan to boost the life chances of the less well off.

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How RMT union could have played the strike action differently

by Sunny Hundal    
May 10, 2011 at 11:12 am

Evening Standard readers will be well aware that London underground is heading for a prolonged period of strikes following a dispute at TfL. This isn’t entirely unexpected; I think both Bob Crow and Boris Johnson are itching for a fight.

But when I first read the story, my thought was that the RMT union could have handled this differently. The issue here isn’t just the unwillingness of Boris to sit down and talk to the unions: it is a trap set by Conservatives.
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Lecturer suspended for exposing handling of ‘terrorist’ students

by Sunny Hundal    
May 10, 2011 at 10:34 am

A popular Professor lecturer at Nottingham University has been suspended for exposing how university management aided the arrest of two innocent students as suspected terrorists.

Dr Rod Thornton, a former counter-insurgency advisor to US and UK militaries, wrote a paper titled: “How a student’s use of a library book became a ‘major Islamist plot’“, alleging that the university’s management badly mishandled suspicions that two students were involved in promoting terrorism.

A protest of several hundred students demanding his reinstatement is planned for Thursday 12th May.

Liberal Conspiracy has been sent a copy of the report, which we publish below in full, after it was taken down by others.

Background
The story starts on 14th May 2008, when counter-terrorism officers arrested student Rizwaan Sabir along with university administrator Hicham Yezza, on suspicion of the “instigation, preparation and commission of acts of terrorism”. They were dubbed the Nottingham Two.

After several days in custody they were told the arrests were made because Rizwaan Sabir, a politics student, had downloaded the “al-Qaida Training Manual” (a declassified document) from the US justice department website while conducting research on terrorism for his upcoming PhD.

He had sent Hicham Yezza copies of his material as the latter edited a political magazine on campus. After nearly a week in custody both were released, but Yezza was immediately re-arrested on immigration charges and the authorities tried to deport him to Algeria.

That politically motivated move was also dropped after heavy lobbying.

Whistle-blowing
Dr Thornton, a former Sgt. in the British Army who served in Northern Ireland and consulted for the Indian government after the Mumbai attacks, says he found the university’s involvement in the affair highly unprofessional.

His report alleges university management conducted a behind-the-scenes campaign of disinformation and spin against the two men.

It says the university tried to to shift blame and silence those who challenged the official account – i.e. that the research material was illegal and the arrests were justified.

It says the day after Sabir’s arrest, the university prepared an exclusion letter for him, even though it later said, “no judgement was made by us” in its own assessment.

The university also said that there were no armed police on campus during the arrests. Dr Thornton’s report points out that this was not true.

Suspended
Dr Thornton said in a statement:

The paper is a detailed document that is carefully sourced. It tells of a very worrying incident which has serious repercussions for campus relations and for the ability of academics to fully to understand difficult issues such as terrorism.

I am saddened by the removal of my paper from the BISA website. I cannot see that there is any reason for its removal other than the fact that the university is trying to prevent its secrets being publicly known, though I would hope that this was not the case.

Rizwaan Sabir, now a PhD student in Glasgow, said:

Dr Thornton’s article proves that university management singled me out for differential treatment, despite my innocence. It is apparent that they and certain staff attempted to undermine my future at the university, perhaps because I would have been a constant reminder of their anti-terror cock up!

The findings of this research, along with Nottingham’s attempts to censor it, are damning. Such cavalier behaviour should not be tolerated in British academia. I call on the government to launch an independent public inquiry into the conduct of the university.

Students at the university are calling for Dr Thornton’s re-instatement and a full investigation into the claims his research made.

A spokesperson from the university told the Guardian:

It is important to remember that the original incident, almost three years ago, was triggered by the discovery of an al-Qaida training manual on the computer of an individual who was neither an academic member of staff, nor a student, and in a school where one would not expect to find such material being used for research purposes.

The university became concerned and decided, after a risk assessment, that those concerns should be conveyed to the police as the appropriate body to investigate.

Public protest
Calling for a Reinstatement of Lecturer and a Public Inquiry
Thursday May 12th @ 12pm
Hallward Library, University Park

A Petition in support of Dr Thornton is here.

Will the AV vote make it impossible to win a referendum on PR?

by Guest    
May 10, 2011 at 9:02 am

contribution by Jon Stone

I don’t buy into the idea that with the AV ‘no’ vote, electoral reform is simply off the table ‘for a generation’ and the issue settled.

Given the differences in voting system and the meagre options presented, it is difficult to argue that the argument for retaining FPTP had been won too.
continue reading… »

Calls for enquiry into hounding of unions

by Sunny Hundal    
May 10, 2011 at 8:50 am

Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn called for an enquiry into industrial relations at Transport for London yesterday after two drivers won their cases at an employment tribunal.

The drivers said they were dismissed for trade union activity rather than the allegations made by TfL.

The dispute is likely to precipitate five days of strikes beginning next Monday and another five days in June.

Jeremy Corbyn told Liberal Conspiracy:

There appears to be an obsession by the Johnson administration with attacking the unions, particularly the RMT.

This Union has genuine concerns about the safely of all of us on the trains and the two drivers who are subject of the current dispute have both won their cases at a employment tribunal who decided they were wrongly dismissed for union activities.

Maybe it’s time for an enquiry into industrial relations in TfL?

Yesterday, Vince Cable warned that Libdem ministers were “not in the mood” to be blamed for Mayor Boris Johnson’s “lack of strategy” for dealing with unions.

Libdem Employment relations minister Ed Davey went further, criticising the Mayor for failing to meet RMT leaders for talks for two years.

That suggests Boris Johnson should have got off his backside and engaged with Bob Crow and RMT members, however difficult they are.

Boris is trying to pass the buck when actually the buck stops with City Hall.

Boris was not happy with the remarks and wants the government to pass legislation making it more difficult for unions to hold strikes.

Challenging conventional wisdom about the elections

by Don Paskini    
May 10, 2011 at 8:45 am

Following last week’s elections, the conventional wisdom can be summarised roughly as follows. The cause of electoral reform is dead; Labour did well in Northern England but poorly in Southern England; Labour’s defeat in Scotland was unprecedented and historic; the Lib Dems got hammered by Labour; and Labour needs to move to attract ‘centrist’ voters and fight the Tories for the ‘centre ground’. I think the lessons of the elections give cause to challenge all of these. continue reading… »

A reply to Policy Exchange: are public workers really that better off?

by Nicola Smith    
May 9, 2011 at 4:54 pm

Today’s Telegraph led with the claim that ‘workers are 40% better off in public sector’. The claim that public sector wages are ‘out of control’ is based on this research from Policy Exchange.

But in February the IFS concluded (in research which Policy Exchange have referenced, and therefore presumably read) that the gap was 6%. So who is right?
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BBC churns for Dorries without checking source

by Sunny Hundal    
May 9, 2011 at 1:33 pm

Late last week the BBC ran this story on their website:

Many parents ‘oppose school sex education for children’

More than half of parents do not think sex education should be taught to children in school from a young age, a survey suggests. Of 1,700 parents of UK 5-11 year olds surveyed by the BabyChild website, 59% said they disagreed with the practice.

The most common reason given was that it is “inappropriate to teach children about sex”. The survey comes after a Bill calling for girls to be “taught to say no” passed its first reading in parliament.

Where did the story come from? Were the sentiments expressed representative? You’d expect BBC journalists to ask such basic questions right?

The story was put out through a press release by a Gloucester-based PR agency called 10 Yetis, points out Unity at Ministry of Truth.

It seems they regularly churn out press releases based on surveys they have conducted themselves. Over 330 in fact!

Fair enough, though they’re not part of the Market Research Society and therefore we don’t know if they are using representative samples. So it looks like the BBC journalist in question didn’t bother asking how kosher this survey was.

And it gets more interesting. The BBC article says people were surveyed for the BabyChild website.

Who is behind BabyChild?

A guy called Andy Barr, who also happens to be at 10 Yetis. He is actually quoted in the Daily Mail story on the same survey.

Unity also points out that the questions used in the survey weren’t exactly neutral.

Yet the BBC was happy to promote the survey as a way of bolstering Nadine Dorries’ agenda.

Why this outrage against super-injunctions is farcical

by Guest    
May 9, 2011 at 12:41 pm

contribution by Carl Gardner

The BBC has reported that someone on Twitter has purported to “out” a number of celebrities who have supposedly obtained “superinjunctions” to protect their privacy.
Who knows whether any of what’s been tweeted is true at all. As the BBC reported in the piece I’ve linked to, Jemima Khan says it’s not true in her case. It may all be false.

In any event, I absolutely condemn this latest move in a diffuse but vociferous campaign by some people in the mainstream media and on the web against the right to respect for private life, a right guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights, and legislated into our domestic law by Parliament in the Human Rights Act.
continue reading… »

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