The advocates of Blue Labour should practice what they preach
It’s been a bit of a tough week for “Blue Labour”, with the discussion having moved on from whether or not its approach should be central to the Labour Party to whether or not there is anything worth salvaging. Although I’m a sceptic of Blue Labour’s approach, I’d like to offer some ideas to help.
My analysis is that the fundamental problem with Blue Labour is not Lord Glasman’s ideas about immigration, nor even Glasman’s “hand grenade” style of debating.
Instead, the problem is that they aren’t behaving in a way which is true to their values.
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Ministers plan to make it harder to get human rights justice in the UK
contribution by Karen Luyckx
In the past few days, 33 Peruvian farmers have received out-of-court settlements for the alleged torture they suffered after protesting against a UK company building a mine on their land.
And in the High Court, a group of elderly Kenyans have been given permission to bring a claim against the government for the abuse and torture they suffered in the 1950s.
It should be a week to celebrate, yet the Government is pressing ahead with legislation which will make it practically impossible for most people in poor countries to seek justice in British courts.
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Public mostly blame media for ‘Islamophobia’
A national poll of Britons has found that the media industry is seen as most to blame for ‘fear of Islam’.
Muslims abroad and far-right parties such as the BNP and EDL come a joint distant second in the poll by Comres.
They were asked: “Which one of the following groups, if any, do you think is most to blame for Islamophobia, fear of Islam, in the UK?”
29% of Britons blamed the media. 14% blamed Muslims abroad and 13% blamed far-right parties.
Just 11% blamed Muslims in the UK for ‘Islamophobia’, with politicians getting the same amount of blame at 10%.
Around 1% agreed with the statement: “I do not think that Islamophobia exists in the UK”. It has not been possible to confirm whether they spent most of their time trolling websites.
Another question by ComRes asked whether people thought the Qur’an justified use of violence against non-Muslims.
Around 14% thought it did, while around 65% disagreed.
How Obama could ruin Republicans over the debt ceiling stand-off
In just under two weeks, the United States government could shut down if Congress does not pass emergency legislation to raise the ‘debt ceiling’. To explain: the US has always had an upper limit on how much outstanding debt the government can accumulate, by law.
That figure is currently around $14 trillion and needs to be raised by 2nd August or the US govt shuts down and financial markets go into a tail-spin. This has happened before, during Bill Clinton’s Presidency.
Rather cleverly, President Obama has created a trap for Republicans and they seem to be falling straight into it. At this point, believe it or not, if the US economy shuts down – Obama benefits.
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James Murdoch is lying, say ex-NotW staff
This could be potentially lethal for James Murdoch.
The New York Times reports:
Two former News International executives publicly contradicted James Murdoch’s testimony to a parliamentary committee, saying Thursday that they told him of evidence in 2008 that suggested that phone hacking at one of the company’s tabloid newspapers was more widespread.
The former executives said they informed Mr. Murdoch at the time that he was authorizing an unusually large secret settlement of a lawsuit brought by a hacking victim.
The problem for Murdoch is that the employees aren’t just anyone – they are Colin Myer (the last editor) and Tom Crone, the former News International legal manager.
The Guardian reports:
Colin Myler, editor of the paper until it was shut down two weeks ago, and Tom Crone, the paper’s former head of legal affairs, said they had expressly told Murdoch of an email that would have blown a hole in its defence that only one “rogue reporter” was involved in the phone-hacking scandal.
This contradicts what Murdoch told the committee when questioned on Tuesday.
The trap was laid by Tom Watson, who asked at the Select Committee hearing:
“When you signed off the Taylor payment, did you see or were you made aware of the full Neville email, the transcript of the hacked voicemail messages?”
James Murdoch replied: “No, I was not aware of that at the time.”
Now he is accused of misleading the Select Committee by prominent former employees.
More than 2 million people could enter fuel poverty on a single day
I wish to start an awareness campaign for Fuel Poverty Day.
On the 1/8/2011, prices in gas will rise on average 20% and prices in electricity will rise 18%. It brings into fuel poverty families whose household incomes are £12,840-£14,440.
From the graph below I can tell you that this is more that 2million people.
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Caroline Lucas launches new Green think-tank
Caroline Lucas MP launched a new Green think-tank, ‘Green House’ this morning.
I chaired the meeting, at which we launched our first two papers.
- Sustainability Citizenship by Prof Andrew Dobson, Keele University, urging politicians to involve people in decision making as morally acting citizens; and
- Mutual Security in a Sustainable Economy by Molly Scott Cato, Green Economist and Brian Heatley, a former senior civil servant. This paper sets out how we should redefine poverty, disconnect welfare from the labour market and reconsider the retirement age.
Both these papers are now available on our website: http://www.greenhousethinktank.org
The Green House Advisory Group, whose membership makes clear that this is far more than just a Green Party initiative.
It is also far more than just a metropolitan organisation. Our board so far includes:
» Michael Meacher MP, the former Labour Environment Minsister;
» Bea Campbell, the feminist, journalist, playwright and broadcaster;
» Tim Jackson, Professor of Sustainable Development at the university of Surrey and author of the influential book Prosperity without Growth;
» Jean Lambert, London’s Green MEP;
» Victor Anderson, a former member of the London Assembly and green economist;
» Mary Mellor, leading eco-feminist;
» Jonathan Porritt, former chair of the Sustainable Development Commission;
» Geoff Tansey, a leading expert on creating a fair and sustainable food system; and
» Simon Thomas, former Plaid Cymru MP for Ceredigion, and member of the Welsh Assembly.
Green House expects to publish further papers this Autumn the food price crisis and the future of banking.
I hope that LC readers will welcome this new development.
Green House is interested in joint initiatives with progressives; contact me offline (or in the comments, below), if you have ideas.
Our website: http://www.greenhousethinktank.org
‘The Blue Labour brand should come to an end’
“I think the ‘Blue Labour’ brand should come to an end, or the politics will suffer,” says Jonathan Rutherford with a tinge of regret and exasperation in his voice. “It created too much polarisation.”
Along with Lord Maurice Glasman, the academic from Middlesex university has been a key figure in the debate that some within Labour say is the ‘only fresh thinking in town’. Last year the two co-wrote David Miliband’s celebrated Keir Hardie speech and have since tried to take the theme further through a pamphlet co-authored with others.
But a controversial interview with Maurice Glasman on immigration this week may have fatally ruptured the grouping.
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Factcheck: Tory MP did lie about Piers Morgan
At the Murdoch hearings on Tuesday, Conservative MP Louise Mensch made a claim regarding Piers Morgan during the proceedings.
She said:
Piers Morgan – now a celebrity anchor on CNN – said openly in his book, which, clearly, was published before this controversy broke, that he had hacked phones. He said that he won scoop of the year for a story about Ulrika Jonsson and Sven-Goran Eriksson. He actually gave a tutorial in how one accesses voicemail by punching in a set default code. Clearly, from the account that he gives, he did it routinely as editor of the Daily Mirror.
Does the claim stand up? Not really.
She was invited on to CNN where she refused to make the claim again, saying repeatedly she was no longer protected by Parliamentary Privilege.
But if she was certain that Piers Morgan had said in his book that he had hacked phones, why not repeat it?
Watch
Here is the background. Louise Mensch MP took Piers Morgan’s words completely out of context.
This is the passage from his book.
Yesterday evening, Channel 4′s FactCheck blog also investigated whether her claim stood up.
They say:
So yes, Mensch is right that he gives his readers a tutorial in phone hacking, but this is quite blatantly not an open admission from Morgan that he hacked phones, routinely or at all.
…
Piers Morgan is big enough and ugly enough to fight his own battles. But in the absence of any confession to phone hacking in his book, FactCheck can’t let Louise Mensch skip off into the sunset with her cloak of parliamentary privilege flapping in Morgan’s face.
That looks like an abuse of Parliamentary Privilege then. Her claim that Morgan said in his book he had hacked phones was untrue.
I’m no fan of Piers Morgan but this attempt to deflect attention away from News International is pathetic.
Has the media forgotten about our teetering economy?
The political-media establishment’s obsession with News International is distracting us from a worrying fact – that our economic prospects are deteriorating. Take these developments:
- The IMF has warned (pdf) that the euro area’s debt crisis has “potentially large spillovers” to the rest of the world economy.
- Governments in developed economies next year will engage in the largest concerted fiscal tightening for 30 years. There’s not much chance of this growing our economies.
continue reading… »
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