Can this new initiative hold our ‘feral elite’ to account?
A new campaign has been launched for a citizens jury of 1,000 people to decide what the public interest is and make our “feral” political elite accountable to the people.
In my view anything that stirs things up and gets people thinking about the wider, systemic nature of the political crisis in Britain, is very welcome indeed.
But I must admit to a sense of relief that I wasn’t asked to sign. I am entirely in support of the spirit of opposition it expresses but troubled by the way they have gone about it.
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Is the British economy now heading into recession?
Although ToryPressHQ was frantically tweeting out positive snippets yesterday, the IMF report on Britain’s economy was essentially a harbinger of doom.
As the Independent and Telegraph report today, the IMF pointed out that British households will lose £1,500 a year for the next five years thanks to Osborne’s austerity drive.
Worse, Osborne might even miss his deficit reduction target, points out the FT. Well, the IMF say he’ll come within a whisker but all targets are essentially being revised down.
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Up to 2000 charities, facing deep cuts / cull
More than 2,000 charities (2,215) are facing budget cuts as local authorities reduce their funding – or in some cases completely withdraw it – according to new research published today by the anti-cuts campaign website False Economy.
The research, based on 265 Freedom of Information responses from local councils across England, shows that one year on from the launch of the Big Society, many charities and voluntary groups are facing deep funding cuts.
Birmingham City Council has cut funding to the largest number of charities (191) followed by the cross-council organisation London Councils, who have cut funding to 174 groups.
The False Economy research shows that charities face net funding reductions of more than £110 million this year, though the final figure is likely to be far higher given that some large authorities have not yet finalised where the cuts will hit.
The list of charities facing funding cuts includes:
112 adult care charities
142 elderly-related charities
382 children’s and young people-related charities
151 disability-related charities
False Economy’s campaign director Clifford Singer said:
These cuts go deep into the voluntary and community sectors. These are not just ‘nice to have’ groups but organisations providing vital services for older people trying to maintain independent lives, vulnerable children and abused women. And with so many of the cuts simply resulting in further pressure on the NHS or other statutory services, they are truly a false economy.
Ministers talk up localism and say services will be better shaped locally, but the huge front-loaded cuts to councils mean that local decision-making simply gives councils the choice of which vulnerable people they should make suffer for an economic crisis they did nothing to cause.
The details of each individual cut are posted on the False Economy website – falseeconomy.org.uk – a resource hub for the UK anti-cuts movement.
False Economy allows people to upload their own stories and find out about cuts in their local area, tell other people how they’ve been affected by cuts and learn more information about anti-cuts campaigns in their area.
From a press release
New Compass paper opens up Red/Green ties
The centre-left pressure group Compass published a new e-book titled, ‘Good Society / Green Society? the red/green debate’ this week,
It has a joint foreword from Caroline Lucas MP, the Leader of the Green Party, and Neal Lawson, Chair of Compass and a member of the Labour Party.
The centre-left pressure group Compass recently voted to open up its membership to Lib Dems, Greens, and other people in parties other than Labour.
Articles in the book discuss questions raised by the proposition that reds and greens should co-operate. Some of the articles tackle questions which cause difficulties for the prospects of co-operation, such as economic growth, the influence of consumerism on the labour movement, and the limitations of anti-cuts campaigns.
There are also articles providing a feminist angle on red-green dialogue, and an account of the experience of red-green co-operation and coalitions in other countries, such as Germany, where the most likely outcome of the next general election is a coalition between the Social Democratic Party, SPD (equivalent of the Labour Party), and the Greens.
Discussing the book as a whole, Neal Lawson said:
This new collection of articles is a signs of the new pluralistic politics. The Labour Party is at last gradually coming to recognise it does not have a monopoly of thinking on the centre-left of British politics.
Red-green dialogue is essential if Labour is to renew itself and the Greens are to have the impact they deserve.
Victor Anderson, editor of the e-book, said:
Future generations are going to be puzzled and angry by the failure of current generations to seriously address the ecological crisis. The pluralistic politics of Compass make it somewhere these issues can be debated, with a chance they will be acted on.
Articles also explore possible common ground, around ideas about equality, values, and international trade.
From a press release
Could Obama yet salvage the situation after this disaster?
contribution by Marcus Roberts
The US debt ceiling deal is bad for the US economy, bad for President Obama’s political capital and bad for the concept of national legislatures full stop.
With nobel laurettes Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz both warning that more rather then less government spending is needed to counter the global downturn, the deal’s proposed trillion dollar plus cuts is a further risk to the US and thus global economy.
Simply put, there is now a greater prospect of a Japanese-style ‘lost decade’ with sustained no-to-low growth rates and high unemployment.
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Phillips: Did Breivik’s views really play a part in terrorism?
[Post update - see 'the evidence' section below]
The Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips has written an article attacking me today. That is the amusing part.
But looking at how she deals with Breivik’s heinous terrorism… here’s what I think Melanie Phillips is trying to tell us:
[Former Norwegian PM] Jagland, however, said leaders would be ‘playing with fire’ if they continued to use rhetoric [on multi-culturalism] that could be exploited by extremists such as Breivik.
This is because Breivik’s so-called manifesto shows that he is violently against mass immigration, multiculturalism and Islamisation — and that he wants the forced repatriation of Muslims from Europe and the murder of all who have promoted multiculturalism.
But to connect such abhorrent ravings with Cameron’s comments is simply grotesque.
Lesson 1 by Melanie Phillips is that you should never connect the views of terrorists with what political leaders say. Apparently politicians have no impact on the population whatsoever
First and foremost, this is treating Breivik as if his words deserve to be taken seriously and at face value.
As of now, however, we don’t know whether Breivik is psychotic, a psychopath or under the influence of all the drugs he claims to have taken.
Lesson 2: We should never take at face-value what terrorists say or claim, even if they’ve spent years discussing those views, writing them, and planning for an attack.
Painting them as a ‘psychopath’ or a druggie helps push the view they didn’t know what they were doing and can’t possibly have been driven by ideology.
We also don’t know what part, if any, his political views actually played in this atrocity.
After all, since his target was his country’s Labour party one might just as well surmise that he was motivated by hatred of his father, who was a Labour party supporter and who was divorced from Breivik’s mother when the killer was a baby.
Lesson 3: The fact that he wrote long texts explaining why he wanted to carry out those actions, should not mean he was influenced by them! His political views may be entirely accidental to this atrocity!
When Muslims commit terrorism, even if they’re not religious, we know they are influenced by their religion.
However, when its far-right terrorism, we just don’t know if they were influenced by articles in the Daily Mail. Got that?
In any event, someone who travels to a teenagers’ summer camp and invites them all to gather round so that he can kill them all cannot be considered rational.
I’m not sure any mass-murderer can be considered rational. See Lesson 2.
Even if he was motivated by hostility to multiculturalism and Islam, it is perverse to suggest that no one should write about these things because some deranged person raving about such ideas has run amok.
Lesson 4: When far-right terrorists kill, we should not be silent on the issues they raised. However, if Muslims kill others, then we should ask why their terrorism-inciting extremist views are unchallenged.
Jagland seems to be cynically exploiting the murder of more than 70 innocents to make a connection which is as obnoxious as it is opportunistic in order to bully into silence those who express such legitimate democratic concerns.
Lesson 5: It’s these lefties who are exploiting the terrorist attacks! A right-winger would never use a terrorist atrocity to make a political point.
Neither would right-wingers ever make a connection between the views of the terrorist and certain political / religious leaders. OK?
… And then she attacks me. Which is nice. I’m now going to buy the Daily Mail and frame that article.
THE EVIDENCE
Melanie Phillips would of course never contradict herself would she?
The flaw lies in its definition of the problem as ‘violent’ extremism.
It refuses to acknowledge that even people who do not themselves advocate violence but who promote extremist and seditious views, such as the overthrow of British society and the [imposition of Islamic sharia law], are a threat to this country by inciting hatred and resentment, thus swelling the sea in which violence swims.
Oh dear. Replace ‘Imposing sharia Law’ with wanting a mono-racial and mono-cultural society, and you get the same don’t you?
And she says she makes a distinction between violent and non-violent Muslims….
The moral depravity of the Arabs is finding a grotesque echo in the moral bankruptcy and worse of the British and American ‘liberal’ media,
(via Larry in the comments below) Hmmm, really?
On Incapacity Benefit, this government is failing our society
contribution by NTDSMK
The coalition often quote Tony Blair ruefully saying that he didn’t “push forward fast enough over the NHS”. The same cannot be said for the coalition, and not just on health.
On many things, the coalition heedlessly charge onwards – their ideological compass acting as their only guide in the dark.
One such prime example is over the changes to Incapacity Benefit.
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Osborne’s key growth policy: the NI holiday, has also failed
Figures released over the weekend show that the government’s National Insurance Contributions ‘holiday‘ has been a damp squib.
The scheme was supposed to help 400,000 new businesses and create 800,000 new jobs in worse-off regions; the results so far: 5,137 firms have been helped to create just over 10,000 jobs. Of the £940 million set aside for the scheme, the government has so far needed to spend … £10.3 million.
Now, it’s not good form to shout “told you so”, but this comes as no surprise.
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With the debt-ceiling deal, Obama bid his re-election goodbye
Every week I play poker and every week there is the same unwritten rule: unless you indicate you are willing to go all in and lose it all, you will walk out a loser.
A couple of weeks ago I said President Obama had the Republicans over a barrel in the debt-ceiling negotiations. But it turns out I over-estimated Obama prowess as a negotiator and how far he was willing to capitulate to Republican extremists.
There is now a huge danger these cuts will sink the Presidency next year.
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