A demand for proportional representation was voted as the top Parliament reform by popular choice, the Power2010 campaign group said today.

The most popular proposals that will make up the ‘Power Pledge’ will now be: PR, the end of ID cards and government data hoarding, an elected House of Lords, English votes on English laws, and a commitment to drawing up a written constitution.

Over a 100,000 votes were cast on the Power2010 website, which also conducted deliberative discussion events across the country.

Power2010 Director Pam Giddy said:

This campaign sends the clearest possible message to the political classes that it is time to listen to the people’s demands. 100,000 votes were cast – and we expect many thousands of people across the country to pledge their support before the election.

We’ve taken the campaign to towns and cities across the country and everywhere heard the same thing: it’s time to fix our political system, not fiddle it.

The next phase of the campaign will see voters asked to commit their support to a majority of the proposals – at least three – and then challenge every candidate at the next general election to support them too.

A network of regional campaigners, supported by high profile partner organisations and a national marketing campaign will also be used to push the campaign forward.

Pam Giddy added:

We’re going to keep up the pressure until election day to make sure the people who want to represent us in parliament take these results seriously and back our campaign for change.

The campaign is backed by the Joseph Rowntree Trusts and is supported by a wide coalition of organisations and individuals.
www.power2010.org.uk

From a press release

The Green Party’s Spring Conference kicks off today at the Arts Depot in North London.

Today’s events will include debates on Low Wages (hosted by London AM Darren Johnson) as well as: ‘Co-operatives and the Green Party’, climate change and ‘Green Party Women’ (hosted by Natalie Bennett, Green Party PPC for Holborn and St Pancras).

Tomorrow, the conference will be addressed by Caroline Lucas MEP in the morning.

It will also hold a session on civil liberties and blogging / new media (hosted by Jim Jepps) later in the day.

Jim Jepps adds on his blog:

There’s some interesting stuff on the agenda, including an over-haul of our health policy, the beginnings of our science and technology review, blogging workshop and technical constitutional reforms of which I’m probably a thousand times more interested in that you are.

A full time-table of the conference is here.

You can also follow the debate on Twitter at the #gpconf hashtag.

A Japanese Finance Minister has called for the country to impose a tax on financial transactions to curb market volatility, also dubbed the ‘Robin Hood tax’.

Naoki Minezaki said market volatility threatened economic growth.

Bloomberg reports him saying::

“We’re seeing speculative funds flowing carelessly around the world — one day in stocks and real estate other times in oil and grains — and this is destroying the lives of ordinary people,” Minezaki wrote in an e-mail to supporters and reporters on Feb. 15. “We have to implement the Tobin Tax as part of international solidarity,” he said, adding that the levy could also boost revenue.

Japan is now fourth in the seven richest countries on the planet to endorse the Tobin, a.k.a. Robin Hood tax. It joins the leaders of Britain, France and Germany.

Owen Tudor at the ToUChstone blog welcomed the news, adding:

Four out of seven. Er, that’s a majority isn’t it? Of course, the US administration is yet to be convinced, but we are getting closer to the tipping point.For those who don’t like decisions being made by the richest countries in the world, the G7 does actually have traction on this issue, because most financial transactions do take place in those richest countries.

Over 70% of the value of global transactions are in just three: Britain, Germany and the USA. And there isn’t actually a mechanism to introduce a global tax, so in reality what a global tax means is the co-ordinated introduction of taxes by the countries where the financial transactions take place.

Japan’s move is likely to put pressure on the US to move in the same direction.

A signature campaign against the Pope’s visit to the UK has gathered over 11,000 signatures according to the National Secular Society’s website.

The organisation has announced a large-scale campaign of protest against the state visit of the Pope to Britain in September.

The trip is estimated to cost around £20 million, payable by the taxpayer.

Terry Sanderson, president of the NSS, said:

We have an online petition where people can make clear their opposition to the state funding of this visit. If the Catholic Church wishes its leader to come here, it should pay for the visit itself.

I am sure many others feel the same resentment as we do at the NSS at funding the presence of someone who wishes to impose a reactionary agenda of social change on us.

He said a coalition of groups that have suffered because of the Pope’s teachings will ensure that wherever he goes he will be aware that he has caused damage and hurt in the lives of real people.

The coalition was seeking to bring together gay groups, feminist groups, family planning organisations, pro-choice groups, victim support groups and anyone who feels under siege from “the Vatican’s current militancy”.

Peter Tatchell, the human rights campaigner told The Times:

His ill-informed claim that our equality laws undermine religious freedom suggests that he supports the right of Churches to discriminate in accordance with their religious ethos.

He seems to be defending discrimination by religious institutions and demanding that they should be above the law.

A growing call has been reverberating across the world to cancel Haiti’s debt ever since the earthquake.

Yesterday the global campaign group Avaaz sent out an email asking people to sign their petition to cancel the country’s debt. Avaaz and partners will deliver it to the IMF and key finance ministers next week.

Their move comes after another anti-poverty group, One, handed over a petition with 150,000 signatures to the International Monetary Fund.

The petition asked that the IMF cancel Haiti’s $165 million debt repayment obligation when the board meets later this week. “Swift action by the IMF would increase momentum and pressure on all creditors,” One said in a statement, according to HuffPo.

This week Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez also announced he was canceling Haiti’s $295 million debt to Petrocaribe, Venezuela’s energy regional energy distributor. “Haiti has no debt with Venezuela — on the contrary, it is Venezuela that has a historic debt with Haiti,” Chavez said.

On Facebook, a group demanding, ‘No Shock Doctrine for Haiti‘ – has accumulated over 30,000 members already.

The World Bank, also under heavy criticism along with the IMF, announced this week it was waiving Haiti’s debt repayments for the next five years.

The Nation magazine reported this week on the issue too:

[Naomi] Klein says that this is “unprecedented in my experience and shows that public pressure in moments of disaster can seriously subvert shock doctrine tactics.” Neil Watkins, Executive Director of Jubilee USA, likewise hails the IMF’s response. “Since the IMF’s announcement last week of its intention to provide Haiti with a $100 million loan, Jubilee USA and our partners have been calling for grants and debt cancellation–not new loans–for Haiti. We are pleased that Managing Director Strauss-Kahn has responded to that call.”

Watkins and others will continue to follow the issue, holding the IMF to its commitment to debt relief and non-conditionality. They’re also pressing the case on Haiti’s other outstanding debt. The largest multilateral holders of Haiti’s debt are the Inter-American Development Bank ($447 million), the IMF ($165 million, plus $100 million in new lending), the World Bank’s International Development Association ($39 million) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development ($13 million). The largest bilateral loans are held by Venezuela ($295 million–hello, Chavez!?) and Taiwan ($92 million).

The lesson: public pressure works, especially in a moment of such acutely visible human need. Keep up the mobilization, on Facebook and in real life.

The mother of one of the Edlington torture case victims hit back at David Cameron today for using the case to talk about a “social recession”.

In a speech given last week David Cameron said:

When parents are rewarded for splitting up, when professionals are told that it’s better to follow rules than do what they think is best, when single parents find they take home less for working more, when young people learn that it pays not to get a job, when the kind-hearted are discouraged from doing good in their community, is it any wonder our society is broken? We can’t go on like this.

He pointed pointed to the brutal attack on the nine and 11-year-old boys in Edlington, South Yorkshire, by brothers aged 10 and 11 to reinforce his case.

PA reported:

the Tory leader will point to the torture of two young boys as an extreme symptom of what he dubs Labour’s “moral failure” as he launches a raft of social policies.

But one of the mothers retorted: “It’s those boys who are broken – not us.” [via Paul Waugh]

Cameron was already under fire from Labour and some media commentators for tarring whole communities with the same brush.

Former London Mayor Ken Livingstone has taken up the ‘class war’ against the Tories in this week’s Tribune magazine.

In it he attacks David Cameron’s Conservative Party for waging a ‘class war’ against average voters.

Livingstone argues that the Tories have ‘reverted to type’, and that ‘those on average incomes, the least well off, the unemployed, teachers, health workers and others must suffer from a savage attack on public spending’. Livingstone also claims that ‘a meaningful fight against climate change would be abandoned’.

‘These are open class-war policies, with a vengeance’.

But he also argues that just focusing on lower income voters cannot build Labour a winning electoral coalition.

Labour “can only win when it has the support of both those on ‘middle incomes’ and the less advantaged,” he says.

He also calls for Labour to engage in dialogue with those who “support a progressive agenda but who, for various reasons, are not natural Labour supporters”.

Ken Livingstone will be the main speaker at next week’s Progressive London event.

More from the Tribune interview here.

Social media websites were the biggest referrers to the Disasters Emergency Coalition fund-raising appeal on Haiti, the organisation has claimed.

The DEC says it had raised £10m in 24 hours after the Haiti Earthquake Appeal was launched.

Facebook and Twitter were by far the biggest referrers to their site after Google and BBC.

The amount includes online and phone donations only, with amounts from corporate, postal, events, SMS and over-the-counter donations still to be recorded.

The DEC issued a statement saying social media “played a crucial part in raising funds and awareness” in the 36 hours following the appeal.

Although the TV ads was not broadcast until Friday evening, £8m was raised online following the first DEC announcement on Twitter at 7.41pm on Wednesday.

It said simply:

You’re the first to know – DEC #Haiti Earthquake Appeal now live, UK broadcast appeals to follow

An SMS donation system was launched shortly afterwards and by Saturday morning a total of 148,000 people had donated online.

The DEC Facebook page now counts over 11,000 fans as of Sunday morning – a phenomenal rise up from 800 five days earlier.

Bloggers showed their support by adding DEC banners and buttons to hundreds of UK blogs.

DEC Chief Executive Brendan Gormley said:

Their donations mean our member agencies can continue to source and deliver the emergency supplies needed like safe water, shelter, medicine and food. We hope people will continue to give their support so that more emergency aid can be added to what will be a massive humanitarian effort.

Photograph sharing site Flickr has also been used to host images from the DEC’s member agencies, with 34,000 views of the DEC account on Friday.

The ability to pool resources on sharing sites and follow the DEC’s 13 member agencies through newly implemented Twitter ‘lists’ has also proved invaluable to the committee in updating the public on developments.

Examples of what donations will go to include:
* £25 will supply a kit of household essentials.
* £50 buys a food pack to feed a family for a fortnight.
* £100 provides temporary shelter for two families.

To make a donation to the DEC Haiti Earthquake Appeal visit www.dec.org.ukor call 0370 60 60 900

London’s occasional Mayor Boris Johnson has found £75,000 for a ‘USA Day’ in the capital despite raising fares for commuters and earlier cutting festivals on cost grounds.

Last year Boris killed off the multicultural festival Rise on cost grounds. But his department has miraculously found money to promote the United States in London, according to the Guardian.

Steve Hart, regional secretary of the Unite union, said:

It is remarkable he is subsidising predominantly wealthy Americans when he has cut £300m from the bus subsidy and increased fares by 20%.

Rise began in 1996 and had become the largest anti-racist festival in Europe, attracting crowds of about 100,000.

Update: Adam Bienkov reports that Boris didn’t seem to be aware that his office was actually sponsoring the USA festival.

Is London’s occasional Mayor ever aware of his own policies?

[via Septicisle]

The organisers of the extremely popular Atheist Bus ads launched the second part to their campaign today.

While the first ad campaign stated: ‘There’s probably no god. So stop worrying and enjoy your life’.

The new one states: ‘Please don’t label me. Let me grow up and choose for myself’.

On Guardian CIF Ariane Sherine explained the reasoning behind the new campaign:

However, rather than using adverts to try and campaign politically, we thought it would be more beneficial to try and change the current public perception that it is acceptable to label children with a religion. As Richard Dawkins states, “Nobody would seriously describe a tiny child as a ‘Marxist child’ or an ‘Anarchist child’ or a ‘Post-modernist child’.”

“Yet children are routinely labelled with the religion of their parents. We need to encourage people to think carefully before labelling any child too young to know their own opinions, and our adverts will help to do that.”
…
We hope the advert’s message will encourage the government, media and general public to see children as individuals, free to make their own choices as soon as they are old enough to fully understand what these choices mean, and that they will think twice before describing children in terms of their parents’ religion in the future.

The adverts will go across billboards and buses from 20th November to coincide with Universal Children’s Day.

The campaign has a Facebook page here.

Extolling his widely known scientific credentials, Fox News host rubbishes global warming by saying it was the codest year on record. The two are not always related.

[via Kevin Blowe]

Meet Tory ‘rebel’ Sir Jeremy Bagge. He is against Conservative Party leader David Cameron pushing his own preferred candidates into a local seat.

Today, in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, he is reported as saying:

“I personally feel that Central Office are dictatorial. They have shoehorned us, they have deceived us, they have betrayed us.” Sir Jeremy pauses before declaring: “I think they need a boot up the backside, a b—– good kick to wake them up, to be perfectly honest.”

Sir Jeremy, a member of the association executive, said: “I’m going to be there on Monday night. I’m only given two minutes to speak but I will say my bit. I might make a complete b—– idiot of myself but I will have done my bit and not done a u-turn.”

That is in response to him and his band of rebels challenging the Cameron ‘A List’ candidate Elizabeth Truss.

In return he has been called ‘Turnip Taliban’. Apparently he’s quite proud of that name:

I have a turban actually. I went to Pakistan a few years ago, and when I read ‘Taliban Turnip’ I put my b—– hat on. I’m proud to be called that. I prefer to be called Taliban Turnip than Tory Toff.

Sounds good to us. But could his vendetta against Truss be motivated by sexism? Absolutely not, he says:

“Sorry, no, I have never said I’m anti-women. I have got absolutely nothing against women.

“Who cooks my lunch? Who cooks my dinner? How did my wonderful three children appear? Women, you can’t do without them. My god, take my wife.”

What does she do for a living? “What does she do? She looks after me. Looks after the children. Runs the house.”

Oh dear. Sometimes it’s hard not to feel sorry for Cameron when he has these people holding him hostage.

Last week Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart caught out Fox News showing video from a previous rally to play up the number of people who attended a different rally against healthcare

Sean Hannity from Fox News then apologised.

This was Jon Stewart’s response on The Daily Show.

[via North of Westminster]

This week the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart exposed how Fox News re-used footage to exaggerate the number of people attending a Fox promoted anti-healthcare rally.

It is increasingly difficult to find clips of The Daily Show to show in the UK as Comedy Central have stopped clips being shown outsides the US.

[via North of Westminster]

A poll for PoliticsHome today found that 65% of voters think the Sun’s reporting on the letter sent to Jacqui Janes was over the top and crossed the line.

About half of all those who voted said they were more inclined to defend Gordon Brown, with only 17% saying they were less inclined.

PoliticsHome reported:

In addition, more than three times the percentage of voters (thirty one per cent) say that this episode has made them think more of the Prime Minister than think less of him (9%). A comparable proportion (twenty eight per cent) say that the episode has made them think less of the Sun.

Today the Daily Mirror hit back, quoting Jamie Janes’ uncle as: ‘My sister’s grief has been hijacked to make a political point..it’s wrong‘.

Army veteran Ian Cox said he was outraged sister Jacqui Janes’s attack on the PM’s condolence message spelling mistakes had been hijacked by opponents.

And Mrs Janes yesterday said she had been misrepresented in the row and only acted out of concern that her son did not have the proper military kit in Afghanistan.

The Mirror story and the poll will come as a huge embarrassment to the Sun newspaper and Rupert Murdoch, who has also had to back-pedal over comments that he thought US President Barack Obama was racist.

A survey for YouGov released today found that most people believed the influence of the Murdoch empire was waning in contrast to Google.

Yesterday Tory blogger Guido Fawkes defended the Sun as:

This morning’s reporting of Brown’s conversation with Mrs Janes was a good news story, news is after all what people don’t want you to hear, the rest is spin. The left is now in full on “Murdoch is evil” mode, Fox and the Sun will be characterised as liars. They will take presenters like Glenn Beck and columnists like the great Kelvin MacKenzie and make out that this is biased news – it isn’t, it is opinionated infotainment.

Seems the “news story” was not perceived as “good” by a vast majority of the public.

Widespread revulsion to The Sun’s political campaign – using a dead mother’s grief to campaign against Labour – was apparent everywhere.

Embarrasingly for the paper, most of the comments underneath the initial article were supportive of Brown. Some even attacked the mother for using her son’s death for political point scoring.

This led the Sun to close comments in a follow-up article in case it faced a bigger backlash from its own readers.

On Twitter, Vincent Moss confirmed:

Newspaper attacks on Brown’s letter/eyesight now starting to backfire badly even among anti-Labour voters, according to my polling expert.

RowanDavies added:

Beginning to think the Sun has dropped a bollock on this Jamie Janes business. Comments on Mumsnet are running 15-1 in GB’s favour.

Behind the scenes there were more examples of back-tracking.

The Guardian reported Rupert Murdoch saying he regretted his editors (note the plural) had “turned very much against Gordon Brown”.

Yesterday, even the newspaper’s former political editor George Pascoe-Watson admitted…

that Brown “cares passionately about the care of our troops”, and said that there was “a danger that public opinion could go against The Sun”.

Paul Waugh at the Standard confirmed the same:

What’s not in doubt is the danger that The Sun runs in overplaying its hand on the whole affair. News websites are full of comments from the public pointing out that while Mr Brown may have blundered, his sincerity is not in doubt in writing letters to the families of the fallen.

Today, the Daily Mirror leapt to the PM’s defence.

Even The Sun today has started back-tracking, accepting that the PM’s letter was “well-meaning”.

Political Scrapbook says the Sun had form for putting words into people’s mouths, illustrating how the paper used a 7/7 victim to push for harsher terrorism legislation.

Recently the Next Left blog surveyed and showed that all the top ten Tory blogs in the UK denied the existence of global warming.

Now Martin from the Lay Scientist blog has done a similar survey of UK MEPs.

By my count, 23% of Britain’s 72 MEPs are either explicit climate ’skeptics’, or are members of ’skeptic’ parties who remain silent on the subject (I use the term in quotes since climate ’skeptics’ are generally about as ’skeptical’ as 9/11 ‘truthers’ are truth-oriented – googling for things that support your case and credulously accepting them as ‘fact’ isn’t skepticism).

Of those, eight belonged to UKIP, two were Conservative and two BNP.

Views of several other MEPs were not know.

Martin adds:

The 26 Conservatives did better than I expected, perhaps through Cameron’s attempt to rebrand the party as Green Conservatives. Indeed, Tories like Vicky Ford are openly attacking bad science, with quotes like: “To be honest, I get fed up with climate-change-deniers.” Roger Helmer and Daniel Hannan from the Tory fringe pose the last challenge to a European party consensus on the issue, while the views of four remain unknown.

The fringes of the right, who now comprise around 20% of our elected representatives in Europe, are a car crash. The BNP aren’t exactly the most rational of parties, and their views were not unexpected; but UKIP are a much more serious proposition and take a fiercely anti-science line, as you can see from a quick search of their website. UKIP are a climate denialist party.

Read the full article here.

Last week The Times newspaper dedicated a full leader column to condemning the French minister for Europe, Pierre Lellouche, for using the word “autistic” to describe the Tory approach to the EU.

It thundered:

He is entitled to voice his disagreement with David Cameron’s stance on Europe. It may be useful to hear his warning that the Conservative leader’s promise to repatriate powers from Brussels is unrealistic. It is less helpful to hear his crude depiction of Britain having “castrated” its influence. What is absolutely unacceptable, however, is his description of Conservative policy as “bizarre autism”.

Autism is a serious, lifelong and disabling condition, affecting more than half a million people in Britain. To use the term “autism” and “autistic” in a derogatory or flippant manner can cause deep hurt to those affected by the condition. To use the term as a criticism, for dramatic effect or to try to gain political advantage, perpetuates the misunderstanding of this condition and is, as the National Autistic Society said yesterday, “extremely unhelpful”.

Blogger Tom Freeman says he “agrees with every word”.

He adds:

But what puzzles me is that the editorial makes no mention of the only noteworthy use in recent years by a British politician of the same term “in a derogatory or flippant manner… for dramatic effect or to try to gain political advantage”.

I mean George Osborne’s suggestion in October 2006 that Gordon Brown was “mildly autistic”.

Anyone who follows politics reasonably closely, as Times leader writers most certainly do, will remember this. Yet not a mention of this episode.

The newspaper also ran two columns by Ann Mary Seighart excusing George Osborne’s use of the term.

Curious that those two columns or the Osborne row were not mentioned.

Blogger Septicisle adds in the comments below Tom Freeman’s post:

Nothing to do with it being the Graun that reported it then. Or the fact that the Times accused the Graun of translating the French minister inaccurately when the interview was in fact conducted in, err, English.

Campaigners pressing for a vote on electoral reform have welcomed news from Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw that “it would be a missed opportunity not to have a referendum on Election Day.”

In an interview with the New Statesman the Bradshaw broke with the government’s stated policy of pushing talk of a referendum into the next parliament. Bradshaw said “if we’re serious about the voters as grown-ups, then let them decide, and I think they’d be perfectly capable of making a decision.”

The Vote for a Change campaign and the Electoral Reform Society, that have been leading calls for vote at the next election, have said “there’s all to play for.”

The campaign is towing a 10 foot effigy of Sir Peter Viggers Duck Island to the Commons terraces for Bonfire Night as a symbol of how little has changed in the struggle to bring real accountability to Westminster.

Dr Ken Ritchie from the Electoral Reform Society said:

Ben Bradshaw’s comments are welcome news for all those who’ve realised our politics had reached its sell by date. We are pleased to see a cabinet minister prepared to question both the timing and system on offer in Brown’s conference pledge.

Ben Bradshaw has recognised the Alternative Vote is a step back from Labour’s early pledges to transform our politics. We need this debate in government. It sends a strong message to all reformers that there’s all to play for.

Willie Sullivan from the Vote for a Change campaign said:

It seems nothing has really changed at Westminster, but by showing his willingness to act on reform on Election Day Brown can turn the page. Brown can swap words for decisive action. He can show he’s prepared to let the voters decide the future of their parliament when MPs gather for the Queen’s Speech on November 18th.

The Vote for a Change campaign will be towing a 10 foot DuckIsland to the Commons terraces today to underline how little has changed since MPs left for recess. The effigy will be burnt after dark.

From a press release