Indigo Jo Blogs

John Harris: The tactics of Crewe expose a truly nasty party: Labour (The Guardian)

An exposé of the "dog-whistle" tactics being used in the campaign for the Crewe and Nantwich by-election next week, in which Labour have circulated a flyer lampooning the Conservative opponent's wealthy background (he is from the Timpson family, which runs a chain of shoe repair and key-cutting shops):

The Labour campaign, under the command of the Birmingham MP Steve McCabe, has rebranded its chief adversary "Tory Boy Timpson", and is going for him with an eye-popping ferocity. Volunteers have been stalking him dressed in top hat and tails; now, there comes a very nasty leaflet titled "Tory candidate application form", replete with questions and ticked boxes. Number one is, "Do you live in a big mansion house?" Question two is - and, really, the sense of humour on display is quite something - "Do you think that regeneration is adding a new wing to your mansion?" The third reads: "Have you and your Tory mates on the council been soft on yobs and failed to make our streets safer?" But the best is saved for question four, at which point pantomimic class hatred is suspended and we get something altogether more sinister. "Do you," it asks, "oppose making foreign nationals carry an ID card?"

I had thought that the daughter of the much-respected Gwyneth Dunwoody, who died last month, would not face much of a contest, but if they need to descend to this level of personal nastiness and thinly-veiled racism, mentioning local yobs next to the bloody foreigners, clearly they are pretty desperate. Dunwoody junior herself, by the way, is listed in Burke's peerage, so she is not exactly working-class herself even if some of her ancestors were. Really, it typifies why Labour are going down the drain: they have no ideas left and really are trying to be the "red Tories", having dumped not only their pro-labour policies but also any progressive stances they once had.

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The recent issue of Red Pepper contains an editorial, written by Oscar Reyes, about the upcoming mayoral elections in London. Reyes notes that Boris Johnson, the Tory challenger for the position against Labour's Ken Livingstone, has hired the Australian strategist Lynton Crosby, who is known for running divisive "dog whistle" campaigns for the "Liberals" in his home country, winning them several elections, and trying the same for the Tories in the UK in 2005, when they lost handily. Johnson has also been much assisted by the London Evening Standard, which has run one front-page after another about what they presume readers will think his nasty friends, which last week were the Muslim Brotherhood and today the Sikh Federation UK.

Continue reading "London election is not just about race" »

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Sarah Brown, the wife of the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, has been attacked in certain sections of the media for wearing Indian dress on a visit to Delhi as part of a visit with the PM to India and China. The clothes were made by Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla, based in Bombay but with a shop in London, who have also made clothes for Dame Judi Dench to wear at the past four Academy Award ceremonies. Alison Pearson, writing in today's Daily Mail, said that she looked lovely, and I agree (you can see a picture of her here). However, some twerp calling himself Ephraim Hardcastle, in the same paper, said she should have been wearing western clothes, and people sympathetic to him on this morning's BBC London phone-in asked when "the robed and veiled women" from that part of the world would start wearing our clothes when in this country.

First thing is that Sarah Brown is not a politician herself; she is Gordon Brown's wife and has no obligation to represent this country at all. She is quite entitled to wear whatever clothes she likes, in the UK or India. Second, her dress is magnificent, in my opinion at least, and I don't think any British designer could have produced something approaching it. I don't think Versace would have - excuse the pun - cut it either (and if she had worn Italian, nobody would have complained). Third, the British clothes manufacturing industry has been run into the ground over the last few years - the vast majority of clothes sold in the UK, including expensive clothes, are made cheaply in third-world countries.

But the most important of my objections is that women from "eastern" countries, both Muslim and Hindu (and most Indians are Hindus, not Muslims), are seen wearing western clothes in both west and east all the time. On any day, you can see women wearing mostly western dress with a headscarf on the streets of any town in England with a significant Muslim population, and if you visit Arab countries outside the Gulf, the dress worn by religious women often consists of a long skirt and a loose top with a headscarf. For men, traditional clothing is often suppressed by the state. Anyone who talks of foreign women wearing "our" clothes, when they usually do while we wear clothes made in India and China, is an ignoramus.

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BBC NEWS: EU stalemate on workers' rights

I heard this being discussed on the radio this morning, with a discussion on the Today programme between representatives of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and the Trades Union Congress (TUC); you can listen to it with this stream. I have considerable interest in this as I have been an agency worker for some time, having worked in both offices as a driver.

The CBI argued that this country has more agency workers than anywhere else in Europe, because agency workers offer flexibility to both workers and employers. My experience is that the flexibility is much more a benefit for employers, because they can sack someone for any reason they like, even after someone has been working there for months. I worked for a certain company for several months through the winter of 2002 and spring of 2003 until I took a week off for a family wedding in Ireland. The managers gave me every impression that I would be welcome back, but when I returned from Ireland I found that my job had been given away. There was nothing I could do about it and was out of work for weeks afterwards. The reason the foreman gave was that he did not like to keep agency drivers on for long, because they tended to "get their feet under the table".

I think a compromise should be reached so that the nature of agency work is preserved - people know when they start that they are there on a temporary basis, which is why it's called temping, and that when the occasion for their employment is over, so is their employment. I would, however, like to see more protection from unfair or capricious dismissal - and this for permanent workers as well, as they cannot sue for unfair dismissal until they have been employed for two years.

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Comment is free: Panic stations

Christian Wolmar (British railways commentator) on the ridiculous security arrangements at the new St Pancras railway station in London, the terminal for trains to Paris:

St Pancras, which reopened today, is a wonderful station but its atmosphere is ruined by the ridiculously onerous security arrangements forced on the architects by Transsec, the shadowy and unaccoubtable government organisation responsible for security on the transport network, which spends much of its time trying to prevent bicycles being parked at stations. A huge 9ft glass barrier surrounds the trains, and crams the crowds into a relatively small concourse. Worse, a very large area between the ends of the platform and the barrier has been left empty in the event, according to one of the architects with whom I spoke today, that people need to be cleared off the train but not allowed to go downstairs to the departure and arrival areas. But surely, I asked, would they not simply open the doors in the glass fence. No, apparently not, in case there was a suspected terrorist, and in any case all these people would be entering Britain without the chance to check their passports (which in any case are checked before they board the train).

All this crazy security for a railway station when, next door at King's Cross, there is none at all! There is no evidence that Eurostar trains face a greater security threat than any other rail service, except the security service's obsessive belief that terrorists like to hit targets that would maximise publicity. However, as both the 7/7 London and Madrid bombers showed, blowing up a few ordinary suburban or underground trains certainly gets them on the front pages across the world. Yes, the World Trade Centre attack was particularly spectacular, but terrorists intent on carnage will always find targets - they would not, for example, have to hit a Premiership stadium, but could easily wipe out hundreds of people at a League One ground.

He also notes that if they really are stepping up security, it might be best not to let on. However, there is another issue here, which is why on earth we have vastly more onerous immigration and passport laws for travel to a neighbouring European country than any other European country, and it's about to get worse - from next year or the year after, we will no longer be able to travel unhindered to and from Ireland either, as we have been since the country became independent.

A lot of people don't seem to know this - on the continent, you can simply walk from country to country without a passport, or without any check at all. When I visited Aachen on the German-Dutch border in 1991 or thereabouts, I took a bus to the Dutch border and simply walked over into Vaals, on the Dutch side. There was nothing much to do and I soon just walked back, but the point is made. You cannot do this when travelling from England to France; you have to have a passport, which now costs £100. This is more than double what it cost three years ago, and I do not accept that present circumstances justify it and do not care, frankly. There was an easy way we could have avoided those circumstances, if they exist at all.

It seems that this country always takes the bad things from the European Union - the pointless rules on what can be traded and what can't, for example - and leaves the good, namely the personal freedom other European citizens enjoy. The reason seems to be the perception that we are an island nation and that this is somehow something we should cherish, when in fact it belongs to the past when we controlled a lot of other people's countries and when we also had overseas white colonies. However, "present circumstances" allow the government additional licence to increase the burdens of security on the public; it allows the government to impress the media that we are neither surrendering to Europe nor letting terrorism happen. The UK has traditionally had a degree of liberty unmatched in Europe, and we have surrendered that within the space of a few years just because of a few bombs. It's ridiculous.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 7:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

muslimmatters.org » “NeO” to Giuliani — United Against a Presidential Nightmare

At the request of Amad, and at the risk of getting a flood of "how dare this Limey stick his nose into American politics" responses, I decided to give a link to the anti-Giuliani campaign at Muslim Matters. (After all, whoever wins, our government will be licking his boots within the hour.)

The bit about Giuliani warning of "another 9/11" if the Democrats win reminds me of something that happened in the 1945 election here in the UK. Winston Churchill, who had been Prime Minister for most of World War II (it was Neville Chamberlain who actually declared the war), told the people that if Labour was to put into practice the Beveridge report (the NHS, social security etc), they would need some sort of Gestapo to make people pay for it. People were outraged by the suggestion that the opposition were like the enemy, and it is widely considered an important factor in Labour's victory.

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This great free-market experiment is more like a corporate welfare scheme (from today's Guardian)

This is a great article by George Monbiot about the tendency of the "free market" system to act as a cover for government subsidy, or preferential treatment, for big business. In the particular case cited here, the renovation of two hospitals in Coventry was scrapped in favour of building a new privately-financed one at what was originally predicted to be nearly six times the cost, but which proved by early 2007 to be nearly fourteen times that amount, on the outskirts of town (against the wishes of the people), resulting in closures of wards, job cuts and punitive charges to patients and their families - while the payments to the financiers are not negotiable. The purpose seems to be an attempt to cast an image of a "fiscally prudent" "Iron Chancellor" by postponing paying for public services to the future.

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Life without hope: America's child prisoners - Weekend Guardian

This story is a distressing read; it is about people locked up for life without parole as juveniles in the USA, in particular Michigan, although such a sentence is mandatory in at least one other US state which has no death penalty. Most of them are people who committed, or participated in, murders as disturbed teenagers, one of them as young as 14. One of them also appears to have been the victim of a racially prejudiced jury. I agree with the general sentiment that sentencing people to life without parole for crimes committed at that age makes no sense; judges and even some of the victims' families agree, but it seems politicians don't.

Continue reading "Life without hope" »

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The past couple of days the London BBC radio station has had features on possible candidates for the next London mayoral election. Yesterday, on Eddie Nestor and Kath Melandri's drive-time show, the candidate was Gary Bushell, a columnist for various tabloid papers who was originally a socialist and moved in a much more libertarian direction, and now belongs to the "English Democrats", an anti-EU party which supports an English parliament. Now, something I noticed from the 2004 election was that at least one far right candidate was talking about things he could not deliver as mayor - such as immigration. Gary Bushell, yesterday evening, was moaning about Londoners' tax money going up north and to Scotland, which is obviously unjust and has to stop according to him, but it's not something he can deliver. Where income tax money goes is decided by Parliament, not by the Greater London Authority.

Continue reading "Bushell, Boris and the Spectator now" »

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Brown's betrayal of democracy (Guardian letters)

The latest in my occasional series on the impending "divine-right succession" of Gordon Brown to become British Prime Minister: the letters in today's Guardian, which show why it is that Labour inspire such cynicism about politics in people these days:

The fact that Labour MPs have collectively decided to deny both Labour party members and the millions of affiliated trade union members any say at all in who the new party leader should be speaks volumes about the nature of Labour party democracy after 12 years of Blair's leadership. The fact that only 30 or so Labour MPs were willing to support a challenge to the continuation of Blairite Thatcherism says all we need to know about the politics of these so-called democratic socialists.

The only people likely to join a political party which treats its members with such contempt are exactly the kind of apolitical careerists and managerial apparatchiks who already seem to dominate the Labour backbenches. Many people already believe that most politicians are out for themselves and will care little about how the Labour party appoints its leader. The process we have just seen in the Labour party will confirm these people in their cynicism.

When reading this, I thought of the apparatchik-wannabes I encountered when involved in student union politics in the years just before Blair came to power, and the contempt they had for the unions they were using to climb up the greasy pole of union politics in order to get noticed and, in some cases, to get seats to fight in the 1997 election. They were very clearly out to silence the NUS and stop them demanding things Labour had no intention of providing. The attempt to "manage" the NUS conference in 1996 became obvious when, a couple of seconds after a member of the executive stood up, the cheers rose from the central part of the audience, almost as if they suddenly realised that someone was waving at them from the balcony to tell them to clap! (I could not see it as my union's seats were under the balcony.)

The other letters are worth reading also.

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Comment is free: The secret to success

Salma Yaqoob (Birmingham Respect party activist) is calling for the postal vote to be abolished in order to cut out the electoral fraud which plagued recent elections in areas of the UK with high Muslim populations; the fraud was aimed at stopping people voting for other than the "community's candidate", which often meant Labour, at a time when many youth did not want to vote Labour due to the Iraq war. She rightly says that it removes the privacy that the voting booth provides by exposing one's vote to family scrutiny (and, as also happened, allowing unscrupulous activists to get hold of many people's votes before it even reaches their houses). To be fair, activists of the other two parties have been associated with dishonest postal vote practices also.

I don't agree with abolishing the postal vote altogether, though - it should be restricted to those with a need, such as the disabled, those too sick to get to the polling station, or their carers.

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The Guardian: Common people

I'm not sure if the latest bit of royal news has made it across the Pond yet, but over the weekend it was announced that Prince William (heir to the throne after Prince Charles) had split up with his girlfriend of four years, Kate Middleton, whom he met while at the university in St. Andrew's (an obscure and remote but quite posh college in Scotland). The press buzzed with conflicting reports on how it ended - the suggestion was that William ended it after a "royals' summit" and that he had been told that the royal family couldn't afford "another Diana".

It's been suggested that Kate's class is what did for her - she is the daughter of a former air stewardess "made good", but her mother still shows her working-class background by chewing gum (at royal parties) and saying "pardon" rather than whatever the royals say. The problem for the royals is how they can reproduce now that they can no longer find some aristocrat to pressure his daughter into a marriage of convenience, because no woman in her right mind would put up with the restrictions and the intrusion of royal life. The life of a Windsor heir's wife may not be the notoriously miserable lot of the Japanese crown prince's wife, but it still carries far higher expectations than any other section of society. The likely answer is that the monarchy will have to drastically down-size if it is to survive at all.

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BBC NEWS | Health | WHO agrees HIV circumcision plan

The World Health Organisation today recommended that the circumcision of boys be used as a means of preventing AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, although obviously not in the absence of barrier contraception or "delaying sexual debut and reducing the number of sexual partners". The effect - a reduction of new infections by half or more - appears to have been on female-to-male transmission of the HIV virus; the effect on women is still unclear. No doubt the anti-circumcision crowd will have something to say, but the report is said to demonstrate that it's not just down to differences in sexual behaviour.

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Technorati Tags: sally clark, terry hamblin

John McManus of the Miscarriages of Justice Organisation (MOJO, set up by Paddy Hill of the Birmingham Six) on the grotesque spectacle of compensation for victims of wrongful imprisonment being cut to take into account the lodgings provided by prison, and the food which other prisoners adulterate with glass and other things you don't want in your food. Also, in the comments, a revelation about some professor who repeated the accusations against Sally Clark (wrongly jailed for killing her babies, released after medical causes were found, which were actually known all along, and who died last Friday) on his blog within a day of her death, then deleted it ([1], [2]).

Posted by Indigo Jo at 8:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

In a couple of weeks' time there will be a conference in London, "A World Civilisation or a Clash of Civilisations", featuring a long list of speakers including Ken Livingstone (the mayor of London), Christina Odone, Tariq Ali, Tariq Ramadan, Bruce Kent, Oliver Kamm and David Aaronovitch. Among the supposed highlights of the conference will be a debate between Livingstone and Daniel Pipes, whom the site quotes as saying that "there is not so much a clash of civilisations as there is one of civilisations vs. barbarism".

Continue reading "Is Ken really the man for this job?" »

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