Weirdest political resignation speech ever? We know that Sarah Palin is intensely ambitious but I can’t see how resigning as governor half-way through the term is a good political move for a future presidency bid. More likely, it feels like Palin knows something in her closet will kill off her leadership bid and rather than put her family through more (evilll librul) media speculation she resigned. The amusing implication from what is a long, rambling, dis-jointed speech, is that her resignation will help the people of Alaska save millions of dollars. This is a sad day for the Democrat re-election cause.

Favourite bits from Palin’s speech:

Let me go back to a comfortable analogy for me — sports… basketball. I use it because you’re naïve if you don’t see the national full-court press picking away right now: A good point guard drives through a full court press, protecting the ball, keeping her eye on the basket… and she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can win. And I’m doing that, keeping our eye on the ball that represents sound priorities: smaller government, energy independence, national security, freedom. And I know when it’s time to pass the ball — for victory.

Only Dead Fish Go With The Flow

David Cameron was quick to claim he is “relaxed” about more details of his shadow Cabinet’s outside earnings being made public this week under new transparency rules: “I do not think that a chamber full of professional politicians with no outside experience is a good thing,” he said.

Glossing over the fact that George Osborne’s entry on the Conservative website reads very much like that of a career politician (”after a short spell as a freelance journalist… he has since dedicated himself wholly to politics”), the question that needs to be asked is: “outside experience” of what?

William Hague, has been employed by private equity group Terra Firma since at least 2002; Oliver Letwin has had a long-term relationship with bankers Rothschild; Francis Maude is paid to advise Barclays; Andrew Mitchell, Merchant bank Lazards; Kenneth Clarke, private equity firm AgCapita Partners. The list is long.

The concern is only compounded by the fact that half of the shadow cabinet are directly funded by hedge fund managers and private equity bosses.

The Tory machine has been quick to reframe the issue of second jobs as one of valuable experience over conflicts of interest. But we should reflect on what we see rather than what we are told. Why else have transparency?

(This is an extract from a longer piece at politics.co.uk)

There’s an easy way to find out - ask them if they support a law which enforces it. A cross party coalition of MPs are petitioning the House of Commons to introduce the Elected Representatives (Prohibition of Deception) Bill for debate.

Our film “The Ministry of Truth” charted the birth of the Bill for the BBC in 2007 - it proved to be an incredibly revealing (and very entertaining) exercise.

Imagine asking a cross party selection of 40 MPs and Ministers if they believed in honesty, transparency and accountability (an overwhelming response of “absolutely - they’re the very foundations of our democracy”) - then asking them to support a Bill which would enshrine these foundations in law…. “errrrr… well, we’ve got self regulation already” etc. etc.

We heard every excuse in the book and not a single one managed to convince us that parliamentarians shouldn’t be subject to real independent legal redress. Harriet Harman tried to convince us we would be taking the power away from the people, but that’s pretty rich coming from a Government who have done everything in their power to not listen to their electorate.

In fact, we ran a recent poll with AOL and a crazy 93% of 77,000 respondents supported a law of this kind. Perhaps Mr Brown should be less bothered about Susan Boyle and more interested in this if he’s genuinely keen to ‘try any option’ to restore public trust.

There were some Parliamentarians, not many, who immediately got it, loved it and wanted it on the statute books. Most of them want it even more now. This small but fast-growing coalition of MPs needs our help to convince the rest, its going to be a tough job.

Many parliamentarians seem to think they are allowed to be unbelievably rude about the Bill as if some sort of joke or affront to their characters. This just proves how much they still don’t get it, the Bill is no joke, and not even such a crazy idea.

There are plenty of other industries who have to abide by such rules, why not our arguably most important? Legislators shouldn’t have such a problem with living within the laws right ?

If you want to find out whether your MP really wants to be accountable to the public for deception, write to them via the site and ask if they’ll support the Bill. You may be surprised at the answer.

————-
Details of the Bill and petition are at www.ministry-of-truth.net.

It is unequivocal. Our criminal justice system is in crisis. A decade and a half of penal excess means that we lock up too many people with too little impact and consequently we are failing make communities safer.

By calling for an end to a mindset that is stuck in a ‘prison works’ groove, the Commission challenges us to fundamentally reverse this path of failure. It calls for a radical reform of our penal system:

• Reduction of the prison population and the closure of prisons.
• Justice reinvestment which shifts resources to communities with high levels of offending with a view to avoiding the problem in the first place and managing more effectively when it does.
• The break up of the centrally managed offender and prison service- NOMS.
• Devolving the management of criminal justice to the local level bringing together the criminal justice, education, health and social services with prison and probation budgets completely devolved.

The underlying ethos of the report is judicial restraint as opposed to excess. It passionately argues that restraint is more ethical, humane and likely to work.

What evidence is there for such confident claims? They’ve tried it in New York. Yes, New York. It has reduced their prison population and enabled the closure of prisons. Canada has reduced its prison numbers by 11% since 1997. Finland did a similar thing after the war. And guess what? The Scottish minority SNP administration has instituted similar reforms to those recommended by the Commission. Prison numbers have yet to come down but it’s early days and progress will be viewed with interest.

Actually, this report is startlingly original in the way that it combines ethics- linked to national character traits- and a pragmatic approach. How do you make communities safer? You give them the finance, support, and encouragement to manage their own issues in the way they see fit and is most likely to work.

Will this lead to a spread in vigilantism? The Commission’s message is trust people, engage them, explain and they will respond with restraint and maturity. That is a truly radical notion and requires us to have a degree of faith. That may be no bad thing after the shortcomings of administrative systems based on central, bureaucratic planning have become so clear across public services. We have to try a radically different approach.

However, it is the ethical message that is the most powerful. Britain has actually enjoyed two significant periods of penal restraint and, indeed, decarceration. Winston Churchill initiated the first in 1908 and it lasted until 1938. The second? It was under the Thatcher government in the 1980s. Churchill and Thatcher? I bet you didn’t expect that.

There is a set of national characteristics- decency, pragmatism, reserve, restraint, fairness- to which penal reform can appeal. The everyday grind of sensationalist media coverage and knee-jerk politics drag us away from these elements of the national character. It is time that they were reasserted.

It is time to radically reform our system of criminal justice. Now, let’s see where we can find the political courage to make it happen.

SWINE FLU UNCONTROLLABLE

Nationwide
Culture minister in Tory homophobia claim
Vodafone agrees to new Carphone deal
‘Get real’ - Darling warns the bankers

International
Green power takes root in a Chinese desert
Vibe Mag, showcase for Hip-Hop and R&B, dies
North Korea test-fires 4 short-range missiles
U.S. ‘hits the pause button’ on aid to Honduras

… previous Netcasts

My main point is a philosophical and historical one that liberty (which I believe in) is not produced from liberalism. Indeed my intellectual argument is that that pure liberalism or liberalism as first philosophy cannot produce liberty - indeed it produces an anarchic individualism that requires a surveillance state.

Thus liberalism produces the very thing it seeks to avoid: an authoritarian individual and an absolutist state. This is a serious point and to have it charactured as anti-liberal is either an inane misreading or an outright misrepresentation. In fact liberalism is not liberal at all.

Phillip Blond is the driver of the ‘Red Toryism’ project and recently left the think-tank Demos to found his own Progressive Conservatism project. So how would you respond to this view?

I wondered if the Oxford based philosopher Staurt White, who contributes to Next Left and occasionally to LC might like to respond.

He said:

At one level, Phillip Blond simply wants to claim that just because he is critical - scathingly critical - of a philosophy called ‘liberalism’, this does not make him ‘illiberal’ in the usual sense of the word (of supporting all sorts of state restrictions on personal freedom). So far as it goes, this point is fair enough - though, of course, we won’t really be able to make a judgment on whether Red Toryism is or isn’t ‘illiberal’ until we get a bit more detail on what Red Tory policies are.

But more fundamentally, there is the question of whether Blond is persuasive, or even plausible, in his criticism of liberalism as a philosophy. Here, he is on very shaky ground. Blond characterises liberalism, as a philosophical tradition, by attributing to it a very specific first principle or premise: a completely unqualified, raw celebration of individual liberty. If this is indeed the ‘logical primitive’ at the base of liberalism, then liberalism is the anti-social creed Blond asserts, and his argument about liberalism generating authoritarianism would be plausible.

However, few, if any, major liberal thinkers do start from the premise that Blond attributes to them. If pressed to articulate the most elementary idea at the very base of their liberalism, many liberals would not reply simply ‘liberty’, but something like ‘equal liberty’ or ‘liberty for all’. In other words, the commitment to liberty is framed right at the base of the theory by considerations of fairness and respect for others. Consequently, liberalism is not the inherently anti-social creed that Blond asserts.

To elaborate this point, take the case of John Rawls. Rawls does not take ‘liberty’ as such as his conceptual starting point. Rather, he argues that his task is to work out what principles follow from the ideal of society as ‘a fair scheme of cooperation between free and equal persons’. This rather complex idea is his ‘logical primitive’. The commitment to individual liberty is in there, to be sure. But it is going to have to be elaborated in a way that coheres with notions of equality and fair cooperation.

In short, Blond’s criticisms may be valid for a hypothetical ‘liberalism’ of his own imagining. But this liberalism of his imagining has little, if anything, to do with the actual intellectual tradition of liberalism.’

Discuss?

“But I don’t think [Ken Livingstone] is progressive. Livingstone is the ally of some of the most reactionary forces in this city. I’m thinking of Ian Blair, I’m thinking of property developers he’s in bed with, I’m thinking of City big business.”

But it’s a bit bizarre that this champion of ‘progressives’ is still working for Iranian state television in the UK - Press TV. This is while even more right-wing colleagues such as Nick Ferrari have resigned. Press TV had recently also promoted Holocaust denial. Gilligan refused to say anything then either. Very principled, our Gilligan.

Update: And he’s part of their ad campaign too!

They have just released the updated version, Minimum Income Standard 2009. There are some really interesting and important findings:

- The minimum cost of living is rising at twice the rate of inflation, making it harder to live on a low income this year than last year.

- A single adult with no children now needs to earn at least £13,900 a year before tax to reach the minimum standard. This is a £500 rise from 2008; nearly half of this extra income is needed for the rising cost of food.

- About one in four people are living below the minimum income standard for Britain, and this is increasing as unemployment rises.

- The minimum cost of living has risen by 5%, contrasting with official inflation figures of 2½% (CPI) and -1% (RPI). A low-paid worker whose earnings were linked to the retail prices index could be 6% worse off this year, relative to the minimum cost of living.

- Job loss can leave you with less than half the income that you actually need to live.

You can read the whole report here

And you can check whether how your income compares to the minimum income standard here

Nevertheless, to consciously use the ‘apartheid’ framework in critiquing Israeli policies past and present, with the presumed analogy with South African history, is still considered by some to be inappropriate or even completely unacceptable.

I was aware of this when thinking about what to call my new book, Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide, and one of the reasons why I felt comfortable opting for the title I did, is that apartheid is a defined crime in international law, independent of any comparison with the old regime in South Africa.

In 1973, the UN’s General Assembly adopted the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, and in so doing, defined the “crime of apartheid” as acts “committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them”. Some specific examples of what these ‘acts’ could look like included:

Any legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country… [including] the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence…

Any measures including legislative measures, designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups…the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group…”

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), adopted in 1998, also specified the “crime of apartheid” as “inhumane acts…committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime”.

Plenty of observers, academics, human rights workers, and legal experts have drawn the conclusion that based on the aforementioned definition, Israel is indeed practicing apartheid. This was the conclusion of a recent report on the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) by the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (HSRC), a study which found “that the State of Israel exercises control in the OPT with the purpose of maintaining a system of domination by Jews over Palestinians and that this system constitutes a breach of the prohibition of apartheid”.

While it is crucial then to understand that apartheid is a defined crime in international law, there is still something to be said about the comparison between South Africa and Israel. As the HSRC report pointed out, any such analysis “is there to illuminate, rather than define, the meaning of apartheid”, and there are both differences and similarities between apartheid in South Africa and Israel.

The common element of both legal systems is the intention to consolidate and enforce dispossession, securing the best land control over natural resources for one group at the expense of another. There is also the strategy of permitting native ‘autonomy’ in order to mask continued denial of national rights - the South African Bantustans, and West Bank cantons. As the late Israeli journalist Tanya Reinhart pointed out, some of the Bantustans “even had elections, Parliaments, and quasi-governmental institutions” and were allowed “symbols of sovereignty” like “a flag, postage stamps, passports and strong police force”.

There are also important differences, particularly with respects to the legal infrastructure involved in establishing and maintaining apartheid. In South Africa, blacks were a clear majority - though the Palestinians were too, until most of them were expelled. Israel also does not practice what Dr. Uri Davis has called ‘petty apartheid’, namely the obvious separation of races in public places e.g. separate toilets.

Perhaps the main difference, however, is that whereas in South Africa, the white minority depended on the economic exploitation of the black population, Israel has always preferred to simply ‘disappear’ the Palestinians (their use by Israel as a cheap labour pool is more of a fallback position). In that sense, Israeli apartheid has been worse for the native ‘other’ than in the case of South Africa.

The South Africa comparison then is meant to shed light on a political system in Palestine/Israel based on structural racism and dominance, rather than being an attempt at simply forcing an easy template on a different situation.

Leaving aside the differences and similarities with South Africa, Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians since 1948 have met the definition of apartheid in international law - with important ramifications for the responsibilities of the international community and civil society.

UNDER INVESTIGATION

Nationwide
Credit card cheques to be banned by govt
£30bn shortfall threatens rail and road plans
CCTV contradicts police, IPCC over death
Defeat for Government over expenses bill

International
Iranian opposition leaders defy ‘unlawful regime’
Keeping the fizz in the journalism biz
U.N. says North Korea food aid has dried up
US tries to retake Afghan valley from Taliban

… previous Netcasts

The BBC said today it had received 748 complaints, with one senior source revealing that there were 10 to 15 times more complaints from viewers about Jackson than about BBC executives’ expenses, which were published last week.
…
[Mary Hockaday, head of the BBC newsroom] added that the BBC would continue to report developments in the Jackson story, although it would do so “in a proportionate manner where we think they are of relevance and interest to our audiences”. Hockaday said that she expected further coverage about the circumstances of Jackson’s death, his business and estate and funeral.

It may be worthwhile staying away from BBC News for the next few days. No doubt the Daily Mail and The Sun will be frustrated they couldn’t milk more apology out of the BBC over its expenses.

Meanwhile, in an effort to move the MJ story on to where the news channels discussed and pontificated endlessly over whether they had overdone the MJ coverage, Krishnan Guru-Murthy ask over at this blog: The death of an icon - did Channel 4 get it right?. Will a simple - ‘no more please!’ - do?

Going by the polls, Labour still remains the electoral alternative remain the Tories so it makes sense in one way. But I think there is a strategic reason for not supporting this New Labour administration.

New Labour was borne out of the view that it was dogma that kept them out of power. So they jettison that and became sufficiently vacuous and pragmatic enough to keep the electorate on side as long as the Tories could continue to be sufficiently demonised.

But with the Conservative brand now sufficiently re-invented, New Labour ministers and communicators are faced with a problem they haven’t had for a long time: communicating effectively with an electorate and explain why exactly cast a pro-Labour than a anti-Tory vote. No wonder they’re stumped and keep churning out lame policies and half-assed racist dog whistles.

But why the ideological vaccuous approach? You can either have strict, rigid ideology or you can have political power. You cannot have both. But it looks like its desperate attempt to rid itself off the rigid ideological socialists, New Labour actually went too far to the right.

What the party Labour needs to be is a moral and ideological project, but with clear strategy on how to build, maintain and extend its coalition of voters. Tony Blair should have worked hard to shift the political centre leftwards early on. That would have made it much easier for successive Labour governments to win power. Instead, it has always been a schizophrenic administration, terrified that it would be labelled ’socialist’ and thus always eager to please the press.

So at this stage it makes more sense for Labour sympathisers to gear up for the General Election in 5-6 years time and figure out what are the big arguments the party needs to make and the coalitions it needs to build. After 12 years in power, the party has no real idea or plan on how to move forward.

So while I think Alex Smith is right in saying that the only alternative (going by the polls) to the Tories is Labour, this is exactly the sort of thinking that has given this government a free ride for far too long.

This is how it works: the socialists get disillusioned early on; the centre-left swallows its pride and shuts up in the name of unity; the right-wing factions like Progress point out that with the far-left disunited and centre-left on side, the only way to extend that electoral coalition is to move right-wards.

Right now it makes no sense, thinking long-term here, for a die-hard Labourite to support this administration. It makes more sense to let it die and then figure out how to influence the next one. The question then is, how can technology play a part in that in that.

This misses the point that it is not the quantity of bills which are passed, and New Labour has in the past been rightly accused of legislative mania, but rather the quality, on which Labour again falls down on. The immediate answer to passing frenzies and quick to evaporate moral panics is always to get something on the statute book, regardless of how those laws will end up being used and the overall effect they will have.

The shining example remains the Dangerous Dogs Act, passed after a tabloid campaign and which outlaws entire breeds of dog, regardless of the dog’s own nature. Last year’s knife panic brought demands for anyone carrying a knife, regardless of age or reason, to be sent to prison, something which most judges are still rightly either ignoring or evading.

With this in mind, some criticism of what amounts to the next Queen’s speech announced yesterday would be unfair.

Who can blame a government in uncertain economic times, when it doesn’t frankly have a clue how much money it will eventually have to play about with, from not having the most ambitious legislative programme mapped out? Added to this is that we are now less from a year away from an election, where the real big reforms and changes will doubtless be held over to put into the manifesto, and you’re likely to be left with what is tinkering around the margins, dropping some of the more unpopular formerly proposed initiatives, with part-privatisation of the Royal Mail postponed and ID cards now not to be forced on anyone (although the real problem all along, the database, will still be around) while also attempting some populist gestures such as allocating more money to social housing building.

As of course this though is New Labour, they can’t help but add some very real stings in the tail. The added measure in the housing commitment to make sure that “local residents” are first to be considered for new council homes has only one target, and that is the persistent myth, mined ruthlessly by the BNP, that migrants, asylum seekers and foreigners have the first crack of the whip. It’s true that all councils have to bump up those who are in genuine need, whether homeless or otherwise, up towards the top, but asylum seekers and migrants are excluded from the very beginning until they are given leave to remain. Only 5% of social housing is allocated to foreign nationals, but this hasn’t stopped the repeated claims that this isn’t the case.

That the government has now given succour to the idea, regardless of whether or not they also point out at the same time that it isn’t true, it’s the sort of legitimisation which the BNP and other discontents thrive upon and which they will be pointing out for years to come. It might not be entirely fair to call this “British homes for British workers”, but it’s not far from it.

What the Labour and the Conservatives are fighting a battle not over ideology, but over the little details. The key differences seem to be that the Conservatives will be slightly tougher, whether on law and order, foreign policy and the welfare system, and cut slightly more, except on health and foreign aid, and possibly education than Labour will. Little else really separates them.

The promise that you would no longer be forced to decide which is the lesser of the two evils, with the Lib Dems joining the fray in certain areas, could have helped to suggest that there will shortly be a real choice. Instead we’re fobbed off with the same old leftovers as before, regardless of which party is proposing what.

LAST RITES READ OUT

Nationwide
Passport details kept despite ID card U-turn
BNP takes advantage of Llanelli’s tensions
Outrage over G20 police imposter theory
‘Queue jumping immigrants’ a myth, says study

International
Franken takes seat, giving Democrats super-majority
Le Pen’s daughter in National Front victory
Ousted president vows to return to Honduras
Iraq marks withdrawal of U.S. troops

… previous Netcasts

The MP had come under heavy criticism for his decision to claim more than £100,000 in second home expenses on a house in his constituency of Leyton and Wanstead, east London, within easy commuting distance of the Commons.

He was able to designate the Leyton property as his second home after registering a house 70 miles away in Colchester, Essex, as his main residence.

Though Tory MPs have paid back over a quarter of a million in expenses so far, Cameron has avoided firing any close friends / shadow cabinet members over their expenses.

But that scandal is likely to be over-shadowed by revelations over second-jobs, details of which are to be disclosed today. The disclosure of outside interests is more likely to affect the Tories. Cameron has already attempted some damage limitation by announcing that senior Tories will have to give up second jobs by the New Year.

But here too, there have been quietly muffled scandals. Last week it emerged that Michael Gove was paid around £1,250 per hour for articles for the Times. It was later revealed that Gove had also breached party rules by accepting money for writing about their policy area. Once exposed, Gove’s office hurriedly stated that he would donate those earnings to charity.

I floated my idea during the Second Reading of the Equality Bill and it caused quite a hoo ha. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development waded in to support the idea – albeit they didn’t think it should be mandatory. Some Human Resource departments were less happy and thought it a stupid idea. Well – it will be interesting to see what they say in response to the evidence that’s now been gathered.

Because - when I spoke to my amendment on anonymous job applications in the Committee Stage of the Equality Bill, I was absolutely thrilled with the Solicitor General’s response:

That is a valid point and perhaps what we ought to do is experiment, which is what we are seeking to do in that the Department for Work and Pensions [DWP] has carried out a CV research exercise. Two carefully matched applications or CVs with names recognised as having different ethnicities have been submitted in response to the same advertised vacancies to see whether employers make different decisions depending on the names in the CVs. That research will be reported in the summer—I am sorry that I do not have an answer now, having tantalisingly mentioned the subject. The initial indications are that there is significant discrimination, so more work needs to be done to find an appropriate solution.

So – initial findings are of significant discrimination. And whilst it is clearly early days and the DWP is going to do more work – it seems clear to me that - first - those who argued there isn’t a problem which needs fixing in particular need to look very closely at what the DWP has been finding, and second - here is a simple proposal which costs business nothing but could actually deliver enormous benefits in removing discrimination in the job market.

Removing such discrimination is not only important in itself - but by providing people with equal opportunities to earn their living, it opens up all sorts of other knock-on benefits in terms of social cohesion and economic efficiency, which we all benefit from.

So once we see what the rest of the research shows - I’m hopeful that we will have a proposal that is easy, not burdensome and brings major benefits - and that of course the Government will in its wisdom decide to adopt it!

I trust that the EHRC (Equality and Human Rights Commission) will also step up to the plate and advocate anonymous job applications - and I will be writing to them as soon as I get a minute to rub together.

And even though Cameron’s has talked tough, as the timeline below shows, he has done nothing about Osborne. And yet our media fails to ask him why Osborne still remains in office.

10th June 2009 - Tory MP’s who will not contest next general election:

Douglass ‘Moat Clean’ Hogg
Sir Peter ‘Duck Island’ Viggers
Anthony ‘You’re All Just Jealous of My Big House’ Steen
Christopher ‘215 trees on expenses a necessity’ Fraser
Andrew McKay
Julie Kirkbride
Sir Nicholas Winterton
Ann Winterton

As yet - David Cameron has as yet made no public statement about George Osborne’s alleged second home “flipping”.

George Osborne is still Tory Shadow Chancellor.

Two Questions for Tory Backbenchers and grass-roots activists:
1) Has Mr Cameron been consistent in his claim that: “I don’t think it is right to get money from the taxpayer for what you nominate as a second home and then to sell it and not pay capital gains tax”?

2) Has Mr Cameron honoured his declaration that: “Where appropriate, others will be removed from the front bench if they do not behave appropriately. I want to very tough [sic] but I also want to be consistent and fair.”?

———-
Article written by a contributor who has to remain anonymous for professional reasons.

]]> http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/06/30/why-is-george-osborne-still-in-office/feed/ http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/06/29/michaeljacksonrip-vs-iranelection/ http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/06/29/michaeljacksonrip-vs-iranelection/#comments Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:17:22 +0000 Robert Sharp http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/?p=6006 Evenin’ all. I wanted to make a quick point about certain global news stories, and the relative amount of news coverage given to each.

Its fashionable, yet incredibly easy to complain that the Michael Jackson death has crowded out news of other more pressing matters. Shawn Micallef sounded an early word of warning about this attitude:

There is no need to compare MJ & Iran - completely dif, just intersect on same medium, not a social/moral lesson to be learned.

Then (again via Twitter, though the link is now lost in the maelstrom) I came across this MJ/Election mash-up, and it occurred to me that coverage (be it on Twitter, blogs or the international MSM) is not a zero-sum game, and that coverage of one piece of news could promote awareness of another.

If you consider Jackson’s output, there are actually loads of other songs that could fit a revolutionary template. Songs like “Heal The World” and “You Are Not Alone” seemed (to me) quite sanctimonious and irritating when they were released. But with the passing of Michael Jackson, the self-congratulatory element to those tracks seems to dissipate. They’re now ripe for the picking as a backing track to some feel-good montages of the peaceful demonstrations in Tehran. “Earth Song”, “Black or White” and (going back a little bit further) “Man in the Mirror” also carry that We-Are-The-World vibe… as does, of course, “We Are The World”! They could all fill the role of unofficial theme-tune to a non-violent protest movement.

Too cheesy? Not one bit of it: The “Yes We Can” generation of political campaigners are unafraid of such accusations. Meanwhile, tracks like “Beat It” could accompany comedic images of Ahmedinejad and Khameni and Keyboard Cat.

I meant to post this last week, so I feel sure I am behind the curve on this one. Yet a quick search through YouTube doesn’t yield further examples. Let us know your favourites, either in the comments, or via the tips form, and maybe we’ll do a round-up or something.

Update

I just knew there would be a “Beat It” montage out there somewhere:

]]> http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/06/29/michaeljacksonrip-vs-iranelection/feed/ http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/06/29/do-we-need-an-armed-forces-day/ http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/06/29/do-we-need-an-armed-forces-day/#comments Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:23:47 +0000 Anthony Barnett http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/?p=6002 Saturday, I learnt from watching the news yesterday, was our first ever Armed Forces Day. According to the official website “The first Armed Forces Day is 27 June 2009, and is an opportunity for the nation to show our support for the men and women who make up the Armed Forces community”

The tradition in the United Kingdom has always been that we do not celebrate the military or have parades of armed men in our town centres if we can help it - unless we are in Northern Ireland. We conquered, or not, when duty called, and commemorated the actions and their dead.

The Colour was trooped annually with pomp and well drilled display to demonstrate the special relationship between the Crown and our armed might - a relationship  being assiduously cultivated with William and Harry. We also, of course, have Rememberance Sunday. Without undue modesty, therefore, we were ‘quiety proud’ and all the more deeply military in our attitude because of this.

Not for us, up until this weekend, the boastful mobilisations of state force down 200 high streets (and the risk of protest that might politicise them and break the spell of monarchy - and Republican protest there was in Strathclyde, described by Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy aa a “sickening
spectacle“.)

But at the request of Gordon Brown, the one-time Tory MP Quentin Davis recommended that veterans day be turned into a ‘national’ event as part of the Prime Minister’s Britishness programme. The Queen boycotted all the “main events” according to the Times.

Claims that the Queen and the Prince were both invited to Saturday’s event were denied by both royal sources and the Ministry of Defence

…
Phil Cooper, the father of Britain’s youngest soldier to be wounded in Iraq, Jamie Cooper, told the Daily Mail:
“When you sign up, you take an oath to serve the Queen and country, laying down your life for the monarchy if necessary. Surely it’s not too much to ask for a senior royal to be bothered to turn up and take the salute.”

But perhaps the Queen knew what she was doing as the real tradition has been cast aside. Perhaps this too should added to Peter Oborne’s list of New Labour’s shredding of the constitution.

Meanwhile a most peculiar chopped off version of the Union Jack has been created to ‘brand’ the event, with attractive service girls holding it aloft on its Flickr page. The website also has a button you can click to show your support. So far there are 61,152 impressions, considerably less than the armed forces themselves, not to speak of their family members.

Maybe the real question is why so many events have taken place at all - given hat they are blatently a New Labour ploy. I suspect there is a slightly subversive defiance taking place. Everyone knows that the Iraq deployment was a military humiliation born of mendacity, while Afghanistan is  serving US strategy not the UK’s.

For the first time while they are serving, soldiers are publically percieved as the victims of government policy. If so, the cheerful applause for them is also an expression of patriotic opposition to the government.

Nonetheless, a battle over Britain has been declared if this usurpation of vetrans day continues to be claimed as a “national” celebration of the UK.

Cross-posted from OurKingdom

]]> http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/06/29/do-we-need-an-armed-forces-day/feed/ http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/06/29/gove-mp-makes-1250-an-hour-on-the-side/ http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/06/29/gove-mp-makes-1250-an-hour-on-the-side/#comments Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:43:29 +0000 Chris Barnyard http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/?p=6000 Who says second jobs aren’t lucrative? Tory shadow cabinet minister Michael Gove should certainly fall into that category. According to information revealed by the Conservatives today, this is his rough second-income from a column at the The Times newspaper.

London Evening Standard’s Paul Waugh writes on his blog:

Govey gets £5,000 a month but reveals that “the number of hours worked for that payment” is “1 hour a week or so”. Nice work if you can get it. He was obviously torn between telling The Times that he worked really, really hard for his money and telling the voters that he doesn’t spend all that much time on his journalism. As a result, his hourly rate looks like something a corporate lawyer would drool over.

That’s not to mention the erudite columns for Building Magazine, Scotland on Sunday etc.

This whole second jobs scheme was working out quite nicely for the Tories.

]]> http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/06/29/gove-mp-makes-1250-an-hour-on-the-side/feed/ http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/06/29/can-labour-learn-the-lessons/ http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/06/29/can-labour-learn-the-lessons/#comments Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:10:21 +0000 Don Paskini http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/?p=5998 Ann Black sent round an e-mail to Labour Party members with five questions which she will feed back at Labour’s next National Executive meeting. It’s a discussion which I hope as many members as possible will contribute to, but also might be of interest to Labour supporters who aren’t members.

So here’s the questions and my answers - do reply to Ann’s e-mail or leave your own thoughts in the comments and I’ll pass them on…

> 1) reasons for Labour losses, both local and European, and
> reasons for any good results against the overall trend;

Apart from the obvious comical and ridiculous national nonsense, the main problem is that in most areas we haven’t developed our local campaigning to be able to persuade people about why it is important to elect local Labour councillors even if they don’t think much of the national party. As a result, local councillors who got elected because of the efforts of the national party in 2001 and 2005 were unable to win when the elections were not on the same day as a General Election. We need to put a lot more effort into developing the ability of local parties to campaign and do well rather than being tied to the fortunes of what happens at Westminster. There are plenty of councillors who didn’t knock on a single door between 2005 and 2009, and that was a much bigger reason why we lost so many councillors than Hazel Blears.

Obviously, an example of how to do this is Oxford. “Where we work, we win”.

> 2) what the party leadership can do to rebuild towards the
> general election, organisationally and politically;

Stop doing stupid stuff, and remember that they’ve still got a healthy majority and nearly a year in power and pick 2 or 3 things which would help make Britain fairer and more equal and do them.

> 3) how members’ views can be taken into account in policy-
> making. The national policy forum “Warwick” agreement dates
> back to last July, before the recession, and needs reviewing, but
> time and resources do not allow another full-scale forum with
> thousands of direct amendments. Are members and local parties
> happy to work through their NPF representatives, and if not, what
> is the alternative within the Partnership in Power framework?

The NPF and Partnership in Power are a load of old nonsense. But the process doesn’t matter as much as the outcomes. There’s abundant evidence about members’ views, from NPF amendments to opinion polling etc. In the medium term, we need to get a different way of making policy, which makes use of the knowledge and experience of Labour members and supporters, rather than just a small clique at the top of the party.

But in the short term, there are any number of obvious policies which a majority of members would support which the government could just get on and do, e.g. :

- build council houses
- scrap ID cards
- reduce child poverty
- not privatise the post office
- cut taxes for lower earners and raise them for the rich

> 4) what policies represent “Labour values”?

As above.

> 5) whether conference should return to resolutions or stay with
> the experiment on “contemporary issues” introduced in 2007;

Resolutions are better than the experiment on contemporary issues, but the aim should be to give people a chance to help shape Labour Party makes policy, and neither does this very well.

]]> http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/06/29/can-labour-learn-the-lessons/feed/ http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/06/29/top-stories-monday-29th-june/ http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/06/29/top-stories-monday-29th-june/#comments Mon, 29 Jun 2009 07:30:28 +0000 Newswire http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/?p=5996 MPs CONDEMN G20 POLICING

Nationwide
Revealed: MPs’ pay from second jobs
Scientists attack Britain’s energy industry
Vodafone prepares for takeover of T-Mobile
Prosecutors take action on BNP leaflets

International
Mumbai: What really happened
India’s gays prepare to join rainbow nation
Chavez threatens to invade after Honduran coup
Political disputes threaten Iraqi oil rights sale

… previous Netcasts

]]> http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/06/29/top-stories-monday-29th-june/feed/ http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/06/29/selling-abortion/ http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/06/29/selling-abortion/#comments Mon, 29 Jun 2009 06:00:54 +0000 Kate Belgrave http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/?p=5987 A revised broadcast advertising code will force anti-abortionists to make their dangerous bias clear:

We pro-choicers were happy to note that the BCAP’s just-closed consultation on a revised advertising code included a proposal to allow abortion providers to advertise abortion services on radio and TV.

Equally cheering was the news that the code would include this new rule (11.11 in the code):

‘Advertisements for post-conception pregnancy advice services must make clear in the advertisement if the service does not refer women directly for abortion.’

BCAP’s argument - rightly - is that there ain’t time to waste if you’re thinking of getting an abortion: the longer you leave it, the riskier the procedure is likely to be (the BCAP reference is the renowned 2004 Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists’ paper on abortion safety and standards).

In other words - you need to know immediately if the ad you’re seeing is for a provider who offers balanced, accurate, post-conception information and abortion (or a referral for one) if that is what you want, or if you’re about to be drafted by an outfit that hopes to pull one back for Jesus Christ by neglecting to mention safe, legal abortion is available, and pumping you full of romantic notions about the realities of an unwanted child.

‘We support [the referral rule] in that context of making accurate and balanced information available,’ Abortion Rights chair Ann Henderson said when she and I spoke about 11.11 last week. Henderson felt that young people and women who didn’t speak English well were particularly vulnerable to post-conception services and counsellors that did not explain all options (in its 2004 report, the RCOG recommended that special arrangements should be put in place for non-English-speaking women, to make sure they knew safe, legal abortion was an option).

The RCOG is hardly alone: in its 2007 review of scientific developments relating to the abortion act, parliament’s science and technology committee identified the dangers of advertising that omitted to mention the abortion option, and recommended that ‘the government consider ways of ensuring that all those claiming to offer pregnancy counselling services … indicate clearly in their advertising that they do not support referral for abortion.’

To the rest of the broadcast advertising code - which, as it stands, indirectly bans TV ads for categories of family planning centres, through its ban on ads for commercial services that offer individual advice on personal problems.

BCAP proposes to relax that restriction for providers that can prove suitable credentials. Its aim is to ‘fulfill two policy objectives: to allow post-conception pregnancy advice services the freedom to advertise [a freedom that the time has long been right for - the public overwhelmingly supports legal abortion] and to ensure that ads make clear whether the service refers women for abortion.’

I’m quietly confident of pro-choice victory, me. If anything is going to knock the Lord and the pro-life moral minority out of the picture, it’ll be man’s religious desire to flog advertising space. Once there, promotion of abortion services becomes a very simple matter of finance. If abortion providers can afford TV advertising, they’ll be able to engage in it. End of story. Abortion will be identified as the safe and legal service it is, and sold as such. The assumed, opportunistic sensitivities and staged outrage of the likes of Nadine Dorries will be neither here nor there.

SPUC sees that point, and is frightened of it. Earlier this year, national director John Smeaton whined to the Guardian about a code that “threatens to further commercialise the killing of unborn children,” [for all the world as though seeing abortion as a transaction was a problem] and that the proposed code would mean ‘agencies with a financial interest in abortion will be in a position to buy expensive broadcast advertising.’

In fact, our screens are unlikely to flood with the high-end imagery that Smeaton fears: Marie Stopes told the same Guardian reporter that although it would consider running TV ads,’it was ‘unlikely to have the budget to buy airtime around peak time evening shows.’ Abortion Rights’ Ann Henderson told me that although AR backed the idea of advertising from commercial providers, its own emphasis remained on promoting the notion of free abortion through the NHS and other public providers.

BCAP expects to publish a final code in the autumn of this year.

]]> http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/06/29/selling-abortion/feed/ http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/06/28/miliband-should-avoid-falling-for-ahmedinijads-trap/ http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/06/28/miliband-should-avoid-falling-for-ahmedinijads-trap/#comments Sun, 28 Jun 2009 20:16:50 +0000 Sunny Hundal http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/?p=5994 If your authority was being undermined by street protests and an election widely seen as rigged - what’s the best way of uniting people behind you? Why, starting a diplomatic row of course, with the hope it will escalate into a bigger show of force.

And this is Ahmedinijad’s obvious gambit as Iran arrested nine staff working at the UK embassy on suspicion they took part in the recent street protests. The EU has now threatened a “strong response” to Iranian harassment of EU staff. Which is obviously what Ahmedinijad wants.

This is a diplomatic headache because escalating the war of words helps Ahmedinijad. At the same time, not many of the protesters are likely to believe Ahmedinijad’s latest attempt at diverting attention. We can play this in two ways: by not making a big fuss and denying Ahmedinijad what he wants. He may then try and escalate the situation and will shoot himself in the foot or quietly release the staff. Or the EU could escalate this massively with a real threat of war very quickly, and asking him for evidence of his claims. That would force Ahmedinijad to back down and expose his stupid gambit. I prefer the first option. But a muddle of the two is unlikely to work.

]]> http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/06/28/miliband-should-avoid-falling-for-ahmedinijads-trap/feed/