Nick Clegg on tuition fees ...when he wanted to get votes
Labels: tossers
Her husband, who was also her agent and manager, paid tribute to her, saying: "Through her work she helped hundreds of thousands of people and doubtless, by talking frankly about the importance of safe sex in the 80s when almost nobody else would discuss it, helped to save thousands of lives.
"Through her own approach to life she enabled people to talk about their problems in a way that was unique.
Labels: sex, stroppy women
Via the LRC :
John McDonnell MP is sponsoring the Lawful Industrial Action (Minor Errors) Bill as his private members Bill in Parliament. The Bill would tackle the increasing practice by employers of using minor technical errors in the balloting process - which have no material effect on the outcome - to take unions to court in order to prevent them from taking industrial action.
The Bill is being debated in Parliament on Friday 22 October, and requires 100 MPs to attend the debate and to vote for it. If you have a Labour MP, please lobby them to attend and vote for the Lawful Industrial Action (Minor Errors) Bill. Come to the Lobby of Parliament and Rally on 13 October to tell your MP to back the Bill.
You can lobby your MP by email using the e-action through the PCS website or download the model letter from the RMT website to print out. You can also download the briefing on the Bill, prepared by John Hendy QC.
John McDonnell MP said:
“We have seen in the current BA Cabin Crew dispute and many other recent disputes, employers have been able to exploit loopholes in the existing law by using minor technical errors in a trade union ballot to thwart trade unionists from taking strike action.
“This resort to the courts by some ruthless employers is bringing current employment law into disrepute and undermining industrial relations in this country. This cannot be right and in the interests of good industrial relations needs to be addressed.”
Read Prof Keith Ewing’s article from the Morning Star (09/10/10), urging Labour MPs to back the Bill.
Dash it, my MP is now a Tory :-(
Labels: trade unionism
Last week, everyone had gone gooey for Diane Abbott. On Saturday, when it emerged that Abbott had failed to electrify trades union voters, the left placed its hope and aspirations on someone else’s shoulders. “Ed Miliband’s victory can open a gap”, said Socialist Worker, without elaborating further. “This is a change in the situation socialists can capitalise on,” argued Workers Power, after making noises about a return to old Labour. The Communist Party of Britain went even further, helpfully produced a “ten-point programme for Ed Miliband’s Shadow Cabinet” that bears a remarkable resemblance to their beloved People’s Charter.
The centre ground has certainly shifted- but not to the left, like half of the press would have you think. There’s no greater evidence of this shift than the reaction to the election of Ed Miliband, Red Ed.
The only thing about the nickname that works is the rhyme.
Post-victory Ed Miliband himself could barely contain himself as he rushed to declare that there would be no “lurch to the left”. Well, of course not. A man on a leftward trajectory would not have received juicy campaign donations from Lawrence Staden, a multimillionaire hedge fund owner, who made millions in profit from the recession.
In his first article as Labour Leader – published in The Torygraph - Ed declares that his “aim is to show that our party is on the side of the squeezed middle in our country and everyone who has worked hard and wants to get on.” The squeezed middle? Try being part of that rather more squeezed socio-economic group right at the bottom of the ladder.
Ed Miliband is not left-wing. He’s the continuity candidate. Not a Blairite, certainly, but he did write the last Labour manifesto. Radical document it wasn’t. On Question Time, Miliband told a London fire fighter that she didn’t have the right to strike, despite being threatened with the sack if she didn’t back a contract change that will knock hours off the night shift, leaving the capital city vulnerable.
Today, Ed Miliband once again came out against the Unions, announcing that “The public won’t support [strikes]. I won’t support them and you shouldn’t support them either.”
Miliband voted for the anti-terrorism laws that undermine the civil liberties of us all. He voted for ID cards. He didn’t oppose the Iraq war at the time but he did oppose an investigation into its legality.
Even worse, Miliband’s sense of “justice” keeps being attributed to Marxist parent, Ralph Miliband. Really, stop blaming poor Ralph for his son.
Labels: Labour Party, new labour
ON THE one hand, sections of a jubilant Labour left are turning cartwheels across the floor. On the other, the rightwing press is rehashing the kind of low level McCarthyite headlines not seen in this country since the early 1980s.
Both immediate reactions to the election of Ed Miliband as Labour leader highlight the lack of balance or historical rigour that prevails in political commentary in Britain today.
To the extent that Ed is not his brother – who of course stood in apostolic succession to Blair – then those who do not favour the continuation of New Labourism in its most anachronistic variant will regard his success as the least bad possible outcome of an unnecessarily protracted contest .
But there is little point in coming to firm judgement until we see what Miliband does in his new capacity. While it is good to hear him declare that ‘the era of New Labour has passed’, he has yet to specify with what it will be replaced. If there is to be a Milibandism, we so far have no real indication of what the parameters will encompass.
Ed’s parliamentary career has so far been short, and he was not around for the crunch votes of the first and second term. But it is fair to observe that nothing he has done since 2005 marked him out as a natural born boat rocker.
Perhaps he deserves the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he has been hiding his social democratic light under a bushel, thus accounting for the accusation that he is some kind of crypto-Bennite.
But look under his bed, and the reds are strikingly hard to find. An examination of his concrete track record suggests that little stronger than reheated Hattersleyism is set to feature on the Miliband menu.
Opinions will vary as to how far that can viable be described as a good thing, but it certainly does not constitute a ‘lurch to the left’ in any meaningful employment of the left-right continuum as a working analytical tool.
A minimal grasp of twentieth century British political history should represent some kind of prerequisite for punditry. Yet how many columnists would be able to fit Miliband into the spectrum of Labour leaders of the past? Ironically, one of the best places to glean that information the book ‘Parliamentary Socialism’, penned by Ed’s late father Ralph.
In short, Ed Miliband does not want to be either a Blair or a Brown, which is to his credit. Neither is he likely to transmogrify into a Foot or an Attlee or a Lansbury. Callaghan? Kinnock? Let’s not go there. The question is how inspiring the public are going to find a Gaitskell or a Smith in the crucial years ahead.
Labels: Labour Party
Labels: health and safety, TUC
THE DESIGNATION Whore of Babylon does not refer to some mythical top notch super-dirty-in- bed Iraqi chick, but to a serious theological debate over the identity to the scarlet-clad woman described in chapter 17 of the Book of Revelation.
In the faith community in which I was raised, my poor old mum was always considered a hopeless cringing moderate because she did not automatically identify this figure with the Roman Catholic church, being alive to the exegetical possibility that the term could better be applied to the European Union instead.
I am put in mind of my upbringing after reading the remarks delivered by Benedict XVI before 125,000 admirers in Edinburgh yesterday, during which he launched into a tirade against the intolerance of something called ‘aggressive secularism’. Hello, your Holiness?
In the first place, it is a bit rich hearing homilies about the need for liberalism from a bloke who accuses gay people of possessing a ‘more or less strong tendency ordered towards an inherent moral evil’ and welcomes Holocaust deniers into the bosom of the mother Church. But let that pass.
I’m not even quite sure what ‘aggressive secularism’ is when it is at home, anyway. Does it differ from, say, passive-aggressive secularism, being one notch up on mere stridently assertive secularism but not quite such a bad thing as violent secularism? But let that pass, too. The whole line of reasoning at work here is just wrong, wrong, wrong.
The overwhelming majority of us secularists are actually laid back, live and let live-type dudes. We actively believe in, and argue for, freedom to propagate all religions and none. So if anybody freely chooses to go to mass on a Sunday morning, that’s fine with us. We’ll just stay in bed and nurse the hangover. Now sod off and leave us to suffer.
So it was that I found myself sticking up for a Christian guy handing out ‘turn or burn’ leaflets at the Brighton gay pride march, which could quite easily have seen him severely beaten had the assembled Muscle Marys taken umbrage at their content.
Precisely because I am a secularist, I am in favour of his right to tell people what they do not want to hear. Equally, I am in favour of the right of the Protest the Pope brigade to hit the streets on Saturday, even though I can’t be arsed to go along myself.
The very obvious historical truth is that the people most likely to be at the throats of members of any given religious group are members of other religious groups. They are, to paraphrase his Holiness, aggressive religionists.
In the playgrounds of western Scotland, competing gangs of kids slug it out under the banner of Papes and Prods. Well, they do in the unlikely event that they go to an integrated school in the first place, anyway
I presume that atheist and agnostic children consider themselves far above that sort of thing, and sensibly slope off behind the bikesheds for a quiet lunchtime fag instead.
And there’s more. In the afternoon, His Holiness was off to Glasgow, where a crowd of 65,000 were told: ‘Religion is in fact a guarantee of authentic liberty and respect, leading us to look upon every person as a brother or a sister.’
No it isn’t, and no it doesn’t. This stupid assertion is so readily refuted that I shall refrain from rehearsing the long, long list of repressive theocracies ideologically legitimated by Catholicism and sundry other creeds, both in history and in the present day.
In sum, Benedict XIV’s strange belief that religious viewpoints are in Britain systematically excluded from consideration in the market place for ideas is scarcely tenable. Indeed, they get a head start in the form of the compulsory ‘God slots’ on many broadcast outlets and a guaranteed place on the curriculum, when they should be slugging it out on the same terms as everybody else.
But if those viewpoints are to be taken seriously, it would help to come up with some arguments that are not quite so ludicrous as those the Pope has advanced so far on this trip.
Labels: religion
Labels: abortion rights, lefties, pope
He told the magazine: "England today is a secularised, pluralistic country. When you land at Heathrow Airport, you sometimes think you'd landed in a Third World country."
Asked whether Christians were discriminated against in the UK, he said: "Particularly in England, an aggressive neo-atheism is widespread. For example, if you wear a cross with British Airways, you're discriminated against."
What exactly is wrong with a secular plural society ? It means all freedom of religion and freedom not to believe . No one belief has privilege or is at risk of persecution.
And what is with the Third World Country comment ?
Anyway , back to the Pope :
He added: "Today, the United Kingdom strives to be a modern and multicultural society. In this challenging enterprise, may it always maintain its respect for those traditional values and cultural expressions that more aggressive forms of secularism no longer value or even tolerate."
The Pope also praised Britain's fight against Hitler's "atheist extremism", saying that "Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live".
Seems the Pope is not above twisting the meaning of secularism, painting it as a bad thing.
But he then goes on to equate Nazism = extreme atheism .
From my history, I don't recall the Nazis as fighting for an atheist society ,but when have facts got in the way of religious teaching . A church that can state that condoms spread Aids as they have tiny holes in them, can just as easily twist and smear secularism and atheism .
For the record , Hitler stated :
Hitler’s Mein Kampf, volume I, at the end of chapter 2: "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."
Many who do not believe in God fought against Nazis, fight today against fascists and war in this world. Religious people do not by any stretch of the imagination have a monopoly on peace and doing good. Examples that immediately spring to mind are Bush and Blair , consulting their God, before going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
How much concern for life does the Catholic Church have for women in places such as Nicaragua, where no abortion is allowed , even if their life is at risk. Doctors are too scared often to give treatment for cancer to pregnant women in case it causes the foetus to abort. My concern is with the woman who is a alive , not sacrificing her as some sort of incubator .
I am pretty sick of those of us who argue for a secular society, with freedom of speech and belief , being called extreme and the whole notion being misused. A secular society = freedom of belief and none for all. What is wrong with that ?
Labels: God squad
Labels: public sector
Labels: 9/11, US politics
Labels: east end