Ramblings about politics, economics, secularism and stuff
I gather BBC Newsline is investigating certain ‘land deals’ conducted between Peter and Iris Robinson and the late Fred Fraser.
All will be revealed, apparently, on BBC Northern Ireland, tonight, at 6.30pm.
Must-see TV I’d suggest.
Oh and BBCNewsnight will have Sinead O’Connor live in the studio tonight to debate with a leading Catholic about how the Church has handled child abuse allegations.
George Walden (Pic: Telegraph)
It’s not really my brief. But I’ll say it anyway. The Conservative Party, nationally, is wrong on education.
In a Northern Ireland context the Conservatives have washed their hands of the selection issue – handily ducking it because it’s a devolved matter. When David Willetts ditched traditional Conservative support for Grammar schools in England the Party quickly made clear that it would have no impact here – that it fully understood that we had every right, as local Conservatives, to continue to support the inherent superiority of our selection based system. But, frankly, the one nation Conservative in me is unhappy with that whole concept of what is right here not being right for the entire country. It has always sat uncomfortably.
Because in England the Conservative Party has bought into a dreadful consensus – that academic selection is no longer on the political agenda.
As George Walden – a former Conservative Education Minister – put it in The Times recently:
The question the Tories never answer is how the independent schools they largely patronise can be selective in every sense — academically, financially, socially — while the party leadership abhors selection for people who do not have the cash?
Owen Paterson – the Northern Ireland Shadow Secretary of State – is the result of a private, selective system - a system that works if ones parents can afford it. Indeed much of the Shadow Cabinet has benefitted from elitism born out of wealth rather than intellectual ability. The Conservative Party’s ditching of its traditional support for academic selection as a method of introducing excellence into the state system means that its education policy is little different from New Labour’s. As Walden has pointed out, New Labour and New Conservative present an oligarchy of professional egalitarians that support wealth based elitism – not meritocracy in education.
Indeed there would appear to be less divergence between the Conservative/New Labour education policies (for England), and Sinn Fein’s (for Northern Ireland), than one might imagine.
In this respect my hope is that some of the UCUNF hopefuls might bend Owen Paterson’s ear and suggest that the Conservative Party might seek to understand popular support for academic selection here – but I suspect few will want to be seen as the tail that wags the dog.
The Conservative Party has much to learn about education from a system, here, that still – despite all the assaults upon it – produces the highest levels of social mobility in the United Kingdom.
A number of parents – who are concerned about the Department of Education’s plans to summarily remove funding from prep schools – have created a campaign blog.
Ian and Julie Rainey, with Sarah Schutzler, Nicola Hunter and Liz Breadon (concerned parents of Regent House Prep) have created a campaign blog with lots of useful resources.
I’m also asking some fellow bloggers to publicise this.
Yes you read correct. Davy Sims, previously Head of New Media at Beeb NI, has been appointed Director of Communications for the UUP. Ivor Whitten, apparently, got the “scoop”.
I have the highest regard for Davy. He gets new media and social media. He understands how technology and blogging and Twitter are affecting the process of engagement with the politically informed (although I’m not sure how adept he’ll be getting stories about sash-wearing UUP councillors into the Lurgan Gazette or whatever it’s called).
But I’m amazed he has taken on this role.
I also knew the previous incumbent, Alex Kane. Alex was much less technically savvy. But he was frustrated at every turn within the UUP – and that’s why he resigned. The UUP Executive systematically ignored him. The leadership failed to brief him. He was out of the loop. No Communications Director can do his or her job properly in this environment.
On the positive side, it seems very likely that the UUP leadership will be changing soon. The dour David Campbell has, I gather, completed (or is close to completing) his 3 year stint as Party Chairman. On the down-side, rumour has it that UUP Treasurer Mark Cosgrove (vast ego and bizarre use of English) – may replace him. [Ed: apparently I'm wrong and Campbell is due to stand again against some bloke called Lemon who 'doesn't stand a chance in hell'...see comments].
Davy, in comparison to Mark Cosgrove, is as smooth as a velvet codpiece. He has a broadcasting voice. He has a calm demeanour. He is measured and controlled. How he’ll cope with the rag-bag collection of mumbling circumlocutors in the UUP is anyone’s guess.
Oh and how he’ll get Sir Reg to tell him anything at all, so he can do his job properly, is a more fundamental question.
Keith Porteous Wood is Executive Director of the National Secular Society
I am pleased that commentators [see Shane in Jeff's post last week] have come forward to illustrate the somewhat counterproductive strategy of apologists for the Catholic Church’s non-actions in tackling child abuse. They make a bad situation a hundred times worse: shooting the messenger; attacking the attacker and playing victim are specialties of the Church. He has learned well from them. But it will not cut much ice; the time is long gone when the Church had so much moral authority those asked to jump asked, “how high?” The Pope discovered that yesterday when his supposed olive branch to the Irish people was rejected by the vast majority of commentators.
On Shane’s secrecy point, I suggest he (or anyone else) puts “secrecy vatican child abuse” into Google. It will provide hours of reading. The culture of secrecy is well covered in an article[1] entitled Arrogant, corrupt, secretive – the Catholic church failed to tackle evil from the Observer on 21 March 2010, which deserves to be read in its entirety. Another article in the same paper refers to the Pope’s/Cardinal Ratzinger’s notorious 2001 letter “instructing bishops to report all abuse cases to his office at the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for confidential handling. Vatican officials have said the measure was designed to prevent cases being covered up at local level, but Irish bishops reportedly understood the letter to mean they should not report cases to the police.”
Continue reading ‘Guest Post by Keith Porteous Wood, National Secular Society’
Danny Kennedy MLA Carries the Orange Banner for David Cameron into the General Election
On Friday evening I had a long conversation with one of the Conservative nominees who has failed to be selected as an agreed Conservative and Unionist candidate in the forthcoming general election. She articulated the disillusionment felt by many Conservatives locally who have been duped by a UUP leader and Shadow Northern Ireland spokesman who have carved up this shambolic UCUNF pact between them.
The Conservative Party used to have an organisation here of sorts. It’s true that membership was never huge. Activists were few and far between. But the quality of people was considerable. Early Conservative activists, like Dr Laurence Kennedy, wanted to see the type of change in Northern Ireland that was only possible through the introduction of a political discourse that was elevated above the nonsense of Unionism or Nationalism.
Over the last few months we have seen the systematic destruction of the Conservative Party organisation here. Just yesterday I spoke to a member of the local Executive of the Party here who made clear that the local Area Executive was essentially ignored by Owen Paterson in terms of candidate selection. Moreover the so-called joint committee has also been side-lined as Reg and Owen essentially carved-up the candidate list between them. The result is just one genuine Conservative in the list (Parsley doesn’t really count as he has no real ideological conviction and only joined the Conservative Party – weeks after standing as the Alliance Euro candidate – when he was offered a job within the Centre for Social Justice, the Conservative think-tank).
Owen went to great lengths to point out that he wanted candidates from all walks of society (especially “Catholic women”, he was at pains to point out). He and Reg prompty loverlooked them, preferring instead to select nice, safe and God-fearing Protestants. This fits nicely with Paterson’s membership of the Cornerstone Group - once referred-to by Alan Duncan MP as the Taliban tendency within the Conservative Party.
The result of this will be a slumping in turn-out in the general election. Far from being a new force in Northern Ireland politics the re-branded UUP is unlikely to perform much better than at the last general election. If it makes any progress it will only be as a result of the DUP’s bifurcating vote in the face of TUV competition.
UNCUNF represents nothing new at all. People will see this shambolic Heath Robinson construct for what it is…and it ain’t pretty.
My old friend, Keith Porteous Wood, Executive Director of the National Secular Society, launched a ferocious attack this week on the Pope and the Vatican’s record on child abuse at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva.
Keith made the intervention under the auspices of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). He said: “Billions of dollars – and euros – have already been paid out in respect of thousands of victims in the USA and Ireland. News of further abuse has since appeared in Austria, the Netherlands and now Germany – and this is just the tip of the iceberg. How much more evidence of children’s suffering at the hands of the Church will the UN and the international community tolerate before fulfilling their responsibility to those children to hold the Vatican to account?
“The Vatican is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), but has contravened several of its articles, and is more than 10 years behind in its reporting. It has habitually compounded the abuse and facilitated multiple reoffending by moving offenders around and shielding them from prosecuting authorities by imposing the “pontifical secret”. Major investigations in the USA and Ireland have been deliberately and cynically obstructed by the Church at all levels without censure from above. This includes the Vatican’s representative in Ireland, suggesting that he acted under instruction from the highest level in the Church. All this has led to abusers being allowed to continue offending and to escape justice, while their victims despair – some even committing suicide.
“The Church cannot claim it is being victimised. It still places the protection of its reputation, and even more its assets, above the protection of those entrusted to its care. Over 90% of the compensation payments paid by cash-strapped Ireland came from the tax payers, including the abused themselves.
“When we raised this issue at the UN in September 2009, the Church blamed everyone else, but did promise one paltry paragraph on clerical abuse in its report to the UN. Even that mandatory report – already 13 years overdue and promised last September – has still not been filed with the UN.
“Following an instruction from Cardinal Ratzinger when head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, all suspicions and accusations of child abuse were to be sent to the Vatican in secret. Furthermore, when acceding to the Convention, the Vatican arbitrarily – and disingenuously – excluded “Vatican City state” from the jurisdiction of the Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC). IHEU calls on the Holy See to:
1. remove its reservation to the CRC to bring the territory of Vatican City state, to which it has instructed all abuse accusations are to be sent, under the jurisdiction of the CRC;
2. open up its files and records to CRC and state investigators; and
3. instruct all its representatives to cooperate with legal investigating authorities worldwide –something that they have signally failed to do, for example, in Ireland.”
You can see video of Keith delivering his fusillade here: http://www.youtube.com/user/IHEUUnitedNations#p/f/12/71UefLWpm2A
The text of the NSS’s previous intervention in September 2009, together with a detailed statement published by the UN, the Holy See’s response and the hostile worldwide press reaction is available here: http://www.secularism.org.uk/uploads/unhrc-holy-see-pack.pdf
Rumour has it that only 2 Conservatives will be selected as “Conservative & Unionist” candidates in the forthcoming general election – with possibly a couple of others being argued over.
This highlights the utter contempt shown to the local Conservative Party organisation by the UUP and the so-called joint committee set up between the UUP and Conservatives.
The Conservative Party has been organised here for 2 decades without any material support from CCHQ or Lord Ashcroft. Now that a deal has been done with the UUP, Ashcroft’s tax free coffers have been opened up. They largely funded Jim Nicholson’s election campaign and they will, no doubt, be drawn upon for the general election campaign – to support multiple candidates who aren’t even members of the Conservative Party.
The Conservative Party has re-energised the lame old faded UUP. Like a dusty old sash on the 12th of July it has been given a shake and donned. But it’s still the same old fart wearing it.
Over on his blog Alastair Campbell is heartened by the fact the the Conservative election machine seems to be off its rails.
He says, “All quite cheering really and among the reasons why, at a dinner for industry PRs I spoke at last night, so many people seemed to echo the view that the election had gone from being all over a few months ago to wide open now. From thinking not long ago that the Tories had a slick campaign machine headed by a supercommunicator in Cameron, the majority view seemed to be it had descended into something close to a shambles, propped up only by the media’s continuing soft approach to matters Tory.”
There’s a lot of truth in this. I think the CCHQ machine is indeed shambolic and I think it reflects the poor management skills of politicians running the show at Millbank – but also the dumping of clear Conservative ideology. There is no real passion – rather it’s tick-box electioneering run by a bunch of very young and very naive tech-geeks with no real operational management skills. The attempts at damage limitation over the Ashcroft affair were woeful.
However, if the Conservative strategy is in a mess the Labour Party is little better. It’s come down to being a comparison game between two dreadfully out-of-touch political parties that are virtually devoid of any clear political values between them. All the emotional intelligence has been drained and there is no single-minded purpose any longer. The result is that on both sides the only party animals are supine appartchiks who are kicked around by the latest, chosen, policy wonks.
I think Campbell is himself, to some extent at least, to blame for this state of affairs.
Both parties need radical overhaul in order to return to some type of emotionally-led vision for what they stand for. The blandness on both sides is a direct result of the modern superficiality of politics. And it is very, very depressing.
Now perhaps Martin McGuinness was speaking yesterday, about Sean Brady, with no sense of irony. It wouldn’t be the first time a Sinn Fein leader ignored all potential accusations of hypocrisy to make a point. The point McGuinness was making yesterday was that Sean Brady, by being party to vows of silence by children abused by his priestly colleague Fr Brendan Smyth, should now consider his position.
This is ironic, of course, because McGuinness’ own Party President, Gerry Adams, would appear to have taken similar vows of silence relating to his own brother’s sexually abusing behaviour. Liam Adams, it is alleged, sexually abused his own daughter, Aine . It certainly seems to be the case that Adams made no particular effort to alert the police or other authorities to the allegations that his brother – working in close proximity to children – was a systematic child abuser and rapist (just like Fr Brendan Smyth).
Adams also seems to have taken his time to get round to highlighting the systematically abusing behaviour of his own father – previously revered in IRA circles.
The astonishing hypocrisy of McGuinness will, no doubt, be noted by other commentators. The parallels between the two cases are astonishing. Both men, it would appear, seem to have put their “causes” before the welfare of children. The causes were, on the one hand, Irish Republicanism and, on the other, Irish Catholicism. Both causes are now thoroughly tainted. But, then again, the tainting started long ago when Adams and his cohorts decided that the means to achieve political ends was to enter into a bloody and sectarian campaign of brutality and destruction, and when the Catholic Church came to the conclusion, decades ago, that it should undertake a systematic cover-up of clerical child abuse.
I’m rather of the view that anyone who, voluntarily, enters into a life-long “vocation” must have odd personality traits. It may be the case that both Sean Brady and Gerry Adams had troubled childhoods. We know that Adams’ own father was a child abuser. Studies have indicated that abused children often have personality disorders that might make them more likely to engage in violent or abusive behavior, themselves, in adulthood. But what we do know is that both these men have contributed to grotesque damage to this society.
It’s about time that society insisted that they – Brady and Adams – leave it in peace.
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