bristling badger

add your voice for justice for kevin williams

2012-01-15T12:52:00.001Z

Even as people were dying, the official lies about the Hillsborough Disaster started. Fans were massed outside the 1989 football match with minutes to go until kick-off, so police ordered gates open and there was a crush that pinned people up against the fences at the front of the crowd.

Watching it unfold from the police control box the man who'd ordered the gates open, Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield, told officials that the gates had been forced open by fans. Afterwards, laywers and senior police edited hundreds witness statements to remove material damaging to the police.

The inquest into the 96 deaths made two indefensible decisions that served to cover up the truth. They ruled that everybody had died of the same cause, traumatic asphyxia, and they decided that everyone was dead by 3.15pm. This latter decision meant that any evidence from after this time was not admissable and so was kept from the public.

At a stroke this denied any place for a vast array of accounts from medical professionals, police and others who had seen people suffer and die after 3.15. It meant that nobody got to question why the police would not let ambulances into the ground.

Fifteen year old Kevin Williams was pulled out from the crush alive at 3.28pm. An off-duty police officer who found a pulse at 3.37pm tried to flag an ambulance down. Kevin was saveable, but they cordoned off the care on the day.

Kevin's mother Anne has long campaigned for a new inquest into her son's death. The evidence is extremely strong, both that he was alive after 3.15 and that he died from other injuries than traumatic asphyxia; injuries that could have been treated.

If a new inquest rules that these things are indeed true, it means the original inquest is proven false. This, in turn, means a reopening of the inquest into the other 95 victims and a demolition of the cruel whitewashed stonewalling that the families of the victims have faced for so long.

Here's where you come in.

Anne Williams has launched a government e-petition to force a parliamentary discussion of the case. A previous e-petition asked for disclosure of Cabinet files relating to Hillsborough. A four hour Commons debate and unanimous vote agreed. Even though it will expose police and politicians lies, there is huge momentum for the truth about Hillsborough to be revealed. How long that momentum will last is unknown; certainly, our best shot at proving that the inquest was a cover up is this petition that has only days to go.

There needs to be over 100,000 signatures to force the parliamentary debate. There are 25,000 on Kevin Williams' petition and only four days left.

This is not about football. This is about justice. This is about holding the state and its agents to account for a massive arse-covering abuse of power. If you are a British citizen or UK resident you can sign the petition here. It needs to be done - signed and the confirmation email clicked - before 19th January.

don't bite the hand that beats you

2012-01-03T21:28:00.000Z

It is gratifying that two of Stephen Lawrence's racist killers have been convicted, but as they were part of a five strong gang and have eluded justice for 18 years, it is far too little far too late.

Amongst the reasons for the delays were a Tory government deeply committed to defending the police from criticism no matter how valid; we had to wait until the Blair government before a proper inquiry was launched.

The Metropolitan Police were forced to admit to 'institutional racism' and have a serious crackdown on overt racism in the force. A Home Office report of 2005 assessed the impact of the Lawrence Inquiry on the Met and found that overt racism amongst officers at work is indeed largely unacceptable these days, though homophobia, transphobia, sexism and other bigotry are all still alive and well.

There has been a lot written about the police not taking racist attacks seriously, and strong allegations of the father of one of Lawrence's killers bribing officers. What I haven't seen mentioned is the police actively attacking the campaigns for justice.

Almost two years ago, a year before the outing of Mark Kennedy put the issue into the spotlight, an undercover Metropolitan police officer gave an interview to the Observer. He had infiltrated far left and anti-racist groups for four years in the mid-1990s; exactly the time when the Lawrence campaign was actively working for justice from a heads-in-the-sand police force. He said

At first, I could convince myself that my job was about fighting subversion, but once I began targeting the groups set up to win justice for those who had died in police custody or had been victims of racism, it was clear that what the loved ones of the deceased wanted was justice. My presence in the groups made that justice harder to obtain.

The officer - identified in the piece only as 'Officer A' but subsequently named as Peter Black - does not specify which campaigns he infiltrated and undermined. The use of the plural is interesting and, given that the Lawrence campaign was by far the most prominent, it would be surprising if he had not targetted them.

Even if the Lawrence campaign was not amongst those Peter Black infiltrated, he will have disrupted others just as serious and deserving of justice. Whichever campaigns they were, it is one of the starkest illustrations of unaccountable political policing yet unearthed in the whole undercover scandal. Whilst infiltrated groups like Climate Camp did not riot (even to the extent of putting their hands in the air chanting 'this is not a riot' whilst being batoned by police), there is undeniably some crossover between anti-capitalist environmental groups and public order situations that kick off into riots.

But with campaigns for justice for those who died in custody, or those whose attacks were under-investigated and dismissed, there is no such hardcore element. The police sent in an officer to grieving relatives pretending to befriend and support them when he was actually there to make their plight worse. The twisted callousness, the absolute lack of conscience and compassion, beggars belief.

Why would the police deploy vastly expensive operatives to these families and their campaigns, what were those groups planning that could possibly warrant such deceit and intrusion? Put simply, they could make the police look as incompetent, belligerent and racist as they actually are. The one thing that power does above all other concerns is protect its position.

So never mind the validity of your cause, never mind the plain documented truth of what happened, if you're going to make police look bad then you can expect the most unaccountable, invasive tactics available to be used against you.

undercover cops' girlfriends sue police

2011-12-17T13:21:00.004Z

Eight women who had sexual relationships with undercover police officers are taking legal action against the Metropolitan police.

Jon Murphy of the Association of Chief Police Officers spoke about his undercover officers having sexual relations with the people they're sent to spy on.

It is absolutely not authorised. It is never acceptable for an undercover officer to behave in that way...

It is grossly unprofessional. It is a diversion from what they are there to do. It is morally wrong because people have been put there to do a particular task and people have got trust in them. It is never acceptable under any circumstances... for them to engage in sex with any subject they come into contact with.

Yet most of the unmasked undercover officers not only did so but formed emotionally committed relationships with their targets. Indeed, most of them aren't involved in this legal case - it concerns three of the established officers plus two new names.

These people were expensive assets, watched over by cover officers on a daily basis. The idea that their handlers didn't know who they were with for years on end is laughable. One of them, Bob Lambert, graduated from fieldwork to running the deployment. If Lambert thought his relationship had been a mistake, why were his subsequent agents encouraged to do the same thing?

Lambert was in charge of Jim Boyling's spy work; Boyling had relationships with two of the litigants. Lambert also oversaw Pete Black who says that sexual relationships were condoned by senior commanders.

Back in January ex-undercover officer Liam Thomas explained

At training school, it was drummed into your head that you are only limited by your imagination. The whole UC [undercover] model in the police is taken from the spooks, where an agent sleeping with the enemy is condoned.

The official Met line was 'don't do it', but unofficially it was condoned. I remember one senior detective saying to me, 'Have you embedded yourself in the community yet?'

Despite several exposed officers admitting the policy, Mark Kennedy has tried to downplay what happened.

He is also furious at what he calls a ‘smear campaign’ that he bedded a string of vulnerable women to extract information.

He said angrily: 'I had two relationships while I was undercover, one of which was serious'.

Yet three of the women taking action had long relationships with Kennedy during his seven years undercover.

The state trained these people in techniques to gain trust, to create a sense of intimacy and closeness. They then used this to deceive these women, and others, into having profound permanent sexual relationships.

Internet message boards and comment sections are awash with arguments about whether what was done is rape. The r-word is so emotive that it rapidly polarises discussion and often makes political allies turn against one another.

Some people say that these women were not giving informed consent, and so it is a form of rape. Indeed, when this point was put to Mark Kennedy he folded into sullen silence and did not deny it. Others point out that all relationships have secrets and many people lie about themselves in order to pull someone. If I tell someone in a club that I'm a commando it doesn't mean it's rape if they swoon for me.

The discussion is interesting and important, but off the point. This is not about a single instance of sexual activity. They did not lie to make themselves a bit more impressive in order to get laid. They went and integrated themselves into people's lives and families, became the closest possible companions, in long term emotionally committed relationships. The officers did so only as a paid agent in order to undermine everything that these women worked for and held most dear.

They did this under orders, and were withdrawn at very short notice leaving those who had loved them devastated.

It's not rape in the commonly defined sense. It's perhaps not fraud in the common sense. This is because the set definitions are for things that we have *had* to define. What happened to these women is so rare that we don't actually have a familiar definition or name for what crime it is. Just because that's the situation it doesn't alter the clear moral position of what was done.

Despite the press focus it is not about sexual assault. As they make clear in their statement, the womens' action is for many crimes committed against them, including deceit, misfeasance in public office and negligence as well as the Human Rights of protection from inhumane and degrading treatment, and respect for private and family life, including the right to form relationships without unjustified interference by the state.

The bravery and dignity of these women is admirable and impressive. Already intruded upon and destabilised, it would be completely understandable if they kept quiet and got on with their lives, yet they are putting the personal injustice they suffered into the public arena.

They have not hired publicity agents to splash them across the press for money, nor are they going for their specific cops individually. Instead, by going anonymously they emphasise the way police invaded their personal lives; by going collectively they demolish the lie that relationships were forbidden and Mark Kennedy was one rogue officer; and by suing the Met as an institution they go for the real villains and give the best chance of bringing the workings of this murky corruption out into the light.

the next bucket of whitewash

2011-12-07T19:43:00.002Z

You know the cliche about how a frog thrown into hot water jumps out, but a frog put in warming water stays put and gets boiled alive?

One all-encompassing cover-up report into the actions of undercover police officer Mark Kennedy and his colleagues would be such a hurricane of bullshit that it would cause outrage. Instead there are - count them - twelve separate narrow little inquiries reporting one at a time.

The frog dropped into a pond of whitewash jumps out; but slowly add whitewash to the pond and it doesn't notice until it's swallowed a load and gone blind.

Yesterday Sir Christopher Rose published his report.

BACKGROUND

The Crown Prosecution Service failed to mention they had transcripts of recordings made by Mark Kennedy at the meeting where activists planned to close Ratcliffe power station - evidence that exonerated many of those involved. Twenty people were convicted and a further six were on the brink of it when they demanded Kennedy's report; the prosecution refused and the trial collapsed.

Had activists not uncovered Kennedy, those convictions would stand. How many other people have been wrongly convicted due to the prosecution witholding evidence of undercover cops who, unlike Kennedy, were never found out?

HOW MANY ONE BAD APPLES CAN THERE BE?

Sir Christopher Rose was a poor choice to write the report (or a good one, if you want a cover-up). He was Surveillance Commissioner, a post that has the ultimate sign-off on deployment of undercover cops. He was one of the people who sent Kennedy and co in. This isn't the same state investigating itself, nor even the same institution; to some extent it's the same individual.

Did he find any systemic problems then? Have a guess.

As I said when the last Kennedy report was due to come out, when it gets caught doing the unacceptable, state power denies it's done anything wrong. When that fails, they hang a small number of lowlies out to dry. No officers went to jail for the American policy of torture exposed at Abu Ghraib. A solitary Second Lieutenant was convicted of the My Lai massacre. If they can do that for such atrocities, the spy cops thing is a walk in a finely kept park.

Just as the undercover cops were 'one rogue officer' (even though Kennedy did nothing that wasn't done by a slew of others subsequently uncovered), so Rose has found that the CPS' witholding of evidence was down to one rogue prosecutor, John Cunningham.

Which takes some brass balls to say, given that emails proving conspiracy between Cunningham and his superior were leaked months ago.

Cunningham exchanged a series of emails with Nick Paul, a more senior CPS prosecutor based in London, according to the documents. At that early stage Paul was also aware of a "participating informant" and "sensitive disclosure issues" relating to Kennedy's evidence.

And of course, there were many CPS staff who will have seen the transcripts of Kennedy's recordings. Rose admits

all involved were well aware

that they should disclose the evidence, yet he says

at no stage of the prosecution was there any deliberate, still less dishonest, withholding of information.

I know I should tell you something, I don't, yet I'm not deliberately witholding it? You fucking what?

The weaselling is done by essentially claiming that the Crown Prosecution Service didn't notice the hundreds of pages pertaining to Kennedy, or if they did they didn't think it would have any bearing on the case to have a transcript of what was said and by whom. (And let's just ignore all the police officers involved who were fully aware but stood by and watched a miscarriage of justice, they're in the clear too). This is a one-off, then, right?

NOT ONE, BUT ONE OF MANY

But we already knew that one of Kennedy's predecessors, undercover cop Jim Boyling, had been arrested as an activist and been prosecuted under his false identity. (Truth, whole truth, nothing but the truth?).

This week we learned that Boyling had earlier been on a hunt saboteur action that ended in arrests, and he had supplied a witness statement for the defence. (In a poetic twist, the sabbers' lawyer was Kier Starmer, who these days is the Director of Public Prosecutions who ordered the Rose report).

What's interesting is that in that case the prosecution declared that they were witholding certain evidence. We still don't know what it was but the only obvious answer is that the 'sensitive' documents showed that the activist Jim Sutton was actually the police officer Jim Boyling.

If that's right then the CPS definitely knew about Boyling, and about undercover officers among activists, at that time. Which means that when Boyling was prosecuted later on, the CPS knew who he was yet it got waved through.

One of Boyling's contemporaries, Pete Black, says that prosecutions under false identities were commonplace in order to build the credibility of undercover officers.

This means that there are many other cases like the Ratcliffe one where the prosecution has pertinent evidence that mitigated or even exonerated the defendants, yet they witheld it.

TELL ME WHAT YOU CANNOT KNOW

The Director of Public Prosecutions, Kier Starmer, went on Newsnight last night to defend the Rose report's weapons-grade whitewash. He said that there was no need to go back through all the prosecutions involving undercover officers. Instead, he would look at any cases that concerned people bring to him.

He knows full well nobody can do that, it's yet another shutdown whitewash tactic. How can anyone know what cases to suggest if we don't know who the secret police officers are?

Either the CPS has to get a list of the spy cops and examine all cases, or they have to publish a list of the cops' names so we can say which cases we saw them in.

THE FORECAST IS FOR FURTHER DOWNPOURS OF WHITEWASH

These enquiries and reports - despite all the evidence incontrovertibly proving otherwise - are saying there is no systemic corruption. They are a denial that there has been decades of this political policing. They are decoys to keep us from asking a larger question about what the mission has been and how far it has gone.

Beyond that there is a larger question still - who invented this role? Did the police invent it for themselves and the prosecutors and politicians keep nodding it through? Did they sit down and do it together? Or was it invented by politicians?

For such a large and long-running scandal, during this extraordinary past twelve months the politicians have been deafeningly quiet.

sweets for my sweet, twit for my twitter

2011-11-17T16:16:00.000Z

Just to point out that I've got a Twitter account, @MerrickBadger.

It has notifications on the increasingly rare occasions when I publish a blog post, plus some personal life idle thoughts, and mostly (so far) it's been political stuff on current events.

There's a wee grey button in the sidebar if you want to follow me.

mark kennedy's thatcher tears

2011-11-15T23:47:00.002Z

Margaret Thatcher was clearly choked up and her eyes welled with tears as she left Downing Street for the last time. Some political observers remarked that this was evidence of her having common humanity after all.

But to only cry for your own loss of power, status and income after despoiling communities and instigating brutal political crackdowns without a glimmer of remorse, well, that actually proves your complete lack of common humanity.

This is not the same as crocodile tears, so needs a different name. As it's not a unique phenomenon perhaps we should call every instance of it Thatcher tears.

Last night, a year after he was uncovered by the activists he had infiltrated for seven years, undercover cop Mark Kennedy starred in a Channel 4 documentary (it can be watched online here, at least for now). In it he said how wonderful the activists had been to him day in day out for years on end and how he feels bad having shopped them by the dozen. If that were true and he had a conscience as you or I understand it, he would have ended his mission years earlier.

After he left the police, he came back to the activists under his real name because he missed the camaraderie, he said. In fact, he'd set up a private spy firm and returned to continue his infiltration. This explained his sudden interest in animal rights, an odd turn of events for a meat eater. He continued spying and lying even without police instructions. He would still be doing it now had he not been caught by suspicious friends.

That he kept working as part of the darkest police mission after he saw the routine brutality of the police on protests - even getting hospitalised by them himself - shows a man in love with power rather than morality. For several years after his beating, he was instrumental in organising similar police war parties on subsequent protests.

To see him on TV saying how great his victims were, and portray himself as the biggest victim of all, is as stark a case of Thatcher tears as can be.

He says he feels guilty about betraying people. Yet he was happy to do it for as long as the cash kept coming in. Jim Bliss likened him to 'Judas pretending to be Jesus'. But Judas started out as a disciple. Kennedy was only ever there because he'd had the pieces of silver up front, and then went looking for more people to hand over to the crucifiers on his own initiative.

He said the activists really cared for him and loved him. Except, of course, they didn't. They cared about a man who didn't exist. They didn't love him any more than the Anti Nazi League would love a secret Klansman in their midst.

LIES AND CONTRADICTIONS

He talks of the people who exposed him as dignified and said he didn't feel threatened by them. Funny that earlier this year he told the Guardian the meeting was 'hugely menacing', and his earlier Mail on Sunday story said it was a 'terrifying kangaroo court' and the front page headline said I FEAR FOR MY LIFE.

He still claims to have only had two sexual relationships with activists - which even the fawning voiceover clearly didn't believe - and says he was in love. Yet when asked if it was abuse as the women did not give informed consent, he crumples and does not deny it.

Both he and the film makers refer numerous times to the four year relationship. They say it was underway by the time of the Icelandic dam campaign of summer 2005 and continued until he was outed in October 2010. Kennedy and the film crew are unable or unwilling to count to five, an indicator of the level of clarity and accuracy in the programme as a whole.

An anonymous undercover cop said that he couldn't be expected to 'live like a monk' for seven years. A man like Kennedy who is frequently returning home to visit his wife and kids is not in that position, though. Incidentally, in the film his marriage continued until he was outed in the press. In previous interviews he said the marriage broke down years ago.

The film makers not only share his poor numeracy but also his attitude towards the truth. Near the end they said that not one activist would participate in the film. Earlier this year they contacted many. After a few weeks, despite having being told in very stern terms to shove it, they contacted some of them again offering them anonymous contributions and saying that others were already co-operating. Using lies to make a vanity film about a liar. You've got to admire the neat consistency of approach there.

Much was made of his arrest at the Ratcliffe power station action in April 2009 and how dropping charges against him made it obvious he was a cop. In real life, 114 people were arrested and bailed. About half of them had no further contact from the police. Were they all suspected of being cops too then? Around 60 were recalled for interview, including Kennedy, after which charges were brought against just 26. Charges are frequently inexplicably dropped against activists. It is not an alarm bell.

He said his role was not to inform on individual people, yet this is completely untrue. Documents disclosed to Ratcliffe defendants show that he was given a short list of named activists to keep tabs on that day. Is seems scarcely credible that his other orders were not along similar lines.

He said he didn't want the publicity. If I didn't want publicity, I don't think I would hire the world's most notorious publicity agent Max Clifford to get me on the front of the Mail on Sunday dressed like Alan Partridge's golfing partner, followed by a five figure sum for being in a documentary about me not wanting publicity.

Amongst the big lies were many small ones. He was described as a 'committed vegan', a point he reiterated in the sycophantically filtered webchat after the show (seriously, was there someone at a computer in Max Clifford's office with the word 'brave' in the clipboard?), yet he never even pretended to be vegan.

Why would they put in such a pointless lie, unless he is a man who genuinely cannot distinguish between truth and falsehood?

He appears to have spent so long in the role of agreer to those around him, surfing the moment, that he not only doesn't know what he thinks but can't even keep track of what he does.

He plainly has no idea why he did what he did, nor who he is. He has a personality disorder that was cultivated and exploited by his bosses, just as they did it to other officers before, just as they're doing it to Kennedy's successors right now. To them, Kennedy and his ilk are just grist to the mill and the legion of people psychologically and sexually abused are irrelevant collateral damage.

ENTER THE PUPPETMASTER

The police refused to comment on Kennedy specifically, but they propped up Jon Murphy from the Association of Chief Police Officers. Despite its public body sounding name, ACPO is an unaccountable private company that was responsible for deploying Kennedy and other undercover cops.

Murphy said that intimate relationships 'shouldn't happen', yet we know that most of the exposed undercovers had them, often having several.

One of them, Bob Lambert, went on to run undercover operations and was in charge of deploying officers who had relationships. If he knew the danger and thought it a bad idea, surely he would have made sure it didn't happen. From the evidence we have, it seems more likely that he encouraged it as a way to ingratiate.

Murphy says undercover cops lie, but they do it 'within the bounds of the law'. Yet this has never been tested. What about the cops who were prosecuted, who stood up in court swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, before giving evidence from someone who didn't exist? What about those sexual partners who have a legal right to privacy and a family life? What about the baton-charged protesters who have a right of free assembly?

HUMANITY WITH PERSPECTIVE

A man moves in next door to you. He is friendly and helpful and shares your interests. Over the years you become close, going on family holidays together, he babysits for your kids, you eat at each other's houses. Then seven years in you find out that he only moved in so he could get close to you in order to film himself abusing your children. More, he did it not out of any compulsion but because a gang of film distributors paid him to do it. But when they stopped paying him, he carried on making the films, selling them freelance until you caught him at it.

When you discover what he's done he is ostracised, his life ruined. The inner void of that abuser warrants some serious counsel and guidance, but he cannot be viewed as the main victim. He chose this. Those he abused did not.

However, neither can he be viewed as the real villain. His hands did the work, but the true evil is in those who sent him in; they run an army of abusers, knowing lives will be shattered, sitting back in the shadows with all of the power and money and none of the risk.

two cover ups for the price of one

2011-10-30T08:58:00.001Z

To briefly recap: Bernard Hogan-Howe's report said Mark Kennedy was a one-off rogue and the police would be fine watching themselves. At the last minute the report was pulped when it was revealed that one officer, Jim Boyling, had been prosecuted under his false identity, even testifying and being present in meetings between activists and their lawyers.

Then it came out that Boyling was not the only one. When his boss, Bob Lambert, had been an undercover officer he too had been prosecuted.

Hogan-Howe either hadn't looked into his subject at all and had simply made some stuff up, or else he knew full well that Kennedy's actions were sanctioned, and wrote a whitewash report of deliberate lies. Given Hogan-Howe's position as chief of the Metropolitan Police, the force that runs the undercover infiltrator officers, I think we can guess which answer is correct.

You'd think being so glaringly shown up would have taught them a little humility, perhaps even inclined them towards a sense of honesty and justice. Think again. Only a week after the shocking revelations that forced the climbdown, Hogan-Howe came out fighting, telling the Metropolitan Police Authority on Thursday that being prosecuted and giving evidence under oath using a false identity, lying about your involvement in the incident before the court, is absolutely fine.

There's no law that says it can't happen. The fact that someone has concealed their identity doesn't mean the crime didn't happen. In absolute terms, the criminal law does not make a crime of it. If you are dealing with more serious crimes, we have to seek all options.

The 'more serious crime' Jim Boyling was prosecuted for was a brief peaceful occupation of an office. In Lambert's case it was leafletting outside a shop.

With even more gall, considering last week's proof that his inquiry was a sham, Hogan-Howe has launched two more internal inquiries. One will look into how many times undercover police officers have been prosecuted under their fake identities. Another, headed by the Met's deputy assistant commissioner Mark Simmons, will look into 'a range of issues' about undercover policing.

In other news, Alex Ferguson has decided to counter Manchester United's recent dip in form by appointing himself referee for every remaining game this season. He has decreed that matches will be played without spectators or any officials from the opposition's team being present, and no cameras will be allowed.

who defends the indefensible?

2011-10-28T10:03:00.002+01:00

Bob Lambert's apology cannot be trusted, partly because of the omissions (why is he not sorry for the other officers he deployed?) and partly because of its implausibility. The idea that his infiltration of London Greenpeace was a mere stepping stone on to more serious threats is nonsense, given the way his department clearly targeted numerous groups similar to London Greenpeace as an end in itself.

By saying that other officers didn't do anything wrong, he portrays himself as one rogue officer making, ahem, 'mistakes'. You know, like all those other one-off rogues he worked with and commanded. His explanation and apology, if they get believed, are not only helpful to his present career but also to the police's attempted narrative.

Two months ago Radio 4 broadcast a documentary called Living With Secrets that featured an interview with an unnamed ex-undercover officer. They perpetuated the fiction that what the undercover officers did - including, we now know, Bob Lambert - was against orders. The officer said that in their job the key thing was

never get too involved, not too personally involved. Definitely don't get romantically involved.

Specifically asked about Mark Kennedy and his sexual relationships with the activists he was sent to infiltrate, the officer said

It's a different time and a different age. As far as I'm concerned, that is dreadful.

Who was the anonymous officer disowning acts committed by Lambert and co? Compare the voices.

The BBC interview

Bob Lambert

one bad apple gets worse

2011-10-26T20:16:00.004+01:00

There is even more to the story of ex-undercover cop Bob Lambert than we thought.

Not only are there revelations that he was prosecuted under his false identity, he is yet another of them who had a serious long term sexual relationship whilst undercover.

Lambert's girlfriend wasn't even an activist, she was merely a random citizen whose emotional wellbeing Lambert decided to sacrifice to help with his cover. He even had his Special Branch colleagues raid her house to puff up his image as a radical activist.

Lambert has come forth and apologised.

I was deployed as an undercover Met special branch officer to identify and prosecute members of Animal Liberation Front who were then engaged in incendiary device and explosive device campaigns against targets in the vivisection, meat and fur trades.

'Incendiaries', 'explosives', makes you picture bloodied corpses being removed after IRA bombs in shopping centres doesn't it?

Most ALF devices were overtly stated as economic sabotage, almost always in empty premises and planted overnight, all the better to have serious damage done by the time anyone came in the following morning. As a tactic it is certainly more serious than leafleting and linking arms across doorways, but it is still just damage to stuff.

How many members of how many peaceful groups can have their trust in humanity shattered police officers trying to prevent property damage?

As part of my cover story so as to gain the necessary credibility to become involved in serious crime, I first built a reputation as a committed member of London Greenpeace, a peaceful campaigning group.

I apologise unreservedly for the deception I therefore practiced on law abiding members of London Greenpeace.

If that's the case, can we take it that he never reported back on what London Greenpeace were doing and thereby had their actions undermined?

By implication, was Mark Kennedy also on a career path to some big bad group, and just accidentally handed in seven years of notebooks detailing the meetings and plans and lives of environmental activists?

Peter Black's deployment saw him infiltrate the Anti-Nazi League before moving on, presumably to the groups whose threat to public safety warranted all the intrusion.

I began targeting the groups set up to win justice for those who had died in police custody or had been victims of racism, it was clear that what the loved ones of the deceased wanted was justice.*

Lambert is holding to the classic 'one bad apple' rogue officer idea, applying it to himself. Yet is is clear that other officers behaved in the same way. Indeed, Lambert was the superior officer in charge of Peter Black's deployment in justice campaigns.

I also apologise unreservedly for forming false friendships with law abiding citizens and in particular forming a long term relationship with [Name of person removed] who had every reason to think I was a committed animal rights activist and a genuine London Greenpeace campaigner.

It is the intimate personal relationships that are perhaps the most shocking aspect of the undercover police scandal. A person you had let into your life, who moved in with you, who had integrated into your family, was in fact there as a paid agent of the state to undermine the things you hold most dear. It must do incalculable damage.

Many of these people were in their 20s and 30s, a time when most people form very long term relationships. Not only did the police put fake relationships in, they kept real relationships out. Every year spent with your Special Branch officer is a year not spent finding and forming bonds with somebody who does actually love you. Even without the profound emotional impact of your partner turning out to be a copper, the loss of time that can never be regained is in itself an horrific attack on a person's personal life.

Lambert apologises, for whatever that is worth. Where's his apology for sending Peter Black and Jim Boyling in to have sexual relationships? Or would that just demolish his 'it was just me, not a calculated plan, honest guv' (fairy)storyline?

Daud Abdullah, who has worked with Lambert in recent years, dismisses all the Lambert revelations as 'smears' with the implication that it's all convenient for our neocon government.

When you have proof of something and the accused admits it and apologises, it's not a smear. It's a fact. Alleging that the anarchists from London Greenpeace who found Lambert are stooges of the government, now that's a smear.

the vast majority of Met special branch undercover officers never made the mistakes I made, have no need to apologise for anything, and I deepy regret having tarnished their illustrious, professional reputation.

His use of the word 'mistake' is a tad devious. It has more than one meaning - an innocent accidental act, or a knowing act that in retrospect was unwise, perhaps because it didn't let you get away with your misdeed. He can only mean it in the latter sense, but an articulate academic used to manipulating people is surely aware that the glow from the other meaning's connotations will make him seem a nicer guy than he is. This stuff was not a 'mistake' in the sense that anyone should be absolved of.

The two 'mistakes' he fesses up to are forming false friendships and having sexual relations with activists. Most other officers didn't do that, right Bob?

There are documented reports of this being true of five of the seven officers named in the Guardian's series of reports (and who knows if it's yet to come out about either or both of the others).

So, given that very high strike rate for the uncovered officers, how many never made these 'mistakes'? Earlier this year ex undercover cop Liam Thomas - not one of the seven - said

I remember one senior detective saying to me, 'Have you embedded yourself in the community yet?' It was tongue in cheek, but I left with the impression that had I shagged around for intelligence, it would have been OK.

Given that Lambert not only did such things but was then the superior officer in charge of Jim Boyling and Pete Black when they did the same, it's clear he had no problem with it at all. Indeed, you've got to wonder if he's the 'senior detective' Liam Thomas mentions.

I offer my new book Countering al Qaeda in London: Police and Muslims in Partnership as evidence of my ability to build genuine trust with groups campaigning for social justice and as a signal of my good faith moving forward.

Plug plug plug. The gratuitous hawking of his book is, by itself, proof that Lambert has no shame and, just as in his days undercover, can only see his career advantage rather than the impacts he is having on others.

He is frantically trying to retain his credibility and save his job. Sorry Bob, but spending the last five years working on one aspect of anti-racist work does not absolve you for 25 years of actively attacking it.

Who has done a better job of giving space for fascists to rise in the last twenty years, Combat 18 or Special Branch? If Lambert and Boyling had not been doing their work, how much of the BNP's increased popularity have been prevented? How many justice campaigns would have borne earlier and more valuable fruit?

I'm not saying that sinners can never repent. Realising you were wrong, saying so and trying to make amends is honourable. Sitting there hoping nobody will notice and only admitting it once tenacious activists have tracked you down and embarrassed you is not honourable. It is the desperate arse-covering of a self-serving fuckwad who has made a career out of duplicity, a man who is still trying to lie his way out of culpability for his actions.

=================================

* Peter Black is referred to in the article as 'Officer A'. The anonymous interview from March last year was actually the first publicity this affair got, though it went almost entirely unnoticed until Mark Kennedy was outed. Post-Kennedy, Black dropped the anonymity and is now the most outspoken of the former cops, a title it's not hard to earn.

covering up the cover-up

2011-10-23T14:35:00.001+01:00

The first of the raft of the state's self-investigations into the Mark Kennedy affair was due to report this week.

Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary had looked into the deployment of Kennedy and undercover officers. Advance notice had been given that it had found that Kennedy had been off-mission and was not properly supervised. It said that independent oversight by people outside the police would not be necessary. It was written by Bernard Hogan-Howe, who has just been appointed as head of the Metropolitan police.

So then, the police look into police misconduct and find that nobody outside the police need be involved in future. In other news, a gang of convicted child abusers say they don't need CRB checks when applying for jobs.

The HMIC report was dramatically pulled at the last minute after (yet more) revelations that Kennedy was by no means a rogue officer. In the late 1990s undercover cop Jim Boyling was prosecuted under his false identity and perjured himself in the process. As a supposed defendant, this officer was in meetings where activists met with their lawyers to discuss their case.

In the same case a police officer offered John Jordan, another of the defendants, helpful testimony if he'd become an informant. Jordan refused and, entirely coincidentally I'm sure, was the only one of the group to be convicted.

From Mark Kennedy's intelligence reports that were later disclosed to Ratcliffe defendants, we know he was recording things in minute detail, right down to people's biscuit preferences. The HMIC report's conclusion that he was going astray and that his superiors didn't know what this £5,000 a week asset was doing is just laughable.

Twenty of the Ratcliffe protesters were convicted and another six were going to court when the revelations forced the trial to collapse. It was not Kennedy himself who witheld the evidence which exonerated the Ratcliffe protesters. It was his superior officers and the Crown Prosecution Service.

Another of the Kennedy reports looks into these 'failings' by Nottinghamshire police and the suppression by the CPS of that evidence.

Sir Christopher Rose, who sat in the court of appeal until 2006, will head the independent inquiry set up by the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, who acknowledged "growing concerns" over the claims.

Rose, as Chief Surveillance Commissioner, has been responsible for scrutinising the surveillance activities of the police and other official bodies for five years.

So, as Chief Surveillance Commissioner, Rose had the ultimate sign-off over the deployment of undercover officers, including Kennedy. This isn't just the same body investigating itself, it's the same individual.

The various reports are an attempt to cover up the cover-up. They know exactly what the undercover officers did. Bernard Hogan-Howe's report could, I suppose, try to use the excuse that it didn't look into its subject at all before coming to a conclusion and making recommendations. Hardly tenable from the new chief of the country's largest force.

The police know full well that the other officers acted in the same way as Kennedy (and in some respects worse, what with being prosecuted under false identities and breaching lawyer/client confidentiality). Those deployments and the torrent of whitewash reports coming down the pipeline are not just institutional corruption. They're evidence of an institution that appears incapable of little other than corruption.

When denials and cover-ups fail, the powerful sacrifice those whose hands did the dirty work. Even in cases infinitely more serious and extreme than anything done by the UK's undercover police, the pattern of the powerful is identical.

The American military's use of torture at Abu Ghraib, a matter of policy practiced and refined at the Bagram base in Afghanistan before they brought it to Iraq, was depicted as an isolated incident of rogue personnel. No officers were jailed, only a handful of low ranking soldiers. A generation earlier, after the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, a solitary Second Lieutenant was the only person convicted.

As their actions are dragged out into the daylight, those who devised and ran the UK's undercover political policing are letting Kennedy be dragged out too, cutting their ties to him so they can remain in the shadows.

Kennedy is the most recent of the seven officers so far exposed. His behaviour tallies exactly with his forerunners. What he did, and what was done with his intelligence and evidence, was clearly part of an ongoing strategy.

No activist I know was surprised by Ian Tomlinson's death; the police dished out such life-threatening attacks thousands of times that day, and thousands of times a day on dozens of other occasions. But nobody I know was surprised at the police lies and cover up that followed either. Even when you have it all on camera they still try to deny it. If Delroy Smellie can be acquitted, any cop can.

But given the huge implications of Jim Boyling's prosecution, and newly-exposed Bob Lambert seeming to have done the same thing, whilst a third ex-undercover officer says that it was 'part of their cover' to be prosecuted, the police had to bin the HMIC report a couple of hours before it was due to be published and move to a higher grade of fob-off.

In place of the HMIC report, the police have asked the Independent Police Complaints Commission to look into Boyling's actions.

This is the same IPCC who ruled that the police did nothing wrong when they killed Jean Charles de Menezes, the same IPCC who were happy to parrot the police lies about Ian Tomlinson being in a place with no CCTV, having no contact with police and dying of a heart attack. Their reports are merely second-level cover-up.

There can be no credibility in self-investigation or reports by puppet bodies, and no believable outcome that doesn't see senior officers and politicians not just named but convicted.

It is clear that there has been a large scale systematic project of political policing, given priority over any considerations for its legality, its cost or, most importantly, the impact on the citizens it deceives and abuses.

Who devised this? Was it ordered by politicians, or did the police make it up for themselves? Which politicians knew about it and gave it their continuing approval? Throughout wild outpourings of truth about undercover policing in the last year, members of the government past and present have stayed conspicuously silent.

yet another one bad apple

2011-10-20T12:25:00.002+01:00

There's the old urban myth about glaziers who go round bricking windows at night then drop their card through the door the next morning. In Apocalypse Now the medics help soldiers of both sides, drawing the comment that 'we cut them in half with a machine gun and give them a Band Aid'.

Bob Lambert is a liberal academic who pushes for greater racial harmony and acceptance of multiculturalism. Here he is speaking at a Unite Against Fascism conference a couple of weeks ago, here he is writing for Al-Jazeera, lefty journal New Statesman and being praised in the Guardian.

For more than 25 years, Bob Lambert was a special branch undercover officer, actively undermining the work of protest groups including anti-racist groups.

Lambert's biography on his academic webpage, presumably self-written, describes his time in the police force working

in counter-terrorism, gaining operational experience of all forms of violent political threats to the UK

Under the alias of Bob Robinson, he infiltrated London Greenpeace in the 1980s. Not to be confused with Greenpeace International with whom they have nothing in common but half a name, London Greenpeace was a long established direct action group of an eco-anarchist bent whose public activities mainly involved a lot of leafleting.

They were perhaps best known for the McLibel case - after handing out What's Wrong With McDonald's leaflets they were prosecuted for libel. The multinational spent thousands of pounds per day on lawyers whilst the defendents represented themselves in the longest trial in English history.

During the trial it was revealed that the group was heavily infiltrated. Indeed, meetings occurred where the activists were in the minority and most people in the room were either undercover cops, private detectives hired by McDonald's, or a second group of detectives hired to spy on the first lot.

After his time with London Greenpeace, Lambert moved to backroom stuff, overseeing officers deployed in other groups. He put Jim Boyling into those well-known terrorists Reclaim The Streets.

More pertinently, he put 'Pete Black' into anti-racist groups for four years. Having had a stint obstructing the Anti-Nazi League's attempts to prevent the rise of the BNP, Black then infiltrated and undermined people fighting for justice for under-investigated black deaths such as the Stephen Lawrence campaign.

The dignified tenacity of the Lawrence family and those around them eventually led to an admission of 'institutional racism' from the Metropolitan police, and serious subsequent changes to the acceptability of racism in the force. But all this was after they'd done their best to scupper the campaign.

Where was the terrorism being countered? Where was the threat of political violence? The only threat they posed was to the credibility of the police by drawing attention to their incompetence and racism.

As we've seen with the Mark Kennedy case, groups are not infiltrated according to their threat to public safety but in proportion to their political unacceptability to the status quo. And nothing draws the police's attention and ire quite as much as an attack on police credibility.

This is why senior officers ordered constables' statements to be altered at Hillsborough disaster.

Last two pages require amending. These are his own feelings. He also states that PCs were sat down crying when the fans were carrying the dead and injured. This shows they were organised and we were not. Have [the PC] rewrite the last two pages excluding points mentioned.

Like all concentrations of power, the police's maintenance of their position becomes paramount, other considerations are secondary where they exist at all. Lambert - whose police work garnered an MBE - is the seventh undercover cop to be exposed, compounding a body of incontrovertible evidence that the same methods were used against the same kind of groups for more than thirty years.

Knowing it is indefensible, the various self-investigatory reports will try to hang their underlings out to dry and tell us Mark Kennedy was a rogue officer straying off-mission. When all seven exposed officers behaved more or less identically, the police need to tell us how many it takes to prove that far from following orders, this was strategy. And more than that, who devised, approved and ordered this political policing?

the best human rights money can buy

2011-10-08T10:43:00.001+01:00

Earlier this week Theresa May donned the jackboots essential for any Home Secretary to wear whilst speaking, got up on her hind legs and railed against the Human Rights Act to the Tory Party conference.

She singled out the use of the Act's guarantee of a right to family life being used to prevent deportations, citing a case where courts decided someone

cannot be deported because – and I am not making this up – because he had a pet cat

She was telling the truth - she had not made it up. The head of UKIP, twitchy right armed freemarket fundamentalist Nigel Farrage, made it up two months ago.

Farrage told a meeting that courts had decided somebody

should not be deported because... and I really am not making this up ... because he had a pet cat

.

This is, as is now established, bullshit. But the right wing campaign against the Human Rights Act rolls on.

The UK is a signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights. Any breach of the rights granted by the Convention can be taken to the European Court of Human Rights.

Despite what the Mail and Express tel you, none of this has anything to do with the European Union. The Convention and the courts that adjudicate on cases arising from it were set up and run by the Council of Europe, an institution older and far larger than the EU.

But here's the thing that I'm not seeing said elsewhere; the repeal of the Human Rights Act would not alter our human rights. The Convention would still stand, and the judgement of its court would still be binding.

The Human Rights Act did not give us more rights, it only made the principles of the Convention enforceable in our domestic courts. This means that people can get Legal Aid for cases instead of needing the vast heaps of personal cash required to take a case to the European Court.

Rather like the way the government (including the Labour Party) says we should have the right to strike but only if we don't use it, they are now saying we can have human rights but only if enforcement is priced out of our reach.

Once again this cabinet of millionaires moves to horde the most important resources as the exclusive preserve of the rich.

comparitive justice (slight return)

2011-08-18T18:52:00.000+01:00

An alcoholic is released from Strangeways prison near central Manchester. He immediately spends his money on tobacco and downs a bottle of sherry, and as he gets to the city centre he sees the aftermath of a riot. He goes into a smashed-in Krispy Kreme and helps himself to a box of donuts. A horde of riot cops turn up and arrest him, and he gets 16 months in jail.

16 months is exactly what MP Jim Devine got for committing over £8,000 of expenses fraud in 2008-09 (after the expenses scandal was front page news) and then lying about it in court. He served a quarter of his sentence. MP David Chaytor got 18 months for a £22,000 fraud, and served less than a third of it.

Looting a plasma screen telly and only fessing up when you're caught is fine, just pay the cost of it and we'll say no more. If you're an expense-fiddling MP, that is. If you're an urban youth, that'll be several years in jail.

The majority of those charged in the aftermath of the riots have been held on remand which, as with Jonnie Marbles, is a way of jailing people no matter what they're sentenced to. One man is sat in jail today awaiting sentence for stealing an ice cream. No violence, no suggestion of property damage, just taking an ice cream.

You don't even need to steal anything. Ursula Nevin slept through the riots but next day was wearing a pair of shorts looted by her flatmate. She just got five months in jail, away from her two young children.

As Andrew Bowman says in the excellent Manchester Mule,

In 2006, the Home Office’s Sentencing Advisory Panel issued advice that shoplifters – the most common criminal in the UK – should never be sent to jail unless involved in violent attacks on staff, using children to steal, or working in organized gangs. It is clear that many of those now facing hefty jail sentences were none of the above.

Meanwhile, people are four years for drunkenly suggesting on Facebook - with a 'lol' at the end - a riot that didn't take place.

For the cost of sending two young men to jail for four years for setting up a Facebook event that didn't cause a riot, you could employ four youth workers for four years working with up to 200 of the most alienated young people per year (800 young people in 4 years). Or pay for a full time youth advice service in eight large secondary schools (benefitting around 10,000 young people) for a year. Or you could employ 24 young people on £15,000 for a year at a time when youth unemployment has reached over 20%.

Beyond the jail terms, families of those convicted of riot-related offences face collective punishment as councils threaten to evict them. Sounds far fetched? It's already happening.

We have indeed "descended into a form of collective madness" over the rioting. Laurie Penny, as is her habit, nails it.

Freedom of speech and equality before the law aren't there just to be indulged when everything is quiet, and tossed aside as soon as teenagers start ransacking Evans Cycles. It is at moments of national crisis that human rights are most important, because it is at such moments that these rights tend to be called into question, although rarely with such bombast as by the British politicians and commentators who openly called for the Human Rights Act to be rescinded in the wake of last week's riots.

It is barely six months since David Cameron was condemning Hosni Mubarak for human rights abuses against Egyptian protesters that included shutting down the internet. This week, the Prime Minister was congratulated by China for proposing eerily similar measures in last Thursday's emergency House of Commons debate. "The US and Britain used to criticise developing countries for curbing freedom of speech," commented Chinese state media website Global Times. "Britain's new attitude will help appease the quarrels between East and West over the future management of the internet."

When China approves of your digital rights strategy, you know you're heading in a dangerous direction.

comparitive justice

2011-08-05T11:52:00.003+01:00

Jonnie Marbles tries to throw shaving foam at Rupert Murdoch. He gets six weeks in jail.

Two men attack TV presenter Fiona Bruce with aerosols of silly string. They get £80 fixed penalty fines.

Marbles' judge, Daphne Wickham (the same judge who acquitted Delroy Smellie, the G20 cop filmed slapping a woman in the face), said that in sentencing him she had taken into account the fear of injury Mr Murdoch would have experienced. I wonder who had the greater fear of their attackers, given that for years Bruce has been dealing with a stalker who breaches the restraining order to keep away from her?

Contrary to the BBC's headline in the Bruce article, a fixed penalty notice is not a fine, it's something much less than that. A fine is a sentence after somebody has been found guilty. Police sometimes issue a Caution instead, whereby the accused person admits guilt and gets a temporary criminal record lasting five years. A fixed penalty notice is a flat fee for alleged minor anti-social behaviour; it does not admit guilt and is not a criminal record.

Marbles, meanwhile, immediately appealed against his sentence. His judge decided to undermine it by sending him to jail while the appeal is pending, so even if it quashes the custodial sentence he will have spent the time incarcerated and not be due any compensation for it.

go johnnie go

2011-07-22T18:39:00.003+01:00

A pie in the face works best when the target is well known as somebody who is pompous, arrogant and thinks they're above the rest of us, someone with too much power, someone who will be riled that any lowling dared to challenge them.

As such, Peter Mandelson was an ideal target. Jeremy Clarkson was less so because, whilst he's a rampantly egotistical fuckweasel of the highest order, he was bound to take it in good spirits.

Frankly, I cannot think of a better target than Rupert Murdoch, target of a pie attack by Johnnie Marbles (who explains it himself here).

The venomous bile he's spewed into our lives, the racism, sexism and homophobia he has promoted and entrenched, the countless thousands of lives he has permanently ruined to get one day's titillating story, the governments he's hijacked, enfeebled and bent to his will. Really, who would weep for him ever, let alone being unhurt by foam?

And yet they pretend to. The Daily Mirror fumed that the outrageous news of yet more City banker bonuses were buried because Murdoch's pieing got the front page, and this is somehow Marbles' fault. As if Murdoch's appearance at the Select Committees wasn't going to be the front page anyway.

Had Marbles not lobbed his custard (so to speak), should we blame Tom Wilson for hiding the banker bonuses by having Murdoch come into parliament that day? Or is this a paper desperately trying to find outrage somewhere but knowing that, really, you can't stick up for Murdoch because we all hate the fucker and he needs less of a pie in the face and something more like a trial for crimes against humanity?

It's not just the usual press gripers though. On Facebook, Billy Bragg posted

We finally get an opportunity to see Rupert Murdoch for what he really is - a frail 80 year old who is out of touch with the day to day running of his empire - on what must be the worse day in News Corps history. Then Jonny Marbles steps up with his pie prank and gives the The Sun, The Times, Sky News and Fox News the chance make Murdoch look like the victim. Thanks a lot, you idiot.

So Fox News were poised to report it properly were they? They hadn't already drafted their portrait of Murdoch as the victim of aggressive axe-grinding politicians?

Tailoring our action to what won't make Fox News and the Sun dislike us is not going to get us far. Doubly so when the target is the Sun's owner. For floundering unthought-throughness, Bragg exceeds even the Mirror.

Direct action is rarely popular with the media. They tend to call it anti-democratic when it is actually almost always about plugging gaps in democracy, reining in or smacking up against power that is far in excess of what is fair and just. Murdoch bestrides the earth designing our tax regimes and picking our leaders. He came into the select committee, once again made the politicians dance for him, then flew away in a private jet.

Jonnie Marbles is the first one to stick something back at him, to give Murdoch's victims a laugh at their tormentor's expense, for who knows how long. But at the end of the day it made no real difference either way. Contrary to what Billy Bragg and co allege, the world is not awash with a spontaneous wave of tender love for Rupert Fucking Murdoch. Neither did it derail the questioning - it's not as if without the pie Murdoch might've spilled the beans on the corrupt police and politicians on his secret payroll.

It did not profoundly shake Murdoch's power. But then neither will any number of attacks be they desserts or select committees. And that was part of the point. It did, for just for one moment, make the self-appointed king into a clown.

they're all in it together

2011-07-18T13:07:00.004+01:00

So the other day I mentioned that the attention given to News International employees shouldn't distract us from the guilt shared by politicians and, especially, the police who colluded; that this wasn't just lowly constables accessing police files but something much more institutional.

After the police killed Ian Tomlinson in April 2009 they put out a string of lies to try to get away with it. They claimed to have had 'no contact' with Tomlinson, that their officers tried to revive him whilst protesters threw a hail of bottles (in fact protesters tried to get an ambulance for him whilst the police refused to speak to medical staff). They had a dodgy autopsy done saying it was all natural causes. They had the 'Independent' Police Complaints Commission say there was no CCTV in the area, and after people published photos of the cameras they amended that to say they 'weren't working'.

And they did almost get away with it. Then the Guardian published the footage of the police assault. The response was to go round to the Guardian's offices and (glove puppeting an IPCC official) tell them to take it off the website. Anything to keep themselves in the clear.

Yesterday the head of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Paul Stephenson, resigned because of the phone hacking scandal (and Assistant Commissioner John Yates looks set to follow today). Like a thousand guilty coppers before him, he knows if you resign there's no real investigation and you keep your pension.

Press reports made much of the fact that Stephenson had a £12,000 stay in a health spa that the owners had 'forgotten' to give him a bill for. It's easily done, my workplace is always doing twelve grand's worth of work for a solitary client and then and absent mindedly neglecting to ask for payment. And a copper taking a massive freebie is in no way suspicious at all.

The spa and the Met both employed Neil Wallis, ex-Deputy Editor of News Of The World, to do their PR. Both sides say this is a coincidence and they didn't know about it. Stephenson now says the real reason was that he should have told the Prime Minister that Wallis was implicated in the phone hacking scandal.

However, it's interesting that the resignations comes less than 48 hours after it was revealed that the toppest of the Met's top brass, including Stephenson himself, made not one but two intimidating visits to the Guardian to tell them that their coverage of the hacking scandal was exaggerated. They particularly disliked the claims that the police were in any way colluding in the hacking.

These visits came two months after they started employing Wallis. If they didn't know Wallis was implicated, and if they didn't know the full extent of the hacking and the police's integral part in it, then it's a bit of a coincidence and pretty poor detective work (especially for professional investigators). From here, it looks very like the same tactics used on the same newspaper to cover their guilt on the killing of Ian Tomlison.

Resignation is no substitute for prosecution and conviction. It's time for the police to start arresting one another.

The Times - a Murdoch paper glad of an opportunity to deflect blame - says today

Journalists who bribe policemen are indicative of a flawed industry. Policemen who can be bribed are indicative of a flawed state.

This is true, but ignores the fact that the media barons, politicians and police are all prongs on the same fork. They share the same aims and values, and seek to maintain the same powers for one another.

And, just as the police response to the final damburst of information about the Mark Kennedy/Ratcliffe affair was to throw some blame on to the Crown Prosecution Service, so Stephenson has lost no time in waving an accusatory finger at David Cameron. He points out that the Met's man Wallis had left the News of The World without a hint of impropriety, whereas Cameron's man Coulson - Wallis' boss - had been forced to resign because of the phone hacking scandal. The implication is that if Stephenson had to go, it counts doubly for Cameron.

We can dream, can't we? They didn't imprison Al Capone for the Valentines Day Massacre, they finally got him in jail for tax evasion. By the same token, I want to see Coulson go down, not for the phone hacking but for getting Cameron into power. But like the feds with Capone, I'll take whatever I can get.

That said, if there's one thing this last week has taught us it's that we can't tell what's coming. This story is *still* gathering pace and is finally beginning to properly bring the Tories and police into it.

Even if it doesn't bring Cameron down, it can certainly be his Dodgy Dossier moment, the point at which the wider public consciously understands that the leader is a duplicitous scumfuck and that the real power is held by a shady swarm of evil people around him whose names we don't know.

phone hacking and spinning the police

2011-07-15T17:30:00.002+01:00

The phone hacking scandal has been amazing. One day there's a move to refer the takeover of BskyB to the Competition Commission that looks like an attempt to sweep it under the carpet till the fuss dies down, the next day the entire bid collapses.

This story is moving so fast - and every move making it worse for Murdoch and News Corp - that The Guardian have a live updates page, they way they do when they're reporting a trial or inquest.

Interestingly, the American end of this may still be barely beginning. If there is proof that News International paid police for information then it is against US law - as an American corporation it is bound by legislation not to bribe officials of any state. And if there is any proof of attempt to hack 9/11 victims and their families, it's game over for Murdoch.

Top marks to Billy Bragg for already releasing a song about it (free download here), with a major nod to the Scouse boycott of the Sun ever since their foul lies about the Hillsborough disaster.

Reflecting on it all, it strikes me that there are several parallels with the Mark Kennedy affair. A scandal was passed off as the act of one bad apple, a rogue that the bosses didn't know about. Then it becomes clear that it was endemic, a policy run from the top. Then beyond that, it becomes apparent that it was the product of the shared political values of the police and the organisations they work with.

The police kept quiet and covered their arses for as long as possible, then when that became untenable they leaked the Crown Prosecution Service's guilt in the Kennedy affair; similarly with the phone hacking they did a lalala fingers in the ears inquiry but now it's blown up they're busy telling us how evil News International have been all along.

There is a major difference though. The guilt in the Kennedy affair lies primarily with the police, whereas in the phone hacking it lies with News International. However, the police were the source of much of the initial seeds of information that led to stories. It appears around £100,000 was paid to officers, a few hundred quid at a time. News International should go down for that, but so should the officers.

If the journalist who wrote the stories on Jennifer Elliott - daughter of Denholm, found begging on the streets with drug problems and being an occasional sex worker - can tell Radio 4 that he feels his work contributed to her eventual suicide, then that culpability is shared by the police officer whose tip off instigated the story in return for a slender envelope of cash.

The family of Jean Charles de Menezes have written to the government urging them to ensure the inquiry into hacking covers the police's involvement. The fact that their phone numbers were on the hack list points the finger squarely at the police.

Given the baseless personal slurs about de Menezes that came out in the tabloids, the relationship was more than bent constables taking a bung from a low-level journo hacking to try to get a story. It is the kind of thing that comes from media management strategy at a high level.

It is certainly a scandal that a senior News of The World executive was working for the Metropolitan Police at the time when the Met were investigating the hacking. But what really caught my eye in the story was that the guy's police job existed at all.

Neil Wallis, the former deputy editor of the tabloid, was paid more than £1,000 a day to work two days a month at Scotland Yard as a consultant to Sir Paul Stephenson, the Metropolitan Police commissioner.

You fucking what? £24,000+ of public money for a total of two weeks spin doctoring?

And Wallis' pay isn't the half of it.

Neil Wallis, who was questioned for several hours on Thursday, was employed as recently as last year as sick leave cover for the force's deputy director of public affairs

Presumably the actual Director of Public Affairs gets even more than the deputy.

Yet there are still people who say that the police do a good honest job with the resources they've got, people who deny the police are a political force who manipulate the media.

Like the Conservative Party leadership, the police are desperately wriggling at the moment, trying to hold News International at arms length. Yet it is plain that all of them share information, personnel and tactics, because they have shared values and a shared mission.

glastonbury 2011

2011-07-08T23:00:00.001+01:00

Many people leave Glastonbury having not slept the night before after five days of excessive drink and drugs. Whilst that was true of me too, I was also among the much smaller number who arrived at the festival that way. That, as you can imagine, is a whole other story.

It was a muddy Glastonbury. But so what? It's not actually cold and as long as you've got wellies there's no problem. Walking is a bit tougher but there's just as much fun to be had. Anyone who says otherwise is a pathological grump.

TRIPOD STAGE

Despite the lack of a Climate Camp this year, their field has been retained as the Tripod Stage with the same frontline political attitude, and amongst the politics there were performances from Get Cape Wear Cap Fly, Chumbawamba and a host of others. I loved the beardy folky band doing Minnie Riperton's Loving You.

It was there that Rabble Rousers - performance poetry triumverate of me, Danny Chivers and Claire Fauset - started off our input to the festival in the Thursday lunchtime sunshine. We began with about six people in front of us but it soon swelled. Everyone's on a bimble on the Thursday and keen to engage. The enthusiasm is matched by the paucity of stuff on the big stages, so stuff like the Tripod Stage and the Bandstand down in Babylon do really well.

And sure enough, cider in hand, we passed the bandstand as the Beau Bow Belles were in full swing. And I do mean swing. Hilarious, theatrical, quirky but underpinned by serious musicianly prowess - god their harmonies! - they're a proper festival band. Why the fuck aren't Madam Laycock and Her Dabeno Pleasures on the bandstand? They would go down a tropical storm.

A huge sweep around the site to the twisted Blade Runner dystopian weirdness of Shangri La, with daylight baring its scaffolding supports made it a bit like seeing the Wizard of Oz as a bloke pulling levers behind a curtain.

During the festival proper it was understandably empty in the day - one daytime band in the Snake Pit had three people watching, blatantly a mum, dad and girlfriend of band members - but on Thursday afternoon the goodtime seekers had congregated and Womp were belting out a manic ska party that made the anticipatory party energy just erupt into the humid sky.

The official schedule is stretching properly into Thursday now. With the increase in punters, Glastonbury keeps adding more acts over a longer period and new stages too. In that way, the festival gets better and better. All those whining turds on the Guardian comments talking about how mainstream it is and why would anyone want to go and watch Beyonce and Coldplay, they just betray their ignorance and can fuck right off. The Pyramid Stage may be the largest, but it has never been what the festival is about.

At, say, Cropredy Festival there's only the one stage so if you don't like what's on then you're stuffed. They guard against that by having Richard Thompson headline the Friday and Fairport Convention healdine the Sunday every year, but still. Being in a place where you can't escape Nik Kershaw is not my idea of fun.

There is seemingly a rite of passage at Glastonbury, loads of people camp within earshot of the Pyramid Stage their first time and then learn to get as far away as possible in future. Indeed, the Pyramid's proportion of the festival is diminishing with all these new stages coming in.

THAT PIANO BAR PLACE

And really, that underground acoustic candlelit piano bar in the Dragon Field is proper, classic, weird, poor health and safety, rollicking festival lunacy.

You go in through a metre-wide concrete pipe into a room mostly underground about the length and height of a double decker bus, and about twice the width. Steeply banked benches run up either side and at the end bands play. They have no amplification so must get the audience to sing along if they're to be heard. When I went in a trad jazz outfit were doing Staying Alive. There is a candle chandelier and bootleg liquor for sale. As Pete The Temp said, it is a carnival of abandoned logic.

It's off the side of the Stone Circle field, at the furthest reaches of the site, and there must be many a pharmacologically altered munter-punter who wakes the next morning with no idea where they found it and starts to wonder if they imagined the whole thing.

I'd planned to see Jimmy Cliff on Friday. Saw him at Glastonbury a few years back and he was superb, piling through his immense repertoire - Many Rivers To Cross, Wonderful World Beautiful People, You Can Get It If You Really Want, The Harder They Come - with all the gravitas of an original reggae pioneer but also the luminous exuberant delivery of a soul singer. However there was a rumour - I always believe the rumours, they've led me to secret sets from Madness and Thom Yorke, and never been wrong - that the special guests on The Park were

RADIOHEAD

The Park is a poorly laid out site. The stage faces a slope side on, so if you come in the bottom of the field you just can't see. We went round the top for Radiohead, mingled well down but still, it was too small a soundsystem for so large a crowd.

When you're listening to music in a fairly noisy car, you need to play things you know well so that your brain can fill in the gaps made by the engine noise. By the same token, Radiohead doing mostly very new stuff with a few In Rainbows tracks to a crowd who mostly couldn't hear it was a bit meh. Given how utterly transcendent they can be, how they make music into something others can't even allude to, it was odd to walk away none the richer.

Jimmy Cliff, meanwhile, had played a blinder including updating Vietnam to be Afghanistan over at West Holts. Incidentally, honourable mention should be made of

BROTHERS CIDER

It's a more or less tasteless pear cider base into which they mix flavoured syrups. It tastes about as sickly and artificial as it sounds when drunk in an urban environment. But out there in the spliffing fields it is the best drink imaginable. Silly, fizzy pop that is somehow stronger than beer. Perfect for keeping you on an uneven keel, and in its way it contributes as much to the weekend as any Arcadia pyrotechnics, bump into a dear old mate, K-hole psychonautry, or blinding set from a band.

Nicely positioned at the side of West Holts field it's easy to get to the Brothers bar no matter who's on stage. West Holts, come to think of it, is sort of an anti-Park. The sound is loud and full no matter where you are, clear view of the stage for far more people than want it.

Anyway, from Radioheady underwhelm down to

PRIMAL SCREAM

They've headlined the Other Stage a couple of times and mates have always come back saying they were mindblowing. Unexpectedly, properly mindblowing.

They are not my favourite band by a long, long way. I respect their excellent taste but find them really derivative. You can so tell what records they're thinking of when you hear them. Not that that's so terrible. As Julian Cope said, rock n roll is a strange artform in that a facsimile is the real thing. Oasis are obvious, unoriginal and meaningless, but nobody can deny that they're a real rock n roll band. So, you know, total originality isn't a prerequisite for being great, but nonetheless it does separate the great from the godlike.

Primal Scream have been doing one of those classic album tours, playing the entirety of Screamadelica. And they came out and did it. And truly, minds were blown. It scooped everyone up and swirled them into the music. It opens with the pop euphoria of Movin On Up and is by turns trippy, euphoric, edgy, sweeping, and has such deep groove running through it, touching on everything I need from music, melded into one huge rich symphony.

They've never split up so, like the Rolling Stones, they've stayed committed to their band and got to a stage where they deliver everything with such push, such penetrating confident swagger. Every moment, individually, was utterly perfect. I'd forgotten gigs could do that. Total strangers were arms round each other, bouncing and singing to the sky. It was quite simply the best gig I've ever seen.

I remember after Bowie at Glastonbury in 2000 - also a glorious and perfect gig that frankly I thought I'd never see the likes of again - I was one of many people checking with strangers at the end that it was indeed the best thing anyone had ever seen. With Primal Scream it happened again.

At the end of Primal Scream someone came up and said they'd lost their mates and come on their own 'and it was the best decision of my life'. I was there with Joe, the random stranger I'd been gurgling and singing and swooning with, and said, 'and your mates won't believe you cos it's only Primal Scream. But you, me and Joe here, we *know*', and we left the field feeling like we were walking on acres of fluffy pillow about two feet above the ground, like an invisible bouncy castle.

I was, it barely needs saying, ripped to the tits for the whole thing.

After I ran out of friends and strangers at the festival to gush at I had to spend the rest of the evening calling and texting everyone to enthuse. I knew that in the cold light of day I'd try to revise it cos, you know, what are Primal Scream next to Bowie or REM or whoever? But really, it was the best gig I've ever seen, anyone, anywhere, ever.

U2

Meanwhile, over at the Pyramid Stage, the U2 protest went off pretty well. U2 complain about low levels of poverty relief from Western governments yet they are registered in the Netherlands to avoid the taxes they would pay if they were an Irish company, rather like the way Boots is run from their vast estates that take up half of Nottingham but are technically based in a PO Box in Switzerland. So Art Uncut inflated a 20 foot high balloon saying 'U PAY TAX 2?', and got their fingers broken by security for doing so.

Holding up banners at stadium rock bands on the Pyramid Stage? Did a bit of that myself back in the day, but that's another story.

U2's set included a mere four songs from the latter two-thirds of their career, a ton of Achtung Baby stuff, and no pontificating from Bono, which is as good as I would've dare hope for if I were there. Wouldn't have swapped that, nor most things I can think of, for being down the front at Primal Scream though. And I still feel weird about saying that.

On Saturday down at the Cabaret marquee

MARK THOMAS

did an epic set, well over an hour long, talking about his recent walk along the length of the Israeli apartheid wall. The energetic passionate delivery is infectious, the way he can find comedy in anything holds you there, yet he can talk of the most harrowing experiences in unflinching detail and it doesn't lose you but pulls you in further. It's a hell of a talent, and what you get for only working on things you really deeply care about.

In some excellent billing he was followed by

JEREMY HARDY

who also does something peculiar with comedy. Like Bill Hicks, he says funny stuff but then wanders off into just saying what he thinks politically and philosophically. The openness he's created with the humour is used to make us amenable to his perspective.

More than that, he's optimistic. It is far easier to write slagging things off than being positive (as a visit to the Comments sections that form the bottom half of the internet can attest). Comedy tends to generalise and ridicule, and whilst Hardy's stuff certainly does this, his underlying position is one of hope, his hatred (where it exists) is for the way we've been made to feel dull and powerless.

He knows he's largely talking to older folks ('good to see so many people here; I have a Radio 4 demographic and it was a harsh winter'), and he uses that to stir people to break through their crust of jadedness. 'Young people aren't being daft when they protest, they just haven't thrown in the towel. They're thinking about globalisation instead of what's on offer at Topps Tiles'

The rumour - yet again, true - was that Saturday's special guests at the Park would be

PULP

I know that they really mean a lot to people who were 14-24 in 1995. And I like the big choruses, the knowingness. Jarvis' subsequent solo stuff is intelligent and continues the same line, bold and inventive and catchy and with a real edge. Cunts are Still Running The World is just marvellous.

But still, I never got on with Pulp. There's a sneeringness in the lyrics, something arrogant and somehow hollow. The heavy irony is laid on so thick that you can't tell what point is actually being made, and I suspect Jarvis himself can't tell either.

When he sings 'is this the way they say the future's meant to feel? Or just 20,000 people standing in a field?', what does he mean? Blatantly he's having a great time and genuinely loving it, as are the 20,000 people singing along. Yet the line is clearly there to say that they don't like it, that it is rubbish. It's the kind of relentlessly dismissive smug aloofness common to people who want to dress up their fear of intimacy and enthusiasm as some form of cool superiority.

Of course, now the whole thing is nostalgia and so it doesn't matter. We can sing along all manner of songs of heartbreak or gibberish and they really mean something to us if we've cherished them in our bones for years and years.

CHEMICAL BROTHERS

Headlining the Saturday night on the Other Stage, Chemical Brothers were massive. With them, as with folks like Orbital and Fourtet, seeing them live is kind of like watching someone check their email whilst listening to Chemical Brothers CD. But at full-on festival volume the dark nebulous elements come out in full, the depth and complexity of the music splatters you in a way that no headphones or home speakers can ever allow.

TONY BENN'S BACKING SINGERS

The Speakers Forum where we Rabble Rousers do our thing was its usual great self all weekend. Climate politics analysis from the person who conceived Contraction and Convergence, Aubrey Mayer who - hell, you're on stage at Glastonbury so milk it - ended with a viola piece.

Sunday brought a truly weird moment for me though.

In Bob Geldof's autobiography there's a picture of him on stage at the end of the Live Aid concert. He is being carried on the shoulders of Paul McCartney and Pete Townshend while David Bowie looks on, applauding. Geldof captioned it 'spot the non rock god'.

Two years ago we were on before Nick fucking Clegg (and I did a seven minute poem about what duplicitious freemarket fundamentalists the LibDems are). But this year the bill on Sunday ran; Mark Thomas, Michael Eavis, Rabble Rousers, Tony Benn. Kinnell. Spot the non folk heroes.

PAUL SIMON

We had to leg it down to my only visit to the Pyramid Stage this year. It's that Sunday late afternoon slot, everyone's a bit minging and a bit musiced-out. You need a legend who touches your soul. In previous years I've seen Al Green, Brian Wilson and Van Morrison in this slot. Paul Simon is a total box ticker for it. It amazes me he wasn't higher up the bill. With such a phenomenal back catalogue and songs that absolutely everyone adores, he'd close the festival so well. What sort of event has given Roger sodding Waters the headline slot yet relegates Paul Simon to 4th?

You've gotta feel for any drummer Paul Simon hires. You're going to dread him saying he wants you to play 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover, a song with a drum pattern so languidly loose and grooving that the original drummer, Steve Gadd, gets a royalty from the track.

As is often the case with going in with high hopes, Paul Simon was disappointing. What was good was wonderful - four or five from Graceland, an album that half the world seems to regard as a dear friend - and some gorgeous sunshine stuff like Slip Sliding Away and (the one time that I cried this year) Hearts and Bones. But there were four from the new album, and no Simon and Garfunkel tunes whatsoever. I know he must be sick of Bridge Over Troubled Water, but how about America, Hazy Shade of Winter? As opposed to coming to Glastonbury and encoring with Kodachrome? Erk?

From there to the BBC Introducing stage, oddly situated in the Dance Village, to see a well deserved headline slot from the mighty

VESSELS

BBC Introducing have put video of pretty much their whole weekend online. You can watch the whole Vessels set here and you'll be a smaller sadder creature if you don't. Try it at the loudest that you dare.

Vessels were magnificent, but then again they always are. Like Radiohead they can take the peculiar time signatures, grandeur and segmentation normally associated with wanky prog and make something epic and rocking that makes you think that the band are telepathic and all other pop music, even the stuff you love, is essentially nursery rhymes.

From there a shlurp back through the mud for the closer on West Holts,

KOOL AND THE GANG

Not many places'll give you Kool and the Gang supported by Vessels and Paul Simon.

Coming from the American soul revue tradition with its roots in playing for dancing before the advent of DJs, the music never stopped, it was one long bouncing party.

Tight as a gnat's chuff and yet all ten of them on stage arsing around and having a hell of a time, they bundled through all the hits - unfortunately that included two I Just Called To Say I Love Youalikes, Cherish and Joanna - they hit with with more funk than I'd dared to hope for. In my mind's ear stuff like Get Down On It is a bit slick and shiny, but that night the sheen became sparkle and there was a real proper dirty funk chassis that it rode upon.

And as I'm obeying the instructions to get down get down, as if the gods of festivalaciousness wanted to make sure everything felt unified and joyous, bouncing in by my side is Joe from down the front at Primal Scream. And, as anticipated, when they closed the set with Celebration, being in the field at the end of the boistrous festival with ten thousand people singing that first 'wahoo' was a real Moment.

As ever, people who don't go to festivals always ask about the bands, and as always it's easiest to cite the bands rather than the thousand little interactions, joys, positive exchanges with strangers and weirdnesses that make the real vibe. Glastonbury would be worth it without any of the bands listed above.

the sinking of the arandora star

2011-07-02T14:08:00.000+01:00

I'm quite glad there's no Glastonbury next year, I think it'll take two years to get over this one. I'll try and do a write-up about it soonly. in the meantime, I've got a guest post up at On This Deity.

Today is the 71st anniversary of the sinking of the Arandora Star, the predictable deaths of 800 German and Italian civilians who'd been interned by the British who had been deported in an overcrowded ship with no civilian markings and not enough lifeboats. The callousness and racism of the British government was matched by the common humanity of the British and German troops on board who evacuated the boat, and the locals along the Scottish and Irish coasts who found the funds to bury the tide of bodies amongst their own.

not just kennedy, not just cops

2011-06-10T20:03:00.001+01:00

When the Ratcliffe case collapsed in January, the Crown Prosecution Service said it was due to new evidence that had just come to light and wasn't to do with the uncovering of Kennedy, honest guv. There was a laying of blame with Nottinghamshire police.

Newly released exchanges lay the blame the other way.

Kennedy had recorded the activists meeting and it is believed this would have cleared the activists. At the very least, it's the most relevant evidence that could exist in the case. It turns out the police handed over a transcript of the recording a month after it was made, 18 months before the resulting trials.

The new revelations could be, in part, the cops fighting back. Just because a police report says something happened doesn't mean it did.

I once got nicked at a legalise cannabis demo. The officer put in their notebook that they had arrested me because they had 'become bored' with me. I'm not sure what they teach them at Hendon, but it should include the fact that you can't arrest someone because you're bored. Also, being boring is not a crime. And if it was, there are far greater offenders than me - why was I in the cells while Lemar and Chris de Burgh still had their liberty?

So I sued the police for wrongful arrest, and then came the sworn statements from my arresting officer and colleagues about how I was goading a terrifying baying crowd whose malevolence made them fear for their safety. Quite how you could 'become bored' in such a situation is not clear.

The police are expert arse-coverers, they dress things up in vague language they can then reinterpret to clear themselves, or else - as with my arresting officer and friends - report that something was said or done when it simply wasn't.

So it's not the cops side of what was said or submitted we should look at, but what the CPS said. There is enough evidence there to damn them.

In June 2009 Nick Paul of the CPS in London wrote to a Nottingham counterpart, Ian Cunningham, about 'the participating informant'. Cunningham's reply speaks of the 'sensitive disclosure issues' that 'reinforced the difficulties of the case'. So they had not only read the transcript of the recording, they knew how it had been made.

When Kennedy was outed as a cop in October 2010 the Ratcliffe defendants' lawyers asked about his presence at that arrest. Cunningham wrote that there was no relevant evidence from Kennedy.

On Newsnight Ken McDonald QC, head of the CPS until 2008, talked about the non-disclosure. He said there can only be three possibilities:

- They weren't aware of it (the emails show not)

- It was undisclosable in court (like a serious national security issue, in which case a judge should approve the witholding)

- It was deliberately concealed

This is not just a conspiracy but a miscarriage of justice. The collapse of the trial against the Ratcliffe 6 in January was the second case from the arrests. The 6 said they never intended to invade the power station. Before their case, in December, 20 others arrested at the same time were prosecuted and convicted. Kennedy's evidence was not given to the defence then either.

This also raises questions about how many other prosecutions went ahead over the years in the same way, with the prosecutors witholding pertinent and even exonerating evidence from Kennedy. Beyond that, how many times has this happened with any of Kennedy's colleagues and predecessors in the 40 year history of their shady squad?

A RUNDOWN OF THE TOP WHITEWASHES

So now there's going to be another enquiry about the Kennedy case. This is so serious that it will be an independent inquiry led by a judge.

We've already got Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary investigating the Association of Chief Police Officers' infiltration of the protest movement, assessing whether operations have been 'authorised in accordance with law' and 'proportionate'. That's the police investigating themselves.

The Serious and Organised Crime Agency, which has responsibility for major cover police operations, are doing an inquiry into 'the conduct of Mark Kennedy'. The police investigate themselves, again.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission - the people who cleared the police of killing Ian Tomlinson - are doing an inquiry into the alleged failure of Nottinghamshire Police to disclose relevant material to prosecutors.

These are all bullshit whitewashing exercises that let the authorities say 'it would be inappropriate for me to comment while an inquiry is underway' and then - just like after the IPCC absolved the police of doing anything wrong when they shot Jean Charles de Menezes and then lied and lied and lied about it - they get to say this 'independent' investigation has cleared them.

The undercover police tactics were not Kennedy acting as some rogue agent but a tried and tested strategy that had been going on for years. By the same token, the suppression of dissent is not just the action of a murky black ops police division or even the police at large. The state sets up a self-regulating infrastructure that approves of whatever maintains its power, and whatever undermines any challenges.

Freshly added to the Kennedy list is a judge-led inquiry with a narrow remit. Let's resurrect Lord Widgery and see what he says.

like literacy taught by illiterates

2011-05-26T19:18:00.004+01:00

The government has decided to abolish the Independent Advisory Group on Sexual Health and HIV and set up a new group to help with policy. The seat held on the old forum by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service has been given to the anti-abortion group Life.

At the same time, there was a parliamentary launch for the Sex and Relationships Education Council, an umbrella group of anti-abortionists, homophobes and abstinence promoters, with a resounding endorsement from Education Secretary Michael Gove.

One member, Christian abstinence advocates Silver Ring Thing, say they want to see "value-based, parent centred" sex education. Which is odd given that most times people have sex they would feel that something has gone wrong - in some instances even crossed the lines of the biologically impossible - if they ended up becoming parents as a result.

Of course, we know what they mean by 'value', and the most cursory look at their materials shows it; heterosexual patriarchal monogamous marriage. It's interesting to note their use of 'value' in the singular, like they've subconsciously wanted to be clear that there is one God, one model of sexual relationship, and all else shall burn in a lake of eternal fire.

Not that it's actually all overtly religious, as The F Word points out

Challenge Team UK, one of the organisations on the Council, is not a Christian organisation. Their volunteers are so passionate about the choice they have made to save their virginity until marriage, which is their choice so fair play to them, that they want to tell the world about it.

The FAQ part of the website includes, to my non-religious eyes, a fairly sensible question: “What if you save sex for marriage and then find out that you are sexually incompatible?” To this the answer is “Men and women are sexually compatible.”

But all these seats on panels and pressure groups is just an advisory thing, it's doesn't translate into actual real-world influence does it?

In Richmond, south-west London, the Catholic Children's Society has taken over the £89,000 contract to provide advice to schoolchildren on matters including contraception and pregnancies. Another Christian-run charity, Care Confidential, is involved in providing crisis pregnancy advice under the auspices of Newham PCT in east London.

This is not just about a clash of values, it's about outcomes. Abstinence-only sex education actually causes greater teenage pregnancies and STIs. Evidence published in the British Medical Journal shows that abstinence-based programmes

were associated with an increase in number of pregnancies among partners of young male participants. There were significantly fewer pregnancies in young women who received a multifaceted programme

This is real-world data about abstinence education, as opposed to the Silver Ring Thing telling us

God wants you to be holy, so you should keep clear of sexual sin. Then each of you will control your body and live in holiness and honour.

What comes next? A council of avowed illiterates to decide how English is taught?

As George Monbiot wrote a few years ago when Silver Ring Thing first came to the UK

The two western countries at the top of the disaster league, the United States and the United Kingdom, are those in which conservative campaigns are among the strongest and sex education and access to contraception are among the weakest.

The United States, the UN Population Fund’s figures show, is the only rich nation stuck in the middle of the Third World block, with 53 births per 1000 teenagers – a worse record than India, the Philippines and Rwanda. The United Kingdom comes next at 20.

The nations the conservatives would place at the top of the list are clumped at the bottom. Germany and Norway produce 11 babies per 1000 teenagers, Finland eight, Sweden and Denmark seven and the Netherlands five.

So that's more than ten times the number of teenage pregnancies in freemarket, abstinence-heavy, anti-abortion USA than in the Netherlands. The Tories think this is something to emulate.

Monbiot concludes

The catastrophe afflicting so many teenagers in Britain and America, in other words, has been caused not by liberal teachers, liberated parents, Marie Stopes International and the Guardian, but by George Bush, Ann Widdecombe and the Daily Mail. They campaign against early sex education, discourage access to contraceptives and agitate against the social inclusion (income equality, the welfare state) which offers young women better prospects than getting knocked up.

Abstinence campaigns like the Silver Ring Thing do delay the onset of sexual activity, but when their victims are sucked into the cesspool (nearly all eventually are), they are around one third less likely to use contraceptives (according to a study by researchers at Columbia University), as they are not “prepared for an experience that they have promised to forgo.”

When Health Secretary Andrew Lansley calls in PepsiCo, McDonald's and Mars to write health policy it is an outrage, but it also makes sense as the government is there to grease the path of corporate power and increase the associated profits. To the Tories the payoff for that - more misery for the population and an expensive increase in demand for health services - pales in comparison.

But with this handing of power to the bigoted sex-hating monotheists, there's no such profit bonanza. This is simply the cruel claws of the Tories tearing into the flesh of the nation on general principle, acting out of opposition to any liberation or pleasure that is not paid for, and out of Francoesque deference to the vicious values of the traditional church.

bin laden: no justice no peace

2011-05-15T19:08:00.003+01:00

I know I'm a little late out of the starting blocks to talk about the killing of Osama bin Laden, but still.

If the American government could find him unarmed, subdue his associates, shoot him in the face then take his body away, they could have taken him alive. He could have been brought back and the Americans could have given their reasons for taking him. More importantly, he could have given his reasons for doing what he did.

Had he been made to stand and speak, allowed to define his position, it would have made the majority of muslims actively go 'hell no, he's not speaking in my name'. By being subjected to summary execution he becomes a pliable cipher to be claimed by all manner of causes, the silence he leaves can be filled by a myriad of future propagandists to further division and violence.

The White House says releasing pictures of Bin Laden's body would give the Islamists a 'propaganda coup' and may make things worse. Yet killing him in cold blood clearly does exactly that.

After the Second World War, the Allies faced the problem of what to do with Nazi war criminals. Winston Churchill opposed the idea of any trials, saying with good reason that there can be no doubt about Nazi guilt, and giving them a platform to mitigate or prosetylise would only help them.

Justice Robert H Jackson answered for the Americans, saying

Undiscriminating executions or punishments without definite findings of guilt, fairly arrived at, would violate pledges repeatedly given, and would not sit easily on the American conscience or be remembered by our children with pride. The only other course is to determine the innocence or guilt of the accused after a hearing as dispassionate as the times and horrors we deal with will permit and upon a record that will leave our reasons and our motives clear.

The Soviets agreed, and we had the Nuremburg trials. This was a major step forward from previous victories where the spoils were carved up by the victors who made a point of humiliating the vanquished. It set a tone for post-conflict activity from which we can trace a line forwards to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Irish Good Friday Agreement.

If we are so right, it should be easy to demonstrate it. If our enemies are so wrong, let them spell it out for posterity. Let there be due consideration and evidence declared for all the world to see, now and in future. This is humane, this paves the way for peace, it speaks of a concern for justice that sets some folks apart from others.

The phrase 'brought to justice' is commonly used as a synonym for a tribunal or trial. So Barack Obama - his Nobel Peace Prize gathering dust at home - does a disservice to those progressive peace-seeking deeds set in train by his predecessor Harry Truman in 1945 by saying that the summary execution of Osama Bin Laden was 'bringing him to justice'. Justice is the process that ends with sentence. The killing of Bin Laden had no such process, it leapfrogged straight to punishment.

Obama has been keen to talk of "what makes us different" from Bin Laden with respect to the treatment of dead bodies. However, in the treatment of people who are alive, the Bin Laden operation is not easily distinguishable from the actions it punished.

There can be no claim that Bin Laden's deeds were worse than the Nazis. If people long before us, brought up in a world of empires, eugenics and all manner of supremacist thinking, could find a way to step forward, then we have no excuse for not doing the same.

The people whose policy of perpetrating crimes against humanity on those they intern in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib are not concerned with creating justice, let alone peace. Indeed, killing an unarmed captive who poses no immediate threat is in itself a war crime.

History shows that a preparedness to use force is not contradictory to the creation of peace, it just needs to be applied with intelligence, with forethought about the view from other parts of the world and from times yet to come, and with an abandonment of short-term Vin Diesel movie urges for retribution. When we yield to those impulses we pollute the moral high ground with the seed of future conflict.

Peace is the most precious of our intangible resources. It does not mean we cannot sacrifice some of it, but it must always be done reluctantly and with awareness of the consequences, actively concerned with minimising how much peace we lose.

glastonbury: a load of bull

2011-05-10T08:32:00.001+01:00

Next month's Glastonbury Festival is to have a 200 seater bullring built from old canal lock doors. Festival head honcho Michael Eavis told the BBC

I've got this bullfighter coming over from Portugal with a cape to fight an artificial bull in a mock bull fight.

They can't get any British bullfighters for the simple reason that such cruelty to animals is illegal in the UK.

What's going to be new for next Glastonbury? Paying convicted badger baiters and dog-fighters to hold mock fights?

why i'm voting yes

2011-05-03T23:11:00.002+01:00

It doesn't feel like a country with an imminent referendum. I remember seeing flyposters in 1997 in Wales. I remember seeing posters in house windows in 1975. I've seen neither this time.

It is perhaps because - oh the irony - AV is nobody's first choice of voting system. One of the No campaign leaflet's main points is that only three countries have it. But take a look at the swathe of countries that emerged from the Soviet Bloc twenty years ago; none went for AV but none went for First Past The Post either.

Another of the No campaign's arguments is that we should vote No because Nick Clegg wants us to vote Yes. Appealing though that sentiment is, there is a more persuasive point for a Yes vote; David Cameron wants you to vote No.

Meanwhile, outside the infant school playground, this is not about which party wants you to vote which way. It's about parties of all shades off into the distant future.

First Past The Post only works if there are two candidates. This is why only an institution as retrogressive as the British Parliament - still swearing an oath of allegiance to a ruler who holds her position because she is vaguely descended from ancient foreign robber-barons - sticks by it. The Welsh Assembly, the Scottish Parliament, the Greater London Authority all use more representative methods and none of the evil things the No campaign talk of are going on there. Hell, even the Tory party don't elect leaders that way.

The No campaign says AV will cost £250m. Most of this will allegedly be the cost of electronic voting machines; yet such machines are not necessary, are not planned, and indeed Australia has AV without voting machines and gets along just fine.

Contrary to the No claims, AV will not let extremist parties in, because they are never going to get over 50% of the votes no matter how many run-offs happen. Channel 4 found the BNP are not even going to have enough votes to make their second preferences swing a seat, not even close. If and when fascist parties rise it is fascists and fascism we should be fighting rather than rigging systems to exclude all small parties.

The Yes campaign's not afraid of being disingenuous either, though.

The beer poster presumes most of us want beer; the cat video presumes we mostly want cats. This works if you're the fraction of a percent who vote for the various socialist parties who would like to support each other as second preference, but not far beyond it. The implication - that all non-Tory parties are essentially the same - certainly doesn't apply to party politics as the British public know and vote for it.

AV will not put an end to tactical voting; we'll still be scared that if we don't put the main Tory-challenger second then it'll let the Tory in. AV might make centre parties work harder to get second preference votes from the margins, but then again it's also easy to imagine that it may - like First Past The Post definitely does - drag the policies of candidates to the centre. AV will not stop elections being fought by vested interests, nor will it make MPs more accountable. It will not stop candidates lying, nor will it end cheapshot polices.

But what AV will do is widen who elections are aimed at. Currently, it's all about a few thousand easily swayed gullibles in a handful of swing seats. Under AV, it'd be about a greater pool of slightly-less-gullibles in a larger number of swing seats. The leverage becomes greater. Most importantly, AV opens the door to further reform, to a greater plurality of voices being heard. Look at the make-up of the UK's institutions run by other electoral methods and you plainly see that.

In 1997, Wales voted Yes to having a Welsh Assembly by the narrowest of margins; 50.3% to 49.7%. On the same day, Scotland was asked if it wanted a parliament with tax-raising powers and overwhelmingly voted Yes. Polls in Wales showed that had they had the same offer as Scotland - and I defy anyone to give a good reason why they weren't - they would also have voted a strong Yes. Many people were not against devolution but actually against such a crap offer.

But as this year's new Welsh Assembly powers demonstrate, grey politics tends to work incrementally. Had Wales said No in 1997 they wouldn't have had this year's chance of improvement. Don't let the UK make that mistake, thinking that a vote against AV will somehow advance the chances of a fairer system. The reverse is true.

The only thing to be said abstaining from voting at all is that, as with any election, you give your mandate to the power-crazed fuckheads in charge. But the only reason to abstain is if you genuinely think that it will make no difference at all. As the switch from Labour to ConDem has proven in stark terms, there is a spectrum of how wrong government can be. Lives and livelihoods exist in the gap between bad and worse.

The only strong reason to vote No is if you genuinely believe First Past The Post is a fairer system, in which case you are too hard of thinking to deserve a vote at all.

earth day

2011-04-26T23:12:00.000+01:00

Oops, bit late.

The other day was Earth Day, and I published a guest-post at On This Deity about it.

death by delia

2011-04-19T01:35:00.001+01:00

After romantically fantasising about violent death, I find I get a bit peckish. So thankyou Youtube for suggesting I follow listening to the Smiths' There Is A Light That Never Goes Out with a Delia recipe for french onion soup.

ian tomlinson's killer given enough rope

2011-04-05T16:59:00.001+01:00

It's the second day of the inquest into the death of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests. The officer who assualted him, Simon Harwood, has been giving evidence, logged on the Guardian's blog.

He says before he got to Tomlinson he 'collided' with a BBC journalist but then, after the footage is shown, admits he pulled him to the ground. He says he was hit on the head from behind by a missile, then it is pointed out that he had his back to a wall at the time. He say his push on Tomlinson was slight and didn't 'push through', then after the footage is shown he has to admit that he did.

Why is he giving such misleading fob-offs when the evidence is plain and he is immediately shown to be lying? Because it's the way cops answer questions, and they usually don't get tackled this closely, normally they get to give their one version and that is accepted as truth.

Harwood was unlucky. The kind of assaults dished out thousands of times that day, and on hundreds of other days, risk death but usually only injure. As I said at the time,

Look at the video of Ian Tomlinson. Look at the casualness of the officer who attacks him. Look how the colleagues are completely unsurprised.

Do you think this is the only time that officer behaved like that? Do you think the colleagues didn't do the same thing elsewhere?

Even when they do kill, a later haemorrhage is hard to link up with a single assault and, of course, until a couple of years ago those assaults were very unlikely to be caught on video. Harwood is experiencing something new for police, and he has no idea how to respond.

Harwood says he 'couldn't recall' if he warned Tomlinson before striking him.

Asked if Tomlinson posed a threat, he replied: "Not to me, no," leaving an open implication that he might have posed a threat to others. This was picked up and, pushed further about whether Tomlinson posed a threat to anyone at all, Harwood conceded, "No, I don't believe he did, no."

He admitted a breach of duty by not recording any of his uses of force against Tomlinson in his Evidence and Actions Book.

And this was only the softly-softly questioning designed to get Harwood's version, before counsel for the Tomlinson family question him.

Harwood interrupted Matthew Ryder, counsel for the Tomlinsons, to disagree when they said - as is plain on the footage - that Tomlinson had his back to Harwood.

Eight days after the incident, when Harwood had watched the footage dozens of times, he made a statement saying "if this was me, the use of force was necessary, proportionate and reasonable". Counsel point out that he was then (as he is today) using misleading qualifiers. There was no 'if' about it - it was him and he knew it at the time of the statement. After repeated questioning, Harwood concedes that 'possibly, yes' he had known at the time.

Ryder: We have all see the video, how you push him and follow through, and we have heard from everyone else who was there as to how they perceived it. You have told us that you didn't perceive Mr Tomlinson to be a threat … If you want to help, would you like simply to admit that what you did to Mr Tomlinson was unreasonable, unnecessary and excessive?

Harwood: No.

Harwood said if the officer using force believes it to be reasonable at the time, then it is reasonable. No other test can or need be applied.

Utterly gripping stuff pouring light onto a dark injustice, but we already know the outcome. Not just because experience shows that cops routinely get away with killing the public despite overwhelming evidence, but because the decision not to prosecute Harwood was taken last July.

This is all uncomfortable for Harwood but, like so many other killers in uniform, he nothing to fear except embarrassment.

john and yoko's bed in

2011-03-25T10:31:00.000Z

I've written another guest post for kickass countercultural anniversary blog On This Deity.

Today is the 42nd anniversary of John and Yoko's first bed-in for peace.

[No comments here; the place to leave them is on the On This Deity post]

marley's mellow moneyspinner

2011-03-12T21:24:00.001Z

Well the other week there was Bob Geldof selling his arse to promote watches.

This week I found product endorsement far beyond that. It is so unlikely that I didn't get disgusted or outraged but literally stood there in the shop laughing.

Having trouble sleeping? Try a can of relaxing citrus flavour Marley's Mellow Mood.

It's got several herbal extracts, though frankly if you ask anyone what herb they think mellowed Marley the answer is unlikely to be 'chamomile'.

Just as the Martin Luther King estate rob the great man's grave for cash, so the Marley heirs license his image to hawk soda drinks and thereby make him no different to the Disney toys that come free with Happy Meals.

climate camp is dead, long live climate action

2011-03-03T12:39:00.003Z

The Camp for Climate Action has announced that it is disbanding. The statement is bold and clear, acknowledging the Camp's achievements - tangible in the cancellation of Heathrow's third runway and the shelving of Kingsnorth power station - and is certainly a brave move.

I want to be clear that I admire the work the Camp has done, and I genuinely don't have a clear idea as to whether the disbanding is a wise move or not. What I am uneasy about is the unreserved glee with which it is being met, and the underlying reasons for that.

Climate action requires long term effort with little chance of major success, and even less chance of being able to measure your contribution to that success. As such, it is really not very rewarding. I should know, I'm one of the people who was involved in the Camp and has latterly ducked out.

It also demands that we all change much of the way we live our lives. This is never going to be comfortable. It is much easier to have 'me and my friends good, those people over there bad' campaigns. This tendency was seen in Climate Camp with some people saying action should never impede the actions of individuals and that 'government and corporations' should be the sole targets.

The anti-cuts campaigns are much more comfortable from this position (as long as we ignore the contradiction of anarchists complaining about a reduction of state intervention in our lives).

The austerity issue should not distract people from continuing vigorous climate action. Take it from The Onion.

climate change, the popular mid-2000s issue that raised awareness of the fact that the earth's continuous rise in temperature will have catastrophic ecological effects, has apparently not been resolved, and may still be a problem.

Back to the Climate Camp statement itself, there are elements that smell a bit funny to me.

Climate Camp leaves a space. What fills that space is up to us. This is a unique opportunity to work together with others to create a more co-ordinated, dynamic and stronger movement against climate change and its root causes.

Climate Camp acted as a lightning rod for those who wanted to take action. Much of climate action away from the Camp has been taken by people who have met and bonded through the Camp. With such loose structure and affiliations, it was easy for people to be involved in different ways and to different degrees and yet still feel part of it, to be propelled by its underlying momentum.

With no other organisation having a similar role, it is very hard indeed to see how taking it away will create something stronger and more dynamic.

we can’t demand that society changes radically, while we ourselves do not.

This is a rationalisation hiding in a word game. The implication is that drastic change of methods and views is, in and of itself, a good thing. That is simply wrong.

Doggedly holding on to a tactic that has become useless is stupid, sure. Refusing to revisit your fundamental philosophy to see if it still makes sense leaves you open to inconsistency and irrelevance. And as William Blake said, 'The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind'.

However it is perfectly possible to hold a radical political perspective and advance it by the same methods for a lifetime. If we oppose some of the fundamental structures of our culture - the profit motive, consumer-capitalism, enormous concentrations of power - then we're unlikely to be in for a quick win. We are probably going to spend our whole lives working on this stuff. Radically changing away from that is not going to help the cause. Doing so for its own sake would actually reduce our chances of improvement.

The movements for women's rights and trade unionism took several generations to make solid advances. Had they been distracted by more popular issues or decided to change for its own sake, we may well not be enjoying the fruits of their work today.

None of this is to say that Climate Camp has taken the wrong decision. Time will tell whether it was the right move or not, and I can readily see how it might turn out to be the right thing. But regarding such change as an intrinsically good thing is erroneous, and engendering that idea could damage radical movements in future.

spongers

2011-02-21T15:06:00.001Z

As the government introduced the Welfare Reform Bill, complaining of spongers getting easy money off the state for doing nothing, I saw nineteen police officers milling about Leeds station with an airport-style metal detector asking - with no powers to compel - random people to go through to see if they were carrying a knife.

kyoto remembered, and what has to come next

2011-02-16T23:58:00.004Z

Following last month's piece about the Newbury Bypass, I've written another article for Dorian Cope's kickass On This Deity site.

This one's for the anniversary for the day the Kyoto Protocol came into (non) effect

is it ok for protesters to damage property?

2011-02-15T20:15:00.001Z

I've just done a written debate with another activist for the New Internationalist on 'Is it OK for protesters to damage property?'.

These NI debates try to get an issue that has progressive people on both sides and have a debate that's thoughtful and respectful but strident, and useful to the movement rather than a retread of polarised cliches. I think it's met the brief this time.

[No comments on this post - the place to leave them is on the New Internationalist site]

watch out for geldof

2011-02-12T02:30:00.003Z

Saw this in a jeweller's window the other day.

Even by the satanic standards of celebrity-endorsed advertising, and even within the confines of just a few words, it's amazing how many different kinds of wrong this poster can be.

FOLLOW YOUR CONVICTIONS
'I don't want to live like you. I don't want to talk like you. I'm going to be like me'.
Sir Bob Geldof - Musician, Activist, Businessman

The slogan makes it clear that we're trading on Geldof's Band Aid reputation here.

His outspokenness with authority was always a fine quality, even before Band Aid had him gobbing off at Thatcher. On a chat show he shared a sofa with Vidal Sassoon who said that everyone owed it to themselves to stay in shape so he does a few lengths of his pool every day. Geldof rounded on him and pointed out that most people have knackering jobs and family responsibilities that sap their energy, as well as a notable lack of money to buy their own pool. That's good stuff, but he crowned it by then asking Sassoon if he didn't consider himself grossly overpaid for a barber.

Anyway, what we're meant to think here is that the part of Geldof that was fearless in dealing with the powerful because he knew he had the moral high ground has somehow led him to wear a particular brand of watch. Whereas it's actually just the pay cheque, a lump of money for a man who is already a millionaire several dozen times over.

But more than this, if you buy the brand of watch that he's prepared to be on a poster for then you too will be as righteous and morally valiant as Geldof is perceived to be. (Let's just ignore his tax evading non-dom status.)

Next up we have that quote that's supposed to chime with this rugged valiance of the spirit that 'follow your convictions' has set up. It's taken from Lookin' After Number 1, the first of the Boomtown Rats' stupendous opening salvo of six singles.

It is written with glaring knowing irony from the perspective of someone toweringly arrogant and selfish.

Don't give me love thy neighbour
Don't give me charity
Don't give me peace and love or the good lord above
You only get in my way with your stupid ideas

I am an island
Entire of myself
And when I get old, older than today
I'll never need anybody's help in any way

I'm gonna take your money
Count your loss when I'm gone
I'm alright Jack,
Lookin' after number one

I don't wanna be like you
I don't wanna live like you
I don't wanna talk like you
I'm gonna be like me

This is obviously written as something that only an idiot would think rather than, as the advert believes, something to identify with.

Even that name under the quote, Sir Bob Geldof, isn't right. Geldof got gonged with a KBE, Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. As he's a citizen of a country where the Queen is not head of state it's just an honorary knighthood. He is not a 'sir'.

All of this deconstruction component by component focuses on the advertiser and the advertisement. We then have the additional principle of the whole thing. Doing something good that makes you prominent and thereby leads to an incidental increase in your album sales is one thing. Taking the doing of good deeds and using them as a marketing tool to enrich yourself by getting people to buy a luxury item is a leap beyond.

As one of Geldof's punk contemporaries said,

I believe in this, and it's been tested by research,
He who fucks nuns will later join the church

Misrepresented as having integrity, misquoted as a lyricist, mistitled as a British knight, all in one swift shot. Advertising; the area where consumerism packs more of its wrongness per square inch than any other.

westminster council attack the jobless (slight return)

2011-02-01T17:36:00.001Z

Further to the last post, not only are Westminster Council punishing the unemployed wanting council houses, they're attacking the poor who rent privately too.

In June last year, Westminster Council's - her again - Philippa Roe defended the forthcoming cuts to Housing Benefit. Lambasting its currently huge cost she said

we have no issue with the families who have been claiming these high levels of benefit, as it is the system itself that is at fault and not them.

The system she speaks of is one the Tories instigated, where few new council houses are built and huge quantities of them are sold off, making the remaining number available spiral down the plughole. So, almost everyone poor has to rent from a private landlord, which is far more expensive than council housing.

Private rent funds two things: money to cover the landlord's mortgage on a property, and extra money to give the landlord a profit for being the owner.

As George Orwell said,

the ground-landlord in a town area has no function and no excuse for existence. He is merely a person who has found out a way of milking the public while giving nothing in return. He causes rents to be higher, he makes town planning more difficult, and he excludes children from green spaces: that is literally all that he does, except to draw his income.

The Housing Benefit system will not buy a house for a family who are renting, yet it will happily pay that same mortgage plus a fat premium to buy that same house for someone who already owns fifty others.

It would clearly be cheaper if the landlord took less of a premium, as is the case with councils who own housing. But the private landlord's main aim is to maximise that premium, so the predictable and inevitable result of reducing council housing is that the Housing Benefit bill will increase. The expense Roe complains of is expense her party created.

The cuts in Housing Benefit will force people to move away, ghettoising them in wherever is cheapest. This will shred communities, with all the associated impacts on crime and mental health, and of course the places with the cheapest rents are the ones with no opportunities. Moving the jobless to unemployment blackspots is hardly going to increase their chances, yet the new benefits regime penalises those who don't find work within a few months.

Philippa Roe assured us last June

the new changes will not take hold until April 2011 and we have time to plan and forecast what the housing needs of Westminster will be.

By December, Westminster Council reportedly

admitted it plans to move 80 per cent of homeless housing benefit claimants needing temporary accommodation out of the borough.

When the Tories talk of 'forecasts' and 'rewards', they are speaking of whitewashes and penalties. Wherever you live, if you are unemployed it is your personal moral failing for which you must be punished.

punishing the poor. again.

2011-01-30T14:40:00.003Z

With the massive demand for whatever council houses are left in the UK far outstripping supply, there has to be some method of prioritising those on the waiting lists.

Westminster Council is planning to shuffle unemployed people to the bottom of the deck and give first dibs to those with jobs. They say it is

designed to recognise positive contributions to society, reward those who are in jobs and to encourage those who are not currently employed to seek work

We've been here before on Bristling Badger, and I've no doubt we'll have to revisit it in future, but here we go again. The government's own figures show that unemployed people outnumber the available jobs 5:1.

Once we see the rise in unemployment that the government expects to be caused by George Osborne's first budget, and the ranks are futher swollen by the millions of people on Incapacity Benefit who the government has decided are suddenly magically fit to work, that ratio will be more like 11:1.

You cannot expect people to get jobs that don't exist. Penalising them for not getting these jobs is an exercise in cruelty.

Westminster cabinet member for housing, Councillor Philippa Roe, said: "We want to introduce a system which is fairer to local people and rewards those in employment."

This is an attack on the fundamental reasons for having social support such as council housing and the benefits system. It is not there as a set of incentives and penalties. It is there to ensure that, in our wealthy society, no person has to fear homelessness, destitution, hunger or illness simply because they have no money.

These are risks posed to us all, so it is a kind of insurance. Also, societies with the greater gaps between richest and poorest have the most crime, so a robust welfare system protects everyone, even those who will never be poor.

But more than that, it is organised compassion. Most of us - Tory councillors evidently excepted - do not want to live in a place where people suffer for lack of any simple and cheap remedy. This is why previous generations of workers agitated and voted for the welfare state to come into existence. It was working people actively saying they do not want the unemployed to be punished for their predicament.

police in 'lying again' shocker

2011-01-23T12:32:00.000Z

Further to the last post, there's another point to be considered in Chief Constable Jon Murphy's desperate arse-covering exercise.

Mr Murphy said officers were not permitted "under any circumstances" to sleep with activists. "It is grossly unprofessional. It is a diversion from what they are there to do," he said.

Yet the first undercover cop to talk, Mark Kenedy, said

I had a cover officer whom I spoke to numerous times a day He was the first person I spoke to in the morning and the last person I spoke to at night. I didn’t sneeze without a superior officer knowing about it. My BlackBerry had a tracking device. My cover officer joked that he knew when I went to the loo.

And yet they were unaware of his relationships including one that went on for many years. They didn't look at any of the communications on that Blackberry between him and his partners. The tracking device presumably switched off when he went to his girlfriends' houses or away on holiday with them.

Two of the other three officers uncovered this week are known to have formed lasting sexual relationships. Presumably their superiors didn't know either.

This stuff isn't just about one or two people, nor is it confined to the eco-anarchist movement targetted by the officers we've heard so much about in recent days. In the early 90s far-left and anti-racist groups were infiltrated. One of the officers involved talked about it last year.

officers would get together for regular meetings and you always knew if something was going on. If someone started talking about getting good information from a female target, we all knew there was only one way that could have happened. They had been sleeping with them.

An officer who worked on totally different deployments in the early 2000s said last week

At training school, it was drummed into your head that you are only limited by your imagination. The whole UC model in the police is taken from the spooks, where an agent sleeping with the enemy is condoned.

The official Met line was 'don't do it', but unofficially it was condoned. I remember one senior detective saying to me, 'Have you embedded yourself in the community yet?' It was tongue in cheek, but I left with the impression that had I shagged around for intelligence, it would have been OK.

The chance that Chief Constable Murphy doesn't understand the National Grid and hasn't seen the defence evidence of the case he commented on is exceedingly small, nonetheless it towers over the odds that he really thinks no officers have sexual relationships with targets.

Bracing themselves for a possible spate of legal action from the citizens who were deceived and sexually abused by police, Murphy's statement is the cops brazenly denying their wrongdoing, denying justice and denying truth. The first duty of the police is to protect the police, no matter what they've done.

lock up your grannies

2011-01-20T23:09:00.002Z

At the recent trial of people who tried to shut down Ratcliffe on Soar coal fired power station, defendants showed that they knew the National Grid network meant that there was no chance of anyone's electricity supply being disrupted. Rather, it meant cleaner-burning gas stations would come onstream. This, in fact, was the basis of their claim to be actually preventing a quantifiable amount of carbon from being released.

Sentencing them, the judge said

It is right to emphasise that this the planned action would have had no practical effect on the electricity supply.

Yet the head of the Association of Chief Police Officers, Sir Hugh Orde, was on Newsnight last week claiming the opposite. He rebutted the interviewer pointing out that the protesters were not terrorists, saying

They were looking at taking out one of the biggest power stations supplying over two million people - hospitals, vulnerable people - for a considerable period of time.

One of the Ratcliffe defendants, Bradley Day, wryly declared

I find it deeply disturbing that a senior police officer with a responsibility for the country's national security doesn't seem to comprehend how his own National Grid works.

But ACPO clearly think this untruth is their best shot. And indeed, given what an awful time they've having as their secret police remit unravels, they may be right. As they continue to be splattered with criticism from all sides - even the Daily Mail laying into them for fuck's sake - they need to ramp up the fear and lies to take our eye off the ball.

Today, ACPO's Jon Murphy went one better than Orde.

Unfortunately, in the midst of some of these groups – recent history would evidence this to be true – there are a small number of people who are intent on causing harm, committing crime and on occasions disabling parts of the national critical infrastructure. That has the potential to deny utilities to hospitals, schools, businesses and your granny.

just checking

2011-01-16T18:40:00.000Z

As Edward Woollard starts his two years and eight months sentence for dropping a fire extinguisher off Tory Party HQ,

Commander Bob Broadhurst, the Metropolitan police's head of public order, said: "We all recognise and respect the fundamental right to peaceful protest.

Is this the same Commander Bob Broadhurst whose boss who, in the wake of the Mark Kennedy unmasking, is getting a stern letter from Keith Vaz MP, chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee?

"During our inquiry into the G20 protests, [MPs] explicitly asked Sir Paul Stephenson and commander Bob Broadhurst about the deployment of undercover officers," said Vaz. "I am disappointed they appear not to have given us the full facts."

Is this the same Bob Broadhurst who spent the weeks leading up to 2009's G20 protests talking up the threat of unrest so any police action would seem justified?

Is it the same Bob Broadhurst who was in charge of the Met's G20 operation on the day, where officers were sent in to baton people exercising their 'fundamental right to peaceful protest', and continued even as they held their hands in the air and chanted 'this is not a riot'?

Is it the same Bob Broadhurst who, after all the kettling, bloodshed and death inflicted by police, said 'My officers did what I asked them to'?

release the kennedy files

2011-01-10T23:59:00.000Z

The dramatic collapse of the trial of the remaining six Ratcliffe power station defendants has been seriously misrepresented.

114 people were pre-emptively arrested in the midst of a plan to shut down Ratcliffe on Soar power station in April 2009. Despite not being charged, most were given restrictive bail restrictions. Proceedings were dropped against all but 26. One of those not prosecuted was a protester called Mark Stone, who was in fact an undercover police officer called Mark Kennedy.

The problem for the police is that Kennedy had helped to plan the action, had paid for the vehicles to transport the equipment on the day. When police vehicles were spotted at the power station and activists debated calling the whole thing off, Kennedy drove out for a recce and reported that the police had gone, putting the action back on. He encouraged others to join in.

Whatever the Met's guidelines are for involvement of undercover officers, you have to wonder whether instigating, planning and inciting crime are outside the remit.

Last October Kennedy's true identity was discovered by activists. He professed remorse, though notably didn't tell activists much that they didn't already know.

The Ratcliffe trial went ahead for 20 who admitted planning the action but claimed to be justified as they were preventing a greater crime. Last month, they were found guilty, with the judge leniently sentencing them amidst glowing praise for those convicted.

The trial of the remaining six - who said they had not decided to go on the action at the point of arrest - collapsed today.

Trial collapses after undercover officer changes sides says the BBC, with the same words appearing in the Daily Mail, Telegraph and across the news media.

'The undercover cop who turned' is a great movie premise (actually, it's a mediocre and somewhat corny movie premise), but it's not what happened. He had swiftly retracted his tentative and unspecific desire to help the defendants. It was only when the defence lawyers insisted that there must be witheld documents about Kennedy's part in the action and asked for disclosure from the police that the Crown Prosecution Service dropped the case.

So, it was not Kennedy's work for the activists that saved the day but his work for the cops. The opposite of what the headlines say.

It is reasonable to assume that Kennedy reported to his superiors about the action. Indeed, there has been reference to a report planned by NETCU for ministers about it that presumably includes material from their man on the ground. Yet none of it was disclosed by the prosecution.

Rather than expose what they knew the Crown chose to drop it. After hundreds of thousands of pounds had been spent and six, if not 26, people had spent nearly two years preparing for prosecution for a crime which the state knew they didn't commit.

Imagine if a police officer sees a street fight. Ten minutes after it's over a vanload of cops turn up. Yet at the subsequent trial, the prosecution don't even mention the one officer who had actually seen the event. There'd be the pervasive odour of rat.

The CPS said they'd found

Previously unavailable information that significantly undermined the prosecution’s case

and specifically said it was

not the existence of an undercover officer

It was just coincidence that they only found this mysterious evidence, 21 months after the incident, within 48 hours of the prosecution's request for the Kennedy documents. When your job is to secure convictions, it must be tempting to withold evidence that exonerates.

Had the prosecution not been aware of Kennedy's outing, those six people would tonight be preparing for their second day of a three week trial at the end of which, like the 20 last month, they would probably have been found guilty.

Yet the way the story's being told totally misses this stuff. Almost as a mirror of the Ian Tomlinson killing being One Bad Cop, this is One Good Cop gets the activists freed. As with the Tomlinson case, it avoids the real issue - this is institutional. Kennedy didn't do anything to help the defendants; the police and CPS chose to conceal evidence as a matter of policy.

newbury remembered

2011-01-09T12:33:00.002Z

I've been a fan of Dorian Cope's On This Deity blog since it began. Bright and bold writing commemorating aniiversaries of the history of rebellion and dissent - with an incredibly prolific daily posting policy to boot - it belongs in the blogroll of anyone with a political conscience.

So it was quite an honour to be asked to write for it. Today is the fifteenth anniversary of the tree-felling work starting at the Newbury Bypass. I wrote a book about my time on the Newbury bypass campaign a few months after it ended. Today I've written a primer/reflection piece for On This Deity, The Third Battle of Newbury Begins.

creating an army of slaves

2010-12-22T14:00:00.001Z

The Conservatives roll out plans to force benefit claimants to work for what was previously their right, but it is actually a scheme set in train by Labour. More, such coercion has existed in prisons for fifteen years.

To make people work for the minimum needed to survive with no hope of improvement or ability to leave is simply slavery. As has always been the case, it's a state of affairs that suits the slave owners very well.

It's the subject of my new Feature article for U-Know, Creating an Army of Slaves.

lib dems: champions of civil rights. in opposition, anyway.

2010-12-12T02:58:00.001Z

As we reel from footage of police batoning school children who had the temerity to hold placards, let's skip back 18 months to the G20 protests. A week after the protests the LibDems attacked the

"sickening and unprovoked attack" by police.

Their Shadow Justice Secretary David Howarth expanded on this point

“The ugly scenes of police aggression and intimidation witnessed at the G20 protests and the Kingsnorth demonstrations were a national disgrace.

“Tactics like baton charges, the seizure of personal property and the kettling of protestors for hours on end are fundamentally wrong. They are a threat to democratic rights, they cause distress and injury

Other LibDems decried the use of kettling as

the practice of highly aggressive advances in police lines against the demonstration, often by fully armed riot police or horses, which compresses the protest into a smaller space. It causes fear and tension and appears to have no justification from the point of view of preventing disorder. It is not surprising that being subjected to both these tactics can turn an otherwise overwhelmingly relaxed and peaceful crowd more violent, as people become agitated, frustrated then angry.

Their party conference last year - just last year, mind - passed a motion saying

The use of aggressive or intimidatory tactics against peaceful protesters is provocative, inappropriate, and counter-productive, since it increases the tension and likelihood of violence; the police must use aggressive tactics such as ‘kettling’, baton charges, and attacks with dogs only when they are absolutely necessary and proportionate; the seizure of personal property from demonstrators is not acceptable.

The same conference declared

The state must not be allowed to trample over an individual’s right to privacy, liberty, free expression and association.

and demanded

The immediate restoration of the right to protest in Parliament Square.

All fine words. Then they got elected.

This week we heard the sound of tumbleweed rolling through the Liberal Democrat press office.

hydrogen planes won't fly

2010-12-03T16:50:00.002Z

The BBC reports that the aviation industry is giving up on its promise of hydrogen powered aircraft.

Millions of taxpayers' money has been funnelled into projects that did not seemingly take on board the the fact that hydrogen power would remain costly and polluting for some time to come.

They knew it wouldn't work. It was never intended to work. The whole point of alternative fuels for cars or planes is to pretend that the answer is just around the corner, so it's OK to keep burning oil today.

Anyone who thinks that there's a readily available sustainable alternative to fossil fuels doesn't understand what fossil fuels are. They are millions of years of solar energy captured and stored. You're not going to get that off a year's worth of plants or whatever.

"Kerosene is a very good fuel and very difficult to compete with," explains Rainer von Wrede who works in Airbus's research and technology department.

But we all want to be able to fly round the world, we all want to be able to take a tonne of metal as a security blanket with us every time we pop down the shops, so we want to think there's an alternative fuel to make it happen.

As one false solution becomes exposed, another rises to take its place. Oftentimes, the public ditching of one will be saved until the next one's ready to dazzle us with.

"The big deal at the moment is alternative jet fuels. Principally biofuels that come from sustainable sources, and do not compete with food and water, ecetera," Christopher Surgenor, editor and publisher of GreenAir Online tells the BBC.

Hate to tell you this Christopher, but all biofuel crops compete with food and water.

Just because we switch from using edible crops like sugar or corn to inedible ones like jatropha does not mean there's no competition. It's not the crop that's the issue, it's the land use. There is already something growing there, either crops or forest. The water supply is already in use. There simply isn't a load of 'spare' land and 'spare' fresh water lying around.

We can safely ignore all the guff about using 'marginal' land. Firstly, there isn't waste land - the harder it is to support life the more fragile and vulnerable the ecosystems we find there. Additionally, much of the land they speak of as 'marginal' certainly isn't regarded that way by the people who live graze their livestock there. But the real clincher is the fact that the gargantuan industrial processes involved want intensive farming and maximum production. That means using high quality land.

When Virgin started using a little coconut oil in its planes it was calculated that it would take a coconut plantation twice the size of France to supply the world's aircraft. And that's what we're facing. Next year Lufthansa begin using 50% biofuel on a (woohoo) short haul service. Wherever you grow biofuels, it puts the squeeze on food production and raises prices.

But the first thing we need to address is the supposed reason they're moving to biofuels - carbon savings. The simple fact is that biofuels usually cause greater carbon emissions than oil. That should be enough to get them discounted before we even look at the food and water issue.

Clearing land causes a huge amount of carbon to be released (and taking over farmland for biofuels causes new land to go under the plough, so either way biofuels are responsible for deforestation), and it takes years for this to be balanced by savings from not using oil - in some cases longer than the global oil supply will last.

In Indonesia the researchers found that converting land for palm oil production ran up the worst carbon debts, requiring 423 years to pay off. Producing soybeans in the Amazon would take 319 years of soy biodiesel to offset the carbon debt.

What's more, everybody knows it

Britain's promise to more than double its use of biofuels by 2020 is "significantly" adding to worldwide carbon emissions, the Government admitted yesterday.

They can power cars with electricity from renewable sources (though those are hardly oversupplied right now) and give us equally fast alternatives on road and rail. But for planes, there's no electric alternative, nothing so swift, nothing but planes and oil and biofuels.

Faced with the decline of oil production, they're moving to biofuels in the full knowledge that it is a climate disaster, yet are dressing it up as carbon savings cos, y'know, it's made from nice green natural plants and stuff.

So the roll-out begins, the carbon emissions increase and millions more of the poorest people on earth are on course for starvation.

ratcliffe on trial

2010-11-22T12:05:00.000Z

Last April police in Nottingham arrested 114 people meeting in a building on 'suspicion of conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass and criminal damage'.

It seems there was a plan being hatched to shut down Ratcliffe on Soar coal-fired power station. You know, like the people who shut down Kingsnorth and were found to have acted lawfully.

No charges were brought against the majority of the 114 (not surprising, given that nobody was on their way to do anything and 'suspicion of conspiracy' puts you two steps away from any visible deed). They did eventually charge 26 of them. There will be two trials; six defendants say they were not on their way to the action and will be tried in the new year.

The other twenty say they were planning to shut down the power station but were justified as they were acting to prevent a greater crime. Their trial starts today, and is being blogged at RatcliffeOnTrial.org

Supporters outside court this morning

beating police repression after the student occupation

2010-11-16T15:28:00.001Z

The trashing of Conservative Party HQ during a student demo last week took a lot of people by surprise, not just the police and public but many of the participants.

Many of them had never done anything like it before. As such, they are largely identifable on the footage, and police have been arresting many.

FITwatch - a site that campaigns about police repression of protest, especially throught the use of Forward Intelligence Teams who film and photogrpah everything - published some advice to protesters.

The police responded by making the webhost take the FITwatch site down for a year. FITwatch nonetheless remain committed to their work.

In defiance of this censorship, and also to assist with the prevention of people who'd only trashed property from getting arrested, the offending post has been republished all over the internet. The more places do it, the more likeoly it is that the Met will give up and leave it be.

So here it is. If you think it should be in the public domain, please republish it on blogs and message boards.

=============================

The remarkable and brilliant student action at [Conservative Party headquarters] Millbank has produced some predictable frothing at the mouth from the establishment and right wing press. Cameron has called for the ‘full weight of the law’ to fall on those who had caused tens of thousands of pounds of damage to the expensive decor at Tory party HQ. Responsibility is being placed on ‘a violent faction’, after the march was ‘infiltrated’ by anarchists.

There are an encouraging number of intiatives to show solidarity with the arrested students – something that is vital if they are to avoid the sort of punitive ‘deterrent’ sentences handed out to the Gaza demonstrators. A legal support group has been established and the National Campaign against Cuts and Fees has started a support campaign. Goldsmiths lecturers union has publicly commended the students for a ‘magnificent demonstration’ .

This is all much needed, as the establishment is clearly on the march with this one. The Torygraph has published an irresponsible and frenzied ‘shop-a-student’ piece and the Met are clearly under pressure to produce ‘results’ after what they have admitted was a policing ‘embarrassment’.

51 people have been arrested so far, and the police have claimed they took the details of a further 250 people in the kettle using powers under the Police Reform Act. There may be more arrests to come.

Students who are worried should consider taking the following actions:

If you have been arrested, or had your details taken – contact the legal support campaign. As a group you can support each other, and mount a coherent campaign.

If you fear you may be arrested as a result of identification by CCTV, FIT or press photography;

DONT panic. Press photos are not necessarily conclusive evidence, and just because the police have a photo of you doesn’t mean they know who you are.

DONT hand yourself in. The police often use the psychological pressure of knowing they have your picture to persuade you to ‘come forward’. Unless you have a very pressing reason to do otherwise, let them come and find you, if they know who you are.

DO get rid of your clothes. There is no chance of suggesting the bloke in the video is not you if the clothes he is wearing have been found in your wardrobe. Get rid of ALL clothes you were wearing at the demo, including YOUR SHOES, your bag, and any distinctive jewellery you were wearing at the time. Yes, this is difficult, especially if it is your only warm coat or decent pair of boots. But it will be harder still if finding these clothes in your flat gets you convicted of violent disorder.

DONT assume that because you can identify yourself in a video, a judge will be able to as well. ‘That isn’t me’ has got many a person off before now.

DO keep away from other demos for a while. The police will be on the look-out at other demos, especially student ones, for people they have put on their ‘wanted’ list. Keep a low profile.

DO think about changing your appearance. Perhaps now is a good time for a make-over. Get a haircut and colour, grow a beard, wear glasses. It isn’t a guarantee, but may help throw them off the scent.

DO keep your house clean. Get rid of spray cans, demo related stuff, and dodgy texts / photos on your phone. Don’t make life easy for them by having drugs, weapons or anything illegal in the house.

DO get the name and number of a good lawyer you can call if things go badly. The support group has the names of recommended lawyers on their site. Take a bit of time to read up on your rights in custody, especially the benefits of not commenting in interview.

DO be careful who you speak about this to. Admit your involvement in criminal damage / disorder ONLY to people you really trust.

DO try and control the nerves and panic. Waiting for a knock on the door is stressful in the extreme, but you need to find a way to get on with business as normal.

Otherwise you’ll be serving the sentence before you are even arrested.

what would you do if i sold out a song?

2010-11-04T22:46:00.000Z

Well, I think I'd stand up and walk out on you.

We always have to wonder not only about actions and deeds, but about what they normalise and what they point the way to. I just watched TV for the first time in months. On one channel in less than two hours, Gimme Shelter and Children Of The Revolution advertised computer games, Pretty Vacant advertised betting, the Lightning Seeds advertised a bank, and Lemmy actually appeared in the advert where there's a specially re-recorded Ace of Spades advertising beer. This is what we feared when The Clash advertised jeans in the 90s.

This has an anti-encouragement effect on me, it makes me feel soiled and hate the products. Then again, I suppose I'm not exactly the target audience.

But this is normal for most people isn't it? Like living next to a sewage farm, you stop smelling the stench of commerce after a while.

The average Briton watches four hours of TV a day. People who watch more than seven hours a day are more common than those of us who watch less than an hour.

Doomed. Deservedly.

andrew marr doth protest too much

2010-10-18T10:18:00.002+01:00

The BBC's venerable Andrew Marr has seriously laid into blogging. In a speech at Cheltenham Literature Festival he said

A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed, young men sitting in their mother's basements and ranting. They are very angry people.

OK – the country is full of very angry people. Many of us are angry people at times. Some of us are angry and drunk. But the so-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night.

This is someone in a glass house firing numerous stones of various sizes in all directions.

Firstly, and most obviously, attacking people for their appearance is cheap and low, and that goes doubly for elements of appearance that are not of their choosing. It's a cornerstone of why we oppose racism, sexism, homophobia, disability discrimination and so on.

Within that, however, consider the fact that Marr himself is not what many of us would think of as a looker. I'm willing to bet he was that mercilessly abused jug-eared lad at school that everyone called FA Cup.

He is perhaps outstripped in these stakes by the phenomenally ugly John Sergeant. Yet this has nothing to do with the quality of their reporting, even though they're on telly. With bloggers, they don't show you what they look like so it makes no odds whatsoever.

And because we don't see bloggers, we get to the serious point about Marr's charges. He doesn't actually know this stuff. He's just listing a variety of things we say about people we don't like, without any evidence. So much for his implied moral high ground of authoritative opinion.

It's notable that these accusations of warped male friendless nerdiness are exactly the same things that were said ten years ago about anyone who used the internet. They were ways for the people who saw the rise of online communication as alien and threatening to pretend they were above it.

By the same token, the mainstream media is feeling the ground shift under its feet, hence these outbursts from Marr and colleagues. Their old certainties, their aloof position, their power to publish where the only available space for retort was a Letters page controlled by the same publisher, it's all been swept away.

Which brings us to another problem with what he says. Yes, there is a lot of ill-informed, vile, misanthropic, intrusive stuff on blogs. Of that material, much of it is intentionally written that way. In this respect, it is no different to the tabloid press.

For Marr to talk as if reporters only write things that are considered, beneficial and true is to pretend that the best selling newspapers in this country have never existed. Such vitriolic, speculative, seedy tittle-tattle is the public's preferred flavour of reporting.

But to look at The Sun and use its standards as grounds to attack the likes of Charles Moore and Nick Cohen is ludicrous. So it is that our repulsion at the putrefying mass of tabloid-equivalent blogging is no basis for attacking the medium as a whole, let alone making Marr's snidey snipes. The lack of real facts in his criticism only underlines that point.

The stuff I love in blogging is the way that, every day, there are news stories dismembered. The bloggers walk you through their reasoning and cite sources that are credible. It's like a forensic version of The Day Today, teaching you to use your critical faculties with news media, keeping your bullshit detector at full power.

All those stories about how 'they're trying to ban Christmas' and making people call it Winterval in case it offends muslims? Not one of them is true. Likewise lots of the stories about immigration. But you wouldn't know that if you only read the papers and watched TV. It's when bloggers look into it that we get the truth.

There are large elements of crossover, because responsible reporting is essentially the same endeavour whether it's bloggers or professionals. Channel 4 News' Fact Check blog does a superb job of correcting what we're told, and conversely news broadcasters pick up rumours from blogs and turn them into stories. Last year there was something going round about Gordon Brown being on certain pills. It didn't appear to have any real foundation, but that didn't stop it being inappropriately being included in an interview by one Andrew Marr.

It appears that, fingers burnt, he's blaming bloggers for telling him to put his hand in the fire.

a bottle of fight the world

2010-10-08T18:13:00.000+01:00

A website about Buckfast's source locality, Dartmoor, informs us that

a popular Scottish phenomenon is the 'Buckie Commando' who is an intoxicated, aggressive, fearless consumer of the Buckfast Tonic Wine... There now are numerous aliases that the wine is known by, some printable examples are; 'Commotion Lotion', 'Wreck the Hoose Juice' and 'Bottle of Fight the World'.

Strathclyde police confirm that there were

448 mentions of "Buckfast" in reports of murders, attempted murders, serious assaults and common assaults in 2008-09, out of a total of 7,483 violent offences. That equates to 6% of the total.

Of these 114 involved the use of a Buckfast bottle as a weapon. This equates to 1.5% of the total

A BBC investigation adds

This echoes a study carried out in 2007 at Polmont Young Offenders Institution. It found that of those offenders who had been drinking immediately before their offence, more than 40% had been drinking Buckfast.

The man who conducted that research, Alasdair Forsyth, says the findings were remarkable. "This is a product, a brand which unusually for any product, is always trumpeting how few units they sell, that they sell less than half of 1% of all the alcohol in Scotland," he says.

This has led to moves within the Scottish parliament to ban Buckfast in the country.

As Monty Python observed, 'contemporary government applies one standard to violence within the community and another to violence perpetrated by one community upon another'. There are times when that enhanced, fearless fighting spirit comes in handy. Are you being bombed by Nazis? Bucky will make it all palatable. This advert ran in the British press during the Second World War.

Buckfast Tonic Wine is made by a secret process and to a formula perfected by the monks many years ago. It is still made with the same unhurried care at Buckfast Abbey in the calm of the Devon Hills. Its recuperative properties are invaluable to meet the strain of war time conditions.

Nerves and depression are largely physical, the result of an unaccustomed drain on your strngth and vigour. A wineglassful of Buckfast two or three times a day will quickly restore your energies and help to maintain your strength and mental poise.

They were not the first to spot its propensity for making people confident in violent circumstances. Those commanding the first world war knew that turning petrified shellshocked boys into Buckie Commandoes would be good for the chances of victory. According to Lyn Macdonald's book Somme, British troops were issued with an English-French phrase book sponsored by Wincarnis Tonic Wine with the slogan 'for the relief of nerves in the trenches'.

Indeed, in July 1916 as the Battle of the Somme was raging the British Journal of Nursing listed Wincarnis, saying

the primary effect is immediate stimulation and invigoration of the system, and the secondary an upbuilding of mental and physical vigour, and that as the secondary follows immediately after the primary effect, the upbuilding of bodily vigour occurs before the stimulating effect has worn off

A bottle of fight the world indeed. Wincarnis was originally called Liebig’s Extract of Meat and Malt Wine. The subsequent brand name 'win-carnis' means 'wine-meat'. These days they make it without actual meat, and nothing of Buckfast's altercation-inviting caffeine avalanche, but it's still a right radge tipple.

We should perhaps be grateful that Buckfast only augments its alcohol with caffeine. When tonic wines became popular in the late 1800s, many of them

used potent, poorly understood and often addictive ingredients. These included strychnine, morphine, opium, quinine, lithium salts and cocaine.

Buckfast with cocaine? Imagine the possibilities.

Graham Harding's book A Wine Miscellany informs us that

Coca wine, with cocaine, was already flourishing in late nineteenth-century America when Dr. John S. Pemberton created his “French Wine Coca” in 1886. He was a latecomer to the market, which was dominated by Angelo Mariani’s Coca Wine. This product, conceived and marketed by a French priest, added cocaine to wine.

Pemberton added both kola nuts and damiana (a natural aphrodisiac) to his drink and marketed it as an aid to overcoming morphine addiction. It was advertised as an “intellectual beverage” with the capacity to “invigorate the brain.”

Cocaine was removed from the drink in 1904, though the Coca-Cola Company continued to use “decocainised” coca leaves as flavoring for some decades. It is possible that they may still do so.

In 2002, the Bolivian authorities authorized the export of 159 tons of coca leaf to the United States “for the manufacturing of the soft drink, Coca-Cola.” The company was equivocal in its response to inquiries. “The formula for Coca-Cola is a very closely guarded trade secret. Therefore we do not discuss the formula.” Make of that what you will.

20% off the bnp

2010-10-05T11:00:00.000+01:00

When people talk about the BNP membership list, who exactly do they mean?

The BNP's mailing list goes out to anyone who's ever had any contact with them. Every couple of weeks there's another letter, usually four pages long, always full of random use of capitals, italics and underlines (and assorted combinations thereof), references to Agincourt and the Somme as reasons to be proud of ourselves, plenty of personality cult stuff about Nick Griffin, and always the appeal for money.

It's that last aspect that's most interesting. Before the general election you'd expect fundraising, campaigns don't come cheap after all. But now, after Griffin failed to make good on his promises to march through the doors of the Commons (the BNP voteshare actually went down where he stood), they're not only still begging but are getting ever more desperate.

After several months of pushing their life membership scheme, the newest letter drops the price from £500 to £395.

(Contact details have been pixellated out, everything else is, in all its tacky glory, absolutely real).

This honour is being extended to a carefully selected group of British citizens, stalwart BNP members like you, and I would like to be the first to personally congratulate you for being among that special chosen group of people.

Special, chosen, stalwart 'members' who haven't been in touch since they once asked for a membership pack or poster three years ago. An 'exclusive' offer that only excludes people who decide for themselves that they aren't interested.

Even our brave young soldiers, heroes all, cannot have a homecoming parade without being spat at on our streets by Muslim fanatics or Marxist UAF traitors.

Cannot? I can find an incident where one person is alleged to have once spat at one soldier. I can find lots of reports of parades without spitting.

And oh, woe is me, those Marxists in the UAF like Ed Balls and Diane Abbott.

We have set the fee for LIFE MEMBERSHIP at £500, but if you respond to this personal written invitation right away, you can take advantage of this offer for the special invitation price of £395. This massive reduction is a token of my deep appreciation for your loyalty and hard work for the party.

But there is more good news for you. If you accept my invitation today - you'll receive all the valuable benefits only available to LIFE MEMBERS, FREE!

FREE top quality, exclusive, engraved watch, his or hers.
FREE exclusive LIFE MEMBER pin badge to wear with pride and dignity.
FREE lifelong subscription to Identity magazine 64pp. (£4.99)
FREE lifelong 'annual party reports'. (£6.95)
FREE complementary copies of the party's magazine, Hope and Glory, for your friends.
FREE prestigious LIFE MEMBER certificate parchment scroll for framing.
FREE limited edition 8x10 signed portrait of party chairman Nick Griffin MEP.

You will also receive a highly desirable GOLD embossed LIFE MEMBERSHIP card.

Mmm, I just love a gender segregated watch. And a limited edition signed photo of Nick Griffin? Limited to how many? Does it come with presentation dart flights?

And that prestigious life member parchment scroll (wouldn't want a non-prestigious one), is it available in perforated 2-ply with aloe vera?

The desperation to get the dosh in, banking on a lump sum today against the prospect of steady revenue streams in the years to come, speaks clearly of their motivations. They either don't expect members to stay for long, or else they are very strapped for cash indeed. Recent reports suggest a bit of both.

Concern about the BNP's finances has been exacerbated by news that the Electoral Commission is investigating the party's 2008 accounts and that its 2009 accounts are already late.

The BNP faces further legal action from the Equality and Human Rights Commission over allegations that it has failed to remove potentially racist clauses from its constitution. Lawyers say the case, due to go before the courts again in November, could see Griffin landed with a fine or even imprisonment for contempt of court.

The BNP refused to comment on reports that the party is more than £500,000 in debt or to confirm how many members had been suspended or had resigned.

Yet still they extravagantly add an extra sheet to the begging letter.

Like some Saga insurance or Littlewoods catalogue junkmail, it not only uses lots of positive terms for the gaudy cheapo free gift, and 'come on, what are you waiting for?' (ie 'please don't think about it or you'll decide not to'), but the punchline for these supposedly desirable watches is that spivvy disclaimer down there in the bottom right hand corner - Watches May Vary. It'll be these, or some other shit, we dunno.

It appears that there's a sort of ceiling for fascist parties in the UK. People feel scared by economic instability and immigrants, they feel ignored by the entrenched power of the big parties, so they vote fascist. But then once they've got a modicum of power and become a real threat, there is a big turnout to defeat them. The party then tears itself apart with in-fighting.

It happened to the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, it happened to the National Front in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and now it seems poised to happen to the BNP.

bnp tolerance

2010-10-03T11:04:00.002+01:00

The comments sections of news sites seemed such a bright idea at first. Democratising journalism and creating a new system allowing debate, challenge and correction to be on the same page as the article. This would surely lead journalists to draft their pieces more carefully, and to a better understanding and level of engagement for all.

It rapidly became clear that nothing like that would happen. Out there on the comments pages it's survival of the shoutiest, with access favouring those who've got the internet in front of them all day and nothing interesting to do. Shielded by anonymity, the need for civility and accuracy wither to nought.

Last year I pondered why news sites get this crap much more than Wikipedia.

Wikipedia's a reference tool, the Guardian is a news site. If you manage to skew the first wave of comments on a news article, you've effectively neutered the ability to debate. Who goes back to a four month old news article to start a discussion?

Most posts on this blog only get a couple of comments, if any. I've deleted very few, just the ones that were solely comprised of insults. I've let ones from climate deniers, Simple Minds fans, BNP supporters and people even further right stay up.

In May I did a post about BNP leaflets and the party's climate denial. Within 12 hours it had about 30 comments. About two-thirds were from BNP supporters, all bar one were anonymous, and none of them about the content of the post (that the source the BNP cited to prove there's no climate change actually shows the opposite).

It was during the period of the European elections when the BNP had clearly got their flunkies to trawl the internet and bombard the comments sections of anything that mentioned the party. The effect is rather like having them run into a meeting with airhorns. Nobody can be heard over the din, and by the time they leave everyone sensible's left the room. I've got another post about the BNP coming soon, and I'm half expecting the same flood of comments, so I thought I'd set out the rules in advance.

Free speech is one of those issues where I strongly agree with opposed sides. I think people have a right to be protected from hate speech, and it is blindingly obvious that extreme actions have their roots in seemingly innocuous incitement activities. We should not allow the fascists credibility and let them march the streets, creating an atmosphere of intimidation, normalising aggressive racism and bigotry. I applaud those who use force to confront and fight fascists.

Conversely, something in that feels a bit paternalistic, like we're saying we don't trust the public to be as smart as us in seeing through facist lies. If we don't trust the mass of people to discount stupid opinions then there is little point in any political activism as a decent future is impossible.

On a more philosophical level, where does the no-platform policy end? I agree with George Orwell when he said

If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

We can't have this apply to our controversial views but not those of others simply because we disagree with them. Or to put it another way, as Noam Chomsky said,

Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're really in favor of free speech, then you're in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech.

However, Orwell qualified his point with stuff that makes obvious sense

If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilization means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way.

So which ones are activities that deserve to be stymied because they 'harm the community'? Fascist attacks on ethnic minorities? Advocating the deportation of our neighbours? Making stupid comments online that inhibit proper discussion?

Here on this blog, I don't have to find definite answers. It's not a freedom of speech issue. If I were the BBC then I would have a duty to be impartial, but really, this place is no more powerful or laudable than a blog anyone could set up in seconds. So if I delete comments it is not shutting down anyone's freedom of speech.

It's my blog, and if I deem comments to be discouraging to the kind of debate and atmosphere I want to see here, stuff full of insults and not even on topic, then I'm free to delete them. And if you don't like that you BNP scumfucks then go cry to your mums.

alex salmond's renewable coal

2010-09-30T18:50:00.000+01:00

Last week Alex Salmond, Scotland's First Minister, announced that Scotland's target of generating 50% of its electricity from renewables by 2020 has been upped to 80%.

This week he went one better, suggesting it could be 100% by 2025.

This is interesting, given the plans for a new coal-fired power station at Hunterston, already dubbed by activists the 'new Kingsnorth'. The new power station would run for many decades, burning coal far beyond 2025. It's not only opposed by Scotland's kickass anti-coal activists, but also such rabid revolutionaries as the RSPB, Christian Aid, WWF, the World Development Movement and the Church of Scotland.

Nonetheless,

Salmond's government aims to fast track the Hunterston proposal by using a new streamlined planning process, bypassing the often lengthy and expensive public-consultation rules that normally apply.

In 2007 Salmond said

Coal is king ... If you can use clean-coal technology, coal has a dynamic future. It means coal, far from being environmentally unacceptable, is becoming environmentally attractive.

The Scottish government will only oblige Hunterston to have 300 megawatts (MW) of production with carbon capture and storage. The station is planned to be 1600MW, in other words over 80% without carbon capture. This makes it more carbon intensive than any other way of generating electricity, except for unabated coal.

The Scottish government has also granted the massive Longannet coal power station an life extension so it can keep burning well past its 2015 sell-by date.

Anyone can set targets, especially ones that are mere suggestions for a time fifteen years hence. Just as every warmongering aggressor talks about peace and self-defence, so every fossil burner talks about the importance of aiming for sustainability.

red ed

2010-09-29T17:45:00.007+01:00

the coalition is losing the argument about its central programme of cuts, even before it has announced them, let alone started carrying them out. The latest Populus polling shows three-quarters of the public oppose both the scale and speed of the planned cuts.

So said Seumas Milne two weeks ago. A Leader of the Opposition who was interested in popular support might see an opportunity to place themselves as a determined, stoic, principled opposer of the cuts. But no, because garnering the support of the majority is not as important as ensuring the wealthy few don't become alienated.

The only red thing about Red Ed Miliband is his tongue, red raw from slurping the collective anii of capitalist scumpigs. He manages to pretend to have been anti-war just because he wasn't an MP when the Iraq vote took place. How we all remember his ceaseless tirades exhorting the prime minister to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan that resounded through the Commons since he was elected in 2005, though. Oh, no, hang on a minute....

He boldly comes forth with his red agenda, replacing Trident and no plans to nationalise anything, not even the railways that 70% of us want renationalised. Instead he says he'll go along with many of the cuts, specifically including the attacks on benefit claimants.

The Tory press has made much of Miliband's support from union votes, implying that this is some sort of con, with additionally strong overtones that unions are something underhand, malevolent and dangerously extremist. Since when did union membership – something a quarter of British employees engage in – become something antisocial?

Mark Steel notes the anti-union element of Miliband's coverage

as if the unions aren’t made up of millions of people but are a pair of illegal bookies and a drug-dealer who, because of a quirk of history, make up 30 per cent of the electoral college. You might as well say the only reason the Tories won the election was they sneaked in with the votes of Tory voters.

But the Sheer Fucking Gall Of The Day Award goes to Baroness Warsi for saying

Ed Miliband wasn’t the choice of his MPs, wasn’t the choice of Labour party members but was put in to power by union votes.

Miliband was elected to leader of the Labour Party by many thousands of entitled voters. As opposed to Warsi, a failed parliamentary candidate who is nonetheless in Cabinet despite having been elected by nobody at all.

hydrogen zombies from murdoch hell

2010-09-21T20:00:00.001+01:00

For those of us who generally spend too much time on news sites, it was curious to see Rupert Murdoch decide to put his papers behind a paywall. Whilst it's cut The Times' website traffic by 90%, there are those who reckon it's nonetheless increased the revenue.

But it's also stopped most of us having anything to do with The Times. Chicken Yoghurt notes the clear air and cheers on the process.

Isn’t the world a nicer place with The Times behind its paywall? If nothing else now only a few thousand hardcore masochists are having their mornings spoiled (either directly or indirectly) by David Aaronovitch’s brainfaeces. Once Rupert Murdoch finishes shovelling the rest of his offal behind the paywall we can get on with finally founding Utopia.

I had occasion to buy a paper copy of The Times the other week. It wasn't for me, it was for a friend. Really it was.

The Greater London Assembly has been enthusiastic about hydrogen vehicles despite the fact that they make no sense in terms of economics or climate impact. Even the Green members support it. So it was no surprise to see Kit Malthouse, Tory member of the Greater London Assembly, trotting out an article for the Times extolling the virtues of hydrogen cars.

Times subscribers can read it here, but you don't have to fork out a quid if you don't want to. Any pro-hydrogen article will have the same old twaddle, zombie arguments long disproven yet still they walk among us.

Fantastic news: by 2015 you will be able to buy a reasonably priced family car that runs entirely on hydrogen

Mmm-hmm. The magic switchover to hydrogen cars has been five years away for about twenty years now. Mr Donkey, meet Mr Carrot.

Nasty 19th-century internal combustion will be out; pure 21st century electrochemistry will be in.

Sexy! Shiny! Space-age! Actually, not. The hydrogen fuel cell is 19th century technology, invented by Sir William Grove in the late 1830s.

Electric propulsion is, of course, the solution. But there is a divide about how to store and release the power: battery or hydrogen?

With a battery, you charge it up and off you go. Perfect for town, where short, frequent journeys are the norm. But there is a teeny problem: instant refuelling... electric cars take between six and ten hours to charge.

No they don't - their batteries take that time to charge. If you have ready-charged batteries waiting at filling stations, swapping your empty one for a full one takes the same time as filling up with petrol, or indeed hydrogen.

That requires new infrastructure at filling stations, but not as much as hydrogen. Additionally, you can recharge your car yourself at home overnight on cheap electricity when you have got hours spare. For convenience and availability, electricity wins because it's everywhere, whereas hydrogen is available nowhere.

Malthouse deftly avoids any mention of hydrogen's cost. There's a reason the protoypes have only been available on lease instead of to buy. As Shell Hydrogen’s CEO Don Huberts bluntly conceded

‘at the end of the day, hydrogen and other alternative fuels will be three to four times as expensive as oil based products, and if no one wants to pay for that, we can't make those fuels’(1).

Or, to compare, Ulf Bossel of the European Fuel Cell Forum said,

The daily drive to work in a hydrogen fuel cell car will cost four times more than in an electric or hybrid vehicle.

Still, at least Malthouse does mention some other drawbacks.

Don't get me wrong, there are problems with hydrogen too. The main one is that it is pretty inefficient - it takes more energy to produce than it produces as a fuel.

And the understatement of the year award goes to...

In a recent post I mentioned the way the word 'recyclable' is used to imply that a product has no environmental impact so we can just use as much as we feel like, throw it away and get more. This also applies to 'renewable electricity'; it apparently has no impact to manufacture, install and maintain generating equipment, and is freely available in infinite quantity. Kit Malthouse certainly thinks so, and it lets him off the eye-watering inefficiency of hydrogen.

But if we use renewable energy to make the hydrogen in the first place, is this still an issue?

In a word, yes.

To replace our vehicle fuels with hydrogen would take as much electricity as we presently use for everything else combined (2). Do we think we can double electricity generation whilst doing away with fossil burning? Or is renewable-electricity hydrogen a non-starter?

Meanwhile, the Tory market values championed by the likes of Malthouse will see to it that we don't actually use renewable electricity. It is, by a huge margin, far cheaper to make hydrogen from natural gas than any other source. Renewable electricity, conversely, is by far the most expensive. Unless we have a stringent big-government regulatory regime, gas will be the raw material.

Making hydrogen from gas then using it in a fuel cell emits about 90g of CO2 for every kilometre you drive, about the same as a modern efficient petrol car (3). So when Kit Malthouse says that hydrogen cars

emit only water

it's true in the sense of what comes out of the exhaust pipe, but that's because the carbon emissions have happened at the hydrogen factory. The climate, of course, doesn't care where you emit the carbon, only that you do it at all. This use of gas as the raw material means that hydrogen is just another fossil fuel.

Perhaps the maddest scenario we could head towards is shifting from oil to another fossil fuel that's just as carbon-intensive and just as scarce, which then runs out after a couple of decades, leaving us with all this hydrogen infrastructure, making us squander our electricity on making hydrogen instead of the more efficient battery vehicles.

Bank-busting, ash-spewing Iceland has started to harness all that free geothermal power, aiming to be the hydrogen Saudi Arabia by 2060.

This is hardly, as Malthouse wants to imply, a reason for the UK to compete. Exporting hydrogen is very unlikely to happen on any major scale, as it contains a fraction of the energy of oil.

Iceland may produce its own hydrogen some time in future, but that is for several reasons that don't apply anywhere else. It is not only sat on more renewable energy than it can use (a few huge hydroelectric plants and a hell of a lot of geothermal energy); it is also little more than a city state. It has a population the size of Bradford and two-thirds of them live in one city.

Even then, its trumpeted 'hydrogen economy' has been and gone several times. In 2000 Iceland was to be the Bahrain of the North and the big breakthrough was five to ten years away. In 2002 it was touted as the Kuwait of The North with hydrogen cars to be on the roads in 2005. Shell put three hydrogen buses into action in Reykjavik in 2005. Two years later, two were scrapped and the third put in a museum.

The hydrogen vehicles are a gimmick, fluttered about by oil companies so we think the breakthrough is around the corner and therefore we can carry on with our cars. The wonder is that we're fooled by it over and over.

The electric vehicle may be more efficient, but the batteries take a lot of minerals and energy to manufacture. It too is being hyped as a decoy, just the way hydrogen has been.

To think there is an easy and renewable alternative to fossil fuels is a fundamental misunderstanding of what fossil fuels are; millions of years of stored energy. We have to stop thinking every individual can have the energy needed to carry a ton of metal and glass with them everywhere they go.

= = = = = = = = = = = = =

1 . Looking Ahead: Fuel Producers Weigh in on Hydrogen’s Fit in Cleaner Energy Production, Fuel Cell Industry Report, January 2003.

2.Decarbonising the UK – Energy for a Climate Conscious Future, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, 2005, p74.

3. Well-to-Wheels analysis of future automotive fuels and powertrains in the European context, Version 1b, European Commission Joint Research Centre, January 2004, p50, Figure 8.4.1b.

road to nowhere

2010-09-17T19:50:00.000+01:00

'Reform' is a word that has shifted meaning in the last twenty years. Like 'modernise', in the mouth of a politician 'reform' now means 'privatise' or 'cut'.

George Osborne told us last week

We are going to reform out-of-work benefits so there's a strong incentive for people who can work to get work.

This ignores the central fact that there are many people who can work, but there is no work for them to get.

There are 2,467,000 people unemployed. There are 467,000 job vacancies. So there are exactly two million people for whom there is no work. And that's before we start kicking people off sickness benefits and out of public sector jobs.

Given the government's plan to cut Housing Benefit for people unemployed for more than a year - leading to debt and eviction for a great many of them - it's also pertinent to know that there are 797,000 people who have been unemployed for over 12 months. So even if every vacancy in the country went to long-term unemployed people, we'd still have 330,000 people long-term unemployed being punished with homelessness for not getting a job that doesn't exist.

Osborne continued;

People who think that it's a lifestyle choice just to stay on out-of-work benefits, that lifestyle choice is going to come to an end.

'Lifestyle choice' implies a preference. It baldly says unemployed people choose their situation. With the unemployed outnumbering vacancies 5:1, unless we start a jobs-for-six-months rota, the only way people will get out of unemployment and into work is by clambering over the heads of others and pushing them back down into the increasingly inhumane and threadbare benefits system.

Nick Clegg defended the cuts, saying

A fair society is not one in which money is simply transferred by the central state from one group to another

One word: bankers.

It also makes me wonder whether this means Clegg opposes taxation in all its forms. He goes on;

Welfare needs to become an engine of mobility, changing people's lives for the better, rather than a giant cheque written by the state to compensate the poor for their predicament.

£65 a week Job Seekers Allowance is hardly giant. But whatever the price, you can only be mobile if there is somewhere to move to. For the overwhelming majority of unemployed people, there is no road out. As they are poor by no fault of their own, it is barbaric and cruel to punish them. A fair society would indeed compensate such people for their predicament.

As unemployment is, if we're honest, a permanent feature of our society, we should see if anyone out there actually does want it as a lifestyle choice. If they can find a way to lead happy, fulfilled lives on £65 a week then good luck to them. Automating their payments would, as Child Benefit has proven, take down the cost of administration. This would free up the job-finding help for those who do want it. Same number of unemployed, lower cost, far greater happiness.

like a war zone without the dead people

2010-09-15T14:44:00.007+01:00

I went to Reading Festival once, nearly 20 years ago. It has none of the character of Glastonbury, none of the quirks and charm of smaller festivals. What it does have is a vast range of top rock bands playing blisteringly loud to massive beery audiences. For some people that's not enough to entice them but for others, like me in 1991, it's a definition of heaven.

It was overwhelmingly populated by teenagers wearing band T-shirts who enjoyed making campfires out of plastic. As I understand it, that is still the case, and their techniques and targets have evolved and expanded. Stories from a few years ago about lines of burning portaloos are truly the stuff of nightmares.

The festival is now so popular that it's held at two sites, Leeds and Reading, with the same acts on alternating nights. This year I helped with the salvage; teams of volunteers get a couple of days after the festival to pick up any decent tat left by punters.

There were people gathering camping tat like SolAIDarity collecting for the camps of migrants at Calais, others for displaced victims of the Pakistani floods, and scouting groups. Other charity collectors like Everything's Possible were looking for stuff to clean and sell as fundraisers.

The waste seems largely to be a product of the mindset of the punters rather than the infrastructure. During the festival, if you bring in a sack of empty cans and/or plastic bottles for recycling, you get a token for a beer. Yet I saw hundreds of full cans of beer lying around, let alone the uncountable thousands of empties.

There are camping gear drop-off points for people who don't want to take stuff home. Yet I would estimate that at least one tent in four was left behind where it was pitched.

This is a spliced together panorama. Bear in mind this is one corner of one empty field, everyone's gone home. There were acres of this.

Almost all the abandoned tents had stuff inside them. Many had just been walked out of, leaving sleeping bags, rollmats, clothes, cosmetics and food. Possessions were seen as disposable, not just by a few who were irredeemably irresponsible or acutely hungover, but as a culture among festival-goers.

Many of the tents and camping gear were clearly new, bought for the weekend, regarded as being as ephemeral as the beer. That was the good bit. Finding otherwise decent tents slashed, or burned out, or shat in was much worse.

GREEN TENTS

One thing that caught my eye was the vast number of 'Green Tents'.

The words 'green' and 'eco' are, as we well know, meaningless. Vauxhall's new Ecoflex range of cars are eco, even though they emit over 130g of CO2 per kilometre, more than a third as much again as some normal cars already on the road. 'Recyclable' is used as if this means the virgin materials have less impact, and as if the recycling process has no impact at all.

Leeds Festival big up their partnership with Green Tent Company, telling us that buying their gear will

help us to reduce our carbon footprint, thus SAVING THE PLANET

They really do use capitals.

So go on then, what's green about a plastic tent? The makers explain

Traditionally a tent is made up of many different components such as fibreglass poles, metal eyelets and pegs, polyester material and nylon zips etc… which make them uneconomical to separate for recycling. This results in the vast majority of the tents being sent directly to landfill... until now !

The Green Tent Company are the first company in the world to design and manufacture a stylish competitively priced range of tents that are made solely of one product. That product is... polyester.

As if to equal Leeds Festival's jarring emphasis of nonsense, they really do put a three dotted drumroll before telling us their green material is the same non-degradable oil product all the other tents are made of.

Should any of our tents, camping mats or sleeping bags be left behind after a festival ends they do not have to be sent to landfill, instead they can be sent for recycling

They can be sent for recycling. They do not have to be sent to landfill. But, in the main, they are.

A two person Green Tent is £12.99. A full kit of tent, two rollmats and two sleeping bags is £30. You can order online and pick up at the festival, encouraging the throwaway attitude. Why waste precious beer space with camping gear when for £15 each you can get it disposably at the festival, and do the same next year?

The wastefulness is seriously exacerbated - and any potential generosity one may feel toward the company dissolved - by the manufacturer's shoddy quality of work. Some of the material is not fit for repeated use (there's a reason other tents don't use polyester pegs), the rest of it is scrappy single-skin stuff that is barely showerproof. The makers acknowledge this when they boast

If our tents have been well looked after AND fully dried out before being packed away, they could be used SEVERAL times

My tent - reasonable quality, still going strong, and I assure you really not that well looked after - has been to at least 80 festivals.

Put another way, had I bought Green Tent Company tents instead, I would have sent fifty or so to landfill already, or to recycling if I could find where to do it.

How would the eventual landfilling of my solitary tent compare to the energy use and waste of making and recycling a hundred Green Tents? Let alone, as would be more likely, to landfilling a hundred of them?

swapping health care for death threats

2010-08-29T15:10:00.001+01:00

NHS Direct is the latest victim of the Tory cuts. The phone line was, itself, set up as a money-saver. People can ring up with minor ailments and speak to qualified nursing professionals so they don't use the more expensive 999 calls or A&E admissions. The plan is to replace it with a line staffed by people who've had 60 hours training. The opportunities for misdiagnosis - costing more money as well as misery - are vastly multiplied.

This is not like John Major's Cones Hotline that was trumpeted by government yet only handled a dozen calls a day (including pranks). NHS Direct receives nearly a million calls a month. Its abolition is just a further gratuitous dismantling of the NHS. The replacement system is still being piloted, yet they've decided to decided to roll it out nationally and permanently. Andrew Lansley has a novel definition of 'piloting'.

The new government's continual excuse for the cuts as essential cost-cuting is an outrageous decoy. Just as they're axing the Sustainable Development Commission even though it saves tens of times its cost, so they're claiming their NHS cuts all save money and improve efficiency.

They tell us they're cutting layers of NHS bureaucracy, such as abolishing Primary Care Trusts. Leaving aside the fact that the Tories invented the internal market of the NHS and fertilised the culture of outsourcing, the new government is actually bringing in a new layer of NHS bureaucracy in GP's fundholding. Indeed, it seems likely that the bureaucrats we sack from PCTs will be rehired by GPs (doctors are hardly going to do all their own accounting), but with all the added waste of bringing in a new system.

Beyond all these giant cogs and gears of Tory spending cuts, there is a simple test to apply to claims of necessary cuts. They cannot credibly talk of saving money by cutting waste and things that don't get used whilst they're planning to replace Trident.

These WMDs are so terrible that they cannot be used. Their effects would decimate populations and poison land far beyond the target, quite possibly affecting the UK.

Here's the deal; if your enemy knows you won't use a weapon, it is not any kind of a deterrent. Every penny of the tens of billions of pounds spent on them is a pointless waste. The cost of Trident replacement is commonly cited as £20bn - coincidentally the same amount the NHS has been ordered to cut between now and 2014 - though a Greenpeace report estimates £97bn over its 30 year lifespan.

You expect Tory papers like the Mail and Telegraph to toe the government line, but the supposedly impartial BBC and the lefty Guardian use the phrase 'nuclear deterrent' too. That is not neutral descriptive language, it is the militaristic opinion that nucelar weapons deter. Trident is not a nuclear deterrent, it is a nuclear weapons system.

Frankly, I can't see any defensive element to the British military. If we abolished our armed forces, who exactly would invade us? But certainly, long before we reach such issues, there is no credible argument for nuclear weapons. Those who say we should keep them talk of being 'left defenceless'. Take a look at what we've done in Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan lately, all without nukes. See how many mighty non-nuclear states around the world go about their business unattacked.

Farting around making what are, financially speaking, comparatively tiny cuts to services people actually use and rely on in order to have the cash to spend on something that will never be used would be laughable if it were just an idea. It means we take away quality of life for our citizens in order to pretend to threaten ugly death to citizens of other places.

The fact that such ideas are at the forefront of the minds of the people running the country is frankly terrifying, and makes you wonder with dread what they'll do next.

sharks, ice cream, methane and hot water bottles

2010-08-20T12:21:00.001+01:00

Analogy of the week has to go to Gary Younge in his piece about immigration and job losses.

Because two things are correlated does not mean one causes the other. Shark attacks and ice-cream sales both rise in the summer. They're linked by the season. But that doesn't mean ice-cream attracts sharks or people react to fear about shark attacks by eating more ice-cream.

This image outstrips another analogy that I found in the new issue of The Land. It's an obscure yet vital magazine. Produced by The Land Is Ours crew, it always gets into the fundamental cogs and gears of land ownership and use. Intelligent, thoughtful and informative, every issue has a number of things that make you want to read them out loud to people. I lifted their article Can Britain Feed Itself? for U-Know.

In the run-up to the Copenhagen Climate Blahblahblah, I pointed out that the Chinese and Indian use of measuring 'carbon intensity' rather than carbon emissions was a way of wriggling out of reducing emissions. The current issue of The Land has chewed the pencil and crunched the numbers. Check out these graphs.

Elsewhere there's a discussion about the climate impact of methane. It's a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, but it breaks down quicker. The convention is to measure a gas' potency over 100 years. At that level, methane is about 25 times stronger than CO2 [IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Chap 2, table 2.14]. Some people are arguing that we should pick a shorter term (over 20 years, it's 72 times stronger), as cuts in methane mean greater cuts in the immediate greenhouse effect.

Anyway, the silver medal analogy of the week comes in a piece about this. The Land's Simon Fairlie argues that the longer-term impact of CO2 is what actually makes it more important than methane, not less. He quotes a piece by Geoff Russell:

a tonne of methane contributes 100 times more warming during the first five years of its lifetime as a tonne of CO2, yet under current Kyoto rules, its comparative potency is set at 21. This is because the relative impacts of ALL greenhouse gases are averaged over the same period 100 years, regardless of their atmospheric lifetimes.

This is like applying a blow torch to your leg for 10 seconds but calculating its average temperature as just 48 degrees because that’s what it is when averaged over 20 minutes, with 20 minutes being used because that happens to be some agreed international standard when measuring heat sources applied to legs. The implication being, of course, that a blow torch for 10 seconds and a 48 degree hot water bottle for 20 minutes have the same effect.

Fairlie then runs with it.

The analogy is potentially illuminating, but it is misleading because the methane blowtorches and the CO2 hot water bottles aren't being applied to anything as sensitive as a leg, but are heating up the atmosphere, as in a room.

Also, it is incomplete because there isn't just one blowtorch and one hot water bottle, there are hundreds of them being brought into the room continuously. Although the blowtorches are individually intensely hot, they go out within a matter of seconds, whereas the hot water bottles keep piling up until their collective heat far outstrips that of the relatively few blowtorches that remain ignited at any one time.

At the point where the heat becomes unbearable, the obvious first course is to reduce the flow of blowtorches into the room. That will be the quickest way of reducing the temperature back to the level it was just before it became unbearable. Reducing the flow of hot water bottles will have comparatively little immediate effect.

But removing the blowtorches won't prevent the hot water bottles continuing to pile up until the heat becomes unbearable again; that will eventually happen even if the flow of blowtorches is completely stopped, and when it does happen it will be much harder to lower the temperature again.

In fact, the shorter lifetime of methane also speaks in its defence. In order to maintain the blowtorch heat, the blowtorches have to come into the room thick and fast. In other words, in order to maintain a given level of methane in the atmosphere we have to keep pumping out regularly otherwise the number of parts per million will fall away rapidly...

On the other hand, if humans stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, the burden of CO2 emitted in the 20th century would linger on for several generations.

This means that if the world decided to stabilise greenhouse gases at their current level, we would only need to reduce global methane output by 6.1 percent, but CO2 emissions by anything from 50 to 85 percent.

Any 'targeting' of methane to compensate for the manifest failure to reduce CO2 emissions... would be scapegoating methane to bale out CO2; or put another way, it would be extracting a subsidy from methane emitters for the benefit of fossil fuel users...

Whereas UK and US methane emissions comprise 8 and 9 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions respectively, India's methane emissions, two-thirds of which come from cows and rice, are reported to comprise 35 percent of her total. India, like most poor countries, burns far less fossil fuels per head than the USA or UK, and for many of her poor, a goat or a cow may represent almost the entirety of their greenhouse gas emissions.

Targeting methane emissions such as these to compensate for a failure to reduce CO2 emissions is another facet of the neo-colonialism that has pervaded international climate negotiations.

The Land. Go buy it.

kingsnorth: back from the dead?

2010-08-18T10:41:00.003+01:00

The latest in the line of anti-environmental actions from the ConDems is a spectacular U-turn on a central policy promise that, in opposition, they beat Labour round the head with.

David Cameron, 16 June 2008:

We’ll only get the big benefits of going green if we’re really ambitious and really change the way we do things. What I’m talking about is one of the most radical technological and social shifts for generations. I’m talking about reconfiguring our whole economy and overturning our whole hydrocarbon dependency...

So that’s why I can announce today that a Conservative Government will follow the Californian model, and implement an Emissions Performance Standard. This would mean the carbon emissions rate of all electricity generated in our country cannot be any higher than that generated in a modern gas plant. Such a standard would mean that a new generation of unabated coal power plants could not be built in this country.

That's clear, specific and unambiguous.

So, once elected, it was no surprise to see it in the main policy document The Coalition: Our Programme for Government, May 2010:

We will establish an emissions performance standard that will prevent coal-fired power stations being built unless they are equipped with sufficient carbon capture and storage to meet the emissions performance standard.

Again, that's clear, definite and unequivocal.

But three months on when it's time for action, we find out it's actually time to jettison the policy promise, 15 August 2010:

Now government sources confirm they will not be bringing forward legislation in the autumn and will instead spend the summer working on "the larger picture". They will open a consultation on the [Emissions Performance Standard] idea in the autumn with the results being presented to parliament as a white paper in the new year.

You can hear the beast of unabated coal stirring in its lair. See you in front of the bulldozers at Kingsnorth.

on this deity (slight return)

2010-08-06T18:09:00.001+01:00

Dorian Cope has relaunched her On This Deity site! I say now what I said when she did the beta version:

This is what I find most encouraging about the writing trades: they allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence.
- Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut observed a truth there that all of us who write recognise.

Dorian Cope, however, is one of those people who can do it without so much of the revision and editing, she can just lay it out off the top of her head. Look what happens when she's interrupted on her way somewhere by a randomer who asks her about the MC5.

Dorian is the wife of the indefatigable Julian Cope. As he releases an album more than once a year and has written a swathe of effervescent groundbreaking scholarly books on history and music, it must take a mighty intellect and a bold character to keep up with him at close quarters, let alone to encourage, inspire and criticise as he creates. Dorian does all that and more, so it's long past time that she started publishing stuff herself.

Her On This Deity site marks anniversaries of events in history. And not the history of kings and presidents but the other history, the history of dissent and rebellion. It's got the classic Cope mix of vision, fresh interpretation and an understanding of music as central cultural force and key part of radical history.

Each post is an illuminating piece, but there's a powerful composite message too. As we see that these events have gone on - every day, all around the world, year in year out for centuries - so we realise that the daring, imaginative, revolutionary perspective isn't a wacky sideshow or something reserved for mighty superheroes like Mandela, but that it's something that binds us in the millions and, most importantly, is as real and possible a force for change now as any time in the past.

poor people, poor health

2010-08-03T13:41:00.003+01:00

As the new government continues to shift the blame for poor health on to the unhealthy people - arguing that we should further stigmatise obese people as a matter of policy - a new report in the British Medical Journal studies the disparity in life expectancy between rich and poor.

By the year 2007 for every 100 people under the age of 65 dying in the best-off areas, 199 were dying in the poorest tenth of areas. This is the highest relative inequality recorded since at least 1921.

Elsewhere, Ben Goldacre says male life expectancy in Kentish Town is 70, whereas two miles away in rich Hampstead it's 80.

I know this because I have the Annual Public Health Report for Camden open on the table right now.

This phenomenal disparity in life expectancy – the difference between a lengthy and rich retirement, and a very truncated one indeed – is not because the people in Hampstead are careful to eat a handful of Brazil nuts every day, to make sure they’re not deficient in selenium, as per nutritionists’ advice.

And that’s the most sinister feature of the whole nutritionist project, graphically exemplified by [Gillian] McKeith: it’s a manifesto of rightwing individualism – you are what you eat, and people die young because they deserve it. They choose death, through ignorance and laziness, but you choose life, fresh fish, olive oil, and that’s why you’re healthy. You’re going to see 78. You deserve it. Not like them.

How can I be sure that this phenomenal difference in life expectancy between rich and poor isn’t due to the difference in diet? Because I’ve read the dietary intervention studies: when you intervene and make a huge effort to change people’s diets, and get them eating more fruit and veg, you find the benefits, where they are positive at all, are actually very modest. Nothing like 10 years.

It's worth pointing out that life expectancy is a good tool for measuring public health, but also something of a blunt one. The poor don't just die younger, they fall into ongoing disability much younger.

Fair Society, Healthy Lives was a government report into this issue, published in February.

people in England living in the poorest neighbourhoods will, on average, die seven years earlier than others living in the richest parts of Britain, the study finds.

Not only is life expectancy linked to social standing, but so is the time spent in good health: the average difference in "disability-free life expectancy" is now 17 years between those at the top and those at the bottom of the economic ladder, the report says.

Goldacre continues, attacking the unqualified media nutritionists like Gillian McKeith for focusing on freakshows rather than confronting the underlying causes of poor diet and poor health.

What prime-time TV series looks at food deserts created by giant supermarket chains, the very companies with which stellar media nutritionists so often have lucrative commercial contracts?

What show deals with social inequality driving health inequality? Where’s the human interest in prohibiting the promotion of bad foods; facilitating access to nutrient-rich foods with taxation; or maintaining a clear labelling system?

Where is the spectacle in “enabling environments” that naturally promote exercise, or urban planning that prioritises cyclists, pedestrians and public transport over the car? Or reducing the ever-increasing inequality between senior executive and shop-floor pay?

However, whilst he says it's a matter of asking 'where's the TV audience ratings?', we can also see Health Secretary Andrew Lansley sweeping free health care and food labelling aside as he and the other Tory ministers ask 'where's the shareholder dividends?'

gay immigrant benefit cheats in your bin

2010-07-27T11:39:00.003+01:00

In February I unpicked a Daily Express article about dawn raids to check bins with hefty fines for people who don't recycle (back on planet earth: there were no dawn raids nor any suggestion of any fines).

The Daily Mail fought back last week with a headline that surely comes from a spoof generator

Are the race Stasi rifling through YOUR bin?

What next? Asylum seekers make paedophile health and safety muslims?

Refuse collection is, it informs us, no longer about getting your rubbish and taking it away. It is now used for

an authoritarian mix of state intrusion and race-fixated social engineering.

The article delivers everything it promises. There are references to Nazi Germany, Soviet bloc authoritarianism, apartheid South Africa and 1984, all for powers that aren't going to be used to penalise anyone for anything.

Even the article concedes all that's going on is some councils have the right to search through rubbish in order to ascertain what kind of people live there so recycling campaigns can be targeted more effectively. You'll get better response explaining the recycling system in a household's first language.

Are they going to send any financial information they find to HM Revenue and Customs? Will they examine private letters for any potentially homophobic or racist content?

Er, no. Your article already told us they won't.

This is the best bin hysteria article since Grade-A cloaca Richard Littlejohn said wheelie bins were for wusses and old 70s-style binmen were

the kind of English yeomen you'd always want alongside you in a fight

making killing invisible

2010-07-23T13:03:00.002+01:00

I wrote yesterday's post about the decision not to charge Ian Tomlinson's attacker pretty soon after the news broke. Later in the day the Crown Prosecution Service published their reasons for not prosecuting

Basically, they weren't charging with Manslaughter because the dodgy first autopsy said death was from was natural causes, and this would be enough to cast doubt on the subsequent two autopsies that place the blame for the death on the assault. A charge of Assault has a time limit of six months, which has passed.

Their explanation for not charging with Actual Bodily Harm and/or Misconduct in Public Office is less clear. They say that they can't prove the officer's push caused any harm. But in this part they don't mention the baton strike - wholly unnecessary and disproportionate for a man walking slowly away with his hands in his pockets - which left patterned bruising. This, then, is surely ABH. It also appears to meet their stated criteria for Misconduct in Public Office.

Today, Dr Nat Cary, who carried out the second autopsy, said the same thing

The injuries were not relatively minor. He sustained quite a large area of bruising. Such injuries are consistent with a baton strike, which could amount to ABH. It's extraordinary. If that's not ABH I would like to know what is.

Even the Independent Police Complaints Commission had said there was enough evidence for a Manslaughter charge. Deciding which one of the conflicting versions is true is supposed to be one of the main reasons to have a trial. Sarah McSherry, a partner at Christian Khan Solicitors, said

The evidence they refer to ought to have been tested in open court in the context of a normal criminal prosecution as with any ordinary member of the public. The court would then have decided on which, if any, of the expert's oral evidence was more convincing. It would also have considered the pathologists' professional reputations.

This last line refers to Freddy Patel. He did the first autopsy, the one that the CPS says casts too much doubt on the other two autopsies. Patel has been officially reprimanded, suspended from carrying out any work for the Home Office, and is facing 26 further charges of sub-standard practices including incompetently carrying out four other autopsies, including questionably ascribing deaths to non-suspicious causes.

My friend David said yesterday,

My new parlour game is to dream up scenarios so extreme a cop would actually get charged with something. I'm thinking sawing off the Queen's head live on TV during her Christmas message wearing a shit-eating grin and a T-Shirt bearing the slogan 'I'm Guilty'. What do you reckon - I reckon its borderline.

I think this would definitely get a charge, though. The queen isn't an ordinary member of the public like Ian Tomlinson, Blair Peach, Liddle Towers, Christopher Alder or any of the other hundreds of people whose deaths at the hands of police have gone unprosecuted. It's all about hierarchy. Police are above us, the queen is above police.

Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur it is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.
- Derrick Jensen

So even when there's the clearest evidence of police violence for all to see, done in the middle of our biggest city in broad daylight on a busy day and clearly filmed, they have to find a way to make it be invisible.

The Birmingham Six were innocent people wrongly accused and convicted of an IRA bomb in the 1970s. They were severely beaten by prison officers and police, confessions and other evidence against them was fabricated, evidence that exonerated them was suppressed. They sued West Midlands Police but in 1980 the Master of the Rolls struck out their case, saying

If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous. That would mean that the Home Secretary would have either to recommend that they be pardoned or to remit the case to the Court of Appeal. That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, 'It cannot be right that these actions should go any further.'

In other words, we cannot bear to even think about the police acting in that way, so we deem it impossible.

Even though the Six's convictions were eventually quashed, no police or prison officers were ever convicted of the documented torture and lies that led to the convictions.

Protection of their power and position takes supreme precedence and makes a foul mockery of any claim to being agents of justice.

As Marc Vallee said, the Ian Tomlinson case teaches this fact to a new generation.

ian tomlinson's attacker walks free

2010-07-22T12:21:00.004+01:00

In April Sergeant Delroy Smellie, a cop who shoved and then batoned a non-violent G20 protester to the ground, was acquitted. At least that case came to court.

Today - five years to the day since the police shot Jean Charles De Menezes - we're told that the officer who attacked Ian Tomlinson won't face any charges. Not manslaughter, not ABH, not assault, nothing.

Watch the video again.

As with Sergeant Smellie, the officer who attacks Tomlinson is not in the heat of a riot but is acting in a calm, slow, premeditated way on a member of the public who poses no physical threat.

I wrote several posts about different aspects of the case at the time. The obscene partisan nature of the 'Independent' Police Complaints Commission, the way the police lied about what contact they'd had with Tomlinson, they lied about protesters trying to hinder gallant cops (when in fact protesters tried to help and cops refused to speak to ambulance services). They lied about Tomlinson dying of natural causes, they lied about there being no CCTV cameras, then had to admit there were but said they weren't working. There was even the suggestion from a senior investigating officer that Tomlinson's attacker might have been a member of the public dressed up as a copper.

It's the same treatment of smear and lies they gave the De Menezes case, and with the same outcome. The officers who did it keep their jobs, those in charge saw a job well done, only the public were beaten and killed.

It's the same story with the Blair Peach case. It's the same closing ranks and protecting their position that we see over and over, be it the Guildford Four or the Hillsborough Disaster.

What would they need in order to prosecute? There can be no clearer evidence of an unprovoked assault than the footage of what happened to Ian Tomlinson. Yet the officer is free, and ready to be policing London once more.

=============

UPDATE 15:02 : The Crown Prosecution Service have published a statement explaining their decision. Basically, the dodgy first autopsy said it was natural causes, and this would be enough to cast doubt on the subsequent two autopsies that place the blame for the death on the assault, so no manslaughter charges. Assault has a time limit of six months, which has passed.

Their explanation for Actual Bodily Harm and misconduct in Public Office is less clear. They say that they can't prove the push caused any harm. But in this part they don't mention the baton strike - wholly unnecessary and disproportionate for a man walking slowly away with his hands in his pockets - which they say earlier left bruising. This, then, is surely ABH. It also appears to meet their stated criteria for Misconduct in Public Office.

cutting responsibility, not costs

2010-07-21T14:02:00.003+01:00

We can learn a lot about the range and meaning of the colossal government spending cuts from the simple fact (as noted by Johann Hari) that the 'cuts tsar' is a total cloaca called John Browne, the man who was head of BP until he was forced to resign after lying in court.

These cuts are supposed to save money. Yet they're abolishing the Sustainable Development Commission, whose advice to government on issues like reducing carbon emissions saves several times what it costs.

Meanwhile, having reduced government income by giving oil companies tax breaks in the Budget, they're unleashing deep-water drilling off Shetland. What could possibly go wrong with that? I'm sure John Browne can tell you.

Cutting the SDC doesn't save money. It costs money, promotes oil and undermines the alternatives.

Two years ago Health Secretary Andrew Lansley was already saying that there was 'no excuse' for individuals being obese, yet traffic light labelling of food that made it easy to make informed choices should be abolished as it was 'nannying' people.

Now he's in power he's wielding the axe with wild abandon. Last week he waved his hand and abolished the Food Standards Agency (a body set up after the BSE crisis showed that government and the food industry were too close).

He's been forced to backtrack a bit on that one, but he continues to cut swathes of regulation that would improve public health. Martin Hickman lists a bunch of them, including this:

the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence published a plan to prevent 40,000 deaths from heart disease, calling for a ban on trans fats, no TV junk-food advertising before 9pm and restrictions on takeaways close to schools.

The British Heart Foundation, the Faculty of Public Health and the Royal College of Physicians supported those proposals. Yet the Department of Health rejected them outright on the day of publication, saying that people should just eat better and exercise more.

Britain has the highest rates of obesity in Europe. Apart from the quality of life issues, it costs the NHS a huge amount of money. So many of Lansley's cuts, as with abolishing the Sustainable Development Commission, will increase the cost to the public. So, again like the SDC, it's not cutting costs so much as cutting corporate regulation.

As Billy Bragg said, anyone who's ever found themselves in the fridge at midnight can tell you that self-regulation doesn't work. It's the failure of banking self-regulation that made the financial crisis that all the cuts are supposedly a response to.

George Monbiot's recent article talks about Lansley, and about the new self-regulation of farming overseen by a task force of farmers and corporate execs, whilst there is

no-one on the task force representing rural workers, and no-one outside the industry seeking to defend the landscape or the wider environment, water quality or animal welfare.

He goes on

Private Eye reveals this week that the government may scrap property developers’ obligations to provide social housing. This won’t save money or streamline the state, but it will allow developers to create enclaves for the rich and ghettos for the poor, ensuring that the UK becomes an even more divided society.

The plans to slash Housing Benefit thresholds from October 2011 mean that poor people will have to move to wherever's cheapest. As Polly Toynbee says,

What will be the net effect? A mass exodus of the poor, those in work as well as the unemployed, the disabled along with pensioners who form 20% of those on housing benefit – all abruptly ejected from their homes, forced to move to the lowest rent, poorest zones all over the country. This is social cleansing on an epic scale.

If the government expects private landlords to cut rents in response, a recent conference of landlords said demand is so high in the south-east – and anywhere with jobs – that they will re-let vacated properties easily.

Not only will ghettos of the poor grow, segregating society and local schools yet more sharply – but the poor will live in places that are cheap because there are no jobs, cementing in joblessness. The homeless will spill on to every city's streets

The financial cost - of emergency housing, poor health, increased crime - will be vast. The social cost, the impact on lives and wellbeing, will be incalculably huge.

The cuts have no sense of their real results and costs. This is not a measured brace of cutting waste, it is not even an array of money-saving schemes. It is a transfer of wealth and security away from the poor and the removal of responsibility from the corporate drive for ever expanding profit.

It is surely all too familiar to John Browne whose cutting of corners and ideological commitment to unregulated corporate activity led to the Gulf disaster.

Polly Toynbee again:

The whole fiendishly complex NHS has been wired for demolition without Lansley having answers to basic questions about where the debris falls. It's an experiment, a game, a folly on a grand scale.

He and his fellow ministers had years in opposition with a fortune for specialist advice – yet they arrive in office with last-minute sketchy plans to reorganise everything at a time of deeper cuts than ever tried in any western nation. Expect multiple train crashes.

glastonbury 2010

2010-07-14T12:26:00.004+01:00

Glastonbury was fabulously hot all week, which was regarded as unusual by those who've only been to recent ones, but for us old timers felt like a return to form. Feeling your brain melt like margarine and your consciousness ooze and slow to the languid pace and level that the elements demand, it was beautiful.

The heat lends itself well to that finest of Glastonbury activities, aimless bimbling. It's in the hours of wandering that you soak up the vibe of the crowd and see the bits of random incidental stuff that makes it so wonderful. The person playing a piano bike. A piano but with pedals underneath to propel the wheels, steered by turning in the seat. Why was it built? Where else could it possibly be utilised? Brilliantly baffling. It's that stuff that really makes the festival.

Because Glastonbury is done on such a colossal scale, they can really afford to fill it with a squillion little bits of fascinating stuff. This means that, more than any other festival, you could go and not see any of the acts whose names are listed in the poster and programme yet still have an amazing time.

That stuff is difficult to pin down in words, whereas describing the stuff you see on stages is a lot easier, so here we go.

Rolf Harris

When I was in a band back in neolithic times, we eschewed the idea of saving our best songs till last. Always open with a big crowd pleaser, it gets the audience right up straight away, and the vibe can readily be made to stay there. Last year's billing for Bjorn Again - and indeed 1993's for Rolf himself - is the same principle. It's a masterstroke to put a popular and silly act on to open the Pyramid stage on Friday morning.

Tens of thousands of people singing Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport to the tune of Land of Hope And Glory. Perfect.

Let's just ignore the, ahem, mounting evidence that Harris is somewhat fixated with autoerotic behaviour.

Femi Kuti

Not many people watched Rolf followed by Kuti, which isn't surprising. Can't really see them touring together or anything. The field pretty much emptied, and we were left with sunshine, space to dance and bright, hard, contagious, funky, bouncy afrobeat belting out. I genuinely thought I'd not see anything better all weekend.

Nouvelle Vague

And yet this airy, soft jazzy approach to new wave classics also sounded like it was made for this weather. The silliness of the covers fit so well into the festival mindset, but the music was genuinely sweet and balmy. And there was a funny frisson in thinking that I'd seen The Specials do Friday Night Saturday Morning at Glastonbury last year and then Nouvelle Vague do it this year.

Some of my team left as there was a rumour that the special guest on at The Park was

Thom Yorke

Imagine if Thom Yorke was playing in a field five minutes walk from where you're sat now, and that you could just nip over and catch it. What would you do? Yet it's a measure of the festival mindset that we stopped for food on the way.

The topography of the Park field meant you could only see if you were on shoulders, but that didn't really detract from the sense of A Special Moment when he played Karma Police and Fade Out.

The aching majestic sweep of the songs is now augmented by the fact that they've been in our bloodstreams for so very long. Truly special guests, Radiohead's music makes the vast majority of other music, even the good stuff, seem trite and stupid.

Broken Bells

These folks were on after Thom Yorke and I'd not even heard of them before but some of the gang said they'd be good, and indeed they were great, sort of like Air but with a strong sense of melody, rich and varied yet catchy and unpretentious. And, continuing the theme established by Nouvelle Vague and The Specials, Broken Bells did a cover of You Really Got A Hold On Me, which I saw Elvis Costello do at Glastonbury five years ago.

Devendra Banhart

Vivacious eccentric lifting pop, with a hilarious distressingly authentic cover of Tell It To My Heart inexplicably dropped into the set like an anvil on your head. That was mopped up by following it with Lover, one of my favourite songs of recent years, so cheeky and sexy, so effervescent and catchy.

But then it was time to miss the end and gallop if we were gonna be over at the Other Stage to see

The National

Introduced to this band by the impeccable taste of Zoe Goldfish, we followed their 2005 tour when the magnificent Alligator came out.

At Glastonbury it was mostly stuff from the last two albums that I'm much less familiar with, but that didn't matter. On record they have such a brooding, hunched over, mysterious quality, but live it's the power that comes forth. It's astonishing how a band can be so intelligent and literary feeling and yet rock so fucking hard, how they can swap brands of intensity so well.

Jerry Dammers' Spatial AKA Orchestra

Now this was something truly remarkable from the mastermind behind the Specials and 2 Tone. I'd heard good things about his recent stuff, and found it interesting that he refused to join the Specials reunion as he wanted to do something that moved music forwards.

An 18 piece orchestra, half of them brass section, the other half having upright bass, tympani, guitars and of course Jerry amidst an encircling tower of old school keyboards.

There is a very potent influence from Sun Ra here, as they came on in ancient Egyptian garb and a sizeable chunk of the set was Sun Ra covers. However, it didn't have the sprawl of much of Sun Ra's work, there was a tight, sharp reggae basis to it, fused with a snaring funky jazz edge.

There was a fabulous mash up of Sun Ra's Nuclear War and The Specials' Man At C&A, and a sweeping rework of Ghost Town (which, continuing the 'heard this here before' theme, I saw The Specials do last year). On came legendary Jamaican trombone player Rico, whose career has straddled the gap with him playing on the earliest reggae records as well as on 2 Tone classics (he even played on both versions of A Message To You Rudy).

A fabulous reggae reworking of Arthur Brown's Fire followed, with Brown himself coming on to sing the breakdown.

They closed with Sun Ra's Space Is The Place, leaving the stage one at a time, some bringing drums, then out into the audience leading a snaking column around the field all chanting 'space is the place, space is the place, space is the place'. An extraordinarily exhilarating visionary performance.

Quick nip over to Chapati Man for refuelling, which was opposite the Leftfield tent, popped in to catch the last four songs from

Billy Bragg

I Keep Faith is a song close to my heart, a tender affirming song of consolation.

As always, his between song talks were almost as good as the music. He talked of how faith is a loaded word with the heightened religious presence in society, but it's not that kind of faith he's talking about in I Keep Faith. It's the kind of faith you have in the people around you, the faith that makes you believe in their ability and resilience even when they doubt themselves, the kind of faith that lets you know that, if it came to it, the people behind you here in the dark who you've never met would be on your side.

He'd been curating the whole Leftfield thing, and talks about it and its place in Glastonbury here. His prime point has been that the word socialism may be being treated as anachronistic but when he says it he means a socialism that's just organised compassion. We need a compassionate society, that means free health care, free education, decent pensions, affordable housing. Call it socialism, call it what you like, it's the compassionate society as opposed to the exploitative rule of the rich.

Then in an abrupt headstate change it was time to zoom out of that and back to West Holts for

George Clinton

Clinton once said 'a good show starts in the dressing room and work its way to the stage', and it's easy to believe he still works that way. A rolling, rollicking deeply funky party flooded the stage and the field, tunes morphing and seguing into one another. Shit! Goddamn! Get off your ass and jam!

They ran right up to curfew, then after a couple of minutes came back out and played more even though the sound system wasn't on for them and after ten minutes the plugs were pulled on stage. It wouldn't surprise me if they were still funking in the dressing room to this day.

Climate Camp's Tripod Stage

The Tripod Stage field is tucked away near the edge of the site, and that was all to its benefit I think. It meant that Climate Campers could take the time to talk to people who came in, and several times I saw people who've only been media spectators of climate activism make the change and decide to get involved.

They were dishing out copies of the sharp, smart Never Mind The Bankers freesheet that I had a small hand in writing, and also putting on some fine performances from musicians and ranters including Robin Ince, Attila The Stockbroker and Get Cape Wear Cape Fly.

On Sunday afternoon I did another set there with a poetry team including Claire Fauset and Danny Chivers, so missed out on seeing the glorious Staff Benda Bilili whose music was just made for hot happy afternoons like that.

Still, did get to see

Tunng

Pretty, quirky, like a wheel of intelligent folk with a flat tyre so just as you get the feel of where it's going it goes ker-chunk and bumps you somewhere totally different. Challenging, absorbing, incredibly internal music, dreams made into sound. Which makes them unlikely candidates for joyous singalongs in the sunshine, but it was beautiful and it worked. I clapped so hard I spilt my toffee-apple flavour cider.

Stevie Wonder

The reviews of the recent tour said he kept getting distracted into noodly instrumentals that burst any bubble that the cool stuff developed. So I went along thinking, well, we'll see. It might still be good. And it was off the top end of the scale.

A tight funkily soulful band, plenty of groove and a hefty punch, Stevie being really funny and warm but with a strong righteous political edge, and all the hits I could have hoped for and beyond.

We were bound to get Superstition, Living For The City, Master Blaster, For Once In My Life, Sir Duke and Signed Sealed Delivered, but I hadn't really expected some personal favourites like We Can Work It Out, If You Really Loved Me or Fingertips. He was buoyant on the music, vibrant and witty and it just lifted the whole field high.

(Incidentally, heard McCartney do We Can Work It Out on the same stage in 2004, that's one more for the repeated songs list, sheesh.)

We'll rapidly gloss over the fact that he did I Just Call To Say I Love You and focus on the set closer, Happy Birthday reworked to reference Glastonbury's 40th year, sung arm in arm with Michael Eavis, Stevie delivering like one of the great soul singers of all time and Eavis singing like a septuagenarian dairy farmer.

Sunday is always great at Glastonbury, the outside world has stopped seeming real. You can remember life outside the way you can remember childhood holidays, yes it was your life but it's a very different world now and that old stuff's not really real any more.

Away from the bands, Arcadia was a bit nuts to get into with the post-big stages crush, but the grand mechanical spooky spider thing with a massive sound system would be graced every night by a full-on fireshow in addition to a huge load of sensory candy for the folks that want it banging out.

Shangri-La is, as I said last year, as baffling, uneasy, and tip-your-scales as you could wish for (or wish not for, depending on your pharmacological intake).

And, as ever, few things in life can beat sitting up till dawn in the stone circle, the joyous swirl of this epic expanse of revelry all around you. Glastonbury is pretty much my idea of utopia.

de burgh invokes satan, amasses weapons

2010-07-06T17:23:00.003+01:00

Chris De Burgh is enacting further preparatory works for our takeover by totalitarian shapeshifting lizards.

He has been in Dorset in order to assemble a concept album based on J Meade Falkner's novel Moonfleet.

For those unfamiliar, the novel is a tale of smuggling, that is to say, of moving things around in a manner that isn't obvious in order to hoodwink the unwary masses. The plot features a code that leads to the truth - as do De Burgh's lyrics - and it features an important peripheral character, Krispijn Aldobrand, who - like De Burgh - uses lies to cheat the masses out of their rightful status.

Needing to assume elements of all major powers on earth, De Burgh has garnered official rank in the UN and a claim to royal lineage. To complete this, it was no surprise to see him assuming religious quasi-messianic roles. Indeed, one of his earliest songs - from the era Jim Bliss alleges to be 'quite good' - is A Spaceman Came Travelling, which aligns the nativity with the coming of alien overlords.

Clearly he taunts us with such thinly veiled declarations of the Lizardly plans, and this use of code is akin to Blackbeard's written code of biblical references in Moonfleet.

Now De Burgh is taking it a step further and personally getting active about his position in church. On his recent Dorset trip

He wanted to film in All Saints’ graveyard because of its connection to the book.

He was singing different sections of Psalms that appear in the book as part of a smugglers’ code.

Putting himself at the centre of focus in a church, singing bits of the Old Testament.

If that doesn't instantly make your mind conjure images of violence, repression and ominous foreboding then you are truly blind to what approaches. He beckons forth the dark lords.

We have, of course, previously seen the relevance of the Old Testament to De Burgh. But on his recent Dorset visit, we're told he gathered his footsoldiers around him.

Lifelong Chris de Burgh fans David and Meryl James, of Heathwood Road, Westham, met their musical hero while he was filming in Wyke Regis.

Retired underwater weapons technician Mr James, 65, said: "He was a very nice, approachable man"

A lifetime's experience of underwater weapons?

Add this to the fact that his daughter was Dublin County under-9s javelin champion and we see a terrifying arsenal being stockpiled and readied.

The countdown has clearly begun. We might only have hours left.

more cruelty from the millionaires

2010-07-01T11:35:00.000+01:00

The government says:

- There are 2.47 million people unemployed.

- The recent budget will cause the loss of a further 1.3 million jobs.

- There are 2.6 million people on Incapacity Benefit. The government's new stringent tests are recategorising 68% of them as fit to work. This will add 1.77 million to the unemployed.

Add these three groups together and we're looking at 5.54 million people unemployed.

There are less than half a million job vacancies.

That's more than eleven people per job available.

Also included in the budget is a 10% cut in Housing Benefit for people who have been on Job Seekers Allowance for a year.

This will lead to evictions, which means moving people into temporary accommodation. The other reforms to benefits may well save money, but this one is likely to be far more expensive for the state than the 10% of housing benefit saved. It is simply punitive.

That's just the money side, before we consider the effects on people's families and mental health as they're made homeless because they can't find jobs that don't exist.

free gaza

2010-06-07T15:25:00.001+01:00

Two members of the Free Gaza flotilla speaking in London, Saturday 5th June 2010.

Respect for human rights and international law is not a policy decision, it's not a choice to be made in number 10. It's an obligation.
- Ewa Jasiewicz

What we went through on those boats and in prison was not one percent of the Palestinian experience, not one percent. The difference is we have governments that can represent us, we need to force the governments to act.
- Alex Harrison

The Free Gaza Movement

Palestine Solidarity Campaign

punish the poor

2010-06-03T23:17:00.002+01:00

Cutmeister General David Laws got shoved out of office after being caught fraudulently claiming £40,000 in expenses, but there is far more hypocrisy and cruelty involved in the plans of those who plan public finances.

The coalition intends to extend and expand Labour's punitive approach to benefit claimant. It is largely an exercise in blaming the victim, meanwhile tax evaders - who cost the exchequer far, far more - are left relatively unhindered.

I've written a new Feature article about it for U-Know called Punish The Poor.

one laws for them, another for us

2010-05-29T17:30:00.002+01:00

The Treasury Chief Secretary, LibDem David Laws, has been outed by his parliamentary expenses. He claimed over £40,000 rent for a second home when it was in fact his gay partner's place that he lived at.

He says

My motivation throughout has not been to maximise profit but to simply protect our privacy and my wish not to reveal my sexuality.

Now, it's a shame if he felt he couldn't be open about his sexual orientation. Had some LGBT not stood up years ago and taken flak we could not have reached today's greatly improved levels of equality. Also, after more than a decade of openly gay Cabinet members being dealt with for their politics rather than their sexuality, nobody thinks it's a big deal. But regardless of all that, coming out is a personal choice and nobody should feel in any way obliged or pressured to do it.

However, had David Laws not claimed for that flat, nobody would have known about his sexuality. A great many MPs haven't claimed for second homes. Some of them have chosen that for honourable reasons, perhaps some others did it to hide secrets. Whatever, it certainly hasn't ended up with us thinking they're all gay.

So as an excuse it's so pathetically flimsy that it's simply implausible. The use of the desire to remain in the closet is a decoy, a device to extract sympathy for what was actually a millionaire defrauding us.

In the furious fire of the expenses scandal last year, every MP must have thought long and hard about their claims and checked whether they matched the letter of the law. Laws tries to wriggle out of his breach, saying he thinks he was inside the rules as his partner was not really a partner.

At no point did I consider myself to be in breach of the rules which in 2009 defined partner as "one of a couple ... who although not married to each-other or civil partners are living together and treat each-other as spouses".

Although we were living together we did not treat each other as spouses - for example we do not share bank accounts and indeed have separate social lives.

Laws has been seeing his partner for nine years, living with him when in London, and has remortgaged his other house to lend his partner money. Would you do this with someone and not think they wouldn't get counted as your partner? Me neither.

Looking at the response to it all, I have to wonder why he's getting robust support from prominent LibDems calling him 'Mr Integrity' and a smidgen of it - and certainly no criticism - from David Cameron.

A couple on Job Seeker's Allowance get £28 a week less than two single people living together. If I lived with my gay partner but chose to register as two single people in order to keep my sexuality private then, like Mr Laws, I'd pocket a load of government money I wasn't entitled to.

If I did it to the tune of £40,000 (whilst advocating slashing benefits for the sick and poor), would I get called Mr Integrity and have Cameron thinking I'm a good guy?

minus the ads

2010-05-27T23:48:00.000+01:00

The internet is a loud and busy enough place as it is, even before we consider the intrusive adverts. Just like the way TV adverts are louder than the programmes, so online ads are more garish and flickery than the pages they're hosted on.

Most people claim not to notice internet ads. But then, most people claim to be immune to advertising.

There is a way to remove adverts from the sites you look at. It's very quick and foolproof. It's also free and there's no catch.

First, stop using Internet Explorer and switch to Firefox. It does everything IE does that's any good and more besides, and it's opensource so isn't made by sending all your money to Bill Gates. You can download it free here.

Secondly, install the AdBlock plugin. Alice walks you through how to do it here.

You'll notice a clearer mindset when going online. But more vividly, you'll be amazed what going on other people's computers looks like; a riot of garish consumerist propaganda, especially when they're on things like Youtube and Facebook. You'll then keep asking people if they mind you installing AdBlock on their machines. And then they'll thank you for it.

music is an amazing thing

2010-05-20T01:56:00.000+01:00

"Music is an amazing thing. It doesn’t exist as a stationary object. It moves in real time and can be uplifting both to the player and the listener. The melting, trans-figurative moment, that feeling of everything being there, just for an instant, that surrender that overcomes us as players (if we’re good enough) and leads us on to the next pregnant second, patient in the knowledge that there always is, waiting in the wings, the next chance to feel this fullness and celebrate it (as it is only in the nature of art to produce it this way); to this we dedicate our lives. But it is not for us alone; it is also made for you, the listener, to feel these same feelings along with us, to participate and to also be uplifted by it."

- Keith Jarrett, 2010

tom robinson: glad to be grey

2010-05-16T12:43:00.002+01:00

I recently launched a site devoted to Tom Robinson's pioneering protest song Glad To Be Gay, which made me dig out his debut album Power In The Darkness. With its crackling anger at a chaotic society of rising industrial unrest and insecurity amidst repressive government and the far right shouting loud and clear, it's uncannily appropriate for 2010.

It seems I've timed it well for a rekindling of interest in Robinson's stuff. New Statesman recently listed the top 20 political songs and there, among Strange Fruit, This Land Is Your Land and the Internationale, is Glad To Be Gay. Next month Richard Thompson's curating a Meltdown in London, and for his Evening of Political Song he's invited Tom to play.

That guest spot at Meltdown is something of a rarity. In recent years, as his career as a broadcaster and standard bearer for new music on BBC 6Music has taken off, Robinson's touring schedule has evaporated. So it's a real treat to find out that he's performing a one-off concert at Shepherd's Bush Empire in London on his 60th birthday, 1st June.

There'll be an extensive set from Tom and band taking in the full sweep of his career, with assorted guests like TV Smith. As he hurtles towards retirement age he's called the gig - what else? - Glad To Be Grey.

It's more than a pun on the signs of ageing, though. In the mid 90s he often used to say before playing Glad To Be Gay, 'in the black and white world of sexuality, I'm glad to be grey'.

Tickets are £15. You can get them online via the gig's site. If you go in person to any O2 Academy box office and pay cash, you get them without any of the ripoff booking fees.

There'll be support from several of the bands he's championed on 6Music, Chew Lips, Little Comets, Eugene McGuinness and Cosmo Jarvis. The whole shebang'll be hosted by Steve Lamacq.

There are more details to come, and they'll be put on the Glad To Be Grey site, which, even if you're not going to the gig, is worth a visit to see the video of him talking you through how to play 2-4-6-8 Motorway.

opening the cabinet

2010-05-14T11:43:00.003+01:00

More importantly than anything else, we are going to form a new kind of government; I hope this is the start of a new kind of politics I have always believed in. Diverse, plural, where politicians with different points of view find a way to work together
- Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Ministerial acceptance speech, 11 May 2010

At least nineteen of the 28 listed Cabinet members are millionaires. Two thirds of them are privately educated, including three old Etonians and three who went to Westminster.

A year ago David Cameron pledged

by the end of our first Parliament I want a third of all my ministers to be female

There'll have to be a serious reshuffle then, as the new Cabinet is just 14% women.

The only non-white member says it's 'humbling' to be in the Cabinet. Not surprising, given how humble a position she's got - Minister Without Portfolio, Tory party chair, making the tea and passing the biscuits.

For the first time in well over a decade, there are no openly gay Cabinet members.

Diverse, plural

But enough of who's not there, who's actually in?

The Lib Dem cabinet members are overwhelmingly from the Orange Book, a collection of writings from powerful Lib Dem top brass, setting out a concerted rightward lurch for the party, basically doing to them what the Blairites did to Labour, moving public services to private hands.

politicians with different points of view

Tom Lehrer said that satire died the moment Henry Kissinger was given the Nobel Peace Prize. This side of the Atlantic we just got our version of that. There seems to have been some extensive irony going on in choosing who does what in the new Cabinet. Many of them have beliefs and history that makes them totally unfit for their given post.

Oliver Letwin - Minister for Policy

After the banks led us into a financial crisis, who do we want to be in charge as Minister of Policy? How about a guy who has spent years being a director of NM Rothschild, one of the world's biggest investment banks, and indeed still holds such a position?

As long as that 'national interest' they're telling us about is the same thing as the interests of enormous global financial conglomerates, we'll be fine.

Theresa May - Home Secretary and Minister for Equalities

By tacking the Equalities brief on to the far more weighty Home Secretary, they're essentially sidelining it. And no wonder. The Tory record on equality is appalling. Right through the Labour years they opposed almost every effort to advance LGBT equality.

This post was going to be Chris Grayling's until he disgraced himself during the election campaign by saying that B&B owners should be able to refuse customers on grounds of sexual orientation.

But Theresa May's record on equality is also barbarous. She consistently voted against gay rights, wanting to retain clause 28, ban gay adoption and keep the unequal age of consent. She's still been a homophobe at the most recent opportunity, 2008's vote to say IVF treatment should have a male role model (so lesbians and single women are unworthy of parenthood).

Ken Clarke - Justice

And in case it wasn't ironic enough making a proven long-term bigot into Equalities Minister, we get this guy.

He's personally trousered millions as a board member of British American Tobacco. A major player in perhaps the only industry whose products kill customers when used properly, BAT is responsible for over five million deaths a year.

BAT has been criticised by Christian Aid for its treatment of tobacco farmers. But its record on this, and documents indicating their involvement in smuggling their products, have been glossed over by their king of Corporate Social Responsibility - Ken Clarke.

Ten years ago Vietnam, where all cigarette sales were state produced and controlled, had a large black market in Western cigarettes. Ken Clarke had plainly said that BAT acts to ensure 'that our brands will be available alongside those of our competitors in the smuggled as well as the legitimate market'.

The Vietnamese government stepped up its customs activities and stemmed the flow of contraband tobacco, cutting demand. The tobacco barons supplying that black market weren't at all pleased. Vietnamese customs officers were murdered, and in June 2001 Mr Justice himself Ken Clarke went in to negotiate with the government. Within weeks they'd agreed to let BAT open the first private tobacco factory in the country.

William Hague - Foreign Secretary

William Hague is one of the legion of unelectable twitchy right armed slapheads the Tory membership chose as leader, until the party's selection process was de-democratised and they installed a post-Blair leader in the shape of Cameron.

Hague - our representative to the other nations of the world - is notoriously hostile to the EU as a concept and an entity.

Leading the Tories to their crushing 2001 election defeat he criticised Labour as 'a government that holds Britishness cheap' and foresaw the Tories getting new votes from 'good, patriotic people who may be lifelong supporters of another party but who are not willing to watch their country being handed away.'

Andrew Lansley - Health

I've written about this guy before. He wants to remove 'traffic light' labelling of food, as giving people information about how healthy things are is 'nannying' them (ie discouraging them from buying the higher-profit junk food). He then said there's no excuse for people being overweight (even though he is).

Watch the Tories try to cut health spending on things they deem to be your own fault.

Why is obesity and tobacco addiction my own fault, yet when smug fucks go round being Tory in public, it's not their own fault that reasonable people slam their heads into walls? Inconsistency or what?

Chris Huhne - Energy and Climate Change

This one went to the Lib Dems. Chris Huhne is another Orange Book freemarketeer. I've written about Huhne before too:

He got a first from Oxford in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He made his millions as a City economist, then he became an economics journalist before he moved into politics. His time as an MEP was spent on the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee. Once he became an MP, he was the LibDems Treasury spokesperson. His wife was Chief Economist at the Department of Trade and Industry.

The man's an economist to the marrow, a believer in the free market above all. His deliberately crooked logic when challenged shows his adherence to the goodness of the market is faith rather than reason.

He is, then, no different from David Cameron, Gordon Brown or Melanie Phillips. They use the language of concern to distract and delay proper response to climate change because they have an over-riding need to help rich institutions get even richer.

The creatures outside looked from Clegg to Cameron, and from Cameron to Clegg, and from Clegg to Cameron again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
– George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945)

whoever gets in, the tories get in

2010-05-11T17:34:00.002+01:00

It's not just a hung parliament, but an incredibly precariously hung parliament - I'm fighting the temptation to say 'well hung parliament' as nobody needs to graphically imagine Cameron and Clegg gleefully swordfighting with their cocks - and no simple deal except a Tory-LibDem coalition can win a majority.

Any party in government will still be a long way from where we could and should be. There will still be racist immigration policy, no serious climate policy, and an over-riding commitment to accelerating the great engine of our destruction, economic growth. This is before we consider the inherent problem of the nation state that, like any centralised authority, seeks to defend its own power at whatever cost before it would even consider acting in anyone else's interest.

So, in wider terms, in what we can imagine and what we're capable of and what we actually need to do to ensure a long-term just society, there is barely enough room to put a cigarette paper between the parties. But, as Johann Hari says, that cigarette paper is big enough to make a pretty fat roll-up. Certainly, the Conservatives are demonstrably further away from a fair world and would put more obstacles in the path that goes towards it.

Nobody can pretend having the Tories in power would be no different to the others. Their commitment to the rich far exceeds Labour's, and the policies Labour instituted to give a trickle of wealth from rich to poor would be reversed.

Choosing the lesser of two evils isn't a bad thing. The cliche makes it sound bad, but it's a good thing. You get less evil.
- Noam Chomsky

But still, I am scared that a Labour-Liberal coalition would actually give us the most rampant Conservative government. Alistair Darling admitted pre-election that the cuts we'll see in the coming years will be worse than anything Thatcher ever did.

So whoever's in power next will have to slash public services, raise unemployment, and generally make themselves deeply unpopular. Because a Labour-LibDem coalition needs other parties to make up a majority, they will have to make serious concessions to non-English nationalists. Top of their list will be lighter cuts for their particular nation.

The Tories will be shouting from the sidelines that they wouldn't do anything so bad, and that this is what we get for having a Frankenstein coalition government. This tension - amongst others - pulls the coalition apart, we have another general election in a few months time, the Tories get in with an actual majority and we have five years of full-throttle Tory rule.

Whereas if the Tories get in now with the LibDems, they take all the flak for the cuts, Labour regroup and get a shiny new leader, people somehow think this is not the same people that cleared the path for the neoliberal excesses that caused the recession, nor the people who waged the Iraq war, and when the Tory-LibDem coalition comes apart then there's a general election and the Tories are booted out.

It's kind of like a social vaccination, a little dose to make us generate the antibodies, a booster as we've not had Tories for 13 years and our immunity has diminished.

Cameron goes out on his arse, and (just like the BNP appear poised to do) the grassroots of the party say this experiment with a moderate leader and slick PR front was a failure and they fly their vicious true colours again, alienating themselves from the great mass of people. It'll be like they'd just carried on with Iain Duncan-Smith as leader. The fact that you can't really remember him proves my point.

Then again, all this banks on the Tory-LibDem coalition collapsing fairly quickly, even though it has a bite-size majority that could lurch on for quite some time. It also has the Tories steering the first, most savage cuts that set the direction and momentum for future ones.

It also presumes that Labour, or at least Labour-LibDem, would win a snap election. The Tories might win it instead. They might even do so having called it before we've had chance to have that promised referendum on a new voting system.

So, whoever the LibDems get into bed with, we still have the shadow of Tory rule over us for a long time to come.

gay men are still sex offenders

2010-05-09T19:41:00.001+01:00

In all the election kerfuffle I forgot to put a notice here about a new article I've published.

Even though gay sex is fully legalised in the UK, men who were convicted of it are still recorded as sex offenders. A gay man who had a confession beaten out of him 50 years ago is still prevented from doing volunteer work with children or vulnerable adults.

Tens of thousands of men's lives are impeded like this, losing job prospects and living with the threat of vigilante violence. The state has deleted some records when individually applied for, but it cannot be fair that we can apologise for persecuting gay men yet refuse to erase their convictions as a matter of course.

I've just published an article about it on U-Know, Gay Men are Still Sex Offenders

every day's election day

2010-05-06T11:43:00.001+01:00

For anyone who thinks that a general election is democracy:

And for anyone who'll be staying up tonight to watch the results come in:

bnp in 'bullshitting again' shock

2010-05-04T12:41:00.002+01:00

It was pretty mad that UKIP used Churchill on their leaflet for the European elections last year. But not as mad as the BNP putting Nick Griffin next to Churchill on their new leaflet.

Not that they're a hate-based party or anything, no. I mean, who isn't motivated to vote out of a desire to 'get even'?

I've recently had the singular pleasure of seeing the latest copy of the BNP's quarterly magazine Hope And Glory. I know, I know, insert your own barrely-fishy-firearmsy metaphor here.

First up, their slogan for the general election.

In the late 1980s, following Tina Turner's hit single Simply The Best, a significant percentage of small businesses in Britain (and I'm more than willing to bet this was true for the USA too) used 'simply the best' as their slogan.

Lifting someone else's slogan is pathetically unimaginative. It says you've no idea about your own identity and no imagination. And that's true even without it being as vacuous as 'simply the best'. As a practice, it's as bad as the unfunny, desperate, can-we-end-the-meeting-please organisations that agree to call themselves 'The ----- With No Name'.

So, how could the BNP beat their anti-immigration leaflets last year using images of Polish pilots defending Britain in WW2, and foreigners from stock-image sites as the hard-working British taxpayers?

How about an act that involves displaying a lack of identity and importing ideas from a black foreigner?

The magazine itself is, of course, filled with bile and twaddle. Stuff about European Human Rights being 'Islamo-Marxist'. (That's the same European Convention on Human Rights that Churchill signed us into).

One thing did catch my eye though. They have the text of a speech Griffin made to the European parliament. He says that belief in human-caused climate change is

a refusal to accept scientific reality. According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 percent, since 2007.

He goes on to say this means human-induced climate change isn't happening and it is, in point of fact,

the most expensive Big Lie in human history

Elsewhere, he says we should pay people of recent foreign descent fifty grand each to leave Britain. In case this isn't offensive enough, he makes an exception for Irish people because he regards them as British. We can, he says, pay for this by stopping our spending on climate change measures.

Back on their election leaflet, they say they'll raise pensions by ending spending on adaptation measures for 'non existent Climate Change'.

Now I don't expect his opinions on climate change to make any more sense than the rest of his lip-diddly fuckwittery. You'd need to be almost as much of an cockwad as Griffin himself to start looking for evidence-based thinking in the BNP.

But still, that Arctic ice figure he cited is very specific, and the US National Snow and Ice Data Center is a body to trust. So what's the score?

Stick that figure into Google and you hit denialist blogs saying what Griffin says and that

most of the Northern Hemisphere is much colder this winter than it's been in decades - and the Southern Hemisphere is cooler, too.

Even though the truth is that

The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for January 2010 was 0.60°C (1.08°F) above the 20th century average of 12.0°C (53.6°F). This is the fourth warmest January on record.

So, what do the US National Snow and Ice Data Center actually say about the Arctic ice?

At the end of the Arctic summer, more ice cover remained this year than during the previous record-setting low years of 2007 and 2008. However, sea ice has not recovered to previous levels. September sea ice extent was the third lowest since the start of satellite records in 1979, and the past five years have seen the five lowest ice extents in the satellite record

As the Met Office explained

Global warming does not mean that each year will be warmer than the last. Natural phenomena will mean that some years will be much warmer and others cooler.

You only need to look at 1998 to see a record-breaking warm year caused by a very strong El Nino. In the last couple of years, the underlying warming is partially masked caused by a strong La Nina. Despite this, 11 of the last 13 years were the warmest ever recorded.

another place, another face

2010-05-02T16:45:00.002+01:00

Gordon Brown calling a bigot a bigot got him labelled as a hypocrite, someone who'll pretend to like what the voter likes when really he thinks something else. Maybe he's been coached by a certain Conservative candidate.

Several years ago I wrote about Another Place, Antony Gormley's installation of lifesize iron statues on Crosby beach in north Liverpool. It's a beautiful, evocative and unpretentious piece of public art.

It's become an iconic image for the area, and indeed the whole city.

The statues stand in the constituency of Sefton Central. The website of their Conservative candidate, the TV shopping channel presenter Debi Jones, has a picture of the statues as the banner on her home page.

Up till now, as her website makes clear, Jones has been a councillor in the area. In that capacity she was one of the most vociferous campaigners - there wasn't much competition - against the Gormley statues as, apparently, they might be a danger to shipping, or people might run out to the further ones and drown. Her old website contained allegations that the mainstream media were deliberately ignoring stories of the dangers.

It would have been merely funny. But Jones who, like the Gormley statues, has a haunting and almost human appearance, got herself on to the Planning Committee of Sefton council and tabled a successful motion to get the statues removed.

After the ensuing outcry and concerted campaign, five months later Jones was moved from the planning committee and within a week they'd voted to keep the statues.

Four years on, everyone loves them and they're part of the cultural and physical landscape, part of the area's identity. So Jones, the statues' greatest opponent, uses their image to cosy up to your vote. If only she'd cosy up to an actual statue with an incoming tide.

munt for wells

2010-04-30T15:56:00.002+01:00

The Liberal Democrats, like the other parties, produce a standard format poster for their candidates. It's an orange or yellowy square on end, like a Baby On Board car sign, or an Australian road warning.

Dunno about you, but I'd rather see a camel as prime minister with a cabinet of kangaroos and wombats than have the LibDems in power.

Anyway, they usually plump for having the candidate's surname emblazoned across the middle.

But they've made a solitary killjoy exception, opting to use the forename of their candidate for Wells in Somerset, a certain Tessa Munt.

Just imagine. These posters could have been soooo much better. Miserable buggers.

meet the new cops, same as the old cops

2010-04-28T02:10:00.002+01:00

The Metropolitan Police have released papers from their investigation into the death of Blair Peach.

Peach died in April 1979 after being hit on the head by a police officer during a counter-demonstration against the National Front, the forerunner of the BNP.

After a large number of witnesses said they'd seen Peach hit by an officer from a specific Special Patrol Group riot van, all six officers concerned had their lockers searched. Assorted coshes and other illegal weapons were found, along with Nazi regalia.

The police had an internal inquiry, and the officers under investigation lied, then stopped answering questions at all. Don't take my word for it. The newly released Cass report talks of the 'easily recognisable lies', and says of the officers' version of events

It would be impossible for all three to have come by the same story innocently. All must have conspired to pervert the course of justice in this manner.

The report ended with a recommendation to prosecute three officers for conspiring to pervert the course of justice and obstruction of police. No charges were brought against any of them, for that or for the killing itself.

Ask yourself - if it finally came to light that you and a group of five friends had stockpiled weapons and killed someone 30 years ago, what do you think would happen next? Answers on the back of a police pension slip to the usual address.

The Guardian's coverage of the Peach papers tells us about the present head of the Met, Sir Paul Stephenson, and his comparison with the death of Ian Tomlinson.

He said that, 31 years on, the Met was a "completely different" force, citing what he said were rigorous inquiries following the death of Tomlinson at last year's G20 protests.

Stephenson might say it's changed, but the facts say otherwise.

The police said Ian Tomlinson hadn't had any contact with the police before he collapsed. They said their medics had attended to Tomlinson, under a hail of bottles and missiles. Video shows none of this is true, and in fact protesters called an ambulance but officers refused to talk to the ambulance service.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission, working alongside the police, said they'd looked at 'many hours' of CCTV, but sadly there was no CCTV in the area of Tomlinson's assault. When it became apparent to anyone who could look up that there were at least eight cameras covering the area, they said there are cameras after all but they just weren't working. We're supposed to believe that, even though they were at the centre of an area for which the police had spent weeks setting up a control room to monitor the CCTV feeds and put over a hundred officers in to monitor footage.

The post-mortem by a police pathologist - just one, not Forensic Pathology Services, the body of nine independent forensic pathologists which usually deals with suspicious deaths in London - quickly said that Tomlinson had died of a heart attack. This was untrue, as a later post-mortem proved.

There's a similar litany with Jean Charles de Menezes. As with Ian Tomlison, crucial CCTV cameras 'weren't working'. But we now know that, despite what police said, he did not jump the barrier at Stockwell tube and run to the train, the police did not identify themselves as armed police, and de Menezes did not move towards them.

The claims were part of an attempt to evade responsibility for killing someone, just like they did with Ian Tomlinson. Just like a 'completely different' force did with Blair Peach.

national carbon calculator

2010-04-25T17:34:00.007+01:00

When not being a freeroving performance poet or a raging nuisance to carbon-criminals, the estimable Danny Chivers is a proper pencil-chewing carbon footprinter. He wades through impenetrably dull technical reports and unpicks their reliability so we can have an informed guess as to our carbon impact.

That is certainly essential work, but kinnell, I'm glad it's not me having to do it. But anyway, with his wealth of knowledge, he's produced a National Carbon Calculator for the Guardian's site.

Rather like the BBC's Climate Challenge game that lets you run the country while trying to have climate-responsive policies (staying in power and hitting the targets isn't at all easy), only with the workings laid bare, the calculator lets you alter national behaviour and infrastructure and see if things will work out. This lets you test ideas, whether they're your own or those advocated by others.

Danny talks about some of the trickiness in making it, and gives the breakdown of figures in full, so if you're that way inclined you can you can test the rigorousness.

The thing that becomes swiftly, screamingly obvious is that we cannot meet ever-increasing demand. We have to cut consumption.

As boosting economic growth is the top priority of the main political parties, it's not surprising that none of them manage to hit the target of a minimum 80% cut. You know, the one the government is legally bound by.

Having already got the main parties environment people to have a face to face debate, the Guardian got them to directly address the issue of carbon cuts in light of the calculator.

LibDem Simon Hughes tells us that his party want 'a 90% cut by 2050'. Yet using the calculator they only deliver 50%. He pins the difference - almost half the cuts we need to make - on burning fossil fuels with Carbon Capture and Storage technology (which doesn't exist and, the government says, might never), and then manages to do what scientists in the field can't do and pin a precise figure on carbon savings for changes in land use. Wriggle wriggle squirm squirm, look over there everyone, shiny things!

For Labour, Ed Miliband proclaims the glory of electric cars and the wonders of nuclear power, even though these don't make a massive amount of difference. As I've said before, to replace all our outgoing nukes and have a huge (read: hugely expensive) building programme that doubles our nuclear capacity would only give an 8% carbon cut by 2034. A pound spent on nuclear is a pound not spent on technology that delivers swifter, greater cuts.

But these two spinweasels are nothing compared to the Conservatives' Greg Clark, who says how important it is not to have regulation and obligation on this - or any other - issue, and how we mustn't do anything to obstruct what the profit-driven growth-maximising private sector wants to do. He then goes on about watermelons.

The simple fact - so obvious that it is a form of self-deceit to ignore it, as all the main parties do - is that we cannot have infinite economic growth from the finite resource base of a single planet. Even if carbon emissions didn't force our hand, other limits will be hit soon enough, as the looming threat of peak oil makes clear.

Sustainability is pretty much the opposite of economic growth. Certainly, for our industrial culture, it's an either/or choice. This pretence by government and media (why is economic growth always 'good news'?) that there can be some compatibility is like running toward the cliff telling ourselves that the meadow stretches on forever, but if it really is a cliff then carbon capture will grow us some wings. Time to stop running and turn the fuck around.

The thing the Carbon Calculator doesn't have is the cost of any of the actions, either financial or political. As the BBC Climate Challenge game shows, taking action that will seriously reduce emissions will be costly on both fronts.

The politicians surely know about the clash of values, and they choose power over long-term responsibility. And in a way it's understandable - getting yourself kicked out of power renders you as unable to effect change as doing nothing in the first place. However, it leaves us paddleless, and actually denying the need for proper paddles, as we accelerate up shit creek.

Rather than pretending there's nothing wrong and avoiding doing what's necessary, the task is surely to make it become politically aceptable. The only chance of really addressing climate change is to shift fundamental values so that we live within our means, that we take responsibility, that we don't externalise the cost of our luxury on to those yet to come.

That starts with wresting power from the tiny enclosed space of the ballot box, as Danny himself says.

Try out the National Carbon Calculator, see how effective your ideas would be.

clause 28 (slight return)

2010-04-22T13:40:00.001+01:00

The election is putting microphones in front of all kinds of Conservatives who would otherwise remain unquestioned. The ones who haven't been to Cuddly Dave's School of Touchy-Feely.

So three weeks ago we had shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling on his hind legs declaring that proprietors of bed and breakfasts should - in defiance of the law - be allowed to turn away customers for being gay.

I think we need to allow people to have their own consciences.

Presumably someone who dislikes serving black or Jewish people should be allowed their own conscience too.

Grayling's comment echoes David Cameron's extraordinary stammering performance to Gay Times, defending Tory MEPs backing homophobic votes and saying Tory lords shouldn't have a whipped vote on 'these kinds of issues'.

Fast forward to this week. Another day, another senior member of the Conservative shadow cabinet coming out with homophobic ideas for laws.

Julian Lewis says that the age of consent for gay men should be 18, two years above the straight age of 16. He says this is because men who have unprotected sex are 'at risk, and potentially at risk of their lives' due to HIV.

And this one's no Grayling said-in-secret thing. Lewis is happy to repeat this in public.

In Lewisland, unprotected straight sex would be allowed even if the man knowingly had HIV, but two young men who've tested HIV negative and are using condoms would be criminal.

In limiting this to under 18s, he's resurrecting an idea used to justify the 30 years of unequal age of consent after legalisation of homosexuality. They said that younger men would be subjected to predatory older men. They said that young men might not have made their minds up that they were gay and get tempted into a life of it, whereas if they were left alone for a couple of years they'd get over this experimental phase and be happy lifelong straights.

It implies a belief in the stereotype of gay men as paedophiles. It presumes that heterosexuality is the natural state and homosexuality is some aberration that may mutate from it. It presumes being gay is worse than being straight.

Lewis is also clinging to another anachronism, the idea of HIV as a gay disease that is a death sentence. For many years now people have been able to live full, long lives with HIV thanks to modern drugs. There is even PEP, a month-long 'morning after pill' for people who've had risky contact.

But we know that Julian Lewis' real concern is not about HIV and public health. Lewis also voted against gay adoption.

Then again, so did some very senior Conservatives indeed. Johann Hari talked to David Cameron about his homophobic record and, once again, he crumpled as soon as he was off the script.

Cameron denied voting to ban gay people from having the chance to provide an adoptive home for children in care. When I showed him the vote in Hansard, he mumbled, 'That's not my recollection'.

Even now, he can't get over it all, saying that straight couples make better parents, and gay people should be an also-ran backup in case there aren't enough straight couples around.

the ideal adoption is finding a mum and a dad, but there will be occasions when gay couples make very good adoptive parents.

They just can't help themselves, can they? Just like the party he leads, Cuddly Dave struggles to appear tolerant and inclusive but the truth keeps on bursting out.

sizing up the seismic advice

2010-04-18T20:12:00.001+01:00

The problem with conveying scientific predictions through the media is, as Richard Black noted this week, the lack of caveats and small print. We look to the news for facts rather than best guesses. Especially in the only bit we all read, the headlines.

Some journos don't even notice this is a problem and actually rail against the scientific world about it. George Monbiot spotted Melanie Phillips doing it.

The latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which collates the findings of climatologists), is, she complained, “studded with weasel words” such as “very likely” and “best estimate”. These weasel words are, of course, what make it a scientific report, rather than a column by Melanie Phillips.

So it is that last autumn a Guardian headline told us

Forecasters Predict Mild Winter

Yet in the article the Met Office forecaster gave it a couple of qualifiers before mentioning the likelihood of an uncommonly cold winter

Early indications are that it's looking like temperatures will be near or above average, but there's still a one in seven chance of a cold winter – with temperatures below average.

This sort of 'Met Office predicted a warm winter' thing, in turn, led to a chorus of climate deniers saying in various places that we can't trust the Met Office's climate modelling, and from there we can extrapolate that the concept of anthropogenic climate change is just made up by them because they're Marxist killjoys who want bigger research grants.

This evening, the government continued to ground planes across the UK after Met Office forecasts said it won't be safe to fly due to an invisible cloud of dust from a thousand miles away.

So, go on all you aviation loving carbon-whore climate deniers who think the Met Office's advice is so worthless. Put your money, and your entire anatomy, where your mouth is. Hire a plane and fly yourselves straight into it. Please.