Keep East Coast Public - Protecting the People from Privatisation

The Coalition Government has published a shortlist of three contenders for the currently state-owned East Coast rail franchise, which carries passengers between London and Leeds/York and Glasgow/Edinburgh and points between.

East Coast came into being in 2009 when the previous private franchisee effectively collapsed. Since then, it has proven popular and more punctual than its private rivals, scored a significantly higher than average satisfaction rating and drawn on fewer subsidies than the profit-seekers who run all the other franchises in the UK.  

And there is the not inconsiderable point that it has earned over £800 millions for the taxpayer.

Green Party calls for renationalisation of Britain's railways.

But now it faces being sold of to one of First Group, Keolis/Eurostar or Stagecoach/Virgin, the very operators who are hoovering up public funds at nearly three times the rate in real terms that the former state owned national British Rail company required - indeed, the Green Party has estimated that the taxpayer would save over £1 billion a year if the franchises were all brought back into state hands as they expired. Little wonder many see the East Coast move as simply ideological on the part of the Tories and yet another demonstration of political vacuity on the part of their Lib Dem appendages.

The Green Party MP Caroline Lucas, who presented a rail nationalisation bill last summer, has now launched a Public Service Users Bill which aims to protect the public from privatisation of services in areas such as the NHS, education and transport. Devised in conjunction with the campaign group We Own It, Lucas's private members bill would:

• Make public ownership the default option before any services, national or local, are contracted out to the private sector
• Require there to be a realistic and thorough in-house bid whenever a service is put out to tender
• Ensure there is full consideration of public opinion before any service is privatised or outsourced
• Give the public a right to recall private companies running public services poorly
• Require private companies running public services to be transparent about their performance and financial data (as in the public sector)
• Make private companies running public services subject to Freedom of Information requests (as in the public sector)
• Give social enterprises and mutuals, as well as public sector organisations, priority in tendering processes

We Own It have cited examples of how public services function best in public hands, contrary to the mythology perpetrated by usually privately owned mass media whose owners have direct interests in privatisation. East Coast is a fine example in itself - sadly, it is unlikely in the extreme that the Government will not sell it off to private hands, ending a brief but successful return to a public rail service. And with the Royal Mail sold off last year and more and more NHS services tendered out to profit seeking organisations like Virgin, the privatisation of the few remaining state assets we have is drawing every closer.

But this makes it all the more important to not give up the campaign to protect the services that remain in public hands and return the ones we have lost at the first possible opportunity. As with others before, Yorkshire & the Humber Greens were recently campaigning against the East Coast sell off at York station, one of the hubs for the company, and across the progressive and socialist political spectrum, trade unions and civil societies, the challenge now is to tear down the corrupt notion that companies seeking to extract profit from people should play any part in our public services.

TORIES IN TROUBLE: Don't Forget the Matches!

Scottish Green Party leader shouts out to PM Mc-Cameron

When Nigel Farage allegedly swept the fringe elements out of UKIP (which if true would leave it somewhat bereft of members), it seems they may have decanted, in spirit at least, to their old home in the Tory Party. Perhaps a bit like the offspring returning after three years joshing in the Bullingdon. At any rate, the last few days have seen the torch of trouble pass from the Faragistas to the Tories, demonstrating just how ludicrously removed from normal people they really are.

First, Aidan Burley, stalwart of the Hugo Boss appreciation society, announced he would (goose) step down from being an MP. This came after it emerged that, contrary to his claim that he left the infamous Nazi "stag in the forest" party before his friends started shouting their ever-so-funny mein fuhrer chants, photos existed of him still present during the Hitlerite banter.

Next, today, came Dave SuperMc-Cameron, the Man with Seven Months to Save the Union! He desperately wants the Scots to stay part of the UK. If they leave, he says, it will tear Britain apart. And of course, that just won't do, since that's David's job.

Tearfully (not), he delivered an ode to his ancestral homeland, revealing that "Cameron" is gaelic for "crooked nose", which seems rather appropriate. Keen to reinforce the sense of belonging together, to show his deep empathy for the hills and humans of Caledonia, he made the long and arduous journey to...the Olympic Park in the East End of London to deliver his homily to unity. This led to Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond mocking his continuing refusal to debate with him face to face in Scotland, while Scottish Green Party leader Patrick Harvie tweeted "What's that David? I can't hear you from there. Why not come here and say that?"

Yet Cameron apparently refuses to intervene in the Scottish referendum. His speech was supposedly directed to the people of Wales, England and Northern Ireland. But although Dave won't be seen talking to Wee 'Eck Salmond for reasons of lofty statesmanship (!), The Times newspaper, The Voice of the Establishment, suggested he would like the rest of us to phone up family and friends in Scotland and ask them please to vote No to independence.

Hello Ma, it's me!
Oh, hello, we've not heard from you in a while son...
Aye, well, David Cameron asked me to call you.
Oh, that's nice of him. Why's that?
Well, he says we're better together.
Oh that's lovely son. We'll be on the next train down there...
**@@!!#  Cameron!
(dialing tone sound)

It may be something he borrowed from his Lib Dem vassals. Apparently a while back the centrist Orcs thought it would be a great idea to programme their computers to deliberately dial a quarter of a million random numbers and play people a speech from Nick Clegg. Truly terrifying. At least Dave wants real people to make the calls. And Aidan has got some time on his hands now, as long as he can stop them jerking skywards.

But topping it all was this gem, reported in The Scotsman newspaper. Tory MP for Penrith & The Borders, Rory Stewart, wants a human chain of 100,000 English people to stand on Hadrian's Wall with fiery torches in the belief this will encourage Scots to vote against leaving Britain. Steve Arnott of The Point has suggested that this is more reminiscent of Lord of the Rings than political debate, but either way, it would be hard to imagine a more chilling scene than legions of Barbour wearing, green wellied chaps, probably complete with an arsenal of shooting sticks, lined up along the course of the ancient Roman barrier. And then, just as the dark purple twilight falls gently on the silent hills...THEY LIGHT THE TORCHES!

If anyone in Scotland still doubted the case for independence, they almost certainly wouldn't any longer.

Gosh! Awfully difficult finding this Scotchland place. Must be here somewhere...

The midgie in the ointment for Mr Stewart's big idea is that, although he is the local MP, he seems to have forgotten that Hadrian's Wall is situated some miles from the Scottish Border. So in fact, his Angle horde would be waving their flames at their own countryside. Unless, of course, they want to give Berwick back to Scotland, and a fair chunk of Newcastle.

In any case, as the beautiful area around Hadrian's Wall has just been declared a "dark skies park" where lights are banned so you can see the stars clearly, their torches would need to be extinguished even faster than Cameron's credibility north of the border.

But in the event that in spite of all reason it happens, I do hope if Aidan goes along to join in no one mentions taking a bedsheet with his fiery stick. You know, for a "fancy dress" party...

Hadrian's Wall has been declared Europe's largest Dark Skies Park. No flaming torches please.

Bite The Ballot! say Greens for National Voter Registration Day

Cllr Andrew Cooper, who is the Greens' national energy & environment speaker and heads the Green Party's European candidates' list in Yorkshire & The Humber, has urged all people 18 years and over who are entitled to vote, whether they are UK, EU or Commonwealth nationals or citizens, to register to do so. He was speaking ahead of 'National Voter Registration Day', which takes place on Wednesday (February 5th) and which aims to encourage people to sign up to vote.

Non-party campaign group 'Bite the Ballot' are organising this year's campaign, which is timed to mark the anniversary of the 1832 Reform Act which gave many of us (well, many men anyway!) the right to vote for the first time.

Greens' Andrew Cooper - bite the ballot!

'Bite the Ballot!' hopes as many as 250,000 UK residents – especially younger people – will register to vote on Wednesday.

Echoing a similar call from Green Euro-MP Jean Lambert, Cllr Cooper said "All citizens have a democratic right to influence what is happening to our society - and the first step is to register to vote. I hope that everyone who is entitled to do so will make their voices heard this May - whatever party they support. It is all the more relevant when the European elections are being held under a form of proportional representation - so very powerfully, this time at least, everyone's vote counts equally.

"This is about ensuring that all who can vote are able to do so by registering - at least they then have a choice whether to vote or not, or even stand for election."

Elections to the European Parliament, as well as to many local authorities will be held on Thursday, May 22^nd.

Click HERE to Bite the Ballot!

Of Gods & Prime Ministers - Levelling with Somerset

Fix this: Cameron is no King Cnut

As Britain has experienced a warm winter and, in consequence, the wettest January on record, the last few weeks have seen more and more areas affected by serious and persistent flooding, especially in south Wales and south-west England. The flat area of the Somerset Levels, which are below sea level, have been particularly badly affected with one village cut off for a whole month now and warnings from the beleaguered Environment Agency just today of lives being at risk as new storms are set to batter the area.

Farmers have complained that with crops submerged now for three weeks or more, their produce will be rotting in the ground and with a number of sewage planets, septic tanks and silage stores breached, there is a growing risk of water-borne disease affecting both humans and animals. It is a major public crisis, though so far treated with rather casual equanimity by a Government that seems rather perplexed by the series of unfortunate events. The army was promised as a rescue agency, only to be withdrawn before it started any work, and the burden has shifted back to local councils and agencies reeling from financial cuts imposed by the Coalition parties - both of whom have significant numbers of MPs in the south-west.

The ending of dredging of rivers, a move actually taken under the last Labour Government, has been criticised by some as the cause of the flooding, but environmentalists and meteorologists have stressed that the levels of rainfall have been such that had the process still been in place, it would have made very little difference - and indeed conceivably have made it worse by speeding the flow of water from catchment areas into river channels. The fact is that nature has overwhelmed the human-made defences and would have in almost any case - for example, a bus was swept off the road today in Pembrokeshire by a twenty feet high wave; it is difficult to envisage any feasible defence that could have been created against such a phenomenon.

And this perhaps is the hardest message of all that stems from this disaster - but it is one we will hear more and more in the future, and one which politicians and the public alike really need to get their heads around: as global warming takes hold, there are no technical fixes for what is coming.

Some years ago, at a seminar held by a leading social "think tank", I listened to a very coherent and dramatic presentation on the future impact of climate change, especially in that the areas most likely to be most affected in the first instance in this country and elsewhere would be zones of social deprivation. As with so much, the poor will suffer most first.

A question came from the audience, from someone who had been a senior civil servant. She acknowledged the devastating effects outlined by the speaker. "So, what are the steps we need to take to mitigate them?" And she went on to ask about - flood defences, food stores and supplies of breathing masks (a la Beijing).

And this is where our elite, our political class, business barons and bureaucrats are betrayed by their own hubris and ignorance of the severe global crisis we face. Flooding? Build a wall. Extreme temperatures in inner London? Install more air conditioning. Too much carbon emissions from cars, planes, industry? Let's invent carbon capture and storage, somehow, one day... And so on.

It is the same mentality that seriously considers seeding the seas with iron filaments to stimulate photoplankton as a carbon sink; or placing solar reflector satellites in orbit to reflect the sunlight away from the earth to make up for the loss of the albedo effect from the melting of the icecaps and Siberian permafrost. Rather than consider how we are unravelling the threads of our biosphere with our inter-related addictions to carbon fuels, growth and capitalist competition, the thinking is we can go on our merry way as before and somehow find a way to engineer a "fix" with carbon capture or radioactive energy.

It resolutely refuses to contemplate the truth revealed by these floods: that ultimately we are at Nature's mercy and while there is no doubt we can ruin it for ourselves and other species, no amount of scientific genius, financial investment or emergency planning will ever grant as imperfect a creature as homo sapiens the ability to "manage" the Earth. Ending use of carbon and planting millions of trees will have a lot more to do with a solution than expensive, ineffective and in many cases still uninvented "mitigation technology". But of course, it is dependence on such large scale technologies and carbon energy that perpetuates the economic and political power of the global elite - at huge risk to all of us.

Cnut: the King knew his limits.

As our planet becomes increasingly hostile to our continued existence on its surface, perhaps it is time more for humility and asking how we can return to be in some degree of harmony with Nature rather than for planning somehow to conquer it. Unlike David Cameron, his ancient predecessor King Cnut deliberately demonstrated the limits of his powers to his fawning courtiers by failing to hold back the tide of the sea. A thousand years later, we could do with some of his sanity to prick the pomposity of our elites. Leaders who believed themselves to be gods went out with the Roman Emperors - and as so many of them discovered, such unwarranted pride tended to come before a great fall.

Having a Heart Attack? You Shirker...

The Daily Mirror carried a story today with what must be the most twisted and sickening tale yet of the Government's "fixing" of the benefits system. We heard a few weeks ago about ATOS writing to a woman to penalise her for not attending her disability benefits assessment - the fact that she was in hospital in a coma had apparently been lost on their thick skulls (even although they had been notified).

But today, somehow, feels worse. A man was attending a work capability assessment in Oldham when he had a heart attack and even the nurse conducting the interview decided she should terminate it (I say "even" because there have been many bizarre instances of distinctly uncaring assessments by medical staff employed by ATOS).

Two weeks later, he had his benefits stopped because the Department of Work & Pensions decided he had "withdrawn" from the assessment. Twisted beyond all measure of belief, this decision goes to the heart of this pernicious process, the signature policy of Ian Duncan Smith, who is allegedly a deep thinker.

Well, maybe he is and this is all part of his plan. While he sits in front of TV cameras trotting out platitudes of how the reassessments are designed to support people in genuine need and " not leave them unseen for years", the truth is somewhat different - hundreds of terminally ill people denied benefits in their final weeks, other people put through processes where meetings can be (and are) procedurally deemed to have happened even when they have not taken place, and then really spiteful decisions like this one - you withdrew from the assessment because of a heart attack? Man up and get back in there!

The system is dreadful and its effects sick. But that is almost certainly what its architects, the rightwing Tories and their Lib Dem Orcs, have intended.

Yet complicit in this too are the staff who take jobs with ATOS and the DWP and who then reach decisions like this one penalising a heart attack victim and then producing a letter like the one sent to him. It may be argued they need a job, but at what cost? Ian Duncan Smith did not phone up the issuing Job Centre and tell them to send out the letter to the sick man - someone on site did that.

Over two years ago, there was an instance of an ATOS employee referring online to people attending capability assessments as "parasitic wankers". He was roundly condemned. It is to be hoped that his attitude is not the default culture of DWP staff as well now - there is evidence to the contrary, but the Oldham instance begs the question and with much DWP work contracted-out to profit seeking companies, it is not at all surprising if the attitudes they engender are somewhat less supportive and humane than was the case under the old public service.

It seems that the default position, as part of the official, government-set process, is to be as harsh as possible. Otherwise caring staff appear to be being forced into dreadfully twisted decisions and positions. It is obviously down to individual conscience, but ultimately, there is a difficult choice for staff instructed to implement this vicious policy to make, one which it would be easy to trivialise or portray as simple if you don't work there for your own livelihood but a question they really need to ask themselves nevertheless: should you stay or should you go? 

UKIP - the Tea Party of the 51st State

Forecast of Drivel Ahead - Farage has disowned his own party's manifesto

The United Kingdom Independence Party cites withdrawal from the European Union as its signature policy. Puffed up by a right-wing media, it has ridden on the back of xenophobic myths ranging from invisible hordes of Bulgarians battering down the doors of the Arrivals hall in Heathrow to invented tales of conspiratorial Brussels bureaucrats forcing Britons to eat nothing but straight bananas (though no one seems to ask where these are to be found either).

UKIP preys on worries about the poverty and social problems afflicting millions of Britons using manufactured fears about migrants and the EU while covering up the real causes - an ever greater hording of wealth by a tiny, rich elite; the widespread incidence of tax avoidance and evasion by large corporations; and the now near complete privatisation (or at least private contracting out) of our key public services.

But in fact, UKIP have a wide range of policies and stances that do not bear scrutiny set against the "party of the people" tone its leader Nigel "Blokey" Farage seeks to espouse. He is Everyman, supposedly, with his pint in one hand and fag in the other. He rarely promotes the fact that he made his money as a stockbroker (as did his errant friend and former colleague Godfrey Bloom, MEP), nor that he used to be an active member of what was at the time a fairly pro-European Tory Party.

Yet more than his past, which could be forgiven if he had genuinely changed his tune, Farage is haunted by his party itself, even although the party very much is him.

We have heard enough of late of bizarre but frankly quite trivial outbursts from strange UKIP members. The most prominent was Godfrey Bloom with his references to "bongo-bongo-land", sluts and bashing a journalist on the head with his agenda papers; then there was the town councillor who suggested the recent floods were God's vengeance for legalising gay marriage; and the county councillor who used Facebook to ask "Is tuna a real fish like ones that swim in water?"

"Trivial" not in the sense that these events and the attitudes they display are trivial, but rather in the sense that they pale in the face of much more troubling aspects of UKIP, its official policies and its supposedly sensible leader's own views.

Consider these issues, generally overlooked by the media:

- Godfrey Bloom, when a UKIP MEP, appeared in a video praising the French secret services for planting bombs on board the Greenpeace ship "Rainbow Warrior" which caused an explosion and killed a photographer. You can see him in action by clicking here.

- in 2006, the European Parliament voted by 545 votes to a mere 13 in favour of calling on all member states of the EU to adopt a zero-tolerance approach to violence against women, treat rape within marriage as a crime and to ban and prosecute all instances of female genital mutilation. Who would oppose such a sensible, ethical motion? Well, UKIP did. All 7 of its MEPs who voted, including Nigel Farage, voted against supporting such steps to protect women. Doubtless they would claim it was to do with asserting British independence - but what comes first: making a political point or protecting vulnerable women and girls from violence?

- UKIP supposedly stands for the UNITED KINGDOM. But there is little resonance beyond England. Farage complained about being heckled by an admittedly loud and probably counter-productive demonstration when he tried to hold a press conference in an Edinburgh pub (to launch a by-election campaign some miles away in Aberdeen - possibly he didn't have a satnav that covered so far north?). But he might have reflected that the Scottish people who turned out to greet him may have felt slightly aggrieved by the leader of his party's tiny Scottish wing, Lord Monckton, who had described his compatriots as "subsidy junkies", playing on the wildly inaccurate theme that Scotland receives more public expenditure than it pays in tax.

And then just this week, having claimed that he was getting rid of five unnamed "barmy" MEPs (over a third of  his group in the European Parliament), Farage went off the policy rails himself, finally unmasking his inner Tea Party libertarian self.

First, in a speech to his former colleagues in the City of London stockbroking fraternity, he railed against laws curtailing sex discrimination: he insisted that women face no discrimination at all in the City workplace, though he then contradicted himself by saying that women who take maternity leave are by default worth less than men to their employers.

And now, he wants to legalise handguns - pistols - which were banned in 1996 after Thomas Hamilton used them to kill 16 primary school children in Dunblane in Scotland. Nigel feels the ban is "ludicrous" - perhaps he will launch his campaign to change the law in a pub in the town; I will be happy to buy him a map so he can get to the right place to justify his call.

But third and perhaps most telling of all, Nigel Farage has denounced the manifesto he and UKIP fought the 2010 General Election on as "486 pages of drivel" which he had never got round to reading and which he has now disowned.

And no wonder; this was a manifesto that promoted a "flat tax rate" - massive tax cuts for millionaires and substantial increases for everyone else; it opposed any regulation of banks in spite of the wave of bad practice and corruption revealed by the 2008/9 crisis; and it even planned to introduce compulsory dress codes in theatres.

Drivel indeed - but let's get this right: although he was not leader at the General Election, Farage was leader until a short time before, stood as UKIP's most prominent candidate and resumed the leadership a short time later. And for all that time up until today, this allegedly Honest Man of British politics, this straight guy who says it how it is, was standing on a platform of drivel, promoting policies he had never even read. Really? This is the man who plans to restore trust in politics?

Unbelievably, he has now said UKIP won't have any new policies this side of the General Election. So we will be being asked to vote for a party with no policies - apart perhaps from whatever Nigel can scribble onto the back of his fag packet while he queues for his next pint. What are we left with? An ability to say whatever UKIP want to say at the time, but watch out for a change next week? Or, more worrying, a licence to play up any and every prejudice without any accountability? It is rank populism - like the US Tea Party.

If we do ever leave the EU, if Farage has his way, the chances are we would be quickly incorporated into the orbit of the libertarian wing of the USA, a sort of offshore 51st State of America, open for international big business and complete with our own huddled masses to fill the sweatshops. Stockbrokers' stock would rise accordingly.

All thanks to Nigel.

What a bloke. And what a joke. But who's laughing?

On The Big Red Bus to Oblivion

Two stories and images have struck home more this week than any sleazy Lib Dem shenanigans, UKIP weather forecasts or Putin lectures on sexual tolerance.

One was the report of a near riot outside a 99p shop in Wrexham in the Welsh borderlands, where police had to be called when an "everything 50p" sale came to a premature end, to the anger of a number of customers. Some wags have sought to make light of it, but there is nothing funny here - we live in a consumer society and we are measured by our possessions. How tragic and desperate that some people in what is still the fourth richest society in the world are reduced to tears of rage when the cheap items sold by these outlets go up by 49p. But what the would-be jokers miss is that these reductions likely represented to some cash-strapped victims of bankers' austerity a brief chance to be able to buy something and own it, perhaps to feel a little more like some of their more affluent fellow citizens.

Fellow citizens, if that's what they still are, like Steve Smith, founder of Poundland, a chain of similar shops, selling off everything at £1 per item. All these little brass coins gradually added up for Steve, who sold off his empire for £50 millions and at 51 has retired to a 13 bedroom mansion with its own swimming pool and in-house pub. Citing his own poor roots and determined hard-working, Steve epitomises the capitalist dream, the handful of genuine rags-to-riches stories used to sell the system to everyone else. If only everyone had his acumen, energy and luck (the latter random event is bizarrely praised as a virtue in this fairytale narrative), well by this time next year, we would all be millionaires, to coin a phrase. Except, of course, there are neither the pound coins, nor the indoor swimming pools, to go round.

Running on empty - the double-decker of privilege

But Steve Smith is small beer compared to the people represented by the other image that has jarred this week. This was of a bus - a red, double-decker London routemaster with enough seating to hold 85 people. A big bus?  Perhaps, until it was explained that it was being used to represent the findings of research by Oxfam that demonstrate that a mere 85 people own more wealth than the poorest half of the human race combined.

Yes, that's right: 85 people own more than the poorest 3,650,000,000 (or so) humans on the Earth COMBINED. That big number includes the billion or so people who go to bed hungry each night - as well as the 85 children who die from hunger every 15 minutes.

This is in a world where there is enough food, right now, to feed not just the actual global population of 7.3 billion, but rather one of over ten billion people more than adequately. However, a socio-economic system based on mind-bogglingly skewed inequality, unaccountable private ownership and full-on profit-seeking will never be efficient enough nor sufficiently humane to put the needs of ordinary humans first. If there were any doubts about that, they were fully and finally laid to rest when we saw in recent years speculation by international traders in so-called food futures drive the price of basic food staples up and their supply down in several poor countries, leading to real hunger and bloody riots.

This is a world now where everything is a commodity - from Nestle seeking to patent natural plants like fennel to the ongoing war of attrition by the biotech industry to copyright even naturally occurring human DNA. If corporations want to own our genetic blueprint and the natural patterns of our food, how on earth can we ever sanely view their intent through any sort of benevolent prism? Or believe any half-hearted claims of corporate social responsibility for the common good to be anything but expired, self-serving marketing ploys?

It is not tenable - as with the banking crisis, the peak oil squeeze and the mounting tidal wave of personal debt, the current state of affairs is an economic system incrementally spiraling out of control - whether over a few years or a decade or two is perhaps the only real question. Like some great oil tanker stuck on auto-pilot and headed for ever-nearer reefs, the owners and officers are jumping ship. Strikingly akin to the off-worlders in the film Elysium, they are leaping into their sanitised, hermetically sealed bubbles of privilege, whether in countryside mansions or on hubristic artificial world-shaped islands off Dubai, perhaps hoping to it sit out when the crash comes, insulated from the mess they have made.

So let them board their big red bus. It's running on empty and headed to oblivion.

But we don't need to go along too. Because we really, really don't need them. We can do better. Let's wave them off, and start again. Like we meant to all along.

Move along please - nothing to laugh at here.

Lib Dems and Sexism: Rennard Isn't the Real Issue

It would be easy to dismiss the Lib Dems' tribulations over Chris Rennard's alleged misdemeanours as simply another example of a rootless party in terminal decline with Nick Clegg's vacillation over how to react as little more than another example of middle-ground muddle. Yet to do so would be to miss an important point - and this is precisely what much of the media is indeed doing, focusing its concerns on either printing semi-salacious articles about what the former party Chief Executive is accused of doing or alternatively broadcasting a blow by blow account of arguments between Clegg and time-servers in the Lords, many of whom most of the public have never heard of.

But there is a deeper issue here, and that is what some of the Lib Dems apparently feel is acceptable behaviour and how seriously, or not, the party has set out to challenge and change it. Read former MP and Rennard ally Alex Carlile in today's Daily Mail (what else!) and you find him caustically diminishing the complaints of four women against his friend. Meanwhile on BBC Radio 4, Lib Dem MEP Chris Davies suggested that the allegations were equivalent to "an Italian man pinching a woman's bottom" a few years ago - with one swift step adding a dash of racial stereotyping to the stew of alleged sexism.

The Lib Dems' problem though is not simply that their byzantine disciplinary rules use bizarre levels of proof - beyond reasonable doubt is normally reserved for criminal cases investigated and tested by the police and CPS. Non-court cases such as workplace conduct hearings normally use the more realistic test of determining what occurred on the balance of probabilities. To insist on a criminal-level of proof for in-house cases of alleged harassment, which will very often involve one person's word against another, is in effect to make it impossible for victims to pursue a complaint with any real prospect of success. It potentially protects the culprits to the detriment of the victims and is completely out of place in any modern organisation. This is the culture of 1950's offices like the male-dominated one in Madmen rather than a supposedly progressive 21st century political party.

It might not greatly matter beyond the confines of the Lib Dems were it not for the fact that this party and the people involved in this argument, including Clegg, Rennard and Carlile, have been responsible for passing legislation which now makes it much harder for women (and men) to pursue claims of sexual harassment in the workplace via employment tribunals. For the first time, it now costs to go to an employment tribunal hearing - £1,200 for a sex discrimination case (compared to £390 for unfair dismissal claims). Driven forward by Lib Dem Vince Cable's department, significant new obstacles have been erected against anyone challenging workplace sexism.

The Lib Dems have got themselves into a dreadful mess over this. Yet the real tragedy is that the vagaries of the electoral system that delivered us the Coalition Government have already allowed their muddled and ignorant thinking to drive a coach and horses through years of progress towards ending sexism in the workplace. Watching all this unfold though, it isn't in the least surprising.

No Fracking Please, We're British, say Greens

Press Release from Cllr Andrew Cooper, Green Party national Energy & Environment Speaker and lead Eurocandidate for Yorkshire & The Humber.

“No Fracking Way” say Greens

Or - Maybe the Bulgarians, Romanians and Leo Sayer know something we don’t!

 

Around the world, Greens are supporting local communities in their campaigns against fracking in their neighbourhoods. Across Europe, fracking is banned in Northern Ireland, France, Germany, Ireland, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Romania. There are further bans in areas of Spain and Switzerland. (1)

 

In Australia, veteran popstar Leo Sayer has even done a song about it called No Fracking Way! (2)

 

Andrew Cooper, Kirklees councillor and Green Party Energy spokesperson, said, 

“Maybe the Bulgarians and the Romanians know something we don’t! Maybe it’s not a coincidence that both their countries ban fracking – along with many EU states. And they’ve stayed at home in their droves, in their green and pleasant lands!

 

“Fracking wouldn’t get anywhere without serious Government support, tax breaks and other subsidies, hence today’s transparent ‘sweetener’ to councils.

 

“As the Green Party has always said, the greatest potential for energy savings is in insulation and energy efficiency. Doing the oil industry’s marketing for them shows Government has no interest in helping householders control their energy demand. They simply want to smooth the way for massive environmental exploitation by oil giants.

 

“Government supposedly believes in ‘localism’ and allowing Councils to make their own decisions. But when Council funding is drastically cut by central government and they are then offered money to accept fracking on their land, it is clearly nothing less than ‘bribery’.

 

“Government has today backed environmentally damaging shale gas extraction just as it has scaled back support for people to insulate their homes.

 

"“They’ve dropped the pretence that fracked gas will reduce fuel bills for householders and they are doing nothing for households in fuel poverty.

 

It is also significant that this policy is not being applied to renewable energy installations demonstrating the governments growing lack of commitment to the green economic sector.

 

 1.   http://oilpatchasia.com/2013/10/9-countries-or-regions-that-ban-fracking/

 2. Leo Sayer's anti-fracking song for the Australian campaign - Pretty good!!  http://v.gd/BAdbQa

 3.  Green Leader Natalie Bennett’s youtube interview on today's govt fracking 'bribe', where she does brilliantly! http://v.gd/hOUQQe

In Remembrance of Lions

Harry Patch - A coin for our times?

The Government has come under substantial criticism for deciding to put Lord Kitchener on the new £2 coins to mark the beginning of what could easily see-saw uncomfortably between commemoration and celebration of the slaughter of the First World War as we approach the centenary of its beginning in August. Education Secretary Michael Gove, who worryingly is responsible for the current review of the history curriculum to make it more supposedly patriotic, has added to the furore by claiming the war to have been a noble one, seen as noble by those fighting it, and a "just" conflict. He has accused supposedly left-wing historians as well as programmes such as Blackadder Goes Forth and the Monocled Mutineer of tarnishing it out of some sort of seditious lack of Britishness and an apparently perverse support of Prussian militarism.

There is not the space here to consider his claims, but both Labour's Tristram Hunt and Cambridge University historian Sir Richard Evans have given powerful responses to Gove, castigating his simplistic and narrow-minded view of events and, in Sir Richard's case, his cunning plans for history teaching in schools.

Gove, who has never served in the military or been in harm's way in the service of our country, is just like so many politicians who talk tough with other people's lives - but as for Kitchener himself, he is an odd choice  for a coin.

Conqueror of the still-troubled Sudan in 1898 in as bloody a campaign as might be imagined, Lord Herbert Kitchener of Khartoum ceased being a serving general to become a member of the Liberal Party Cabinet as Secretary of State for War at the commencement of hostilities. He was key to the drive to raise a volunteer force for what some have described as "the war that had to be fought". After a record-breaking period of over 40 years of general (though not total) peace, the European imperial powers - Russia, Germany, France, and Austro-Hungary (and arms merchants far and wide) - were itching for a conflagration to settle their primacy as industrial, social and political changes swept their peoples, challenging the long, tense equilibrium of The Powers. Britain, with its naval supremacy and huge overseas Empire, was to an extent on the sidelines, but tied to Russia and France through the Tripartite Alliance. So, when the Czar declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungary, we were drawn in within a matter of days.

Kitchener himself played no part in the fighting as regiment after regiment were slaughtered on the fields of Flanders, whose red poppies today commemorate the blood spilled on its soil. Perhaps contrary to popular imagination, he did argue for a cautious approach and opposed what he termed "too vigorous offensives". But while other generals still genuinely believed the war would last months, Kitchener was planning for at least a three year conflict which he believed would last "until the final million", whether as a warning or as a strategy, or both, it is not clear, but chilling under any circumstance.

After initial success in organising the new armies for the front, Kitchener came under increasing criticism for failing to organise weapons and munitions supplies and was gradually sidelined by Prime Minister Asquith. He became an envoy to the Czar and died in June 1916 en route to Russia when his ship was sunk by a German mine off the Orkneys.

For a century now, the Great War, once seen as "the war to end all wars", has been judged as far from just in either its cause or execution. It was grounded in squabbles between unelected Royal families in eastern Europe and led directly to the deaths of fifteen million people, with many more injured and disabled or displaced. It traumatised a generation and led rapidly to the conditions that would claim over sixty million lives in the 1939 to 1945 war.

We should commemorate those who died - no one can doubt their bravery and sacrifice, but unlike the Second World War and the struggle against the Nazis, their deaths were at the hands of their political leaders as much as at the ends of their opponents guns. That the conflict unleashed consequences on a scale they could perhaps not have imagined (although Kitchener apparently did) is no mitigation.

Commemoration should therefore be about the people who were at risk, who lived and died in the trenches, rather than the men who sent them there from the safety of their Whitehall office desks. So rather than Kitchener on our coins, why not Harry Patch, the very last veteran of the 1918 army, who died in July 2009? His perspective on the conflict was rather different to Mr Gove's gung-ho take on it. Rather than a noble cause, Harry Patch, a veteran of Passchendale, warned that the war was "organised murder, and nothing else."

Harry Patch would be an appropriate face on our coinage, but it is doubtful if his views would chime with our Government's intentions for the remembrance of the war, coming as they do ahead of the difficulties they face in the European elections in May and the General Election next year. When he was 106 years old, Harry met a former Austrian solider, who was 107, and, declaring his former opponent to be a "nice gentleman", he said, "He is all for a united Europe and peace - and so am I."

Lions led by donkeys is a long used phrase to describe the British Army of the Great War, men who lived and died in the most appalling conditions. Many of those suffering shell-shock were punished in on way or another, and over three hundred, including at least one 16 year old child, were executed by firing squads sanctioned by the British Government and Lord Kitchener. It is an insult to them to lead their remembrance with a coin that has no space for anyone who served in the actual conflict and all the more galling to have Michael Gove try to put such an appalling spin on the slaughter. He might do well to think on this extract from Harry Patch's book, The Last Fighting Tommy, and ask himself if this really is what he believes to have been noble:

"We came across a lad from A company. He was ripped open from his shoulder to his waist by shrapnel and lying in a pool of blood. When we got to him, he said: 'Shoot me'. He was beyond human help and, before we could draw a revolver, he was dead. And the final word he uttered was 'Mother.' I remember that lad in particular. It's an image that has haunted me all my life, seared into my mind."

"Breeding Speaks to Breeding" - farewell Peter O'Toole

The world said good bye to a giant of stage and screen today with the passing of Peter O'Toole. Famous from the start for his complex portrayal of T.E. Lawrence in David Lean's 1962 epic, he acted prolifically on stage and in film, with no fewer than eight Oscar nominations as well as winning a BAFTA, an Emmy and four Golden Globe awards. In the films Beckett and The Lion in Winter, he brought to life two distinctly different portrayals of King Henry the Second, while he was infinitely more sympathetic in Goodbye Mr Chips.

But it was the role of Jack Gurney, the accidental14th Earl of Gurney, in The Ruling Class which gave him perhaps the fullest opportunity to demonstrate his range of characterisation and his penchant for satire. Without plot spoiling, his speech to the nobility on taking his place in the House of Lords splendidly destroys the whole conceit of inherited authority.

He grew up in Leeds, of mixed Scottish and Irish parentage and set out as a journalist on the Yorkshire Evening Post before being called up to do national service in the Royal Navy. It was with the encouragement of an officer there that he entered theatre on leaving service via a scholarship to the Royal Academy.

Although dogged by ill health and marital breakdown, complicated by drinking problems, he said he had a good life and was both surprised and grateful for it. With friends numbering Richard Burton and Richard Harris as well as his long and successful career, few would demur. He will be long remembered and his work enjoyed by posterity.

And The Ruling Class remains as pertinent now as at its release in 1972.

Goodbye Madiba

"As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.”
― Nelson Mandela, 18 July 1918 to 5 December 2013

Old Before You Die? You'll Need To Be

Government Projections of a 0.1% fall in retirement costs as a % of GDP between 2010 and 2050 somehow make pensions unaffordable, apparently.

While claiming the recovery in the British economy is now firmly underway in his Autumn Statement this week, Chancellor George Osborne's Government slipped in the forecast, trailed in an anti-welfare speech he made a few days earlier, that the qualifying age for the state pension, already rising from 65 to 67, will apparently "need" to rise further to 70 and above in the coming decades. In future, Osborne has decided, if life expectancy rises, the pension age will be indexed to rise with it. Older folks are having the temerity to live longer and, if they are not working, they truly are a burden to our Not-So-Big Society, it seems.

For sometime, we have become accustomed to hearing the refrain that "it's great people are living longer, but...(we can't really afford them)." And on the face of it, it appears to be a logical argument - more people living longer but not working longer will mean an increase in costs. Sure. But there is a difference between an increase in expense and what is affordable especially if the overall economy continues to grow, which it is expected to do. For example, in the last 10 years, wealth in Britain has increased by over £60 billion, in spite of everything. But only £1 billion of this has gone to ordinary households in the form of income. The other £59 billion has gone to shareholders as dividends or higher valued stocks.

The fact is, there is plenty of wealth to go around and afford retirement, as well as pay for higher education and a range of other services for younger and middle aged people as well. In fact, projections by the Pensions Policy Institute indicate that, as a share of GDP, the cost of the current pensions system (with retirement at 65) would only rise from 5.6% in 2010 to 5.8% in 2050; while Government forecasts indicate an actual decrease of 0.1%. But of course, if fewer and fewer corporations and individuals avoid tax and Government continues to allow this, retirement costs, as well as other social benefits, will become harder to afford as although the economy might grow faster than the rate of aging, there will indeed be less public finance available. Add on top of this a Government ideologically determined to "shrink the state" and drive pensions increasingly into the arms of private finance companies, and it soon becomes obvious that the choices being foisted onto British people are not about what is affordable at all - rather, it is about priorities and the sort of society we want to see.

Why is it affordable for the state to hand out over £70 billions to just one private company to clean up its mess at Sellafield nuclear plant, or pay out £4 billions in subsidies every year to private rail companies to hand on to their shareholders in dividends, but pensions can't be afforded for ordinary people, mostly on low incomes to begin with (we are, after all, talking about state pensions, not private or occupational schemes)?

The priorities become even more troubling when you reflect that although people are living longer, not all are doing so in good health nor are they all living to the same age, and social class and income closely correlate to your chances of survival. The bottom line is that poorer people do not live as long as wealthier citizens: geographically, life expectancy at birth ranges according to one (experimental) set of ONS figures from over 93 years in wealthy Moreton Hall ward in Bury St Edmonds in West Suffolk to just 65.4 years in less well off Rooksdown ward in Basingstoke in Hampshire.

But even these are averages: there are many variations and lower paid, manual workers live shorter lives even now in the 21st century. As pointed out by another recent study of life expectancy among people who have already retired (among whom a village in Somerset comes out as the best prospect), your location itself doesn't determine your chances of survival - rather it hints at other factors, primarily your wealth and the lifestyle it affords, including access to better food, health services and environmental factors such as housing and leisure. Consequently, people in areas with lower wealth live significantly shorter lives, with healthy life expectancy in Manchester a meagre 55 years, similar to some parts of Glasgow and poor districts in other larger cities.

And so, the reality is that with our privatisation-obsessed, inequality-promoting government seducing the populace into accepting the idea of old age being supposedly unaffordable, a growing number of the poorest will not only have to wait longer to get their meagre state pension - they will need to do without it altogether.

Why? Because they will be dead.