Tag Britain

War, what is it good for?

The arms trade, and you, dear UK tax­payer, are pay­ing to set up the deals:

Brit­ish tax­pay­ers are pay­ing a secret­ive lob­by­ing firm $10,000 (£6,354) a month to push Amer­ican politi­cians to award con­tracts to Brit­ish defence companies.

The Daily Mail would rather everyone worked longer hours for less

Pub­lic sec­tor staff spend nine fewer years at work over life­time than private employ­ees AND earn 30% more

Appar­ently this isn’t an indict­ment of the private sec­tor but of the pub­lic sec­tor. Go figure.

UK denied chance to choose proportional representation

It’s offi­cial, the UK has blown its his­tor­ical chance to bring its elect­oral sys­tem into the 21st cen­tury and make a bet­ter democracy.

Both the Con­ser­vat­ives and Labour have ensured the UK won’t get a ref­er­en­dum on whether people want pro­por­tional rep­res­ent­a­tion or not. The Lib­eral Demo­crats didn’t have the num­bers. There will be a ref­er­en­dum on the Altern­at­ive Vote sys­tem but, while an improve­ment, it is not pro­por­tional representation.

Labour is now lying to their sup­port­ers that they didn’t have the num­bers for a coali­tion. In fact they did, the smal­ler parties were offer­ing their sup­port to an alli­ance. Labour sup­port­ers who are gut­ted that the Con­ser­vat­ives are now in power should real­ise that it is entirely Labour’s fault that they are:

A [Lib­Dem] spokes­man said key mem­bers of the Labour team “gave every impres­sion of want­ing the pro­cess to fail” and the party had made “no attempt at all” to agree a com­mon approach on issues like schools fund­ing and tax reform.

Cer­tain key Labour cab­inet min­is­ters were determ­ined to under­mine any agree­ment by hold­ing out on policy issues and sug­gest­ing that Labour would not deliver on pro­por­tional rep­res­ent­a­tion and might not mar­shal the votes to secure even the most mod­est form of elect­oral reform,” he said.

This isn’t a party inter­ested in policy. They’re inter­ested in unbridled power. Instead of com­prom­ising a little on policy with the Lib­eral Demo­crats they’d rather com­prom­ise com­pletely and have a Con­ser­vat­ive government.

Labour and Tories arrogant as usual

As coali­tion talks con­tinue in the UK both Labour and the Con­ser­vat­ives are prov­ing them­selves arrog­ant as usual.

The biggest bar­rier to a Conservative-Liberal Demo­crat coali­tion is the Con­ser­vat­ives’ refusal to sup­port a ref­er­en­dum on elect­oral reform, offer­ing instead a tooth­less “all party com­mit­tee of inquiry on polit­ical and elect­oral reform”; the Con­ser­vat­ives would rather retain an unfair vot­ing sys­tem which dis­en­fran­chises not just a third of voters (about 10 mil­lion people) but also 16 mil­lion or so eli­gible voters who didn’t vote, most of whom prob­ably don’t see the point in vot­ing in a rep­res­ent­at­ive sys­tem that clearly isn’t even representative.

Mean­while Labour is dash­ing its own chances of form­ing a coali­tion, which, along with the Lib­eral Demo­crats, would require the sup­port of other smal­ler parties too. Alex Sal­mond of the Scot­tish National Party offered that sup­port yes­ter­day. Labour’s appar­ent response? Unbe­liev­ably to refuse it:

BBC News:

Scotland’s First Min­is­ter, SNP leader Alex Sal­mond, called on the Lib Dems to join a “pro­gress­ive alli­ance” involving Labour, the SNP and Plaid Cymru.

How­ever a Labour source dis­missed that as “a des­per­ate attempt by Alex Sal­mond to make him­self look rel­ev­ant after a ter­rible gen­eral elec­tion result”.

UK election: statement on the thousands of voters turned away

State­ment from the Elect­oral Commission

Update: The Guard­ian has a map with a break­down of all the prob­lems that occurred around the coun­try on polling day.

Too late Labour, you had your chance

Nick Clegg and the Lib­eral Demo­crats are as much a part of the estab­lish­ment as the rest of them but they get my vote (my first in a UK elec­tion) for point­ing out the bleedin’ obvious:

Brown sys­tem­at­ic­ally blocked, and per­son­ally blocked, polit­ical reform. I think he is a des­per­ate politi­cian and I just do not believe him.

Brown and Labour, at heart, are author­it­ari­ans and deserve to be thrown on the dustheap. This is the best chance Bri­tain has had for elect­oral reform in a very long time.

Next time maybe Bri­tain will be able to vote in mod­ern demo­cracy under a mod­ern sys­tem of pro­por­tional rep­res­ent­a­tion (not the ruse that Brown was tout­ing, the altern­at­ive vote).

Poll reveals: people are easily confused

Sharp decline in public’s belief in cli­mate threat, Brit­ish poll reveals:

The pro­por­tion of adults who believe cli­mate change is “def­in­itely” a real­ity dropped by 30% over the last year, from 44% to 31%, in the latest sur­vey by Ipsos Mori.

What I don’t under­stand is that we’ve been here so often before. Why do people listen to the pro­pa­ganda of oil com­pan­ies and the like over sci­entific evid­ence? How many times do you have to have the wool pulled over your eyes by pro­pa­gand­ists deny­ing that smoking causes can­cer, deny­ing that CFCs lead to ozone deple­tion, deny­ing that cer­tain pol­lut­ants cause acid rain or deny­ing that cli­mate change is man­made (or, ori­gin­ally, that it even existed)?

This is a great time to be born, a great time to be alive. This gen­er­a­tion gets to com­pletely change the world we live in. We have a chance here to reima­gine every single thing we do. But, no, per­haps we’d rather go down with the ship and listen to rich old men try­ing to squeeze every last dol­lar, euro and yen from their invest­ments in out­dated industries.

Help arrest Tony Blair

Great piece by George Mon­biot on the cam­paign to arrest Tony Blair:

Already the cam­paign has borne fruit. Out­side the Chil­cot inquiry a woman called Grace McCann, inspired by the web­site, tried to appre­hend Mr Blair, before she was restrained and removed by the police. She qual­i­fies for the first bounty: one quarter of the total pot at the time of her attempt. She has pledged to give the money to rel­ev­ant char­it­ies. The fund will remain open until Blair is offi­cially pro­sec­uted, and we will keep pay­ing out to those who fol­low Grace’s example.

You can donate here.

New Labour’s cynical electoral reform

No Right Turn on Labour’s elect­oral reform announcement:

After a dec­ade of broken prom­ises, the UK’s Labour gov­ern­ment is finally mov­ing on elect­oral reform, announ­cing that they will pass a law before the elec­tion requir­ing a vote on the elect­oral sys­tem within two years. Of course, New Labour being New Labour it is being done for all the wrong reas­ons

Inquiries into invasion of Iraq are a smokescreen

There have been a num­ber of inquir­ies into the 2003 inva­sion of Iraq but as someone com­ment­ing on the European Tribune web­site put it, they

… are not inten­ded to reach a find­ing that the pub­lic find cred­ible, they exist to provide a smokescreen for a few years to cover the estab­lish­ment for a few years in the hope every­one for­gets about it.

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