spiked are asking for donations to support “smart, bolshie, no-holds-barred journalism … to really light a rocket under illiberal miserablism next year”.
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I am willing to receive anonymous donations or bequests. Bequests are ok because I can’t serve or be seen to serve somebody who is dead. It’s – of course – up to you to decide if I’m a worthy cause or not. I’m advised that used, unmarked notes are a good way to ensure anonymity.
What I’d really like is a small sailing boat – something that I can learn to sail in but that can also be sailed long distances single-handedly. A nice Hunter 19 sailing boat (like this one [25/12/13 I’ve come to realise that this is far from an ideal trailer-sailer because of that fin keel and would avoid it. Imagine trying to launch that from a launching ramp. The one in the image above is fine.]) with outboard, etc on a trailer would be ideal and not too expensive. A Hunter 19 has crossed the Atlantic. I’m sure that it could be delivered anonymously on a trailer.
The issue is about oversight of the security services: the home affairs select committee consider that intelligence agencies should be answerable to parliament and ordinary MPs, the government and the Home Secretary do not. Tim Farron, President of the ‘Liberal-Democrats’ is to propose measures to improve scrutiny of the intelligence services at the ‘Liberal-Democrats’ spring conference. The ‘Liberal-Democrat’ leadership has previously ignored directions from their ‘liberal-democratic’ party e.g. student tuition fees.
PAC chair Margaret Hodge said it was “hard to understand why the government debt and deficit highlighted in the whole government accounts differ from those reported in the ONS’s national accounts.”
“According to the former document, compiled on the basis of well-understood accounting standards, the UK’s in-year deficit for 2011-12 was £185bn. The national accounts used by the chancellor put the figure at £90bn.”
George Osborne has said that he wants “billions” more cut from the welfare budget. George Eaton at the New Statesman speculates where the axe might fall:
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What cuts could he have in mind? It’s worth looking back at the speech David Cameron made on the subject in June 2012 when he outlined a series of possible measures, including:
The restriction of child-related benefits for families with more than two children.
A lower rate of benefits for the under-21s.
Preventing school leavers from claiming benefits.
Paying benefits in kind (like free school meals), rather than in cash.
Reducing benefit levels for the long-term unemployed. Cameron said: “Instead of US-style time-limits – which remove entitlements altogether – we could perhaps revise the levels of benefits people receive if they are out of work for literally years on end”.
A lower housing benefit cap. Cameron said that the current limit of £20,000 was still too high.
The abolition of the “non-dependent deduction”. Those who have an adult child living with them would lose up to £74 a week in housing benefit.
Osborne would also likely reduce the household benefit cap of £26,000 (he said today that “future governments could change the level” and Tory MPs have been pushing for one of £20,000) and maintain the 1% cap on benefit increases (a real-terms cut).
There is a story developing – which has had surprisingly little attention – that five Tory MPs including one ex-minister are being investigated for paedophile crimes against boys. The source of the story is exaro news while slightly different reports appear in the daily record and ibtimes. The former cabinet minister is described as a household name. What does that mean?
Commentary and analysis on recent UK politics events.
Fidel Castro peers out of the bars of Nelson Mandela’s former cell on Robben Island during a recent visit.
There’s a very good article about the sanitization through political values of Nelson Mandela and the South African campaign against Apartheid at politics.co.uk. I’ll quote some but urge you to read the whole article.
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For decades, Cuba supported the armed struggle liberation movements in South Africa, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique. In 1961, when Che Guevara attended a summit in Geneva as industry minister, he attacked “the inhuman and fascist policy of apartheid” and demanded the expulsion of South Africa from the UN, all decades before Britain could bring itself to challenge the racist government.
The climax of the decades-long campaign came when Cuba supported liberation forces in Angola against South African interference. In the 1988 battle of Cuito Cuanvale, a victory celebrated across southern Africa, South African soldiers were defeated a volunteer Cuban army , dragging PW Botha and FW de Klerk to the negotiating table.
Mandela described Cuba as “our friend”, a country which “helped us train our people, who gave us resources that helped us so much in our struggle”. He added: “The defeat of the racist army at Cuito Cuanavale has made it possible for me to be here today. What other country can point to a record of greater selflessness than Cuba has displayed in its relations with Africa? For the Cuban people internationalism is not merely a word but something that we have seen practiced to the benefit of large sections of humankind.”
When challenged on his friendship with Castro by Clinton, Mandela replied: “We should not abandon those who helped us in the darkest hour in the history of this country.”
Low-income households spend an average of £2.10 per person per day on groceries, having cut their daily food budget drastically since the summer, according to the latest instalment of a survey on the impact of welfare reform.
The detailed survey of more than 87 families found that a third said they now spent less than £20 a week on food, partly to cope with spiralling gas and electricity bills, while more than half said they had no money left once bills were paid.
A combination of shrinking incomes and rising living costs, coupled with high personal debts meant the “reality of everyday life has got tougher” for low-income families since April when a series of welfare changes, such as the bedroom tax, were introduced, the report said.
Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, has resigned as Master of Pembroke College, ahead of the potential release of his account of the events leading to the Iraq war
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Sources close to Dearlove have spoken about how he feels Chilcot should recognise the role played by Blair and his spokesman Alastair Campbell in the reports which suggested Saddam could use chemical weapons to target British troops in Cyprus – a claim which put Britain on a path to war in Iraq.
Online gaming is big business, attracting tens of millions of users worldwide who inhabit their digital worlds as make-believe characters, living and competing with the avatars of other players. What the intelligence agencies feared, however, was that among these clans of elves and goblins, terrorists were lurking.
The NSA document, written in 2008 and titled Exploiting Terrorist Use of Games & Virtual Environments, stressed the risk of leaving games communities under-monitored, describing them as a “target-rich communications network” where intelligence targets could “hide in plain sight”.
Games, the analyst wrote, “are an opportunity!”. According to the briefing notes, so many different US intelligence agents were conducting operations inside games that a “deconfliction” group was required to ensure they weren’t spying on, or interfering with, each other.
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But the documents contain no indication that the surveillance ever foiled any terrorist plots, nor is there any clear evidence that terror groups were using the virtual communities to communicate as the intelligence agencies predicted.
After months of trying, MPs on the work and pensions select committee finally had a chance to question Iain Duncan Smith on the DWP’s abuse of statistics and the chaos surrounding Universal Credit today. On the former, Duncan Smith bullishly pointed out that the department had published “over 500” statistical releases and had received just two critical letters from the UK Statistics Authority. He again declared that he “believed” thousands of people had moved into work as a result of the introduction of the benefit cap, despite the UKSA warning that this was “unsupported by the official statistics”.
But when he was questioned on the false statement by Conservative chairman Grant Shapps that “nearly a million people” (878,300) on incapacity benefit dropped their claims, rather than face a new medical assessment for the employment and support allowance (which resulted in another reprimand from the Statistics Authority to Duncan Smith and Shapps), he took a strikingly different line. Rather than defending the claim, he replied that it was “nothing to do with the department” and blamed CCHQ for the inaccurate “conflation of data”. Speaking from what appeared to most to be a glass house, he added: “I’ve tried to get my colleagues at Central Office to check first before they put anything out about the areas that the DWP covers because it’s complex”. One was left with the image of Duncan Smith pleading with Shapps and other Tory apparatchiks not to twist statistics for the purposes of political propaganda but his own record meant he received little sympathy from the committee.
After being challenged on the DWP’s demonisation of benefit claimants through its references to “a something for nothing culture”, Duncan Smith similarly sought to shift the blame, noting that it was “a minister” from the last government (Liam Byrne) who first referred to “shirkers” and “workers”, to which the only appropriate reply is ‘two wrongs don’t make a right”.
