UK politics news
A selection of recent UK and international political articles.
- How to discredit your democratic opponents in Egypt | openDemocracy
- How we ended up paying farmers to flood our homes | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian
- Hospital chiefs misleading Londoners over A&E closures which will bring chaos to the capital’s hospitals | NHA Party
- NHS in England delays sharing of medical records | Society | The Guardian
- Suspension of care.data scheme must be used to address security concerns | NHA Party
- Ed Miliband, the NHS, and the lurch back towards Blairism | openDemocracy
- Welfare state presides over ‘culture of fear’, charities say | Politics | The Guardian
- David Cameron Wrong To Say Workless Households Doubled Under Labour, Official Figures Show
- Tonee Miranda offers to help Rebecca, Rupert and James. “… set up a Hutton-style enquiry …”
UK politics news
A selection of recent UK and international news articles
Home Secretary waited until terror suspect was abroad before stripping citizenship | The Bureau of Investigative Journalism … [Home Secretary Theresa May] denied that it has a policy of waiting until individuals are out of the UK before removing their citizenship. But research by the Bureau has also found that of the 18 individuals we have identified who have lost their UK nationality removed since 2006, at least 15 were known to be abroad when orders to remove their citizenship were issued. Of those individuals, two – Mohammed Sakr and Bilal al-Berjawi – were killed in US drone strikes in Somalia. Another, Mahdi Hashi, was rendered to the United States where he’s currently awaiting trial on terror charges in a high-security jail. Speaking in the parliamentary debate, Diane Abbott pointed out that debate around citizenship-stripping often failed to presume the innocence of individuals who had not faced criminal charges. ‘We are talking about terror suspects. Nowadays in Parliament, saying that someone is suspected of terrorist activity is enough for the political class to assume that that person does not deserve due process,’ she said. …- The state assassination of a US citizen foretold – World Socialist Web Site
- NSA spying poses “direct threat to journalism,” watchdog group warns – World Socialist Web Site
- European Parliament kills call to protect Edward Snowden – World Socialist Web Site
- Valentines Day: Couples split up by Home Office express their anguish
- Comment: How Jeremy Hunt plans to sell your NHS records
38degrees warn Jeremy Hunt about the NHS If the government gets its way, from May this year your family’s patient-identifiable data will be uploaded from your GP surgery to a single, centralised database for the very first time. This ‘care-data’ database will include your NHS number, date of birth, postcode, ethnicity and gender. Your medical diagnoses, including cancer and mental health, your referrals to specialists, your prescriptions, your body mass index, details of your vaccinations and screening tests and your smoking and alcohol habits will be on there too.
The scheme, led by health secretary Jeremy Hunt, is being hailed as a revolution in the use of information to improve our healthcare and to advance medical research – admirable aims indeed. But once it goes live, organisations including drug and insurance firms will be able to apply to purchase ‘pseudonymised’ details about patients. And ‘backdoors’ to the database will allow bodies like the police to enjoy direct access to your medical records as well.
- Cameron ditches promise to allow public to sack MPs
- Boris ‘prioritising super rich’ amid new flat development
- Is free speech on drugs being censored by corporate giants? The disappearance of a YouTube channel. | openDemocracy
- Coalition spends millions sacking and rehiring Government officials – Telegraph
- The NHS is not like a supermarket. Patients are not consumers. | NHA Party
- These floods are washing away the founding logic of David Cameron’s government | Jonathan Freedland | Comment is free | The Guardian… But that is the least of the damage that Cameron’s words have inflicted on himself. For this government was built, the coalition formed, on a single, simple premise: that austerity was unavoidable, that there was no alternative. There could be no more spending, an assertion endorsed by the outgoing Labour government in what must rank as one of the most ill-judged jokes of modern times: “There’s no money left,” said Liam Byrne in a note left for his successor at the Treasury. But now, less than four years on, it turns out that this is no longer true. The PM has told us that, should the need be urgent enough, there is money after all. Limitless supplies of it in fact; enough to defeat nature’s wrath. To quote Cameron in full, “Money is no object in this relief effort. Whatever money is needed for it will be spent.” This rather undermines the austerity message, for it shows what was always true – that the national belt is not tightened universally and for ever but can be loosened when the government wants to loosen it. The last demonstration of that truth came nearly two years ago, when George Osborne cut the top rate of tax from 50p to 45p. That destroyed at a stroke the claim that we were all in it together, but it also illuminated a more obvious fact: that, despite all the “no alternative” talk, the government had not lost its power of discretion. Even in the age of austerity, it still got to decide what to spend money on and what not to spend it on. …
- Welfare reforms a ‘disgrace’, says UK’s most senior Catholic | World news | The Guardian
Traitor Tony Blair receives the Congressional Gold Medal of Honour from George ‘Dubya’ Bush - War-weary Britain: “The Iraq war was where it all started for me” | World news | theguardian.com
- Your bills help British Gas to £600m profit – Business News – Business – The Independent Centrica is set to announce on Thursday that its British Gas household supply arm made a profit of nearly £600m last year, helped by a 10.4 per cent hike in gas prices in November and an 8.4 per cent rise in electricity prices. Politicians and campaigners said the bumper profits provided further evidence that showed the Big Six were overcharging customers in an uncompetitive market.
Image of a badger - BBC News – Scarborough Mayor Jaconelli abuse claims investigated by policeSavile associate Peter Jaconelli
- Fish farms are destroying wild Scottish salmon, says leading environmentalist | UK news | The ObserverAlex Salmond “accused of overheating production of Scottish farmed salmon to meet China’s insatiable demand for sushi in return for its loan of two pandas to Edinburgh Zoo.”
17/2/14 edit: That would be Alex Salmon “accused of overheating production of Scottish farmed salmond to meet Japan’s insatiable demand for sushi in return for China’s loan of two pandas to Edinburgh Zoo.”
- Bottom trawling: how to empty the seas in just 150 years | Environment | The Observer“For every hour spent fishing today, in boats bristling with the latest fish-finding electronics, fishers land a mere 6% of what they did 120 years ago. Put another way, fishers today have to work 17 times harder to get the same catch as people did in the 19th century.” And the reason for this startling state of affairs is straightforward: we have caught so much fish in our own waters over the past 150 years, there is little left for us today. Some species hover at the edge of extinction. Our seas, and the floor below them, have been stripped of their riches.
UK politics review – the lurch towards Fascism
UK political events combine into a lurch towards Fascism.
The gagging law is passed. Called the Transparency of Lobbying Bill, Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act it has nothing to do with transparency of lobbying and everything to do with silencing the government’s critics and opponents. It’s a huge blow against trade unions and other campaigning groups like 38degrees and charities. The Conservative-pretendLiberal coalition have attacked democracy by passing this law.
Fascism is described by it’s creator Benito Mussolini as corporatism – the unification of corporations and government. This is entirely the action that the gagging law continues to excuse. Fascism is right-wing authoritarianism typified by attacks on trade unions and political opponents.
Home secretary Theresa May wants to strip suspected terrorists of their nationality and leave them stateless. This is to be done through the use of secret courts. Theresa May has previously stripped dual-nationals of UK nationality so that they could then be renditioned, etc.
This is intended to be done to suspected terrorists. If there was any evidence against them they would be terrorists. Political activists and dissidents are suspected terrorists. Terrorism as defined in UK law is not necessarily anything to do with explosives or arms or similar threats. Once again the government is seen to be silencing it’s critics and opponents.
Madman and London Mayor Boris Johnson wants police to use water cannon and “get medieval” on protesters. The riots of 2011 were sparked by the police murder of Mark Duggan.
Mark Duggan: profile of Tottenham police shooting victim
later edit: Home Secretary Theresa May’s intention is to deprive ‘naturalised’ subjects i.e. from abroad and granted UK status, of UK nationality. It’s still disproportionate since it only needs suspicion rather than any evidence and the powers are bound to be extended later. Politicians love terrorism because it gives them cover for Fascist laws.
Although reported almost universally as suspected terrorists it is actually “… the Secretary of State is satisfied that the deprivation is conducive to the public good because the person, while having that citizenship status, has conducted him or herself in a manner which is seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the United Kingdom, any of the Islands, or any British overseas territory.” [source] That seems far wider than suspected terrorists.
Commentary on and analysis of recent political events
Merry Christmas.
The New Statesman reports on Britain’s new Victorianism whereby the filthy rich get filthier rich and that the poor get poorer. Just in case you haven’t realised, we are most definitely not all in this together.
We are re-living a traditional Victorian Christmas – of excess for the few and struggle for the many
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Like the Victorian poor, Britons on low and middle incomes are often treated as a different caste of people to those which in the nineteenth century were called the “upper ten thousand” and are now the “super rich” 0.1%. The practice of sacrificing workers’ need for reliable incomes to the desire of employers to have flexibility is spreading – through zero-hours contracts and false self-employment – up the income scale. This is reflected in how our incomes are described: too often, the business pages of refer to the pay of the 0.1% as “reward” (they are valuable creatures to be nurtured and thanked) whereas the rest of us are “labour costs”.
At the other end of the scale, the rich are getting richer. The UK’s 1,000 wealthiest people last year got richer by £35bn: they now have assets, on average, of £450m each. London now boasts the world’s most expensive home, and we are seeing the return of the butler. The share of national income that the top 1% get fell throughout most of the 20th century, but is again heading towards Victorian levels.
And this new gentry are not, for the most part, talented hard-working who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. As in the Victorian era, the rich are the privileged offspring of privileged parents. The UK has one of the lowest levels of social mobility in the developed world. A child whose parents send them to private school is 11 times more likely to go on to run a major company than his state-school equivalent, and 30 times more likely to become a high-court judge.
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Martin Robbins reports on Cameron and the illiberal Con-Dem coalition government’s progress in censoring the internet. He asks what the porn filter is all about? I think that you can see what was intended by looking at the consequences: it was intended to censor huge swathes of the internet and allow only a prudish flaccid anodyne vacuity and it was intended to disempower individuals so that using the internet should be passive like watching television.
Cameron’s internet filter goes far beyond porn – and that was always the plan
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As Wired reported back in July, Cameron’s ambitions extended far beyond porn. Working through secretive negotiations with ISPs, the coalition has put in place a set of filters and restrictions as ambitious as anything this side of China, dividing the internet into ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ categories, and cutting people off from huge swathes of it at the stroke of a key.
“As well as pornography, users may automatically be opted in to blocks on “violent material”, “extremist related content”, “anorexia and eating disorder websites” and “suicide related websites”, “alcohol” and “smoking”. But the list doesn’t stop there. It even extends to blocking “web forums” and “esoteric material”, whatever that is. “Web blocking circumvention tools” is also included, of course.”
And the restrictions go further still. Over the weekend, people were appalled to discover that BT filters supported homophobia, with a category blocking, “sites where the main purpose is to provide information on subjects such as respect for a partner, abortion, gay and lesbian lifestyle, contraceptive, sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy.”
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It was never really clear what the so-called porn filter was supposed to achieve; what problem it was trying to prevent. Filtering seems to have become a crutch for inept parents looking for an easy way to avoid having real conversations with their kids about sex, porn and the world outside their comfortable little cul-de-sacs. If their first sight of a vagina traumatizes your teenage child, then you have brought them up wrong – but of course the problem here is often the parent more than the child; the embarrassed mother of father – projecting their own feelings of discomfort and embarrassment around the topic of sex onto their child. There remains, despite a wave of public hysteria, no good evidence that porn has any detrimental effect on children.
What clearly does have an impact on children though is denying them sex education, suppressing their sexual identity, and shutting off access to child protection or mental health charities. In all this talk of porn filters, the rights of the children campaigners supposedly want to protect have been ignored or trampled. Children should have a right to good quality sex education, access to support hotlines and websites, and information about their sexuality.
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Chris Grayling and the illiberal Con-Dem Conservative coalition government are accused of being petty and killjoys for banning prisoners from receiving gifts from friends and families.
Prisoners Won’t Receive Parcels This Christmas
Convicted prisoners will not be able to receive parcels from their loved ones this Christmas under new rules introduced by the Government.
The rules forbid prisoners from receiving any items in the post unless there are “exceptional circumstances”.
The new measures were introduced in November, meaning this is the first Christmas for which the new rules will be in effect.
A Prison Service spokesperson confirmed the rule change, saying it was part of a raft of Government reforms.
But Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said: “These new mean and petty prison rules just add stress and strain while doing nothing to promote rehabilitation and personal responsibility.”
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OurNHS in 2013 – some highlights
OurNHS is on a publishing break until the New Year. Why not check out some of our stories you may have missed?
Dr Clare Gerada, outgoing Chair of the Royal College of GPs, asks ‘What do we want – a good doctor, or “patient choice”?’
How did we get here? Marcus Chown explains in The great NHS robbery.
Could young doctors have done more to fight NHS ‘reforms’, asks Guddi Singh in Asleep on the job – young doctors and the NHS reforms.
Dr Jacky Davis questions the media presentation of hospital deaths.
Dr David Zigmond challenges the poor quality of decision making in the new NHS structures in ‘NHS decisions, Eurovision-style’. Richard Grimes wonders whether the Deregulation Bill is even more worrying than the Lobbying Bill in ‘A Bonfire of Citizens’ Rights’.
OurNHS editor Caroline Molloy investigates the rising threat of NHS charges in Zombie policies walking into Downing Street, the scandal of Peterborough Hospital and the PFI racket and asks ’What is G4S doing in England’s NHS’? She also exposes how predictions of compulsory tendering are coming true, and how the NHS pays millions to end contracts which have put patient lives at risk.
In The Race to Privatise England’s NHS Paul Evans of the NHS Supporters Federation lays bare just how many contracts are going out to the private sector.
In ‘The NHS and dog whistle politics’, Dr Kamliz Boomla highlights the problems of charging migrants for the NHS, and Shibley Rahman asks whether we should be worried about personal budgets in ‘Shop til you drop’.
The sale of personal medical data to private interests is exposed in “Your medical data – on sale for a pound” by Phil Booth of MedConfidential.
Green Party leader Natalie Bennett speaks out on the sell-off of NHS land.
Clive Peedell (National Health Action Party Leader) tells us how David Cameron has lied about his intention to privatise the NHS.
Rachael Maskell, Unite National Officer for health, highlights the scandal of low pay in the NHS & the NHS’s electoral impact.
Ex-Children’s Commissioner Sir Al Aynsley-Green sets out how the health and welfare ‘reforms’ are failing children.
Professor Dexter Whitfield asks should we turn the NHS into mutual and co-ops?, Professor Rosemary Mander questions whether charities are losing their way in healthcareand Andrew Robertson of Social Investigations exposed how the charity sector has lobbied for NHS privatisation.
Professor Marianna Fotaki of the Centre for Health & the Public Interest suggests the NHS learn from how privatisation has damaged social care.
Dr Kailash Chand OBE urges Labour to ‘Shout from the rooftops’ to save the NHS, Grahame Morris MP of the Health Select Committee) exposes how privatisation is harming Freedom of Information and Roger Kline asks if private sector secrecy will stop the NHS becoming more open.
In 2013 OurNHS was the first to highlight and promote campaigns including the privatisation (Section 75) regulations, the EU/US Free Trade Treatyand the Hospital Closure clause.
We recently launched an up-to-date resource guide, the most comprehensive collection of the best NHS campaigning resources on the Web, and hope to build on our work supporting grassroots campaigners.
2014 will be a big year for NHS campaigning. There are big questions to address on healthcare funding, charging, cuts and privatisation, and democratic accountability. OurNHS wants to continue to ensure a range of progressive and sometimes challenging voices are heard in the debate.
OurNHS continues to campaign hard for an ‘NHS restoration bill’ to restore the Secretary of State’s duty to secure a comprehensive health service, abolished by the 2012 Health & Social Care Act.
See you in 2014!