Posted by Jonathan Birch on May 13th, 2009
Here’s what I wrote a month ago:
It turns out that some MPs have been claiming hefty expenses to which they are technically entitled under the current rules, even though they don’t really need the money. This must have come as a terrible shock to all those who thought MPs were selfless ascetics who spurn all remuneration and donate their salaries to orphanages.
A month later, the story is even bigger. The full details of every MP’s expenses are in the public domain, and I suspect that some people are enjoying the resultant holier-than-thou MP-flagellation orgy a bit too much. The weirdos of BBC Have Your Say are, predictably, foaming. My favourite comment (apart from the top recommended comment, suggesting we should dissolve parliament and put the Queen in charge), is one asking “how much necessary equipment could have been purchased for our troops fighting overseas” with these expenses. Perspective, anyone?
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Posted by Jonathan Birch on April 12th, 2009
An aide to the Prime Minister spreads some nasty gossip in a private email to a blogger. The blogger’s emails are hacked, the emails are leaked to another blog, and the aide resigns. It’s a juicy and very modern tale of a spin doctor getting a taste of his own medicine. But is it really the outrageous sleaze scandal the media wants it to be?
Surely the PM himself cannot be held responsible for his aide’s private emails, and his aide’s private emails should never have reached the public domain in the first place. The aide has resigned — line drawn, case closed.
In other news, it turns out that some MPs have been claiming hefty expenses to which they are technically entitled under the current rules, even though they don’t really need the money. This must have come as a terrible shock to all those who thought MPs were selfless ascetics who spurn all remuneration and donate their salaries to orphanages. Was this an outrageous sleaze scandal? Come on.
The outrageous scandal here is that it’s issues like these that swing elections. There are so many serious issues to think about, and Britain is more interested in the politics of the petty.
Filed under: Uncategorized, bbc, conservatives, davidcameron, jonathanbirch, journalism, labour, ukpolitics
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Posted by Ed Ballard on March 29th, 2009
Creative Commons licensed photo courtesy of Flickr user John Perivolaris.
One may take Job to task on life being ‘full of misery’, but some day we shall all be ‘cut down like a flower’ and ‘flee’th as it were a shadow’. Death has been in the news a lot lately. It is never a comfortable subject. However it is a fact of life, and we do seem to hold some funny views towards it at present.
To begin with the ‘sanctity of human life’ question, which repeatedly cascades across the news. There is Patricia Hewitt coming out in favour of assisted suicide and the High Court ruling on ‘Baby OT’, then the absurd case of the nine-year-old rape victim in Brazil whose mother was excommunicated by the Catholic Church for getting her an abortion. UNICEF can remind us all it likes that a child dies needlessly every 3 seconds, and yet we still fixate upon the debate of ending un-savable or unborn lives, rather than saving those who so dearly want to live.
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Filed under: abortion, afghanistan, arabisraeliconflict, jadegoody
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Posted by Jonathan Birch on March 21st, 2009
Two signs of the times this week. Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt comes out in favour of assisted suicide; and a seriously ill baby, “Baby OT”, dies after the High Court orders an end to its assisted breathing. Behind both developments, an underlying intuition that death is preferable to a painful life.
I worry where this utilitarian thinking might lead us. “Death” and “preferable” just don’t sit well together for me. A human being has unconditional value. Avoiding pain is good for a human being, but, as such, its value is conditional. We ought to alleviate pain wherever we can because we value the lives of human beings.
In cases of assisted suicide and withdrawal of life support without consent, the pain-prevention imperative apparently takes priority. That makes me uneasy. The assertion by the BMA today that, in the Baby OT case, death was “in the best interests of the child” strikes me as somehow horrifying.
Filed under: ideas, jonathanbirch, religion
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Posted by Jonathan Birch on March 17th, 2009
Creative Commons licensed photograph courtesy of Flickr user jgraham.
Even after eleven years, there’s still something a bit shocking about tuition fees. If the vice-chancellors get their way, fees will rise to at least £5000 per student per year. It’s a policy that flaunts its pragmatism on its sleeve. I still think fees defy any principled justification. If you think HE deserves state funding, fund it properly. If you think it doesn’t deserve state funding, don’t fund it. But funding HE most of the way, then extorting the rest from the people attending the courses? There’s just something absurd about the whole thing. I want to tap David Lammy on the shoulder and whisper: “Psst! Stop it! Be rational!”
But the consequences of abolishing tuition fees would be unpleasant too. Either the total amount of state funding for undergraduate courses would have to increase, or the total number of funded undergraduate courses would have to decrease. Most people are quite happy to bite one bullet or the other. I’m not so sure. Take the first route, and I can guess where the money would come from. It would be taken out of the research pot. Academia in areas without demonstrable practical utility would end up more atrophied than it is already. Take the second route and Oxbridge would get by fine, but the dream of giving at least half the population a higher education would be dead.
Filed under: barackobama, education, jonathanbirch, labour, religion, ukpolitics
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Posted by Peter Lockwood on March 1st, 2009
‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.’
— Martin Luther King 28th August 1963
‘We must recognise that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power’
— Martin Luther King on SCLC staff retreat in 1967
Today, the election of Barack Obama to the White House has given rise to the belief that America has successfully dealt with its history of institutional racism. ‘It’s been a long time coming, but tonight… change has come to America’. Unfortunately, the idea that the election of Obama as president embodies a significant change within American society is not one that I personally buy.
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Filed under: barackobama, education, poverty, racism
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Posted by Tom Hegarty on February 18th, 2009
Mitrovica, Kosovo — Creative Commons licensed photo courtesy of Flickr user Jekkyl.
Yesterday was the first anniversary of Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia. Kosovo was not a Yugoslav republic like Croatia or Slovenia, so it did not immediately emerge as independent from the break up of Yugoslavia, but remained a province of Serbia, despite ninety percent of its population being ethnic Albanians, until a year ago, when it declared independence unilaterally.
Kosovo had been under UN administration since 1999, but Serbia still claimed it as an integral part of its territory, and extended talks about Kosovo’s status failed to reach an agreement that was supported by both Serbia and Kosovo. The Russian alliance with Serbia also meant that no resolution could be pushed through the UN Security Council without Belgrade’s approval. The former President of Finland, Martti Ahtisaari, was charged with leading talks on Kosovo’s independence. As it became clear that the talks had failed and that the US, the UK and France would all recognise Kosovo should it declare independence, Kosovo’s assembly announced its rejection of Serbian rule on 17th February 2008. However, since then, only 54 of the UN’s 192 members have recognised this independence.
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Posted by Jonathan Birch on February 16th, 2009
Creative Commons licensed photograph courtesy of Flickr user photoverulam.
If there’s one thing more irritating than excessive political correctness, it’s excessive whining about how political correctness has “gone mad”. So I’ll try not to take that line here. But I’m a little baffled by the complaints over Emmanuel’s British Empire-themed May Ball, and the subsequent backtracking by its committee, who have renamed it.
I’m not a gung-ho imperialist. I can self-flagellate as heartily as anyone. But the suggestion that we ought to respond to our dark past by erasing every morally neutral portrayal of it — by outlawing every representation that fails to be sufficiently negative — this is, at best, naive, weird, and unrealistic. But I worry that it’s also dangerously misleading when it goes hand in hand with a contrasting rose-tinted celebration of other cultures.
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Posted by Peter Lockwood on February 16th, 2009
34 Squadron, RAF Regiment patrols around Basra on Dec. 17, 2007.
Creative Commons licensed photo courtesy of David Axe.
After climbing onto the coach to Aberdeen during one of the more fateful twists of my RAG jailbreak adventure, I found myself sitting next to an Egyptian journalist on his way to Glasgow to divorce his wife. Fortunately for the both of us, the conversation swiftly turned away from this awkward revelation and it wasn’t long before we were talking about Iraq. He asked what I thought was the biggest mistake with the whole affair, to which I replied ‘the lack of a plan’. ‘Exactly’, he said.
Sir Hilary Synnott’s speech a week before had made clear just how devastating the lack of a plan was. Whereas now in 2009 we tend to focus on the chaos that has developed since the invasion of Iraq, Sir Hilary also chose to highlight the now lost hope of Iraqis for a better future. Reading from his recently published book Bad Days in Basra, he spoke of the first Eid after Saddam as being a time of optimism now that Saddam’s laws that prohibited people from gathering no longer applied.
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Posted by Edd Mustill on February 4th, 2009
The spread of wildcat strikes at oil refineries and power stations, beginning in Lindsey in Lincolnshire, is the biggest such movement in Britain for years. It began as protests against the attempts of overseas contractors to undercut working conditions by bringing in their own labour force.
There are important aspects to consider when looking at this strike movement.
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They are breaking rules. The strikes are illegal, but the strength of feeling is such that the participants don’t particularly care. They are a sign of a shift in people’s consciousness, from seeing a movement in action and sympathetically observing from the sidelines (as occurred, for example, during the Gate Gourmet dispute of 2005) to actively becoming involved in it themselves.
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Filed under: socialism, strikes, trade unions
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