Articles for July 2006

Snatching At The Pink Pound

50 quid just to march in Gay Pride. Now that’s inclusive:

Fury over ?50 charge to join gay pridemarch

By Ian Herbert

Published: 18 July 2006, Independent

The organisers of one of Britain’s best-known gay pride marches have been accused of profiteering after insisting that all those who take part must pay ?50 for the privilege.

Next month’s 10-day Manchester Pride festival, now in its 12th year, is expected to attract 100,000 people to the city centre. But for the first time, organisers are insisting that the costs of crowd control and additional policing, which have grown with the event, demand that individuals or non-commercial groups on the event’s march through the city must pay.

[…]

Manchester Pride, which organises the three-day weekend festival and has raised more than ?400,000 for charities in Greater Manchester over the past three years, insisted the flat charge of ?50 plus VAT was justifiable. “I would love to throw the biggest and best event in the world, but you are acutely aware that every pound you are spending is a pound less going to charities,” said the event’s chairman, Andrew Stokes. “These things always have a cost attached and there are all sorts of health and safety costs. And, while it is not directly attributed to this, we don’t currently have a parade sponsor. “

[…]

“Those early years were great, it was a real charity event with everyone having a great sense of community,” one festival regular said. “Now it’s too big and commercial. The biggest amount of money made is by the businesses and not the charities, which is after all what it’s all about. It should be about gay pride and not about money.”

Perhaps the Manchester plod should just ask the Home Secretary for a Section 44 order. They can find money pretty swiftly if the magic word terrorism is invoked.

Of course, Pride attendees would have to accept random intimate searches from muscular officers in tight-fitting uniforms, but then isn’t that what Pride’s all about?

Sleaze and Serendipity

Remember how the whole cash-for-honours affair started, with the sponsors of the democratically unaccountable City Academies being promised gongs and/or a seat in the Lords for a million-pound donation or higher to New Labour’s dreadful city academies scheme?

Of course, then the affaire de sleaze opened out, encouraged by party treasurer Jack Dromey, to expose the centrality of Tony Blair and his chief moneyman Lord Levy to the giving of undeclared loans to the party election coffers in exchange for more patronage.

The Specialist Schools and Academies Trust is the freestanding ( ie no democratic oversight) over-arching organisation of the city academies scheme. Of the 40 representatives on its ruling council 16, or 40%, have some form of honour, ranging from an OBE, to a dameship or life peerage; and of those, 7 are awarded to sponsor’s representatives, a similar percentage.

Guess who’s President of the Trust? Cha-ching! Yes, indeed it is who you think it is – step forward, Lord Levy, take a bow.

Wow, what an astonishing co-incidence. I’m quite bowled over with surprise.

Comment of The Day

On the Xian-Charles De Menezes murder and the subsequent whitewash:

Last year, the London police execeuted [sic] an innocent boy. It was not a true mistake. De Menezes lost his life due to police incompetence. The officer whose task it was to positivelty [sic] identify a potential suspect was not concentrating at all on his job. Anyway, a young man is dead. The true reason why the police officers who shot him 8 times will not be chanrged is simple: Government knows that the police will be required to shoot suspects on many other occasions; and so if the police are charged now, then in the future no officer will open fire, even on a real terrorist. This dilema is something for whole society to worry about. It could be my son or your son next.

Quite.

Dutch Paedophile Party Wins Legal Challenge

Voters must decide, says Netherlands court:

A Dutch court rejected an attempt by anti-paedophile campaigners to ban the Brotherly Love, Freedom and Diversity party (PNVD), which wants to cut the age of consent from 16 to 12 and to legalise child pornography. “The freedom of expression, the freedom of assembly and the freedom of association should be seen as the foundations of the democratic rule of law and the PNVD is also entitled to these freedoms,” the court in The Hague said in a statement.

The court declared that curbs on freedom of expression could only be applied where public order is at risk. “They [opponents of the party] only want to give expression to their moral concerns. That is far from being sufficient to outlaw a party. It is up to the voter to give a judgment on the arguments of political parties,” Judge H Hofhuis was quoted by the Dutch news agency ANP as telling the court.

Blast From The Past

So I was reading a post at Steve Clemon’s Washington Note when an aside in the comments about the evacuation of US citizens from Lebanon caught my eye.

Apparently there are an estimated 25.000 US citizens stranded in the Lebanon war zone and the US government plans to evacuate them by cruise ship ‘in the next few days’, though Beirut is already in ruins from the Israeli bombing and the situation’s becoming increasingly precarious and could deteriorate at any time.

It occurs to me that they’ll need quite a few ships to ferry up to 25,000 people away from the area of conflict. The biggest available is Royal Caribbean’s Adventure of the Seas, a 142,000- ton behemoth built in 2001 that carries 3,114 passengers. Even if they had this class of vessel available, they’d need at least 8.

The Pentagon is actually sending the Orient Queen, – which 525-foot-long ship currently has a maximum capacity of 922 passengers. It’ll be accompanied by one warship. Seems like a bit of mis-match; though only 15,000 of US citizens in the country have registered with Embassy officials and many have already left by land routes, any sea transport’ll still have to make multiple trips.

Adding insult to potential injury the government also plans to charge the evacuees ‘commercial rates’ for the privilege of being rescued. This made me wonder – how much will it actually cost to escape the fighting, and what if you don’t have the money?

A 4 days/4 nightsTuesday-Saturday, cruise on the Orient Queen stopping at Port Sa?d, Limassol, Rhodes & Marmaris costs a minimum 595 euro per person ( plus taxes and port fees) or approximately 750 dollars, not exactly affordable when you’re fleeing a war zone with only 30lbs weight of personal possessions. The Pentagon says if evacuees can’t pay, they’ll work something out. Uh-huh, that’s worked really well for the Pentagon so far.

Britain at least is sending in warships, amphibious landing craft and helcopters, and we have, at a maximum, only 10,000 British citizens and dual nationals in Lebanon.

HMS Illustrious, the aircraft carrier, and HMS Bulwark, a new commando assault ship, have been sent to the Lebanese coast. They will use their helicopters and landing craft to take thousands of trapped British citizens off the beaches in Beirut if the order to evacuate is given.

Royal Marine commandos on board HMS Illustrious and HMS Bulwark are preparing to establish a landing zone. This is being billed as the ‘biggest evacuation since Dunkirk’.

One poxy, days late cruiseliner seems a little insufficient but indufficiency’s par for the course with this shower of an administration. All the while they’re making these inadequate plans to protect their own citizens they’re encourging the primary aggressor in the conflict, Israel, to carry on bombing them. Why does America hate Americans?

Hezbollah has already managed to hit an Israeli warship off the coast of Lebanon and the regular back and forth of one unarmed cruise ship and one lone battleship would seem to make a tempting target for anyone so inclined. I sense another Lusitania coming on. I do hope I’m wrong.