UK politics – Page 35

The ruling classes are a-feared

Published on February 23, 2009

British police is warning about a Summer of Discontent:

Police are preparing for a “summer of rage” as victims of the economic downturn take to the streets to demonstrate against financial institutions, the Guardian has learned.

Britain’s most senior police officer with responsibility for public order raised the spectre of a return of the riots of the 1980s, with people who have lost their jobs, homes or savings becoming “footsoldiers” in a wave of potentially violent mass protests.

Superintendent David Hartshorn, who heads the Metropolitan police’s public order branch, told the Guardian that middle-class individuals who would never have considered joining demonstrations may now seek to vent their anger through protests this year.

He said that banks, particularly those that still pay large bonuses despite receiving billions in taxpayer money, had become “viable targets”. So too had the headquarters of multinational companies and other financial institutions in the City which are being blamed for the financial crisis.

Hartshorn, who receives regular intelligence briefings on potential causes of civil unrest, said the mood at some demonstrations had changed recently, with activists increasingly “intent on coming on to the streets to create public disorder”.

If you look back through the archives you’ll see Palau has warned time and again that New Labour and its cronies in the police forces have been preparing for the economic downturn for a long time, exactly by giving the police far ranging powers to nip any social unrest in the bud. Deliberately or not, they’ve created a body of legislation that can make any form of protest, no matter how peaceful, illegal.

Hartshorn is indeed issuing a warning, but it’s aimed at us. Best not be thinking about protesting and accept your lot like good boys and girls…

PFI: the next bailout

Published on February 18, 2009

Various Private Finance Initiatives (projects in which government infrastructure is built through private capital which is then paid back with exorbitant profits) are having trouble attracting funding, hence the government should put more money in them. That’s right, the state should provide the money to private investors so that they can then rake in the profits later:

But Tim Pearson, director of private equity firm Innisfree and spokesman for the PPP Forum, said private firms might need state help for funding that should have come from commercial loans.

“Because we are having problems raising the funding, what we are now looking at is alternative funding structures,” Mr Pearson told BBC Radio 4’s World This Weekend.

We need to be very careful about the taxpayer taking all the risks and the private partners taking all the benefits

Even with possible European Investment Bank funding and increased equity investment, there could still be a funding gap of up to 40%, he said.

“This is where the problem is, because although there is debt available, there is not much of it and the terms are much too expensive,” said Mr Pearson.

“This is where we are looking to talk with the government and say we can go ahead with this business, but it is more expensive.”

He said state funding would be “to some extent against the principle” of PFI, but added it was not fundamentally a problem.

Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman Vince Cable, a long-time sceptic about PFI, said the government should go back to more traditional public financing structures rather than use taxpayers’ money to prop up the public-private model.

Meanwhile the banks the government has already partially or whiolly nationalised own a big chunk of the PFI market; wouldn’t it make sense to take away these projects completely, as part payment for the rescue of these banks? It’s more than a bit stupid to let one arm of government keep on paying another arm of government rather than actually invest it in much needed services. the banks would only use the money to pay bonuses with anyway.

Which other British politician was Berlusconi friends with again?

Published on February 17, 2009

Even lend him his villa in Tuscany, wasn’t it? Anyway, David Mills, Tessa Jowell’s estranged husband (ha!) is convicted for taking bribes:

David Mills, the estranged husband of Tessa Jowell, the Olympics Minister, was given a jail sentence today for accepting a bribe of $600,000 (at the time £350,000) from Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, to give false evidence on his behalf in corruption trials.

[…]

Mills was accused of accepting the bribe from Mr Berlusconi for testimony that he gave as a tax lawyer in two corruption trials in 1997 and 1998. In a letter in 2004, Mills told his accountant, Bob Drennan: “I turned some very tricky corners, to put it mildly, and so kept Mr B out of a great deal of trouble he would have been in had I said all I knew.”

Mills, in a statement to the court last month, insisted that he had “never been corrupted by anyone” and apologised to Mr Berlusconi for causing him “trouble”. However, Gabriella Vanadia, a lawyer for the Prime Minister’s office, but not Mr Berlusconi personally, sided with the prosecution and told the court that the State accepted the allegation that Mr Mills had accepted the bribe.

Don’t worry, he’s unlikely to go to jail until the appeals process is exhausted, by which time the statue of limitations will have been reached. Can’t have the great and powerful go to jail like a common shoplifter, no can we?

Dead Party Walking

Published on February 12, 2009

:
After so many crushing blows, so much self-immolation and such blatant, unbridled corruption you’d think that surely by now it has to be all over for New Labour.

But the battered and bloodied corpses of the cabinet just keep twitching. Nothing seems to kill them off. What’ll it take? Do we have to get out the flamethrowers?

The latest news from Guido Fawkes, who did the digging, is that the party’s spin doctor, epitome of arrogance and ‘psychotherapist’ , and now blogger Derek Draper (he’s author of New Labour’s pisspoor attempt at copying Kos or Obama’s netroots campaign, LabourList) is an unprincipled quack who may well have lied by omisssion about his credentials, pretending to have received a U.Berkeley MA when he actually got it part-time from a weekend school in Berkeley…

How does that song* go?

Aneurin Bevan,
Your Party is dead
And the time for a new one is nye.
Would the last person left
Please turn out the light
New Labour, just fuck-off and die.

*Chorus of ‘Guy Fawkes’ Table’, by Atilla The Stockbroker

from his LPBarnstormer on Eastside Records

UPDATE

Draper replies on his personal blog to Guido’s allegations :

To clarify this I attended the Doctoral programme at the Wright Institute that lasts, on average, five to six years. Within that programme students qualifying receive an M.A. at the end of the third year. At that point I had completed a training that was very intense compared to UK psychotherapy trainings, and had undertaken many hundreds of supervised clinical hours, so returned to the UK to set up my practice. I always describe myself as a psychotherapist, have never claimed to be a clinical psychologist, although my degree is, in fact, an M.A. in Clinical Psychology.

[…]

However, it now seems clear that this episode was a clumsy attempt to smear me, concocted by Guido Fawkes and fed by him to David Hencke at the Guardian. A journalist I have hitherto always admired and respected. I think he was led astray by Guido Fawkes and made a genuine mistake. I did, however, as the Independent reports today, give him a bit of a rollocking when I saw him yesterday.

To recap: I have never said to anyone or written anywhere that I attended U.C. (University of California) Berkeley. The fact that Hencke himself wrote a “fact box” stating I had, which I never saw, was his mistake not mine. I attended the Wright Institute, a well respected graduate school for clinical psychology where after 3 years of full time study, I received an M.A. in Clinical Psychology. I have always said I studied in Berkeley not at Berkele

Guido in his turn claims more evidence of Draper’s mendacity is forthcoming.

This one will run and run: too many people loathe Draper to let it go. He is New Labour in a nutshell and his current trials are giving anyone who loathes them and him a great deal of justified satisfaction.

Spirit of ’68 ’09

Published on February 12, 2009

Students turn out not to be apathetic proto-consumers shock!

Beginning with a 24-hour occupation at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) on 13 January, the sit-ins spread across the country. Now occupations have been held at the LSE, Essex, King’s College London, Birmingham, Sussex, Warwick, Manchester Metropolitan, Oxford, Leeds, Cambridge, Sheffield Hallam, Bradford, Nottingham, Queen Mary, Manchester, Strathclyde, Newcastle, Kingston, Goldsmiths and Glasgow.

Among the demands of students are disinvestment in the arms trade; the promise to provide scholarships for Palestinian students; a pledge to send books and unused computers to Palestine; and to condemn Israeli attacks on Gaza.

Technology has set these actions apart from those of previous generations, allowing a national momentum to grow with incredible speed. Through the linking up of internet blogs, news of successes spread quickly and protests grew nationwide.

Just three weeks after the first sit-in at SOAS, students gathered yesterday at Birkbeck College to draw up a national strategy. The meeting featured speeches from leaders in the Stop the War movement, such as Tony Benn, George Galloway MP and Jeremy Corbyn MP. There has also been an Early Day Motion tabled in Parliament in support of campus activism.

At the end of the month students from across the country will gather for a national demonstration calling for the abolition of tuition fees, an event that organisers say has rocketed in size following the success of the occupations over Gaza.

Vice chancellors and principals have been brought to the negotiating table and – in the majority of universities – bowed to at least one of the demands. The students’ success means that now there is a new round of protests. On Wednesday two new occupations began at Strathclyde and Manchester universities, and on Friday night students at the University of Glasgow also launched a sit-in.

I predict we’ll be seeing a further radicalisation of students in the coming few years. The people now in uni or starting uni have largely grown up under New Labour, have constantly been disappointed by New Labour, not in the least by the way it pulled up the ladder behind them (grants turned into loans, top-up fees etc). You’d think this would mean students would be more focused on getting a degree than on getting involved in politics, especially now the economy has collapsed, but this generation of students doesn’t toe the line easily.

Their most enduring political memory has to be the build-up to the War on Iraq in which they had been actively involved as well. When the war finally broke out you’ll remember it was the students that went out on strike, including primary and secondary school kids. The greatest political event of their lives was a war that millions of people protested against using all legal options available to them and that ended up happening despite a majority of the country being opposed to it.

The cynical way with which the antiwar protests were disregarded by a political establishment desparate to crawl into George Bush’s arse (or suffering from a messianic complex) has shown this generation that just going on marches is not enough. We’ve seen the results during Israel’s assault on Gaza. By putting pressure on their universities to divest themselves from Israel students took a radical and practical approach to the issue, a way to directly help the Palestinians. It’s a very good sign for the future.