letters

Dear David Cameron,

I neither voted for you, nor do any of your policies or positions represent my interests. Your enormous majority means that I have no representative under this so-called democracy - and am not likely to have one for as long as I live in this constituency. But I would like at least to be added as a statistic: someone who finds your policies abhorrent, dangerous, and imbued with the most distasteful ideology which both fails to understand the difficulties normal people face and which threatens to kill off the structures and social values which have been built up over centuries.

You will kill off people too: this is happening already. If you look at the suicide rates of people with mental health, forced to undergo humiliating, unsympathetic and narrow 'work assessments' you will see that these have increased just in the time you have been in power. If you look at the closure of care homes and removal of care for the elderly and mentally ill, you will see that you are already condemning these people to an even more miserable existence, through no fault of their own. If you look at the record of commissioned out (privatised) health and social care services, you will see that they are both more expensive and of lower quality than those provided by the NHS.

UPDATED: A public ponging

Correspondence:
Ping (me)
Pong (Rentoul)
Ping (me)
Pong (Rentoul)
PING...
POOOONG (You shill, you)
NO PINGS ALLOWED

John Rentoul, chief political commentator at the Independent on Sunday, has also boarded the We Hate The Human Rights Act bandwagon, along with the Daily Mail, the Sun and Daily Torygraph. How Independent. How liberal.

He joins other esteemed correspondents at the Indy who hate human rights - or who hate them when they get in the way of our middle class 'freedoms'. Mary Dejevsky believes in deportation of the Roma, on the grounds that they are criminal and parasitic, and too expensive for the richer nations to support. Bruce Anderson believes we have a duty to subject the families of terrorists (suspected terrorists?) to torture: 'torture the wife and children' if the terrorist won't talk. And Rentoul, who is a bit more circumspect about the details of which rights he would withdraw, and from whom, thinks the concept of inhuman and degrading treatment 'is too broad and subjective', and therefore probably is fine for terrorists, suspected terrorist (and foreigners).

I wrote to complain about a single paragraph in one of his (two) recent articles against the HRA:

From his article
A Pincer movement on No 10

[Blair] and his home secretaries talked of "revisiting" or even "repealing" the Chahal judgment of the European Court of Human Rights that would not allow the UK to deport a suspected terrorist. Which, needless to say, could not be done.

UPDATED:
Correspondence with Evan Davis

Good old BBC. Let's try as hard as we can not to make the banks look too bad.

Nearly all outlets are reporting that Barclays paid out less than 1% of its stupendous profits in corporate tax:

The Guardian
Sky News
FT (uses Barclays' own initial declaration of 11.6 bn in profit, which gives the 1% figure for corporate tax.)
The Daily Torygraph (yes, even them)
The Mirror
The Daily Mail (uses 11.6 bn figure)

The Independent ... manages to bump it up to 4.5%

And the BBC?

This page on the BBC says 'Barclays has revealed it paid £113m in corporation tax to the UK in 2009, 2.4% of its £4.6bn global annual profit.'

This page (BBC) says 'Barclays has said it paid £113m in corporation tax in 2009, which was 2.4% of its global profit.'

Evan Davis reveals all in his morning chat with Joe Lynam on the Today programme:

ED: First just tell us what the profits are, because the Guardian calls it 11.6 billion pounds of profit
JL: ... and Barclays say that was correct for 2009. But then they changed the number when they released their figures this week on Tuesday, so they .. they're now saying that the official figure that they should have said last year was £4.6 billion. Both the Guardian and Barclays are correct, because they sold a huge management company called BGI for around 7 billion, they then took that back off the profits that they had ...
ED: So let's call it ... let's call it 4.6 billion, be generous to Barclays, which makes it a rate of 2.4%...

'Let's be generous to Barclays'!!?

The Gates Foundation has poured $218 million into polio and measles immunization and research worldwide, including in the Niger Delta. At the same time that the foundation is funding inoculations to protect health, The Times found, it has invested $423 million in Eni, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Total of France -- the companies responsible for most of the flares blanketing the delta with pollution, beyond anything permitted in the United States or Europe.

Indeed, local leaders blame oil development for fostering some of the very afflictions that the foundation combats.

Oil workers, for example, and soldiers protecting them are a magnet for prostitution, contributing to a surge in HIV and teenage pregnancy, both targets in the Gates Foundation's efforts to ease the ills of society, especially among the poor. Oil bore holes fill with stagnant water, which is ideal for mosquitoes that spread malaria, one of the diseases the foundation is fighting.
Dark cloud over good works of Gates Foundation

So why is the Guardian promoting the Foundation (and the man) as a true friend of development? The article above identifies many more examples of the B&MG Foundation pouring money into companies which work against the poorest of the world.

Of course, the more the Gates Foundation funds the killers of development, the more there is to do to patch the sores created by those killers. And they - Bill Gates and Co. - will get the credit for their generosity (in giving away what they could not possibly need or spend themselves), and for the effectiveness with which they stick the sticking plaster onto sores they have themselves created.

At least - they will as long as people fail to make the links between the killing companies, and the Foundation Trusts set up by millionaires, which buy the killing shares and help the killing companies pour out their pollution and their GM seeds and toxic chemicals - as long as Gates, Buffet and Soros seem to be the ones mending the world, not funding its destruction. These men will be our liberal heroes, feted by the liberal press.

Letter to the liberal press

Incredible.

Israel inquiry finds Gaza aid flotilla raid 'was legal' (BBC news online)

Not, incredible, of course, that Israel found itself to have acted legally. Incredible that the BBC writes a long piece about how Israel found itself to have acted legally, and their idea of 'balance' is to offer the information that a UN inquiry found that... the navy had shown an "unacceptable level of brutality"!

Even a pretence at balance ought to mention not just that the brutality was 'unacceptable', according to 'a' UN report - but that the said UN report concluded that

Such conduct cannot be justified or condoned on security or any other grounds. It constituted grave violations of human rights law and international humanitarian law.

Fact-finding mission to investigate Israel's attacks on the Gaza flotilla, by the Human Rights Council

Much more importantly, the 'balancing' fact to Israel finding that its actions were legal has little to do with brutality: it is surely that the UN report found they were illegal.

My complaint:

Dear Steve Herrmann (etc)

This page, about Israel's report on the Gaza flotilla, contains the following claims:

1. 'An Israeli inquiry has found the country's navy acted legally'

2. 'in the report released on Sunday, the Turkel Committee said: "The imposition and enforcement of the naval blockade of the Gaza Strip does not constitute 'collective punishment' of the population of the Gaza Strip."'

As 'balance' to the first claim, you offer the following two pieces of information:

a) 'A separate UN inquiry last year said the navy had shown an "unacceptable level of brutality".'

Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has never been convicted of that crime, nor of any other crime. Despite that, he has been detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months -- and for two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait -- under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture...

From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement. For 23 out of 24 hours every day -- for seven straight months and counting -- he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he's barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that appear completely punitive, he's being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed...

Glenn Greenwald, The inhumane conditions of Bradley Manning's detention

And what does being held in such conditions do to you? According to the Istanbul statement on the use and effects of solitary confinement, adopted at the International Psychological Trauma Symposium in December 2007 -