Though Cowards Flinch

Yes, this is sour grapes. 

Yes, I am bloody angry that the people of Skelmersdale have been crapped on yet again by the Tories’ refusal to  fund the development of a town centre now forty years overdue.

Yes, I think the whole design of the Regional Growth Fund is shite.

And yes, I think it’s pretty fucking astonishing that the Western Morning News has just been awarded millions from the fund for some kind of grantmaking assignment about which there are absolutely no details, all because the Chair of the Regional Growth Fund panel, Michael Heseltine, personally asked the editor of the said paper to submit a bid.

It may not be technically corrupt, but for the Chair of the Funding Panel to ask for a bid, and for that bid then to be one of the 1 in 10 bids chosen for the cash, is pretty damn suspicious.

The BNP’s Simon Darby has claimed that David Cameron’s speech on immigration is “advocating BNP policy”. On the BNP website they also claimed that recent debate on multiculturalism is another milestone in the “Griffinisation” of British politics.

I oppose many of the things Cameron said in his speech, but we cannot forget that the BNP are opportunists, dressing themselves in populist clothing to score votes with people not typically inclined to fascist politics.

In fact, in comparing Cameron to Griffin, we risk forgetting exactly what the BNP’s opinions on immigration are. Namely:

• Griffin said last year that some UK residents should return to the country of their ethnic origin, and Muslim immigration should end entirely. He also once said that al-Qaeda is the real expression on Islam and that moderate Islam is false.

• In 2009 Griffin opined that The EU should sink boats carrying illegal immigrants to prevent them entering Europe.

• In 1996, Griffin told Wales on Sunday that “All black people will be repatriated, even if they were born here”

• When defending a leaked document explaining why BNP members should no longer use the words “British Asians,” Griffin argued that immigration has caused a “bloodless genocide”

• Richard Barnbrook, member of the London Assembly, now expelled from the BNP, once blamed tuberculosis on immigrants. According to Hope not Hate Barnbrook ranted: “Yes I have got TB. Immigration has caused this.”

• Though denying man-made climate change as “myth”, the BNP asserted in its 2010 election manifesto that  the bulk of the environmental problems are caused by “mass immigration”, and that an end to immigration will relieve pressure on our green belts.

• The BNP, if elected to office, would offer £50,000 to anyone not defined “White British” as an incentive to return to their country of ethnic origin.

• In the BNP’s 2005 manifesto, it promised that a ”BNP government would accept no further immigration from any of the parts of the world which present the prospect of an almost limitless flow of immigration: Africa, Asia, China, Eastern and South Eastern Europe, the Middle East and South America would all be placed on an immediate ‘stop’ list.” The same policy as stated in their 1997 manifesto (which read as follows: 1 - Future immigration of non-whites must be stopped; 2 - Non-whites already here must be repatriated or otherwise resettled overseas and Britain made once again a white country), only with fewer overtly racist references.

• British National Party (BNP) member Adam Walker, who taught at Houghton Kepier Sports College near Sunderland, posted comments online describing immigrants as “savage animals”. According to the Socialist Worker, he also claimed that parts of Britain were a “dumping ground” for the Third World.

You see my point. Cameron’s electioneering should be condemned in the strongest terms – but we should not forget just how extreme the BNP’s policies and opinions on immigration are (and that’s in public!).

Sources:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8639097.stm

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=1066780

http://www.zen26144.zen.co.uk/resources/The%20BNP%20Uncovered.pdf

http://www.pickledpolitics.com/archives/4366

http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/news/article/599/BNP-chief-blames-immigrants-for-TB

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/apr/23/climate-sceptic-bnp

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/bnp-would-offer-pound50000-to-leave-the-country-1957668.html

http://1millionunited.org/blogs/blog/2000/01/01/the-the-bnp-is-an-anti-immigration-party-myth/

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=21367

BP had its AGM yesterday. 

Post-Deepwater Horizon, it was always going to be a vibrant affair, and the media coverage is about those groups who showed up, including those who had come over from the US to make their feelings known about the loss of their livelihoods. 

More interesting, perhaps, is who didn’t show up, even though the AGM was in the same city.  

I quote the Telepgraph Liveblog:

Martin Simons, a shareholder “of this great company” since 1954 rises….. There are nervous looks from the management as he begins: “There are very many upset people here. I’ve lost a great deal of my savings income.”

……..

Mr Simons turns his guns on BPs biggest institutional shareholders:

“Is Blackrock here? WELL here we are. This is corporate governance for you. It’s quite a scandal. What about Legal & General? No?”

My industry informant informs me that Blackrock and Legal & General hold more than 9% of BP’s shares between them. 

Yet apparently* neither could be bothered to send anyone from their Corporate Governance/social responsibility teams in the wake of a massive environmental disaster, and in the context of massively controversial plans for drilling in the arctic?

* My informant tells me it was later checked whether Blackrock had sent anyone, and there is no evidence that they did.

As I said in February, I don’t think it’s correct for a person to be judged alone on the kind of support he receives – particularly if that support comes from opportunists trying to score column inches.

The same, I feel, goes for David Cameron. When he gave his speech on multiculturalism earlier in the year, the BNP called it “the Griffinisation of British Politics”, while the equally unpalatable English Defence League used the speech as fuel for their fire in Luton.

Pointing out these embarrassments should not be the crux of our criticism – since politics is not merely about doing the opposite of your counterparts. Ones political judgement should stand up by itself.

The problem with Cameron’s speech on immigration is that it reduces migrants themselves to stereotypes – namely that they pursue sham marriages, fail to assimilate and put pressure on the welfare state – while also reinforcing good immigration as the cheap commodification of labour.

However the problem does not begin and end with Cameron. This kind of low politics, deprecating immigrants, is the order of the day for the European right wing.

I found Nick Clegg’s reaction the most telling:

Cameron’s language isn’t what we would have used…but he’s a Conservative leader talking to Conservative voters in the run-up to an election.

How right Clegg is! But these are not conservatives, rather, Conservative voters who are lapping up this kind of flabby rhetoric. The worry is that this politics could fill the gap of third way politics, now in its declining hour.

In France, for example, President Sarkozy has decided to whip up tensions concerning Muslim immigrants, their headwear and assimilation, in a bid to attract voters away from Marie Le Pen’s National Front (FN).

As for Germany, during an argument inside Merkel’s cabinet about labor shortages, the chancellor chose to frame the terms of debate on the “failed approach” of multiculturalism.

In the Netherlands, fear of the immigrant is not restricted to Geert Wilder and his clan of PR-savvy stunt fascists; Netherlands immigration law now requires citizens to pass difficult tests demonstrating Dutch language fluency and cultural knowledge. 

Earlier in the month, on this site, Paul identified three types of actors around the core executive of the new Conservative regime. The first being the upper class elite comfortable with high politics, the second as neo-liberal pacemakers defining the shrinkage of the state, and the third being the apologists whose presence is simply CV development. Though I think this is helpful, in order to properly understand the root of Cameron’s immigration speech, and the Tory party on social issues in general, we cannot ignore the emerging new rightist politics in Europe - immoderate on presentation, and epistemically closed in substance.

Where does Sarkozy sit today? Really he is at the centre of a rigorous national debate; that of multiculturalism, mass immigration, liberalism and secularism. France is well placed to have this discussion.

In 2010, Muslims made up two-thirds of all new immigrants to France, and while there is no question of the nation’s historical appeal to freedom and equality, tension had been whipped up on the notion of fraternising and the glue that holds up its civic republicanism.

The far right have made grounds with the new Le Pen, at the fault of Sarkozy in some people’s minds, and the President has to make a choice: does he sweep up the centre with appeals to France’s liberal heart, despite the relative depression of the socialist party, or does he drum up the hard right with a protectionist hue?

The outcome of France’s intervention in Libya could swing either way, but the possibility of a negative turn could prove disastrous for Sarkozy; at home, lubing up the right seems the least risky option.

It is no surprise, then, that the President’s loathing of religious symbols and facial coverings have culminated in a burqa ban.

But it’s proportionate right? At state schools, Christians cannot wear large crosses, Jews cannot wear yarmulkes, Sikhs cannot wear turbans. However the direction of these latest moves in France are quite clear, and the excuse that this is a wink and a nudge towards women’s rights transparent; as American philosopher and author Martha Nussbaum recently said, in her examination of the burqa ban:

“Sex magazines, nude photos, tight jeans — all of these products, arguably, treat women as objects, as do so many aspects of our media culture. … Proponents of the burqa ban do not propose to ban all these objectifying practices. … banning all such practices on a basis of equality would be an intolerable invasion of liberty.”

But might this ban be for the common good? The burqa is a symbol of repression and subjugation after all. The point is, for Sarkozy, that covering up is not the product of a free choice. But in philosophical terms, no act is free, and we are steeped in a chain of cause and effect; the point is we experience reality as though we were free, and as though we had primacy of will.

And this is the rub: In 1970s Iran, or Suharto’s Indonesia in the 80s, the burqa was worn as a symbol of political and religious defiance when Islam found itself under threat. I was reminded of this once more as journalists took pictures of a women in France who ignored the ban and wore her veil anyway.

I dislike the veil myself, it has no Qur’anic justification and should be seen through the lens of deep-rooted, political weaponry to suppress the power of women. The problem today is that, for the Muslim women who wear the veil, the decision to wear it is experienced as a free choice. The ban will do two things at the expense of real political action: 1) it will punish that which is seemingly a free choice, and be regarded itself as subjugation – the very thing the ban pretends to mitigate against; 2) it will ignore, and push further to the bottom of the pile, the real problem of deep rooted oppression against women.

David Cameron is playing an interesting game at the moment. After promising to “cut the deficit, not the NHS” he went and did both anyway. In fact he went further still: NHS reforms include abolishing Primary Care Trusts and handing 60% of the NHS budget to new GP-led consortia.

Under Cameron’s watch, health secretary Andrew Lansley has done nothing else but implement the very measures the Tories have always wanted to do to the NHS, but never before being so stupid as to.

In return for Lansley’s loyalty to the cause, Cameron has given the minister a cold shoulder.

Nicholas Watt put it this way:

In public the prime minister expresses support for the hapless minister. In private few are left in doubt that the minister has been placed on the naughty step or, in the case of Andrew Lansley, on the you-have-had-the-political-stuffing-knocked-out-of-you step.

The BMA stopped short recently of delivering Lansley a vote of no confidence, concentrating on his poor reforms only, but that’s not the message put out today by nurses who will debate a motion of “no confidence” – informed in part by Lansley’s refusal to address the Royal College of Nursing conference in Liverpool, instead limiting himself to a 45-minute Q&A with 50 select nurses.

If that wasn’t bad enough for the minister, his spats with Lord Owen – who has called on Cameron to “replace existing health ministers” – and Norman Lamb have caused a public embarrassment.

The influential Lamb, who has threatened to resign unless the government acts favourably upon a series of demands on the NHS reforms, joins a number of rebel Lib Dem figures who have proposed changes to Lansley’s plans.

Cameron has responded by saying he regrets “charging ahead” on reform without support – a change of heart which will not bode well for the health minister, who will be first in the firing line if Cameron wants to save face.

Clearly Lansley should be sacked on merit of his terrible reforms, which threaten the very heart and soul of the NHS, and aims only to swamp the service with pro-privatisation measures.

But we should remember the minister is merely the architect of the plans. The Tories under Cameron are only delivering the destructive ethos they know and love.

In a thinly veiled attempt to rock the boat a bit, Rawnsley asked on Sunday:

Andrew Lansley is clearly in trouble … Does Mr Cameron need to find himself a new health secretary?

Bryan Fischer is the Director of Issues Analysis for the American Family Association – a conservative organisation which promotes “Christian values”. He has been keeping US bloggers and commentators busy recently with his almost daily dose of bile which he often pumps out during his talk radio program Focal Point on American Family Radio.

To cite some examples, it is Fischer’s opinion that all new immigrants to the US must convert to Christianity or stay put and that the US should put an end to all Muslim immigration.

He once wrote on his blog that welfare in the US has destroyed the African-American family by telling them that husbands and fathers are unnecessary and that the state has incentivised “fornication rather than marriage” to which he reasoned “it’s no wonder we are now awash in the disastrous social consequences of people who rut like rabbits.”

Elsewhere Fischer stated that Native Americans, on account of their inability to convert to Christianity, were “morally disqualified” from maintaining their land.

He has also called grizzly bears a “curse” – but you get the idea; he’s not a very nice man indeed, and his rhetoric is filled with hate.

The American Family Association and a former US House Speaker

If you were planning on running for Presidential candidate (or at least testing those waters) – on a moderate GOP ticket – you probably wouldn’t want to touch the man with a bargepole. But Newt Gingrich has done just that.

Associated Press broke the story in March a “group connected to former U.S. House Speaker [...] contributed $125,000 to a Mississippi nonprofit organization […] AFA Action Inc., a nonprofit arm of the American Family Association”. Anyone else might have claimed ignorance saying they cannot micromanage every transaction or some other excuse, but instead Gingrich decided just to deny the extreme views of the AFA, saying:

You [Igor Volsky, Health Care Policy Editor for ThinkProgress.org, questioning Gingrich] bring a series of allegations that I can’t check about a group that is largely a Christian based membership group, that is fairly widespread in its membership and I suspect most of those people do not in any way think of themselves as a hate group even if that’s how you would characterize them.

I suggest Gingrich picks up a newspaper once in a while and checks the views of AFAs’ spokesperson – he’ll soon see rather than being a mere Christian organisation, it is host to an anti-gay, anti-Muslim, anti-Grizzly bear bigot whose absurd opinions are the real threat.

Islam and the Law of the Land

Another recent controversy involved Fischer saying Muslims have no first amendment rights “for the simple reason that it was not written to protect the religion of Islam.”

Of course the first amendment actually guarantees freedom of religion and “prohibits the government from passing legislation to establish an official religion or preferring one religion over another.”

But he wriggles out of this one, qualifying his comment: “They have that privilege [to build Mosques in the US] at the moment, but it is a privilege that can be revoked if, as is in fact the case, Islam is a totalitarian ideology dedicated to the destruction of the United States.”

So because Fischer chooses not to distinguish Islam and political Islam, Muslims for him are a political grouping (oh, whose sole intention is to destroy the United States) and thus not worthy of the term religion, safeguarded under the first amendment.

Islam, for Fischer, could not respect the laws of the land in the US and are thus a threat – informing his opinion that all Muslim immigrants are a “toxic cancer”.

But let’s not trust Fischer with the facts on Islam and law; why not consult an expert on the subject.

Professor Shaheen Ali of Warwick University in 2008 waded into the debate about Sharia Law and the UK, as caused by comments by Rowan Williams on the (“unavoidable”) role sharia law has in UK law.

With regards to what Islamic Law has to say about how a Muslim is to conduct oneself in a non-Muslim country, Shaheen Ali notes that:

• there is already a code of practice on how a Muslim conducts themselves and what their obligations viz-a-viz the country to which they now call home

• Britain affords a legal system to all its habitants and is therefore congruent with Islam and social justice

• Britain does not put a curb on the practice of the 5 pillars of Islam (Shahada – the professing of oneself to be a Muslim; Salat – prayer; Zakat – to give to charity; Sawm – the ritual fasting; Hajj – the pilgrimage to Mecca), therefore the laws here must be respected by Muslims, stipulated, Professor Ali states, by “Islamic law”.

The same applies to the US; providing the law does not prohibit Muslims from carrying out their religious practices there is nothing within Islamic Law that says it must distrust the law of the land in which the Muslim finds him/herself.

On first sight Fischer is clearly a crazed right wing nut job, but on closer examination he’s a crazed right wing nut job who doesn’t bother doing his research.

It’s a measure of British politics that most people visiting this blog will have no idea who this man is, when there’s a decent argument to say he should currently be one of the most famous, by which I mean revlied, men in Europe.

He’s Algirdas Semeta, EU Commissioner for Taxation. 

The reason his picture is popping up on campaigns across Europe is his reaction to the European Parliament vote on 8th March in favour of the introduction of a European Transaction Tax of up to 0.05% on each financial transaction, netting up to €200bn in tax revenue.

The vote was carried by 529 to 127, with 18 abstentions, and included support from across the European party blocs. 

The vote has no legislative impact because it was privately intorduced by a Greek socialist MEP and not by the Commission, but a vote of this majority size, by a democratically elected parliament on a matter close to the current heart of Europe’s current malaise, might have been expected to have some impact.

Algirdas Semeta’s reaction to this vote, however, was to call the Parliament ’irresponsible’ and ‘premature’.   This, as you can imagine, has not gone down well. 

Of course, the right (though clearly not many of those in the European Parliament) object on the basis that it will cause havoc in the financial system with banks leaving the EU for lower tax climes, unless worldwide agreement is reached.   Nigel Farage was straight in there, calling it ‘Kamikaze politics’ and ‘an attack on the City of London’.

More sensible commentators dismiss this as the ‘myth of capital flight’.  Stephan Schulmesiter, of the Austrian Institute of Economic Research, says such a tax is ‘fair, equitable and realistic’ and points outs that:

Financial centres are about much more than computers. The most important element of trading is time zones. There is insufficient incentive for financial centres to be located in, say, Morocco or South Africa because they are on the same time zone as Europe.

So if you think Nigel Farage is a big knob, and think that Algirdas Semeta’s reaction to a democratic vote in a Parliament which is there to represent half a billion people rather than a few bankers, is a bit off, you can sign the Europe-wide petition here. It’s open to 19th April.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/8368563/EU-Parliament-approves-Tobin-tax-on-transactions.html

http://www.theparliament.com/latest-news/article/newsarticle/eu-commissioner-accused-of-obstructing-plans-for-a-european-financial-tax/

http://www.financialtransactiontax.eu/en/mail

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+TA+P7-TA-2011-0080+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN

Regular readers will know that I’m taking a keen interest in the Regional Growth Fund, directly overseen by Nick Clegg as chairman of  the funding decision panel.  

The Regional Growth Fund acts as a very partial and very poor replacement to the regeneration expenditure of the now defunct Regional Development Agencies.  Round 1 of the scheme attracted 450 bids worth around £2.8bn, against a total of £250 -£350m actually available, meaning a huge waste of energy in putting together complex bids for maybe 80% of applicants.

My view is that the criteria for round 1 of the fund display an astonishing lack of understanding about local economic development, mixed with a blatant ideoligical slant towards the supposed additional effectiveness of the private sector, to create a scheme which is full of deadweight and a huge waste of public money and energy.

But things are going from bad to worse under Clegg’s apparent non-direction.

Original expectations were that the announcement about who would be funded would come in mid-late March, but it now appears that the announcements may not be made before 14th April, the day ‘purdah’ begins for the local elections.  This will put the announcement back into early May at the soonest.

However, the second round of the fund is due to open on 12th April, and bidders have been told that if they are unsuccessful in round 1 then they can bid for round 2.  A delay in announcing round 1 results will mean that unsuccessful applicants have less time to prepare round 2 bids against an already tight timetable, and this is bound to lead to accusations of unfairness.

The reasons for the delay are unclear, but it seems likely that there is behind-the-scenes wrangling about state aid issues with private sector bids that have come from ‘non-assisted’ areas for the purposes of the European Commission (‘assisted areas’ are those deemed by the Commission to be deprived enough to warrant some direct investment into the private sector without the principles of open competition being compromised).

This wrangling relates back to the fact that the inital guidance for bidders was not clear enough on this score, and this in turn relates to the fact that the Regional Growth Fund is supposed to be under the joint direction of DCLG (Tory ministers) and BIS (given to Vince Cable as part of the Coalition deal).  I suspect that the poor guidance emanates from mixed lines of accountability and reporting, and the high speed at which it was issued in the Autumn and applicants expected to respond - all the more ironic now given the delay in decision making.

Put simply, the mucky compromise around who runs the Growth Fund is being shown up for what it is – administative efficiency severely damaged by short term political interests, including the desire to let clegg have his day in the sun announcing thousands of jobs created (however false these claims are).

Whatever the real reasons for the delay, the outcome is that the £250  -£350m that has already been committed by government to the round 1 scheme are still tied up, at exactly the time they should be out there making the economy tick (albeit that the criteria for the scheme were misguided and the money will not be spent as effectively as it should be).

In general, this latest debacle fits the emerging picture of a government quickly losing control of an increasingly hostile civil service administration, of ministers floundering, and of Clegg at the centre of the vortex of incompetence.

And Expansionary Fiscal Contraction has fallen at the first......

It being Grand National weekend, it seems like a good time to raise the small matter of the current government’s wager on Expansionary Fiscal Contraction in the big race to the bottom.

A reminder on the stakes laid to date:

On May 7th 2010, the FT reported on Cameron’s bet:

Since then news seeping out about the UK’s economic lameness have lengthened the odds considerably, and the losing streak for Expansionary Fiscal Contraction continues unabated in countries across Europe.

Is it not now reasonable to ask Clegg and the LibDems whether they want to change their bet, before it’s too late?

After all, they simply want to govern in the National interest. Clegg said so, and we can take him at his word, I think.