A campaign has been launched to put right yet another injustice in the Armed Forces Compensation Scheme (AFCS).As it stands, those injured during the first four years of the War on Terror, i.e between 2001 and 2005, receive considerably less compensation than that paid out to those injured later in the war.At least 100 service personnel seriously injured at the start of the campaigns receive virtually nothing, £150 a week if they're lucky.As the campaign says: "Fairness dictates that, given the sacrifices made by British troops in service of our country in Afghanistan and Iraq, each soldier seriously injured in these theatres should benefit from the same compensation arrangements, enabling them a decent on-going quality of life".The campaign is being headed by Col. Richard Kemp, former...

Saloon bar bigot Bruce Anderson came out with a fierce defence of the government's use of torture. It could have been written by Torquemada, Walsingham or Franco. To get that vital information about the ticking bomb, it would be morally imperative to torture the terrorist's wife and children, he concluded. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/bruce-anderson/bruce-anderson-we-not-only-have-a-right-to-use-torture-we-have-a-duty-1899555.html Interesting is it not that to opine that Palestinian suicide bombers are justified is illegal, but to advocate torture of innocent women and children is patriotic? I took grave exception because I saw the effects of women and children being tortured in front of suspects in Uzbekistan, where it happens pretty often. I wonder if...

Charlotte Gore is an addict. A blogging addict. She tried to quit - even announcing to the world the other day that her blog - which last year topped the Total Politics poll (albeit in the Lib Dem category) was shutting down. She'd run out of things to say, she claimed. Furthermore, "the need to avoid repetition – not just of my own work, but what others write too – becomes exponentially more challenging with every post." I know the feeling. The only way to avoid repeating what others have said, I find, is not to read what others are saying at all - that way you aren't repeating the other bloggers, merely thinking alike. But then you miss out on all the blogging action, and people think you don't have any friends, so that's hardly a solution.Best just to give up. Make a firm...

There are few worse sights in life than the British public led by a feral media into a moral uproar. I mistrust the morality of the mob. I heard one fan saying he wouldn’t want a man like Terry holding up the World Cup or England. Do me a favour, do we have to like all our footballers now; do we have to find them morally and politically acceptable too? Many England fans have never liked Terry as captain. Many think he shouldn’t even be in the side. He certainly pales terribly in comparison to his predecessor. But if you want to get rid of him because of this latest story, then you’ll have to accept he’s out of the squad too. If he has become a divisive figure in the dressing room, stripping him of the captaincy is irrelevant; he would have to be booted out all...

Co-created by Rex Firkin and Vincent Tilsley, The Guardians was one of the first drama series to get its hands dirty with the soiled laundry of the political and social fall-out of the late 1960s. The UK emerged, somewhat dazed, from the hedonism of that period to face mass unemployment, industrial unrest and galloping inflation. Tilsley and Firkin clearly wanted to produce a drama that examined these issues, morally and philosophically, suggesting a very radical and dystopian alternative to the national crisis the public and their politicians were dealing with. At the heart of the drama is the notion that the UK is actually run by a private police force, headed by the mysterious General. Whilst the idea of private police being the arbiters of law and order might seem a bit fanciful, the...

One oppressive state that I do not write about enough on this blog is North Korea. I will try to blog more about this terrible regime. Mick Hartley's excellent blog draws attention to a rather ominous article from the Korean Central News Agency, the propagandist mouthpiece of the ironically named Workers' Party of Korea.He believes the article could herald a Pol-Pot style genocide.The article comments: "It is also important to struggle against allies and stooges of the imperialists."A fierce struggle should be waged against the class enemies within the socialist society.All those who try to destabilize the socialist society are the enemies of socialism. "They include remnants of the exploiting classes who harbor antipathy towards the socialist system, those who work hard overtly and...

Did I tell you that I can sing? No... phew, then I don't have to apologise publicly for fibbing. I can't sing, not a note, I am tone deaf. That probably has something to do with the fact that I was classed as being profoundly deaf for four years. After surgery a few years back I am now just classed as being mutton and ignorant by those around me that don't know my history. My hearing is deteriorating again. So when I was asked to get involved in a project working with the regional opera company I was a little nonplussed to say the least. I protested loudly, (I sometimes forget to adjust my volume control), to the powers that be, 'you want me, but I can't sing, I won't be able to hear the flipping music properly.'  Their reply, 'ah but if they can get you to sing then it...

We have been becoming accustomed to the new ‘Scrooge’ face of the Cameroon Conservatives, ever since Osborne’s calamitous ‘Age of Austerity’ style conference speech. We need hope, not accountancy speak about cuts, pain, and deficit reduction (it sounds like a medical operation to reduce fat or something). But, while John Redwood has highlighted the need to cut tax on enterprise (I would add to that the working people who need to be incentivised to keep working, or to survive financially in the current climate), Iain Martin has demonstrated how the Conservative leadership doesn’t seem to know what its policies are on tax and is in a ‘tangle’. It might just be because the Shadow Chancellor isn’t up to his brief and he is only in post...

Merry Christmas EveryoneApologies for the lack of posting over the last few weeks, a combination of the weather, (lovely, lovely snow), work, (not so lovely morally challenging bods, who think that this time of year is a burglars dream and are so grateful to you kind souls for presenting them with such wonderful gifts to pilfer), and trying to fight my way through the shopping hell.My presents are wrapped and under the tree, like the true child inside me I am sitting here excitedly waiting for his Lordship to wake up so that we can open our pressies. It will be a quiet day here, a visit to the Captain, and Mrs Beeton is coming for dinner, nothing too strenuous. Tommorow their Ladyships will be coming over with our two youngest grandchildren for fun and mayhem.So have a wonderful day,...

Labour and anti-blood sports campaigners rally to Back the Ban campaign as Countryside Alliance starts push for repealThousands of country sports enthusiasts will turn out on Boxing Day to launch an election-year push to repeal the controversial and much-dodged Hunting Act.Opponents will also be out in force, and a "Back the Ban" campaign will be launched on Boxing Day by the environment secretary, Hilary Benn, alongside celebrities including the actors Tony Robinson and Patrick Stewart.The issue is high on both Tory and Labour election agendas, with the opposition leader, David Cameron, promising a free vote on a repeal in the Commons if the Conservatives gain power. Labour lists the act among one of its achievements in changing British society since Tony Blair became prime minister in...

Antonia Senior has an op-ed piece arising from the conviction of Munir Hussain for attacking intruders who menaced and humiliated him and his family in their home. In it she points to the disparity there can be between majority opinion and the opinion of legislators and judges. Senior's discussion throws a light back on this post of yesterday concerning the legitimacy of parliamentary decision-making. If, as she claims, public opinion is 'firmly in favour of capital punishment', it would be good to know why the Guardian, Sir Jeremy Greenstock and Ken Macdonald aren't now campaigning for its reintroduction. But, in any case, here is the more general issue Senior raises in this regard and which I want to pursue:Many in the majority would be justified in believing themselves to be citizens,...

According to the UN, population growth is a driving force behind emission increases yet it will not be on the agenda at any of the upcoming climate talks World population has doubled to more than 6 billion in the past 50 years. It’s expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. The population of the USA is projected to rise from 300 million to more than 400 million by 2050. But most of the population growth will be in poorer countries, such as Africa and the Indian subcontinent, whose CO2 emissions per capita are relatively small – 20 or more times less than the USA. Given the gulf in carbon emissions per capita it is hardly surprising that few politicians or environmental groups want to raise the issue. Rich world’s greed Friends of the Earth says the critical issue is reducing the...

Waiting is an important element in stories about women. They are often obliged to demonstrate their patience in the way that men in stories are called upon to demonstrate their physical or mental strength. Women must wait until men are finally able to declare themselves romantically, they must wait for the sick to heal, and for children to grow, putting their own cares and concerns in second place. One of the most powerful waiting narratives is the story of the woman who waits for her man to return from war. Penelope in the Greek myths rather sets the bar high on this one. For ten years she waited faithfully for Odysseus to return from his wanderings, each day working on her tapestry, each night unpicking it so that there should be no leverage on her to marry one of the many suitors...

The senior padre of Task Force Helmand, 11 Light Brigade, has said British soldiers in Afghanistan should be prepared to die in a 'fight against the evil of fundamentalism'.Padre Mark Christian said killing 'to defeat evil' was 'morally permissible'. He leads today's Remembrance Sunday service in Lashkar Gah, where hundreds of soldiers will gather to remember not only the fallen of past wars, but also their own friends, colleagues and brothers who have paid the ultimate sacrifice. We only see their faces for a few seconds on the news, but they are quickly forgotten amidst the glitz of X-Factor. Parliament hears their names routinely read out each week by the Prime Minister, and their heroism is quickly subsumed to party political point-scoring. But those who live in the warzone face the...

A friend alerted me to the fact that, while I was away recently in the US, BBC Four screened a programme about Robespierre and the French Revolution that focused, in particular, on the Reign of Terror. I watched it with interest (though, unfortunately, it is now no longer available on BBC iPlayer). As is usual with this kind of programme, the makers had interviewed a number of people - academics and writers (among them Simon Schama and Hilary Mantel) - who they thought might be able to offer informative and interesting comment on the history being recounted, and the observations these commentators had to offer were duly relayed across the hour and a half. Most of them spoke about mass terror in the accents you would expect from liberal-minded people. Schama, for example, was shown towards...

Carson McCullers second novel opens like this: An army post in peacetime is a dull place. Things happen, but then they happen over and over again. The general plan of a fort in itself adds to the monotony – the huge concrete barracks, the neat rows of officers’ homes built one precisely like the other, the gym, the chapel, the golf course and the swimming pools – all is designed according to a certain rigid pattern. But perhaps the dullness of the post is caused most of all by insularity and by a surfeit of leisure and safety, for once a man enters the army he is expected only to follow the heels ahead of him. At the same time things do occasionally happen on an army post that are not likely to re-occur. There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was...

Crime has been a badly underestimated problem: more so among scholarly experts than among ordinary citizens or elected officials.  A1% reduction in crime provides economic value — measured in terms of willingness-to-pay – of something like $15 billion a year. The material losses due to victimization are only a small part of the crime problem.  For example, property losses from residential burglary average out to $4 per house or apartment per month.   And yet, in a survey, people asked how much they would be willing to pay out of their own funds to reduce burglary in their community by 10% gave an average answer of $100 per year. One difference between victimization losses and other costs is that victimization doesn’t just happen.  Victimization is done to someone by someone...

A row has broken out about spying on Muslims, that I haven’t had a chance to go into yet. It started with a Guardian article by Vikram Dodd that showed Prevent Violent Extremism money was being used to spy on British Muslims. A few points. Most people who know enough about PVE know that some of it is undoubtedly used to ’spy’ on people by at least monitoring what they’re doing and whether they have extremist sympathies. The question then comes down to proportionality: how much information gathering should there be? What are the legal frameworks put in place to ensure that information is not abused and that civil rights are not violated? At which point do intelligence services take action? How far does it go? It’s absurd to assume that without PVE, the...

Party leader says the Lib Dems have a 'proud record' in local government, and are already providing essential services of millions of peopleLiberal Democrats can show voters how they will behave in government by pointing to their control of England's big cities, Nick Clegg said today.The Lib Dem leader said the party had a "proud" record to promote as the only mainstream party with a presence in local government right across the country."For a party that has not been in national government and power nationally for quite some time, it is immensely important to demonstrate what we do when we are in power," he said.Clegg today hit back at Tory claims that the two parties shared common ground on a range of policies as he accused David Cameron  earlier today of hypocrisy and of making...

The Times has followed up on Guido’s story yesterday about the involvement of Sir Mark Allen, the ex-MI6 point man for Libya turned BP fixer in the release of al Megrahi. The Times confirms that Jack Straw was personally lobbied by BP over Britain’s prisoner transfer agreement with Libya just before he abandoned efforts to exclude the Lockerbie bomber from the deal… the Justice Secretary took two telephone calls from Sir Mark Allen, a former M16 agent, who was by then working for BP as a consultant, on October 15 and November 9, 2007. Depite BP flatly denying last week that it had lobbied for the release of Megrahi The Times reports that a spokesman now says: “BP did bring to the attention of the Government in late 2007 our concerns about the slow progress in...

Having already started legal proceedings to clawback compensation paid to wounded soldiers, Defence minister Bob Ainsworth and his labour mates are now looking to further reduce the allowances paid to wounded troops by as much as £3,000 per year.At the moment soldiers unable to work due to battlefield injuries receive an allowance of £57 per week and 12,000 veterans are currently in receipt of this additional benefit. In a bid to get back some of the £millions the MoD has squandered on its failed defence contracts, the government is planning to axe this injury benefit as from next April.Coming at a time when British troops are suffering their highest rate of battle injuries in Afghanistan, this latest kick in the teeth from the government has been called "morally indefensible" by the...

Sebastian Faulks is in trouble. The Daily Mail has identified him as the next Salman Rushdie after he made a few disobliging comments about the Koran in an extended interview with the Sunday Times:“It’s a depressing book. It really is. It’s just the rantings of a schizophrenic. It’s very one-dimensional, and people talk about the beauty of the Arabic and so on, but the English translation I read was, from a literary point of view, very disappointing.“There is also the barrenness of the message. I mean, there are some bits about diet, you know, the equivalent of the Old Testament, which is also crazy. If you look again at those books of the law, Leviticus or Deuteronomy, there’s a lot about who you are allowed to sleep with, and if a man had lost his testicles he wouldn’t...

My reaction to the Compass High Pay Commission proposal (http://www.compassonline.org.uk/campaigns/campaign.asp?n=5246) is that I could not care less what the super rich earn - it's seeing the least well-off in society properly rewarded for their labour and free of poverty that gets me politically fired-up.It seems a very odd political priority to push the punishment of a very small number of the extremely financially successful rather than focus on the betterment of the least well off. In tax terms punishing the super rich few would not generate enough to be useful for practical redistribution, might indeed lower the tax take due to evasion and emigration and might stuff the economy even more than it already is by stifling entrepreneurialism. I.e. the only benefit would be to placate the...

Magistrates are angry that they are being made to carry the brunt of cuts because their workload is being diverted away from the courts, reports the Times. "They say that increasing numbers offenders are being dealt with by “on-the-spot” fines and cautions — almost half of all offences are now dealt with in this way."Ian Parker Joseph, LPUK's leader, had this to say:"This is the corporatisation of government gone mad. It flies in the face of our constitution, which guarantees that all grants and promises of fines and forfeitures of particular persons before conviction are illegal and void."This proves beyond doubt that our Government is bankrupt of all moral and legal authority, and to couple that with the Bank of England's announcement today that it will print a further £25bn,...

When he meets Medvedev in Moscow, Obama should know this is not a mighty superpower, but a weak and corrupt federationUS president Barack Obama arrives in Moscow on Monday 6 July. Here, in Russia, he is awaited with some foreboding – he is, after all, the most powerful man on earth. The Kremlin hopes he will announce a "reset" in US-Russian relations, and recognise today's Russia as a respected, worthy ally. Russia's liberals, by contrast, want him to admonish the Kremlin for shortcomings in its authoritarian regime.Many Russians see Obama as a kind of secret messiah, chosen to guide the nation towards a new phase in its historical development. Surprisingly, among Russia's ruling elite there is no real anti-American sentiment: both those in power and Russia's opposition crave, more than...

Jack Straw could set EU legal precedent should he decide to exercise royal pardon for Michael ShieldsA decision whether to pardon the jailed Liverpool football fan Michael Shields is days away, the Ministry of Justice has confirmed. The decision could set a precedent for cases of Britons convicted abroad on contested evidence.Shields, 22, is serving a 10-year sentence for the attempted murder of Martin Georgiev, a barman, in Varna, Bulgaria. The justice minister, Jack Straw, is expected to decide by Tuesday whether to grant a pardon, having commissioned a Merseyside police investigation into new evidence not featured in his trial.Georgiev was attacked outside the Big Ben diner in Varna on 30 May 2005, several days after Liverpool won the Champions League final in Turkey. A witness...

This is a wonderful piece of writing from Charlotte Gore, discussing Sunny Hundal's perceived wish for Liberal Conspiracy to be the UK's answer to the DailyKos. [Emphasis mine.]Liberal Conspiracy, on the other hand, rarely has anything new to say or anything interesting to bring to political debate. It’s the same old, “The state should do this!!!” concept repeated ad-infinitum, convinced the failure of the left is due to the specific implementations or the personalities of their leaders.Wrong. All that fretting and worrying about policy is such a complete waste of time. I’ve heard it over and over on Labour Home, I’ve heard it over and over on Labour List and it’s been done to death on Liberal Conspiracy. All of them looking for the new idea, the new brilliant policy that’s...

ToryDiary: "Please give examples of things that people are saying to you about the state of politics" Seats and candidates: Last night's post on Andrew MacKay is updated with a Sky reporter saying that the double claiming Tory MP was "disingenuous" in saying majority of people were supportive of him.Marcus Wood on Platform: Could the expenses scandal mark the beginning of an entirely new era of democracy?Local government: Redbridge Council control in the balanceWATCH: Nadine Dorries talks to the BBC about the way expenses-gate is 'torturing' MPs and their familiesThe Archbishop of Canterbury has warned the "systematic humiliation" of MPs is a threat to Britain's democracy - TimesThe pursuit of MPs is becoming a witch-hunt - Independent leaderTory MPs Anthony Steen and Nadine Dorries...

Some snippets of an article I have written for theChristian Political Forum E-Zine, IMPACT:Social Gospel! A phrase which attracts a number of images and thoughts, whether it is remembering people such as Oscar Romero or Martin Luther King, or suspicions being raised about the possible hidden political agendas involved. It is a phrase which excites, unnerves, and fires off trains of thought for Christians and non-Christians alike.It was over a perceived decline in the spreading of the Moral Gospel in the US that could be seen as part of the reason why George W. Bush was elected President in 2000. It wasnt just hanging chads that decided for Bush, it was also to do with wanting a President with moral fibre and commitment to Christian values, especially as it is possible that some...

One of the less-noted consequences of the Bush presidency and the extreme hatred it generated among people of liberal outlook was a discourse about America according to which the key political evils associated with Bush's term of office had sprung new-born from him and his administration in a country up till then innocent of them. This was not, of course, a belief held by leftists of the type who regard the US as the root of all evil. For them Bush was just more of the same, only worse. Still, with a section of mainstream liberal opinion, amongst those who allow that there are things about America one can admire, the talk has often been about how it is Bush who has single-handedly driven America off the rails morally and politically. You might be forgiven, for example, if you'd formed the...