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15 Nov 09
EU Commissioners have stayed in office illegally
"A good many people were shocked to learn that the order to break up two of our largest banking empires, RBS and Lloyd's TSB, at great cost to shareholders and pension funds, was given by the EU's Dutch Competition Commissioner, Neelie Kroes. They might have been even more shocked to know, as Lord Willoughby de Broke explained in the Lords last week, that this unelected official exercising such enormous power over Britain's affairs is not even legally entitled to occupy her office."
Why we will lose in Afghanistan
"As both Britain and America are plunged into an orgy of tortured introspection over what we are doing in Afghanistan, a further very important factor needs to be fed into the discussion, because it helps to explain not only why we have got into such a tragic mess but also why our armed intervention in that unhappy country is doomed. What we are hardly ever told about Afghanistan is that it has been for 300 years the scene of a bitter civil war, between two tribal groups of Pashtuns (formerly known as Pathans). On one side are the Durranis – most of the settled population, farmers, traders, the professional middle class. On the other are the Ghilzai, traditionally nomadic, fiercely fundamentalist in religion, whose tribal homelands stretch across into Pakistan as far as Kashmir."
Voters will no longer be told what to do
"Suddenly, politicians of all parties have made the startling discovery that there is a new generation of adults accustomed to buying their holidays and electronic goods on the internet, and who would not dream of purchasing car insurance without consulting a price comparison website – who are, in short, very sophisticated consumers for whom choice is a birthright and a way of life. These people, who regard themselves as being capable of making grown-up decisions in all sorts of specialised and technical fields, then discover that when it comes to the most important areas of their lives, they are being told that they must take what they are given and be grateful: that they can not have their babies at this hospital, but only at that one; that their children cannot attend this school, but only that one. There was a time in Britain when even private businesses behaved this way toward their customers – the legacy of wartime shortages and rationing had turned a generation of people into docile supplicants. But now the major public services are run on assumptions which are glaringly anomalous with the rest of our everyday experience."
Belle de Jour revealed as research scientist Dr Brooke Magnanti
"The secret life of Dr Brooke Magnanti, an obscure research scientist, is revealed today as she unmasks herself as the writer behind the pseudonym Belle de Jour. Her identity has been one of the great literary mysteries of the decade after the publication of bestselling books about her secret life as a prostitute."
VINCE CABLE: A minefield of myths called immigration
"Unfortunately, issues around race and ethnic minorities become confused with arguments about immigration. I had a heated conversation with a lady who demanded action on the ‘illegal immigrants’ she saw in the High Street. I asked how she knew they were ‘illegal’. What she really meant – but was too embarrassed to say – was that they were black and Asian people. Then two blonde women, with whom she clearly didn’t have a problem, approached with babies in pushchairs. But they were speaking an Eastern European language. Immigrants? Certainly. Illegal? How would we know? "
Now State takes over bankers’ contracts
"Bankers who are paid “unjustifiable” multi-million-pound bonuses face having their contracts ripped up and their banks fined, under new legislation to be unveiled this week. "
Labour’s heartland won’t be fooled on immigration again
"There is something a little pitiful watching Gordon Brown tell the country how worried he is about immigration, and how it must not be a taboo issue. Like watching a paralytic drunk explaining in slurred tones how he will never touch another drop, and all the while you can smell the paint-stripper on his breath. There is no issue — with the possible exception of Iraq — on which Labour has been more deceitful to the public at large, or has more egregiously betrayed its core working-class support. The only reason Brown is addressing the issue now is that we are six months away from an election and he fears that the troglodyte BNP thickoes will chew away great big gobfuls of angry working-class voters across a diagonal swathe of supposedly Labour country, from the white-flight satellite towns of Essex to the old mill towns of east Lancashire. "
Stop the game, ref. We’re all too cross to play by the rules
"Last weekend a man in a blue shirt fell over while playing a game of football. And a free-kick was awarded by the referee against the team playing in red shirts. This made the man who manages the team in red shirts very furious. “Och aye the noo,” He told waiting reporters, angrily. The man in question, Sir Alex Chewing-Gum, is always very angry about referees. Not that long ago he said one man was too unfit to monitor a football game, and on Sunday he said the chap in black was in an “absolutely ridiculous” position. I’m with him on this. Referees are a very strange bunch of people that no one ever sees outside the confines of a footballing ground. Seriously. I once met a man who sexes the queen’s ducks for a living. I really do know a pox doctor’s clerk. I also know a butcher and a lorry driver and a man who puts food in his mouth and then earns a living from telling people what it tastes like. But I don’t know a single football ref. I’ve never even met anyone who knows one."
'Dangerous' speed camera rakes in £500,000 a year
"A motorway speed camera blamed for causing accidents generates up to half a million pounds a year in fines. Crashes have risen by almost a quarter and casualties have almost doubled since the camera was installed on a busy stretch of the M11 in Essex, in 2000. Now, details revealed under Freedom of Information legislation, show that the device results in up to 9,000 speeding tickets a year, enough to raise around £500,000. "
Welcome to Club Bounce: Where the big – and beautiful – people go
"The ladies call themselves "BBW" or "big, beautiful women". The gentlemen are known as "BHMs'" or "big, handsome men". Their common interest, when they're not pounding the specially reinforced dancefloor, is the noble cause of "size acceptance". With a black President in the White House, and laws protecting gays, women and religious minorities, America's nightclub scene is fostering a new movement to secure civil rights for one of the few social groups who can still legally be persecuted: fat people. An explosion of "plus-size" entertainment venues, where revellers of all shapes and waistlines are welcomed, is managing to tap both the economic and political potential of the country's one in three adults who are clinically obese."
Oh nurse, your degree is a symptom of equality disease
"One of the government’s sillier initiatives was its announcement last week that in future all NHS nurses must have a university degree. From 2013, all would-be nurses will have to have taken a three- or four-year university course to enter the profession. The disastrous consequences of this ought to be obvious to the meanest Whitehall intelligence. All sorts of people who might make excellent nurses will be put off, and lost to nursing: anyone who is not particularly academic; anyone who — frankly — is not particularly bright; anyone who has a vocation to care for patients without wishing for the most high-tech training; anyone who is unable to take on a mass of student debt on a nurse’s poor pay; any late entrants — and this at a time when the NHS is desperately short of nurses. "
The disgrace of Britain's jails: Institutions short-change inmates and society
"Britain's prison system is being "brought to its knees", according to penal reform experts responding to a damning new report obtained by The Independent on Sunday. The soaring prison population, consistently high re-offending rates and increasing numbers of people on short sentences highlighted in the Prison Reform Trust's dossier have produced a system that is "not fit for purpose", they say."
Obama will be on trial with the 9/11 accused
"At the time, as America reeled from the horror of the 11 September attacks, the idea seemed perfect: a remote and instantly available high-security prison for the country's most implacable enemies – "the worst of the worst", as the Pentagon boss Donald Rumsfeld called them, when the place opened for business in January 2002. Technically it wasn't on US soil, so inmates would not enjoy the tiresome protections of the American legal system, nor, since they were not classed as prisoners of war, those "quaint" Geneva Conventions. It was conveniently close to the mainland, but hidden within a military base, so prying eyes could be kept away. But Guantanamo Bay hasn't quite worked out like that. Instead, it has proved a nightmare, and not just for the numerous detainees who, far from being "the worst of the worst", were mere flotsam from the Afghan battlefield. Such was the blot on America's global reputation, and so uncomfortable the legal arguments that Guantanamo spawned, that even president George Bush wanted to shut the place down, only to conclude it simply wasn't practical."
Sir John Chilcot 'wrong man to head Iraq invasion inquiry'
"A former senior government adviser on Iraq today accuses ministers of ignoring a series of opportunities to avert war in the months leading up to the conflict. But Carne Ross, the UK's former Iraq expert on the UN security council, has said he fears the forthcoming official inquiry into the 2003 invasion would fail to establish a true account of how and why the UK opted to join the US in taking military action.Ross says he believes the inquiry, which will open next week, will produce little in the way of illumination because it suffers from "an insidious intent" to establish that "our democracy, parliament and government function as they should". "That Sir John Chilcot served on the Butler inquiry is like trying the same crime twice with the same judge and jury – not a credible standard for truth-seeking," Ross writes. He warns: "Many of those giving evidence will have a deep interest in confirming the government's narrative, for they are deeply implicated in having implemented it.""
The country doesn't want to be led by someone it pities | Andrew Rawnsley | Comment is free | The Observer
"Since Gordon Brown's his premiership started to unravel, a process of attrition that began when he flunked having an early election in the autumn of 2007, he has been portrayed with ascending levels of vituperation as dithering, cowardly, mendacious, useless, unstable and generally unfit to be prime minister. He has generated anger, ridicule, loathing, spite and despair. It got to the point where he couldn't even go jogging without being lampooned for looking like most men of his age look when they put on trainers. I remarked a few weeks ago that there was a flavour of the blood sport - the spectacle of the once proud bull being speared and slashed to death - about some of the media coverage of his premiership. He had brought a lot of this on himself, but that did not make it terribly pleasant to watch. In the past few days, we have witnessed a wholly novel phenomenon: the prime minister receiving near universal sympathy."
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It's now got this bad for Gordon Brown: his enemies are feeling sorry for him. For the first time since he arrived in Number 10, he is the object of pity.
Since his premiership started to unravel, a process of attrition that began when he flunked having an early election in the autumn of 2007, he has been portrayed with ascending levels of vituperation as dithering, cowardly, mendacious, useless, unstable and generally unfit to be prime minister. He has generated anger, ridicule, loathing, spite and despair. It got to the point where he couldn't even go jogging without being lampooned for looking like most men of his age look when they put on trainers. I remarked a few weeks ago that there was a flavour of the blood sport – the spectacle of the once proud bull being speared and slashed to death – about some of the media coverage of his premiership. He had brought a lot of this on himself, but that did not make it terribly pleasant to watch.
In the past few days, we have witnessed a wholly novel phenomenon: the prime minister receiving near universal sympathy.
HIV tests for everyone may become routine
"Testing for HIV could be introduced routinely in GPs’ surgeries and hospitals under government plans to screen the population for the condition. Ministers are concerned that more than a quarter of people with HIV do not know they are carrying the virus and are passing it on to their sexual partners. A pilot screening programme, which is expected to be extended across the country if it is a success, will target gay men and black Africans who have a higher than average chance of carrying HIV. "
Children's rights 'being systematically breached'
"England is "systematically" breaching international human rights laws protecting children, according to a damning new report released by a coalition of Britain's biggest children's charities to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The use of Asbos to name and shame teenagers, the Government's failure to prevent parents from beating children, and an increase in the number of children living in poverty are just some of the ways in which the rights of young people are being undermined, according to the report on the state of children's rights in England to be published on Friday."
Australia to say sorry to abused British child migrants
"An apology is to be made to the victims of child migration schemes who were shipped from Britain to Australia, where many suffered abuse and neglect. On Monday, the Australian government will say sorry to the thousands of children deported there during the twentieth century. Meanwhile, Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, will this week say he is to look into what can be done to make amends to all the children who were shipped to Australia, Canada and other former colonies, in schemes undertaken by successive governments up until 1967. "
Sorry darling, I can't do the vacuuming. It might damage my sperm count
"It's the get-out clause work-shy husbands have been praying for for years. A study has found that household chores – including using a vacuum cleaner or microwave oven – could reduce a man’s chances of having children. Researchers exposed male volunteers to electromagnetic fields – high doses of which are produced by all electrically charged objects, including refrigerators and vacuum cleaners – and found such exposure could double the risk of having poor-quality sperm. Fertility expert Dr De-Kun Li said his work provides the first evidence of a link between electrical goods and declining male fertility."
Will Self: My body & soul
"I stopped drinking soon after that car accident, so I haven't drunk since 1984. I was very obviously an alcoholic-level drinker. The way that I cope with giving up is by keeping a large glass of crème de menthe by me at all times, so if I want to have it I can. It's a strange mind trick."
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