Saturday, March 13, 2010 

Forced to die alone and without dignity.

An especially powerful letter in today's Graun on the subject of assisted suicide, well worth republishing:

As I read yet another news piece about someone travelling to Dignitasto die (Vicki Wood), I am consumed by sadness (Woman who attempted husband's mercy killing takes her own life in Dignitas clinic, 12 March). Nearly five years ago, my grandfather travelled to Zurich to die. Unable to face months of pain, coupled with physical and mental degradation, he elected to end his life while he could still make the journey. Alone.

Ever the gentleman, my grandfather declined the offer of companionship from my father, for fear of his son's potential prosecution. There were no updated guidelines from the director of public prosecutions – to have such clarity would have been a luxury. Instead, my grandfather took his final journey abroad, alone. He ate his last meal, alone. And his last words were uttered to medical staff. I have no idea what those words may have been, or, indeed, how he felt.

Too often I hear talk of dignity at work or dignity in life generally, but where is our right to dignity in death? In the eyes of Westminster, my grandfather is simply one of 100; another statistic lost in the reams of data that fills the corridors of Whitehall. But to me, he was a brave man forced to leave his homeland in order to die with dignity.

I appreciate the issue is complex, and would be naive to state otherwise, but a sensible resolution is required. How many more Britons have to voyage to Switzerland, before the government seeks a solution? In criminalising assisted suicide, are we not overlooking – undermining? – the right to articulate our own views on life? May Vicki Wood rest in peace.

Name and address supplied

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Tuesday, February 23, 2010 

Never open a book with weather.

Letter in the Graun on one of those wonderful articles featuring writers telling everyone else how to write:

• "Never open a book with weather." advises Elmore Leonard (Put one word after another, Review, 20 February). There goes Bleak House.

Lewis Elton

As does Nineteen Eighty-Four, and doubtless dozens of other classic works of fiction. Especially daft considering what a famous opening Nineteen Eighty-Four has, and how I doubt anyone would change a single word in it:

IT WAS a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

To be fair to the Graun, it's only Leonard whose "advice" is so dogmatic. AL Kennedy's is the complete opposite, and makes me wish she was teaching creative writing.

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Tuesday, May 05, 2009 

Hazel Blears? She's just like Thatcher...

Apropos of yesterday's post, I was fairly confident that the Graun's leader which featured Hazel Blears had been written by Martin Kettle, who used to be one of the main leader writers, and who now fills in occasionally, but because I wasn't completely certain didn't directly attribute it to him. Today Mr Kettle devotes an even more stupendous column to comparing and contrasting Blears and... Margaret Thatcher, which rather does confirm it. His main argument is that Thatcher, having first been patronised, proved everyone wrong. His penultimate paragraph:

Yet if you look at the Labour party today and try to imagine a current minister of either sex with unchallengeably authentic political roots, an aspirational life story that image makers dream of, a clear sense of where she's coming from, an irresistible confidence in her own instincts, a clear set of convictions, and the potential to turn herself into an iconic political figurehead, you don't find many better candidates than Blears.

In one sense, you have to admire both Kettle and Blears: few are so deluded about either their greatness or someone else's potential to be great; that's impressive in its own right.

The problem with this view of Blears is obvious upon watching George Monbiot's eye-opening interview with her. This came about after Blears responded to a Monbiot column, which wasn't one of his best, which attacked politicians as a whole. Blears, for her part, put in an even more poorly argued reply, which brazenly claimed that those who have never stood for political office shouldn't criticise the great work which politicians are doing. After Monbiot ripped Blears to shreds in his riposte, she rather pathetically asked him to visit her constituency to see the great things that she and Labour have achieved, presumably thinking that he wouldn't take her up on the offer. He did.

This took place before Blears' weekend article in the Observer, which set the slavering Kettle off on his Thatcher riff, but after watching it you couldn't possibly mistake Blears for even the most shallow Thatcher follower. Whatever you think about Thatcher, she was undoubtedly a leader. Blears, despite her pretensions to become deputy leader, where she was humiliated by coming dead last, is not a leader. She's a follower. Monbiot dismisses the distinctions between Blairites and Brownites and just describes Blears as a career politician, which certainly also is accurate, but the Blairite description still holds, because she undoubtedly shares Blair's terrifying sense of self-assurance, his ability to believe two contradictory things at once, which Orwell famously called double-think, and also to argue regardless that of any changes in policy, everything they have ever done has been the right thing, even if the right thing at the time turned out to be the wrong thing and the opposite had to be done to make it the right thing. Brownites, for their sins, have never been so self-assured, and have recognised they have made mistakes. Blairites, however, only believe they made one mistake, and that was acquiescing to Gordon Brown's unopposed ascent to the leadership.

There really is no other way to describe Blears's view that despite hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dying, which, she insultingly says, is a tragedy, that it was the right thing to do and that it was made in good faith, as bordering on madness. It has to be asked: what possibly could have made it the "wrong thing" to do if the deaths of hundreds of thousands didn't? The answer is that there is no answer; regardless of whether the entire population had died, nothing could alter the fact that Blears would still defend it. She knows no other way than absolute and utter loyalty, and as Monbiot repeatedly prods her, you can start to see the desperation and even the loneliness of her position in her eyes: secretly, and deep within the recesses of her mind, she knows that she's wrong, but that she can't find it within herself to admit that either she or the party she quite clearly dearly loves, even if it doesn't love her, can be wrong.

Once you understand this, then her Observer article isn't in fact an act of disloyalty, or an attack on Gordon Brown, but rather concern that the party, which is more important than the leader, even if she thinks the party stands for things which the members themselves don't believe in, is in peril. Although Kettle mentions that Blears prior to 97 was a lawyer, that she's been ostensibly a minister or working for one since 1998 suggests that she can no longer imagine not being in government. Blears clearly has no interest in being a politician who has no power, despite her protestations that she's doing everything she can for her constituents, although her belief in that is doubtless sincere and motivates her. Such a situation can lead to what would normally be drastic action.

The only other thing Monbiot gets wrong is that he admires Blears' engagement and the way she answers questions when others wouldn't. This isn't always the case, as an encounter with Jeremy Paxman a few years back showed. The very problem is that the way Blears responds is what turns people off: if you're not prepared to admit that you've ever got anything wrong, that everything you've done even if it subsequently turns out to be wrong was right at the time, and that the party is always right, you're better off not engaging because it just frustrates and and angers. At least with Thatcher you could channel your hatred against her, because she didn't try to be liked; Blears, on the other hand, desperately wants to be loved while being just as obdurate. Thatcher inspired a generation of those who believed there was another politics possible despite there being no alternative; Blears is inspiring a generation who genuinely do believe there is no alternative. In this sense, New Labour is turning out to be far more destructive than the Tories were.

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Monday, May 04, 2009 

Just one fucking thing after another.

Back Brown or boost BNP, says Kinnock. You really would have thought that a former Labour leader would know that the one thing you do not do is tell people that you have to back someone otherwise someone worse will triumph, not only because it's the politics of desperation and an intellectually bankrupt scare tactic, but because most people when told what to do, especially by those in authority, will be even more likely to do the opposite.

Almost equally ludicrous is today's Guardian leader on the government's connected woes, which calls Hazel Blears an "authentic Labour voice". She's about as authentic a Labour voice as Nick Griffin is. It doesn't read like a typical Graun leader, giving the impression that someone's filling in over the bank holiday weekend, and filling in exceptionally badly. It says that Stephen Byers, Charles Clarke, David Blunkett and Hazel Blears are not part of an "undifferentiated Blairite plot", and they probably aren't. They are however, with the possible exception of Clarke, who cooled on Blair after he sacked, either ardent or moderate Blairites, and Blears is quite possibly the summation of everything wrong with New Labour. That she now also seems to consider herself as the voice of New Labour's conscience and feels the need to stick the knife in, as that is clearly what her Observer article yesterday did, also seems to suggest that she is becoming even more certain of herself and her eminent greatness.

Blears, sadly, has a majority of almost 8,000, meaning her seat is likely to remain safe, although the way things are going who knows what sort of carnage might occur this time next year. Then again, even if she was culled, she'd doubtless be replaced with an equally loathsome Tory. Sometimes politics feels a bit like history as described by Alan Bennett: it's just one fucking thing after another.

I was also intending to post on the Daily Mail's latest HUMAN RIGHTS OUTRAGE, namely that lawyers are daring to appeal against someone's conviction, but Mr Vowl has beaten me to it, so I shall direct you there instead.

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Thursday, March 19, 2009 

A depressing pyrrhic victory.

The only possible way you can describe Barclays' depressing legal victory over the Guardian, Mr Justice Blake ruling that the paper cannot republish the memos detailing the workings of Barclays' Structured Capital Markets team is as a pyrrhic one. The Guardian, in its own editorial, more than sums it up when it states that all that Barclays has achieved is to shut the stable door after the horse has not just bolted, but completely disappeared from view. This is thanks to the documents being immediately mirrored by Wikileaks, where they still reside and where they can be downloaded from a server in this country, in defiance of the injunction. The terms of the injunction mean that the Guardian cannot even point people in the direction of where they can find them or "incite" others to publish; all they will have to do instead is Google for them, where they'll quickly find them.

Part of Justice Blake's justification for ruling against the Guardian was that he didn't believe that the documents had spread far enough for their confidentiality to have completely broken down. This is clearly nonsense: all those that Barclays wanted to hide these documents from have not only got them, they've been poring over them now since Tuesday, whether they be HMRC, Barclays' rivals, or anyone else with the slightest grudge against the bank. The Grauniad refers to the House of Lords ruling on Spycatcher, that you cannot put the melting ice cube back into the freezer. That is more than apt: through the ban the only people who are being denied from being allowed to see what everyone else has is those who are either without the internet or those that have never heard of Wikileaks and can't properly use a search engine.

Equally weak was Blake's second argument. He agreed that the Guardian can report on the contents of the documents, as that is in the public interest; not in the public interest is the unexpurgated publication of the documents in full, containing legally sensitive matters and other confidential information. There are some obvious flaws in this: how is the paper meant to know firstly what is considered legally sensitive and confidential and what isn't? Their lawyers' might come to predictability different conclusions from those of Barclays'. This appears to have the potential to be a slippery slope; how else can a paper know what is sensitive unless they first consult the people they are preparing to expose and give them the opportunity to halt publication in its entirety? Ideally, journalists should do this anyway, but there are certain situations where if they did on an incredibly important story, undoubtedly in the public interest, they could end up not being able to publish anyway. In cases such of that as Max Mosley, there ought to be no question of the person being informed beforehand; when it involves politicians being accused of corruption or corporations being accused of blatant and artifical tax avoidance, there is a good argument for not doing so. Furthermore, why shouldn't the general public be able to view the source material for such exposes and be able to make their own minds up where it is possible for the hacks to provide such a service? Journalists cannot always be relied upon to report accurately what is in things which they either come across, investigate or are handed to them, especially when it comes to such incredibly complex and difficult to understand matters as tax avoidance. The Guardian itself is has an example of this, having misinterpreted how Tesco was operating a tax avoidance scheme and wrongly claiming that they were avoiding corporation tax to the tune of £1bn when they were in fact avoiding stamp duty land tax on a much lesser scale.

Blake also suggested that "if the debate can flourish without the publication of the full documents, that is a highly material factor". But none of the articles in either the Graun or the Sunday Times begins to cover in anything approaching forensic detail just what is discussed and proposed in these documents; they just give a broad summary. Debate can flourish without them being freely available, but that is not truly informed debate. The best summation of what they contain was made by Alan Rusbridger in his statement to the court:

"I considered these documents to be of the highest significance in the debate about tax avoidance.

"They revealed at first hand the processes involved in structuring extremely complex and artificial tax avoidance vehicles; how lawyers and accountants worked together to exploit loopholes in government legislation; and the degree to which they are sanctioned at the highest levels within Barclays."


Only by examining the documents first hand do you fully understand just how Barclays' SCM team operated and operates. Blake's decision has slammed the door on one source of light, but the others remain wide open.

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Monday, February 02, 2009 

Have we got tax for you.

It is, as the Guardian's leader on the subject suggests, rather easier to target benefit fraudsters and those without access to good lawyers than it is to investigate tax avoidance. The paper knows this from bitter experience: it last year accused Tesco of avoiding corporation tax to the tune of £1bn, only for it to discover after publication that it had mixed up corporation tax with stamp duty land tax, and that the real sum avoided was far less. The paper quickly admitted its mistake, but not before Tesco, running straight into the arms of Carter-Fuck, had issued not just a libel writ but also a claim for malicious falsehood, although Justice Eady, the bête noire of the tabloids, subsequently threw it out.

The other reason for the Guardian to be extra careful when reporting on tax affairs is that it has also publicly admitted to be involved in avoiding tax itself, or rather that its parent company, the Guardian Media Group, has admitted such. This came about through GMG's alliance with Apax Partners, a private equity group, when it purchased the magazine publisher Emap. Quite rightly, some are therefore suggesting hypocrisy on the Guardian's part to be so apparently outraged about tax avoidance when the newspaper itself also does it. In the paper's defence, it's one of the few companies that has openly admitted some of its tax arrangements, although how much of this was in relation to the Tesco affair is unclear, while Richard Murphy, of Tax Research UK, examined all the other large media groups and found that the Guardian paid the largest percentage of corporation tax of the lot. As Richard Brooks also points out, it would be far worse if the paper's own tax arrangements stopped it from investigating "the tax gap", or even worse, if it affected its stance on it. Hypocrisy can be alleged, but it seems doubtful that the News International papers will be investigating tax avoidance any time soon, just as the Sunday Times every year mysteriously excludes Rupert Murdoch from its rich list.

Richard Brooks' involvement is one of the signs of how seriously the paper is taking its investigation, presuming of course that Brooks is the same Brooks that also works for Private Eye and who has been one of the heirs to Paul Foot's throne. That Private Eye subsequently discovered that Tesco was indeed avoiding corporation tax, as the paper had alleged, doubtless helped.

Undoubtedly, as we plunge head first into a recession, the tax receipts, taken for granted during the boom, become ever more important and should become ever more scrutinised. Peter Mandelson's famous quote, that New Labour was relaxed about people becoming filthy rich, often leaves out its second half, that this was fine as long as they paid their taxes. Half the reason why it was left off is not just so it can be used to beat Mandelson and Labour with, but also because the government itself became fabulously relaxed about companies and the individuals behind them not paying their fair share of tax. The Treasury might each year during the budget plug a few of the loopholes which are discovered by the bean-counting firms and mercilessly exploited, but the real tale, as always, was shown in the honours list, which year after year was resplendent with the burghers of industry who saw it as their duty, both to shareholders and themselves, to reduce their tax burden. Probably the most egregious example was the knighthood awarded to Philip Green, the man behind the Arcadia group - this was despite him taking £1bn out of the company to pay himself, which he funnelled to his wife in Monaco, therefore avoiding having to pay any tax whatsoever. The other gob-smacking incident was the selling off of tax offices to the company Mapeley, which is based in the tax haven of Bermuda. According to the National Audit Office's report on the deal (PDF), this saved Mapeley in the region of £55 million that the taxpayer would otherwise have had paid back to into the public purse.

The completely secretive nature of the deals, as well as the highly complex nature of the avoidance schemes exists not only between the companies and those that draw them up, but also between HMRC and the companies. HMRC, possibly out of embarrassment, possibly out of the desire to keep the missing taxes due a secret, refuses to give a figure for how much they're being left out of pocket each year, although estimates range wildly from between £3.7bn to over £20bn. Part of this secrecy is because HMRC deals directly with many of the companies over exactly how much tax they intend to pay - individuals such as Mohamed al-Fayed have long had agreements with HMRC over the exact figures. This is of course in stark contrast to how other taxpayers who get into arrears are treated, and to how the aforementioned benefit fraudsters are subject to the equivalent of a 10 minutes hate every so often. Both rip off the public purse, but only one enters the public eye, while further establishing the idea that most of those claiming to be sick are in fact not.

Some will console themselves with the idea that although undoubtedly avoiding pay your dues is a bad thing, that the money would just be squandered anyway. The argument would be a lot less alluring if this government wasn't so determined to do the equivalent of pouring money straight down the drain, as it continues to do on the various disastrous IT projects, on ID cards and on the Olympics, to name but a few such schemes. At the same time, there are always other things which many of us would like to see extra money going towards, not least at the moment a more generous benefits scheme for those temporarily out of work, or additional funding for retraining. It could be used to pay off the extra debt we're taking on more quickly, so as not to mortgage another generation of ordinary workers. As could be expected, it has been those ordinary workers, such as those protesting outside Lindsey and walking out in solidarity across the country, regardless of the involvement of the far-right and the nature of some of the slogans used, that are now being hit hardest when it was unrestrained global market fundamentalism which created the mess and which has been bailed out. The least those responsible can do is pay their fair share - and closing down the tax havens and the avoidance schemes has to be one of the conditions of the recovery and subsequent re-regulation.

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Friday, November 07, 2008 

Frank Field and preventing a British Kristallnacht.

For some reason the Guardian doesn't seem to have published today's response column from Frank Field online. One has to wonder if this might be something to do with the arguments made by Field in it. Responding to an article by Paul Oestreicher on the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, in which Oestreicher referred to Field but once, quoting Peter Selby's attack on him, Field defends his call for "balanced migration" by saying that his ultimate aim is, and I quote directly, "[T]he aim must be to prevent a mini Kristallnacht in this country."

To suggest that this is a wholly distasteful comparison and allusion is an understatement, but it is perhaps one that is more appropriate than Field realises. Kristallnacht was sponsored and abetted by the German government. Field's argument that is as "unemployment rises there is a danger of increased tension as British citizens lose their jobs." This is almost identical to Phil Woolas's completely unprompted comments that "people losing their jobs makes the immigration issue extremely thorny", and that it had been "too easy to get into this country in the past and it was going to get harder." It's true that during recessions tensions are bound to rise, but those tensions very rarely turn to major unrest or riots without the deliberate involvement of those with the most to benefit from such unrest. The riots in northern England in 2001 were almost uniquely sparked by the activities of the British National Party and National Front in the respective towns. What you do not do when tensions are liable to rise is then stoke the fire: Woolas may have been addressing what he thought was a coming problem, but he also through his statement suggested that it had been too easy to get into this country, when that is simply not backed up by the facts, as Diane Abbott pointed out. He was pandering to those whom have been arguing such for years, encouraging the kind of victimhood which the BNP feeds of off. Woolas was quite openly pointing towards who's really to blame for the economic mess, and it wasn't his party. From someone that had accused the Tories' Sayeedi Warsi of pandering to the BNP over very similar comments, this was hypocrisy of the highest order.

Likewise, Field seems to be taking the opportunity afforded by the recession to gain supporters for his immigration "reforms". His invocation of a "mini Kristallnacht" as something which can only be avoided if his slamming shut of the door is introduced is not worthy of a politician that stood up to the government over the 10p tax rate. He tries to shut down dissent to his ideas by claiming that they are overwhelming supported by the public, as though this means they are unquestionable. Then finally, to add insult to injury, he states that "[A]ny outbreaks of anger will be denied public support if voters know that the labour market is closed to new migrants from outside the EU." In other words, unless we adopt my proposals, it will be understandable if the public supports the indiscriminate targeting of "foreigners" like that which occurred in Germany in 1938. And Field has the audacity to suggest that his policies should not be confused with the position of asylum seekers, when he seems to be tacitly suggesting that riots would be understandable in the current circumstances, in which asylum seekers, legal workers, illegal workers and long time citizens of this country would all be tarred with the same brush. What a thoroughly boorish and unpleasant man Field really is.

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Wednesday, August 20, 2008 

Alternative answers to asinine questions.

MI6 are apparently so desperate for operational officers that they've taken to advertising on the front page of the Grauniad.

The advert reads:

"There are three strangers in the room that you need on your side. How do you get them to warm to you?"

"Could you be an operational officer?"


"www.mi6officers.co.uk"


Well, failing getting them on your side, you could do what MI6 (SIS) and its sister organisation MI5 did in the cases of Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil al-Banna. Having confronted al-Banna at his home and failing to convince him to spy for them, MI5 subsequently informed the Americans that he and al-Rawi would be travelling to Gambia, and that they had a "electronic device" that could form part of an improvised explosive device, or as they're otherwise known, a bomb. What MI5 didn't tell the Americans was that this electronic device was, err, a battery charger from Argos. Still, that didn't bother the CIA too much. For them the pair's relationship with Abu Qatada was enough for them to be first flown to Bagram air base in Afghanistan, and then latterly to Guantanamo, where they "stayed" for four years.

Whether the MI6 hierarchy would regard that as another acceptable option should you apply remains to be seen.

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Wednesday, February 27, 2008 

No further comment necessary.

Sometimes you still get gems like this on the letters page:

Like many "marriage phobic" couples (For whom the bells toll, G2, February 25), we only decided to marry when advised that we, on the premature death of one of us, would pay far more tax - to Margaret Thatcher's government - than we would if married. That decided us: after 17 years and two children we "did the deed". We "vowed", however, that when we had a Labour government we would divorce, because we wouldn't mind paying more tax for a decent government with better public services. We're still married.
Lucy Craig and Gordon Best,
London

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