Labour MP Danczuk's comments risk alienating party members

It is difficult for any Labour Party campaigner when elected members of Parliament behave in a way so far removed from the grassroots, one wonders if they ever knew what it meant to be Labour in the first place.

The latest MP to speak in alienating terms to the Labour Party masses is an apparent cuckoo in the Labour nest, the MP for Rochdale, Simon Danczuk.

Danczuk has some "interesting" opinions which any member of society's working class - who expect Labour to uphold their interests - needs to know about. His agitation process began a few days ago with a risible Twitter post that suggested those about to lose their jobs and face a seven days' wait before benefits (instead of the previous three) should simply "save up." Classless - and I do not mean that in the context of Britain's class system.

Since Twitter seems to be the platform to engage in wide political dialogue there days, I sent a tweet to the Labour Party as a concerned member to find out if this is now the party's position on any worker in Britain facing unemployment - to just save up. A letter is also on its way.

I appreciate that as a country we are looking down the backs of all the sofas for some spare cash (except the bustling higher tax rate sofa of course). However, a policy inflicting further financial punishment on someone who has just lost their job is not the type of policy that any "Labour" party should be endorsing.

If a Labour Party is compelled to honour Tory cuts, at the very least they should refrain from appearing as though they are extracting pleasure from it. The "save up" comment was so distasteful, it could have been lifted from the Tory textbook of nasty party putdowns. It is no wonder some are viewing Danczuk as a Tory cuckoo in the Labour nest.

Labour was set up to defend the interests of workers. As Ed Miliband would say, "the clue's in the name." If workers entering a period of unemployment do not have the party looking after them, then we may as well throw in the towel now.

Events became far more absurd, when the Danczuk appeared on British state TV to discuss the issue with centre-left writer Owen Jones.

Rather than debating the issue at hand, Danczuk proceeded to ridicule Jones, by suggesting that his Oxford education means he is from a privileged background. If that is the case, perhaps Labour should review the entry requirements of its MPs, many of whom graduated from that privileged sphere.

Furthermore, post-war reformist Labour Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, entered politics via Oxford. Danczuk needs to brush up on his Labour Party history. Someone also needs to tell him that non-privileged students who demonstrate ability are allowed to study at Oxford too if they pass the entry ritual.

If Danczuk thinks his attacks on Jones will blunt the writer's popularity, he needs to think again. At present, Jones is proving an effective opponent to the coalition government. Danczuk, on the other hand, will simply alienate voters and increase the risk of a second Tory term.

Pensioners who sold battery eggs deserve no sympathy

A retired couple were fined for fraud after buying battery eggs and selling them outside their home as being from their own free-range chickens.

The Dorset couple bought 12,000 eggs and passed them off as free-range after their own free-range chickens stopped laying last year. They deserve no sympathy.

Intensive battery-farmed eggs is a sensitive issue for many consumers. Those who buy free-range eggs usually do so as part of a considered purchase. There are those who believe the quality of the farming is relative to the quality of the product, and will buy free-range as a premium product. Even more common are those who buy free-range for ethical reasons due to the better treatment of chickens.

The couple, Stephen and Anne Hobbs, of Three Legged Cross, Dorset, can consider themselves fortunate they were fined £300 each in addition to £1,178 court costs. Their age should not be relevant to their defence. They misled those who made the sensitive decision to buy free-range eggs and wanted to buy farm fresh products.

Jeremy Forrest latest: Police now wasting police time

It is the story that will not go away. Britain has long had a voyeuristic obsession with paedophiles, which led to the public feeding frenzy that accompanied the revelation of Jimmy Savile's secret predatory life. Since then, the binoculars behind the venetian blinds have been focused towards Jeremy Forrest, the teacher convicted for having sex with a pupil aged 15.

I have long explained that Forrest needed a short but significant custodial sentence to at least cover taking the mystery girl (Lady X) to France. That is an appropriate punishment for the pain he put her family through, and provide a chance to reflect on his actions. I have also long said that the situation was never as straightforward as we thought. Critics still insist that Lady X was 'groomed' despite the premise of grooming being that the 'victim' is not aware they are being manipulated.

It is clear that in light of being fully aware of what grooming and paedophilia amounts to, Lady X still insists that she is in love with Forrest. She aims to marry Forrest and is supported by her father. Forrest has had unprecedented moral support from his own family. I will refrain from making a judgement for, as I already hinted at above, this case is complicated and I simply do not know enough about it.

Sadly, the authorities continue to bring great embarrassment upon themselves over this case. Police are now wasting their own time trawling Twitter to identify who named the mystery girl in defiance of the law, despite her name being as well-known as that of a minor celebrity.

While the stupidity of defying the law is without dispute, this is clearly a waste of police time and resources. Furthermore, if people are going to get in trouble with the law for naming people in defiance of the law, what about the companies that are facilitating it?

On one social media network and at least one search engine, to find out the name of the girl who entered the relationship with Jeremy Forrest is so easy that a five year old could do it, for the websites in question provide cues to make it more efficient for visitors to search for what they are looking for.

This demonstrates that once again the law in the UK is biased against people in favour of firms and corporations. If you are a company, do what you like. If you are a person, feel the full weight of the law.

If the law applies to the people, it should apply to companies too. Don't hold your breath though.

Q&A on Jeremy Forrest's crime - how can it be best understood?

Before today, it was all so simple. A suspected child abuser would take his place in the dock, have the charges read out, then would either plead guilty or watch his defence decimated in court. We then collectively rejoice at the warm feeling of justice being done, putting our pitchforks away for another day. Then along came Jeremy Forrest, who fled to France with his school pupil – Lady X – and plunged how we respond to child abuse cases into confusion once again.

A lot of absolute nonsense has been written in the press and on social media, ranging from complete misplaced sympathy towards Forrest (and Forrest/Lady X as a pair) to sensational ‘paedophile’ headlines. Here, we aim to settle some of the questions surrounding Forrest.

Was it fair that he was sentenced to five and a half years in prison, when serial child molester Stuart Hall received 15 months, with his sentences running concurrently?

It is not fair, but I feel that it says more about the leniency of Hall’s sentence, rather than the stiffness of Forrest’s.

There is no reasonable defence for the actions of Jeremy Forrest. His behaviour was despicable, and by any standard he is a villain. The decision to run off with his 15-year old pupil when the authorities were closing in on him was an act of gross selfishness, which caused immeasurable distress to her mother (more so than any revelation of sexual activity between the pair). Many questions would have been spinning around her head at that time. “Is my daughter safe? Will I ever see her again? Is she even still alive?”

Having been convicted of child abduction on Thursday (20^th June), the only acceptable outcome was a custodial sentence. The maximum sentence for child abduction is 7 years, but around 2 years ought to have been sufficient for an abduction involving a passenger seat rather than the car boot.

He was subsequently charged with five counts of sexual activity with a minor, each of which he pleaded guilty. I predicted the upgrading of the offences would mean the sentence passed would be between 5 and 7 years. In the end he was given 5 and a half years (or just over 4 “Stuart Halls” in pervert currency).

The press are describing Forrest as a ‘paedophile’. Is that harsh?

It depends on how you base your judgement. In the strictest of terms, Forrest is a paedophile. Within the framework of the law, he would be defined as such. If you want it in more domestic terms, consider it from another angle: if an adult gets on a bus with his or her partner, who in turn buys a child’s ticket, should they really be together? How would you feel if your child started dating someone twice their age?

One lady caller to a daytime radio programme told presenter Jeremy Vine that she was uncomfortable with Forrest being described as a paedophile. She did add however that she would be livid if a Jeremy Forrest entered into a relationship with her 14-year old daughter.

Others still see the situation as an unfortunate love story. Many young people took to Twitter to send their support to the “couple” – yes, you read that correctly.

Overall, rather than widespread disgust, the vast majority of posts on my own news feed merely stressed the Forrest/Hall sentencing distinction. I guess many felt that considering how many pupils and teachers there are in Britain, and how much time they spend in the vicinity of each other, this scenario is inevitable from time to time and the difference in sentencing is unjust.

In sum, while there is cause for huge discomfort in this case, I would refrain from using the toolbox of ‘P’ words to describe him, pending further evidence that suggests otherwise.

What other evidence would be needed to confirm that Forrest is unquestionably depraved?

We need to be sure that this case is an unfortunate one-off and not a snapshot of more dedicated and prolific paedophilic behaviour.

No evidence was presented at the trial that he had a stash of child pornography anywhere – the standard way of removing any remaining doubt of the defendant’s guilt in this Internet age.

At present, there is also no evidence that Forrest has abused or assaulted any other children. At least one woman has made a further allegation against Forrest, but so far she has only taken it to a tabloid newspaper rather than the legal authorities. Until she does that, the allegation must be treated with caution.

If any more evidence emerges, things could promptly change.

What is the difference between Jeremy Forrest and Jimmy Savile then? They’ve both exploited young people, after all.

Ultimately, Jeremy Forrest laid everything on the line for a girl. Logic suggests there must have been some love involved, even if it was misplaced. He risked (and lost) his career. He risked (and lost) his marriage. He risked (and lost) his liberty.

In contrast, Jimmy Savile risked nothing. Every predatory manoeuvre was risk-assessed in his paedophilic mind. He targeted the most absolutely vulnerable. He used his TV programmes, his status and his charity veneer to fill his sleazy boots at every turn. His scheming ensured he did not face justice during his lifetime.

The lack of distinction between the Saviles and the Forrests provide a crisis for the otherwise priceless child protection movement. At present, paedophilia is treated as something dichotomous, something that people either are or are not. There is no scale. In the minds of the most dedicated campaigners, Forrest now joins Savile and Hall in the hall of shame. To illustrate this further, the press could not resist the occasional gleeful use of various words beginning with the letter ‘P’ (most of which have already been used above) as adjectives to describe Forrest.

As this article has tried to demonstrate, Jeremy Forrest’s behaviour was unacceptable and apparently predatory, but to join the Premier League of perverts, more evidence against him would be required.

Did the crime warrant the level of coverage it received in the media, then?

Not ordinarily, but the level of public interest when the pair first went missing meant that the trial was also going to receive unprecedented coverage. This again demonstrates the selfishness of Jeremy Forrest’s actions, rather than taking responsibility from day one.

The outcome is a girl has been left in confused and in pieces, while he has received a custodial punishment that went far beyond what he would have received had he not gone through that tunnel.

One day, Lady X will realise that she was dragged to France, dragged through the media, and then dragged through the courts by a man trying to save himself.

Summary

Forrest was a teacher. Lady X was his pupil. He was in a position of responsibility and should have resisted, however tempting she was to him. He was a professional and should have acted as such. When parents send their children to school, they do not expect them to enter a relationship with Sir or Miss.

Both will require care now to ensure that their mental health does not suffer long-term.

Though I resist casting him in the very harshest of terms, it was only right that Forrest was given some time in the slammer to reflect on what he has done.

Britain's favourite bigot uses Nigella incident to hone his comedy act

Most of the British public will by now be familiar with the incident where Nigella Lawson appeared to have the violent hand of her husband Charles Saatchi thrust upon her neck. With that in mind, I will resist posting the photographs again, for I think we have all seen them enough. Needless to say, the "playful tiff" that Saatchi claimed to be enjoying did not look particularly enjoyable for Ms Lawson.

Society responded by trying to interpret the photographs in order to ascertain the level of aggression by Saatchi and to propose its own sanctions. Some pondered why a photographer was happy to snap away at the sparring pair, yet nobody was prepared to step in and help. Others questioned what sort of potential violence may be going on behind closed doors.

However, the real "fun" began when the leader of the British National Party, Nick Griffin, was allowed loose on Twitter. He promptly attracted revulsion by adding sexism to his already extensively bursting suitcase of prejudice by making light of the situation.

He wrote: "If I had the opportunity to squeeze Nigella Lawson, her throat wouldn't be my first choice."

No great mind-reading feat is required in order to unravel what Griffin was driving at. The subject of most discussion of Ms Lawson over the years has been (in all probability) the size of her chest - as opposed to her cooking skills, her well-to-do background or even how she manages to maintain a naturally youthful appearance.

The use of Ms Lawson's body shape for the benefit of humour is probably is not in itself the biggest atrocity in human history. Britain is full of supposedly edgy comedians who love nothing more than to crack a boobs or backside joke. Some of them are even funny, and I love nothing more than a bit of dangerous comedy. I would not fit the definition of politically correct too comfortably, therefore any attempt by Griffin to characterise someone like myself as a humourless PC bore is nonsense.

The problem, however, is that the situation was inappropriate for comedy. The pictures depicted what appeared to be a woman being physically manhandled. If joking about a woman's breasts is not necessarily crossing the line of decency, then joking about the right place to grab an alleged brutalised woman is. The potential of domestic violence is not a suitable platform for a gag.

Whatever I may think of Griffin, he is supposed to be the figurehead of a legitimate political party. Could you imagine David Cameron, Ed Miliband or Nick Clegg thinking it acceptable to go on to Twitter and joke about where best to get hold of Nigella so soon after those photographs appeared?

The simple truth is that there is a time and a place to try and beat Frankie Boyle and Jimmy Carr in the extreme comedy stakes, and joking about Nigella Lawson on Twitter today was not it.

Hugo Chavez - the final word

I notice that on the day of Hugo Chavez's state funeral, Anglo-American journalists are still being highly disrespectful, with snarky comments about who attended the service, with smug references to their human rights and foreign policy records.

As with many democrats, I am not comfortable with the concept of charismatic personality cults either, such as the one Chavez built, even though, ironically, we do it with our own (highly cherished) royal family. The right-wingers, who often befriend authoritarian regimes sympathetic to their goals, had a tendency to knock the Chavez government in Venezuela though. Why was this?

The reason is that right-wing politics, which has sadly become as much populist discourse in the UK as it has been in the USA for decades, is against the redistributive policies that were championed by Chavez.

This is sad for one significant reason. After the Second World War, the British public actually voted for democratic socialist politics. Labour was elected, and the NHS, an education system, the welfare state and social housing were built, albeit under the much quieter and thoughtful leadership of Clement Attlee. I am convinced that nowadays, such policies, along with a major nationalisation programme, would lead to spiteful vilification in the press along the lines of that subjected to Chavez.

Hugo Chavez may have few friends in the neo-liberal West, but he has now passed away. He deserves a little more than the same obituary that was given to Kim Jong-il, Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein, with only the names and a few local details altered.

His status was sufficient enough for our own Conservative Foreign Secretary, William Hague, who is by no means a socialist revolutionary, to pay his respects to Chavez and his family. It was also remarkable that despite the constant criticisms in the UK media, the British public nonetheless still had enough independence of thought to ensure that "RIP Hugo Chavez" was a statement popular enough to briefly trend on the Twitter website.

RIP Hugo Chavez indeed.

Every day is a bad news day under this government

Living in Britain at the moment is a tougher experience than we have been used to. While we continue to struggle to make ends meet, every day it seems as though there is another piece of news that is a slap in the face to us all. Each helping of gloom is supported by a source, which cumulatively are broad and inclusive.

Wednesday 27th February

Centrica, the private company that owns British Gas posts a tasty £606m residential profit in 2012 - up 11 percent on the previous year. In November 2012, the company put up gas bills by 6 percent.
Source: Which (consumer group)

Thursday 28th February

The bank that needed to be bailed out by the government, the Royal Bank of Scotland, made a pre-tax loss of £5.17bn. Many of the losses were due to PPI claims and fines. Bonuses remain set aside for staff. Astonishingly, the hapless organisation has been praised by the government.

Source: BBC

Friday 1st March

The pound plunges to a two-and-a-half year low against the dollar following a "shock" fall in manufacturing output. I place the word "shock" in quotations on purpose, for many of us would hardly be shocked by a fall in manufacturing under a Conservative-led government.
Source: Sky

Saturday 2nd March

From the file marked 'how to win friends and influence people', Philip Hammond, the Secretary of State for Defence decided to suggest that spending cuts should be made to welfare rather than his war chest. Great. We can all starve, but at least our military will be kept strong. Nothing like North Korea at all, of course.
Source: Independent

Sunday 3rd March

The Conservatives are now making noises about withdrawing from the European Court of Human Rights after the next election, in what is seen as a populist move as a knee-jerk response to some high-profile defeats for the government regarding the deportation of terror suspects. A move would put Britain in a minority of two, alongside Belarus – at present Europe’s only remaining dictatorship.
Source: Independent

Monday 4th March

Government policy to encourage banks to lend in order to breathe life into the economy is a catastrophic failure after banks and building societies slashed lending by £2.4 BILLION in the three months to December. The government’s “Funding for Lending” scheme was meant to encourage the banks to lend.
Source: Evening Standard 

Tuesday 5th March

In a slap in the face to all those struggling to make ends meet, George Osborne went to the European Union finance ministers’ meeting to fight the corner of the bankers by voting against a cap on bankers’ bonuses. He lost 26-1.
Source: Telegraph

 

And you wonder why Labour are 13 points ahead in the polls.

As horsemeat scandal escalates, could excrement be next?

The equine jokes are knackered out. As many could have predicted, and some of us already had, the horsemeat controversy is fast escalating towards an infamous scandal, with the police now involved. As the seriousness of non-standard ingredients in everyday food products sinks in, it has emerged that some processed food products contain up to 100% horsemeat and possible veterinary drugs deemed unfit for human consumption (video link - Daily Telegraph). It is therefore evident we have no idea what is added to bulk out these frozen processed food products. Research suggests that in our love of burgers and pies, we could be consuming anything - including excrement. You read that correctly: it is entirely possible we are eating animal 'waste products'.

Any unforeseen and unstated artifact found in a foodstuff is by definition contamination. We have been relatively good-humoured, and typically British, about the shocking news that popular food products used to feed our families are contaminated with horsemeat. The online community have been happily trading jokes in some form of virtual horse play, an indicator of the generally light-hearted response.

Meanwhile, media outlets, including the BBC, have been full of vox-pops from hardy shoppers mostly arguing those who buy cheap food should be neither surprised, nor dare to complain, that they have been sold contaminated food. I avoid the cheapest products myself and have never been allured by sausages and burgers bulked up with rough matter, but even I accept that those who buy the cheapest goods (particularly given these hard economic times) at the very least are entitled to know the ingredients.

The problem is we do not know what is in our food, and the nature of our diet means we lack the sensual capability to detect what is in our food. What other possible explanation could there be for our apparent willingness to scoff a Findus beef lasagne and not even consider that it may have 100% horsemeat content?

For too long many of us have existed in our shallow Anglo-American dietary paradigm, where the textures of our most popular food are beaten down to a flavourless pulp, blended with filler and supplemented with seasonings and sugar to make them desirable. This is how we consume our sausages - bulked out with rusk, herbs and sugar. We consume our burgers in a similar way. We smother them with ketchup, brown sauce or stuff them in a roll full of condiments, ensuring we can barely taste or feel the texture of the meat potentially poisoning us. This is serious, given that we are potentially eating poo, to put it politely.

An escalation of the horsemeat scandal (Source: Wikipedia)

In his investigation of meat packing factories, Eric Schlosser revealed in his excellent book Fast Food Nation that in order to keep meat-processing costs low, production lines were run at the highest possible speed the workforce could cope with. This led to errors, including the frequent incorrect removals of cow stomachs, resulting in excrement spillages contaminating those retail beef products (2002, p.197; p.203). If you think that sort of thing could not happen here, then consider what your reaction would have been to the possibility of horsemeat contaminated burgers just a couple of months ago.

Schlosser argues that higher standards of meat are demanded by the EU, but this offers little in the form of reassurance. I am fully expecting excrement to be a future development of this current food contamination scandal, reducing the horsemeat issue to a level of comparative triviality. With the news that drug-contaminated horsemeat could have been entering our food chain for at least a year before it was discovered, there is some inevitability that other nasties will also have found their way in undetected.

I have some sympathy for the traders, from the smallest grocers to the largest supermarkets. I am a long-term critic of the largest corporations, but other than around-the-clock monitoring of their supply chain and frequent laboratory testing of their own products, it is difficult to know how they could have prevented this fiasco. They are not entirely blameless though, for their desire to provide us with cheap food leads them to use suppliers prepared to supply goods at a dangerously low demand price.

With some hope, the current food scandal will mark the demise of the race to the bottom in our consumer culture. In the meantime, I suspect there will be more unsavoury food discoveries, inevitable government inquiries and eventually legal actions. Regardless of the level of food poverty in Britain, all consumers have a basic right to know what is in their shopping basket.

Normalising the predators - a response to Jon Henley's article on paedophilia

Today, I read an article so ill-conceived, I can hardly believe The Guardian published it.

Jon Henley, in this analysis of evidence on paedophilic desires, has written something widely criticised as heavily apologetic of paedophiles an their behaviours.

Critics include Labour MP, Tom Watson, and Mark Williams-Thomas - the researcher whose investigation revealed the truth about Jimmy Savile's private lifestyle.

Henley's article claimed to be a review of the conflicting evidence about what causes paedophila, and the harm it causes. Closer inspection of the piece illuminates some worrying claims from dubious sources.

The tone of the piece is set from the offset, attributing a quote to the pressure group now known as Liberty, which apparently normalises paedophilia. Henley goes on to say that in light of the Savile backlash, it would be unlikely for any organisation to make such a claim.

The most worrying aspect of the article was the use of Tom O'Carroll as a source, described by Henley as "a former chairman of PIE and tireless paedophilia advocate."

O'Carroll was cited as saying "[i]f there's no bullying, no coercion, no abuse of power, if the child enters into the relationship voluntarily … the evidence shows there need be no harm." The comments are given an air of legitimacy with Henley's commentary that "[s]ome academics do not dispute the view of Tom O'Carroll."

Leading the criticism of Henley's controversial report is Mark Williams-Thomas, who described his main concern with the article as "giving a voice to a convicted child sex offender who wants [to] say adult sexual contact with a child is not abuse."

The respected Labour MP, Tom Watson, added that the article was "[a] jumbled list of arguments for a more sympathetic approach to paedophilia."

Most worrying to my eyes is the normalisation tone of the piece. That is not to say that exceptions do not happen. Relationships between very young people and adults do happen, and some even survive as the younger party moves into full-adulthood.

However, such relationships are not conventional, nor should they ever be considered as such. Fresh in the memory was the relationship between a runaway schoolgirl and teacher that worried and alarmed the entire nation.

The reaction from the public was remarkably mixed, with some even sympathetic to the pair. Fewer would have argued the relationship as justifiable though.

Any attempt to rationalise the behaviour of the predatory minority must be resisted, which is why Henley's article has been widely condemned by observers of all political shades.