Banonkers

On the Today programme, Phil Woolas described right-wing opposition to Labour's oppressive immigration controls as "banonkers". It most certainly is both bananas and bonkers to want to impose even harsher controls on immigrants, but the portmanteau did make me smile.

This latest attack on Labour is ridiculous. The charge is that immigration policy was chosen to deliberately encourage an influx of immigration to manipulate Britain into a multicultural society.

An open-borders encourages nothing. People are free to choose whether they are coming or going. If an immigrant wants to come here then that's up to them, not the government. Perhaps a multicultural society is inevitable with an open-borders policy. But that is society finding its own form without government sticking its beak in. Indeed, it is the people who wish to restrict immigration who expect the government to deliberately manipulate society for their own ends.

Anyway, in tribute to this awesome new word to describe the nationalists, xenophobes, bigots and racists who want to persecute people for their own convenience, I've done a little mash-up. Enjoy!

Your Mom's a Scum-Sucking Pig

...yeah you heard me David Wright.

And Eric Pickles is fat and likes to eat pies like a fat man.

I does politics me.

Missed Off The Shopping List?

Apparently the Lib Dems will not go into a coalition, but would support a minority government who makes concessions in four key areas - the Lib Dem 'shopping list':

• Investing extra funds in education through a pupil premium for disadvantaged children.

• Tax reform, taking 4 million out of tax and raising taxes on the rich by requiring capital gains and income to be taxed at the same rate.

• Rebalancing of the economy to put less emphasis on centralised banking and more on a new greener economy.

• Political reforms, including changes to the voting system and a democratically elected Lords, that go further than proposed by Labour.

These sound like the same four objectives outlined by Nick Clegg last month.


I support all four, but to my mind there's one glaring omission: the restoration of civil liberties.

Throughout this parliament, the party has spent a lot of time talking up a Freedom Bill that would reverse the countless erosions of civil liberty by consecutive Conlabourtive governments. The party created an in-depth website that goes into the history of civil liberty, the detail of the 20 freedoms we'd restore, along with a petition and quiz. During the leadership contest, here's what Nick Clegg said would be his first bill as Prime Minister:



...and here's what Chris Huhne said:



So it always seemed like a top-level priority to me. And so it should be. Civil liberty is a crucial element of liberalism. It is central to our values, and is fundamentally what unites the social- and classical-liberal wings of the party.

As mainstream British politics comes to a broad consensus around economics, the dividing lines are becoming increasingly about the amount of government intervention necessary for society. By not giving the proposals set out in The Freedom Bill their deserved place in this shopping list, it seems that all this good work in setting out our stall for the general election may fall at the last.

Racism within the UK Border Agency

It's not racist to impose limits on immigration. Shame then that it appears there is a culture of racism within the body which imposes limits on immigration.

I of course don't use the term 'racist' lightly.

A whistleblower has revealed to the Guardian her experience of working at the UK Border Agency in Cardiff.

The whistleblower claims:

• UKBA staff kept a toy gorilla that was placed as a badge of shame on the desk of any officer who approved an asylum application
• An official tested the claims of boys from African countries who said they had been forcibly conscripted as child soldiers by making them lie down on the floor and demonstrate how they shot at people in the bush.
• The authenticity of an asylum seeker claiming to be from North Korea was determined by the UKBA asking whether they chop suey
• If an asylum case was difficult, the UKBA's advice was simply to refuse it and "let a tribunal sort it out".
• A UKBA manager is quoted as saying "If it was up to me I'd take them all outside and shoot them" regarding their asylum seeker clients.
• When asked about the case of a Congolese woman, a member of the UKBA legal department said "Umbongo, umbongo, they kill them in the Congo."

Like I said, racist.

The chairman home affairs select committee, Keith Vaz, acknowledges the "culture of disbelief and discrimination" within the UK Border Agency. Vaz also said that "a number of ex-UKBA workers who have spoken out", so this whistleblower is not alone.

Whilst searching for comments regarding this report, I came across Twitterererer @benjimmin who works for the UKBA - I presume in Manchester, as listed in his Twitter profile. He kindly replied to me asking for his reaction to the claims made by the whistleblower: "I've never seen behaviour like that. I think I'd leave on the spot if I did." I sincerely hope this reportedly racist culture is limited to this one branch in Cardiff.

Safe Seats Disenfranchise Voters

One of the outcomes of a first-past-the-post electoral system is that it creates safe seats. These are seats where one party has such a large lead over their opponents in their constituency that the chances of being overturned is slim.

It seems obvious that people in these seats will be less minded to go out and use their vote. The statistics back this up.

This graph compares the size of the majority (the scale of the win) in the 2001 general election to the size of the turnout in 2005 in each constituency.
(Excludes Northern Ireland)

There is a significant trend (PMCC -0.71). As the majority at the last election gets bigger, the turnout tends to goes down.

If we are to get people voting again, there needs to be an end to the first-past-the-post electoral system that gives MPs unassailable majorities.

UPDATE 26/01/2010: Timothy asked if the scatter plot could be colour-coded by party. Happy to oblige. Each dot is colour-coded by the winning party in 2001.
So it does seem that the seats with the big Labour majorities 2001 subsequently had low turnouts in 2005. I'm not sure this shows much, since the Tories had no heavily safe seat in 2001. I'll definitely remake this plot after the next general election to see if the same pattern occurs.

Nadine Dorries on Expenses

Every blogger's favourite MP is being formally investigated over her expenses claims for her second home.

Dorries famously called the expenses scandal a “McCarthyite witch hunt”, but I would also like to draw your attention to what Nadine said about her expenses on Radio 4's Any Questions, 23rd October 2009:

You know can I just say before I begin cos I feel I need to say this always now. My name's Nadine Dorries. I'm an MP. I've never claimed for mortgage on my expenses. Therefore I have never flipped. I have never benefited in any way. I've never claimed for a cleaner or a gardener, a duck house, a moat or anything. I don't own a company that I pay funds into. I've never claimed for petty cash or for food ... And I feel I need to say that now to every person that I meet. And my expenses were poured over by the scrutiny and I do not have to pay a penny back in misclaimed expenses. [APPLAUSE]

Irony overload.

Because He's Worth It

On The Horizon 12/01/2010

Jack Pickard: Alibhai-Brown: A Dangerous Moderate? shows how seemingly moderate proposals are damaging to civil liberty.

David Keen: UK Border Agency: Invasion of the Baby-Snatchers on another terrifying case of sinister, inhumane behaviour by the UKBA.

End Child Detention Now: Persecution Begins at Home shows how the UK now has a more authoritarian regime towards immigration than Silvio Berlusconi's Italy.

Mark Wadworth: Trees points out how local councils can act against the interests of residents.

...and finally Robert Popper has found evidence that white people can play reggae:

What Nick Clegg Actually Said About Tuition Fees

Lots of spinning going on over the Lib Dems commitment to phase out tuition fees. Labourite tweets from the likes of @2pallas tried to suggest that the Lib Dems had scrapped the tuition fees pledge. Conservative blogger Declan Lyons suggested that the policy was all over the place:

the policy was dropped as they couldn't afford it. Then they picked it up again. Now, it has just been extended to be done over more time.

All not true.

The policy was never dropped at Conference. What Clegg said was

Ending tuition fees would cost billions of pounds every year - we need to be certain we can afford it before we make any promises.

So he said that given the state of the country's finances, the policy's affordability needed to be checked.

Then, the new policy of phasing out tuition fees over 6 years was announced last month. This made the long standing commitment affordable.

Today, Clegg has simply restated this pledge as part of a wider message about only promising what could be afforded. On the Today programme, he said:

We will not be able to deliver our pledge on scrapping tuition fees - something we are determined to do - on the timetable we have once envisaged.

So the same policy as announced earlier this month.

Nick Clegg has been totally consistent over tuition fees. Any suggestion otherwise is desperate spin from the opposition.

Tories Would Recognise Crutons in the Tax System to Fight Obesity

The Conservatives will today announce a new tax policy to tackle the growing waistlines of British plebs.

The plan, put forward by Iain Smith MP, would give cruton munchers £20 a week off their cumbersome taxable income.

Findings by the Justice for Social Centres policy group, which Smith chairs, showed that eating crutons promote healthy lifestyles by 11 to 87 per cent.

Speaking via his mouth, Smith said "so I put two graphs next to each other, and the lines seemed to sort of follow each other a bit, so then I thought 'Hey, this conforms to my pre-existing personal prejudice, I'll present this as evidence', and here we are today, on the brink of my idea becoming policy.

"I thought I'd had it politically, you know", he added.

Conversely, using the same technique, Smith also showed that gherkins encouraged obesity, despite the fruit's low cholestorol and high vitamin content.

Critics who had stopped and thought about it for a few seconds said, "correlation does not imply causation, you stupid fucking imbecile".

Findings that the new Tory diet tax break would benefit the richest 13 times more than the poorest were universally ignored by the press.