TomWatson not very clever and publishes lies by Martin Salter

I recently saw the pictured tweet from Conservative MP, Louise Mensch and it got me thinking. Is it really so formidable Mr Watson? I think Mr Watson is not the most bright and quite lazy so I don’t think I agree. So what evidence do I have for this?

The first thing that got me thinking that was the quizzing of Rupert Murdoch and his son before the Culture Media and Sport Select Committee when at the end of his questioning he compared James Murdoch to a mafia boss. (See here) This outburst got all the media coverage, distracted from the evidence given to the Committee and allowed the Murdochs to earn some sympathy, undermining all the work that had been done regarding the phone hacking. Not very clever.

Then he backed the decision to include the phrase that Rupert Murdoch was not fit to run News International into the report of the select committee on phone hacking. This was then voted on across party lines, resulting in what had been a largely cross-party agreement on the report into a party political one. I think it is always better to get all party agreement where possible. It again was the item that got the publicity distracting from the other conclusions of the report. Not very smart.

Thirdly, in his witness statement as part of his evidence to the Leveson Inquiry Mr Watson included something from a former MP, Martin Salter. Mr Salter  responded to a letter from the then editor of the News of the World about their “Sarah’s Law”campaign by writing back to them saying he would not support the campaign. I wondered at the time what he was hoping to achieve by doing what could only wind them up. It did and the newspaper published a poor photo of him and some unpleasant things about him and a journalist spent some time trying to get him. MPs should be able to write to editors saying they do not support their campaign without getting harassment but then to use the words of a former chair of Reading Labour Party and now Australia resident, Mike Price, if you do not want your photo and things written about you in the paper don’t do what caused them to do it. Anyway that is not relevant particularly to this piece about Mr Watson. The point is that as part of his evidence Mr Salter told lies about events which led up to a story in the Mail on Sunday. This is not relevant to the argument Mr Salter and Mr Watson were making about News of The World. So why did Mr Watson allow this lie into his evidence? I believe it is now going to become the most important part about his evidence, again distracting from the phone hacking.

On the political relevance of Newton’s Third Law of Motion and fighting the last war

This morning I was contemplating the evidence of Alastair Campbell to yesterday’s Leveson Inquiry when I was struck about the relevance of Newton’s Third Law of Motion. For those whose scientific study did not extend to these important rules of physics or in case you have forgotten it the law states:

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

The written evidence submitted to the Inquiry by Alastair Campbell sets out here what happened in more detail but in brief; in the 1980′s Labour got slaughtered by a largely right-wing press. We didn’t help ourselves by having open rows and letting the latest piece of loony nonsense set the agenda. After 1992 when  a close election was lost, and one part of the print media was able to claim they had won the election for the Tories, lessons were learnt and a more professional approach was taken to dealing with the media, particularly after the election of Tony Blair as leader of the Labour Party. This involved the genesis of spin-doctors.

The perception was that the print media was important, for their own impact and for that they have on the rest of the media from the point of setting the news agenda, in terms of mediating between people involved in politics and the public. It determined what a lot of people thought was going on. As a result the politicians became a lot more disciplined in the way they dealt with the media. To go back to Newton. Having got slaughtered in the past Labour learnt to manage the way they were perceived as a reaction. Journalists did not like it because as a result of it became harder for them to get stories which were different from the one politicians wanted. The Newtonian reaction by politicians in the 1990′s happened as a result of the actions of the media in the 1980′s. The media became very interested in the attempt to manage them, some even got obsessed about it to the lengths of writing a number of books about it. I read a couple of these books and the only thing that seemed to come out of them to me was how unhappy the journalists were at now having to do more work to find the more interesting stories. They don’t like Alastair because he was effective at the job he did. As someone who was a politician I am pleased to see that as I think it evened things up. So that’s Newton dealt with.

What I found interesting in the evidence from Alastair Campbell yesterday was that he said it is no longer necessary for a politician to worry so much about managing the media. It takes up too much of their time. The reason he gave was that the development of blogs and social media means that it is even more difficult for the print and broadcast media to mediate between politicians and the public. It is much easier for politicians to have a direct relationship with people. I have also seen how it is now easier to get mistakes in articles, especially online articles, corrected through the use of twitter. So I think he was right in what he said. It is quite common to talk about people ‘fighting the last war’ and politicians spending all their time trying to manage the media is an example of that.

The change is now

People might have noticed that there was an election taking place in France for the post of President yesterday. On my way to one of the city’s Irish pubs in order to watch a football match yesterday I passed a school which was being used as a polling station with people going in to vote. All very familiar.

What is not familiar and is, therefore, different is that the municipality provide space for the different parties to post-up posters of their candidate. The ones seen here are just outside the polling station pictured earlier. When there were ten candidates in the first round there were ten of these hoardings outside this school and at different locations all over Strasbourg.

Opposite the posters and the polling station someone had put forward their own view on the vote, Left = Right + vaseline:

Why do men hate women? In praise of Louise Mensch.

This week the House of Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport published a report on phone hacking. One of the noteworthy things about the report was that the majority voted to include in the report that Rupert Murdoch was not a fit and proper person to lead News Corp.

There was very strong media interest in the report, especially the verdict on Rupert Murdoch, and a number of media outlets featured MPs who had supported and opposed the verdict. One who opposed the verdict was Conservative MP, Louise Mensch. As a result of this she received fierce misogynist tweets in the most vile language. Someone else I do not agree with, the columnist on the Independent Laurie Penny, has now written about the misogynist emails she receives as a result of publishing opinion pieces.

For eight years I worked for a female Labour MP who similarly received misogynist hate emails when she did something, said something or was in the media, in parenthesis there were a small group of men in her party who thought she should not do or say anything unless they told her to. Polite emails saying how dare she express an opinion (Not how dare she express the opinion she did) right through to pornographic emails about what would be done to her, quite often featuring guns.

I could never understand what so threatened these men that when a woman expresses an opinion they have to respond in such a violently hate-filled way. OK, disagree and say so. Argue the merits of the case and say why you think someone is wrong. I am ashamed to say that some of my gender have real problems being in a society featuring women, particularly when women then get into a position of authority. That is their problem, get over it. I do not claim perfection in this for myself but I do try to deal with everyone as I would like to be treated. I hope the attention given to this, as well as the awful behaviour over the Ched Evans rape conviction, will lead a few other men to stop and reflect a bit more about their behaviour and whether what they’re doing is how they would like to be treated.

One thing I found working in the House of Commons was the way friendships could be formed across parties. This should not really be so surprising as representatives of whatever party have their whips, their local party and their constituents to deal with. They are colleagues in the same line of work, with the same working conditions, stresses and pressures. So it has not been surprising to me that there has been support from across the political spectrum from other women MPs for Louise Mensch and her raising this issue. I too am glad she has raised this rock and shined a light on these insects.

Who remembers the Armenians – I do

24 April is the day to remember the genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire against the people of Armenia. There is a very good piece on Armenia, with information about the country and its history here in the New York Review of Books. After the US and Russia, France is home to the third highest number of Armenians outside the country. As well as in Strasbourg there were events to commemorate the Armenian Genocide in many towns and cities in France, including a large rally in Paris attended by both the Presidential candidates.

In Strasbourg a group of people including; municipal councillors, the Armenian Representative to the Council of Europe, an Armenian parliamentarian who is a representative to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, priests and representatives of different religions and peoples, formed up near the Palais du Rhin and walked, behind a banner saying “No to genocide” to the Monument to the Fallen in the centre of the Place de la République.(first picture)

The crowd listened to three people talk about the genocide in Armenia listing places where particular events happened during the genocide at the end of the 19th century and between 1915-16.(second picture) At different stages during this people walked up and placed flowers at the base of the monument. First it was the Armenian Representative to the Council of Europe, Mr. Armen Papikian, and the Armenian parliamentarian, Ms Hermine Naghdalyan, then the second group featured the three municipal councillors, Robert Herrmann; 1er Adjoint to the Mayor – Coordination municipale et démocratie locale, conseil des jeunes – Adjoint de Strasbourg centre, (left) Jean-Jacques Gsell; Adjoint du quartier Gare, du tourisme, du commerce et de l’artisanat (right) and Henri Dreyfus. I did not catch the names of the last two people (pictured) placing flowers at the monument.

There were also short speeches including one from a survivor of the genocide in Rwanda who talked about her experience of genocide denial, where an MEP said that there were only 2 or 3 people killed in her village when she lost more than three members of her own family. We heard from the Armenian Representative and then from a representative of the Kurd community in Strasbourg who apologised to the Armenian people present for the Kurdish people’s participation in the genocide; there was a Kurdish battalion established specifically to carry out the genocide.

We finished up having a prayer from an Armenian Orthodox priest followed by the Priest in Charge, Father Harold Nahabedian, from St Albans Anglican Church in Strasbourg who is from Canada of Armenian heritage.

At the end of the remembrance the crowd dispersed and JTO and I left for to introduce her to a, for her, up to now unexplored Irish Pub where we had some fine food and I, of course, had a drop of the black stuff.

N.B. The headline comes from a question Hitler posed when questioned about the holocaust. His reply was “Who remembers the Armenians?“

Strasbourg English Speaking Union

It is hardly hot news but last Tuesday there was the inaugural meeting of the Strasbourg English Speaking Union. By the kind invite of the Deputy Mayor of Strasbourg it took place at the 18th century town hall.

The first presentation was from our host, Nawel Rafik-Elmrini whose official title is 2ème Adjointe – Relations internationales et européennes, coopération décentralisée for the municipal council, who talked about the building, Strasbourg and relations between the UK and the city. The room was the place where the Council of Europe had its inaugural meeting. After her speech Ms Rafik-Elmrini stayed on whilst we listened to the next speech.

Next up was John Darcy, Advisor to the President of the European Court of Human Rights. He started off by talking about the history of the European Convention on Human Rights which was then followed by the creation of the Court and then over time it was set up and started before the accession of various countries to the court. We hard about the way the Court had developed and the way the understanding and interpretation of the convention had developed, as a living breathing document.

He then talked about the almost 150,000 cases before the court which are added to with about another 50 to 60,000 every year. A lot of these are not cases which are relevant to the Court or have not completed all stages in the judicial process in their own country and are deemed inadmissible.

Mr Darcy, there was the inevitable reference to the name, then went on to talk about reform of the Court. Following judgements by the Court on votes for people in UK prisons and recently on Abu Qatada there has been pressure in the UK for reform of the Court or for the UK to withdraw from it all together. Following the visit of the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron MP, to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which I reported on here, as part of the UK Chairmanship of the Council of Ministers of the Council of Europe. He then spoke about what was then the upcoming Brighton Conference on reform of the Court. My understanding is it was outlined that as a result of the views of the other members of the Court it was unlikely there would be much of anything that would change as a result of the conference. Measures to streamline the judgement process to speed up decisions, and make sure that the Court does not make decisions that should properly be taken in countries, had been put in place anyway and were working.

So, it seems to me, that Dave’s attempt to attack the Court to satisfy his barking anti-European backbenchers resulted in him making a fool of himself in front of the Parliamentary Assembly followed by a lot of hot air with little, if any, achievement of change to the Court and the way it works.

After a short outline on the way the Strasbourg ESU would work we were given an apero courtesy of the people of Strasbourg and then we headed off, it being the birthday of JTO and I was taking her out for something to eat.

Votez tôt, voter souvent

In case you missed it, yesterday there was the first round of the elections for President here in France. As none of the ten candidates got more than 50% of the vote there will be a run-off between the top two scoring candidates in a fortnight. From the DNA here is the result, both here in Alsace and nationally:

As you can see this frontier region voted in greater numbers for the UMP party of the current président Sarkozy, and put the politically right but economically almost communist – so probably best described nationalist populist Front National in second place and the national winner, Parti Socialiste candidate François Hollande in third place. The story was different in Strasbourg, which in contrast seems a leftist island in this right-wing region:

As a sad election statistic geek I love it that in France the results are published by polling station on the council’s website. Here is the comparison for the polling station I vote at, though obviously I could not vote this time, compared with my city, region and the country.

But what does it all mean? Here is a round-up of what the French newspapers are saying,  this is the view of the politics department at Nottingham University about the accuracy of the French opinion polls, here is the BBC’s version of what happened yesterday, this sets out what YouGov thinks will happen in the second round of voting. Published this morning in the DNA is this graphic showing the change in the percentage of votes for the extreme right, right, centre, PS, Green, extreme left and others since 1974:

Not ‘One of Us’

I return to the despicable, desperate, ‘dog-whistle’ racist leaflet produced by John Howarth’s Public Impact Ltd for Reading Labour Party.

On my twitter feed the chief political commentator of the Independent on Sunday, John Rentoul retweeted an article in the Sunday Telegraph religion section about the favourite to be the next Archbisop of Cantebury, Dr John Sentamu. It was retweeted by Mr Rentoul to highlight the use of language in the piece but I noticed something separate:

“At its best, the besmirching of John Sentamu has revealed that strand of snobbery which views outsiders as lacking class, diplomacy or civility — in other words ‘not one of us,’” said the Rev Arun Arora.

“At worst, it has elicited the naked racism which still bubbles under the surface in our society, and which is exposed when a black man is in line to break the chains of history.”

The last paragraph won the Daniel Hannan award for mixed metaphor of the day. The use of ‘one of us’ in the first paragraph quoted is interesting as showing that what is meant by the use of the phrase are “outsiders” lacking “class, diplomacy or civility” that it has highlighted “the naked racism which still bubbles under the surface” Whereas the Reading Labour Party agent tries to justify the use of the term “one of us”, in terms of a white woman candidate ‘born and bred’ on the other side of the town, in drawing a distinction with a Pakistani born, local-living candidate:

“Labour voters in Church Ward are entitled to know that their candidate is not likely to abandon her party and that she understands the issues that matter to them. In other words, she is  ’one of us’,”

And the school-girlish Sarah “No Councillor” Hacker tries to justify the term thus:

“As for the statement ‘one of us’.  Again, how is this racist?  Who is defining ‘us’?  Reading Labour are defining it as a resident, a family…”

Both of the defences mentioned above fail totally to address the racist aspect of the use of the term, the drawing of ‘the us’ against the other in the use in Church ward highlighted by the quote from the paper.

Strasbourg Neustadt

After the German victory over France in 1871 Strasbourg, as part of Alsace-Lorraine, was ceded to the German Empire and became the capital of the Elsass-Lothringen Reichsland. In 1880 the municipal architect, Jean-Geoffroy Conarth, came up with a plan to develop Strasbourg as a capital which would showcase the modernity and glory of the Imperial German Empire.  (There had been unrealised plans to extend the city since the 18th century.)

The first phase (1 on the plan above) consisted of an Imperial Palace (Now the headquarters of the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine – the oldest international institution in modern history) and Palace of the Landtag of the Elsass-Lothringen Reichsland (The Regional Assembly, now the Théâtre National de Strasbourg.) opposite each other on a big public square, the Kaiserplatz (Now place de la république), ministries, post office, library and university along a grand East-West avenue, north of the historic city. This was completed in 1900 with other areas shown above including the station and private and collective housing, which took longer to complete. In 2010 the municipality of Strasbourg and the Alsace Region decided to carry out a six-year study of the area to better understand the development of the area, and better preserve it. The first study developed was l’axe impérial, the first stage developed and this weekend there is a programme of guided visits, displays and talks about the results of this first stage. (Here is the website.)

I live in the ‘quartier gare’ (5 in the diagram above) and the houses in my street were built in the first decade of the 20th century. The picture shows them and they are typical of the buildings of the period with a historical eclecticism of taste (Italian or German neo-Renaissance, neo-Baroque etc.) Among them some wonderful examples of Art Nouveau constructions can be found including my favourite building in the local rea, around the corner from me.

The building had got into a poor state with plaster falling off and measures erected to stop people being hit by any further pieces to crumble away. It has now been restored to its glory and I just love looking at it in the sunshine, as in the photo, with the different shapes, like the more oval openings for the balconies, the different treatment of the recessed corner and the figurehead, or spire, on the corner of the building.

Across the street the variation of the building designs, styles and details is added to with colour. There are several examples of wonderful or interesting details on the buildings but I think that is the subject for another post.

Around the corner is a group of buildings different in style, closer to the buildings I saw in the part of Gdansk where Gunter Grass was born. It’s no surprise that two sets of buildings in two Germanic cities should be similar. These ones seem to have been designed as public collective housing and that seems to be the use to which they are put. A quick tour of some of the buildings part of the ‘Strasbourg Neustadt’ in the block where I live.

Reading Labour’s desperate racist campaign – What they are saying

It is only a week since the news about the despicable dog-whistle racist leaflet produced for Reading Labour by the Public Impact Ltd company of John Howarth so it is not surprising that some of the Reading Labour bloggers are only now catching up.

As usual, one of the first to respond was the now Redlands Labour candidate, Tony Jones, which I wrote about here. Well, as I reported here, he has now had second thoughts about posting the statement and letter from Reading Labour in full and has removed the post. You can still read it in full here or below:

View this document on Scribd

We then had the woeful attempt by Battle ward councillor Sarah Hacker which I reported on here. It has now ben joined by Redlands councillor Jan Gavin who just posts the Labour party press statement with no comment. Then yesterday they were joined by Whitley councillor Rachel Eden who in this bizarre post has published the letter to the Reading East Conservative Agent from the Reading Labour Party Agent. This formed part of the post by Tony Jones but it was thought that after this post by WAS, followed by this from Janestheone, pointing out the criminal nature of posting the letter that led to him taking his post down. I have tried to comment on the post from Ms Eden which is waiting on her to approve it for publishing. How long do people think I should wait?