Leading Muslim Scholars, coming from diverse backgrounds and schools of thoughts, have urged British Muslims to "vote in the European elections, as xenophobic, extremist right wing parties have a very real chance of gaining national prominence by winning a seat in the European Parliament," in a statement that was issued on May 28.
... whatever the Telegraph's agenda, you can't agitate people if they are not already aggrieved about something. If there was widespread respect for our political class, there would not have been anywhere near the level of sustained public anger we have seen over the past few weeks. That many of these expense claims are trivial and that many of us have also bent the rules on our expense claims is beside the point because this collective outrage has much deeper roots.For many years now, people have been feeling increasingly frustrated and powerless. As usual, working class people were the first to feel it as immigration changed the urban landscape, put pressure on local services and led to increased competition for work. More recently, rural areas have found themselves subjected to the same pressures. Then middle-class people began to feel threatened too as their incomes were left behind by those of the super-rich. Their children could no longer afford to live in the areas in which they grew up and higher education, once almost a right, was priced beyond many people's reach.
As TUC leader Brendan Barber explained last week:
A sense of anger was growing too about the state of public services. Even when they had been sold off, few benefits seemed to come to consumers ...Middle-income Britain did not share in the largesse of the boom years. One study shows that real hourly wage rates for median earners grew by only 0.1% a year between 2002 and 2007.
All the while, people were assured that all this was part of the dynamism that was re-shaping Britain into a global economy and bringing us unparalleled prosperity. Ministers boasted that Britain was the most open economy in the world. Immigrants, it was argued, created jobs and helped the economy to grow. PFI deals and privatisation brought market disciplines to public services and made them more efficient. The rise of the super-rich was good for us as they spent money and it trickled down into the economy. Sure, there were some temporary downsides but the increased prosperity brought by our globalised economy would sort it all out in the end. Public services would improve, immigrants' taxes would pay for the increased demands on healthcare, transport and school places, the booming economy would create more jobs and debt-laden graduates would easily be able to pay off their student loans as the demand for their skills rose.
It still sounded unconvincing to many of us but the soothing voices of politicians and journalists dampened down the feelings of suppressed rage.
Then the dam burst.
A Home Office investigation is under way today into a Pakistani gang alleged to have pocketed millions of pounds enrolling hundreds of men from the militant heartland of al-Qaida into bogus UK colleges.
One of the young businessmen thought to have helped mastermind the scam, Mir Ahmad, was arrested yesterday, according to a report on Times Online. A subsequent report on the site says he is also alleged to be linked to two murders in Pakistan.
Hundreds of men paid at least £1,000 to the gang to be admitted into sham colleges, it is alleged. Some paid £2,500 for fake diplomas, attendance records and degrees.
This allowed the students to extend their stay in Britain and enabled the fraudsters to make almost £2m in less than two years.
Many of the students are from the North West Frontier province of Pakistan, the heartland of al-Qaida.
Eight of the terror suspects arrested last month in Manchester and Liverpool attended one college, which has three small classrooms and three teachers for 1,797 students.
The Times, which handed a dossier on the bogus colleges and the gang behind them to the Home Office, said another college claimed to have 150 students, but secretly enrolled 1,178 and offered places to an extra 1,575 — the majority of whom were from Pakistan.
Most of the violence was in or around Jalandhar, which is a stronghold of the Dera Sach Khand, a Sikh sect made up mainly of Untouchables, or Dalits, from the lowest level of the Hindu caste system.
A leader of the sect was killed and another preacher wounded yesterday when higher caste Sikhs wielding knives and a gun attacked the two at a Sikh temple that they were visiting in Vienna, according to Austrian police.
Guru Sant Rama Nand, 57, died in the night after an emergency operation. Guru Sant Niranjan Dass, 68, was in a stable condition, police said. Both had suffered bullet wounds.
At least 15 other people were wounded, including four of the attackers, who were eventually overpowered by worshippers, police said.
Witnesses said that the attackers were fundamentalist Jat Sikhs — traditionally the land-owning farmers in the northern state of Punjab — who accused one or both of the preachers of being disrespectful of the Guru Granth Sahib, Sikhism’s Holy Book.
Sikhism does not officially recognise caste and was founded partly to rebel against the system but the concept remains deeply rooted in Indian society, even among Sikhs, Christians and Muslims. The system divides society into hundreds of groups and sub-groups which for many Indians continue to define where one lives, who one marries, what job one does and many other things.
The Dera Sach Khand also differs from mainstream Sikhism on several religious issues, including worshipping living gurus such as Sant Rama Nand, which is considered blasphemous by most Sikhs.
At least some of the attackers were Austrian residents who had asked for asylum, prosecutors said. About 2,800 Sikhs were living in Austria in 2001, according to the last census.
When you first looked at this leaflet, which party did you think it was for? It's no surprise that this is Labour's Euro election leaflet for the North West of England - the region which is most likely to return a BNP MEP. Wonder who this leaflet is aimed at, then?
The ideal solution would be an Irish-style single transferable vote system in which voters elect the person, not the party. But even alternative vote plus – as first advocated by Roy Jenkins in 1998 and now backed by Alan Johnson – would ensure most MPs have a personal constituency link with their voters, as already occurs in Germany and Scotland. Labour made a promise more than a decade ago to hold a referendum on the Jenkins proposals. If the government won't call a general election, let us have this referendum in early September, as the culmination of 100 days of reform.
Together, over the next 100 days, we could achieve nothing less than the total reinvention of British politics.
Like millions of women I am a mother who works. Like millions of other working mothers I have put in place networks to ensure that my child enjoys security and consistency while I work demanding hours and do the best job I can...So it's all about Jimmy being able to go to sleep in his own little room again, is it ? Worth a try I suppose. And Mr Cameron wants to maintain a bit of diversity in the ranks. If she was a bloke her feet would not have touched the ground. Her husband's didn't.
But a wider issue gives me great concern. What effect will stories like mine have on mothers who aspire to be MPs? We want Parliament to be more representative and that includes women with school-age children.
Just before this story broke, I spoke to a woman journalist thinking of entering Parliament. Her main concern was the effect it would have on her children. I assured her it was possible to combine an MP's life with being a good mother, as long as she organised her support structure well.
That must continue to be the case - or Parliament risks taking a step backwards.
Scotland's perception of itself as an increasingly multi-ethnic and diverse country will be challenged today by official figures that show almost all of the net international immigration to Britain since 1991 has gone to England.
Between 1991 and the 2007 a net 2.14million migrants came to England. But in Scotland for the same period net foreign migration was a paltry 105,000.
In effect, the statistics mean that England absorbed 20 times more international migrants than Scotland even though the population is only 10 times larger. England also took 11 times more migrants than Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland combined, even though its population is only 5 times larger than these three parts of the UK put together.
Herb the gift from the earth,Well, yes - up to a point. What's from the earth isn't always of the greatest worth. The same sentiments that Gregory Isaacs expressed 20 years earlier. I think, like so many reggae singers, they're both channeling Genesis 1:29.
And what's from the earth is of the greatest worth.
So before you knock it try it first,
Oh, you'll see it's a blessing and not a curse.
"To you it shall be for meat" doesn't IMHO translate as 'get it down your neck 24/7'. Let moderation in all things be your key to life. "The Road of Excess Leads to the Palace of Wisdom" was one of Blake's Proverbs of Hell. A quick look at this 'In Memoriam' page - or this one - should give pause for thought.
And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
But I was pessimistic that anything would actually happen :
Creating larger institutions could encourage more risk because they were "too big to fail", he added. It would be a "bitter irony" if the sector became "even riskier", he said.
British banks must be allowed to remain large enough to compete on the international stage, Treasury minister Lord Myners said today drawing a line between the Labour government and more draconian plans from the shadow chancellor, George Osborne, for a sharp reduction in the size of banks to cut risks to the taxpayer if they fail. Myners said a review of the financial services sector by a group of City grandees argued that more effective regulation of the banking sector was the key to reducing risk and maintaining London's position as a major financial centre. Myners also argued innovation would be encouraged, despite concerns that a legacy of complex financial instruments were in large part to blame for helping create the credit crisis.
Re your comments about George Galloway MP
My attention has just been drawn to your blog http://ukcommentators.blogspot.com/2009/05/dirty-dogs.html which is not only inaccurate but grossly defamatory.
You have regurgitated some nonsense that appeared in the Sunday Telegraph, with no thought as to the absurdity of their methodolgy about what does or does not constitute value in an MP, but with every intent of smearing Mr Galloway.
1) You make no distinction between the expenses an MP might receive in their pocket - second home allowance, "John Lewis list" and travel costs, which in George's case add up to zero - and those monies that pay for staff and the maintenance of a constituency office. Also, please note that none of Mr Galloway's staff members are related to him. Therefore George has made no personal or familial gains from Parliamentary expenses.
2) Mr Galloway stands for complete openness and public accountability in relation to Parliamentary expenses, as a matter of principle. This was the paragraph that appeared in his constituency report in 2008 which was distributed throughout Bethnal Green & Bow last autumn:
"You have every right to know where public money is being spent and whether it is spent properly. That's why I have voted for complete openness in MPs' expenses and allowances. I opposed the House of Commons when they resisted moves under the Freedom of Information Act to disclose MPs' "additional costs allowance" expenses. I told the authorities to exclude me from their attempts to keep the breakdown of these expenses secret, and I published my details myself. The amount I claim on what the media call the "John Lewis list" is zero, nothing. Nor do I claim any travel expenses from Parliament or the taxpayer. As for staff - I employ five people (three women and two men), their pay subsidised by me. They are divided between constituency and Parliamentary work. Not one of them is in any way related to me."
3) The methodology you use to assess an MP's value is absurd. You omit the following:
a) Enquiries raised on behalf of Mr Galloway's constituents to Tower Hamlets council, which often amount to more than the combined total enquiries from the all the local councillors and the other borough MP, to various government departments and other bodies. George Galloway has written literally thousands of letters over the last four years on behalf of his constituents and in at least two cases more than 20 letters trying to get justice for his constituents.
b) Regular communication with the Borough Commander and other senior managers in Tower Hamlets police - plus meetings with the same.
c) Letters to Tower Hamlets PCT and NHS plus meetings.
d) Letters to immigration ministers and the Home Office.
e) Maintaining a weekly drop in surgery (a greater service than most MPs). The number of constituents seen at each drop in session averages at more than 25, and the number of cases dealt with each week normally exceeds 50.
f) Meetings in the constituency and elsewhere raising issues of constituents' concern.
g) Regular meetings throughout the constituency - including throughout the summer months.
h) Time spent in Parliament attending to MP's business that is not actually on the floor of the House eg personal letters to Ministers, initiating and signing EDMs, responding to constituents
i) The quality of interventions and content of speeches made on the floor of the House .
j) Press releases and MP's letters to local and national press & media about issues of local and national concern.
.
I could go on, but I think, by now, the inaccuracy and and defamatory nature of your comments must be apparent to you.
This is the statement that was sent to Ben Leach of the Sunday Telegraph:
"A spokesperson for George Galloway said: "'Sunday Telegraph doesn't rate George Galloway' is down there with dog bites man for news. We do find it odd, however, that the paper seems to consider that the public gets value for money from the backbench poodles with pagers who pipe up for any god awful policy so as to keep in with their party whips. But you'd be hard pressed to find many people who think that an MP who has blindly backed the government on votes which are a foregone conclusion is 'value for money'. The Sunday Telegraph is to be congratulated for concocting a formula that generates the precise opposite of what it was supposed to measure. With such acumen, the paper might want to consider a sideline in investment banking." "
Mr Galloway insists that you issue an accurate statement and retract your grossly defamatory remarks as a matter of urgency. Failure to do so will mean that Mr Galloway will be forced to take appropriate legal action.
I look forward to your timely response.
Yours sincerelyOffice of George Galloway MP
Caroline Conway
The calculation took no account of the fact that most votes in the House of Commons are a complete waste of time because the outcome is already determined and the choice is between a rotten Labour motion and a rotten Tory one. It ignored just about everything that is relevant to whether an MP was any good or not.Incidentally, there has been a huge rise in the number of parliamentary questions being put down by MPs over the last couple of years. The reason is not that MPs have suddenly discovered the virtues of this parliamentary device. Answers are still slow to come and almost invariably evasive. It is rather that the more you put down the better you do on Theyworkforyou and rubbish like the Telegraph best and worst value tests. Grandstanding no less and definitely not a sign of an MPs necessarily giving better value for money.
A group of travellers wrecked a multi-million pound police helicopter which was being used to spy on their site. The gang used axes to smash the £5million aircraft, after they leapt over a 4ft wall surrounding Surrey Police force’s helipad at Fairoaks airport, near Woking in Surrey.
After threatening staff working in the operations room, they set about wrecking the helicopter, smashing six of its windows and causing tens of thousands of pounds worth of damage. The incident happened at 10pm yesterday after weeks of aerial surveillance on the travellers’ site, where detectives believe stolen goods have been hidden.
Officers were getting ready to raid the site after collecting evidence they had filmed from the air. A police source said last night: 'The gipsies were furious because they kept getting buzzed by the helicopter. But no one expected this level of violence. Before a raid is conducted we will observe the criminals from the air. That way we get an idea what we are likely to find, identify suspects and locate entrances and exits. Maybe we got too low.'
Nineteen people were arrested after reports of a huge brawl at a Mid Wales gipsy site. Dozens of police officers attended after “violent disorder” broke out. Neighbours reported seeing a gang of men pile out of several vehicles and run on to the site at Withy Beds, on the outskirts of Welshpool, at about 2pm yesterday. Dyfed-Powys Police said 19 travellers from Welshpool and Oxfordshire were arrested for violent disorder and officers remained at the scene overnight, but had left by 8.30am today.
"Yes, Victorian Values. They covered their piano legs !"
"The truth – and I am indebted to Matthew Sweet’s 2001 book Inventing the Victorians for what follows – is that the Victorians did not cover the legs of their pianos at all, unless it was to keep off the dust or children’s boot.
The idea that anyone would worry about the eroticism of furniture first surfaced in Captain Marryat’s A Diary in America, published in 1839. He reported that the word ‘leg’ was not used in polite society across the Atlantic, and that when he visited a ladies’ seminary his guide informed him that the mistress of the establishment, in order to demonstrate her ‘care to preserve in their utmost purity the ideas of the young ladies under her charge had dressed all these four limbs in modest little trousers, with frills at the bottom of them!’
No doubt the guide was making fun of Marryat’s credulity, but the story soon caught on in nineteenth century Britain. How those Victorians enjoyed poking fun at the straitlaced Americans! Nothing so absurd would ever be seen over here.
Somehow the story remained in circulation, and when the publication of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians made it fashionable to scoff it was recycled to make fun of the people who had originally found it so funny."
Just as the Bloomsbury lens distorts our picture of the Victorians, so the Swinging 60s have given us a false view of the 1950s. But they want to close the College Library and there are macaroons for tea, so that story will have to wait for another day.
FWIW, I don't disagree with the demographics either. The question is what the impact will be.
James Carville, the man who masterminded Bill Clinton's first election victory, has predicted the Democratic Party will dominate American politics for the next four decades due to "seismic shifts" in demographic voting patterns...
"There have been long periods where one party generally has the upper hand. You never win every election – the Democrats won't win every election – but for 40 years the underlying dynamics in demographics stay with them," he told the Daily Telegraph.
From 1896 to 1932 there was just one Democratic president and from 1932 to 1968 just one moderate Republican, Eisenhower. Since 1968 the Republicans have generally held sway, exploiting the backlash to the liberal society.
But in the first decades of the 21st century, young voters have swung heavily to the Democrats, a crucial advantage given that voting behaviour in the US is generally set when people are in their 20s.
Hispanics and blacks are growing as a percentage of the population, while white men and Christians, who have voted heavily Republican for the past 40 years, are declining.
"It's the kind of seismic shift we have never seen before," he said.
As an unashamedly partisan Democrat, Carville rejoices in Republican misfortune, but also claims that none of his high-powered Republican friends – Congressmen, pollsters and columnists – disagree with his hypothesis.
"I don't even care why Cameron has said what he's said and done what he's done in the last couple of days. He's right, and he's doing what's right. Sure, you've got to worry about how consistently a man with no principles can be right, but this thing's big enough for the rest not to matter so much. And it's also big enough to significantly shape the behaviour of the party. Overnight, the Tories have become the most principled party, and clearly not because they wanted to, but because they've been forced into it by Cameron. Well, OK, then. I'll take him as Prime Minister."
A former Guantanamo Bay inmate said that the thought of walking the Worcestershire countryside had helped him cope during his imprisonment.
Moazzam Begg told an audience in Malvern that visiting the Malvern Hills with his family was something he wanted to do when he was finally released.
Moazzam Begg was speaking at a talk at Malvern Baptist Church organised by the Malvern branch of Amnesty International.
The Malvern branch of Amnesty meet regularly on the first Thursday of every month at 7.30pm at Abbey Road Baptist Church and anyone who wants to get involved is welcome.
2nd Lt. Hulbert Robertson Relatives of an American Air Force crew whose plane crashed into a west Wales hillside in World War II have unveiled a memorial in their honour.
The bomber hit the slopes of Carn Llidi near St Davids in thick fog on 4 June 1943, killing all four on board. One of the aircraft's propellers, found on the hillside, forms part of the memorial at nearby Whitesands Beach.
The daughters of pilot Robert Lawrence and navigator Hulbert Robertson travelled to Wales for the ceremony. On Saturday - 62 years to the day of the crash - they were joined by civic and military representatives to unveil the memorial and plaque.
In late summer, 2003, while skimming through my hometown Texas newspaper, the Comanche Chief, I was surprised to see a name I recognized. A man in England, I read, had written in search of relatives of 2nd Lt. Hulbert H. Robertson, who served in the Army Air Corps in World War II. I knew that name well. Hulbert was my mother’s first husband, father of my half-sister Gwen. He died on June 4, 1943, when his B-26 Marauder crashed into a Welsh hillside. He was buried in the American Cemetery near Cambridge, England.
Gwen was not quite two years old when her father died, too young to remember him. My dad raised her and loved her as his own, but from early on I knew that my big sister and I had different biological fathers. Her daddy was the smiling young soldier whose picture hung on the parlor wall of his parents’ old dog trot cabin in the country near Comanche.
I knew he’d died in some war, and that it made people sad to talk about him, but they were proud of him just the same. As I got older and understood more I thought it was kind of tragically romantic. 2nd Lt. Robertson would remain forever young and handsome and brave, and those he left behind would have only happy memories of him.
Gwen grew up, married, had children and grandchildren. They knew, in an abstract way, that they’d had another grandfather, but he was just a young man in a photo to them, a part of history they knew little about. Now, out of the blue, someone, a complete stranger from another country, was asking about him.
She said she got a little shiver every day when she drove by the cemetery and thought about those boys, and she got a bit teary eyed as she talked about it. So did we. That would happen a lot during our trip.
The woman, who already had two daughters, requested an amniocentesis in order to allay concerns about possible chromosome abnormalities. At the same time, she also asked to know the foetus's gender.
Doctors at Mälaren Hospital expressed concern and asked Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) to draw up guidelines on how to handle requests in the future in which they "feel pressured to examine the foetus’s gender" without having a medically compelling reason to do so.
The board has now responded that such requests and thus abortions can not be refused and that it is not possible to deny a woman an abortion up to the 18th week of pregnancy, even if the foetus's gender is the basis for the request.
"I think that the brittish system of imigrasion can bee compered with the subpraime morgage scheme. Some peoples has benefitted on it for some time but in the end the countrie wil sufer when the scheme colapses wich of corse sooner or later it wil."I don't know. He can spell 'system' and 'scheme' but not 'will'. He's the Nigel Molesworth de nos jours.
Hello, my name is Anatolie. I live in Australia, where I move to about one year ago. I have desided to start this webpage to print articles from the newspaper that I think is good and i will make coments to. I will also print storys that are funny and will make people lauhgh to.
“You are odd, Father Gordon,” the young man said,
”And your party is in disarray;
And now your delusions have gone to your head –
Do you think you should call it a day?”
“In my youth,” the Prime Minister said in reply,
“My integrity mattered a lot;
But, now that it’s obviously gone by-the-by,
Depart? I shall certainly not!”
thanks partly to our relatively open immigration policy and partly to a rise in births, Britain's old age dependency rate is set to increase far less rapidly than that of any other major country between now and 2050, according to UN projections.In and out of wedlock, babies are being born at a higher rate than for many years, and every new child represents another prospective taxpayer to help reduce that bill.
Teenage pregnancies may bemuse nonagenarians such as Gertrude Janeway, and they may cause hand-wringing among social commentators; but in economic terms, they may be the best hope we have for solving the impending fiscal timebomb.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Britain went, via the Beveridge Report, from being a warfare state to a welfare state. We may take the current system for granted now, but it was nothing short of a massive economic experiment, one forged in the shadow of terrible suffering. Moreover, it is a system that has been in operation, in its full embodiment, for less than a lifetime.In other words, the cultural revolution kicked in and babies went out along with churchgoing and wearing a tie on weekends.
Unfortunately, it has been an experiment based on unrealistic assumptions about Britons' longevity and their fecundity. Since the 1940s, life expectancy at birth has climbed from just over 60 years to just under 80. And fertility rates, which peaked at an average of almost three children per family in the baby boom era of the 1960s, have now seen a drop to below two children per family for three decades.
Until relatively recently, most funds were designed either as defined benefit schemes, with pensioners given a guaranteed payment no matter how much they paid in, or plain unfunded schemes, with pensioners paid from the current account.There's a word for financial schemes which take in money, promising a good return in the future, and use the new money coming in to pay existing investors. They're called Ponzi schemes. A characteristic is that they need to recruit more and more new investors to pay the outgoings to the current investors. When the supply of new investors dries up, the scheme cannot continue to pay out and collapses.Several companies suffer a hangover from large versions of the former British Airways and British Telecom being prime examples. Many insiders fear that before long we could see a major British company taken down by the burdens of its pension scheme.
But these bills are as nothing compared to the unfunded liabilities of the state. By even conservative estimates, the state and public- sector pensions liabilities could more than double the total national debt, causing far more damage than the current financial crisis. The situation is hardly any better in the US, where the unfunded liabilities for social security and Medicare health care for the old are more than $50 trillion.
For all the talk of waste in the public sector, of inefficiency and of profligacy under Gordon Brown, nothing that this Government has done to dent Britain's public finances can compare with the damage imposed by decades of this demographic disaster.
"Gorbals Mick" Martin ...
It's all over for Brown and Labour. The abyss awaits. As long as he remains leader, there is nothing that wretched Labour candidates can plausibly say on the doorstep at next month's European elections. They are struck dumb. Why should people vote for them?
He just doesn't get it, does he ?MPs exchanged looks. Now Norman Baker, who has campaigned long and hard on this issue, arose to mutters of irritation. He was urging the release of more information when Mr Speaker, robes swishing, cut him off.
“Another individual member who is keen to say to the press whatever the press wants to hear!” he announced, embarking on another rant, the nub of which was that Mr Baker had said in the past that the Commons authorities had done nothing on this. “It’s wrong for you to say that!” he said.
MPs just wanted it to end now. Yesterday should have been the Commons at its best, instead we were seeing it at its worst.
Hear this, O ye that swallow up the needy, even to make the poor of the land to fail,
Saying, When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell corn? and the sabbath, that we may sell wheat, making the measure sold small, and the measure bought great, and falsifying the balances by deceit?
That we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes; yea, and sell the sweepings of the wheat?
The LORD hath sworn by the excellency of Jacob, "Surely I will never forget any of their works".
Margaret Moran: "I have to be able to have a proper family life sometimes which I can't do unless I share the costs of the Southampton home with him (her partner, Booker)."
Andrew Sinclair: "But why should the taxpayer pay for your home in Southampton when clearly you are not using it for work?"
Margaret Moran: "Well, I... I... I...you could argue that I use it to be able to sustain my work. Any MP has to have a proper family life.
