Sunday 22 November 2015

UK Government petitions, are they worth doing?

For future reference if anyone is thinking of using the UK Government Petitions service, you need to bear in mind the scope of petitions that can be moved forward for debate, as not all of them can be it seems!

So, when writing your petition you need to include within it a call for a policy action or change, rather than just a petition about a named minister. It is well-worth reading the Rules/Help page to see what can and cannot be included.

This is the reply from the Petitions Committee re a recent petition:
"The Petitions Committee decided not to debate the petition you signed – "Vote no confidence in David Cameron" 
"The House of Commons Petitions Committee has decided not to schedule a debate on this petition, because the Committee does not have the power to schedule debates on motions of no confidence, and the petition does not contain a specific request for action on policy. 
"It is usually more effective to start a petition calling for a specific change to government policy or the law, rather than a petition about an individual Minister. 
"It is still open to MPs to seek time for a debate on this petition in the main House of Commons Chamber, if they wish to do so. However, debates on motions of no confidence are fairly rare. "
So, the moral of the story is, if you want your petition to get discussed, attack the policy not the person!

It still raises the question why, if the petition raised a question outside of the scope of the Petitions Committee, it did not rule the petition out under their standards checking procedure when it was first filed?  Would it be cynical to suggest that the petition may have been viewed as an indicator of the popularity of the minister named? 

Saturday 14 November 2015

Mourning the deaths of innocent people

Today the world is expressing its outrage at the attacks carried out on people in multiple locations in Paris last night, and rightly so.  Killing innocent people anywhere is to be deplored.  But how much of an outcry have we heard about recent attacks elsewhere?  Did we bemoan the massacre of seven people from the Hazara ethnic minority in Afghanistan, when the decapitated bodies of four men, two women and a nine year old child were found last Saturday in a rural town in the southern province of Zabul? The deadly assault in Lebanon on Thursday where at least 41 people were killed in two suicide bombings in the capital, Beirut rated a story on the BBC news website, but hardly a murmur of indignation from the populace.  Do we rate the lives of people in France to be more valuable than those of the people of Afghanistan or Lebanon, or is it that Paris is much closer to home, so it scares us more?

Our media are partly responsible for the lack of information. How much do we see or hear or read about the IS attacks elsewhere? Very little comparatively, so unless you actively seek out that news on alternative media sources you simply are not aware of it.   Instead we get endless guff about which celeb is dating who, the next soap story line, chatter about reality TV programmes, how much football teams pay for players, and storm-in-a-teacup non-stories about politicians such as Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, which are designed to take your focus off the diabolical activities of the Government in respect of British citizens.

The situation in the Middle East was mainly caused by political interference by Western governments, arms manufacturers and oil companies to protect their interests.   Think back and understand how long the West has been trying to control the oil supplies in the area. Remember back to 1988 and the blowing up of Pan Am flight 103 which crashed into the Scottish town of Lockerbie, which caused the deaths of all 259 people on board along with 11 people in Lockerbie at the time. Remember also the 1991 Gulf War, when Iraq under Saddam Hussein's leadership, invaded neighbouring Kuwait and the US and UK armed forces were sent in to deal with him. Hussein's setting fire to Kuwait's oil wells frightened the West immensely, as oil is such an important commodity, and the Western governments could not countenance losing access to its supply lines in the Middle East. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent overthrow of Saddam Hussein  in Iraq , the overthrow of President Gaddaffi in Libya in 2011 are more recent instances of that interference, but it is still happening, and is the root cause of the rise of the Islamic State (IS) and the terror attacks we are now seeing.

If our Governments hadn't interfered we would probably not be seeing this situation now. Everything which has happened since that involvement can be traced back to Western interference in the oil-producing regions of the Middle East. If there had been no oil then the West would have had no interest in the region at all!

Monday 9 November 2015

Honouring the troops should never glorify war

My grandfather, who was a boy soldier in WW1, always told me that we should not have been involved in fighting that war as it was not about people but power, and I really believe that our involvement in some of the world's recent conflicts has been for the same reason: power and oil. WW2 was indeed about fascism and freedom, but was a conflict which probably would not have happened but for the outcome of WW1.

We owe a huge debt to all military personnel who have served, and those who continue to serve, in our armed forces. Sadly too often they are let down by Governments, and the politics gets in the way of the human issues they are faced with, such as injury, loss of limbs, blindness, PTSD, and more. And for those who lose their lives, the families pay an even bigger price.

I am firmly behind our serving personnel, many of my family are ex-military - and I do not want to see our troops being used as a political football by either side. And I really do not want to see any more of our troops die in any conflict, especially in ones where we really should not have been involved in the first place.

I disagree with some of the things our troops have been ordered to do by recent governments, and it appears that the actions they have been ordered to undertake has made the situation worse for lots of people. This is nothing that the troops are to blame for but it is fulfilling a wider political agenda in which they, and we, are pawns.

I want to see a world free of conflict, but sadly it's not going to happen whilst big businesses make mega-millions out of the arms trade. I want to see a world where wars don't happen, where armed forces are unnecessary, and where all humans live in peace, but as a race humanity isn't yet ready for that, so until it is there will always be a need for people willing to step forward and put their lives on the line keeping others safe.

So much of what our armed forces do is important in peace-keeping, in rescuing refugees, in providing aid in disaster areas, as they have the skills and the training to work effectively in those areas, and without them we would be much poorer as a nation.

On Remembrance Sunday and on Remembrance Day itself we should remember and honour those who serve and who have served in defence of our freedoms. We should respect those who still serve. What we shouldn't do is glorify the *process* of war for its own sake. Our soldiers, sailors and air force deserve better than that.



Friday 6 November 2015

Labour lacks "serious opposition" claims Lord Mandelson

Peter Mandelson expressed his concern that Jeremy Corbyn's leadership is a problem not just for Labour, but for the country, when he appeared on the BBC's HardTalk last night. "It is a very, very bad and sad day for this country," Lord Mandelson said, "when we do not have a serious opposition and a serious alternative to the Government."
I am not sure where Peter Mandelson has been keeping himself since September 12th, but there is more serious and active opposition by the current Opposition than we have seen in the Labour Party in many a long year.

During the interview by Stephen Sackur, Mandelson repeated many of the same old untruths and bits of misinformation that we have read and heard in the media over the last several months. His claims that Jeremy Corbyn is "far-left", that Harriet Harman opened the door to everyone to join in with the £3 vote, that Jeremy Corbyn changed his mind about Trident at the Labour Party Conference, and that despite Corbyn's claim of his belief in equality he appointed men to the top Shadow Cabinet positions.

Just for the record, Corbyn is not "far-left", his views reflect those of many others on the left or centre-left (not far-left or hard-left or even ultra-hard-left!) of the Party, even many in the centre of it! In fact, until the Blairite tendency moved the Party so far to the right that it was hard to differentiate between the Blairites and the Tories, Corbyn's views on many issues were pretty much standard Labour Party policy!

Harriet Harman did not come up with the £3 vote scheme. It was actually a change brought in by Ed Miliband in 2014 and supported by Mandelson's former boss, Tony Blair! In fact Blair actually said that it was a reform that his own leadership should have thought of.

And as for the Trident issue at Party Conference, that was not Corbyn's call either. At Labour Party conferences there is a committee which determines which subjects are debated. The short-list of subjects are put to a vote of those attending, thus it was conference itself which decided not to discuss the issue of Trident this year. 

As for the top Shadow Cabinet positions statement, this is very much a macho attitude! That positions of Chancellor, Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary are seen as the Top Jobs reflects an out-of-date view of what are priorities in government and society. Implying that the other Shadow Cabinet roles are less important denigrates whole sectors of society. It infers that health, education, employment, business, welfare, environment, transport, etc are less important issues, whereas to the electorate and I suspect to Corbyn these are most often the most important aspects of government as they have a direct and personal effect on each and every one of us. Cut backs in health or education funding have a more direct impact on us than does our foreign policy, yet Foreign Secretary is considered to be a Top Job by some. Clearly Corbyn will form his own opinions on what is important, but his first Shadow Cabinet does have a majority of women members - the first time any frontbench team has done so, so that's one up for him then!

Now we have corrected Lord Mandelson, what else can we say about the interview? Jeremy Corbyn is unelectable, and he cannot lead the Labour Party to victory and government, seems to be two main themes of Mandelson's spiel. In between the chest-beating mea culpa lament of "We didn't make enough changes ourself" and "We lost our way" type comments, it is quite clear that Mandelson has no intention of supporting the new leader or his attempt to win the next election. There was a lot of talk of "being ready" for when Corbyn goes (he said stands down but could just as easily have meant gets pushed out) and lots of guff about the Party not sharing Corbyn's aims for the Party, despite his "stonking" victory in the leadership election with just shy of 60% of the votes across all three voting sections.

Mandelson's sly inference that it was only the £3 supporters and the trades unions members voting that gave Corbyn his victory belies the fact that the full member vote of 121,751 out of 245,520 for Corbyn was only just shy of the 50% victory mark in itself, A further 1,010 full members voting for him would have given Corbyn the leadership even without the ability of the registered supporters and the trades unions members to vote, and Corbyn polled almost as many votes alone as the other three candidates did between them!  On that basis Mandelson cannot justify any claim that full members do not agree with Jeremy Corbyn's policies.

Mandelson's claimed that 47%  of the people who voted Labour in the 2015 General Election do not see Corbyn as leadership material, but that could also mean that 53% do see him as such!  But what about the 35% of the electorate who have not voted for anyone, many of whom claim they cannot see any difference between the Tories, LibDems and New Labour, so why vote?  Those people are amongst the sector of the electorate which has been excited and energised by the emergence of Corbyn as the Labour Party Leader. Many of them are becoming politically active for the first time ever, and come 2020 they will no longer be in the silent third, they will be voting!

Meanwhile, right across the country members and supporters are readying themselves to fight local elections in 2016. Indeed, some are already planning their campaign in the by-election caused by the death recently of the veteran MP, Michael Meacher.  Those of us who will be campaigning for local council seats do so in the strong hope that this will help the Party win votes and seats in the general election in 2020 also. We expect that it will be a hard fight; after all, we have to reconnect with an electorate that has become increasingly disillusioned with the New Labour Party of Blair and Mandelson, and it is to them that we have to establish our credibility as a Party fit for government. That job will be made all the harder by the whingers and the doomsayers, such as Mandelson, undermining the Party's democratically elected leader! So my message to him, and others like him, is this, "Button it! Support Corbyn. Help us win!"