Wednesday 15 March 2017

Canned 'Kippers

Last month as part of the OpenMedia campaign against the so-called Link Tax, or more properly the European Commission’s proposal on Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, I emailed the MEPs who represent my area (i.e. the North West of England) raising concerns about how the Directive would adversely impact on a whole host of internet users from bloggers like me to new internet-based businesses and would ride rough-shod over existing rights across the whole of the Internet.

My email was as follows:
Sent: Thursday 23 February 2017 03:56
Subject: Save the Link: No #linktax or mandatory censorship
Dear Member of the European Parliament,
I am writing to express my concern about the Commission’s proposal on Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, announced on September 14.
I am worried about the proposals in Article 11 and 13 which amount to a link tax, and mandatory censorship.
The “Link Tax” proposal creates a new ancillary copyright for press publishers. This new right would create unprecedented new monopolies for publishing giants to charge fees for snippets of text that automatically accompany hyperlinks.
The Link Tax will act as a brake to innovative EU digital startups that will never be able to get off the ground if forced to pay these fees. This proposal has failed everywhere it has been previously tried, including Germany and Spain.
I draw your attention to a briefing on this issue produced by the Save The Link campaign (https://SaveTheLink.org), which I support. You can download the briefing here: https://openmedia.org/sites/default/files/documents/mepbriefing-singlepgsinteractive_0.pdf
I am also very concerned about the new proposal for content filtering and increased liability of Internet companies. The proposal at Article 13 includes requirements for monitoring Internet users, demanding that tech companies produce filtering robots to detect the copyright status of user-generated content. This filtering would not be done on the basis on what is legal, but on whether uploads contain content that has been "identified" by rightsholders. This would overturn existing rights for quotation, parody and other public-interest copyright exceptions.
The European Commission pushed this idea forward despite overwhelming opposition in its consultation from over 120,000 Internet users and dozens of civil society groups.
The Commission has failed to defend the interests of citizens – we need you to stand up and act as our voice.
We ask you to pay close attention to Article 11 which proposes an ancillary copyright for press publishers as well as Article 13 and recitals 38 and 39 which propose mandated content filtering technologies.
Please, stand up for my rights and challenge these proposals which will seriously harm the Internet, and the citizens you represent.
I look forward to hearing your response.
In the North West there are eight MEPs: 3 Labour, 1 LibDem, 1 Tory, and 3 UKIP.  To date I have had a reply from just one MEP, UKIP's Paul Nuttall (the man who failed to gain the Stoke on Trent seat for UKIP in the recent parliamentary by-election).  His response was risible:
Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive
Now we are leaving the European Union we will not be bound by their rules, it will be up to member states to decide such legislation for themselves.
Fortunately, once we have left the EU we can again decide our own legislation, via our democratically elected U.K. Parliament.
Thus, even if the EU Parliament votes through this Directive, we can later chose to delete it from our Statutes.
Apart from not even having the courtesy of a personalised response - what I have copied above is exactly what was in his emailed reply - it appears to be the sort of basic stock response that any UKIP MEP might send out to any query about any piece of EU legislation. 

A British MEP's final take-home pay (which varies from month to month based on the exchange rate) is roughly £3,900 per month, a sum for which I expect a darn-sight better response than a canned "when we leave the EU all will be well"! 

Bias? What bias?

Following on from my post about BBC bias in its coverage of the #OurNHS march on 4th March, and my subsequent complaint to the BBC, I have now had a wholly unsatisfactory response from them...
Thank you for contacting us about our coverage of the NHS march in London on 4th March. We appreciate that you feel we didn’t give enough prominence to this story.
We covered this protest across BBC News platforms, including on BBC Radio bulletins, in the PM programme on Radio 4, in headlines and live coverage on the BBC News Channel, in our television bulletins on BBC One, and online.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39167350
Of course we appreciate that the NHS, and the challenges it faces, is a major news story, and one which many in our audience care about. At weekends, some of our news bulletins are shorter than during the week – but we would also point to our in-depth coverage of the NHS including a recent series of extended reports to explore this topic last month, during our “NHS Healthcheck” series.

We understand that you may still be unhappy with our coverage of this protest, but hope the above explains that we did report the protests across a range of News output. BBC News will continue to cover any significant developments relating to the NHS.
Thanks again for contacting us.

Kind Regards
BBC Complaints Team
www.bbc.co.uk/complaints
NB This is sent from an outgoing account only which is not monitored. You cannot reply to this email address but if necessary please contact us via our webform quoting any case number we provided.
That they consider their previous month's coverage of the NHS during their NHS Healthcheck series an adequate explanation for their poor ongoing coverage just beggars belief.   I remain unconvinced of their lack of bias, and I certainly heard very little about the march on Saturday on Radio 4 whilst it was happening or later the same evening after it had finished.

In their response the BBC also indicated their coverage online, via the link given, which did not appear in the list of top news stories and for which I had to go hunting (as I pointed out in my complaint). This was posted under the very misleading headline "NHS protest: Tens of thousands march against 'hospital cuts'" whereas the police were quoting in excess of 200,000 people, so by diminishing the turnout by a factor of ten the BBC appeared to be attempting to reduce the apparent impact of, and the participation in, the march in support of #OurNHS. Doing so is manipulation of the facts and should be denounced.

So the question is, can I take my complaint further or is the complaints processed closed?


Thursday 9 March 2017

No home, no job, no bank account... what can you do?

I see many outspoken comments about how bad it is that people are sleeping on the streets, that they are not working but can afford tattoos, piercings, dogs, booze, fags, etc... and every time I read such a post my heart sinks as I know it will be followed by any number of highly critical replies calling homeless people every name under the sun. Calling them out for being lazy, for not wanting to work, for just being interested in drugs or booze, for not taking responsibility for their own lives. 


There may well be odd cases where the person sleeping rough could have prevented it happening, but for the vast majority that is not true. The reasons why people find themselves on the streets, homeless and jobless, are many. Usually there is a connection between them: In the UK it is almost impossible to find a job if you are homeless. In the UK it is almost impossible to find a home if you are jobless. How do you resolve that?

Some homeless people are ex-service personnel who have left the armed forces and not been able to re-adjust to civilian life. Their marriage may have broken down, they may be disabled physically or suffering PTSD or other mental health issues as a result of their service.

Others are youngsters who have left home for whatever reason: perhaps a family conflict, perhaps abuse by a relative, perhaps just not being allowed to remain within the home they grew up in. Some of them are youngsters who grew up in foster families or children's homes who have nowhere else to go once they reach the age of majority.

Some are people who have lost their job or been laid off and can no longer afford to pay their mortgage or rent, and for whom the welfare benefits system has failed, or through sanctions or ineligibility. 

Yet more may be those with mental health issues, who are so badly let down by the current system of non-care. Those who, for all sorts of reasons, may not be able to cope with living alone or with others, yet who still need to be housed and cared for.

There are times when there needs to be help provided, where the collective responsibility of a compassionate society needs to kick in and help those who have nowhere to live to find somewhere, or to find a job. How can we do this?

Well firstly it takes money - and under a government which runs an austerity budget that is not an easy thing to find! It also takes social and political will. Social, because we as a society need to understand why homelessness happens and how we can address it, and political because the politicians need to understand there is no quick fix for this, that it will cost money, but that by not taking action it will, in the long term, cost us even more, so non-action is a false economy!

Government could allocate funds to every area with a homeless population, sufficient to purchase a large enough property (or properties if more than one is needed) that can be converted into bedsits so that anyone who is homeless has a safe place of their own to live and sleep. It could even be done as a community project with those who will live in it helping to create the living spaces - thus learning new skills that could help them later on and giving them a sense of involvement and ownership of the project.

Once they are safely housed then they may need help with more skills training, with further education, or finding work suitable to their health and abilities. This could be done in collaboration either with local colleges, or with employers who would provide spaces for people in need of job experience. Once they have those extra skills or experience and an address it becomes so much easier to find permanent employment. 

But there are still other factors to take into account: how does one live without a paid job? This is where UBI comes in. I don't mean like at the work experience level of payment, I mean an amount that is sufficient to provide the necessities and a bit left over. It needs to be set at a level to pay for clothes, food etc, with the accommodation cost being covered by government until such time as they were earning enough to move into a separate place of their own. The key thing is to set levels realistically, not at some artificially low sum where the only way you can survive is by eating 9p bean-burgers every day! 

Managing the UBI brings to mind the need for banking facilities for those whom the high street banks find unattractive, whilst avoiding the lure of the money lenders who prey on the vulnerable. Having a people's bank would allow those who do not have access to commercial banks to have an account into which their earnings or allowances would be paid. This removes another of the hurdles that face many people who are homeless and jobless.

By helping homeless and jobless people in this way you are encouraging them to become members of the wider community rather than living on the fringe or outside of it, you are also giving them dignity and independence, and enhancing their sense of personal self-worth, which in many cases has been destroyed by years of abuse or deprivation.

Finally, there needs to be a shift in attitude towards homeless and jobless people: they are being blamed for being homeless and jobless and it is not their fault! The reason the media promotes the idea that they are to blame is that it suits the government's rhetoric of austerity and the principle of divide and rule. Until we all realise what game the government and media are playing  and if we allow them to make us believe that being homeless and jobless are not political issues then we are being fooled.  We need to stand up and protest, whether that be direct to our MP, via marches and demonstrations, at the ballot box each time there is a by-election for council seats or an MP, or most importantly, at the elections for councils and mayors on 4th May. #VoteLabour and help get this situation sorted. 



 

Monday 6 March 2017

BBC News Media - Evidence of Continuing Bias?

Alston Labour Party Branch at the #OurNHS March London
Sat 4th March 2017 © Alice Bondi
Following on from yesterday's #OurNHS March where over 250,000 people from all over the UK marched through London, a fact the BBC and some other mainstream British media seems to have ignored or referred to in passing, I felt a formal complaint to the BBC was in order. I do not have a TV so never see the BBC's TV output, but have been told by friends who do that there was scant mention of the march in the TV news. I listened to the R4 News where the same was the case, whilst looking at the BBC News online pages you would not even be aware that there had been a march if that was your only source of news as it did not feature in their top UK news stories, and only shows up if you really dig for it.

This is yet another instance of the sort of media bias we have seen over the last couple of years - Media Lens did a big exposé of this last November under the title BBC Propaganda Watch: Tell-Tale Signs That Slip Through The Cracks

My complaint is as follows:
Yesterday there was one of the biggest marches in London in support of the NHS & against the cutbacks in its funding & services. Over 250,000 people (police estimate) marched through London over a 4-5 hour period. The only coverage on the BBC R4 News was scant mentions of "thousands marched through London today", whilst the BBC News website seems to have no coverage or photos of the March, nor any journalistic coverage, nor interviews with those concerned, who ranged from the Labour Party leader and Shadow Chancellor, trades union general secretaries, health service workers of all grades, NHS service consumers, and a whole raft of concerned citizens who had travelled from every part of the UK to support this march. Contrast this with the more than 2 minutes of video broadcast yesterday evening by a German broadcaster, highlighting not only the march in London but also the dire state of the NHS in the UK under the current government. This is blatant bias on the part of the BBC, who have a duty to provide impartial and comprehensive news to the people of this country. Those who make the decisions not to cover such big events are sanitising the news and colluding with an increasingly fascist and intolerant government attempting to further subdue the population through the reduction in public services and the stripping of dignity from the most needy and vulnerable citizens. As the BBC is publicly funded via the licence fee my complaint is that the biased coverage against the march and against the Labour Party's current leadership is against its own constitution and against the principles of fairness and natural justice. I request a full and detailed investigation into the lack of 4th March coverage and the bias that underpins the scant coverage of both popular mass actions and the current Labour leadership.
The BBC website Complaints pages say they will respond within 2 weeks, so I shall wait and see the outcome.

Meanwhile if, like me, you were unable to go to the march, you may like to see the video on YouTube which recorded all 3½ hours plus of it!



Contingents certainly went from Cumbria were I live, leaving home around 4am to make the journey down to London by coach to be there in time for the march start at noon. After walking through the capital, and listening to various speakers as well they set off on the journey back in the late afternoon and many will not have reached home until around midnight. Such a long day, but that so many people did make those sorts of journeys to take part shows the strength of feeling in the country in support of #OurNHS and the people who work within it.

Sunday 5 March 2017

German broadcaster takes more notice of 1/4 million march than does the BBC!

It says something when German TV gives more coverage to the London #OurNHS march than did the UK's #BBC!

250,000+ people marched through London today in support of the NHS but if you watched or listened to the BBC news yesterday you'd be forgiven for thinking only a few folks went to London to to protest against the NHS cuts.
Well, guess what? More than a quarter of a million were there on the streets, yes that's right, more than A QUARTER OF A MILLION people took to the streets of London today in support of #OurNHS.
Oh and that figure came from the Police apparently, and past experience tells me they do tend to underestimate slightly...

When more than 250,000 people take to the streets of the capital it should send a very clear message to Government that the people are a bit miffed with them. Loads more of us were not able to make the trip to London but we were with the marchers in spirit.
We are ordinary people, some working, some retired, some disabled, some still at school or university, some old, some young, some in the middle. We all share a passionate support for the NHS and outrage at the Tory government's budget cuts, privatisation of services and closures of hospitals and other health services.
Enough is enough. We stand, we fight. HANDS OFF #OurNHS !