The increasing confusion about what hate crime means, who it refers to and what it covers is having its own divisive effect. Inflated hate crime figures are reinforcing division by painting a picture of a Britain more bigoted and hate-filled than it actually is.
It has also created a two-tier justice system, because when it comes to victims, some have special status. Consider this extraordinary passage from the website of the Crown Prosecution Service: “All police forces would want you to report crimes . . . But, if it could be a hate crime, the police will take it even more seriously.” The College of Policing’s guidance goes further, asserting that because “hate crimes can have a greater emotional impact on the victims than comparable non-hate crimes . . . all victims should not be treated the same”. Got that, you white and straight and faithless, you “cisgendered” and able-bodied? If you get beaten up, your bruises and your bleeding are less important in the eyes of the law, less worthy of strong punishment.
Claire Foges
Source: Hate crime doesn’t deserve a special status | Comment | The Times & The Sunday Times
Posted in Britain, Crime, Politics, Quotes.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 16, 2017
Jeremy Corbyn is not as straightforward as his supporters claim. He has, most notably, been disingenuous about his real views on Brexit. But then Trump used to be a Democrat. Authenticity is not the same as policy consistency.
John Rentoul
Source: Can Jeremy Corbyn win by becoming a left-wing Donald Trump, railing against the ‘rigged system’? | The Independent
Posted in Britain, Politics, Quotes, Trump, US politics.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 15, 2017
When Corbyn promises to “break the grip of vested interests” he’s saying what Labour leaders have always said. The trouble is that it’s not very different from what Theresa May is saying, and she says it a bit better than he does.
John Rentoul
Source: Can Jeremy Corbyn win by becoming a left-wing Donald Trump, railing against the ‘rigged system’? | The Independent
Posted in Britain, Politics, Quotes.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 15, 2017
The key dividing line in the USA remains racial, not economic. But there are real reasons for the sharp growth of white resentment. Already, whites are in a minority in America’s schools. In 17 states there are more whites dying than are being born. Nationally, the white share of the electorate is predicted to fall from 69% this year to 46% in 2060. On the other hand, the Hispanic share of America’s population is predicted to rise to 27% from 13%; and the share that is Asian or “other” is expected to double to 14% from 7%. By the time a baby born this year can vote, whites will be on the verge of becoming another ethnic minority, albeit the largest
Trevor Phillips
Source: Farewell to the chief | The Sunday Times Magazine | The Times & The Sunday Times
Posted in Quotes, US politics.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 15, 2017
“The irony of Barack Obama’s presidency is that while it began at a time when it seemed America’s fortunes could only improve, his inauguration day turned out to be his personal high water mark.”
Discuss.
Quote taken from: No, he didn’t: Obama’s legacy
Posted in Quotes, US politics.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 15, 2017
After he became President in 1969, during his very first post-election session with Henry Kissinger, who would become his national security advisor, Nixon rebuked the Agency as a group of “Ivy League liberals” who lacked analytic integrity and had always opposed him politically. Like Trump, Nixon did not see the value of CIA intelligence briefings. It is unclear whether Nixon read any of the President’s Daily Briefs, the CIA’s flagship top-secret product tailored for each President.
Source: Is Trump’s rage at US intelligence unprecedented? | Prospect Magazine
Posted in Quotes, Trump, US politics.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 15, 2017
The news media are far less respected today than they were in forty years ago.
In 1972, Gallup first asked the question: “In general, how much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media . . . when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately and fairly — a great deal, a fair amount, not very much, or none at all?”
68% said a fair amount or a great deal, and 5% none at all.
In September 2016, the numbers were 32% and 27%.
Source: Here’s a true Trump nightmare for the liberals: that his policies work | Comment | The Times & The Sunday Times
Posted in Britain, Politics, Stats, Trivia, US politics.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 15, 2017
Trump won by a huge margin among whites — 63% to 31% among white men, 53% to 43% among white women. His appalling sexism made little difference: he led 62% to 34% among non-graduate white women. Even among the quarter of white men who hold a degree, he led by 14 points. By contrast, he lost in every category of black, Hispanic and Asian voter.
Source: Farewell to the chief | The Sunday Times Magazine | The Times & The Sunday Times
Posted in Stats, Trump, US politics.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 15, 2017
One of the striking aspects emerging about the hacking scandal is that British intelligence was apparently first to tip off US intelligence that Russian hackers were targeting Democrat computer servers. It is reported that the same Russian cyber group that allegedly interfered in the US election, “Fancy Bears,” previously attempted to disrupt the UK General Election in 2015, but its attacks were foiled by Britain’s signals intelligence agency, GCHQ.
Source: Is Trump’s rage at US intelligence unprecedented? | Prospect Magazine
Posted in Britain, Geopolitics, Politics, Trump, US politics.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 14, 2017
The big reason that Corbyn cannot copy Trump is that he hasn’t learned the lesson of how Trump won. It wasn’t simply by railing against the “rigged system”. Trump won by taking a coalition of the Republican base – minus the elite parts of it such as the Bush family – and bolting on to it two constituencies that Mitt Romney had failed to mobilise four years before. Trump won over enough working-class Democrats and non-voters to get him over the line in the Rust Belt swing states that mattered.
Corbyn isn’t even holding on to Labour’s core vote, let alone winning over parts of the electorate that the party failed to win in 2015.
Source: Can Jeremy Corbyn win by becoming a left-wing Donald Trump, railing against the ‘rigged system’? | The Independent
Posted in Britain, Politics, Trade, US politics.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 14, 2017
An iron law of politics applies: in any political argument it is more than likely that both sides are right.
Philip Collins
Source: Desperate NHS needs a desperate remedy | Comment | The Times & The Sunday Times
Posted in Quotes.
Tagged with Philip Collins.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 13, 2017
The wages of expectation are paid in disappointment. That, too, is one lesson to be drawn from Obama’s presidency. If you are led to expect $100 you will be disappointed to receive just $50. Obama never quite managed to balance results with expectations.
Alex Massie
Source: The lost promise of the Obama presidency – CapX
Posted in Quotes, US politics.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 13, 2017
Four pints of milk has now been £1 at all the major supermarkets for well over two years now. Indeed, it fell to 89p in Iceland supermarket briefly. This is astonishingly low. Milk has not been this cheap since the mid-1980s. Over Christmas, Asda was selling one kg of carrots for 20p – a price not seen since 1978. This is food deflation on a dramatic scale.
Source: Higher prices are the only way of dealing with Britain’s food waste problem | Coffee House
Posted in Quotes.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 13, 2017
More than 850,000 people in the UK now suffer from dementia, which affects one in six people over 80 and costs £11 billion a year. Not only is this now the biggest killer of the elderly, it also changes the lives of the 670,000 people caring for others at home.
Source: Shared society exposes May’s tunnel vision | Comment | The Times & The Sunday Times
Posted in Stats.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 13, 2017
At the end of last year, in a speech on the rail strike, the president of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union, Sean Hoyle, told a cheering crowd that: “Rule number one in our [RMT] bible is that we must strive to replace the capitalist system with a socialist order”. It was his first remark, before giving details of the dispute.
He wasn’t talking out of turn or being quoted out of context. Rule number 1 of the RMT is that the object of the union “shall be to work for the supersession of the capitalist system by a socialistic order of society”. This objective, followed by that of “the promotion of equality for all”, comes several points above another aim that you might have thought would come first: “to improve the conditions and protect the interests of its members”.
Danny Finkelstein
Source: Rail strikes expose socialism’s hollow core | Comment | The Times & The Sunday Times
Posted in Quotes.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 13, 2017
British households are throwing away the equivalent of 500 meals every year. Household food waste in the UK has increased from seven million tonnes in 2012 to 7.3 million tonnes in 2015, a rise of 4.4 per cent, according to Wrap, the government endorsed charity that wages war on food waste.
Source: Higher prices are the only way of dealing with Britain’s food waste problem | Coffee House
Posted in Stats.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 12, 2017
It costs about £250 a day to keep a patient on a ward, £150 a day in a care home and £100 a day for domiciliary care (which is most people’s preference).
As Alice Thomson says in this piece, “It is obvious, morally and financially, that the elderly should remain in their own homes as long as possible.”
Source: Social care is dragging down our hospitals
Posted in Britain, Politics, Stats.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 11, 2017
When voters are asked to choose policies blind, they often admire those of rival parties, only to reject them as soon as they discover who’s advocating them.
Source: Why Theresa May is the new Ed Miliband | Jenni Russell
Posted in Politics, Quotes.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 11, 2017
Those who claim leadership of the centre-Left (in which I include Tory liberals) are know-nothing poseurs who talk only to each other. What is now called (as if it were a brand new phenomenon) the cosmopolitan governing class is not new at all. It is the established bourgeoisie of our age which embraces all the received arrogant attitudes of its time – as the high bourgeois always have.
Janet Daley
Source: The Left’s future is bleak if it insists on living in denial about why it lost
Posted in Politics, Quotes.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 10, 2017
The relative freedom which we enjoy depends on public opinion. The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.
Source: The age of outrage
Posted in Uncategorized.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 10, 2017
Blair promised a lot on education and, to be fair, delivered much (especially during David Blunkett’s tenure in the Department for Education).
Between 1997 and 2007 funding per pupil went up by 48 per cent, there were 35,000 more teachers in classrooms, overall class sizes went down, there were 172,000 more teaching assistants, and teachers were paid (on average) 18 per cent more. More than 1,000 new schools opened, and many more received additional funding for improvements to classrooms. Extra resources were put into Early Years education (including Sure Start). And it was Blair’s government that built on the empowering of Ofsted to make it an inspectorate that increasingly made schools, and their leaders, accountable.
Source: Why we teachers miss Michael Gove – CapX
Posted in Uncategorized.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 8, 2017
Boris Yeltsin may have reversed the revolution by overthrowing the Communist party. But it’s Putin who has brought the century’s circle back to its beginning. Putin has restored Holy Russia: a society where ruler and church are united, where dissent is treason and where secret police watch for the slightest flicker of popular discontent.
Official Russia will avoid glorifying 1917 — and not just because of the political dangers of encouraging revolt and protest. A century ago, Russia’s avant-garde represented the boldest concentration of imagination and talent in the world. They invented the future in which we now live. Today’s Russia, by contrast, lives in a cloud of nostalgia for a lost Soviet past. There’s no place in Putin’s vision of a united, obedient, God-fearing people for either revolution or radical thinking.
Source: Why Putin’s Russia will be keeping quiet about 1917
Posted in Uncategorized.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 8, 2017
Juliet Samuel writes that, “The defining feature of the argument around Brexit models is an obsessively legal one that assumes that Brexit can create no new legal forms of co-operation or trade, but must rely on the current available options. It ignores that fact that we are not dealing with lawyers and statute on a two-year timetable. Brexit is about the fate of nations over decades.”
Of course, the very fact that it IS political is why no-one in the EU wants to admit this. Providing too easy an “out” for the UK threatens the entire edifice.
And in that combination lies the entire problem.
Source: Theresa May must explain how Brexit can strengthen, rather than overturn, the West
Posted in Europe, My articles, Politics.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 8, 2017
Polly Toynbee says that “Homes are not taxed at all, and yet that is where all this burgeoning wealth comes from.” But as the OECD points out, Britain raises more of its tax take from property than just about any other rich country.
Tim Worstall
Source: Here’s the real truth about inequality – CapX
Posted in Stats, Trivia.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 8, 2017
Alain de Botton, in his book Status Anxiety, points out that in the 1820s the word ‘snob’ emerged from Oxbridge, where colleges often wrote ‘s.nob’, short for ‘sine nobilitate’ — without nobility.
‘In the word’s earliest days,’ he writes, ‘a snob was taken to mean someone without high status, but it quickly assumed its modern and almost diametrically opposed meaning: someone offended by a lack of high status in others, a person who believes in a flawless equation between social rank and human worth.’
Source: How Brexit gave us a different class of snob
Posted in Trivia.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 6, 2017
Violence in Pakistan is down by three quarters in the last two years. The country is safer than at any point since George W. Bush launched his war on terror 15 years ago.
In 2013 there were 2,789 killings in Karachi. In the first 11 months of 2016 there were 592. In 2013 there were 51 terrorist bomb blasts. Up to late November this year, there were two.Three years ago, Karachi suffered from an orgy of kidnapping for ransom. There were 78 cases in 2013, rising to 110 the following year. This year, there have been 19. Some 533 extortion cases were reported in 2013; in 2016, only 133. Sectarian killing is sharply down: while 38 members of the Shia minority (who are brutally targeted in Pakistan) were killed in 2013, that figure was down by two thirds in 2016.
Source: Pakistan is winning its war on terror
Posted in Geopolitics, Stats.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 5, 2017
Last year the Overseas Development Institute reviewed 165 studies into 56 cash transfer programs in 30 different countries to find out their true effectiveness.
The findings showed that cash transfers had improved school attendance and reduced child labour, boosted access to healthcare, improved and diversified diets, stimulated local economies and resulted in a reduction in domestic violence. It also found no evidence that they caused workshy tendencies: in fact, the studies showed cash transfers actually increased employment among adults.
A study comparing food aid with cash transfers in Ecuador, Niger, Uganda, and Yemen found that 18 per cent more people could be helped, at no extra cost, if everyone was given cash transfers instead of food.
Source: Why giving people money is a great way to tackle poverty – CapX
Posted in Issues, Politics, Poverty, Stats.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 4, 2017
Within five years India will overtake China as the world’s most populous country and then move far ahead.
In 2050 the world’s third most populous country after India and China will be Nigeria — just ahead of the US.
In 1950, Europe’s population was three times sub-Saharan Africa’s; by 2050 it will be the other way round.
Source: Happy 70th, baby-boomer. But it’s the young who need the gifts
Posted in Stats.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– January 4, 2017
I love this positive piece from Philip Collins. Worth quoting his reasons at length.
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We are living through a long arc of progress and it will take more than Nigel Farage to bend it backwards.
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Democracy is not in peril; it is thriving. More than four billion people live under a democratic government. This is a towering historical achievement. Power was transferred discreetly and peacefully in 2016 in Ghana, Morocco, Japan, South Korea, Croatia, Iceland, Ireland, Lithuania, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain and the United States. In Gambia, the 22-year tyranny of President Yahya Jammeh ended when he was beaten by the opposition candidate, Adama Barrow.
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Myanmar swore in its first elected civilian leader in more than 50 years.Taiwan is on the verge of becoming the first Asian country to legalise same-sex marriage. Gambia and Tanzania banned child marriage. In June, the pan-African parliament endorsed a ban on female genital mutilation across the continent. For the first time ever, the death penalty has become illegal in more than half of the world’s countries.
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The last of the western nations to recognise same-sex unions capitulated in 2016. Take a belated bow, Italy.
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The world kept getting richer. The number of people living in extreme poverty fell below 10 per cent for the first time. Since 1990 almost 1.1 billion have escaped extreme poverty. World hunger reached its lowest point for 25 years in 2016 and it was the first ever year in which the total amount needed to eradicate poverty fell below the money spent on foreign aid.
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Average household income in Britain grew at its fastest rate since 2001.
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Employment at a record high of over 75 per cent and near zero inflation helped living standards recover.
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The introduction of the national living wage meant that pay inequality fell.
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The world got healthier again. Since 2000, global malaria deaths have declined by 60 per cent. Since their peak a decade ago, AIDS-related deaths have fallen by 45 per cent. Maternal mortality has fallen 44 per cent since 1990. Infant mortality has halved over the same period.
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Worldwide, people can expect an extra seven years of life compared to a relative born in 1990.
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The WHO announced that measles has been eradicated in all the Americas, from Canada to Chile. In April, the WHO said that polio could be wiped out within a year.
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In wealthy countries, colon cancer, dementia and heart disease are all waning.
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The environment improved. For the third year in succession, global carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels did not grow at all. China hit its peak coal usage in 2014 and India announced it has so much capacity that it won’t need any new coal plants for three years. Acid pollution is back to 1930s levels and a survey in June showed that the hole in the ozone layer is still shrinking, and should be healed by 2050.
Source: Never forget that we live in the best of times | Comment | The Times & The Sunday Times
Posted in Quotes, Stats.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– December 24, 2016
Most MPs will be unable to point to any one thing they did that wouldn’t have happened without them. Occasionally, individuals make a difference, though. Polly Toynbee lists a few that have, as follows;
- Barbara Castle’s lifesaving 70mph speed limit
- Patricia Hewitt’s smoking ban
- Harriet Harman’s childcare and nurseries
- Roy Jenkins’s great 1960s “permissive society is a civilised society” reforms
- David Steel’s Abortion Act.
Source: Politics is a rough trade, but Jamie Reed should be hanging in there | Polly Toynbee | Opinion | The Guardian
Posted in Britain, Politics, Trivia.
By mark.davies@camberton.com
– December 24, 2016
