Links - 25th September 2019 (1)

As it starts to implode, I no longer recognise Corbyn’s poisonous Labour party - "Our monthly constituency party meetings in Streatham featured a spectrum of opinions, but they were good-natured. When people disagreed, they did so in an agreeable fashion, and we usually would head to the pub for a pint after. This was the local Labour Party of around 600 members who selected me as their parliamentary candidate in March 2008. But the local party I left back in February 2019 was barely recognisable.There were around two and half thousand members, fewer than 500 of whom had been members before the summer of 2015. At the time I left Labour, most of those who selected me seven years beforehand had resigned from the local party or had stopped attending meetings, which had become unpleasant and often shouty encounters where you were defined by whether or not you were sympathetic to Momentum and a disciple of “Jeremy”. I witnessed the outright bullying of non-Corbynista members, and came to dread giving my parliamentary report at the meetings. Heckling and pointless points of order were the order of the day. Most of the dedicated group of moderate members who stayed came to dread these meetings too – you could endure them, but rarely enjoyed any more. In the end, the hard left took over. The picture I paint of my local experience was far more rosy than many a tale I’ve heard in the parliamentary Labour Party. A large number of former colleagues have experienced far worse... Just 15 per cent of today’s Labour members are proud of Britain’s history, most blame Britain and not the IRA for terrorist attacks in Northern Ireland, 69 per cent now blame Western governments instead of groups like al-Qaeda and Isis for Islamist terrorist attacks on the streets of Britain or think they are equally to blame as the groups that plan and execute them. Less than one in four thinks Labour has a serious problem with antisemitism despite the avalanche of evidence under Corbyn’s leadership; the majority think the accusations are down to the media or Corbyn’s opponents. And in one particularly disturbing figure, 51 per cent think a Labour government should take greater control of broadcast media. This paints a pretty disturbing picture of illiberal, authoritarian attitudes – and that’s putting it generously. It also explains why, in order to quash any dissent from St Jeremy’s views, the hard left attempted to abolish the deputy leader, Tom Watson."

Dave Rich on Twitter - "Today's Observer reports Jeremy Corbyn on Press TV in 2012 saying "the hand of Israel" was behind Jihadist terrorism in Egypt. But there was another interesting guest on that show with Corbyn: a convicted Hamas terrorist called Dr Abdul Aziz Umar
Here is Umar ("Brother Amr") via satellite with Corbyn and Lauren Booth. He got seven life sentences for helping to organise a Hamas suicide bombing in Jerusalem in 2003 that killed seven people. He was released in the 2011 Gilad Shalit deal...
So what did Corbyn have to say about this convicted Hamas terrorist? "You have to ask the question why they are in prison in the first place... I'm glad that those who were released were released, I hope they're now in safe places"
He had even met Umar before: "I met many of the brothers including the brother who's been speaking here when they came out of prison, when I was in Doha earlier this year." So now we can add "brothers" to "friends" as the words Corbyn uses to describe Hamas...
I'm sure we'll be told Corbyn doesn't condone violence, just cares about prisoner welfare, doesn't think Hamas terrorists are his "brothers", etc etc. But that's not what it looks like here.
A postscript to this thread: Corbyn's appearance on Press TV was in August 2012, seven months AFTER Press TV lost its Ofcom licence for broadcasting the forced interrogation of a prisoner in Iran."

Jeremy Corbyn told Labour will be crushed over Brexit as leader faces party revolt - "Jeremy Corbyn is facing a full-scale revolt over his Brexit policy after senior party figures warned Labour will be crushed at the next election if he continues to sit on the fence... a new poll showed the majority of people who voted Labour in the 2017 election now think Mr Corbyn should quit."

No more free schools, Labour pledges - "There will be no more free schools under a future Labour government, the shadow education secretary has said... Nick Timothy, director of the New Schools Network which supports opening free schools, said: "Free schools are better placed to give parents what they want and drive up standards because they give more control to head teachers, teachers and governors, rather than politicians and bureaucrats... "Rather than trusting heads and teachers to run their schools, Labour would return to the failed model of schools micromanaged by bureaucrats and politicians, undoing everything we've done to extend opportunity and give families security."The statement added: "Our reforms have seen more 11-year-olds leaving school able to read, write and add up properly, a narrowing of the achievement gap between pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds and their peers and a million more pupils in good and outstanding schools.""

Could Labour really ban private schools? - "Could Labour really abolish private schools? That's the big question after the party's conference voted to "integrate" private schools into the state sector.The plan would see the assets of private schools "redistributed".Universities would have a quota imposed of admitting no more than 7% of their students from private schools, so their numbers were in keeping with their proportion in the overall school population.And private schools would lose their charitable status and tax exemptions... Within hours of its announcement, the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference, representing a group of private schools, warned the policy would be "tested in the courts for years to come".The private schools could be expected to challenge its legitimacy and ask why they were being singled out for such confiscations of private property and why other forms of non-state education - whether it's nurseries, private tutors, universities or driving schools for that matter - were not... The Independent Schools Council has even suggested it could breach human rights legislation - could you stop parents from exercising the right to pay for the education of their choice?... the state sector would struggle to take on so many new pupils.It would "shift billions of pounds of additional cost on to the taxpayer and would cause massive disruption to students and staff", he said. It would mean almost another 600,000 pupils entering the state system - more than the school population of Wales. And with average per pupil spending at about £6,000 per year, that would add around £3.6bn to the annual cost of running the school system... The language of "redistribution" is almost self-consciously revolutionary.And the phrasing of the motion echoes Labour's radical manifesto from 1983, which promised to end charitable status and "integrate private schools within the local authority". But it's also worth noting that this manifesto, under Labour leader Michael Foot, has been described as the "longest suicide note in history"... Although "private schools" is used as a shorthand for bastions such as Eton and Harrow - in practice, many independent schools are small, local places, often with pretty threadbare finances.Would there be much public support for seeing these smaller institutions, often with deep local roots, being shut down?"
The easiest way to achieve equality is to make everyone equally miserable

Labour would replace 'unfit for purpose' Ofsted - "Schools minister Nick Gibb said the announcement was "another sign of the extreme left-wing ideological drift that Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party has taken"."Now they want to stop parents having even the most basic information so that they can make informed choices about their children's schools""

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Fast fashion: The carbon footprint - "‘We're buying five times as many items of clothing as we were 30 years ago. I'm in the UK where we’re the worst culprits of but it's very hard to walk past one of your stores and see a dress saying 29 pounds 99. You don't need to wait till payday, you can buy it now, many of the people we’ve spoken to saying if you’re serious about sustainability, put the prices up, we need to buy less’‘Each person is free to decide how much he or she like to buy at any point in time. Or if this person wants to spend money going to a restaurant or buying clothes. This is the freedom that each person has’
When leftists want companies to charge more, so the poor can't afford their products. Ahh...

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Morality of Fashion - "'So I too have been to Bangladesh, I have talked to academic researchers looking at what actually is the effect of the wages that are being paid in these sweatshops. And it's beneficial, these wages are higher than alternative occupations. Paul Krugman has written an absolutely superb essay called Ricardo’s difficult idea, pointing out that in the absence of sweatshops in the Philippines, people are trying to eat the rubbish heaps of Smoky Mountain. This is an advance'…
‘I'm trying to say, just this contrast, which ordinary people look at between people wearing incredibly expensive fashion garments, and the people who make them being paid almost not enough to live on and to eat off. Is that contrast in and of itself immoral?’
‘No. The question we really ought to be asking is, how do we improve matters, and you make poor people richer’...
‘I guess what you're talking about there is you specifically thinking about women and the body issues argument and the pressure on women to adhere to certain beauty standards. Isn't that making a judgment about women's capabilities to be moral agents, and as I said, understand these pressures within the fashion industry, which are obvious. And then rise above it?’
‘Well, it's not just women and girls, actually, increasing number of boys and men are reporting mental health issues around their body image... research actually shows that men tend to be less confident... about their body image than women are… I think [diversity’s] a step in the right direction, I still believe that there will be a large proportion of the population that are vulnerable to aspiration beyond attainment.’
‘And what's wrong with having an aspiration that's beyond attainment? Because I think part of what fashion is about you could argue, is doing something different with yourself... isn't... focusing on the mental health aspect of it needing to represent us just going further down that kind of narcissistic spiral of the fashion industry?’...
‘I'm trying to think about what is it specifically about fashion, which, which bothers me, and there is something about this gap between the sort of peacocking consumption that goes on in a beautiful suit or dress or something, and the conditions of poverty. Now we can, we can argue about the ways in which poverty is alleviated. But that gap that exists there, and the fact that one is premised on the other, still, irrespective of how you resolve one, makes me feel, I think lots of people feel distinctly uncomfortable.’
‘But that's because your main problem is not with the poor, it’s with the rich.’
‘It’s both. It’s both I have a problem, you and I disagree about this, I do have a problem with excessive wealth, as well as, as well as with excessive poverty, definitely’...
‘Fashion had become democratized and affordable, that if we're looking at, you know, you've been very snooty about fast fashion and cheap dresses and throwaway culture and everything. But you know, a couple of generations ago, poor people didn't have any of these opportunities’
‘Well I agree. And when I put that, therefore, her solution would be to make it unaffordable, and to deprive people, poor people of the ability of obtaining these garments, and make them only affordable by the rich, she didn't seem to follow that logic.’"

BBC World Service - The World This Week, Trump's racism row - "Many China watches think that China's GDP figures can't necessarily be relied on, although the feeling is that they're more reliable than they used to be. Now the reason for that is that the combined GDP in China comes from different provinces. Now some provinces, in order to gain more support from the national government will downplay their GDP, and others will exaggerate it in order to show off...
Worth his or her weight in gold, is a well known turn of phrase. But for many modern big stars, it now seems hopelessly out of date. Let's illustrate the point with the most expensive ever football transfer. That was the Brazilian striker Neymar when he moved from Barcelona to Paris St-Germain in 2017. The fee was 222 million euros, equivalent to about a quarter of a billion dollars. When he went to Barcelona, his weight was reported to be about 64 kilograms. The club was said to be concerned that he was a bit too light for the rigors of Spanish football, and wanted him to bulk up a bit. So let's use a slightly higher figurative value him, say 70 kilograms… On those numbers, the Brazilian players weight in gold would have cost you four and a half million dollars. You couldn't possibly buy a Neymar for that money, you couldn't quite manage 2% of him, at least at his 2017 valuation… Is there anything else that Neymar would be worth his weight in? The most expensive spice saffron? No. And that's quite a relief. I'm very partial to paella... What about diamonds? The pricing is complex. But if you could get enough high quality and large diamonds together, you can beat the price of the Brazilian star, you'd also have to spend quite a lot on security and insurance"

BBC World Service - The World This Week, Boris takes centre stage - "When I lived in Paris, I had an apartment in a part of the city, where the streets were named after 18th century scientists, the botanists Carl Linnaeus and the Comte du Buffon among others. I admired this public veneration for learning and thought of it as characteristically French. There's a botanical garden nearby called the Jardin des Plantes. Go and check it out a British friend advised me when I first moved there, there's a statute to the scientist to develop the theory of evolution as the origin of species. Why would the French put up a monument to the quintessentially English Charles Darwin I wondered? It was only when I stood in front of it, that I saw that of course, it's not Darwin. It's the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. The history of science in the English speaking world has relegated Lamarck to a minor role, but he prefigured Darwin by a generation and in France, he not Darwin remains the father of the theory of evolution. We tell our national stories, and we people them with our own national heroes. France has been fighting a rearguard action for its place in the world for generations. It is a story of a long slow retreat from the condition of Empire. The former British Prime Minister Anthony Eden said famously uncontroversially that after the Second World War, the French had, in the end, forgiven Germany for invading and occupying their country, but not forgiven America for liberating it... France’s sense of its place and purpose in the world was battered when Rwanda, hitherto part of La Francophonie, the community of French speaking nations, joined the Commonwealth… [On English replacing French as an administrative language] How much worse than that is this latest rejection of French in Algeria, a country which within living memory was not just a French territory, but an integral part of metropolitan France itself?"