Starmer Officially Refuses to Sack Mike Tapp
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30 Jun 2009
27 Jun 2009
26 Jun 2009
The Essential Michael Jackson?
By Nick Currie, this is the best I've read today - and it was written in 2005! Thanks to Pat Kane for the recommendation.
........Consider all the extraordinary ways in which Michael Jackson is Yet-Also. He's black yet also white. He's adult yet also a child. He's male yet also female. He's gay yet also straight. He has children, yet he's also never fucked their mothers. He's wearing a mask, yet he's also showing his real self. He's walking yet also sliding. He's guilty yet also innocent. He's American yet also global. He's sexual yet also sexless. He's immensely rich yet also bankrupt. He's Judy Garland yet also Andy Warhol. He's real yet also synthetic. He's crazy yet also sane, human yet also robot, from the present yet also from the future. He declares his songs heavensent, and yet he also constructs them himself. He's the luckiest man in the world yet the unluckiest. His work is play. He's bad, yet also good. He's blessed yet also cursed. He's alive, but only in theory..........
Read the full article, written in 2005, here
Read more...Greengairs Incinerator
North Lanarkshire approves 300,000 tonnes per annum toxic fag end and the Scottish Government doesn't think that this is of national importance - read this and make up your own mind.
Environmental Campaigner Fiona Sinclair writes.
As someone who fought a campaign against one of Scotland's 2 merchant incinerators and who lived as a teenager within a 5 mile radius of the other, and having gleaned a wealth of informationabout the effects of environmental toxins down the years, I may be one of the best placed people to comment on the planning approval for a 300,000 tpa incinerator at Greengairs in North Lanarkshire.
Given that my own campaign was successful in stopping the incinerator, inspite of retrospective planning permission having been granted centrally by the Scottish Office, there is still hope that the Greengairs incinerator can be stopped in its tracks.
I am sure that there are rather a lot of people who are breathing a sigh of relief that such an incinerator is not going to be in their back yard. The illogicality of that position, given the known pollution fallout from incinerators, has to be challenged, as indeed should the decision by the Cabinet Secretary for the Environment not to call in this permission, on the basis that it is not of national importance. (A golf resort in Aberdeenshire is of national importance, but not a major additional source of environmental toxins.)
The Greengairs campaigners say that the whole `development`, including the incinerator, is contrary to the Structure and draft Local Plans, but because of changes to planning legislation since April, is not being called in. The draft Local Plan was not part of the councillors' consideration, even though the campaigners had spent a great deal of time and effort in their contribution to this. Councillors used the previous plan of 1991 instead. Of course, this fails to take CO2 emissions, let alone anything else, into account. Local campaigners also point out that, if all the council's proposals are implented, Greengairs will be dealing with 1 million tpa of waste per annum. As such, the proposals are clearly of national significance and importance. From experience elsewhere, incineration acts as a disincentive to recycling, re-use or, indeed, to clean production. Therefore, unless the Lanarkshire councils plan to abandon the targets they are set for recycling, they are going to have to import waste from outwith Lanarkshire on a far bigger scale than they are doing at present. Given the economic downturn, it is more likely that such importation will include waste from outwith Scotland. How much of a PR disaster will that be to a naionalist government?.
The Women's Environmental Network, FOE Scotland, Greenpeace, WWF Scotland and the Scottish Green Party should all be asked to add their voices to a call for this planning application to be called in, on the basis that, at 300,000tpa (tonnes per annum), it is clearly both a major additional source of environmental toxins and carbon dioxide and incompatible with a purported`zero waste policy` which seeks to minimise waste and maximise recycling and re-use of resources. Quite how a reduction of 42% in CO2 is to be achieved by 2020 without including transport or incineration in this strategy, beats me. I can only assume that this represents a further entrenchment within the permanent North British government, even to the extent of denying that incinerators emit CO2, pretty much along the same lines of the expressed attitude of waste disposal companies that incineration is a liability-free method of waste disposal.
When I was campaigning on this issue during the late 80s and early 90s, there was no internet, and therefore no cheap or easy way to access information or to lobby. Even more importantly, there was little research on the health effects of incineration and of the environmental toxins that this processcreates. Indeed, Greenpeace specifically warned community campaigners against campaigning on health grounds because of this. Nearly 20 years later, there is plenty of research and scientific consensus on the health effects ofincineration, in spite of what SEPA officials may claim. The early research pointed to cancer as a suspected health effect - concerns are now more focussed on the longer term effects on children and more recent research isproviding evidence of neurological effects. There has been an explosion in the incidence of neurological disorders, and there are established links between these and environmental toxins..
The fact that much research cannot prove causality for specific toxins as regards human health is neither here nor there - we don't live under laboratory conditions. When there has been a 30 year assault on independently funded scientific research within the UK, it's no wonder that it has taken so long to establish a body of research providing clear links between ill health and environmental toxins. Indeed, most of the research is international, not domestic. It is government's job to apply the Precautionary Principle, not to play pass the parcel between suspect pollutants and polluters when it comes to accountability.
No-one can say that this is not a national issue, for the aforestated reasons, and because there are more incinerators planned in Scotland and elsewhere inthe UK. The Scottish Government should dispose of the toxic chalice of incineration and implement a geniune zero waste policy.
Fiona Sinclair undertook all the Scottish research for `Waste Not, Want Not`, by Robert Allen, published in 1992 by Earthscan. This book collated theaccounts of community campaigns throughout the UK against proposals for toxicwaste incinerators and dumps. See Comments section for some useful links
16 Jun 2009
Calman Reflections
It would be churlish to call the recommendations of the Calman Commission irrelevant tinkering. Potentially granting the Scottish Parliament £10 billion pounds worth of tax raising powers, plus extending its remit in a number of other important areas is, in Unionist terms, significant.
But first of all, let's be clear: Unionist proposals maybe, but produced in the context of the SNP's historic win in May 2007 and the SNP's subsequent successes. So, even without participating, these concessions are nationalist victories, whatever the spin. Because as Jim Murphy, Brown and co all hail the Commission's recommendation, remember Jimbo's immediate predecessor as Secretary of State for Scotland, Des Browne said he saw no need whatsoever for a review of The Scotland Act, a view endorsed by both Gordon Brown and Tony Blair.
So whatever happened to that "settled will of the Scottish People"? And who are these Unionist appointed Calman commissioners, and now a committee of Unionist party leaders chaired by Jim Murphy to unsettle it?
So whatever happened to that "settled will of the Scottish People"? And who are these Unionist appointed Calman commissioners, and now a committee of Unionist party leaders chaired by Jim Murphy to unsettle it?
Remember it was Nulab in 1997 that insisted on a separate referendum question on the new -parliament's tax raising powers when the power on offer was no more that what has turned out to be a theoretical right to vary the basic rate of income tax by 3p. But now Holyrood is to have, not just theoretical power, but the annual obligation to set all rates of income tax, plus the ability to vary these by as much as 10p.
But no referendum to endorse these significant new powers.
How very old politics. How so not 1997. How so not 2009 .....for it all to be down to of a small cabal of polticians to decide. No need for a referendum - incredulously confirmed on Newsnight Scotland last night by Tavish Scott, who leads a party screaming for one on electoral reform. And this morning Labour is making a virtue of having most of the Calman's proposals legislated on before the next UK General election. That's right, disgraced and corrupt MPs like Margaret Moran and Andrew McKay get a say, but the people of Scotland don't.
And whatever happened to the sovereignty of the Scottish People, the claimed DNA of the Scottish Constitutional Convention?
So, well done Calmun Commission, you've done you job within the remit you were given. But now surely it is the job of the people of Scotland. not a cabal of Unionist politicians (half appointed directly from London), and a whipped fag end Westminster parliament containing people that may end up in jail to decide the next steps?
Unionist politicians seem strangely afraid of the people - even on their own proposals!
Got a view - post it here by all means, but why not instead make it on Scots Voices an new broad based blog set up to discuss Calman and related matters? Worth a visit.
Read more...
14 Jun 2009
In Search of Labour's Soul
Today's Sunday Herald carries and excellent feature by doyen of diarists, now returned reporter Tom Shields. I recommend a full read , but below for me are the most striking paragraphs, especially as we mark ten years of devolution: The infamous 1998-99 selection process, when a Blairite London appointed committee, chaired by Rosemary MacKenna, supervised by Jack McConnell, and fully endorsed by Donald Dewar and Gordon Brown, ripped the intellectual and independent soul out of the Labour Party in Scotland before the new parly even met. Where it all started to go wrong for Scottish Labour, what in big measure explains where it is today. Tom Shields takes up the story:
"....The party does nothing to encourage or recruit energetic, colourful or independent-minded individuals. The default choice is for the candidate who will be a safe pair of hands. Which usually means docile and biddable. The decline of personality in the Labour ranks is a legacy of the infamous selection process of 1999. The great and good of the party were supposed to choose the brightest and the best for the Scottish parliament. They singularly failed to do so.
"Applicants with a spark were excluded in favour of people who had made no mark and would make no mark. People in their 30s and 40s who had left no fingerprints of achievement were put into our national legislature. We were landed with legislators and tribunes who were ineffectual and unaccomplished, with no track record as strategic thinkers or ability to communicate. They were never going to bloom. It is a legacy which affects Labour and Scotland. ........."
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