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Renewing participatory democracy Multiple Differential Uncertainty |
Week 3 Saturday No Laughing Matter 
This is an appeal for your help. The collapse of public toilet provision in the UK is a serious matter. Half of the nation's public loos have been closed down by local councils, within the last ten years. This scandal, and the consequential public health risks, are highlighted this week in The Guardian. Your help is needed. I have registered a new public hygiene charity - Hygeia, Reg No 1,097,294 - which will be able to provide self-funding 24-hour public toilet facilities. We are seeking the support of both private owners (shopping centres, malls) and local authorities. And we need local eyes-and-ears throughout the UK, to identify the most urgent requirements. We also need charity volunteers who take the issue seriously and are prepared to spend time and energy to help us solve the problem. We do not need your money. But we do need your intelligence, your concern, and your time. If you know of local circumstances where provision needs to be made, or where local authority provision is threatened, we want to hear from you. 
Sanity from Worthing Chris Baldwin is a paraplegic, and redoubtable campaigner for the right to use cannabis medicinally, a member also of the Legalise Cannabis Alliance. He ran his own cannabis cafe in Worthing, and has just been imprisoned for six months. The middle-o'-th'-road Worthing Argus carried this Leader, which I commend to you... What idiots we make of ourselves. Or rather, our politicians make of us. To register your support for drugs legalisation, click Angel Declaration
Fiscophobia 
The "fear of taxation" has become - absurdly - the driving force of UK politics. Michael Howard's new electoral strategy is founded upon it. The "top-up fees" saga is driven by the Government's refusal to admit to raising taxes to pay for higher university expenditure. Labour's drive to maximise the scope of the private finance initiative is inspired by the same imperative. The craven failure of the Government to address the Great Pensions Crisis is driven by the same fear. The demeaning panoply of minor administrative charges (which threaten to distort the essential character of public intervention) all reflect it. Even Blunkett's latest wheeze to raise "criminal injury compensation funds" by a supplementary levy on criminal fines - it's becoming a pantomime, making the Government a laughing stock.
There must be a better way.
I give thanks for 
Louise Christian is just the kind of lawyer I would have wished to be, if I had remained a practising lawyer. She is innovative, courageous, politically radical (much further Left than I will ever be..) - and dedicated to individual justice. She represents two of the UK Guantanomo Bay prisoners, and recently tracked current civil inhumanities, the world over - writing in The Guardian. Her article makes compelling, and deeply disturbing, reading. I wish I could have written it myself.
Trivial Pursuits
I find it difficult to understand what all the current fuss is really about. The "headline issues" of our domestic political headlines - first Foundation Hospitals, now top-up University fees - are minor, insubstantial political issues. They generate differences of view, but no great clashes of "principle". They certainly do not justify the political investment being made in them. How is it that both Government and "opposition" have got so hung up on them?
But that, in turn, makes me nervous. Because they can only be smoke-screens for the "real action" - which must be going on elsewhere. And that, I suspect, is the awful and unjustified aggression in Iraq, the construction of "Western" police states, the consolidation of a deeply oppressive State of Israel, the erection of an new stranglehold of professional politicians over people, under the guise of a spurious "War on Terror".
Reforming Corporations It is literally just twenty-four months since the US Enron scandal "broke" - does it not seem longer? These are the eyes of the whistle-blowing accountant Sherron Watkins, whose vigilance and courage first revealed the awful truth behind a massive, "well respected", corrupt American corporation. That was in January 2002.The European headlines are now absorb ed by the awful Italian Parmalat scandal. While Governments have huffed and puffed, no radical reform is yet on any national or international agenda, sufficient to prevent the same corruption occurring again, and again, and again.
Surfing my Diary 
For the first time in the two-year history of this Weblog, my diary was 100% up to date, at Christmas! 'Twas a big effort, over the break, but you can now browse back over the entire 24-month period
..or rather - Special Footnote 
I love the online newspapers, which are my access to the world - share them with me - click through to their Homepages from here - I have added the English-language China Daily ... and I now offer you the leading English-language Indian paper The Hindu.
Never miss
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Awful straitjacket 
The Green Belt penny may be about to drop. I have long argued that its irrational constraints should be abandoned, and high-quality residential opportunities created. Large country-park areas should be created, and residential development permitted within the framework of that park network. Government has now announced a new £63m budget, specifically for the creation of such country parks in South East England. I welcome that, and encourage the Government to go much further with the creation of public country-parks. I am fed up with planning authorities who continue to peddle Green Belt fallacies, maintaining high house-prices and blocking the creation of decent housing for future generations. 292,287,454
Our hemp  The Body Shop has answered a question which had, I confess, always
puzzledme. Does all "hemp" contain psychoactive elements or not? In their reply to a fund-raising request from the Legalise Cannabis Alliance, this is what the company said -
Dam'fool ideas  Blunkett has done it again.
What? Floated a dam'fool idea about imposing an
additional levy of motoring and other "fines", to avoid having
to top up the Criminal Injury Fund from taxation. The hapless
Baroness Scotland was put up to defend this ridiculous idea, on TV
earlier this week. Blair did the same with frog-marching rowdy
teenagers to cashpoints - remember? Other nasty wheezes regularly
crop on David Blunkett's "To Do" List. Then the Government
backs down, on the pretext that it was "just a proposal, and we
listened to public reaction". BlunketThis simply will not do. I am a fellow citizen, not any old Focus Group member. I expect Government proposals to be well-researched, practicable, capable of statutory implementation. Does Blair not realise the damage done to Labour by this cavalier approach to politics?
Misfeasance,
"Negligence" is a relatively modern civil wrong. It was only in the early-1900s that the Courts started thinking of civil liability in terms of negligence (lack of care, breach of duty of care), culminating in the Lords' ruling in the famous snail-in-bottle case (Donohue v. Stevenson 1932). And Parliament responded, in some cases, shielding certain institutions against such claims of "negligence". The Bank of England has that statutory defence, in the discharge of its public duties. That is why the creditors of the failed BCCI bank, in trying to sue the Bank of England for incompetent supervision of BCCI, have had to go back to the 19th-century legal doctrine of "misfeasance". That relates to a public officer who does something positively wrong (i.e. not simply carelessness). The doctrine used to apply (for example) to damage caused by defective highway repairs, weak bridges, even badly-installed pavement-slabs.
Awkward Squad
Seeds of optimism
Even in dark times, optimism is possible. This week, I have deliberately tried to turn away from the illiberal authoritarianism of current Western politics. I have sought to accentuate the positive. I think I can see better times ahead, the small green shoots of a more rational and peaceful world - even in the Middle East, even in Europe - and even in America. Our much-misunderstood "consumerism" is at base a factor making for peace - even corporate bosses and their shareholders now have more to gain from peace than from war. The unilateral bullying of the United States is not strengthening global friendships. And even George Bush's advisers are starting to realise that warmongering is bad for electoral prospects, in the longer-term.. Swords may well have to be beaten into ploughshares, just to win the November 2004 Election - once the money is spent on NASA, there will be less left for the Military, after all.
Left Activists' Corner I have three moderately-left political projects to engage your interest, in 2004 - nothing too revolutionary, you understand... Company Reform Coalition targeting a major Easter pow-wow in London; (b) Public Advocates - the birth of a new profession, group also to hold its first London meeting in March;
(c)
Labour Links,
seeking to unlock the resources of the
Labour Party - and I seek the opportunity to speak to Party groups about
Party reform
Let me know what you think
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New
And read the redoubtable Alun Buffry
of Norwich, and Officer of the Legalise Cannabis Alliance,
responding in the Argus and pressing home the moral case
I am not a fan of Bob Crow
of the RMT Union, but he does have a point. The Labour Party
is planning to cancel the affiliation of his Union to the Party
because of its local support, in Scotland, for the Scottish Socialist
Party. The RMT complains that, according the strict wording of the
Labour Party Constitution, every affiliated organisation must “accept
the programme, policy and principles” of the Party. That is absurd,
they argue: not even Cabinet Members can say that. Of course
they cannot.