The Government PR machine has failed quite spectacularly again. Yesterday after months of been bashed over the issue of EMA we have finally come up with a bursary scheme that is much fairer than Labour's Educational Maintenance Allowence.
The Government is doing the right thing, EMA was a classic example of Labour wasting money. Yes, there are students in real need and do need support to continue with their post GCSE education. But nine out of ten who receive EMA would have done A-Levels without it. My sister in law got EMA, she spent it on new clothes, a friend of mine called his EMA his "going out on the piss fund". These are not isolated examples. 45% of 16-18 students received EMA, an astonishing figure, do 45% of these students really need thirty quid a week from the tax payer?
So I fully support changing EMA (note I don't use the word scrap). The problem is that we should have had a scheme in place when the first announcements about EMA were made. Then we could have plausible denied we were scrapping it. The Government could also have said we were giving more money to those who needed it most. We could have called them EMA bursaries.
Instead the PR machine announced they were being scrapped so Labour could tell hundreds of thousands of parents and teenagers that the Lib Dems were evil and going back on promises. Rather than us telling the population we were saving money and helping the poorest. Slick!
Wednesday 30 March 2011
Monday 28 March 2011
Why our intervention in Libya is right
Ten days ago was the eight anniversary of the start of Iraq War. I was opposed to that war. I even joined the over a million others in marching against it - something I had never done before.
Now once again British planes are bombing an Islamic nations tanks, do I feel a sense of deja vu?
The simple truth is that I do not. I believe the actions of the coalition are essentially just. However this does not mean that I have changed my mind of the Iraq War. I still believe that was not morally justifiable.
There a 3 factors with regard to the Libyan conflict that were not evident in the Iraq conflict.
The first is the imminence of a humanitarian catastrophe. Had we not started bombing, Benghazi would have fallen and Gaddafi would have levelled the city. It is likely that the number of dead would dwarfed the death toll from the Japanese Tsunami. This was another Rwanda, another Srebrenicia, another Cambodia in the making. In Iraq the there was not the same immediate threat to vast numbers of civilians. I don't doubt Saddam was a terrible, evil dictator. But by 2003 he simply didn't have the capacity and ability to kill the amount people to qualify for a humanitarian catastrophe. Why is this concept important? quite simply war by it's very nature is horrific and will kill and cause damage that is greater most abuses of human rights. Only with an imminent humanitarian catastrophe can war prevent more damage than it will cause.
My second factor leads on from this point and that is the response is proportionate. We have essentially stopped Gaddafi from killing his subjects, but we haven't gone the whole hog and invaded or fired nuclear weapons, napalmed towns etc. So again we have limited the damage that war causes as far as possible to combatants. With Iraq, the response was not proportionate, the damage we caused; 700,000 dead (according to one report)years of civil war, the collapse of state infrastructure was not a proportionate response, as the good of removing Saddam was outweighed by cost of the action.
Finally the Libyan conflict has legal backing. Unlike Iraq, the UN has passed a resolution that sanctions hostilities. In Iraq there was no resolution, mainly because we had not reached the end of the diplomatic process, in Libya the diplomatic time frame was much shorter because of the imminent threat to Benghazi. In Iraq, weapons inspectors were still to report and then there could have been further movements towards forcing Saddam to comply with Human Rights law. Yet the invasion took place before legal backing had being obtained. Legality is important as the failure by the allies in Iraq to obey the will of the UN, undermined international law, potentially for generations. This assists those leaders who wish to break international law as they now have a powerful precedent and will argue if prosecuted that it is "victors (or western) justice" with some degree of justification.
In conclusion, this does not meant that the Libyan conflict will necesserley remain just, if we are causing more damage than we are stopping, or the UN decrees that we should stop then the conflict in my view would become unjust...time will tell.
Now once again British planes are bombing an Islamic nations tanks, do I feel a sense of deja vu?
The simple truth is that I do not. I believe the actions of the coalition are essentially just. However this does not mean that I have changed my mind of the Iraq War. I still believe that was not morally justifiable.
There a 3 factors with regard to the Libyan conflict that were not evident in the Iraq conflict.
The first is the imminence of a humanitarian catastrophe. Had we not started bombing, Benghazi would have fallen and Gaddafi would have levelled the city. It is likely that the number of dead would dwarfed the death toll from the Japanese Tsunami. This was another Rwanda, another Srebrenicia, another Cambodia in the making. In Iraq the there was not the same immediate threat to vast numbers of civilians. I don't doubt Saddam was a terrible, evil dictator. But by 2003 he simply didn't have the capacity and ability to kill the amount people to qualify for a humanitarian catastrophe. Why is this concept important? quite simply war by it's very nature is horrific and will kill and cause damage that is greater most abuses of human rights. Only with an imminent humanitarian catastrophe can war prevent more damage than it will cause.
My second factor leads on from this point and that is the response is proportionate. We have essentially stopped Gaddafi from killing his subjects, but we haven't gone the whole hog and invaded or fired nuclear weapons, napalmed towns etc. So again we have limited the damage that war causes as far as possible to combatants. With Iraq, the response was not proportionate, the damage we caused; 700,000 dead (according to one report)years of civil war, the collapse of state infrastructure was not a proportionate response, as the good of removing Saddam was outweighed by cost of the action.
Finally the Libyan conflict has legal backing. Unlike Iraq, the UN has passed a resolution that sanctions hostilities. In Iraq there was no resolution, mainly because we had not reached the end of the diplomatic process, in Libya the diplomatic time frame was much shorter because of the imminent threat to Benghazi. In Iraq, weapons inspectors were still to report and then there could have been further movements towards forcing Saddam to comply with Human Rights law. Yet the invasion took place before legal backing had being obtained. Legality is important as the failure by the allies in Iraq to obey the will of the UN, undermined international law, potentially for generations. This assists those leaders who wish to break international law as they now have a powerful precedent and will argue if prosecuted that it is "victors (or western) justice" with some degree of justification.
In conclusion, this does not meant that the Libyan conflict will necesserley remain just, if we are causing more damage than we are stopping, or the UN decrees that we should stop then the conflict in my view would become unjust...time will tell.
Thursday 24 March 2011
I'm £85.14 better off
Hooray, this is the second budget in a row I'm better off!
Under Labour I was always worse off because although low paid, i don't have kids or qualify for the myriad of benefits that Labour introduced. Labour wanted to buy off the middle class swing voters, so many low paid got shafted. The raising of the threshold is the fairest way to help those on low incomes and helping people into work. It's also cheap to introduce as it's simple, the only problem is that it doesn't bind voters to the Government in the way that Labour's tax credits did. It's better economics, morally better but politically Labour have the last laugh.
Under Labour I was always worse off because although low paid, i don't have kids or qualify for the myriad of benefits that Labour introduced. Labour wanted to buy off the middle class swing voters, so many low paid got shafted. The raising of the threshold is the fairest way to help those on low incomes and helping people into work. It's also cheap to introduce as it's simple, the only problem is that it doesn't bind voters to the Government in the way that Labour's tax credits did. It's better economics, morally better but politically Labour have the last laugh.
Monday 21 March 2011
The shame of American justice: Patricia Spottedcrow
I've recently come across a case that actually shocked me to my core. A 25 year old mother of four has been sentenced to TEN years in prison for selling 31 dollars worth of weed. Apparently the (numbskull) judge who handed out this ludicrous sentence thought it was lenient!
There are a couple of points to be made here: Firstly, Patricia Spottedcrow had no previous convictions. Secondly she was the primary carer of four children under the age of nine (the youngest is only 12 months old). Thirdly it was a sting operation, she sold the drugs to an undercover cop. Fourth, this is the USA, although anyone reading this had probably realised that already!
So what has the idiot judge achieved:
1. Leaving four children without a mother, the children now have a 20-30% of going to prison later in life and likely to be far less successful in terms of education and employment than if their mother was on the outside. Psychologically it is much harder for children to grow up without a mother.
2. A huge cost to the tax payer, Oklahoma residents will pay for the food, board and lodge of this woman along with the help that will need to be provided to her children.
3. She will now be far less likely to be able to get a job in future and therefore is more likely to commit a further crime, making Oklahoma's streets more dangerous than less dangerous.
4. The judge has robbed a human of ten years of her life for committing what can in reality be only called a minor crime - no one was hurt, the person buying the weed was doing it as part of their free will and the quantity was tiny.
The point I am trying to make is that sentencing cannot just be about punishment, we cannot take the social consequences out of this type of decision. Of course having children shouldn't mean you should get away with murder but this type of punishment has no benefits to society - so why bother?
I think cannabis should be legalised, I accept the health implications, but taxing and educating people about a drug is much more effective than banning (see alcohol in the prohibition era - as that was obviously a resounding success!) but even the staunchest defender of criminalization of drugs cannot really agree with this sentence.
I hope people in the USA will write to the Governor of Oklahoma to ask for him to pardon Miss Spottedcrow, but I wouldn't hold my breath, America doesn't have a great record of correcting injustice.
There are a couple of points to be made here: Firstly, Patricia Spottedcrow had no previous convictions. Secondly she was the primary carer of four children under the age of nine (the youngest is only 12 months old). Thirdly it was a sting operation, she sold the drugs to an undercover cop. Fourth, this is the USA, although anyone reading this had probably realised that already!
So what has the idiot judge achieved:
1. Leaving four children without a mother, the children now have a 20-30% of going to prison later in life and likely to be far less successful in terms of education and employment than if their mother was on the outside. Psychologically it is much harder for children to grow up without a mother.
2. A huge cost to the tax payer, Oklahoma residents will pay for the food, board and lodge of this woman along with the help that will need to be provided to her children.
3. She will now be far less likely to be able to get a job in future and therefore is more likely to commit a further crime, making Oklahoma's streets more dangerous than less dangerous.
4. The judge has robbed a human of ten years of her life for committing what can in reality be only called a minor crime - no one was hurt, the person buying the weed was doing it as part of their free will and the quantity was tiny.
The point I am trying to make is that sentencing cannot just be about punishment, we cannot take the social consequences out of this type of decision. Of course having children shouldn't mean you should get away with murder but this type of punishment has no benefits to society - so why bother?
I think cannabis should be legalised, I accept the health implications, but taxing and educating people about a drug is much more effective than banning (see alcohol in the prohibition era - as that was obviously a resounding success!) but even the staunchest defender of criminalization of drugs cannot really agree with this sentence.
I hope people in the USA will write to the Governor of Oklahoma to ask for him to pardon Miss Spottedcrow, but I wouldn't hold my breath, America doesn't have a great record of correcting injustice.
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