Civil Liberty

Make assisted dying work, Starmer tells Streeting

Are we going to have targets? Quotas? Tractor production statistics?

Insistences that that’s yer lot because we must overfill the quota? Comrade?

A former Conservative councillor who was recorded saying that every white man should have a black slave has been banned from public office for four years.

Andrew Edwards, who was a Tory councillor on Pembrokeshire county council in Wales, was heard making the comments in a 16-second WhatsApp voice clip.

He referred himself to the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales when it emerged, but claimed the recording may have been a “deepfake” hoax.

However, he has been banned from standing as a council candidate for four years after the watchdog ruled that it was his voice.

In the clip, Mr Edwards said: “Nothing wrong with the skin colour at all. I think all white men should have a black man as a slave or black woman as a slave, you know.

“There’s nothing wrong with skin colour, it’s just that they’re lower class than us white people, you know.”

Yer wha‘?

Thought we’d sorted this all out with John Wilkes?

The only people who get to decide whether someone’s views are inconsistent with public office are the voters. This then extends to criminal offences – which he’s not been charged with anyway – and even then only if sentenced to a year and a day in pokey. Even that only applies to the year while they’re an MP. Haviong been sentenced and served in the past doesn’t count.

How in buggery have we ended up with purity tests for public office? And, what are all the other ones?

“Which viewpoints NPR and PBS promote does not matter. What does matter is that neither entity presents a fair, accurate or unbiased portrayal of current events to tax-paying citizens,” Trump said.

“Today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options. Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.”

Now, about that BBC.

A dozen ministers could quit over Starmer’s disability welfare cuts

Yes, yes, let’s kill the babbies, the old, ill, depressed, but take a tenner a week off my constituents and I’m outta here!

Cunts.

Civil servants will be given “dangerous” powers to access the public’s bank accounts under Government plans branded a “snoopers’ charter”.

Privacy campaigners and peers have raised concerns about the legislation, which would give mid-ranking officials powers that are usually reserved for police investigators.

The new fraud Bill will allow civil servants to ask banks to provide personal information about a person’s account without a court order, and extract funds if they “reasonably believe” that money is owed to the taxpayer.

The crayon eaters can just take money from your bank account whenever?

Tower Hill for whoever thought that one up then. And their horse.

Léo Lins was found guilty of inciting intolerance with a 2022 stand-up routine that made fun of black people, indigenous people, fat people, gay people, Jews, evangelicals, disabled people and those with HIV.

During the performance, which was uploaded to YouTube and has more than three million views, Lins told a 4,000-strong crowd in Curitiba, in southern Brazil: “Prejudice, to me, is a primitive thing that shouldn’t exist any more. Just like indigenous people. Enough already.”

Wearing a bright red shirt and yellow trousers, he warned the audience that he “jokes about everything and everyone”.

He told them: “What show could be more inclusive? I even hired a sign language interpreter just to be able to offend the deaf-mute.”

Anyone got a translation?

Public ownership of England’s water companies could cost close to zero, says thinktank
Exclusive: Common Wealth report argues debt, pollution and underinvestment justify process known as special administration

The mechanism he suggests using is “Steal it”.

“Would I have been prosecuted if I’d set fire to a copy of the Bible outside Westminster Abbey? I doubt it.”

The CPS said that Coskun was not being prosecuted for burning the book.

They argued it was the combination of his derogatory remarks about Islam and the fact that it was done in public that made it an offence.

The CPS originally charged Coskun, who is an atheist, with harassing the “religious institution of Islam”.

Do public blasphemy is illegal, private is not. That’s not actually much of a solution, is it?

A handful of “small but dirty” public affairs and law firms in Europe are enabling pollution by lobbying extensively for big oil, an analysis has found, with most major companies in the industry working for at least one fossil fuel client.

Several of the top spenders on activities to influence EU policymaking are on the payroll of oil and gas companies, according to an analysis of the EU Transparency Register by the Good Lobby nonprofit, but fossil fuel clients represent just 1% of the industry’s revenue.

The researchers said it showed that public affairs companies could cut ties with the big polluters who pay them to influence policy without hurting their bottom lines – but warned there was little public or regulatory pressure on lobbyists to go green.

Those bad people over there shouldn’t have free speech. Because we’re perfect, we are…..

The French justice system chose courage over surrender. The law was clear, and so was the court in its sentencing: no special treatment for Marine Le Pen, no deference to the powerful, no using a candidacy for office as an excuse to break the law with impunity.

For more than a decade, from 2004 to 2016, Le Pen’s reactionary rightwing party – named the Front National until 2018, when it became the Rassemblement National (RN) – operated an organised scheme to embezzle public funds by creating fictitious parliamentary assistant jobs at the European parliament, and to break other financial rules, in effect using European public money to finance a debt-ridden party domestically. Under a French anti-corruption law passed in 2016, the guilty verdict rendered against Le Pen comes with a sentence of ineligibility to run for office.

The Guardian columnist actually approves of the law passed after the act prosecuted under the law.

In the name of anti-fascism, of course.

Romania has banned the far-right frontrunner in the country’s presidential vote from taking part in the election, in a move that comes despite warnings from the US to respect voters’ wishes.
The country’s electoral bureau said on Sunday it was invalidating Călin Georgescu’s candidacy after receiving objections that he had violated laws against extremism.

Only the right sort of people are allowed to compete, of course…..can’t have the people actually choosing something we don’t want now, can we?

Assisted dying would be provided by private companies under plans to stop a flood of requests hampering efforts to bring down NHS waiting lists.

Options to contract out assisted death to the private sector are being considered in government in an effort to ease pressure on NHS clinics while dealing with doctors’ insistence that a separate service is needed to help patients to end their own lives.

No, go on, just imagine…..

I’ll start with the most straightforward case. X should be banned outright, for precisely the reasons that the US Congress tried to ban TikTok, and for its general evil and toxicity. We already have alternatives in Bluesky and, more appealingly, the Fediverse. An important additional step would be the establishment of an official platform, open only to legitimate public and non-profit organisations for the kinds of public service functions that have migrated to X, and also to Facebook – weather alerts would be an obvious example.

Sigh.

On Wednesday, Jeff Bezos, the third-richest person in America, who bought the Washington Post in 2013, announced that the paper’s opinion section would henceforth focus on defending “personal liberties and free markets”.

Anything inconsistent with this view would not be published, according to his statement. “Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

The Post’s opinion editor, David Shipley, promptly resigned, as he should have.

ou’ll recall that Bezos barred the Post from endorsing Kamala Harris in the last weeks of the 2024 election. Subsequently, the paper wouldn’t print its cartoonist’s drawing showing Bezos and other oligarchs bowing to Trump, leading the cartoonist to resign.

Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, bought Twitter in 2022, laid off everyone who was filtering out hateful crap on the platform, renamed it X and turned it into a cesspool of lies in support of Trump.

Mark Zuckerberg, the second-richest person, has followed suit, allowing Facebook to emit lies, hate and bigotry in support of Trump’s lies, hate and bigotry.

How very dare anyone allow people to say what they think?

Britain has launched a crackdown on “hypermasculine” social media after digital watchdog Ofcom urged technology giants to take action against “misogyny influencers”.

I always think of social media as being intensely feminine. The fashions, backstabs and general ganging up are far more like a gaggly of teenage girls than anything else.

The technology regulator has proposed new measures aimed at tackling online abuse of women and girls, urging social media sites to go “above and beyond” the legal duties required under the Online Safety Act when tackling sexist speech.

And there’s a lovely example. Yes, yes, sure, it’s legal, you’re allopwed to do that but don’t because it’s hurty.

We’ve known for decades that some American tech companies were problematic for democracy because they were fragmenting the public sphere and fostering polarisation.

That people do their own thing is a problem for democracy? What?

Psychiatrists have warned there may not be enough doctors in their profession to meet the needs of the assisted dying Bill.

Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP behind the Bill, tabled a raft of last-minute amendments last week – scrapping the involvement of a High Court judge and handing the final decision to a three-member panel, comprising a social worker, a lawyer and a psychiatrist.

But two eminent professors of psychiatry have warned that staff shortages could make the inclusion of psychiatrists unworkable.

Sigh.

You’re not being asked to do anything. Well, other than just leave a pile of signed and otherwise blank permissions by hte door.

Google has cooperated with autocratic regimes around the world, including the Kremlin in Russia and the Chinese Communist party, to facilitate censorship requests, an Observer investigation can reveal.

The technology company has engaged with the administrations of about 150 countries since 2011 that want information scrubbed from their public domains.

As well as democratic governments, it has interacted with dictatorships, sanctioned regimes and governments accused of human rights abuses, including the police in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

That is, Google obeys the law.

Obviously, the law in a specific place can be good or bad by our standards. But it is still the law in that place. And do we actually want private sector companies deciding which local laws they’re going to follow? Or not?

Imagine if Google – unilaterally – decided not to obey UK law. The Observer’s reaction would be?

A Nigerian woman who tried and failed eight times to secure asylum in Britain was finally granted the right to stay after joining a terrorist organisation just to boost her claim.

If you do join a terrorist group then you *can* stay.

The judge who gave the 49-year-old woman the right to stay acknowledged that she was not being honest about her political beliefs and had become involved with the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) only “in order to create a claim for asylum”.

The woman, who came to the UK in 2011, joined IPOB in 2017. A separatist group that has been blamed for acts of violence against the Nigerian state, it has been banned as a terrorist organisation by Nigeria but is not proscribed in the UK.

Upper tribunal judge Gemma Loughran ruled that the asylum seeker’s activities on behalf of the group meant she had a “well-founded fear of persecution” under human rights laws due to her “imputed” political opinion.

At which point the usual observation. The moment you’ve got a system of any complexity at all then folk will try to beat that complexity.

“But no one would cut their dick off just to win bicycle races.” “But no one would reject a job to stay on welfare” “But no one would join a terrorist group just to stay in the country” – yes, they would. Observably.

But no one would talk Granny into topping herself…….

Pro-Palestinian activists were planning a demonstration through London as the Oct 7 massacre was taking place, it has emerged.

At 12.50pm on the day of the 2023 terror attack, while it was still ongoing, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) notified the Metropolitan Police that they intended to hold a protest.

A PSC organiser told police over the phone that the group planned to march through London on the following Saturday, Oct 14, a freedom of information request revealed.

At least it wasn’t before…..