Taking Out The Trash

Naming and shaming

Back on April 1, Justice Minister Bridget Prentice announced a new register to name and shame employers who don’t pay tribunal awards.
Prentice said: "A few unscrupulous individuals are defying or delaying payment after tribunal rulings and we will not hesitate to name and shame them.
“Delays like this prolong the ordeal and force successful claimants to continue with court action to recover their money. This is particular unacceptable following an employment tribunal."
The new register certainly had the support of the TUC. General Secretary Brendan Barber said: “This register will help put bad employers in the spotlight by naming and shaming those who fail to pay up when they lose employment tribunals.
“But action against bad employers shouldn't stop here, and the Government must put systems in place to ensure that everyone who wins an employment tribunal award actually receives it.
“Too many people are still hit by the double whammy of employers acting illegally and then refusing to pay when they are caught.”
But is the register actually performing its much-trumpeted task of naming and shaming?
When I asked for a list of the companies on the defaulters register the Ministry of Justice said: “The Register actually doesn't work that way.
“You have to have the names first before you can do a search, or you will not get a result. You can't actually do a personal search on the type of award and get a list of people or organisations back.”
The Register of Judgments, Orders and Fines lists items such as county court judgments, as well as tribunal awards. Tribunals cover not just employment hearings but also so-called First-Tier tribunals such as the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board.
The register is maintained by the Registry Trust Ltd (RTL), a not-for-profit company contracted by the Ministry of Justice.
The Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “Of course you can apply to RTL to purchase the full information on a commercial basis from the Register (as the credit reference agencies do) but there are contractual restrictions on who can purchase the data and how it can be used.
“Given that the register is designed as a proportionate deterrent, there would be data protection issues we would need to clarify with the Information Commissioner (and we will do on the back of this query) to establish where the register stands with regards to details being provided to the media.”
You can of course, do individual searches, provided you know the company’s name, at £8 a go. But that is an unwieldy deterrence.
The Ministry of Justice was able to say that there are 161 companies were on the register who had not honoured tribunal awards and 150 were employment tribunal award defaulters.
The average amount defaulted on was £6,101.85 with the lowest being £50 and the highest £50,340
I've put in a Freedom of Information request for a copy of this public database which may reveal which firm has declined to pay £50,000 awarded against it.

Deaths in custody

A few years back I wrote a piece for The Big Issue in the North on a film about deaths in custody called Injustice.

The film achieved most of its publicity not because of the shocking facts in it (that hundreds of people have died in custody and no-one has ever been successfully prosecuted) but that the Police Federation's heavy handed lawyers tried to get it banned (thus breaking rule 1 in the PR handbook).

Today there will be a march to Downing Street to remember the 2,533 people known to have died in custody since 1969. There will also be a press conference involving the TUC and United Friends and Families Campaign.

Road campaigners usually say that if all the deaths on our roads took place on one day then people would really sit up and take notice and do something about it.

That figure of 2,533 is only a couple hundred short of the number of people killed in the 9/11 attacks. Meanwhile there are 1,600 names on the UK police memorial to officers killed in the line of duty and they go back to 1680.

It's not a case that some people are less deserving of remembrance or that a police officer killed stopping a robbery is of more value than a person who chose September 11 to visit the Twin Towers.

But neither should it be true that just because you end up in custody  (wether in a police station, prison or mental institution) you forfeit any rights to life.

Just as we should rightfully honour those police officers and the people killed in 9/11 and bring to book the people responsible - so we should do the same for those in the state's custody. It is the most vulnerable who require the greatest care but who make up a significant proportion of those 2,533.

The fact that 2,533 people can die and barely anything is said about it, no-one is accountable and we're not even sure if that is the final total is, frankly, shameful.

And in other news...

This blog is named after the West Wing episode where they try to bury a load of bad news by getting it all out on a Friday.
Are we seeing a similar principle with the Glenrothes by-election?
The date has been set for November 6. Now I'm sure there's something else happening around that date? Dentist appointment? Recycling? Saturn in conjunction with Uranus?
Oh yes; on the 4th it's the presidential elections so on the 5th news will be dominated by whoever wins as will much of the 6th (along with whatever the economic crisis du jour is).
Brown's not going whatever happens in Glenrothes; but it doesn't strike a confident stance if they pick a day designed for burying bad news.

State capitalism

Really interesting post from Newsnight's Paul Mason on some wider economic implications from the current shake out of the banking sector.
As Mason points out:

On top of Northern Rock, Fannie & Freddie and 11 US deposit-taking banks now in public ownership (or "conservatorship") this is turning into a modern version of state capitalism.

Well, except over here where we continue to pretend the world hasn't moved on. Gordon could be crushed by many things and one may be well the fact that the financial order which has ruled for the last 15 years, and through which he made his career, is about to disappear.
Note: Mason's book Live Working or Die Fighting is well-worth a read.

A small country far away of which we know little

There's a good piece in the latest edition of Mother Jones on the fight by the Chagos islanders to return to their homeland.

For once, it seemed, the former inhabitants of the British atoll of Diego Garcia might get a break. It was the last day of June, and the Chagossians, a Kreol-speaking people named for the island chain encompassing their homeland, were packed into Britain's highest court to challenge Her Majesty's government over their expulsion.

The author is Dr. David Vine who is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the American University in Washington and you can read the fulll piece here.

Thanks to Celia at the UK Chagos Support Association for the tip on this.

Quite how Britain can look other countries in the eye when it talks about the rights of small nations and the bullying attitude of great powers while this injustice continues is astonishing.

I interviewed some Chaggossians and wrote a piece for the Big Issue in the North on this which you can Download here

Taking liberties

Civil liberties seem to be the issue of the moment.
Iain Dale posted this after someone complained about the the intrusive state particularly relating to schools (but aren't schools pretty autonomous now on everything other than curriculum and so free from the shackles of the state?).
Tom Harris followed this up by asking what's wrong with cctv; Iain hit back (as did his loyal legions) and it all got rather predictable and with regard to surveillance cameras.
I think the letter writer's complaint about fingerprinting in schools was far more interesting.
At the same time the shadow home secretary Dominic Grieve talks about relaxing the rules on state surveillance (and is Cameron going to be known as the politician who reduced the number of CCTV cameras?). What with Grieve's predecessor staking out the civil liberty agenda it's all got rather crowded in this particular ideological battleground.
It has led Tom Watson today to highlight what he sees as inconsistencies in the Conservative approach.
Are we under greater surveillance than, say, in 1997? Undoubtedly. As ever, technologically as outpaced public debate and neither the state or private sector has hung around too much waiting for everyone to give their OK.
Yes, there are more CCTV cameras than anywhere else but most don't work or aren't monitored - even the police see little merit in the way they are used at the moment.
But it's far more than CCTV. It's information databases and data mining. It's the way our details are shared between agencies or with other governments (Statewatch has done excellent work observing this area). Above all its a general public ignorance about what scope of surveillance that allows its abuses to flourish. If we don't know, then how can we debate the issue?
Do I think an incoming Conservative government would lead to civil liberty nirvana? No. They've already shown contempt for the Human Rights Act. They would treat enemies of the state (climate change protestors, strikers etc) with as little respect as previous administrations. And, with a tough on crime and terrorism ethos how could they make it more difficult for the police and security to 'do their job? Like Labour I think they are hamstrung by their own rhetoric.

Georgia on my mind

Don Paskini has a useful summary of how the right views events in Georgia at the moment.
The neo-cons are not short of confidence in putting their points across despite the fact that their foreign policy approach has been pretty lamentable and, in Iraq's case, an outright diaster.
There are differences on the right as to how to approach the issue (which is understandable; broad church and all that) but from the left the response generally appears to be a mixture of confusion and caution. Having read and enjoyed Shock Doctrine I'm waiting to see Naomi Klein's take on the issue.
Again, the right-wing commentators appear to have the confidence to put forward ideas and possible solutions however barking mad. (I liked Don's point about some Taxpayers Alliance spokesman who has suddenly found enthusiasm for state funding - as long as its to finance wars.)
So is my preamble a way of getting out of stating my own position on the battle between Russia and Georgia? I think Iain Dale got it right (and more importantly was honest) when he wrote initially:

Why haven't I blogged about the Russian invasion of Ossetia? Because unlike some I wanted to read up on it before formulating a view. It's a place I have frankly never heard of,

and then concludes

This has been an unusually long post for me and I am sorry it is going to conclude with a question which I have asked several times so far, but failed to come up with answer.

What. Do. We. Do?

I think this is about security of energy supply and about Russian pride and about buffers (Russia likes to have some distance between Moscow and any potential enemies) and about the assertiveness of small states and the chess games played by the West on Russia's borders.
If economic policies cripple a country then they are going to seek out other places to gain currency and security. Georgia is feeling the effects of Russian vulnerability. I think it's a bit rich for some in the West to have recommended the medicine and then condemn the side effects.
But Iain cuts the nub of it. In the short term; a UN-brokered ceasfire and a return to borders. In the long term I think a stable and engaged Russia is better than a wounded bear. That's not appeasement; it's treating countries how we expect to be treated ourselves.

PS: Still the confusion on the left is nothing to that in the Sky newsroom. As Journalism.co.uk points out; it's easy to mix up a former Russian republic and a southern US state. But then, Bush can't even hold his flag up the right way.

It's all in the breeding

Just caught this little gem from David Willetts, Conservative Shadow Higher Education Secretary, who has been furrowing his brow about the problem of marriage and the working classes.

Of course, he thinks, young men need to become apprentices to help them attract women! Willetts explained that apprenticeships should be 'part of a far bigger ambition to produce more marriageable working-class men, more stable families and less crime.'

'Women,' he claimed are: 'not feeling that they need to marry men because men are not earning enough to support them.'

I could take this apart (the sexism, the patronising class attitude) but the fword does it so much better.

Suffice to say that this is another example of how the Today programme exists in a temporal bubble all of its own. Someone from the 1950s could tune in to the programme and (apart from a few references to mobile phones) would feel perfectly at ease with it all. The chancellor gets interviewed, there is a feature on bird song, something about a social issue inspired by a story in The Archers and a debate over whether modern classical music is any good.
It's not hard to do contemporary and intelligent: Newsnight manages that on a daily basis.

Democratic Society

Came across this blog from the Democratic Society which:

"exists to support political participation and improve democracy."

They've turned up some interesting items (I liked this on the chicken and egg debate about journalism and political coups). Well worth keeping an eye on.

Cash in the policy

Picked this up from LabourHome - a reminder that some companies have no shame when it comes to dealing regimes such as the Burmese junta.