Taking Out The Trash

Bosses spies are loo-dicrous

Good piece from union member Steve Kelly about being on Ian Kerr's blacklist of construction workers.

Kelly obtained his file from the Information Commissioner's Office. He says:

"It was an 18 page document containing allegations that I was a “trouble maker”, “trade union militant” , “strike organiser” , “intimidating workers to join the union”, “threatening supervisors”, and even “writing abuse on the toilet walls”!"

So, was it some poor sap's job to inspect toilet graffiti and match it against suspect employees? That time could perhaps have been better spent insuring people were not needlessly being killed or injured at work one thinks.

note: if you think you can do a better pun for a headline then you try it.

Journalists last in the queue for MoD FOI responses

Thanks to FOI News for pointing out a report from an American academic which shows our Ministry of Defence is far from neutral when it responds to FOI requests.

Alasdair Roberts, from Suffolk University in Boston, looked at the data relating to 15,627 FOI requests made to the MoD.

He found that MPs and Peers had “Quick Response” stamped on 64% of their requests (the most of any category of requester) while bottom came journalists with a third getting a “Quick Response” stamp.

You can bet that those third came from the national media; your poor old freelancers and local reporters are unlikely to have been given preferential treatment.

FOI News says:

So much for the MoD being blind to who is making the request. ‘Quick Response’, who decides if a question gets that stamped on it? But I don’t want to attack the MoD as my experience is that of all the Government departments they are the fairest and most professional when it comes to FoI requests. Heaven knows what this study would have looked like if it had been using data from the National Offender Management Unit at the Ministry of Justice!

And I can second that comment about the National Offender Management Unit having spent two years trying to extract basic information from them. I currently have an appeal with the Information Commission about their abject failure to respond to requests in time.

You can read Prof Roberts report here.

Review of Paul Mason's book Meltdown

Update: Interesting (if short) review from Tom Watson MP

Tribune has just published my review of Paul Mason's book Meltdown, on the global economic crisis. You can't see the review online so a copy is below.

"A succinct and well-structured post mortem on the last days of casino capitalism" is my bid for the sentence which ends up on the back of the next edition.

It's one of a number of books on the credit crunch (such an innocuous term) and while I'm not that bothered with Vince Cable's The Storm I would like to try The Gods That Failed by Larry Elliot and Dan Atkinson which predicted many of the current problems.

But, as it is, I have Jason Cowley's The Last Game on the Liverpool v Arsenal title deciding match in 1989 to review next (reviewed by the excellent Jim White here). It's bringing back a lot of good memories.

If there’s one boom caused by the global financial bust then it’s in books telling us how it all happened.

Paul Mason, Newsnight’s relatively new economics editor, got to cover the biggest economics story of the last 70 years and could hardly believe what he was reporting. The one constant through the breathless prose is the sound of his jaw dropping as another low is breached.

The book is roughly in three sections. The initial part is the traditional bit where a journalist talks in the present tense as events unfold around them. Mason is always being woken at some ungodly hour to be told another venerable institution has gone belly up and then has to rush off to stand outside a big glass building or watch Alistair Darling give a press conference.

There are nice details such as the body language of Treasury officials betraying their terror.

Having set the scene, Mason then tries to put the crisis in context. Some of this will please supporters of the position that it’s all America’s fault. For Mason it stems from deregulation during the Clinton presidency combined with a complete lack of oversight by all the institutions we usually rely on. That includes the media.

As the mind boggling sums of money accumulated nobody thought to peek behind the curtain. It’s here that Mason sticks it to Brown. Second only to America in cheering on this gigantic house of cards was the Labour government and the then chancellor. It had given up on manufacturing as a basis for the country’s prosperity and bet everything on the City of London.

Mason does not spare us the complex details of the financial deals. Reassuringly he tells us that MPs have been left holding their heads in their hands having tried to similarly fathom where the money went. A glossary of terms at the back helps you get through this.

He also makes the vital point that the collapse has already had a direct and savage impact on the poorest. Swathes of urban America have been cleansed of people who defaulted on their mortgages as industries folded. Meanwhile the short lived commodity bubble priced food directly out of reach of millions of people in the Third World.

In a short final section of a short book, Mason suggests how this changed financial and political landscape might develop.

He sees an opportunity to institute systems “shaped by the willingness of ordinary people to impose limits, standards and sustainability on capital”.

Being such a short, and somewhat rushed, conclusion it doesn’t quite have the force that it might have. However this is a succinct and well-structured post mortem on the last days of casino capitalism.

ENDS

Gearing up for June 4

After months of preparation, starting to really gear up for the local authority elections on June 4.
Just had this Facebook site set up for my local campaign.

Chalk up a victory

Supporters of a student arrested for writing slogans about liberty in chalk on a pavement celebrated the CPS dropping charges today....by writing slogans about liberty in chalk on the pavement outside court.
Paul Saville and supporters handiwork can be seen here and Paul's blog is here.
The Bristol Evening Post report on the charges being dropped has all the detail and you can hear the man himself being interviewed on Jones The News.

Hello to Felix

Welcome to Felix Farley's Bristol Journal, a new blog about, well, let's here what 'Felix' says:

"I thought it would be interesting to get lots of informed people talking about the future of news reporting in Bristol, so I’ve started this blog. In coming weeks I plan to post a series of short articles addressing various questions and hopefully will get some debate going. It might be a complete waste of time, or it could fire some really interesting ideas. We might even create some wonderful new media models for other cities to emulate.

"I am a Bristol-based freelance journalist, working for local and national organisations, mostly in print. I am not an employee of any media firm and have no ulterior or financial motives in doing this. It’s simply that the future of news is something that colleagues and I discuss constantly in the pub and something which we all assume, rightly or wrongly, is an important issue. So let's open the debate up beyond the pub."

Can't argue with that - let the debate begin.

And perhaps we can look a little beyond Bristol to take in the hinterlands of Bath, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and Somerset as we're all suffering the same problems. However, while Bristol is supplemented by a healthy blogging community, the same cannot be said for my local area of Bath and Wiltshire.

G20 death

This video from the Guardian shows the police have some very serious questions to answer regarding the death of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests.
It's pretty shocking in its casual brutality and gives the lie to the smears which some media put about in the immediate aftermath of the death.
Shortly after the events on this video Tomlinson, who was walking home from work and not part of the protests, suffered a heart attack and died.

Update: Bob Piper pretty much nails it and while Iain Dale makes a very reasoned statement some of the comments this sparks have to be read to be believed.

Olympic firms caught up in blacklisting scandal

Not being a regular visitor to t'capital I've only just picked up the report from Thursday's London Evening Standard pointing out that several firms named as having paid a firm providing blacklisting services have won contracts from the Olympic Delivery Authority.

When I spoke with an ICO investigator last year as they were about to start their probe it was specifically the prospect that the publicly funded Olympic projects could be ensared in blacklisting practices that sparked their interest.

You need the info to name and shame

The TUC sent me a press release welcoming a register naming and shaming those employers who refuse to cough up after being found guilty at employment tribunals.

TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said:

"Too many people are still hit by the double whammy of employers acting illegally and then refusing to pay when they are caught."

Except the naming and shaming bit isn't that straightforward.

I've just got round to reading the official government announcement. The Department of Justice says that:

"People who fail to pay awards made by employment tribunals will be publicly named and shamed from today, as the government clamps down hard on employers who disregard tribunal rulings.

"Justice Minister Bridget Prentice said offending individuals or companies who have been taken to court to enforce the award will now be entered onto the Register of Judgments, which can be searched by members of the public and credit reference agencies."

Oh look, there is that public naming and shaming bit again. Except the register can only be search for a fee and is generally used only by companies looking to carry out credit checks.

Sure it's good that this information is entered on a public database but the fees are prohibitive -far more so than on other databases such as those held by Companies House. If the purpose is naming and shaming then it should be far easier to get the info.

And finally: Unless I missed it, this story has been barely covered by any media despite the fact that it signals a large and deliberate attempt by businesses to dodge their financial punishments.

Maybe, considering the date it was announced, they thought it was an April Fool?

CPS drop charges against student chalker

I wrote previously about Bristol student Paul Saville who was arrested for criminal damage for writing a poem about liberty on the pavement  - in chalk.
Paul was due to appear before magistrates in Bristol this week but received a letter at the weekend telling him the CPS have dropped the charges.
Which is obviously a sensible conclusion to what would have been a colossal waste of time and money against someone exercising their right to free speech.
Paul's case was widely reported and united civil libertarians on the left and right. I'm not aware of anyone else getting the Guardian civil liberty hero of the week award and the conservative Young Britons' Foundation's hero of the week award.
However, Paul still has a DNA sample taken from a first arrest for chalking on a pavement where he was given a caution and that remains on file. Comedian and activist Mark Thomas explains in this video how you might go about clearing your DNA file from the national database.
I understand Paul still plans to have a gathering of his supporters outside Bristol Magistrates Court at 9.45am this Wednesday to protest against the way he has been treated and highlight some of the civil liberty questions his case throws up