Author Archives: Jamie Kenny

About Jamie Kenny

Jamie is a journalist from the UK.

like loyal, faithful dogs

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I don’t find it particularly surprising that some of the people freed by police after allegedly being kept as slaves at a travellers site say that they wanted to be there. For one, thing, that doesn’t tell you anything about what would have happened if they had tried to leave and been caught.

And there are a whole number of reasons why people picked up from soup kitchens and homeless shelters being kept as slaves might have found their situation preferable to the one they were in before. They had regular accommodation, no matter how squalid. They were wanted, if only for forced labour. As the local MP pointed out, they will have worked out there where everybody could see the condition they were in – and nobody apparently thought that worth remarking on. They had a reliable, if reliably inadequate, food. Perhaps some of them were made into pets, or even given a kind of kapo status. They had regular company. Above all, people can be treated much worse than they were allegedly treated and still behave like loyal, faithful dogs. Rebelling against your condition, as the people who escaped and complained to the police did, is entirely natural. So is accepting it. Neither acts determine what your actual condition was in the first place.

And it should hardly be so surprising that people accept the idea they have to work in order to receive the means of basic sustenance when this notion forms a large part of government policy on unemployment.

surplus to political requirements

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p>Our American comrades will be familiar with this kind of thing:

As many as 10 million voters, predominantly poor, young or black, and more liable to vote Labour, could fall off the electoral register under government plans, the Electoral Commission, electoral administrators and psephologists warned .

The changes will pave the way for a further review of constituency boundaries that will reduce the number of safe Labour seats before the 2020 election.

It's a two stage thing. First shift voting registrations from households to individuals and remove the legal obligation to report. Then measure constituencies by individual registrations rather than numbers eligible to vote, thus cutting down the number of urban constituencies, and therefore Labour constituencies. And the man driving this through is Mr Fair Votes himself, Nick Clegg.

It should be said that if core Labour voters are demotivated then that has a lot to do with the Labour Party: the numbers voting between 1997 and 2001 dropped by around 13%, I think. This is where new Labour's they've got nowhere else to go attitude to their voters eventually got them. many went anyway, and now we have a rightwing government trying to systematically discourage them from coming back.

I'm also not at all sure that if this goes through that it won't rebound on the Tories, who have their own secular decline in voters to worry about. Party loyalties are so generally attenuated these days that it makes no sense for any government to discourage voting.

the man on the Clapham omnibus says bring death from the sky

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Micah Zenko on the burgeoning US assassination programme. Here's the halfway point:

However, in mid-2008, President Bush authorized a vast expansion in the scope and intensity of the use of drones in Pakistan. Since then, there have been an additional 250 strikes. As David Sanger reported, Bush lowered the threshold for an attack to what one anonymous U.S. official described as the "reasonable man" standard: "If it seemed reasonable, you could hit it."

I'm not returning to the good old days of Bush bashing here. We've now reached the stage where people whose names are not known can be assassinated on the grounds that their "life patterns" as interpreted by targeters provide "operational support" to organisations that the US has decided are terrorist, and on the grounds that their deaths will "minimize threats to allies and partner states." Widely interpreted – and the trend is clearly towards wide interpretation – those parameters could end up including a lot of reasonable men.

life in a low trust society

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I missed this when it came out a week ago. Have yourselves a cheerful read:

On the morning of Sept. 4, in the riverside boomtown of Wuhan, Mr. Li, an 88-year-old man, fell in the street and injured his nose. People passed him by, but no one raised a hand to help as he lay on the ground, suffocating on his own blood.

This week, China’s netizens have expressed an outpouring of sympathy – for the bystanders. This is nothing new here. In recent years, there have been several high-profile cases of elderly men and women who have collapsed or suffered accidents in public spaces who then sue the good Samaritans who have tried to help them. These cases have created a genuine and widespread fear that helping a person in need will lead to personal financial loss.

The proximate cause of this is a court ruling back in 2006 which found the fact that someone helped an old lady in distress was evidence that he caused that distress in the first place. But there's maybe more to it than that. More good commentary here.

 

 

mining in North Manchester

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Alex’s post on the sub-prime/ legal loansharking industry’s rental of the Conservative Party reminds me again of the odd cluster of payday loan cum pawnbroking storefronts in our local high street; four on a hundred yard frontage.

Now the thing is that Crumpsall ward has low numbers of absolutely workless households, but the highest number in Manchester of households earning below 60% of median income, the official poverty metric. Still, they have stuff in their houses, stuff that can be pawned, until it runs out. And they have an income: a low income, but one bad month for them allows you to crack into it and extract yourself a little value. And once you’ve extracted that value, you’ve created the need which enables you to crack into it again next month and the month after that. Some of this, of course, can be kicked upstairs for legislative protection. And so here is our growth sector with its own emerging lobby. Not Osborne’s magic export pixies but the working poor considered as an extractive industry.

human currency

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The operation coincided exactly with Tony Blair's first visit to Libya. Two days after the fax was sent, Blair arrived to shake hands with Gaddafi, and said the two nations wanted to make "common cause" in counter-terrorism operations. It was also announced that Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell had signed a £550m gas exploration deal. Three days later Saadi and his family were put aboard a private Egyptian-registered jet and flown to Tripoli.

Associates of Saadi cannot understand why his capture and interrogation would hold any great intelligence value for the British authorities, and are speculating that he may have been a "gift" from the British to the Gaddafi regime.

He came with fugitives in his chain, and the two leaders met in a tent. Interesting the extent of Beijing's co-operation, too.

 

boutique conservative leftism

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Mironov has headed the left-leaning Fair Russia party since its foundation in 2006. The party united pensioners, ecologists and trade union activists, but its political program is very close to the parliamentary majority United Russia party, and thus many analysts see Fair Russia as a project aimed at weakening the positions of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation rather than a genuine struggle for power.

Mr Fair Russia is currently griping about internet porn. This kind of offering must be very appealing to the people currently in charge of Egypt, for instance.

war of position

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Useful map by Iyad el-Baghdadi of the current state of play in Libya. And here’s Steve Negus’ more detailed Google maps mash up. From the look of things, Gaddafi still controls Tripoli and a strip of territory in the middle of the country from Sirt to Sabha. As reported, Eastern Libya has completely liberated itself, while rebel strongholds now surround the capital. The current key battlegrounds seem to be around Sabha, a point of ingress for Gaddafi’s mercenaries and for control of the road to Tunisia to the west of Tripoli. Via.

for my next trick, i will pull an imaginary army out of someone else’s arse

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p>Oh, jeebus. Someone on CIF has just ordered the Egyptian army into Tripoli. It’s like some kind of pathological agony of distance. Running the scenarios is one thing; issuing imaginary orders to the Egyptian high command is another entirely. Gaddafi’s in his bunker but the further out in the fresh air you get the more people seem to be running around with cardboard boxes on their heads paging general Steiner.

Given the obvious proviso that these things are not tea parties, it seems to me that the Libyans are running their revolution quite nicely. They have most of the country, are putting provisional forms of governance in place, and large sections of the armed forces seem to have come over along with tribal irregulars. Gaddafi will be out of aviation fuel long before you can put a no-fly zone in place, and without the means to get more. The locals may be in need of certain goods which could be supplied from outside – I think a planeload of rpgs would be a handy way to stop Gaddafis loyalists/mercenaries hosing down the crowds with mobile anti-aircraft artillery, for instance – but aside from that, why not let the Libyans finish their own revolution?

not a fidgety person

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As we wait for the final denouement in Libya, let’s revisit, courtesy of Chris Brooke and Fistful’s Charlie, this fantastic essay on Gaddafi the modernizer by New Labour intellectual godfather Anthony Giddens, who back in 2006 was ready to believe that Libya could be the new Norway and that it’s leader was a thoughtful chap with a strong affinity for “third way” thinking. Also:

He is not a fidgety person but has a calm, articulate manner

He looked pretty fucking twitchy to me last night.