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MPs and peer charged with expenses offences deserve fair trial | Michael White
When I was a regular court reporter in Queen Victoria’s day we took contempt of court seriously. Some papers today ought to refresh their memories
A wholesome public figure whom we all know said in my hearing this week “there’s a crisis of public life”. By that he meant that the politics of relentless scrutiny, which prefers to play the man, not the ball, is driving good people out of responsible positions.
That’s fine if you want “monks or millionaires” running the country, he said. I didn’t give it further thought until I opened this morning’s papers and saw three MPs and a Tory peer all over some front pages.
They were all appearing at Westminster magistrates court on expenses-related charges. Guilty? I don’t know and nor do you, though we both probably have views. That’s my point.
The Daily Mail’s splash headline is “‘Thieves’ who think they’re above the law”. Note those delicate quotation marks around “thieves”. It’s a perfunctory nod to the law, which requires court reports to reflect the proper presumption of innocence, even for rapists, child molesters and politicians.
When I was a regular court reporter, under Queen Victoria, we took it seriously. Woe betide papers that didn’t.
But in 2010 the Mail’s strap line gives the game away. “With brazen cynicism, three Labour MPs [where's that Tory peer gone, I ask myself?] charged with expenses fraud argue a court has no right to put them on trial.”
Actually it’s not quite brazen cynicism. But it’s certainly prejudicial to say so in a court report. On radio, TV and in print there was plenty more. Some papers, including this one, sent their sketchwriters.
Thus my old friend, Simon Hoggart, has written an uncharacteristically testy piece that takes a passing swipe at costly and overdue renovation work at the Palace of Westminster.
You would never know from the article that the authorities have just spent millions renovating the Commons press gallery where we all work rent-free. The office under Big Ben where Simon and I have worked for years in Stygian darkness now has a window, two actually. Daylight at last! Few reporters wanted the upgrade; we were happy in our squalor. Few MPs wanted to upgrade us. Officialdom and our old mate ‘ealth and safety drove the project.
Back to the magistrates court. Surely, we have spent a lot of the past week debating the need to ensure that Jon Venables gets a fair trial for whatever offence he’s allegedly committed under whatever name he lives under? The mob is in full cry over him too and his rights deserve defending.
But they have been abused, roundly so by great swathes of reporting – as Simon Jenkins also pointed out this week. It happens all the time. Will anything be done about it? I doubt it, and there’s an election coming.
The politicians are afraid of the press, which can do truly scary things to them. I don’t need to remind Guardian regulars about the News of the World phone-hacking, far more extensive than admitted, as becomes clearer by the week.
When Nick Davies and Rob Evans reported that the NoW had paid out another £1m to buy off Max Clifford’s phone-hacking law suit – not a man to cross is Max – how many other papers picked up the report? None that I saw.
It didn’t suit them, as it would have if an MP had been – allegedly – drunk at the wheel and they’d been tipped off for money by a copper.
Why not? Plenty blag for information too, so the information commissioner concluded. You won’t have read much about that either. Professor Brian Cathcart explained it well in MediaGuardian the other day.
And while we’re on the subject, there’s another little report in today’s Guardian which you might usefully read. Facebook is threatening to sue the Mail for tweaking a scary piece written by Mark Williams-Thomas, an ex-police detective specialising in paedophile cases.
He’d (allegedly) told the paper that the social network on which he’d posed as a teenage girl – and been inundated with dirty propositions – was not Facebook, but they said it was anyway. It fitted the story they were writing about poor Ashleigh Hall.
That happens a lot too; take my word for it. Make the facts fit the story. But it needn’t happen. In many years at the Guardian I can only recall one instance of a “fact” (which later proved untrue) being inserted late at night against the advice of the reporter whose name was on the story. There was a big fuss afterwards.
So let’s go easy on unconvicted MPs once they’ve been charged, on Venables too. Due process matters. And don’t tell me that applies to Tony Blair’s deficient handling of the Iraq war, as demonstrated (again) by the Chilcot inquiry. I agree.
But before you get too smug read this. It’s a rare take on the Iraq war by a rare kind of witness. Nigel Biggar is regius professor of moral and pastoral theology at Oxford and he marshals a powerful case against the “Bliar Blair’s illegal and murderous war” brigade.
Whether or not Biggar knows what he’s doing raising his head above the parapet is another matter. Doesn’t he know what happens to people in public life who cross the prejudices of the Daily Beast?
If readers in the quiet streets of north Oxford hear unusual noises just before dawn it may be a freelance trawling through the Biggar family bins on behalf of the Beast. And change your mobile phone number, Prof.
Good luck.
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More money makes society miserable, warns report
about 6 months ago - No comments
Economics experts argue that Britain’s thirst for status symbols harms our well-being
The national belt-tightening expected to follow next month’s budget could prove to be of more benefit to the nation’s sense of well-being than if wealth levels were to soar, according to a new study.
Complex economic formulas developed by two professors of economics, Curtis Eaton and Mukesh Eswaran, and published in the current edition of the Economic Journal, suggest that greater affluence can seriously damage a nation’s health. Based on their mathematical modelling, the economists advance the theory that once a country reaches a reasonable standard of living there is little further benefit to be had from increasing the wealth of its population. Indeed, it could make people feel worse off.
They believe their work shows that, as a nation becomes wealthier, consumption shifts increasingly to buying status symbols with no intrinsic value – such as lavish jewellery, designer clothes and luxury cars. But they warn: “These goods represent a ‘zero-sum game’ for society: they satisfy the owners, making them appear wealthy, but everyone else is left feeling worse off.”
Their work owes much to the economist Thorstein Veblen, who in 1899 coined the term “conspicuous consumption” in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class. Veblen argued that people seek status through conspicuous consumption, which derives its value not from the intrinsic worth of what is consumed but from the fact that it permits people to attempt to set themselves apart from others. As the economy grows, people increasingly choose status symbols or “Veblen goods” over other goods.
“Those with above-average wealth consume Veblen goods with a positive impact on their happiness,” the authors write. “But those with below-average wealth simply cannot afford these goods, so they have a negative impact on their happiness. This is known as ‘Veblen competition’. As average wealth rises, people grow richer but not happier.”
The pair believe their research helps to explain why empirical studies show that levels of happiness and feelings of community in affluent countries have stagnated, despite growth in real incomes.
There is another downside. As people yearn for more status symbols they have less time or inclination for helping others. This, the authors argue, damages “community and trust”, which are vital to an economy because they ensure the smooth running of society. They conclude: “Conspicuous consumption can have an impact not only on people’s well-being but also on the growth prospects of the economy.” The theory may go some way to explaining the public backlash against the louche lifestyles of the UK’s footballers, bankers and politicians.
It fits into a debate within economics about how to measure a nation’s true wealth. Many economists believe they need to focus more on measuring happiness. The belief that a focus on individual wealth creation can be divisive has spread around the worlds of politics, psychology and science. Clinical psychologist Oliver James has argued that there is an epidemic of “affluenza” throughout the developed world, with attempts “to keep up with the Joneses” triggering huge increases in depression and anxiety.
Last year a bestselling book by two epidemiologists, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, called The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, suggested that Britain and America were the countries with the widest gulfs between rich and poor in the developed world, and as a result had the most health and social problems.
Nevertheless, Eaton and Eswaran, from the universities of Calgary and British Columbia respectively, do not believe the developed world’s obsession with wealth shows any signs of abating. The pair predict that “it is likely that conspicuous consumption will become worse as time progresses”.
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Conservative defector condemns party’s ‘vile letter’ and hostility towards Europe
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MEP Edward McMillan-Scott accuses Tories of euro-scepticism and ‘double standards’ for expelling him while only suspending Lord Archer
The former leader of the Tories in Europe launches a scathing attack on David Cameron’s Conservatives today, accusing them of “visceral euroscepticism”, “twisted” thinking and bullying tactics that forced him out of the party.
Edward McMillan-Scott, who defected to the Liberal Democrats on Friday, has also accused the Tories of “extraordinary double standards” for expelling him permanently, having only suspended Lord Archer, who was sentenced to four years in prison for perjury in 2001.
Writing in today’s Observer, McMillan-Scott, who remains a vice-president of the European parliament, says the Tories unleashed a “campaign of vilification” against him after he claimed that Michal Kaminski, the Polish MEP who now leads their centre-right group in the EU, had an antisemitic, homophobic and racist track record.
A strong pro-European and member of the Tory party for 43 years, McMillan-Scott gives voice to years of frustration at the party’s hostile attitudes to the EU under present and past leaders, including William Hague.
In his outspoken attack on the party over its handling of his expulsion, McMillan-Scott says he has been smeared by Tory press officers who have tried to claim he is the one who holds antisemitic views.
He adds that they have distorted facts about his defection and claims that the party produced no documents to support its case when he appealed against expulsion. “I am not bitter, but they are twisted. It is not a nice party now,” he writes.
He accuses Cameron of tolerating eurosceptics who depart from the party line while persecuting him, a pro-European, for daring to express sincerely held doubts about the leadership credentials of a controversial fellow MEP.
“David Cameron shields his europhobes,” he writes. “No murmur was made when last weekend Lord Tebbit in effect encouraged Conservatives to vote Ukip in the general election against the Speaker, John Bercow. The dog whistle is really at a lower pitch: that Ukip supporters know that there is a real home for them, back in the Conservative party.”
Last night, speaking from the Liberal Democrat spring conference in Birmingham, McMillan-Scott said the party had shown “massive double standards” by expelling him while suspending Jeffrey Archer for five years.
When the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, mentioned McMillan-Scott’s name at a rally on Friday night there was a huge roar from activists. Yesterday he was seated in the front row for a question-and-answer session, so Clegg could welcome him.
The row over McMillan-Scott blew up last year when he stood as vice-president of the European parliament against Kaminski, who was Hague’s choice. Following McMillan-Scott’s stand, Timothy Kirkhope, leader of the Conservative MEPs, withdrew the party whip.
On 15 September, without any prior notification, McMillan-Scott was expelled from the Conservative party after 25 years as an MEP, four years as leader of the MEPs and three years on the party’s board.
• Hague is also likely to come under fire if he declines an invitation to appear this Thursday before a parliamentary committee investigating the granting of a peerage to Lord Ashcroft .
The three Tory members of the public administration committee – David Burrowes, Ian Liddell-Grainger and Charles Walker – have already said that they will not attend the one-off meeting, at which confidential Cabinet Office records relating to the decision to grant Ashcroft a peerage in 2000 will be discussed.
But the event is now in danger of running into farce. Ashcroft, a “non-dom” who does not pay UK tax on his overseas earnings, is unlikely to appear in person and Hague, too, looks doubtful.
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Recovery yields Alistair Darling a £12bn budget windfall
about 6 months ago - No comments
Chancellor will cite state investment in jobs as key to lower-than-expected unemployment
Alistair Darling will claim next week that government action to protect jobs has saved around £12bn, as Labour uses the pre-election budget to spell out key economic dividing lines with the Tories.
In what is expected to be the most political budget in decades, the chancellor will cite government investment in jobs programmes as a major reason why unemployment has turned out to be dramatically lower than economists predicted. Last year’s budget anticipated that the level of unemployment, based on National Audit Office assessments of independent forecasts, would be 2.09 million people in the fourth quarter of 2009 and 2.44 million in the fourth quarter of 2010. By December’s pre-budget report (PBR), however, the government had revised the forecasts to 1.72 million for 2009 and 1.91 million for 2010, saying that this would save up to £10bn over five years from lower unemployment benefits alone.
Since then, the Observer has established that Darling’s officials have cut the forecasts still further. The latest projections for unemployment are for it to hit 1.72 million in the final quarter of this year and 1.75 million in the fourth quarter of 2011 – a further 200,000 lower than in the PBR plans, potentially freeing up an extra £1bn-£2bn.
The work and pensions secretary, Yvette Cooper, said: “In the 80s and 90s unemployment continued to rise even after the recession ended, because the government failed to put the necessary support and training in place and keep it there as the economy returned to growth.” She claimed that the Conservatives would cut back investment in jobs programmes and “put the economy at risk, even though the clear evidence shows helping people back to work saves money for the future too”.
This week Cooper is expected to announce that the government will subsidise another 7,000 jobs for young people, bringing the total created under the Future Jobs Fund to 117,000. The funding will pay for work at the national minimum wage, targeted at under-25s and people living in unemployment hotspots.
Last night Treasury sources insisted that most of the windfall savings from lower-than-expected unemployment would be used to cut the deficit, rather than for pre-election giveaways.
Darling believes the budget could spark a sell-off in government markets unless he stands by his pledge to halve the deficit within four years. Ministers believe that they have a credible plan to put the public finances back in order, through targeted investment in the economy, which they say will speed progress towards sustained growth; the introduction of tax rises such as the 50p rate for top earners (from this April) and national insurance rises from next April; and efficiency savings across government. But Darling is not expected to spell out any more details of specific departmental spending cuts so close to polling day.
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Can Katy Perry stop EMI going to America for a song?
about 6 months ago - No comments
Billions of pounds of debt, the internet and piracy are crippling one of Britain’s most iconic firms
It is a tale of sex, debt and rock’n'roll that is unlikely to have a happy ending. When Guy Hands, a City financier with a penchant for fast food and an insatiable appetite for deal-making, came up with a plan to buy EMI, Britain’s flagship music company, using billions of pounds of borrowed money, many wondered how he could possibly make a decent return on his investment. As it has turned out, he couldn’t.
This weekend EMI’s new chairman Charles Allen, the former ITV chief executive hired by Hands last week to run the music arm of the company, is battling to ensure its independence, assembling a rescue plan for the company that signed the Beatles and became synonymous with the golden age of British pop.
Sources close to the company say Allen, a former accountant whose eclectic musical tastes encompass Lily Allen and Edith Piaf, is “rolling up his sleeves” and working to ensure the company does not breach the terms of its bank loans, but there is no doubt EMI is in peril. “It is a very, very big moment,” according to Claire Enders, founder of media consultancy Enders Analysis. “The next two or three months are critical for the future of EMI.”
Allen’s predecessor, Elio Leoni-Sceti, left suddenly last week just as the final touches were being put on a rescue package, prompting fears over the company’s future. The business is effectively being propped up by its past, surviving on the revenues generated by artists signed during a 30-year period when British music dominated the world.
The list of talent on EMI’s books reads like a roll call of rock royalty: David Bowie, Queen, Lennon and McCartney, the Sex Pistols and Pink Floyd. As an incubator of home-grown musical talent, the company is without equal and its position as one of the “big four” global record labels is a source of national pride; it exists to make money but EMI also safeguards the country’s status as a place where music that matters is made.
If EMI disappears or falls into foreign hands, many music industry figures worry that future generations of British acts may find it more difficult to find a worldwide audience. Jazz Summers, who manages former Verve vocalist Richard Ashcroft, who is signed to EMI, said: “If you look at their track record, they have broken more British acts in America than anyone else, and the same is true in other countries.”
EMI is in crisis because it is burdened with what sources close to the company describe as a “ludicrous” amount of debt, racked up after it was bought in 2007 by Hands’s private equity company Terra Firma. EMI Music currently has three artists in the top 15 of the album chart for the first time this century, including Blur vocalist Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz, and it is on course to make a profit of £200m this year, but a staggering three quarters of that will go on interest payments.
Hands borrowed heavily to fund the deal, using money provided by Terra Firma’s investors, and EMI’s valuable back catalogue, as collateral, but even then some questioned whether he was right to pay the amount he did for a business that was struggling to come to terms with downloads and a dramatic decline in physical music sales. The industry has lost between 30% and 50% of its revenues in the last five years, but the irony is that EMI is currently outperforming its peers, which include Sony BMG and Warner Music.
It had the biggest-selling album of 2008, Coldplay’s Viva La Vida, and reissued the Beatles digitally remastered back catalogue last year. Acts including Lily Allen and Katy Perry are selling well, but the way the company is structured means it cannot trade its way out of trouble.
Before the credit crunch, loans could be refinanced cheaply, but now EMI is struggling to meet its debt repayments in the wake of the severe economic downturn. It has been forced to cut costs dramatically, laying off close to 20% of its workforce. The company is now worth £450m, around a tenth of what Hands paid for it. Some big acts, including Radiohead, have already left, muttering that the money men simply didn’t understand the music business.
Last week one of EMI’s biggest-selling groups, Pink Floyd, won a court action preventing the company from making tracks from their 1970s album Dark Side of the Moon available to download individually. That was widely portrayed as a victory for artistic integrity – the group want their masterpiece to be consumed from start to finish, as they originally intended – but it also illustrates the challenges the music industry faces in an era of huge upheaval, when illegal downloading is costing it dear and making money from talent discovered and developed at huge cost is more difficult than ever.
If Allen cannot persuade Terra Firma’s investors to stump up another £120m, EMI will be in breach of its loan terms, and its main creditor – US bank Citigroup – could seize control of the company. If it does so, Citigroup is likely to sell it to Warner Music, an American rival which was outbid by Hands for EMI three years ago. The situation is complicated by Terra Firma’s decision to sue Citigroup in New York, accusing it of forcing EMI towards administration so it can take possession of the company and make a profit from a quick sale, allegations that the bank denies.
Hands is a larger-than-life tax exile, a hero in the Square Mile whose reputation has been badly tarnished by the EMI debacle. He now concedes he overpaid for EMI, but his miscalculation means he could be about to hand a much-loved cultural institution into the keeping of the Americans.
At the end of last year Cadbury’s city shareholders agreed to sell the nation’s favourite chocolate company to Illinois-based Kraft. The prospect of another household name passing into foreign ownership, particularly a national champion in one of the few industries in which Britain still excels, is an unsettling one.
One senior music industry executive explained: “For British music, the fact that there was a very successful British company to sign for was hugely significant.” However, others say the temptation to indulge in flag-waving should be resisted. Enders said: “Britain is one of the places people come looking for talent and that won’t change. There are a lot of players in the market and advances paid to acts such as Florence and The Machine have gone up.”
If EMI does fall into the hands of an American rival, she added, it might ultimately safeguard its future. “It would be better for EMI to have less indebtedness. It will have much more firepower.”
EMI could survive. It is still lining up the sale of some prized assets. It was reported last month that the Abbey Road studios in London could be sold off. The company later insisted the studios should stay under its ownership and was working with “third parties” about funding a “revitalisation project”.
Raising the possibility that a part of the nation’s cultural heritage could be sold provides a graphic reminder of how the company’s huge debt is forcing it to make unpopular decisions.
It may not matter if British acts are no longer championed by a UK company as long as the country continues to produce talent and A&R men from overseas arrive here in search of the next Lily Allen or Amy Winehouse. “In the end the music business is the same as it ever was,” Enders said. “It’s about hits.”
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Edward McMillan-Scott: Standing up to extremism in Europe cost me my place with Tories
about 6 months ago - No comments
What the Conservatives say publicly about Europe is not what they really think, says the MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber
William Hague has been using positive words to describe the Conservative party’s future relations in government with our EU partners. I have been around the higher circles of the party for long enough to know that a visceral euroscepticism has been growing there since John Major’s day. I had a stand-up row with Hague when, while leader of the Tory MEPs, he tried to get me to back his “Never to the Euro” ticket.
It was chilling to hear the then party leader say to one very senior spokesman at an EU meeting some years ago: “We can say what we like here, but it will be different when we are in government.” I should have left then, instead of carrying on the pro-European fight from within.
David Cameron shields his europhobes. No murmur was made when last weekend Lord Tebbit in effect encouraged Conservatives to vote Ukip against the Speaker, John Bercow, in the general election. The dog whistle is really at a lower pitch: that Ukip supporters know that there is a real home for them, back in the Conservative party. Dan Hannan MEP plays the same game, even declaring that he had resigned his spokesmanship in Europe to campaign full-time for a referendum on EU in-or-out. No slapdown there, either; certainly no expulsion. But then he is a chum of Sam Cameron’s; they were at Marlborough College together.
My decision to join the Liberal Democrats this weekend was made easier by the vile letter the lawyers conducting my appeal against expulsion last year from the Conservative party received last weekend. They described it to me as “intemperate”, and advised me that, since the party refused to supply any documents about my expulsion, there was no hope of a fair final hearing next Thursday at Tory HQ. So I withdrew from the appeal and thereby resigned from the Conservative party I have served more or less faithfully for 43 years.
No doubt my successful stand for re-election last July as European parliament vice-president against the “official” candidate from Poland’s Law and Justice party, Michal Kaminski, put forward by Cameron’s controversial new group, caused him some discomfiture. But the campaign of vilification against me when I explained my reasons – that Kaminski had a recent antisemitic, homophobic and racist past – was so bizarre that it began to attract attention.
Indeed, Toby Helm in this newspaper was the most attentive. He had been present at the national commemoration in July 2001 of one of the most notorious massacres of the second world war in Nazi-occupied Poland. At Jedwabne in July 1941, more than 400 Jews were rounded up by their Polish neighbours and herded into a barn where they were burned.
At the time of the apology, Kaminski was the local MP and he made it his business to organise opposition to the commemoration. He denies this now, as he denies so much else of his easily discovered past, using the Nick Griffin defence: “If I said it then, I would not say it today.”
Last week Cameron was interviewed by the Jewish Chronicle and assured its readers that he would bear down hard on extremism in Britain. This sits uneasily with a man who propitiates it in Europe.
Conservative press officers hounded Labour over Damian McBride. The same pack have been repeatedly reported to me by journalists as using heavy tactics. One hapless Yorkshire Post journalist was called one week by six Tory boys demanding a right of reply for Kaminski. He coolly and properly said that, if he accepted that, he would also have to give space to Nick Griffin. The same team put it about that I was antisemitic because I once met Hamas – actually to tell them to stand for election. They are out again this weekend distorting the facts about my defection to the Lib Dems. I am not bitter, but they are twisted. It is not a nice party now.
A move to the Lib Dems is easier because I have known, liked and respected Nick Clegg for some years, whether as a key negotiator on trade while Sir Leon Brittan was EU commissioner or later as an MEP.
Most of my family are liberals and I am comfortable joining the Liberal family. From being a liberal Conservative I have become a conservative Liberal. And it is not a nasty party.
Edward McMillan-Scott is MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber and continues to sit as an independent vice-president of the European parliament
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NHS ‘neglects’ parents of sick children
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Top doctor accuses hospitals of failing to provide beds for families, who end up exhausted, stressed and depressed
The NHS is adding to the suffering of parents with a child in hospital by not giving them somewhere to sleep, the UK’s top children’s doctor has warned.
Far too few hospitals provide parents with accommodation so they can stay beside their ill son or daughter, Professor Terence Stephenson, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, told the Observer.
He said it was “not good enough” that some parents have to sleep on a pulldown bed or an unused patient’s bed, sometimes for weeks or even months, in order to keep a vigil by their child. Some end up exhausted and reduced to tears by sleep deprivation and the lack of privacy, he added. He accused the NHS of neglecting the needs of people who deserved a better deal for playing a key role in their child’s recovery.
“Every week, hundreds of pre-term babies are born and thousands of children end up in hospital with a broken limb, cancer or cystic fibrosis. But there aren’t enough family accommodation facilities across the NHS and the situation is not good enough. In my experience, the majority of parents who are in hospital overnight are on a Zedbed beside their sick baby or child,” he said.
“They will be woken frequently throughout the night when other children are admitted, or the ward buzzer sounds, or the lights go on and off. They will often become exhausted. Parents can’t be expected to sleep on a put-you-up bed for weeks on end,” he added.
“This is a major issue, as more than 40 hospitals are looking to a charity to provide what we as a college regard as an essential service. But there are over 250 children’s inpatient services across the NHS and provision is far short of what’s required. We believe that, whenever children are admitted to hospital, their parents or carers should be able to stay with them. The NHS is trying as hard as it can, but it can do a lot better,” Stephenson said. He wants every parent whose child has more than a short stay to be offered a private room with washing and cooking facilities.
Stephenson praised the role played by Ronald McDonald House Charities, which is backed by the McDonald’s fast-food chain. It houses more than 400 parents or families every night in its network of 14 houses and 29 sets of family rooms at 43 hospitals across the UK.
Action for Sick Children welcomed Stephen son’s remarks. Some hospitals do provide good parents’ facilities, said the charity’s Jo Waterson. For example, the new Manchester Children’s Hospital has a pulldown bed beside each bed and in each patient’s room. But while more hospitals are addressing the problem, it is still a recurring complaint from parents, she said.
The shortage of parental rooms is most acute in neonatal wards. Over 1,000 premature babies are born every week. A neonatal ward containing 25 babies may have just four rooms for mothers and fathers, he said. Emma Pugh’s son, Tom, now two-and-a-half, weighed just 1lb 2oz when he was born at 23 weeks in her local hospital in Hereford. He was treated in the special care unit at Birmingham Women’s Hospital, 70 miles away, where there were no overnight parental facilities.
Pugh said: “It meant three-to -four-hour, 140-mile round trips for me, Gary and our three-year-old, Nancy, which was horrendous. I did that journey every day for three months. Having to leave Tom, especially on days when things weren’t going well – he was given a less than 10% chance of survival – was gutting. That lack of parental accommodation at the hospital added to our stress, cost us £150-£170 a week in fuel, made our life even more difficult than it already was and, crucially, took away time with Tom.”
Andy Cole, chief executive of the sick and premature baby charity, Bliss, said: “Around 50% of special care baby units do not provide accommodation for parents. Families are already facing an extremely traumatic and stressful time. To be faced with not being able to stay with or even be near their baby is inconceivable.”
A department of health spokeswoman said that the department’s National Service Framework for Children, Young People and Maternity Services stresses that the NHS and parents are partners in looking after children receiving treatment. She said: “It also recommends that hospital care of children and young people should be provided in buildings that… cater for parents and siblings, with suitable provision for overnight stay. These must include access to meals and relaxation, and must respect parents’ privacy.” She added that it was for the NHS locally to decide how such facilities are provided and to what level.
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Liberal Democrats start to believe that this election could be different
about 6 months ago - No comments
From eternally Tory Eastbourne to the Labour heartlands of West Yorkshire, the Liberal Democrats are convinced that they can take seats off both main parties at the forthcoming general election and end up holding the balance of power in a hung parliament. Could it really happen?
Annemarie Field smiled, her pale blue eyes sparkling in the sunshine. “I always used to say that if you put a blue rosette on a cornflakes packet it would win a general election in Eastbourne. This town is Conservative.” She should know, having worked for the town’s two local papers since 1985. But this year might be different.
Eastbourne is one of the top target seats for the Liberal Democrats, who are determined to overturn a Tory majority of 1,124. Field described the party’s campaigners as an army of “yellow ants” marching through the streets. With two months to go, they are delivering 45,000 leaflets and 25,000 targeted letters every fortnight. Their candidate, Stephen Lloyd, will knock on 2,000 more doors before 6 May.
“We don’t have multimillion-pound donations from Lord Ashcroft or the unions,” said Danny Alexander, the MP who chairs the group in charge of the party’s manifesto. But the Lib Dems appear to have something else: an unprecedented ability to organise locally.
That is what they are doing against the Tories in the south – and against Labour, largely in the north. It is a geographical spread which brings accusations that the party changes its message to suit its audience.
In this seaside town, the Lib Dems’ focus has been car parking – and, in the wake of the MPs’ expenses scandal, on the sitting Tory MP’s second home.
“The Lib Dems are desperate for Eastbourne,” said Field, walking into the newspapers’ main office. “If I was a gambling person I wouldn’t know who to put my money on,” she said to a male colleague. He swung his chair round to face her and nodded. “In fact, I might put my money on Stephen Lloyd,” he said. “Me too,” boomed another, raising his arm.
It is not only in Eastbourne where the Liberal Democrats are increasingly optimistic. At their party’s spring conference in Birmingham this weekend, the same conversations could be heard in the hallways, the restaurants and the bars. There was talk of whether the party could gain from public fury about expenses; debate about how the words “hung parliament” had thrown the party into the news like never before; chatter about whether Nick Clegg could exploit his role as equal player in the three televised leaders’ debates.
By yesterday many were daring to consider the question: could the 2010 general election be a turning point? They were boosted by the news that Edward McMillan-Scott, a former Tory MEP who once headed the party’s grouping in Brussels, had joined the party.
Then there was the rallying call from their leader. “On Monday morning I want you to get out there and go for broke in what will be the biggest fight of our political lives,” he told delegates, who rose to their feet and roared in appreciation. It all sounded good, but then again hadn’t they heard it all before? Wasn’t it much more likely that the activists dressed in yellow would wake up on the morning of 7 May disappointed again?
Some disagreed. “I think this election is starting to look different,” said Olly Grender, a former party director of communications who worked with Paddy Ashdown. “What is uniquely interesting is the strength of feeling that it is time for a change, and the same strength of opinion that David Cameron is not the embodiment of that change. That creates an opportunity for the Liberal Democrats.”
Grender said the televised debates were vital. The fact that broadcasters, and in particular the BBC, were taking the party seriously would create a “ripple effect”. Then there was the “hung parliament scenario”, which Grender called a “double-edged sword”. It made the party relevant but also raised fears among voters of its economic dangers.
“I headed the media in 1992 and anyone involved in that campaign came out deeply scarred,” said Grender, as he recalled the “absolute certainty” with which pollsters predicted a hung parliament in the exit polls and the “absolute nonsense” that proved to be the cold light of day.
Grender said it was “critical” that Clegg was not drawn on the issue. On Friday he wasn’t. On stage, he referred to “you know what”, baiting journalists looking for any sign that he was ready to make a pact. Clegg lifted up his red tie, then smiled and pulled open his jacket to reveal a blue lining.
Today he will tell delegates in his conference speech that it is for the public to decide. “I am not a kingmaker. The 45 million voters of Britain are the kingmakers. They give the politicians their marching orders, not the other way around. It’s called democracy,” he will say.
Clegg says his party is interested in promoting its four main areas of policy focus: tax, education, cleaner politics and the financial crisis. Nevertheless, fears emerged among left-of-centre delegates at the weekend that he would get too close to Cameron .
Yesterday evening MPs and others gathered for a fringe meeting to formally launch the Social Liberal Forum – a pressure group committed to “reinventing the left” in Britain. Some admitted they were uneasy about the notion of a Tory-Lib Dem pact.
Clegg had aimed to reassure delegates by clarifying comments that appeared to support the former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. “I violently opposed and was hostile to pretty well everything she did,” he said.
But Grender argued most delegates would not put themselves on the left-right political spectrum. “There is a strength of philosophy and it is liberalism.”
Many people spoke at conference about what was happening outside, on the streets of Birmingham, through Yorkshire and into Newcastle, across Cambridge, London and into the south-west. Tim Farron, who is defending a majority of only 267 in Cumbria, told delegates that the Lib Dems had to deliver 10 times more leaflets that their rivals just to be heard. In a rousing speech, the MP compared the campaign to a football match in its final five minutes.
John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, said he had seen activists in action in his own constituency and “boy, are they fighting for it”. But he also introduced a dose of realism, saying that the national polls suggested the party was “indestructible yet uninflatable”. That said, the key to the general election could be the Lib Dem-Tory marginals, he said. The results there could determine whether or not Cameron won his much-yearned-for majority.
In Eastbourne, seagulls flocked above the union flag flapping in the wind over the station, beside neat, landscaped gardens which run parallel to the beach and above rows of well-kept, sizeable homes. At 100 Seaside Road last week, the windows were filled with yellow and orange posters. Four volunteers sat inside the front room rhythmically picking up leaflets and stuffing them into envelopes.
This war room has been active for years, not months, funded by Lloyd and a large number of relatively small donations. The candidate’s message is persistently local: his three top issues are a campaign against a parking scheme, a fight to save a local college and policing.
As one of the writers at the Eastbourne Herald claimed: “You can’t win in Eastbourne with Lib Dem policies.” And Lloyd’s team were having “field day” attacking the local Tory MP, he added, largely because it had emerged that Nigel Waterson’s children went to school near a home he owns miles away in Beckenham, Kent.
“I live locally, I shop locally, I know the issues that people experience every day because I experience them too,” said Lloyd, repeating the mantra he has used to the people of Eastbourne.
The other message repeated again and again was that only the Lib Dems could beat the Tories in Eastbourne. Lloyd, whose own roots are in the Labour party, said he was grateful for the votes Labour supporters might bring.
The Tory response is to stress the other side of the equation. “The question that matters in this is election is whether people want five more years of Gordon Brown or David Cameron and the Liberal Democrats do not feature in that,” said Waterson. He criticised Lloyd’s campaign as “particularly nasty and personal” and warned it could backfire.
But if the question for the Lib Dems in affluent towns in the south-west is how to persuade Labour supporters to back their assault on a Tory incumbent, how can it challenge Labour in some of the most deprived wards in the country? Does it cynically change its message to boost its chance of election?
Bradford East is another seat the Lib Dems are desperate to secure – this time by seizing it from the Labour MP, Terry Rooney. In 2005 it wasn’t a target. The candidate, David Ward, remembers the “battle bus” flying straight past his office on its way to Leeds North West. “But this time it will stop,” he said. “The party is relentless with target seats.”
Ward’s constituency was added to the list two years ago and since then central office has demanded monthly updates about the number of leaflets and letters dispatched and doorsteps trodden. Clegg has already visited a number of times.
Ward drove his car around the constituency to demonstrate its diversity. He passed through the attractive cottages at the northern tip, before turning in to one of the most deprived estates in the country. Some of the houses lay deserted with huge metal plates hauled up over windows and doors. At others the gates had fallen off their hinges.
The estates gave way to Bradford Moor, where shops such as Sana Fabrics, Ahmed Foods, Nangla Furniture and Akbar’s lined the streets. In Bradford East half the children were on free school meals, there were five big working-class estates and in the poorest ward a child was five more times likely to die than in Ilkley, an affluent spa town outside the city, said Jeanette Sunderland, the leader of the Lib Dems on the local council and Ward’s campaign manager.
Sitting back into her chair in the campaign headquarters, she flung her hand up towards a map of the sausage-shaped constituency, colour-coded by deprivation. “That means poverty,” she said, sweeping her hand over the lower half of the map, which was red. “And no one lives up there,” she said, pointing to the smaller area of blue.
Behind Sunderland stood a flip chart on which were written four key policies for the Lib Dems. “We take the complex national messages and we explain why they matter to you in Bradford East,” she said. “The £10,000 personal income tax allowance will benefit everyone, while the mansion tax on homes worth more than £2m will hit no one. There are no millionaires in this constituency. There isn’t a house worth £1m, never mind £2m. And the pupil premium to target the most deprived school students will bring in £12m.”
Here too, leaflets are being printed in the thousands. And it is an example of another way that the Lib Dems target areas – starting with a council seat, then another, until they have a ward, then two, then more. Finally, as is now the case in Bradford East, they throw all their energy into securing an MP.
Here too there is leaflet after leaflet reminding voters that there is one party that can’t win: this time, it’s the Tories.
Both Sunderland and Ward rejected the claim that the Lib Dems changed their message to suit the town. Sunderland said it was about talking about the parts of the message that were relevant . “In Little Horton ward in Bradford there is no point talking about tax – most are on benefits,” she said. Electoral reform was a non-issue in Bradford, especially for families where the decision was whether to eat or warm their houses.
Ward claimed disillusionment was rife in Bradford East. To prove his point promised that the first person he asked would not know the name of their local MP. He was right. “I haven’t got a clue,” she said in a strong local accent, laughing. Mubarak Khan, a 42-year-old taxi driver, said he had always backed Labour but now wouldn’t bother voting at all. “They promise and don’t deliver – on education, health, transport, even policing. I won’t be voting.”
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Portraits of the dotcom entrepreneurs
about 6 months ago - No comments
Remember the dotcom tycoons who shook up the business world before the bubble burst spectacularly? Ten years on, we look at what they are doing now
In the late 1990s wannabe entrepreneurs with a dotcom idea flocked to the monthly get-togethers organised by First Tuesday, co-founded by London-based American expat Julie Meyer, left. In the hothouse of the dotcom craze, the get-togethers developed into a weekly schmoozefest replicated in 16 countries. The business was sold for £33m to Israeli firm Yazam in 2000 and Meyer went on to create investment group Ariadne Capital. Often outspoken, Meyer is a web evangelist who often sticks her neck out for web businesses she advises.
In 1995, leading City options specialist Geoffrey Chamberlain took the helm of a small loss-making stockbroking firm called Durlacher and decided to focus on the technology sector. When Durlacher floated on Aim in September of that year it was the smallest company on the market, with a value of just £800,000 and a share price (in today’s terms) of 2.5p. A few years later its value later soared to £2.2bn and its employees were credited with helping create such hits as Autonomy, Demon Internet and 365 Corporation. But when the bubble burst, it took many of Durlacher’s more fledgling businesses with it. When Chamberlain and his brother Graham, the finance director, quit in 2002 the firm was worth just £17m. (they walked off with £2.7m) In 2005, the saga came to an end as Durlacher merged with Panmure Gordon.
Along with co-founder Brent Hoberman, Martha Lane Fox became one of the pin-ups of the dotcom boom this side of the Atlantic with her creation, Lastminute.com, becoming the benchmark by which all British tech-startups were judged. She stepped down as managing director in 2003, having helped pull the company’s stock price out of the doldrums, but hit the headlines in 2004 when she was involved in a near-fatal car crash in Morocco. She remained as a non-executive at Lastminute until 2005 when the company was sold to Travelocity owner Sabre Holdings for £577m and became a non-executive director of Marks & Spencer, Channel 4 and mydeco.com – the interior design web shop set up by Hoberman. She currently divides her time between charity work, her karaoke bar chain Lucky Voice and being the government’s digital inclusion champion, a role created by Lord Carter in his Digital Britain review.
You know you’ve hit a raw nerve when traders change the name of your firm from Dialog to Dial-a-dog. That is what happened to Dan Wagner, a man named “the new Bill Gates” by the Daily Mirror’s disgraced City Slickers team. He was one of the first people to realise the benefits of packaging electronic information and data for scientists, librarians and other specialists and created his first company – Maid – in 1985. It floated a decade later but in 1998 he saddled his firm with too much debt.Name changes from Maid to Dialog and then to Bright Station failed to erase City memories, while his acquisition of the remnants of Boo.com raised eyebrows. Wagner vowed to keep out of the spotlight when he left Bright Station in 2001 but has since built a fashion blogging empire and Venda, an e-commerce service and is run by former Orange boss Eric Abensur. Perhaps Wagner’s biggest mistake was failing to take up the chance to invest just over half a million pounds in an tech start-up created by one of Maid’s former staff. It would have given him a 30% stake in eBay.
Jonathan Rowland came to be a major figure in the British dotcom boom when he launched Jellyworks, designed to nurture new dotcom companies. Backed by the Barclay Brothers, JellyWorks listed in December 1999 and saw its value increase tenfold on the first day of dealings. Seven months later it was sold to investment bank Shore Capital for less than a quarter of its peak value. His next venture onto the stockmarket, buyout vehicle Resurge, was refinanced in 2005; later that year Jonathan launched a new vehicle, Nettworx, which was wound up in 2009 and cash returned to investors after it failed to find any attractive acquisition targets; in 2007 Tembusu Investments, designed to buy financial services assets in Asia, gained 40% to 14p on its AIM debut, he remains its chairman. Rowland currently has more than a dozen directorships to his name, and for three years was a director of Wagner’s Venda business.
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Portraits of the dotcom entrepreneurs
about 6 months ago - No comments
Remember the dotcom tycoons who shook up the business world before the bubble burst spectacularly? Ten years on, we look at what they are doing now
In the late 1990s wannabe entrepreneurs with a dotcom idea flocked to the monthly get-togethers organised by First Tuesday, co-founded by London-based American expat Julie Meyer, left. In the hothouse of the dotcom craze, the get-togethers developed into a weekly schmoozefest replicated in 16 countries. The business was sold for £33m to Israeli firm Yazam in 2000 and Meyer went on to create investment group Ariadne Capital. Often outspoken, Meyer is a web evangelist who often sticks her neck out for web businesses she advises.
In 1995, leading City options specialist Geoffrey Chamberlain took the helm of a small loss-making stockbroking firm called Durlacher and decided to focus on the technology sector. When Durlacher floated on Aim in September of that year it was the smallest company on the market, with a value of just £800,000 and a share price (in today’s terms) of 2.5p. A few years later its value later soared to £2.2bn and its employees were credited with helping create such hits as Autonomy, Demon Internet and 365 Corporation. But when the bubble burst, it took many of Durlacher’s more fledgling businesses with it. When Chamberlain and his brother Graham, the finance director, quit in 2002 the firm was worth just £17m. (they walked off with £2.7m) In 2005, the saga came to an end as Durlacher merged with Panmure Gordon.
Along with co-founder Brent Hoberman, Martha Lane Fox became one of the pin-ups of the dotcom boom this side of the Atlantic with her creation, Lastminute.com, becoming the benchmark by which all British tech-startups were judged. She stepped down as managing director in 2003, having helped pull the company’s stock price out of the doldrums, but hit the headlines in 2004 when she was involved in a near-fatal car crash in Morocco. She remained as a non-executive at Lastminute until 2005 when the company was sold to Travelocity owner Sabre Holdings for £577m and became a non-executive director of Marks & Spencer, Channel 4 and mydeco.com – the interior design web shop set up by Hoberman. She currently divides her time between charity work, her karaoke bar chain Lucky Voice and being the government’s digital inclusion champion, a role created by Lord Carter in his Digital Britain review.
You know you’ve hit a raw nerve when traders change the name of your firm from Dialog to Dial-a-dog. That is what happened to Dan Wagner, a man named “the new Bill Gates” by the Daily Mirror’s disgraced City Slickers team. He was one of the first people to realise the benefits of packaging electronic information and data for scientists, librarians and other specialists and created his first company – Maid – in 1985. It floated a decade later but in 1998 he saddled his firm with too much debt.Name changes from Maid to Dialog and then to Bright Station failed to erase City memories, while his acquisition of the remnants of Boo.com raised eyebrows. Wagner vowed to keep out of the spotlight when he left Bright Station in 2001 but has since built a fashion blogging empire and Venda, an e-commerce service and is run by former Orange boss Eric Abensur. Perhaps Wagner’s biggest mistake was failing to take up the chance to invest just over half a million pounds in an tech start-up created by one of Maid’s former staff. It would have given him a 30% stake in eBay.
Jonathan Rowland came to be a major figure in the British dotcom boom when he launched Jellyworks, designed to nurture new dotcom companies. Backed by the Barclay Brothers, JellyWorks listed in December 1999 and saw its value increase tenfold on the first day of dealings. Seven months later it was sold to investment bank Shore Capital for less than a quarter of its peak value. His next venture onto the stockmarket, buyout vehicle Resurge, was refinanced in 2005; later that year Jonathan launched a new vehicle, Nettworx, which was wound up in 2009 and cash returned to investors after it failed to find any attractive acquisition targets; in 2007 Tembusu Investments, designed to buy financial services assets in Asia, gained 40% to 14p on its AIM debut, he remains its chairman. Rowland currently has more than a dozen directorships to his name, and for three years was a director of Wagner’s Venda business.
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Jon Venables case reveals the dark side of online opinion
about 6 months ago - No comments
Was the tabloid press telling readers what to think in the row over the return to prison of James Bulger’s killer? Or was it responding to what they thought already?
You could, in a sense, write the script the moment news of Jon Venables’ “serious offence” leaked out. Think murder on the moors. Think Myra Hindley – and her doomed efforts to regain freedom. Think grief-ravaged parents from long ago, and communities bent on implacable justice. Think rampant press and quavering politicians, too.
But not, in fact, all the press – and no frontbench politician from any of the major parties. The racketing row over our “right to know” what one of James Bulger’s 10-year-old killers had done now he was 27, and what he looks like today so we could hate him in person, was basically a case of tabloids against the rest.
“The chief enemy of British freedom at present is the British press,” declared Simon Jenkins in the Guardian. He despised Jack Straw and Alan Johnson for “sating themselves” on cheap publicity. He hated the Sun, Mirror and Daily Mail in “full outrage mode”. He argued that “transparency that contributes to injustice, failed rehabilitation and even greater secrecy is bad transparency”.
And Sir Simon was not alone. Brian Masters in the Telegraph, Terence Blacker in the Indy and a judicious leader writer at the Times all worked the same rich seam of distaste. The ghost of Lord Longford, champion of a rehabilitated Myra, could almost be heard clapping from a passing cloud.
Yet this time another voice opened another front. Hadley Freeman at the Guardian is a fashion expert turning into a terrific columnist. And suddenly her laptop had been taken over by hundreds of Venables-related groups on Facebook, “all hysterically screaming about how he ‘must be hung’, ’should rot in prison 4 eva’, should ‘die, die, die’”. These “portals into a brave new world are becoming little more than on-screen versions of the most retro pockets of the old-school media”, complained Hadley. Hang on to justice, she pleaded. Don’t confuse it with “vigilante vengeance”.
But there is deeper confusion here. For whatever liberal commentators think about the haunting aftermath of child murder, tabloid editors have always realised what grips their readers. They have the previous day’s sales figures on their desk when they decide today’s lead story. And the big question has always been, chicken or egg? Was this a press telling readers what to think – or a press responding to what readers thought already?
That question begins to answer itself in a digital world. The clicks of web readers choosing tales sends signals right around online newsrooms. The BBC (under attack from Simon Jenkins for ramping up the Venables saga) can discover in a trice what turns viewers on. Those hundreds of Venables sites that horrified Hadley sprouted spontaneously, not because someone at Bun HQ issued instructions. We’re on the dark side now.
Some of the most innovative and fascinating work in the online news world surrounds the “mutualisation” of interest between readers and journalists, a profound rebalancing of relationships. Once “we had the information and you didn’t”, said the Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, in an eloquent Cudlipp lecture the other day. But “that state is now in tension with a world in which many … readers want to have the ability to make their own judgments, express their own priorities, create their own content, articulate their own views”. Journalism, he said, might remain one source of authority – but not in “an inert context, one that can’t be responded to and challenged”.
Here’s the rub, though, the Venables rub. Suppose “authority”, from Jack Straw to the quality press, is getting challenged instantaneously. Suppose readers of the Bun think themselves quite as good as readers of the Times. Suppose we’re not finding convenient scapegoats – press or politicians – but talking about ourselves, our communities, our own visceral instincts. Rot in prison 4 eva? Suppose I don’t want to have mutual Facebook friends?
■ We ought to be nice to Facebook, too. Turn to one paragraph on page 4 of the Mail. “In an article by a criminologist on Tuesday we wrongly stated that he had conducted an experiment by posing as a 14-year-old girl on Facebook with the result that he quickly attracted sexually motivated messages. In fact he had used a quite different social networking site for this exercise. We are happy to set this record straight.”
Well, happy or not, Facebook may get litigious. But there’s one quick point to make. The lead headline on page 1 of Tuesday’s Mail read “Facebook under fire”. That story ran on to page 6, facing five-sixths of page 7 devoted to a piece entitled “I posed as a girl of 14 on Facebook. What followed will sicken you”.
Or at least mildly nauseate Mail editors who expect better fact-checking from the people they employ – and may covertly regret that the Press Complaints Commission code isn’t tougher about the need for due, equivalent prominence when somebody makes a debacle out of a straightforward yarn.
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