In which I discuss some issues that I saw on the news today, Wednesday 14th October 2015..
In opening up the BBC News website, the top story is that a teenage girl who was murdered by a man was failed by police, who had sufficient information to flag it up and arrest him sooner. Tragic, but as far as I care this does not deserve the top story: sensationalist, irrelevant news. It’s good to hold police (and other government) failings to account, but this is far less important to our society or us as individuals than many of the other stories on it. For example the story on the economy, discussed below.
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Article: Budget Charter and John McDonnell
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-34524078>
Story: The Conservative Party is introducing a bill, called the Fiscal Charter or Budget Charter, which says that from 2019, which “would legally force future governments to run a budget surplus – which involves spending less than they receive in tax revenue – when the economy is growing.” John McDonnell (Labour Shadow Chancellor) initially said that Labour would back it, but has now changed his mind and is opposing it.
My thoughts:
- Much is being made of McDonnell’s “U-Turn” and that it was a “stormy meeting of MPs”. It seems to me like there is an attempt to portray the new Labour leadership as being messy – definitely worth scrutiny, but seems to me to be a bit much.
- The law is nonsense for a couple of reasons. Firstly, as anyone with an interest in the UK Constitution would tell you, the law is meaningless. The basic principle of our constitution is “parliamentary sovereignty”: Parliament can do what it wants. Courts cannot enforce law against parliament. So if in 2018, they decide to repeal this law, they can. Or if in 2020, they decide to pass a budget which does not run a surplus, this could supersede this Fiscal Charter law. The Charter is therefore not really legal as such, as it will never have any force, and is only political. McDonnell is entirely right to call it a stunt.
- Secondly, the phrase “in normal times”. An initial complaint might be that this is too woolly for law, but as said above, it will never be applied as law. I’m not sure what’s “normal”, and clearly this could be got round by saying “oh, this isn’t normal at the moment”.
- Thirdly, it’s economic nonsense. I had a quick check of a chart and saw that since 1988, there has been a surplus (more income than spending) in only 5 years, with 20 deficits. It is completely standard economic policy to run a deficit; from what I remember from economics A-Level, the idea is that you outgrow the debt and it doesn’t matter. And it hasn’t mattered for a long time, we have consistently run a deficit since WW2.
- Fourthly, there’s a huge hypocrisy from the Conservative Party. The deficit while they have been in power has been way higher than normal. It wouldn’t be fair to use the data from 2008-2011, because in recession tax income drops and more people need support etc, but from 2011-2014, the net borrowing has been £88.0bn, £98.5bn, and £119.7bn. For comparison, in the years 2004-2007, it was £43.5bn, £41.4bn, and £36.9bn. (Yet they still say that “Labour spent too much”). Another fun and forgotten fact is that in 2011, Osborne promised to reduce the deficit to zero by the 2015 election, and said that if they did not do this they did not deserve to be re-elected. They have failed to do this so far, yet want to impose this upon a future Parliament?
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Article: Racist killer’s human rights ‘violated’
<www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-34527215>
Story: A man who is imprisoned for a horrific racist murder of a schoolboy, minimum 25 years, has been kept in solitary confinement for four years and eight months. There was a legal challenge to this by him, which he won in part: the UK Supreme Court said that 14 months of his confinement was unlawful. He was being held for his own safety, as he was attacked in prison, but there wasn’t a meaningful plan for reintegration into the prison population or looking to transfer him to another prison.
My thoughts: The article in general is ok. My main issue is with the title: the BBC App has the headline “Racist killer’s human rights ‘violated'”. There seems to me to be some subtext that prisoners don’t have human rights, which is clearly not true. Why else use that title? The title could be “solitary confinement of prisoner unlawful”, there is no need to mention what he is in prison for in the title (maybe as interest in the content, but it isn’t relevant).
I think that Human Rights, the Human Rights Act, and the European Convention are all great, so the slightly negative spin of the story is not good. Another example is that the article says that “[The Court] ruled that this had violated the European Convention on Human Rights.”, whereas my preference for wording is that it violated his human rights – because that’s what actually matters, given that the Convention gives him rights. This phrasing also ignores the fact that it violates the Convention because it is unlawful under UK law, the subtext is “ooh look, meddling European thing”. It is also worth a mention that the ruling was that it “lacked authorisation under the prison rules”: ie it was not done lawfully under UK law. It wasn’t some black magic European Human Rights that has come in and said that it is unacceptable, it was our own British law. And also worth a note that it was decided all by UK Courts (first the Scottish court of session, then up to the Supreme Court), which is the whole point of the Human Rights Act 1998: it means that Convention Rights can be enforced by domestic courts, instead of having to go to the European Court of Human Rights to challenge something.
(I think this worth mentioning because there will certainly be more anti-human rights attempts by the government in the future)
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Article: Israeli police set up East Jerusalem checkpoints
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-34527369>
Story: There has been an increase in violence by Palestinians against Israelis, and Israel Security Forces are increasing presense and checkpoints and punishments.
My thoughts:
- The slant of the article is all about that “There has been a spate of stabbings of Israelis – several of them fatal – by Palestinians since early October”. There is a mention in only one place of violence going the other way: “Shooting and stabbing attacks by Palestinians have left eight Israelis dead in two weeks. Several assailants and at least 18 other Palestinians have also been killed.”. It would appear that twice as many Palestinians (not assailants) have been killed as Israelis. Yet the article is focusing on the Israeli deaths.
- The article contains some criticism of the Israeli response, eg “Human Rights Watch warned on Tuesday night that locking down parts of East Jerusalem would “infringe upon the freedom of movement of all Palestinian residents rather than being a narrowly tailored response to a specific concern”.” But the slant of the article seems to just ignore this.
- It is also mentioned that “It also announced that the homes of Palestinians who attacked Israelis would be demolished within days and never rebuilt, and that their families’ right to live in Jerusalem would be taken away.” This is definitely not ok: the families lose their right to live because of an attack by one person in the family. Punishing people not involved is bad bad bad.
- At the same time, I came across a story (by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights) about violence by security forces, with three under-18s being killed by soldiers or police in the last couple of days. There is also this video by Channel 4 showing an elderly man being shot, as he stands in front of soldiers to stop them “shooting at kids” (offscreen, that’s what he says though).
- (it also doesn’t mention any context as to why there might be a lot of Palestinian attacks)