ILEX quick off the mark

ILEX have quickly provided a response to Jackson's report. See: http://www.ilex.org.uk/about_ilex/consultation_responses/lord_justice_jackson_review.aspx

Pigs to the trough again

So we now see the leaders of the free world zipping around trying to talk our representatives into giving away our money. The image of the pigs whose snouts were in the trough for years coming to us for a refill when they hit bad times is sickening.

What do they actually need to do to be held to account?

What about making them personally responsible and ultimately answerable in a court so as to focus a few minds? Would it not be nice if a shareholder or ex-employee laid off could ask someone to consider making the chief executive and his underlings pay them compensation from their golden goodbyes?

Dream on – New Labour aka Old Tory Brown will make sure they are compensated for their greed and incompetence.

Same old same!

Get emailing, telephoning and protesting NOW!

On Sunday 15 June, the mass murderer-in-chief George Bush will be visiting Britain to meet with Gordon Brown, who continues to collude obediently with Bush's war crimes. Stop the War, in conjunction with CND, has called a demonstration on that day, which will assemble in Parliament Square at 1pm.

Clearly it is important that we all join together and protest either in person, or by writing to your MP, Gordon Brown and to all family and friends to encourage them to protest about the visit.

Here’s what some others have to say about the Texan butcher:-

HAROLD PINTER, playwright and Nobel prize winner:
"There is no more suitable candidate for Leading War Criminal than George Bush. The only person that comes anywhere near him is Tony Blair. They are both beneath contempt. Bush should certainly be arrested and sent to Guantanamo Bay where he can rot forever.

"LOUISE CHRISTIAN, human rights lawyer:
"George Bush bears a heavy responsibility as the leader of the most powerful country in the world who has comprehensively turned his back on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and the whole concept of international law.

"MOAZZAM BEGG, former Guantanamo detainee:
"History will judge G.W. Bush as the man who wreaked devastation and destruction on earth even as he was having men tortured in the world's most notorious and secret prisons."

Get emailing, telephoning and protesting NOW!

Father Blair?

As Tony Blair launches his Faith Foundation in New York, saying that he wants to spend most of his remaining years ensuring that religion is seen as a force for good in the world, what must the orphans, widows and mutilated men of Iraq and other war zones think of western “justice” and our brand of "religion"?

The new organisation, for which he is seeking hundreds of millions of pounds of charitable funding (nice little earner then), claims that it wants to focus on developing better understanding between faiths as well as fostering concrete action on fighting poverty and disease. Exactly the thing his policies as the British Prime minister promoted in Iraq.

He is simply a war criminal and all his recent turns as “Peace Envoy” and now promoter of “religion” will be seen for what it is – a guilty man trying to reinvent himself.

Maybe a turn in a prison to reflect and pray could be the best thing for him.

Ready for the fight!????

Seeing New Labour/Old Tory going into meltdown means that we could be looking at a right-wing resurgence, something Brown and Co have been promoting for some time now.

The only answer to this is to get the “Real Left” in gear for the general elections set to happen in the next 24 months or so.

Can the Left raise a campaign in time? Well let’s hope those manoeuvring for position in their local pond don’t miss the opportunity that beckons at sea!

Fat Cats win again

A Labour friendly think-tank, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has produced two damning reports which expose New Labour’s failure to address issues of poverty and inequality.

In Poverty and Inequality in the UK: 2007 the IFS find that the number of people living in relative poverty (living in households with less than 60% of median incomes - that is less than £363 per week disposable income) rose from 12.1 million in 2004/05 to 12.8 million in 2005/06 (the last available figures).

Despite Labour promises, these figures show a rise in child poverty and working adult poverty.

The second report, published last week, called Racing Away: Income Inequality and the Evolution of High Incomes suggests that inequality is higher today than at anytime during the present Labour or proceeding Tory administrations.

Inequality is measured using the "gini coefficient." It gives a measure as a single number between 0 and 1. The closer to 0 a country scores the greater the levels of equality; the closer to 1 the country scores the greater the inequality.

In 1979 Britain’s score was 0.25. During the 1980s inequality grew sharply, reaching a peak in the early 1990s at 0.34. This was a rise in inequality without historical parallel. There was a slight fall in the inequality measure between the early and mid-1990s, but it rose again during the early New Labour years (reaching a peak in 200/2001 of 0.35).

Although there was a slight drop in the inequality score after this, it has now gone back up to 0.35 - a higher level of inequality than when Labour came to office in 1997.

Under New Labour the top 10 per cent of earners now take home 40 per cent of all earned income in Britain, while the top 0.1% have an average pre-tax income of £780,000 (the average pre-tax income for the UK is £25,000).

Since New Labour came to power in 1997 the average income of the top 10 per cent of earners has grown faster than any other group in society. Meanwhile, the average income of the lowest 15 per cent has grown at a slower rate than that of any other group.

So there you have it. Under New Labour the rich get richer and richer, and the poor fall further and further behind.

(As seen on RESPECT www site)

Abuse of Protesters Human Rights

Anyone who thinks that human rights in the UK are a one-sided affair in favour of hardened criminals and others who usually would not attract much sympathy should take time to look through the court injunction obtained by npower who want to dump 500,000 of waste ash into Radley Lakes, an area rich in wildlife and much loved by the ordinary folk of the surrounding community.

A copy of it can be seen at: http://www.epuk.org/News/475/the-npower-injunction-in-full

RWE NPower and Oxfordshire County Council have between them concocted a scheme which will destroy a beautiful lake, an area rich in bio-diversity that should be protected. To ensure there is no reporting of the ongoing devastation nor many voices raised in protest, the same legal team who tried (unsuccessfully)to injunct £5million folk on behalf of BAA have done a similar hatchet job on protesters, press photographers and others who now face jail and/or ruin for even uttering a person’s name or protesting against the destruction.

When we protested that freedom from harassment legislation would be abused to stifle legitimate protest we were condemned by Cameron et al and the right-wing press as rabble rousing liberals.

How right it appears we were when the right to defend these wetlands is defeated by the abuse we warned would follow.

Millions of criminals in green wellies

What do 5 million people have in common?

They are all to be banned from approaching Heathrow airport as members of the National Trust, Woodland Trust, RSPB, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Campaign to Protect Rural England.

What a sight it will be to see commuters on the Piccadilly line, or lads nipping off for a knees up in a European city hiding behind a rubbish bin, or breaking down in tears confessing to our well armed police officers seeking out terrorists, that they forgot to cancel that direct debit that maintains their membership of the National Trust and therefore are law breakers in defiance of the injunction.

Motorists on the M25 and M4 will be swerving from lane to lane as they rummage in the glove box for the receipt they were given when they visited that bird sanctuary last year just in case they signed up to the RSPB.

What planet would a judge have to be on to allow that one to slip through under the guise of stopping Swampy and friends from disrupting CO2 gushing flights leaving the capital’s best known airport?

Apparently this one.

If this wasn’t actually happening, you’d have to wonder if you were still asleep.

No justice for dead workers

So the Government have conceded defeat and published an amendment to extend the scope of the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill to allow Prisons and police authorities to be prosecuted over deaths of people held in custody.

This is indeed a right decision (arm up the back or not), but it is really an amendment to a proposed law that falls well short of holding the real criminals responsible - the directors and senior management who pocket the dosh whilst workers are mutilated and killed.

Lets take a look at the reality.

Firstly, the bill proposes criminalizing a firm as opposed to the managers or directors. We’ll see massive fines and public humiliation. What a load of tripe!

If you are a doctor or driver, or indeed the ordinary 5’8” in the street, you can be held personally liable for causing a death by doing something otherwise lawful so badly as to come under the legal definition of manslaughter. If this is the case, then why not someone like the head of an oil company who could be said to have run the company so badly as to be liable for deaths caused by his firm when they cut the safety budget?

If you are looking for logic in this proposed law, then you are looking in the wrong place. Try a glance toward who really holds the power – big business.

They wield power unimaginable to the ordinary citizen – they get what they want, when they want. Just look at the bribes scandals; the cash for honours; and now this poor cousin to the original quest and desire for justice.

Blair leaves office wealthy beyond the means of the combined wealth of thousands in the poverty trap and he lets his big business friends off the hook.

RIP all those who will never see justice, and those yet to die who will leave families in the same situation because our MPs were spineless.

George is the only one with RESPECT here!!

We are told that Respect MP George Galloway is facing suspension from the House of Commons for 18 days, following an investigation by Parliament's standards committee.

The MPs say he "damaged the reputation of the House" in his comments about the inquiry into his Mariam Appeal charity. Apparently he should have looked a little closer at the money he received (all of which was used for the charity) before allowing the funds into the charity. Worse still, he actually had the cheek to enter a debate in an institution that is a debating chamber!

What an absolute joke!

Parliament - full of parties who have nominated peers who have (by sheer coincidence) provided them with a nice little wedge, and who have received donations from rapists and other dodgy characters - now feel that George Galloway’s conduct has damaged the reputation of that place.

I’m sure that the rapists, donors and lobbyists who have provided “support” to all the major parties must be laughing their socks off.

Catch a grip – parliament has the reputation it deserves and it’s not down to the alleged actions/omissions of one MP alone. The reality is that they simply can’t handle anyone who doesn’t fall over when they demand it.

Hear what the condemned has to say for himself: http://politics.guardian.co.uk/otherparties/story/0,,2128329,00.html