Robert Hampton

If you think benefits claimants are worthless scroungers, perhaps you should take a look at this article, published in the Guardian last week. You will be introduced to Thomas Bebb, a Liverpool man who wants to work but has been unable to find a new job since being made redundant by the council in a round of spending cuts last November.

He gets Jobseeker’s Allowance, but thanks to a crisis loan repayment and card debt (his bank refused an overdraft but happily offered him a credit card), he is left with just £20 a week to live on after utility bills are paid. He has plunged into a world far away from the £2,000 plasma TVs and massive houses that the Daily Mail pretends all benefit claimants get:

He goes once a fortnight to one of two local shops that offer heavily discounted food – packets of buy-one-get-one-free frozen burgers for a pound, two-for-£1 ice-cream tubs for his younger children who stay with him at the weekend, a bag of frozen chips, which, if he rations it correctly, he can get four meals out of. When that runs out he eats rice and pasta which he gets for 25p a pack at Tesco. “Sometimes you have to eat crap.”

Bebb looks healthy, but admits he sometimes feels wobbly when he does the 45-minute walk to the job centre (a £3.80 day bus pass is usually unaffordable), because he hasn’t eaten enough. “Sometimes I’ve had to stop because I’ve had the shakes, dizzy.”

Should we expect the Old Etonian Prime Minister and his cabinet cronies to understand any of this? Mr Bebb knows the answer to that question:

“If the prime minister can go out and spend £100 a night for his dinner and I don’t get that a fortnight, where’s the justice in that?”

So a new EU accord has been reached and the only member not interested in supporting it is, er.. us. Thanks to Dave, Britain has been left isolated. As the Guardian succinctly puts it: The two-speed Europe is here, with UK alone in the slow lane.

Cameron says the deal wasn’t in “Britain’s best interests”. It certainly wasn’t in the best interests of Dave’s political career – his decision appears to be squarely about pandering to the Tory right and the Daily Mail.

There’s a debate to be had on Europe and Britain’s role in it. There are plenty of ways in which the EU could and should be reformed. Unfortunately it’s quite impossible to have a sensible discussion when the country is run by a party of little Englanders and the popular press is full of exaggerated and just plain made-up scare stories about “Barmy Brussels Bureaucrats”. Any debate would be strangled at birth by daft comments about straight bananas and butter mountains.

Meanwhile, Nick Clegg (remember him?) — a leader of a supposedly pro-Europe party, continues to back the Prime Minister. Is there anything I can do, even as a meaningless symbolic gesture, to retract my LibDem vote in the May 2010 elections?

Have I Got News For You is usually a nice sorbet to round off the week – a welcome way to cleanse the palate of the stresses and strains of life and perhaps laugh at

This week, I get well and truly annoyed by the show, thanks to the presence of Tory MP Louise Mensch, and in particular her mockery of the “anti-capitalist” protest camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral. She smugly pointed out that some of the protesters are buying coffee from Starbucks and using iPhones, as if this somehow negated the point they were making.

Apple and Starbucks are global corporations with huge power and influence. That is because they make products (electronics, coffee) that people want to buy. They – like many other companies, both large and small – are successful because their products are good and people want to part with their money to buy them. They have succeeded on their own merit and that is the “good” side of capitalism. No-one, apart from the three remaining members of the British Communist Party, wants to see that system abolished.

On the other hand, you have the capitalism that caused the mess the world finds itself in: City traders short-selling shares, banks giving out loans to people who couldn’t possibly afford to pay them back and the sub-prime mortgage problem. All of this was enabled by lax regulation, thanks to politicians who were in the pocket of wealthy donors from the financial sector.

And yet, despite everything, many firms in the City are still paying out huge bonuses to their workers, on top of salaries which are already obscenely large in many cases. The people who caused the problem seem to be immune to the effects, while the rest of us in the real world struggle. That is why people are angry, and I think that anger spreads well beyond a few tents in Ludgate Hill.

Louise Mensch (like too many of her colleagues in Parliament unfortunately), simply doesn’t seem to understand this.

What’s got everyone involved in an animated discussion this week then? Why, it’s the always sexy topic of rubbish collection, as big-boned Government Minister Eric Pickles has announced that he is bribing councils to return to weekly collections:-

Last year, the communities secretary told the Daily Mail he was an ardent supporter of weekly bin collections, explaining: “It’s a basic right for every English man and woman to be able to put the remnants of their chicken tikka masala in their bin without having to wait a fortnight for it to be collected.”

(Pickles wasn’t talking about himself in the above sentence, as he has clearly never thrown any food away, ever)

I’ll say this very quietly, because it will probably annoy certain people, but (whisper) I actually think weekly collections are appropriate. Now, it’s true that a home containing one or two people probably doesn’t produce enough waste to need a bin emptying every week, but there are four of us here at Castle Hampton and we generally manage to fill both our recycling and normal waste bins every week. Liverpool is one of the authorities which has stuck with weekly collections; if they went to fortnightly, I’m not sure we’d cope. Yes, I’m sure Captain Planet wouldn’t approve, but it’s not my fault that everything I buy is packaged in what seems like fifteen layers of cardboard and plastic.

There are a few things which bother me, however: first of all – we had £250m sitting around doing nothing? Where did they find this? Was it tucked away in Eric Pickles’s jowls? And, if we do have that money, is bin collection really a priority? Couldn’t we spend that money on schools or hospitals or something?

Secondly, one of the key policies of the Conservatives, as announced on their web page, states: “We are promoting the radical devolution of power and greater financial autonomy to councils, local residents and community groups.”

So it seems the Government’s policy is to give local authorities more devolved powers, except when the local authorities to do things the Government don’t like, in which case the government bribes them to change back. Well, that makes perfect sense.

London has experienced days of rioting in various parts of the city, there was disorder in Liverpool last night, while tonight Birmingham and Manchester are under attack.

From watching the near-continuous news coverage, I have come to a terrifying conclusion: our notion of “law and order” only works if most people behave themselves without intervention. Once you have a sufficiently large group of people with no respect for authority, the system breaks down and the police are easily overwhelmed.

The chickens are coming home to roost. For decades, social issues have been left to fester, leaving us with areas of high unemployment and high crime, where many people exist without any purpose or direction in life. This situation has been perpetuated by successive Conservative governments (who simply didn’t care) and Labour governments (who cared deeply, but failed to get to grips with the problem).

Now to compound the problem the Government is pushing through vicious budget cuts: not just to front-line services like the police and fire brigade, but also to services like youth clubs and other community organisations. And then they act surprised when it blows up in their faces.

Tough-sounding soundbites from Theresa May and David Cameron won’t solve this: it requires long-term thinking. Unfortunately this sort of thinking is not favoured by politicians and their friends in the tabloid press. We will see demands for the return of National Service, calls for water cannons to be turned on the rioters, and wails about the Human Rights Act. The actual root causes will not be addressed, and the problems will be stored up again for next time. Repeat ad infinitum…

On 5th May the country will hold a referendum on changing the voting system. If the public votes “yes”, MPs would, in future, be elected to Parliament using the Alternative Vote system.

Under AV voters do not choose one candidate. Instead they rank the candidates in order of preference. If no candidate wins more than 50% of the votes, the candidate in last place drops out of the contest and the next preferences of those who voted for him are distributed among the other candidates. This is repeated until one candidate gets over 50%, and they are declared the winner.

Let’s take a couple of real examples. In the constituency where I live, Liverpool Riverside, Louise Ellman was elected in 2010 with 59% of the vote – a clear winner and AV would not change this. However, over in Wirral South, the result was less clear cut:

• Labour 40.8%
• Conservative 39.5%
• Lib Dem 16.6%
• UKIP 3.2%

The Labour candidate was declared the winner on a minority of the vote, with the rest of the votes (more than half) ignored completely. That doesn’t seem right to me, and that is why I am voting YES in the referendum.

It’s no secret that the Lib Dems want electoral reform and this referendum is only happening because they successfully negotiated for it as part of the coalition agreement. It may be tempting for some to vote “no” just to piss off Nick Clegg, a man without any discernible backbone or principles. I think we should put that aside and look at the bigger picture: this is a golden chance to improve our democracy – one which we may not get again for decades.

There is more info on the Alternative Vote system from the Yes to Fairer Votes web site.

The terrible events in Tucson, Arizona last week saw many people leaping to accuse right-wing politicians and pundits of whipping up violence. Sarah Palin attempted to rebut the accusations in an online video which was remarkably tone deaf, even before she used the phrase “blood libel” to describe the attacks on her. Luckily, some enterprising soul edited out all the offensive parts and uploaded it to YouTube:-

Go and read Media Matters web site about the misinformation spread by right wing pundits, not just on blogs and Fox News, but throughout all media. This is the sort of stuff that is coming our way if Murdoch et al get their way and politically-biased news broadcasts are permitted. Be afraid…

July brought big changes to the newspaper industry, as The Times started charging for access to its web site. This was supposed to ensure a steady income stream for the newspaper, putting it on a secure financial footing for the future. However, it also resulted in the Times being completely removed from the online chatter of the blogosphere, as its news coverage and columnists were no longer accessible to the internet hoi-polloi. Still, I’m sure this decision made sense to someone somewhere.

The Supreme Court ruled that gay people facing persecution are entitled to claim asylum in the UK. I welcomed the decision, although my blog post is curiously vague about precisely why I welcomed it. Hmm…

In other gay-related news, I reviewed, with sadness, a booklet from the US Military discussing its anti-gay don’t ask, don’t tell policy.

Elsewhere, health and safety went mad as one person suggested banning rugby scrums. I felt uncomfortable on a train full of Orange Lodge marchers and I defended the traditional sitcom from an onslaught of criticism from trendy TV reviewers.

Read the rest of this post »

The student protests added a frisson of excitement today. I had just got back to the office after my lunch break, and saw the Liverpool contingent marching down Church Street.

I work on the 6th floor so had an excellent view as they sat down on the pedestrian crossing at the junction of Bold Street, Church Street and Hanover Street, causing a queue of buses to build up rapidly.

The police presence – with vans, helicopters and horses all scrambled — seemed to be slightly over the top, but I understand from the Echo’s live blog that things were a bit rowdier at the Liverpool ONE end of Hanover Street, where the Liverpool Conservative Party has an office.

A smart-arse in the office (NOT me for once) claimed that the students were daft to protest, because they won’t be the ones affected by the tuition fee increase. I take the view, however, that they should be applauded for caring about the kids of today who want to follow in their footsteps, who are being sold down the river thanks to Nick Clegg’s inability to keep a promise.

In other news, Liverpool has a Conservative Party office. Who’d have thought?

The MP Phil Woolas has been stripped of his seat in the House of Commons, after a Court ruled that he breached election campaigning laws.

As a consequence, Woolas has been expelled from the Labour party, a decision which has not pleased everyone. Colleagues and sympathisers are stumping up for his appeal.

In the Guardian, Michael White argues that half-truths and unkeepable promises are par for the course in election campaigning. That may be true (although it’s not a fact that reflects well on our politicians) but Woolas went a bit further than most though: accusing his opponent of funding his campaign illegally and associating with Islamic extremists.

And if you still don’t think he’s done anything wrong, consider this: e-mails from the campaign team revealed during the court case show that there was a strategy to ”galvanise the white Sun vote”. His seat is in Oldham. Of all the places where stoking racial tension is a bad idea, that would have to be near the top of the list.

If Woolas’s appeal fails and a by-election is held, it will be interesting to see how the result turns out. The Liberal Democrat candidate lost by just 103 votes in May 2010 and would be expected to win this time round. Will the coalition cost the Lib Dems votes?