Last night an MP entered the Strangers’ Bar in the House of Commons, shouted abuse, and violently attacked one or more fellow MPs. I anticipate wincingly that, given the kind of abuse the MP shouted, that this is going to turn into a discussion about anti-Tory feeling among Scots or about the appalling behaviour of a Labour oik.

For several years running, the LGBT Tories have shown up to Pride fairs and marches in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Given how Scots feel about Tories, and given how LGBT people feel about Tories, they’re not a big group and they’re not a very popular one. But they have their stall at the Pride fair or they march with their banner, and while I doubt if they’ve convinced anyone in the crowd to vote Tory, no one has ever – to my knowledge – used abusive language to them or been violent. Pride marches and fairs are loud, cheerful, and sober parties.

From PoliticsHome, last night:

Conservative Stuart Andrew, MP for Pudsey, was reportedly head-butted and punched in the incident which happened just after 11pm tonight in the Stranger’s Bar, a Commons bar which is reserved for MPs and their guests.

Mr Joyce is alleged to have “just started lashing out at people”, according to one eye-witness who asked not to be named.

The eye-witness told PoliticsHome that Mr Joyce, a former Army officer who represents Falkirk, pushed a Tory MP and then started punching some of the other Conservative members seated at the back of the bar. Drinks were thrown over other bar partons.

I could be wrong but I think the evidence strongly suggests that Eric Joyce has a drinking problem – he was banned from driving in November 2010, after an incident near Grangemouth where he refused a breathalyzer test. (And he also has an expenses problem.) I have no comment to make on his blog about Vodka stats and the Scots but I expect plenty of other people will.

Not that this excuses the violence last night – I strongly agree with David Allen Green:

How wonderfully amusing. Someone we disapprove of is headbutted. What a laugh, eh? He must have been asking for it, so funny.
Because having one’s head smashed is just a joke, isn’t it?
Why are peeps calling it a “brawl” when the only current information is that it was one-sided? Makes the headbutt ok, does it?
By calling it a “brawl” the implication is that the victim has blame as well as the attacker. So we can laugh at alleged physical assault. (1, 2, 3, 4)

Though I disagree that taxpayers should subsidise their food, there’s every reason why MPs should have somewhere to go have a meal in the House of Commons, as should everyone who works there. I’d rather subsidise the food for the civil servants who work there than the MPs – anyone who gets a salary of £64K can pay for their own dinner. I’m not suggesting that the restaurants should be unlicenced. But the taxpayers subsidise four bars in the House of Commons, and I’m failing to see why we should pay for even one. Nor do I see why MPs should be able to buy as “souvenirs” bottles of wine or spirits at a subsidy of nearly 20% from the taxpayer.

If Eric Joyce is an alcohol addict, he needs help. For all the other MPs who work there, alcohol addicts or not – close down the bars, end the “souvenirs” subsidy, and set your own House in order. Though I doubt if David “Tiger-Tiger” Cameron, Bullingdon boy, will make any speeches in support of that.

This evening about 5:45, on North Fort Street (about 200 meters from Ferry Road) I saw three police cars. Two on the corner by Fort House, one on the facing corner by Lapicide Place. And at least five police. They were all gone about an hour later, established by cunning investigative journalism (ie I texted someone who I knew would be walking home about that time and asked).

Anyone got any idea what was going on there?

This has been your hyperlocal news query.

In other news, David Cameron does not know the difference between a month spent shelfstacking in Tescos and a month studying at university, which suggests his time at Oxford was totally wasted, as was he.

“We see this in the debate on education, put a young person into college for a month’s learning, unpaid – and it’s hailed as a good thing. Put a young person into a supermarket for a month’s learning, unpaid – and it’s slammed as slave labour.”

David Cameron was that student you see wandering dazed around the supermarket, staring thoughtfully at the text on the back of tins of baked beans. He was “learning”. I wonder what his essays were like?

“Bibble babble TOMATO KETCHUP.”

I waved my hand. (My toothpaste in fact had writing on the tube in all the languages of the European Union, but the Greek lettering was the most conspicuous.) Everyone looked at me.

“Why do you have Greek toothpaste?” she asked me.

“I am a citizen of Europe,” I told her happily, and that silenced all the North Americans in the room.

I have been seeing cheerful headlines around the news quite a lot, declaring that the Greek Parliament’s vote to accept the bailout means the “long nightmare is over”, that Greece is “rescued” at last. This is nonsense.

For Greece, the nightmare is just beginning. And it will look like this:

There is no money for a lot of things around here, not since Jefferson County, population 658,000, went bankrupt last fall. There is no money for holiday D.U.I. checkpoints, litter patrols or overtime pay at the courthouse. None for crews to pull weeds or pick up road kill — not even when, as happened recently, an unlucky cow was hit near the town of Wylam.

“We don’t do that any more,” E. Wayne Sullivan, director of the roads and transportation department, said of such roadside cleanup.

This is life today in Jefferson County — Bankrupt, U.S.A. For all the talk in Washington about taxes and deficits, here is a place where government finances, and government itself, have simply broken down. The county, which includes the city of Birmingham, is drowning under $4 billion in debt, the legacy of a big sewer project and corrupt financial dealings that sent 17 people to prison. New York Times, 18th February 2012

I found the above story via Slacktivist’s Jubilee series of posts. Fred Clark notes rightly:

That’s the opposite of Jubilee. The creditors will be paid, but the debtors will never be freed of their debt.

That’s immoral. It’s also impractical. Greece and Jefferson County are not isolated entities. They’re part of an interconnected global economy and a network of mutuality. To satisfy their creditors without liberating or restoring them means that they will continue to limp along, and all those who are affected by them will continue to suffer as well.

Greece remains a member of the European Union thanks to the bailout, which means every Greek who can (and most of them can’t) will be heading for the EU countries to find work, anywhere they can. A condition of the bailout is that there will be no money for any of the things cheap-work conservatives hate: education, healthcare, any kind of public welfare: the Greek Parliament is required as one of the conditions of the bailout to pass a law giving priority to paying off the interest on their country’s debt over paying the salaries of people who work for the state. So Greece will lose teachers and doctors and nurses – some of whom may be able to get jobs at their educational level elsewhere in EU, but many of whom will be cheap workers. Just what’s wanted, if you’re a roll-back-the-clock-to-1834 cheap-work conservative: people desperate for work and willing to accept any wage at all. £2 an hour? Less.

In 2010, after the first EU-IMF deal for Greece, it was predicted that

Economic contraction of 4 percent [predicted for 2010] and 2.6 percent in 2011. Growth will return in 2012 at 1.1 percent and 2.1 percent in 2013 and 2014.

What actually happened:

The economy shrank 4.5 per cent in 2010 and was estimated to have contracted by more than 5.5 per cent in 2011. The economy is forecast to shrink 2.8 per cent in 2012 and then return to growth of 0.7 per cent in 2013.

That would be after the Greek Parliament passes a law saying that the country has to service the interest on its debt before it can pay state employees. That’s one of the conditions of the bailout. Not just teachers and doctors. Tax collectors. Police. Fire brigades. Road menders. Road cleaners. In Jefferson Country, if a car hits a cow, the cow is going to stay rotting by the side of the road: there is no means of paying anyone to clean up. Nor will there be, in Greece. Even tourist income is going to go down, inevitably – Greece simply won’t be a very pleasant country to visit, unless you’re immensely rich. But we’ll see more and more Greek exports – cheap fruit and vegetables flown in to Marks & Spencers, cheap workers hopeful of earning something – and complaints from right-wing media that after all this money has been given them, Greeks are still complaining. While regular Greek families don’t have enough to live on, middle-class Brits will be buying Greek kiwi-fruit from M&S.

The Greek finance minister, Evangelos Venizelos, claimed that the deal has helped Greece to avoid a “nightmare scenario” and given it a “new opportunity”. But it’s hard to see how he isn’t lying like Iain Duncan Smith – everyone involved in the “deal” knows that there will have to be more money in a few months, as the Greek economy shrinks again, because the tax income that the bankers want to get from Greece just simply won’t be enough even to keep paying the interest. The Greek debt to the bankers is going to grow as the Greek economy shrinks.

A report written by “experts from the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund” which was published by Reuters on 15th February, admits that the “political risks” to the bankers’ plans for Greece include the problem that:

“economic agents” (workers) may resist wage cuts and flexibility, “strong vested interests” may continue to resist opening up closed professions and liberalizing product markets, and bureaucracy may continue to shackle business reforms.

In short, the people of Greece are strongly objecting to the current plan to sink them into an economic dungeon in which – if they can find work – they labour hard for less money, and see everything they produce go to profit the bankers who own their debt.

These kind of people are happy:

“It is good to have cleared the Greek Damocles sword for a few months,” said Raphael Gallardo, the head of economic research at Axa Investment Managers in Paris, which oversees about 515 billion euros ($680 billion). “The euro area governments and European Central Bank have won some time, two months at least. It is positive for risk assets in the short run.”

The bailout “for Greece” will be 130 billion euros – £109,526,842,000 in GBP. The largest Euromillions lottery prize ever won in the UK is £161,653,000. This bailout is the equivalent of 677 such winners.

Although this will be repetitively sold to us as “for Greece”, this money is not actually going to Greece at all. It’s going to the creditors.

There is a better and cheaper solution to the economic problems of Greece, originally proposed by Milton Friedman, and it’s called helicopter money:

It works like this. You get De La Rue to print £14bn of banknotes, roughly the amount extracted from high-street spending in extra VAT this year. You send a fleet of vans to transfer the money to Northolt and other regional airports. You load it into squadrons of RAF helicopters and, in full view of television cameras, scatter it over shopping streets the length and breadth of the land. The notes are designed to disintegrate within six months and can be banked only by registered firms. Those finding them must spend them fast on goods and services.

“Helicopter money”, once a satirical monetarist metaphor, suffers only one serious objection as a cure for a nation suffering from collapsed demand. It is vulgar and undignified. It seems tacky, populist, messy, a smart-alec suggestion not fit for consideration by ministers, bankers or economists.

As Greek bailout talks gathered steam throughout the start of 2012, and an imminent bailout seemed to be in the cards, these stocks have recovered some lost ground. As of February 17, 2012, Goldman Sachs has appreciated 28% to $115.19, Morgan Stanley has appreciated 26.6% to $19.16, Citigroup has appreciated 25% to $32.92 while BofA has appreciated 44% to $8.02.

The population of Greece is nearly 11 million. Cut the bailout by 90% and instead of giving £110 billion pounds to Goldman Sachs give each Greek 1200 euros (£1017) – that would make a real difference, and cost much less.

“The very wealthy are spending,” says Richard J. Kurtz, a New Jersey developer of estates for the rich. “Everyone below that is holding back.” But the rich-rich-rich? “They’re so wealthy it doesn’t change their lifestyle. If they want a boat, they’re gonna get a boat.”

And if they want to rent a private island for a birthday party, they’ll do that, too. Recently, a client of Sanctuare, a luxury-villa-rental agency, reserved Musha Cay, a private island in the Bahamas, for a nine-night 50th-birthday party with a dozen friends at $40,000 a night. “It made my jaw drop, and I’m in the business,” says Sanctuare’s president, John Steinle. “That’s more than an awful lot of money. I do fewer transactions now, but the ones I do are no less spectacular.” Newsweek, 28th November 2011

“Every night I cry alone at home, but what can I do? It hurt my heart, but I didn’t have a choice,” [Maria] says. She spent her days looking for work, sometimes well into the evening and that often meant leaving eight-year-old Anastasia alone for hours at a time. The two of them lived on food handouts from the church. Maria lost 25kg. In the end she decided to put Anastasia into foster care with a charity called SOS Children’s Villages. “I can suffer through it but why should she have to?” BBC, 12th January 2012

Ask yourself: Who do you want to help? The bankers who can afford to hire private islands, or Maria and Anastasia?

Why are we bailing out Goldman Sachs, again?

The bank’s unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere — high gas prices, rising consumer credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you’re losing, it’s going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it’s going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals. Rolling Stone, 5th April 2010

Goldman Sachs, responsible for creating Greece’s problems, is now running both the National Bank of Greece and the Greek government.

The bank’s traders created a number of financial deals that allowed Greece to raise money to cut its budget deficit immediately, in return for repayments over time. In one deal, Goldman channelled $1bn of funding to the Greek government in 2002 in a transaction called a cross-currency swap. On the other side of the deal, working in the National Bank of Greece, was Petros Christodoulou, who had begun his career at Goldman, and who has been promoted now to head the office managing government Greek debt. Lucas Papademos, now installed as Prime Minister in Greece’s unity government, was a technocrat running the Central Bank of Greece at the time. Independent, Friday 18 November 2011

Why aren’t we helping Maria? Why is it more important to add to Goldman Sachs’ billions than to give her the chance of a job, food, a home, and a life to share with her daughter?

Helicopter money is what the EU is about to drop into the coffers of the banks who own Greece’s debt. Over one hundred billion euros.

Dropping the stuff from helicopters is more effective since it does what it says on the tin: it instantly unleashes demand. It is an emergency blood transfusion straight into the veins of the economy, through high-street tills, job recruitment, restocking, warehouses and order books. It does not pass through the constricted arteries of bank managers.

I am a citizen of Europe. I vote for giving Maria and Anastasia a couple of thousand pounds, and against giving Goldman Sachs one more penny.

Two or three years later, I had gradually acquired about five more.

And then I discovered you could listen to music online.

And now I’m really not sure how many CDs I have. Lots.

All because, instead of staring at a strange name and a list of unfamiliar songs in a music shop, if someone rec’d a song or an artist I could almost instantly find it somewhere online, listen, decide if I liked it or not, and if I liked it, buy more.

Not one of the tracks I have saved on my MP3 player is one that was illegally downloaded. (I will cop to watching US shows which are online ahead of British broadcast, though. But I buy DVDs, too.)

Sales of music have gone up, massively, since filesharing started to happen. People hear stuff they like, they buy it. It’s how this works: you find out if you like something online, then you buy it.

Geoff Taylor, Chief Executive of British Phonographic Industry, welcomed the decision and said,

“The high court today ruled that The Pirate Bay is illegal. The site defrauds musicians and causes huge damage to the music industry and wider creative industries.

“The ruling helps clarify the law on website blocking and we will now proceed with our application to have the site blocked to protect the UK’s creative industries from further harm.”

The British Recorded Music Industry have decided, along with their American counterparts, that this is a terribly bad idea. They would rather I bought less music, liked fewer artists, drifted back into my pre-Internet days of really just not listening to new music, because how on earth am I going to know if I like it or not? Why spend money on something I don’t know if I’m going to like?

So, Geoff, I’d really like to ask you a question. How exactly has my buying tons more music than I did ten years ago “caused huge damage to the music industry”? Please tell me. If I’ve now got to quit an acquired habit that’s brought me a great deal of unexpected pleasure, I’d really like to know how my listening to and buying artists I’d never thought of enjoying before, has “damaged” this industry?

Inspired by TheOatmeal’s efforts to buy Game of Thrones legally.

According to Stephen Naysmith at the Herald, the answer is horrifyingly simple – the DWP have decided not to tell us which companies and charities are making use of unpaid workers:

The Herald has been requesting, through Freedom of Information, the names of companies involved in the provision of unpaid placements for job seekers since early last month.

The request was turned down last week by the DWP, which said providing it would compromise the “commercial interests of both the department and those delivering services”.

The commercial interests of DWP? The Department of Work and Pensions isn’t supposed to have “commercial interests”. What are they telling us here? And why should the commercial interests of companies using workfare to avoid hiring be put ahead of the public right to know?

Legally, workfare is supposed not to replace paid work but to provide a kind of work trial – a few weeks unpaid work that is rewarded with a job interview (though there’s no requirement on the company to actually have a job to offer). Workfare is unquestionably a most unpopular policy, and companies and charities which have been revealed to be using it have recently had to back off and drop the scheme, declaring hastily that they had no idea that the JSA claimants showing up to work for 25 hours a week for their bus fares were actually being made to do it under threat of sanctions.

So it’s clear that telling the public what businesses are using workfare in Scotland is against the commercial interests of those businesses. But it’s far from clear that this is a valid “no public interest” argument.

The refusal said the DWP considered there was no public interest argument for releasing the information requested for what is known as the Scotland Contract Package Area (CPA). But these concerns only appear to apply in Scotland. The DWP has published the names of the companies which provide mandatory work placements in south-east England and north- west England CPAs.

In December, the DWP revealed that in areas of south-east England such as Kent, providers of unpaid work placements include Asda, Oxfam and Pizza Hut.

Workfare placements are supposed to be work for the public benefit. And as the DWP defines “public benefit”, this can mean increasing Asda’s and Pizza Hut’s profitability by providing free labour.

An unnamed spokeswoman for the DWP claimed this wasn’t inconsistent:

“Scotland is not being treated as a separate case. In line with the Freedom of Information process, we have been asked to review this decision and that is what we are currently doing.

On 9th February Tom Greatrex, Labour MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton, asked in the House of Commons:

My constituent Mr McGowan, of Blantyre in Lanarkshire, is in the latter stages of his life. He has a terminal illness, severe dementia, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease, he is bedridden and he cannot even swallow. He recently received a standard letter from the Department for Work and Pensions asking him to get in touch so that he could be given guidance about how to get back to work. Given that the DWP knows all the people who are terminally ill, because they have filled in the DS1500 form, is it not irresponsible and distasteful, as well as deeply upsetting for those concerned and the relatives looking after them, for the DWP to send such standard letters, when the data already exist, and people know they should not be in that position?

Today he lodged questions in the House of Commons asking why the DWP is withholding the names of the firms it is working with to deliver the workfare programme in Scotland.

“It is astounding that the DWP are refusing to release this information in relation to contracts in Scotland when the same information is available for England. As these are contracts funded through public money, people have a right to know which companies are involved.”

This is why we need the Freedom of Information Act, and the FOI Commissioners, to remain powerful and independent. We have a right to know. Use WhatDoTheyKnow to ask about workfare in Scotland. Write to your MP to defend Freedom of Information – the Justice Committee sits tomorrow.

The Freedom of Information Act opens up all levels of public infomation to the public. The standard of the Freedom of Information Commissioners is that all information should be made available, with clearly specified exemptions to do with personal privacy and national security: there is a legal exemption if someone has asked for information that would be too expensive or too burdensome for a public body to provide, but they have to prove this to the Commissioner – they cannot simply tell you “too expensive, we won’t tell you”.

You don’t have to say why you want to know. You don’t have to prove “Need to know”. You don’t have to demonstrate that you have the good judgement to use the information wisely.

You are a member of the public. You want to know how a local authority or a public body arrived at a decision, or what they spent money on, or what was minuted at a meeting, or what the borrowing records are at your local libraries. The Freedom of Information Act says that wanting to know means you have a right to know.

Because of the FOI Act, a journalist (acting like a journalist, for once, even though they were working for the Mail on Sunday) was able to find out that the company “shaping and directing” the NHS Reform bill is McKinsey & Co, and it’s their clients who will largely benefit from it.

In essence, what we are left with are the ambitious plans for the expansion of privately run provision, masterminded it seems by the management consultancy McKinsey, many of whose corporate clients will now bid for work inside the NHS. McKinsey is said to have earned nearly £14m from the government since the election, but this is a drop in the ocean compared with the business that private health organisations working with McKinsey now expect to gain. The extent of this one firm’s involvement in shaping and directing the changes, discovered by the Mail on Sunday using Freedom of Information requests, suggests that if the “reforms” are successful, we are going to see a torrent of publicity about fat cat firms benefiting from the NHS between now and the election. Guardian, 19th February 2012

The FOI Commissioner has ordered that the Risk Register should be published. Andrew Lansley has used his ministerial veto. The decision will now go to a FOI tribunal, at which the government will have to show why they think it would be damaging to the public interest to reveal how expensive the NHS Reform Bill is going to be.

The Information Commissioner for England writes:

On the Freedom of Information Act, a chorus of distinguished Whitehall insiders would have us believe, against all the evidence, that the act threatens good government because nobody dares write anything down any more. But it’s nonsense to say that the act threatens to make public what really ought to remain secret for 30 years (shortly to be 20 years).

True, the information commissioner is not infallible. That’s why we have a route of appeal to a tribunal. Nor is the government impotent. That’s why we have the ministerial veto. The information commissioner’s decision to order publication of the Department of Health’s risk register, the subject of some controversy around the health and social care bill, will be subject to review by the tribunal, where the public interest arguments can be debated.

Because of the FOI Act, a handful of unfunded volunteers were able to research and write the Spartacus Report, which blew the lid off the government’s DLA reforms. Demands to make them pay for the information they were asking for would have killed the Spartacus Report from the start.

Because of the FOI Act, Edinburgh Council was obliged to respond to the questions the Save Our Services campaign was asking. (Sometimes we win.)

Because of the FOI Act, Durham Police are being asked to explain why there’s been a steadily increasing use of tasers by the police on members of the public. No doubt they find this awkward. But they work for us, and Freedom of Information keeps that in mind.

The Ministry of Justice is complaining about vexatious “serial requesters”, and I would hope they are thinking about this kind of story – a FOI request discovered that large numbers of electronically-tagged prisoners are tampering with their tags or in breach of curfew, and what seem like very few prosecutions proportionate to the number of breaches. Now I would guess that the low prosecution rate means most breaches of curfew are minor or unintentional: most “tampering” accidental: the story is tabloid fearmongering.

Of 277 people given tags by Norwich Crown and Magistrates’ courts last year, 173 breached their curfews, including 38 who tampered with their tags.

However, Serco, the contractor responsible for the electronic monitoring, has been able to prosecute only a handful of cases.

The figures, obtained by the Evening News through the Freedom of Information Act, show the number of breaches from Norwich’s courts is increasing, with 46pc of people tagged in 2009 reported for a breach, 52pc in 2010 and 62pc last year. Norwich Evening News, 20th February 2012

Given the fearmongering stories tabloids like to write about crime waves, the MoJ and the police must be especially apt to get pestered with this kind of request.

But complaints that FOI is producing “revelations of public waste or corruption” and therefore FOI should go? That’s… backwards, to say the least.

The Association of Chief Police Offices complains

“fishing” by journalists “to trawl for stories” was “a major concern”.

It backed the introduction of a £10 fee for all requests and an education programme to give the public “more realistic expectations as to the types of information they are likely to receive”.

But this is rightly a matter for the Leveson inquiry – should newspapers fish for stories about crime waves that don’t actually exist? I’d say no – but banning or raising the fees threshold for FOI requests is the wrong way to go about it. We need better, more responsible newspapers in the UK. Trying to make it more difficult or more expensive to get information out of a public body is not going to accomplish that.

The Freedom of Information Act sets a standard for transparency and openness in democracy. The post-legislative scrutiny by the Justice Committee, twelve years after the Act was passed, must not be used to make it more difficult for us to find out what we want to know about how public and statutory bodies are being run.

Write to your MP and tell them you support the right to know. The Justice Committee meets again tomorrow. The more support Freedom of Information has from all of us, the less likely they will be able to take it away. They say a very small proportion of the public requests information. That may be. But when you want to know what’s going on with the trams or the privatisation of services or closing down your local school – that’s when you don’t want to be met with a bland “You don’t need to know.”

Follow the campaign at SaveFOI2012.

All of this feels like recent events to me. I have to think to realise that that there are people who were old enough to vote in May 2010 who would have just started primary school on 11th September 1997 – for whom the Claim of Right for Scotland and the Scottish Constitutional Convention, if they remember them at all, are events from before they were born.

Here is the Claim of Right for Scotland, signed on 30th March 1989 at the General Assembly Hall in Edinburgh, where 10 years later the Scottish Parliament sat for the first time:

We, gathered as the Scottish Constitutional Convention, do hereby acknowledge the sovereign right of the Scottish people to determine the form of Government best suited to their needs, and do hereby declare and pledge that in all our actions and deliberations their interests shall be paramount.

We further declare and pledge that our actions and deliberations shall be directed to the following ends:

To agree a scheme for an Assembly or Parliament for Scotland;

To mobilise Scottish opinion and ensure the approval of the Scottish people for that scheme; and
To assert the right of the Scottish people to secure implementation of that scheme.

Who signed it? 58 of the 72 Scottish MPs at the time. Seven out of eight of the Scottish MEPs. 59 out of 65 of the Scottish regional, district and island councils. Political parties. Churches. Trade unions.

Who didn’t sign it? The Conservatives and the SNP. The Conservatives were openly hostile to the idea of the SCC, and even tried to block the funding, but the SNP were initially part of the Scottish Constitutional Convention, but they withdrew early, because they did not wish to support devolution instead of independence. On 30th November 1995, Scotland’s Parliament, Scotland’s Right was published by the SCC, and this document, described as the “blueprint for devolution”, was used as a basis to create the structure of the Scottish Parliament, re-opened in 1999.

Donald Dewar, the first First Minister of Scotland, died on 11th October 2000.

When Donald introduced his Scotland Bill in 1998, he read the first clause, ‘There shall be a Scottish Parliament’, paused, looked at his audience and beyond to the people of Scotland and said, ‘I like that’. It was powerful because it was so uncharacteristic of a man for whom the personalisation of politics was a matter of regret. But it was evidence of a longer, deeper and more nuanced commitment to devolution than one hears in John Smith’s more statesmanlike comment quoted above. But Smith had to convince the UK party that devolution was a good idea: Donald had to make it work. (Alan Alexander, Scottish Review, 1st July 2011)

A story got an unexpected amount of publicity on Twitter this afternoon because of a foolish and nasty comment by George Foulkes. He tweeted at 4:16pm, comparing a “CyberNat myth” to Holocaust denial. This kind of thing Godwins the argument before it starts: no matter what the facts, Foulkes had just lost, and furthermore, had foolishly let the argument not become about the plain facts of the matter but about his own unpleasant comment on it.

CyberNat myth that Devolution was forced on the Labour Govt.by EU or Council of Europe (stories vary) is akin to Holocaust denial

— George Foulkes (@GeorgeFoulkes) February 19, 2012

The story he is referring to is about a body referring to itself as the “Scotland-UN Commitee”, which claims to have sent a memorandum to the Council of Europe in 1993. (In fact there seems to be 0.5m worth of documents of various kinds which were presented to the National Library in 1997.) The founder and secretary, John G. McGill, also wrote under Craufuird C. Loudoun, and I tracked down an article he wrote in 2006 about the Wallace Loudoun Sword.

Mr. McGill, who is also published under the nom de plume “Craufuird C. Loudoun,” assures that the Wallace Loudoun Sword is still in Scotland and while he cannot reveal its exact location, he hopes that the current owners will put it on public display. When questioned about the number of Wallace swords in existence and he believes there are possibly four. The one in the archives at the Wallace Monument, the replica on display at the Wallace Monument which was created after the original was stolen in 1972, the current Loudoun Sword, and a possible fourth in the Wallace Collection in London.

If you know anything about the Wallace Sword, you know this kind of thing is popular BS. Tartan tax dressed up as history. There is a sword in the Wallace Monument in Stirling, and it has been popularly supposed for centuries to belong to William Wallace, and it was stolen in 1972 by three students who referred to themselves as the Tartan Army.

If you are old enough to remember the period 1979-1997, not as history but as current events, you know you never heard of this “Scotland-UN” pressure group: this self-description sounds awfully like some massive self-aggrandisement going on:

Scotland-UN was founded as a pressure group in the summer of 1979, shortly after the referendum on a Scottish Assembly. Its purpose was to take the UK Government’s response to that referendum, and the Scottish case for self-determination, to the United Nations and other international authorities. A delegation visited the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva in the autumn of 1980. Scotland-UN also presented its case at various times to the EEC Parliament, the Council of Europe, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE, now the OSCE), and every national government in the world. A number of documents were issued over the years, for example on the fishing situation. From the very beginning, Scotland-UN cooperated closely with other organisations active in the promoting a Scottish Parliament.

The article being tweeted this afternoon declared that there were “other personal papers” that were “still diplomatically sensitive” and which so couldn’t be listed in the NLS archives, and claims that the 1993 Scotland-UN Memorandum “triggered a programme of action in the Council of Europe that revolutionised the maintenance of democratic standards throughout Europe at one of the great turning points in European history, with a probable secondary effect worldwide” and is “the only authentic account of how the devolution of political power to Scotland and the restoration of the Scottish Parliament came about”.

This? Is nonsense.

There is a clear and trackable history of how the Scottish Parliament came about – you can follow it through Hansard, read about it in the Labour manifestos back when we all thought John Smith, not Tony Blair, was going to be the next Prime Minister. Moreover, you can read it in the records of the Scottish Constitutional Convention, and the Claim of Right is acknowledged by the SNP today, though they had no part in it back in 1989. You will find the “UN-Scotland Committee” nowhere in the History of the SNP

Unlike the Conservatives, who embraced the Scottish Parliament shamelessly once it was reality, the SNP acted at all times with political principle; they wanted independence and not devolution, and while with hindsight it’s easy to see that the reality of the situation was that they had to support devolution if they wanted to be able to hold an independence referendum, still: they were clear about why they wouldn’t support the Claim of Right in 1989 or the ten years’ work the Labour and LibDem activists were doing to get devolution. I’m not a Labour Party member, I’m not a LibDem supporter, but I was there at the time, these are current events I lived through, and it’s just plain historical fact: without Donald Dewar and John Smith, without the cross-party constitutional convention, without the settled will of the Scottish people given formal expression by the Claim of Right, there wouldn’t have been a Scottish Parliament in 1999.

The article was written by one James Wilkie, who is the chair of an organisation called the Scottish Democratic Alliance. He lives in Austria. On 22nd June last year, he was awarded the Goldenes Ehrenzeichen für Verdienste um die Republik Österreich (the Gold Medal for Meritorious Service to the Republic of Austria) which is the 9th level down of a 15-level award system by the state, usually at this level given to delegates to the National Council after ten years in office, or to distinguished non-officials. I presume he wrote the article about his award: it was published at Electric Scotland, and it reads like it was written by the recipient dressing up his career and the significance of the award – in fact what it reads like is Johann Hari’s Wikipedia page back when Hari’s David Rose was editing it on his behalf. (James Wilkie writes for an English-language magazine called Austria Today, found online at AustriaToday.at.)

The Scottish Democratic Alliance was the Scottish Enterprise Party. The Scottish Enterprise Party ran for election in the third Scottish Parliament elections in 2007, fielded three candidates, got 1,025 votes. Currently they define themselves as a sort of internet-based think-tank: they certainly have at least two members – James Wilkie, living in Austria, and John McGill, living in Kilmarnock. This organisation has a website, which (I looked it up in WhoIs) is scottishdemocraticalliance.com, which is registered to James Wilkie. (The address WhoIs has for the website isn’t in Austria or in Kilmarnock: it’s in Leith, a small shop I know well by sight – Arkay Imaging Ltd, 228 Leith Walk.)

Pretty certain if this article on Newsnetweb was meant to accomplish anything other than give a retired gentleman in Austria a pleasant sense of achievement, making the years he spent at play with John McGill seem worthwhile, it was intended to make the Scottish Democratic Alliance look more like a real political party by inventing a kind of alternate history in which the letter-writing activities of these two friends over the years actually accomplished something.

George Foulkes was a fool to call this “Holocaust denial”. Not only is it grossly offensive, it also takes this kind of silly fiction altogether too seriously: and any number of people tweeted about Foulkes’s comment who would have ignored the silly article if Foulkes had let it alone.

On the day of the opening of the parliament in 1999, people on the Royal Mile, as he passed by, broke into song: to the tune of the Cuban anthem Guantanamera, they sang, ‘There’s only one Donald Dewar, there’s only one Donald Dewar’. It was true, and for me it vies with Sheena Wellington’s unaccompanied rendition of ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’ as the enduring memory of the day. (Alan Alexander)

I’ve expended more time on this than it probably deserved, and I never planned to do three blog posts in one day ever. What’s still current events to me is history to others: and history is a matter of fact. James Wilkie wants to write himself into Scottish history from his Austrian home: he’ll do less harm if we ignore him.

he highlighted the cost of alcohol to the NHS after meeting doctors, nurses, paramedics and police officers.

Mr Cameron toured the hospital, which has a police officer on duty two nights a week to handle drunken incidents, with matron Angela McNab and paramedic Paul Fell.

If David Cameron has a knack, it’s for suiting his speeches to fit his audience. If this occasionally makes him look a bit like Mr Wobbly, well, it means his immediate audience is usually happy and he gets the all-important visuals as background for his Prime Ministerial self.

NHS staff, however, are unusually and uniformly unhappy with David Cameron, to an extent that even Margaret Thatcher didn’t share. Cameron’s bullish attempts to push the NHS into privatisation for the profit of his cronies is so unpopular with healthcare professionals that Cameron has not risked inviting anyone who works in healthcare to his summit to discuss his NHS Reform bill.

It might be argued that David Cameron is not the right person to talk about the dangers of binge drinking. Not because he used to be a Bullingdon Club member – a reformed drunk who admits that he used to do dangerously criminal things when under the influence and that’s why he knows it’s stupid, could be just the person to talk to other teenagers about why binge drinking is bad but if you sober up and are extremely wealthy you too could be as successful as him someday. Hm, maybe not. But because Cameron really didn’t seem to see a problem with binge drinking when he was a director of the company which runs the Tiger Tiger chain, where the cocktail Pink Pussy could be bought in jugs for £8. This came out when he was running for leader in 2005, and, like homophobia, it seems to have been one of the things he gave up when he wanted to lead the Tory party.

That may have been why journalists were locked away in waiting rooms when Cameron toured the Newcastle hospital. It would not do to have anyone making a snarky comment about Cameron’s days selling booze cheap or the days when he swilled booze expensively.

The police aren’t in favour of locking drunks up in “drunk tanks”, because as Paul McKeever, the chairman of the Police Federation, says:

“To recommend locking people up in so-called ‘drunk tanks’ to resolve the issue of binge drinking is dangerous. People who are very drunk can be vulnerable and often require medical attention, so locking them in a confined space is not an effective solution.”

But that turned out not to be Cameron’s real problem. Cameron’s problem is that while NHS staff are absolutely professional at all times… there are limits, at least to one nurse’s resolve. She said – and she was overheard by a visitor to the hospital –

Walked past Prime Minister in RVI, Newcastle. Nurse tells him: ‘I’m vehemently opposed to reforms they’re bad for patients & bad for care.’

— Alexander Hay (@Alex_Hay) February 15, 2012

Alexander Hay twittered this at 4:07 on Wednesday 15th February. There were no journalists around – they were locked up in a separate room; the nurse faces disciplinary action* for her comment; and all the staff had been told if they repeated what the nurse had said, they too would be disciplined and might lose their jobs. Apparently what is said to a perfectly healthy Prime Minister in the public corridors of an NHS hospital has medical confidentiality.

But you can’t stop someone overhearing and tweeting.

According to Eoin Clarke at the Green Benches,

The staff were never informed of the Prime Minister’s visit, and were affronted when Cameron arrived at their Newcastle Royal Victoria Infirmary. I am told that the entire staff refused to speak to the Prime Minister, and this caused quite a stir. It transpires that the shift manager (or matron- I cannot confirm which) was left to ‘handle the PM’. Cameron was also assigned close police protection for his entire time in the hospital. The PM was shepherded into the back corridors to give his interview in isolation, apparently because the grimaces and frowns of staff members would have caused an embarrassment. One staff member joked that the ‘only persons who were smiling was his police protection’.

And that’s how, as Eoin Clarke says, a visit that on Tuesday was being promoted as a high-profile speech against binge drinking and a walkabout at a hospital where they care for the drinkers brought in for medical attention – you know, kind of the opposite of Cameron’s plans for a drunk tank – turned into a furtive scuttle:

A member of the public got in touch to say that it was rumoured that Cameron had received a very cold reception from the staff. The complainant also stated that there had been a rumoured altercation, and it was rumoured that the press had been kept away. But unlike the days of old when Tony Blair’s encounter with an angry patient, or Gordon Brown’s famous encounter with Mrs Duffy was beamed onto our television screens, this time we have seen nothing but a faceless interview. This is censorship of the highest order and according to the complainant who got in touch, this undermines our free press.

If need be, I will publish the complainant’s letter, a little later, but first I would like some answers. What happened on David Cameron’s hospital visit yesterday? Did he speak to staff or patients, and if so why does the clip not show this? Did he meet with the press, and if so why do we not see any evidence of this? Why has the PM concealed the hospital or any interaction with the public?

Without the happenstance of a visitor to the hospital who could not be legally silenced overhearing the nurse’s comments and reporting them on Twitter, this story could still be sitting in the “no evidence” limbo. When David Cameron does not wish journalists to report accurately on the facts of his visits to hospitals, he can simply have them sidelined and order the hospital to silence their staff.

*Update, 23:36 -

“However the Prime Minister; looking stern and red in the face, simply dismissed this and reverted to scripted spin – failing to respond to the concern. The bemused staff member was then left in the lurch as the entourage moved on towards A&E, leaving behind other shocked members of staff.”
A spokesman for Mr Cameron insisted: “It’s completely untrue. The Prime Minister had good discussions with both nurses and doctors during the visit.” (Telegraph)

If it’s “completely untrue” does that mean the nurse won’t face disciplinary action for not saying it?*

Only a week before the visit, David Cameron was claiming on PMQ that

he believed “passionately” in the future of the NHS, “not least” because of the care his family had received from the health service.

“I want to see that excellent service implemented for everyone and that means two things: it means we have got to put more money in to the NHS, and we are putting the money in, but it also means we have got to reform the NHS.”

The top-down “restructuring” and privatisation of the NHS was not on the Tory manifesto for the 2010 election. In fact, David Cameron explicitly claimed he wasn’t going to touch the NHS. This is purely and simply a matter of the vultures descending, the healthcare companies that see the NHS not as a healthcare service but purely and simply as a source of profit – a billion-dollar industry. The kind of stuff we heard from Julie Meyer on Thursday night at BBC Question Time.

No wonder Julie Meyer talked about the #NHS as an industry. She’s been meeting with @medicalfutures twitter.com/#!/JulieMarieM… &that’s £££ #BBCqt

— EdinburghEye (@EyeEdinburgh) February 17, 2012

Great lunch with Andy Richards at Mews of Mayfair cooking up some collaboration between Entrepreneur Country and Medical Futures ….

— Julie Meyer (@JulieMarieMeyer) February 12, 2012

As Eoin Clarke reports: Shutting the journalists away from the Prime Minister and silencing the staff and keeping even the patients out of the way is not standard procedure for when a Prime Minister visits a hospital. Cameron needs to do this because he needs very much to try to claim that his loosing the vultures on the NHS is welcome at grassroots level.

So far 147,156 people have signed the e-petition that

Calls on the Government to drop its Health and Social Care Bill.

And 504,330 people have signed the Take Action – Protect our NHS petition at 38 Degrees.

But the future of the NHS actually depends on about 22 MPs, LibDems or Tories, who are willing to stand up against David Cameron and Nick Clegg and their pary apparatus and vote to kill the bill. So far, the Bill has kept passing with a comfortable government majority. Either the LibDems and Tories who vote for it don’t understand it – entirely possible, since the government is refusing to publish the Risk Register.

You can use WriteToThem to ask your MP to sign EDM 2659 :

That this House expects the Government to respect the ruling by the Information Commissioner and to publish the risk register associated with the Health and Social Care Bill reforms in advance of Report Stage in the House of Lords in order to ensure that it informs that debate.

Kath Viner tweeted, when Julie Meyer was booed by the BBC Question Time audience on Thursday:

Think Julie Meyer hasn’t quite realised how much British people love the NHS #bbcqt

— Katharine Viner (@KathViner) February 16, 2012

But David Cameron knows we love the NHS. That’s why he didn’t want anyone watching when he made a speech from an NHS hospital last Wednesday. He’s been Twittered – but will it be the final straw that convinces just enough MPs being whipped to vote for the NHS Reforms that for the sake of their Parliamentary careers past 2015 they really, really have to kill the bill? That won’t end the danger to the NHS – as Tim Montgomerie at ConHome notes, virtually everything that Cameron wants to do to the NHS he can do by statutory instrument, quietly and without fuss. But it will ensure that the huge wash of reforms won’t go through right now.

Especially if you have a Tory or LibDem MP representing you, you can write to ask them to vote against the Bill. There is not much time left. On 22nd February there is a vote in the House of Commons to publish the Risk Register.

There is a third reading in the House of Lords on 27th February, and a final debate and vote in the House of Commons after that, and then the Bill receives Royal Assent and becomes law, and the NHS, sixty-four years old this year, is handed over to the vultures.

The TUC is rightly concerned that a booklet Jason Evert wrote, Pure Manhood: How to become the man God wants you to be, teaches homophobia.

You can read more of the booklet here:

• A guy who has these attractions may not want them, or even know where they’re coming from. Perhaps they stem from an unhealthy relationship with his father, an inability to relate to other guys, or even sexual abuse.

This is standard evangelical-Christian teaching about gay men in the US. Jim Burroway describes how this affects the parents of lesbian and gay children here:
With that, a very painful groan rose from the audience. This was probably the second-most effective line delivered that day (I’ll get to the most effective one in just a little bit). I looked around and saw heads shaking, couples looking at each other, and a general sense of horror filled the room. My cheeks flushed as I wondered how many of those groans came from fathers and mothers themselves who made up a sizeable chunk of the audience.

• Even if a person does not believe in God, he cannot argue with nature. For example, the life expectancy of homosexual men is half that of heterosexual men.

This claim is regularly used by the Christian Right in the US. It is often sourced back to an article published by the Journal of Epidemiology in 1997 “Modelling the impact of HIV disease on mortality in gay and bisexual men”. The kindest thing one can say about this claim is that it is way out of date.

• Furthermore, imagine what would happen if all people with same-sex attractions were placed in their own country. It would be empty in a century, because bodies of the same gender are not made to receive each other.

Jason Evert doesn’t appear to be aware that bisexuals exist. But never mind that. What if an imaginary country were populated entirely by lesbians and gay men, who had never experienced any heterosexual sexual attraction in their lives? Not in a century but in one generation – every child would be a wanted child. Why would anyone – least of all a Catholic – think this would be a bad thing?

But it’s not just homophobia that’s the problem with this booklet:

• Before long, part of the blade is exposed and the wolf’s tongue is nicked. But since its tongue has been numbed by the icy blood, the animal is unaware of the damage that’s been caused. As more goat’s blood is cleaned off the blade, it is replaced with the warmer blood of the wolf. In an excited frenzy at the taste of fresh blood, the animal licks more ravenously, is cut again and again, and continues to bleed until it becomes faint. Within hours, the wolf will die of blood loss.

If you’re wondering WTF? I can’t say I blame you. In this erroneous piece of natural history, the knife is pornography, the blood is animal lust, and the wolf is a teenage boy. Yes, it doesn’t make sense to me either.

What’s really interesting is that the Snopes.com community sourced this story of how to kill a wolf to a 1978 novel by John Norman, Beasts of Gor [Update, 20th February: But see caveat below and discussions in comments.]

Jason Evert says:

In the case of porn, the most troubling effects usually come later in life, when you actually try to love a woman. Research about people who looked at porn found that they were less likely to be satisfied with their partner’s affection, physical appearance, sexual curiosity, and sexual performance. Some husbands even come to think that they have the right to be aroused by fantasies. They seem to feel that if a wife isn’t flawless, it’s her fault.

John Norman is the author of about 25 books set on “Gor”, or “Counter-Earth”. The general assessment among SF fans is that while the first five or six are standard sword & sorcery stuff, thereafter the series descends into BDSM soft porn. There are some who argue that the Gor series is not pornography, but there’s no denying the sexism:

Women on Gor are slaves. Sure, there are “free women” – but, as you’re reminded over and over again throughout the course of the series, a free woman is just a slave without a collar. And they love it. Only in slavery and in submission do women (both Earth and Gorean) realize their true femininity. Men are real men – they’re beasts, brutes, and warriors, chockfull of honor and honest-to-goodness manhood, not the tepid stuff men from our world try to play off as masculinity. So sometimes? Those mysterious forces have a not-so-mysterious motivation: profit. Gorean slavers often raid Earth in order to kidnap its women, who are known for their “hot bellies” (ease of arousal) and overall craving for REAL MEN.

Already, it’s a mixture for problematically awesome times. There’s the many proud, bratty women (all women in this series are proud and bratty, until forcibly reminded to be otherwise) who realize they in fact love being topped and collared. There’s the men who are eager to top and collar them. There’s the static gender roles. There’s the constant denigration of the feminist movement, the insistence that equal rights squashes women’s sexuality, the idea that lesbian/assertive women just haven’t met the right man, and on and on. Underlying all this is the insistence that these sexualized gender roles are a biological necessity.

Jason Evert, apparently, is a Gor series fan. [Update, 20th Feb: Actually, the weight of evidence - see comments - suggests that by the time Evert heard this knife-licking story it had mutated from John Norman's Gor to anonymised glurge. Second update, 21st Feb the story has now been sourced to Chapter XIV of an 1881 account of the US expedition in the Arctic to find the Franklin papers, 1878-1880 - Schwatka's Search] At least, that’s where he’s taking his illustrative examples from, to teach to teenage children at Catholic schools. [21st Feb, again: Jim Dixon found the reference (see comments): I had never heard of Schwatka or Gilder till now. I am thoroughly impressed, though I have to say it does not make the story or anything else about the booklet less repellent.]

I oppose homophobia being taught in school, as every decent person should; no child should sit there in class listening to their teacher or an invited adult explain how that child is inferior or their parents are inferior.

A report released in 2004, Stand Up for Us – Challenging Homophobia in Schools, cites a 2001 study that suggests 85% of lesbian, gay and bisexual men and women experienced homophobic bullying at school.

Another UK study found that more than 50% of LGB men and women who had been bullied at school contemplated self-harm or suicide, while 40% had made at least one attempt to self-harm. A further study found that more than 20% had attempted suicide.

Three years ago Phil Beadle wrote:

These figures stand as testimony to an issue that I’ve witnessed, day-to-day, over the space of many years: British schools are the final bastions of homophobia, which is, and has always been, at epidemic proportions. In schools where racism is unheard of and sexism is petering out, protecting the rights of gay children is perceived as an equality too far. Homophobia, in British schools, is the last acceptable prejudice.

This appalling state of affairs is even worse in faith schools. A Stonewall report says that while 65% of pupils in non-denominational schools have experienced homophobic bullying, this rises to 75% in faith schools. Students experiencing such bullying in faith schools are also far less likely to report it.

That the Diocese of Lancaster thinks that homophobia is such a good thing they need to import American “experts” to have more of it, is appalling in itself.

But in the video (I don’t blame you if you didn’t listen to it) Jason Evert is lecturing on how contraception isn’t necessary because natural family planning is what you need. (2% of sexually-active Catholic women in the US use NFP. All the rest use contraception. The Catholic Church has accepted contraception is not sinful, even if the celibate hierarchy are still catching up.)

In the booklet, which was handed out to schoolchildren at state-funded schools as part of their Sex and Relationships Education, Jason Evert claims

“scientifically speaking, safe sex is a joke”, explains that “the homosexual act is disordered, much like contraceptive sex between heterosexuals. Both acts are directed against God’s natural purpose for sex – babies and bonding.”

Apparently every teenager in a Catholic school in Lancashire got this anti-contraception message.

From The Blackburn Citizen, a Lancashire local paper:

The number of women having abortions has risen in East Lancashire — with a ‘worrying’ number of young girls undergoing the procedure.

Fourteen abortions were undertaken by girls aged 14 and younger last year across the area.

Coun Ron O’Keeffe, Blackburn with Darwen Council’s health watchdog, said abortion was “a major problem in the borough”, especially in deprived areas.

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Inviting a guest speaker to tell a large number of teenagers that contraception is “disordered” and safe sex is “a joke”, does not necessarily imply a connection with a rising abortion rate.

But it is certainly true that a rising incidence of contraceptive use invariably parallels a drop in the abortion rate. Put simply: Preaching chastity to teenagers as a substitute for telling them about safe sex is already proven not to work.

I am disturbed about the homophobia. I am alarmed and amused about the Beasts of Gor being used as a teaching aid. I am appalled that the Diocese of Lancaster considered it more important to impose Catholic doctrine on the children in the state-funded schools their Church runs, than to give them accurate and helpful information about safe sex.

And as for Michael Gove, who argues

The education provisions of the Equality Act 2010 which prohibit discrimination against individuals based on their protected characteristics (including their sexual orientation) do not extend to the content of the curriculum. Any materials used in sex and relationship education lessons, therefore, will not be subject to the discrimination provisions of the act.

Well, he is unfit for purpose as Secretary of State for Education: he should resign.

So Tesco have decided…

Well, not to stop using free labour. They like that part.

In a statement from Tesco on Friday night, the company – which made £3.8bn in profits last year – said it wanted the scheme to be free from any sort of sanction.

“We understand the concern that those who stay in the scheme longer than a week risk losing their benefits if they drop out before the end of their placement,” Tesco said. “We have suggested to DWP that to avoid any misunderstanding about the voluntary nature of the scheme, this threat of losing benefit should be removed.”

That would be the evening of Friday 17th February 2012. Tesco signed up to make use of the slave labour provided by SBWA at latest by October 2011. For four months at least, they had no difficulty at all with the scheme that the Department of Work and Pensions would pay them to take workers for any store who would put in 30 hours a week, without Tesco having to pay them more than their bus fare. At least 1400 people were provided by the JobCentres, and Tesco admits that only 300 were actually hired – the remaining 1100 were simply let go back into the unpaid labour pool.

Tesco’s sudden concern over why they were getting so many hundreds of people to work for them for free, 30 hours a week for 4 weeks, without any real prospect of a job at the end of it, did not arise until on Wednesday night, Eoin Clarke at the Green Benches blog posted a link and screencapped an ad that Tesco Bury St Edmunds Superstore had posted for night shift workers who would cost Tesco a couple of bus fares for every shift, not nearly as expensive as actually hiring someone for nightshift work with all the health and safety niceties that employers are expected to pay for.

And on Thursday morning, UK Tesco woke up to a Twitterstorm the likes of which Gareth at their Twitter Customer Care feed had evidently never seen. Tesco’s Facebook page was getting a constant stream of angry comments which they could delete, but they could do nothing about the tweeters. Puffles the Dragon Fairy blogged about this on Thursday – he’s a nice dragon fairy, he felt sorry for the Tesco employee responsible for covering the @UKTesco twitterfeed during the working day.

Perhaps not surprisingly, by Friday evening Tesco had decided not to reject the free labour they get paid for, goodness no, but to try to finangle a way of making it look a little less like slave labour – not to go as far as paying minimum wage, but to get DWP to stop sanctioning people for turning down the opportunity to help out at Tesco.

Good luck with that, Tesco.

A JobCentrePlus whistleblower admitted last April that the new coalition government has brought with it a culture of reducing unemployment figures by setting JobCentre employees sanction targets:

A whistleblower said staff at his jobcentre were given targets of three people a week to refer for sanctions, where benefits are removed for up to six months. He said it was part of a “culture change” since last summer that had led to competition between advisers, teams and regional offices.

“Suddenly you’re not helping somebody into sustainable employment, which is what you’re employed to do,” he said. “You’re looking for ways to trick your customers into ‘not looking for work’. You come up with many ways. I’ve seen dyslexic customers given written job searches, and when they don’t produce them – what a surprise – they’re sanctioned. The only target that anyone seems to care about is stopping people’s money.

The point of workfare is not to provide Tesco with a means of propping up their profits. It’s understandable that Tesco should see that as the main issue, but for the Tories and LibDems who endorse slave labour, the sanctions are an important part of the scheme.

Not just because sanctions cut benefit costs in the short term. But also because workfare is an essential part of the ideology of cheap-work conservatives:

The larger the supply of unemployed, the cheaper it is to hire workers. The more desperately you need a job, the cheaper you’ll work, and the more power the 1% have over you. If you are part of the wealthy elite – or are fool enough to imagine you might be someday – your wealth, power and privilege is enhanced by the vast majority forced to work cheap.

Support unions calling for an end to mandatory work schemes.

Sign the petition.

Today demonstrators brought one Tesco store to a standstill. National day of action, 3rd March.