Tom Griffin, 21 January 2008

There's a huge amount of knocking copy about Ken Livingstone in the press at the moment, ahead of Martin Bright's Dispatches documentary on Channel Four tonight.

Bright writes:

I was delighted when Livingstone became Mayor of London in 2000 against the full might of the Labour spin machine. I believe he has been a courageous politician whose once-derided "loony left" ideas about the promotion of the rights of minorities are now so mainstream that they are even official Conservative policy. Livingstone has been right about many things, but I believe his behaviour is symptomatic of a man who has grown too comfortable with power. (New Statesman)

Perhaps it's not Livingstone who's changed since 2000, but Bright who has fallen in with Dean Godson's neoconservative crowd at Policy Exchange.

Andy Rowell and Rich Cookson, 16 January 2008

The Government held at least nine secret meetings at Downing Street with the bosses of nuclear energy companies while it formulated controversial plans for a new generation of the power plants.

No official records were kept of the discussions with the companies, which stand to profit from Gordon Brown's announcement last Thursday that he was approving a new generation of nuclear power plants.

The Government initially tried to block details of the meetings requested under the Freedom of Information Act. However, last week it revealed that Geoffrey Norris, Gordon Brown's energy adviser, met bosses from EDF, British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), E.ON and British Energy at a crucial phase in the Government's deliberations.

Confirmation that there are no official records of the meetings adds to concern that certain advisers can operate outside the rules of government accountability.

Andy Rowell, 14 January 2008

As the once-peaceful African nation of Kenya has descended into an orgy of violence after its disputed election result, the reaction in the west has been one of outrage based largely on ignorance. Both politicians and the media have failed to fully understand the role of Kenya’s colonial past in the current crisis.

Late last month, the government of ruling President Mwai Kibati declared that he had won the country’s election. But all the indications are that the election was rigged in the closing stages, after his main challenger Raila Odinga had surged in the early exit polls.

With nearly half the vote counted Odinga had 57 percent of the vote compared with 39 percent for Kibaki. However, when the results were announced Kibaki had supposedly won by 46 per cent to 44 per cent.

Election observers were quick to point out that Kenya’s election commission ignored undeniable evidence of vote rigging. For example, in one district Kibaki’s total went from 50,145 votes after voting closed to 75,261 votes the next day. “The presidential elections were flawed,” said Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, the chief European observer.

 10 January 2008

As the British Government announces the go-ahead for a new generation of nuclear power plants in the UK, Nuclear Spin reveals the pro-nuclear covert campaign underway in British schools.

For example, in 2006, the national curriculum was changed so that it became compulsory for schools to teach all 14-16 year olds about nuclear power. The move was largely sparked by a report for the Department for Trade and Industry written by the Nuclear Skills Group, made up of Government officials and a panel of six ‘independent members’.

In the report only one, Paul Thomas, was said to be working for BNFL. But NuclearSpin has discovered that two more members were also working for BNFL.

One of the nuclear industry’s largest education projects is called Energy Foresight, run by Young Foresight, which in turn has been paid hundreds of thousands of pounds by nuclear organisations to develop a set of teaching materials “that present radioactivity and related issues in personal and social contexts.” Energy Foresight’s material’s have been criticized by independent nuclear consultant John Large as “a blatant piece of propaganda… it misleads”.

For more on this go here 

Stephen Carter

Quick fixes aimed at driving the media agenda became the hallmark of Tony Blair’s decade in Downing Street and the cumulative damage which they inflicted on both the authority of Parliament and the standing of the civil service caused widespread unease within the Labour Party.

Early last summer, as he outlined a vision for his Premiership, Brown and his aides did much to promote the idea that the new administration would rein in unaccountable political advisers and put the levers of power back in the hands of civil servants.

David Miller, 9 January 2008

The Lobbyists who run the SPBE: Scobie and Gauld (middle and right)

Writing in the IPT magazine The Bridge, Devin Scobie of the SPBE notes that facilitating the access was not easy: 'Establishing... that an IPT led Programme was a charitable cause and thereby eligible to book meeting rooms in the Parliament took some time but is now firmly in place' (January-March 2008, p. 16.).  Amongst those attending the IPT led programme in Edinburgh was Jane McGirk, lobbyist for SELEX Sensors and Airborne Systems UK .  This is an arms firm (part of the Finmeccanica Group the privatised former Italian state company which now owns Westland Helicopters) which produces 'sensing solutions for fighters, transporters, helicopters and Unmanned Airborne Vehicles (UAVs).'  They also produce 'high power lasers for long range designation of ground targets (selected for the Lockheed Martin Sniper pod and Joint Strike Fighter EO targeting system)' and  'long range target identification systems'.  These weapons are currently used in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the academic research has suggested that more than half a million people have been casualties since March 2003. 

David Morrison, 21 December 2007

On 3 December 2007, the US administration published declassified Key Judgments from a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) entitled Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities [1].  Its principal conclusion is that Iran halted its nuclear weapons programme in the autumn of 2003, and hasn’t restarted its programme since.

The US administration’s reaction to this has been to say that nothing has changed, that Iran may not have an active nuclear weapons programme any more, but it has the knowledge to make nuclear weapons, in particular, it knows how to enrich uranium.  However, try as he might, President Bush will have difficulty convincing the world that an Iran that halted a nuclear weapons programme four years ago is as threatening as an Iran with an active nuclear weapons programme – which was the previous story from US intelligence.

Next Monday the new head of the fledgling European Chemicals Agency will be formally appointed in Helsinki, the home of the new Agency.

Despite the formal announcement, the European Commission is facing a growing political row over its “imposition” of a business-friendly candidate to head the Agency.

The Agency is tasked with implementing REACH – the highly controversial chemical legislation that was adopted by the EU in December 2006, after years of lobbying by the chemical industry to water it down. The Agency will be hugely influential as it will oversee how 30,000 industrial and everyday chemicals that are used by the public are regulated within the EU.

The Commission’s candidate of choice is Geert Dancet, a Belgian-born economist who is currently the Interim Director of the Agency. He is a twenty-year career bureaucrat from the Commission, who critics argue will be its “puppet” and not be independent enough.

If ever there was a harbinger of an imminent demolition job it has to be Rupert Murdoch’s demand for an easing of the rules which require radio and television services to be politically impartial in their news and current affairs output.

Murdoch knows he is pushing at an open door: newspaper websites are already free to be as partisan as they like in what they report and now that the broadcasting regulator Ofcom has thrown in the towel, the same goes for the burgeoning audio-visual output of press proprietors.

Internet television will soon be available at the flick of a remote control and my fear is that political parties struggling for support will rue the day that the Blair government failed to ensure action was taken to protect balanced reporting on television and radio during general election campaigns.