Does anyone agree that there is a need for forum space to mention all those things that are of interest in the short term but, would not necessarily sustain a half a dozen or a dozen comments.
For example: Yesterday was the last day of the Six Nations rugby competition. Only of interest perhaps, to few on these Forums. I’d like to have placed a reminder but couldn’t find the last Six Nations subject, so didn’t bother.
Another example: Lord Neuburger, President of the Supreme Court mentioned that it was desirable that people should not be prevented from venting their often frustrated opinions on contentious issues for fear of condemnation. He thought that commentators who were opposed, were inhibited by the prospect of disapproval, from discussing rascism, homosexuality, ordination of females etc.
My Six Nations snippet was that it was a generally good result. Ireland won (by points difference) the Six Nations title from England. England won the Triple Crown and France was beaten ! Result.
By: John Green - 16th March 2016 at 18:37
Education. It worked and continues to work on smoking. Funny tho’ that it applies only to some aspects of human behaviour.
By: charliehunt - 16th March 2016 at 16:14
Indeed, but by the same token there’s an awful lot of rubbish – no pun intended – spouted about excess packaging!!
By: TonyT - 16th March 2016 at 15:47
It rings of the ill thought out bin tax that would have resulted in increased fly tipping and people stuffing their rubbish into other peoples bins, fining the public for the amount of waste products they throw away does not solve a problem, fining a company for excess packaging does… It’s all well and good saying recycling works, but an excess of cardboard or plastic packaging would have been far better off still growing as a tree or as a future oil source than being recycled.
By: charliehunt - 16th March 2016 at 15:30
In fact the real argument is whether it is actually a solution and whether it would work. This from the Guardian last month:
“While price is a major tool in seeking to govern behaviour, the multi-faceted reasons behind obesity will not be dealt with by a blunt rise in cost. The British Soft Drinks Association claims the soft drinks tax in Mexico has only reduced the average calorie intake by six calories per day.
Although a tax would raise prices for consumers, this does not necessarily mean they would be any more educated about their diet. What’s more, taxing essentials such as food and drink would take a larger share of income from those already struggling with rising costs.
There are no shortcuts to solving a long-term problem such as obesity. More complex proposals to help tackle the crisis include reformulation; reduced portion sizes; restriction on advertising and marketing to children of certain products high in fat, salt or sugar; promotions of healthier food ranges; and further voluntary proposals for clearer labelling.
Education also plays a central role in healthier lifestyle choices, with investment essential in sports resources, particularly for children and young adults, and policy reform needed to ensure healthy procurement choices for public bodies such as schools, hospitals and prisons.
These alternatives will undoubtedly involve time and consensus and will not have the headline-grabbing effect of taxing sugar or publicity of well-known campaigners such as Jamie Oliver. However, together they are likely to have a greater effect on the nation’s waistlines, if not on its pockets. “
By: TonyT - 16th March 2016 at 14:25
He said the £530m raised by a tax on the makers of sugary drinks would be spent on doubling the funding of primary school sports.
The levy will be introduced in two years’ time, to give companies time to adapt products to reduce their sugar content.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-35813973
Horse crock!!!!!, they will simply increase the price to deal with the extra tax, if he wanted to make a major difference, then the only way of doing that would have been to legislate the amount of sugar permitted in soft drinks….. Smoke and Mirrors again.
By: charliehunt - 15th March 2016 at 12:44
Mr BS – You’ve said it yourself. And instead of the disturbing comments about the rise of right-wing parties in Europe by the likes of Hollande, the nations most affected need to address the causes for their rise in the democratic process. Punishing member states whose democratic process runs counter to the autocracy of Brussels will lay the seeds for what Europe went through – twice – in the last century.
By: John Green - 15th March 2016 at 12:42
You sow the wind; you reap the whirlwind.
All that you describe is a cosequence of the ‘open door’ policy favoured by politicians in the liberal West. It had to happen. People will permit these massive demographic changes only for so long.
By: MrBlueSky - 15th March 2016 at 12:24
Germany held regional elections on Sunday in three states, and the results were shocking. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which ran on a xenophobic, anti-immigrant platform, won 12.5 percent in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, 15 percent in Baden-Württemberg, and 24 percent in Saxony-Anhalt. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats and the center-left Social Democratic Party, by contrast, lost considerable vote shares.
AfD didn’t win enough to control the government of any of the three states that voted, but it does now hold a significant presence in each state’s legislature. In fact, it’s the best result for a far-right party in any German election since World War II.
AfD isn’t nearly as toxic as the Nazis, to be clear. But its rise is a troubling sign for Germany — and, indeed, the West in general.
Here’s why.
1) AfD’s growing popularity in Germany is scary
The big takeaway from the election is the obvious one: A disturbingly far-right party is surging in the eurozone’s most important country.
AfD began life in 2013 as a fringe anti-EU party. Its popularity has soared in the past several months: Since November, polls have found that AfD is the country’s third most popular party nationally.
The key reason for its rise is easy to spot: the refugee crisis and rising anti-immigrant sentiment.
AfD’s core policy proposal is to reverse Chancellor Merkel’s relatively open migration and refugee policies. AfD leaders have proposed closing Germany’s borders to new migrants, suspending the right to asylum, and shutting down the EU’s internal open borders policy (called Schengen).
The party’s leader, Frauke Petry, defends these policies using language that’s at best nativist and at worst outright racist. “Petry has urged Germans to have three children to reduce the need for immigration,” Bloomberg reports, “and suggested German policy is driven by Holocaust guilt.”
In late January, Petry said that German police “must prevent illegal border crossings and even use firearms if necessary.” This call to shoot migrants and refugees was expected to hurt AfD at the polls. But, as a Der Spiegel feature on the party notes, AfD’s numbers actually went up.
The party is scary enough that Germany’s justice minister is openly discussing whether the BfV, Germany’s FBI equivalent, should monitor the party to see if it is unconstitutional. Article 21 of the German constitution prohibits parties that “seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order.”
“The AfD has also become a catchment basin for right-wing extremists and anti-refugee, Islamophobic rabble-rousers,” Der Spiegel explains. “The party’s existence, and growing popularity, is raising questions as to whether Germany has truly learned the lessons of World War II and the Nazi dictatorship.”
For obvious reasons, post-World War II Germany has had something of a taboo on far-right extremist parties. They’ve existed, sure, but until recently have been unable to pull together significant levels of support.
The fact that one is rising — and, indeed, winning a significant percentage of the vote in elections — suggests that the liberal consensus in German politics may not be as strong as previously thought.
“Before now, populist or xenophobic parties in Germany rarely won more than 5 percent of the vote,” Judy Dempsey, a senior associate at Carnegie Europe, wrote after the vote. “The success of the AfD changed that, at least for the moment.”
2) The far right is still on the rise in the West
AfD’s big win underscores something very important about modern politics: Far-right parties like AfD are growing throughout Europe.
Der Spiegel has a nice map on this, showing the countries where far-right parties have a presence in Parliament (yellow dots) or are actually part of the government (red dots). It turns out the xenophobic far-right has surged in countries as diverse as Sweden, the UK, the Netherlands, and Hungary:
These parties have, in most cases, ridden the European refugee and migrant crisis to power. While Europeans have for some time been skeptical of migration, the huge surge in migrants last year has dramatically inflamed these sentiments — leading to a rise in the far-right’s poll numbers. Italy’s Northern League, for example, is polling at four times what it was in 2013.
Political science research shows that the support for the European far-right is driven principally by fear of immigration.
Elisabeth Ivarsflaten, a comparative politics professor at the University of Bergen in Norway, examined seven different European countries with far-right parties in a 2008 paper. Specifically, she was looking to see what drove people to the populist right: dissatisfaction with the economy, distrust in political institutions, or anti-immigrant sentiment.
Her findings were unambiguous. “As immigration policy preferences become more restrictive, the probability of voting for the populist right increases dramatically,” Ivarsflaten found. By contrast, voters with right-wing economic views were barely more likely to vote for the far right than an ordinary voter. Ditto those who didn’t trust politicians very much.
(Elisabeth Ivarsflaten) Y-axis is probability of voting for a far-right party; x-axis is the level of support for restrictive immigration policies, right-wing economic views, etc.
“This study therefore to a large extent settles the debate about which grievances unite all populist right parties,” Ivarsflaten concluded. “The answer is the grievances arising from Europe’s ongoing immigration crisis.”
The immigration crisis today is, of course, much worse than it was when Ivarsflaten’s piece was published in 2008. Hence why AfD is surging even in a country that’s been terrified of the far right for the past 70 years, and why the far right is on the march throughout Europe more broadly.
3) Merkel’s refugee policy is surviving the right-wing onslaught — for now
There’s a sliver of good news in the election: AfD has not gained enough power to enact its agenda, and its surge is not likely to pressure Merkel into abandoning her pro-refugee stance.
The Guardian’s Alberto Nardelli took a close look at the results from Sunday, and found that candidates who were pro-refugee and pro-migrant weren’t always losers. In Baden-Württemberg, for example, Merkel’s party (the Christian Democrats, or CDU) lost big. But the leading CDU candidate for state premier (governor, essentially) in that state had distanced himself from the Merkel’s open borders approach to the migrant crisis.
By contrast, the Green party’s candidate had embraced Merkel’s stance, and he won the state for the first time in German history.
“Across all three as a whole, a majority of voters supported the chancellor’s policy [on migration],” Nardelli found. “The prevailing narrative in swaths of the press on Monday morning – that the results are a rejection of Angela Merkel’s refugee policy — is simplistic.”
Instead, Nardelli explains, the election shows that a segment of German society is becoming increasingly staunch in its opposition to welcoming refugees and migrants. This group is, at present, still a minority. That means Merkel is very unlikely to change her refugee policy, either in Germany specifically or in upcoming European negotiations.
“The refugee policy as a whole — it’s simply not true that it’s lost the support of the German population,” Andreas Kluth, the Economist’s Berlin bureau chief, explained in an interview with CNBC. “Here, she’s discovered that she needs to take a certain line.”
However, there’s no guarantee that this will remain true. The big question going forward is whether extreme parties like the AfD are able to build on the support base they’ve demonstrated, or whether the sentiments driving their support (like anti-migrant sentiment) will begin to fade.
“More voters becoming bored and turning to the extremes — that is more of a threat than any immediate change to Angela Merkel’s refugee policies, which I don’t think will happen,” Kluth concludes.
By: John Green - 14th March 2016 at 19:30
Snafu352
Forget the other clowns. You know as well as I do that it is the Commission that calls the shots and again, you know as well as I do that they are subject to the full frontal democratic assault by a grateful EU wide electorate.
As a former Marine, you can take it from me that the above is entirely true and you can tell it to the rest of the Marines.
By: Arabella-Cox - 14th March 2016 at 16:02
.
Do you have any knowledge of the actions of the Polish government?
Do you understand the changes to the constitutional court that they are attempting to force through?
Do you appreciate that they have taken over the running of the national media? The government can now dismiss and appoint whom it pleases as editors and managers of the media outlets.
Does that sound like a step towards open and un-restricted communication with the populace or perhaps seeking to at best influence and at worst control the message?
Wouldn’t it be good if there was some body that could stand up when such liberties with freedom of speech were taken and point out the clear problems with such steps?
Oh what’s that you say, there is?
Are you in any way aware of the thoughts and feelings of a large proportion of the more thinking Polish populace? I am I was there a week ago.
By: Arabella-Cox - 14th March 2016 at 15:45
Well done John, you have got something correct. The EU is as democratic as any other governmental institution and just as flawed for that.
European Parliament
Role: Directly-elected EU body with legislative, supervisory, and budgetary responsibilities
The European Parliament is the EU’s law-making body. It is directly elected by EU voters every 5 years.
Council of the European Union
Role: Voice of EU member governments, adopting EU laws and coordinating EU policies
Members: Government ministers from each EU country, according to the policy area to be discussed
The European Council
The European Council defines the EU’s overall political direction and priorities. It is not one of the EU’s legislating institutions, so does not negotiate or adopt EU laws.
The members of the European Council are the heads of state or government of the 28 EU member states, the European Council President and the President of the European Commission.
European Commission
Role: Promotes the general interest of the EU by proposing and enforcing legislation as well as by implementing policies and the EU budget
The European Commission is the EU’s politically independent executive arm. It is alone responsible for drawing up proposals for new European legislation, and it implements the decisions of the European Parliament and the Council of the EU.
By: John Green - 12th March 2016 at 22:19
Of course the EU is entirely democratic, to say otherwise is – now let’s see – a bit silly.
By: MrBlueSky - 12th March 2016 at 18:18
Nicola Sturgeon reveals the SNP will start pushing for ANOTHER independence referendum this summer…
Sheese, enough already…
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3489225/Nicola-Sturgeon-reveals-SNP-start-pushing-independence-referendum-summer-18-months-Scottish-people-rejected-chance-split-Union.html#ixzz42iK1GyNO
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
By: MrBlueSky - 12th March 2016 at 15:41
French President Threatens To “Suspend” Nations That Elect “Far-Right” Politicians
Last month, the burgeoning spat between Brussels and Poland over the latter’s move to approve new laws that allow the conservative (and Eurosceptic) Law and Justice (PiS) government to name the chiefs of public TV and radio, and select judges for Poland’s constitutional court.
In response to a bloc-wide backlash, Polish minister Zbigniew Ziobro sent a letter to EU commissioner Gunther Oettinger in which Ziobro dismissed criticism of the new laws as “silly.”
Oettinger earlier suggested that Poland be put under supervision for possible violations of democratic principles and after the Polish Wprost weekly ran a cover depicting Angela Merkel, Jean Claude-Juncker, and other eurocrats as Nazis who “want to supervise Poland again,” Brussels hit back by launching a review of the country’s new media laws. Under the “rule of law” mechanism, the EU Commission can compel member states to change measures that pose “a systematic threat” to democracy.
But that’s not all. according to comments from French President Francois Hollande on Friday, Europe could move to “suspend” countries in which far-right governments rise to power.
“French President Francois Hollande warned that an EU member state could be sanctioned if the extreme-right came to power there — and could even be suspended from the bloc,” AFP reports. “A country can be suspended from the European Union,” the President told France Inter radio.
“Human rights watchdog the Council of Europe last week expressed concern at legislative changes proposed by Poland’s new right-wing government that have been described both at home and abroad as unconstitutional and undemocratic,” AFP goes on to say, adding that “similar concerns have been expressed about Hungary’s right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban.”
“When the freedom of the media is in danger, when constitutions and human rights are under attack, Europe must not just be a safety net. It must put in place procedures to suspend (countries) — it can go that far,” Hollande said. “Checks,” are necessary on Poland.
There are a couple of things to note here. first, it’s not at all clear why it should be up to France how another country’s citizens vote. indeed, there’s something terribly ironic about the idea of punishing a country for their voting preferences in the name of democracy. There’s certainly nothing democratic about telling entire countries who they’re allowed to elect.
Second, Holland’s comments seem to reflect fears that the worsening refugee crisis has led to a revival of nationalism in Europe. Between the growing support for PEGIDA, which staged bloc-wide rallies earlier this month) and the popularity of groups like the “Soldiers of Odin” in Finland, it’s clear that the far-right is indeed staging a comeback. One wonders how many nations Holland and Brussels are prepared to “suspend.”
Or perhaps it’s the other way around. Given the shifting sentiment, perhaps the far-right will “suspend” the bloc’s Francois Holland’s for failing to keep Western Europe secure in the face of myriad threats to the bloc’s territorial inegrity and cultural heritage.
By: trekbuster - 11th March 2016 at 17:35
Typical anti-NHS Tory behaviour in commons today. Arrogant numbskulls
By: TonyT - 10th March 2016 at 22:26
How apt
By: charliehunt - 10th March 2016 at 21:17
Yet another angle. As with every contentious subject the truth must lie buried in there somewhere.
But in reality the NHS will continue to drag its way forward sucking more and more money from the already over-extended exchequer, leap-frogging from crisis to crisis until it is either fundamentally reformed or implodes under its own debt.
By: trekbuster - 10th March 2016 at 18:12
Well done James O’Brian for pointing out how tabloid papers are avoiding mentioning strike because the media realise the majority of public are behind the junior doctors – over 65% support the doctors and opposition is dropping
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/junior-doctors-strike-the-truth-behind-those-media-attacks-on-doctors-a6922581.html
Having said that, in the online torygraph there is a remarkable* article today
* remarkable because it actually discusses an alternative viewpoint to the general anti-union stance of the publication.
By: Beermat - 9th March 2016 at 10:22
Ah. Sorry. Different interview. She did say ‘of course’, didn’t she? Oops!
By: Beermat - 9th March 2016 at 08:19
Not sure now, Stu. I am looking for the footage, as there are two different written versions, one with the ‘Of Course’. I thought I had seen it, and I remember her as being more evasive..
Sign In
March 16, 2014 at 1:27 pm