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Articles by Ian Hernon
Heroic WWII soldiers slaughtered because of bad intelligence on bloodiest battlefield
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Putin signs anti-foreign organisations bill
President Vladimir Putin signed a bill which allows foreign organisations to be banned from operating in Russia. The law allows the authorities to prosecute foreign non-governmental organisations (NGOs) or firms designated as “undesirable” on national security grounds, and individuals working for NGOs could face fines or up to six years in prison. Critics say it is a Kremlin move aimed at stifling dissent.
Letter From America
If anyone were to say China is playing a leadership role in the world I would say it’s not China rushing to the front but rather the front runners have stepped back leaving the place to China,” Zhang said. “Oh Brave New World, that has such people in it,” Miranda gushed in The Tempest, but Aldous Huxley put it in perspective, invoking her exclamation to name his dystopia. And dystopic is the name of the game.
Ian Williams: Letter From America
When he takes office on New Year’s Day, the new United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres will pick up the most poisoned of chalices – Syria. Last week, following successive Russian vetoes in the UN Security Council, by a large majority, the United Nations General Assembly supported a Canadian resolution condemning the “extensive and persistent violations of international humanitarian and international human rights laws” in Syria. It called for prosecutions of those responsible.
Books: Living with the legacy of a father’s journey beyond the pale
Fascist In The Family:?The Tragedy Of John Beckett MP by Francis Beckett Routledge £16.99 There is an established genre of what Americans call ‘red diaper’ memoirs – growing up in a communist family in the heyday of post-war western communism. David Aaronovich’s recent account of his father Sam, a CP official and then Marxist economist, is the best British example. But what was it like to grow up as the son of one of Britain’s leading fascists and anti-semites?
Letter From America: Ian Williams
At least the Clintons are consistent. They maintained a serene sense of entitlement almost to the end of the election night count. They had explained that the cancellation of the victory fireworks display in the East River was a consequence of the lateness of the count rather than a lack of confidence in victory. That complacency had been unperturbed by Obama’s victory over Hillary and hardly dented by the Sanders’ upsurge.
High Court rules Commons must vote on Article 50
The High Court ruled on Friday (November 3) that Parliament must vote on whether the UK can start the process of leaving the EU, which means Theresa May’s government cannot trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty without Commons approval. The decision threw the prime minister’s entire post-Brexit strategy into chaos with claims that it was “unconstitutional”. The government is appealing, with a further hearing expected next month.
Tribune
November 3, 2016 Campaigners will seek a judicial review into Amber Rudd’s refusal to hold a public inquiry into the police role in crushing the miners’ strike..” The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign … October 25, 2016 WHEN Theresa May sent her attorney general to court last week to stop Parliament deciding on Brexit, she stepped on a legal trip wire laid forty years ago in New … October 25, 2016 Health inspectors have raised safety concerns about two-thirds of A&E units in England,...
Time for reform of the labour market
I first stood for Parliament in 1974. Then the only story in town was immigration. A right-wing racist Conservative MP called Enoch Powell had set politics aflame with his argument that the mass arrival of non-British citizens was disruptive to settled British society. Fast forward to today and exactly the same arguments can be heard sometimes from some Labour as well as most Tory MPs and all Ukip MEPs – that immigration is the Number One issue for Britain.
Campaigners to seek Judicial Review
Campaigners will seek a judicial review into Amber Rudd’s refusal to hold a public inquiry into the police role in crushing the miners’ strike..” The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign (OTJC) said “the gloves are off” and secretary Barbara Jackson said it may start crowdfunding to pay for a review. “This has been four years of hard work, it’s taken over our lives,” she said at the Barnsley branch of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM).
Tribune
November 3, 2016 Campaigners will seek a judicial review into Amber Rudd’s refusal to hold a public inquiry into the police role in crushing the miners’ strike..” The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign … October 25, 2016 WHEN Theresa May sent her attorney general to court last week to stop Parliament deciding on Brexit, she stepped on a legal trip wire laid forty years ago in New … October 25, 2016 Health inspectors have raised safety concerns about two-thirds of A&E units in England,...
The Diary | Tribune
Masters of war The Labour MPs who abstained on their own Shadow Defence Secretary Emily Thornberry’s rather mild motion to distance the UK from Saudi atrocities in Yemen, revealed a somewhat twisted concept of loyalty in their haste to put their receipt of arms trade largesse ahead of their Party.
Tribune
November 3, 2016 Campaigners will seek a judicial review into Amber Rudd’s refusal to hold a public inquiry into the police role in crushing the miners’ strike..” The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign … October 25, 2016 WHEN Theresa May sent her attorney general to court last week to stop Parliament deciding on Brexit, she stepped on a legal trip wire laid forty years ago in New … October 25, 2016 Health inspectors have raised safety concerns about two-thirds of A&E units in England,...
FBI under fire for ‘partisan’ decision to reopen email investigation
FBI chief James Comey has a personal fortune of around £9 million. He is a registered Republican and donated to John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign and to Governor Mitt Romney’s campaign in 2012. He may now go into history as the man who put Donald Trump in the White House. Only in America.
Tribune
November 3, 2016 The High Court ruled on Friday (November 3) that Parliament must vote on whether the UK can start the process of leaving the EU, which means Theresa May’s government cannot … November 3, 2016 Campaigners will seek a judicial review into Amber Rudd’s refusal to hold a public inquiry into the police role in crushing the miners’ strike..” The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign … October 25, 2016 WHEN Theresa May sent her attorney general to court last week to stop Parliament...
Born in the USA: violence, racism and songs
Could there be a more apposite time to revive Terrence McNally’s dramatisation of EL Doctorow’s Ragtime? The original opening night in London coincided with the beginning of the Iraq War. Predictably, the show bombed.
Tribune
October 25, 2016 WHEN Theresa May sent her attorney general to court last week to stop Parliament deciding on Brexit, she stepped on a legal trip wire laid forty years ago in New … October 25, 2016 Health inspectors have raised safety concerns about two-thirds of A&E units in England, blaming underfunding of council care services for causing overcrowding in hospitals.” The Care Quality Commission review said … October 25, 2016 Commons watchdogs have been given evidence that pensioners of the...
Queen’s greatest hits
Beginning life as Champion, a 20-minute short play that formed part of the To Russia with Love series of shorts tackling homophobia, Gypsy Queen was developed by writer and star Rob Ward following boxer Tyson Fury’s comment that: “There are only three things that need to be accomplished before the devil comes home and one of them is homosexuality being legal.” Thankfully, Ward employs a much better turn of phrase than Fury; consequently, he makes sense where Fury, frankly, doesn’t.
Westminster Watch: Navel-gazing while inequality bites
The Tories are tearing themselves apart over hard and soft Brexit, HS2 and Theresa May’s incompetent reshuffle. Labour are beating each other up over alleged anti-Semitism, alleged entryism and Jeremy Corbyn’s incompetent reshuffle. UKIP are disintegrating in a welter of punch-ups, both verbal and physical. And the Liberal Democrats are doing, what? Apart from Nick Clegg’s toe-curling chairmanship of an episode of Have I Got News For You.
Santos wins Nobel prize despite peace deal defeat
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has been awarded the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end the 52-year conflict with left-wing rebels. . The Nobel committee in Norway praised him for his peace agreement with Farc rebels, signed last month after four years of negotiations, even though voters narrowly rejected the deal in a vote last weekend. The conflict has killed about 260,000 people, while more than six million have been internally displaced.
Car industry fears exit from single market
Investment decisions by major carmakers on the production of up to 15 new models in the UK are “hanging by a thread” unless the government secures tariff free access to the European single market, according to a report by the Unite general union.
More schools needed
Public sector specialists have warned that hundreds of extra schools may have to be built in England to cope with the school population bulge. Official figures suggest there will be 730,000 more school age children by 2020 than there were last year, and the Scape group, which advises local authorities on new buildings, said this amounts to 24,287 more classrooms. But ministers said there is “significant capacity still in the system… before new places need to be created”.
Theresa May and Piggy Muldoon
WHEN Theresa May sent her attorney general to court last week to stop Parliament deciding on Brexit, she stepped on a legal trip wire laid forty years ago in New Zealand by a former Desert Rat. The chief justice of New Zealand, Sir Richard Wild, ruled on June 11, 1976, that the country’s new prime minister had breached Section 1 of the 1688 Bill of Rights, a law enacted 288 years earlier in London.
Gender gap in mental health care
The charity Agenda has found that mental health services across England are not adequately considering the needs of female mental health patients. Only one NHS Mental Health Trust, out of 35 who responded to its survey, had a women’s mental health strategy. In every other trust, there was no strategy explicitly recognising women’s mental health needs.
Women may have to wait another 50 years for equal pay
New research has found that the UK gender pay gap will not close until 2069 based on current salary progression. Accountancy firm Deloitte said the hourly pay gap between men and women of 9.4%, or about £1.30, was narrowing by just two-and-a-half pence a year. The company’s investigation also found that men were paid more than women at the start of their careers.
Failure of care services damaging A&E
Health inspectors have raised safety concerns about two-thirds of A&E units in England, blaming underfunding of council care services for causing overcrowding in hospitals.” The Care Quality Commission review said emergency care was one of the poorest-performing parts of the system, and cited safety as a major weakness, with 22 of 184 units rated inadequate and another 95 requiring improvement.
Theresa May and Piggy Muldoon
WHEN Theresa May sent her attorney general to court last week to stop Parliament deciding on Brexit, she stepped on a legal trip wire laid forty years ago in New Zealand by a former Desert Rat. The chief justice of New Zealand, Sir Richard Wild, ruled on June 11, 1976, that the country’s new prime minister had breached Section 1 of the 1688 Bill of Rights, a law enacted 288 years earlier in London.
Out And About | Tribune
I can’t even remember the day the letter arrived. Certainly no one bothered to wait at home for the mail. Least of all me. I had a valley to conquer and waiting at home for the postman was the kind of interruption I could do without. The jars of sweets in Mr Fletcher’s shop wouldn’t empty themselves. A heist like that required careful planning. Which is where my two best friends came in. Of course, my friends had no need to wait at home either.
As I Please | Tribune
Power. That was the fundamental gulf between this autumn’s Labour and Conservative conferences. Power. The Tories flaunted power in Birmingham while the hard truth is Labour displayed little or none in its Liverpool vacuum. At the Cons, power was tangible in all its destructive arrogance and huge potential to change lives – for better or worse.
Reflections | Tribune
After more than five decades of violent conflict in Colombia, finally peace was in sight. Four years in the making, a new deal that was brokered between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was hailed as marking the end to the longest running conflict in the Western Hemisphere.
In Perspective | Tribune
Lewis Carroll would have had a field day had he been alive to attend the Tory and Labour conferences. In Liverpool, for all the earlier talk of a fight for the heart and soul of the Labour Party there was little evidence of that from the conference podium. Where were the impassioned speeches of the left and right? Even in the overheated bars late at night there was little sign of revolution.
TV: Ripping yarns return with a prime cut
Ripper Street is back on mainstream television. Amazon Prime now commissions it and has the first run of each new season, but the show has returned to its original BBC home for the benefit of more patient fans. What the point was of cancelling the programme only to buy it back in again, I do not know – but such are the vagaries of modern broadcasting.
Film: Desert island dead
The Lovers and the Despot Two guys named Daniel (surnames Kwan and Scheinert) direct another Daniel (Radcliffe) opposite a guy whose surname also has Dan in it (Paul Dano). Swiss Army Man, also known as the movie in which the Harry Potter star plays a farting corpse, is very inward looking. It is about a guy on a desert island, Hank (Dano), about to hang himself (a phonetically suitable form of suicide – Hank, hanging) when a dead man, the descriptively named Manny (Radcliffe) washes up on shore.
Cinema: Scary movie is an education
The Girl With All The Gifts Director: Colm McCarthy Most zombie stories follow more or less the same formula: awkward guys use guns and improvised armaments to protect women and children from the ravenous horde of zombies. But this one is something less familiar.
Theatre: Devil take the classics
Revivals of classic plays are a staple of British theatre. But each time a play is revived questions about interpretation and staging are asked – and the biggest question of all is whether the play is still relevant. And in what way? In the case of Harold Pinter, there’s been a transformation in his reputation: The difficult modernist playwright, who wrote obscure dramas in the tradition of Beckett and the absurdists, gradually became an easy West End entertainer.
The Diary | Tribune
Theresa May appears to have recognised that the Black and White Ball, the ultra-lavish annual Tory fund-raiser where table places go for up to £1,500 a head, may be a tad incendiary during an age of austerity. The event during her predecessor’s era attracted city fat cats, Cameron cronies, hedge fund managers and multi-millionaire donors. Mrs May has ordered that the event be scaled down with any subsequent fall in donations balanced by more smaller-scale events in the regions.
Books: Chartist struggle in Yorkshire
Catherine Howe has done an incredible job by discovering a significant piece of West Yorkshire history that very few people know anything about. The period from 1838 to 1848 was made famous by Chartism. This was the first working-class movement in Britain.
Books: Tibet’s pain brought into the light
Tibet is a forgotten issue. As we struggle with the political and military quagmire of the Middle East, IS, Yemen and Putin’s kleptocractic, homicidal Russian regime, and pay obeisance to the economic clout of China in our desire to attract even more nuclear-powered investment post-Brexit, an illegally occupied country that has been turned into a gigantic prison camp is being colonised by a foreign power and is having its entire indigenous culture destroyed.
Books: Hero betrayed by the cynicism of the Great Powers
Raoul Wallenberg, descendant of a banking dynasty, was a Swedish diplomat who was responsible, in the final months of 1944, for saving thousands of Hungarian Jews from Auschwitz and other ‘death camps’. Although proud of his Jewish blood, he didn’t even fit Hitler’s definition of a Jew, being only 1/16 Jewish. His mother, widowed at 21, two months before he was born, remarried six years later. Consequently Raoul was a fringe member of a bourgeois extended family.
The criminal acts that shaped the modern world + Book Offer
A new book by Ian Hernon examines pivotal ‘crimes’ in world history and the long-term effect they had on the societies in which they were committed. At its simplest, history could not have happened without crime. The structures of competing societies were kick-started by the need to impose rules and common standards. Such societies became wealthy through trade with others, and trade also needed rules which could be observed – and then broken – to someone’s advantage.
Still work to be done to achieve rights for people with disabilities
The ‘Tom Clarke Bill’ was passed in 1986, and Tom Clarke himself here looks back at what the legislation achieved and what still needs to be done. The Disabled Persons (Services Consultation and Representation) Act received its Royal Assent in July 1986 after a fierce battle in Parliament. Even now I am astounded that, in trying to force through legislation arising from a Private Member’s Bill, so much depends on luck.
Books: Mexican magic realism
Mexico City, the setting for this novel, is like London stretched to the nth degree; so grubby, so socially and ethnically diverse, its snobbery and racism so unassailable, it’s an even greater challenge for native writers to cross society and racial boundaries convincingly. Laura Esquivel’s earlier hit, Like Water for Chocolate, had little need of that, rocking an absurd Viva Zapata! plot with cartoon-levity in an apocryphal Wild West-type past.
Books: Football divisions
The Topical Times For These Times:?A?Book Of Liverpool Football Liverpool born photographer Ken Grant has been photographing the weekly rituals around the city’s two famous football clubs, as well as local park teams, for some years now. His vivid black and white photos show fans meeting, drinking, eating, fighting and queuing in and around Anfield and Goodison Park on a Saturday afternoon.
Prescriptions | Tribune
The NHS is struggling to reconcile burgeoning health demands with the need to limit spending. It does not have the money to fund care for all those who need it when they need it. The shocking fact of the two sentences above is that I wrote them in the Daily Mirror 21 years ago. And nothing has improved since then. I found the cutting last week when sorting out my filing cabinets.
Cat About The House
When it comes to equality the Labour Party has been pioneering. We are the Party of the Equal Pay Act, the Sex Discrimination Act and the Race Relations Act. It was Labour which repealed the homophobic Section 28 legislation and brought in civil partnerships. We eve pushed the Tories on LGBT equality and they needed our votes in Parliament to get through equal marriage rights. When it comes to women in Parliament, Labour still rules the roost.
The Union Card | Tribune
The Tories gather in Birmingham following a Labour Party conference which opened with what we hope is not an annual event – a Labour leadership election result – and was closed by a confident leader’s speech full of radical policy proposals. In contrast it’s the party of government that is showing the cracks in its edifice. No sooner does a Minister open their mouth on the subject of Britain’s exit from the European Union than Number 10 reels them back in.
Pound Notes | Tribune
Keith Waterhouse once suggested that anyone who felt his (sic) faith in the Labour Party waning should make sure that they attended conference as they would most assuredly be inspired, stimulated, rejuvenated and return refreshed to the class struggle.
Is Scottish Labour listing right?
It is a great shame for Labour in Scotland that the UK party has voted for the renewal of Trident, as this will severely affect Scottish Labour’s hopes for recovery north of the border. Only days before the UK conference, Labour voted with the SNP and the Greens in the Scottish Parliament to continue opposition to renewal, in accordance with their manifestoes in the May 2016 Holyrood elections.
How the Tories plan to fix the vote
The Tories are long into a orchestrated plan to transform the electoral landscape by subverting democracy to further their partisan interests. Yet to date it has barely been criticised for the corrupt practice it is, partly as a result of shoddy reporting and partly because of its complex and multiple strands. This is not the first time it’s been tried. It was successfully pioneered in the late 80s by ‘Dame’ Shirley Porter the then leader of Westminster Council.
The devil’s best trick and the ineptitude of usual suspects
At the start of this month, the New York Times revealed Donald Trump’s tax records from 1995 showing he had reported a loss of $916 million dollars, which could have allowed him to avoid paying income taxes for up to 18 years.
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