More on the TIF

Why do I even bother writing anything without checking whether Marc Roberts has already done a cartoon on the subject?
Sigh.

Swings and roundabouts

It's always nice to get good feedback on work, and even nicer when it's public and from the excellent Coolerchoice environmental blog. They've posted a positive review of my Ethical Consumer magazine report on the environmental and human rights records of Premiership football clubs.
Between the content of the article and the comments, it was also heartening to see some decent debate going on about the whole issue of making football ethical. There are plenty of campaigns on this, from the rejection of corporate control of football clubs by supporters via organisations like Supporters Direct, to revelations of the outrageously small wages (in some case well below the minimum wage) paid by many Premiership clubs to low-ranking employees, whilst top-rank footballers take home sums beyond most people's wildest dreams.
Some attacks on the idea of considering ethics alongside football - such as on Indymedia - have suggested that this is just another example of middle-class environmentalists interfering in working-class culture.
I'd reject that on two grounds: one, that plenty of working-class football supporters have political, environmental and social consciences and to suggest that giving a toss about the environment is solely a middle-class trait is pretty offensive, and two, it discounts that fact that when things go pear-shaped environmentally, it's people on low incomes and with no political clout who get properly shafted - see for instance Friends of the Earth's work mapping pollution in the UK onto low income areas. Golly gee, middle-class people don't get dirty factories and particulate-clouded bypasses built next to their gardens. Next stop, the revolution.
Well, however much of a warm fuzzy feeling I might have got from that nice review, it's done little to overcome my general sense of fury, disappointment, disgust and lots of other negative emotions at the killer combination of stupidity and selfishness which has caused the population of Greater Manchester to reject the TIF bid. So, we've got some of the shitest public transport in Europe, but no, lets reject £3 billion in investment so that a load of middle-class idiot commuters in Cheshire Tractors are free to spend hours sitting stationary on Princess Parkway every morning.
You bloody morons. Especially you so-called lefties who've campaigned against the Yes vote. Worried about the 'state tracking'? Well get rid of your mobile phone before you whinge about your car. Worried about 'working class people who can't afford to get into work in the morning'? Bullshit: you're worried about your own privileged car-driving lifestyles. You just have to look at the demographics of public transport use to see that it's not the comfortable middle class that would have benefited from better buses, trams, trains and cycling and pedestrian routes. And as for the scum at Peel Holdings; well, it just adds to the myriad reasons why Peel is beneath the underneath of the belly of contempt.
Rant over. I'll just go and seethe some more in peace.

Manchester climate change essay competition

Essay contest: What do we do next?
"What are the current problems/future opportunities for climate campaigners in Greater Manchester"
First Prize- £30
Runners Up- to be confirmed
Deadline Sunday 1st February 5pm
entries to editor@manchesterclimatefortnightly.info
Winner announced on Tuesday February 10th at the "Climate Change: Global and Local" meeting hosted by Manchester Climate Forum. Friends Meeting House, 6 Mount St
More information from http://www.manchesterclimatefortnightly.info

RIP Oliver Postgate

Sad news this morning, although well into his 80s I guess Oliver Postgate had had a decent run at life, and possibly is checking out at a good time, a decade or so before things go really tits up.
Anyway, this is just the product of a desire to pay tribute not just to his wonderful children's programmes (I remember with particular love Bagpuss, Ivor the Engine, the Clangers and Noggin the Nog) but also his staunch political stands - on climate change, on pacifism, and on unpopular topics such as the idea that the West should buy up the Afghan poppy crop to take it out of the hands of the world's various drug barons whilst also giving Afghan farmers a livelihood.

No comment needed

Language and journalistic arrests in Israel

Outgoing Israeli PM Ehud Olmert made an interesting choice of words the other day when talking about the appalling violence Hebron's community of extremist religious Jewish settlers have been inflicting on the city's Palestinian inhabitants. Speaking of footage of settlers opening fire on unarmed people, he used the word 'pogrom.'
Not a term used lightly by anyone in Israel, and certainly not by a Jewish Israeli of the oppression of a West Bank Palestinian. Certainly not a term that a goy (and yes, I have been called that in Israel, to my face, and on one occasion by a child who must have been all of seven years old) like me would be allowed to use of these settlers' action without howls of 'anti-semite!'
And another interesting event to note amidst the horror of events in Hebron and Gaza, Ha'aretz newspaper reports that the heroic Israeli journalist Amira Hass was arrested leaving Gaza via the Erez border crossing and questioned by Sderot police. Hass has spent much of the last ten years living in Gaza or Ramallah, one of the few Israelis to do so, and her writings, including the books Drinking the Sea at Gaza and Reporting from Ramallah, should be required reading (alongside Robert Fisk) for, well, pretty much anyone really.

Another work of genius from Marc Roberts

I was going to post something ranty about press coverage of the Plane Stupid Stansted action today. And certainly the BBC R4 lunchtime coverage was typically shite, in its usual style of 'let's give unlimited space to Michael O'Leary to talk drivel and not address any of the substantive issues at all.' But Marc Roberts has covered pretty much everything else I'd want to say.

The Guardian on writing for the internet

Now here's an interesting piece on writing for the internet, and how to go about pushing a website up the ratings not by filling it with rubbish that's searched for a lot ('Britney Spears naked' etc) but by the quality and quantity of links to it.
Michael Wignall at Streamengine does great short workshops on how to do combine writing in a search-engine-friendly way, as well as one that's attractive to website readers.

BBC in tedious old fool shocker

Well golly gee, looks like the BBC has been letting its misinformed old farts talk bollocks again. Why do the likes of the hugely tedious Peter Sissons get to interview anyone who actually knows their stuff? The case in point being his interview today with Green MEP Caroline Lucas, in which he was peddling the stunningly outdated line that there is a genuine scientific question over anthropogenic climate change. No Peter, there isn't, and there hasn't been in twenty years. There are just a few left of a dying swarm of well-funded lobbyists who are still trying to get idiots like him to cover their frankly genocidal ideas. Why do I pay my licence fee again?

All the men should leave now...

Today is the 19th anniversary of the shooting dead of 14 young women and injuring of 14 more people at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec. Marc Lepine shot the women because, he said, he was 'fighting feminism' and they were engineering students.
Women get beaten, raped and killed all over the world for asking for their right to be human beings, and it's usually done by men. I'm not arguing that men are intrinsically worse or more violent, but I am arguing that we've created societies that encourage them to be that way, and that now they are being challenged in their power some of them seem to find it legitimate to fight back in violent and horrible ways. It's also why it pisses me off that idiots like Fathers for Justice get so much coverage for their whingings about male rights; yes, there are a few men out there unjustly separated from their children, and there's an awful lot justly separated because statistically men are much more likely to be the ones beating their wives or partners and abusing their children. The press goes crazy when a Karen Matthews does something terrible to her child (at least the child is still alive...) but apparently men sitting in cars gassing themselves and their kids so their wives/mothers can't 'have them' attracts pretty brief comment nowadays. I don't see the Sun giving them front page spreads with 'pure evil' headlines...

Message from the campaign to stop the Deportation of Hicham Yezza

Below is the text of a message regarding the threatened deportation of Hicham Yezza. Hicham was an administrator at the University of Nottingham who helped print off material about al-Qaeda from a US government website for a friend who was using it for his academic research. With the racism endemic amongst the British public and police, Hicham and his friend were both arrested and questioned for nearly a week before being released without charge. However, Hicham was told that there were 'irregularities' in his immigration status and was told that he wouldn't be charged if he would leave the UK quietly. He refused, and now the immigration service is even sinking to cancelling court proceedings to try and turf him out quickly and quietly. Freedom of speech and knowledge - but only if you're white, apparently.

Legal developments and the home office - we need your help!!
To members of Global Support to Stop The Deporation of Hicham Yezza

November 27 at 1:11pm
Reply
Dear friends,

Thank you all for your continuing support throughout the previous months of hard campaigning. Together we have already achieved an extraordinary level of success in stopping the initial deportation and bringing the Home Office actions to the attention of the national and international media.

Last Wednesday, on the 19th November, Hicham was due to attend a hearing regarding the alleged charges that formed the basis of his attempted deportation in June This is precisely what the campaign demanded: a chance for Hicham to fight his case in a court of law (As you might already be aware, Hich was offered the chance back then to have the charges dropped against him in exchange for quietly leaving the country but refused).

However, in an extraordinary and highly unexpected move, the Home Office announced on the EVE of the trial that it had decided to reject Hicham's right to stay in the U.K and, even more incredibly, have announced that he would only be given till Tuesday 2nd of December (in five days!) before being LIABLE TO BE DEPORTED from the country.

In other words, the Home Office has opted to assume Hicham is guilty rather than let a court of law decide. Hicham's solicitors have called the decision (and its timing) a clear attempt at "psychological warfare" in order to unsettle Hicham before the hearing and to intimidate him into giving up.

We believe this act and its timing to be clearly unfair and highly indicative of the political nature of Hicham's persecution by the Home Office. We are committed to fighting this decision by lodging an appeal before Tuesday and we ask you to help us in every way you can.

In particular, we are in urgent need for people to donate to Hicham's legal fund. Hicham has been prevented by the Home Office from returning to work and is entirely dependant on the campaign's support for financial support. We are currently aiming to raise five thousand pounds to ensure Hich can fight his case properly. We are still applying for access to legal aid in order to lessen this burden but we cannot count on this and need to ensure we are ready for all eventualities.

Please, if you can, log onto your online banking and donate TEN pounds (or whatever it is you can afford) to the campaign bank account. With a collective effort, we can give Hicham the opportunity to fight his case in a fair and just manner.

Please click www.freehicham.co.uk for details of how to donate as well as other ways of helping out (including template letters to the Home Office).

Please continue to spread the word and inform all your friends and colleagues about the campaign.

Many Thanks

The Free Hich Campaign

Website: www.freehicham.co.uk

Email: staffandstudents@gmail.com

A work of pure genius

As someone who occasionally needs to resize photos for work purposes but has no desire to learn (or to shell out for) Photoshop, and who hasn't yet managed to figure out how to resize or crop pictures using the various opensource graphics programmes, I was very, very happy to discover DrPic. That rare thing, a really useful website...

Surviving winter in freelance-land

This spring, I moved from being a part-time employee and part-time freelancer to being a full-time freelancer. I joined the pyjama workforce, that band of people who can be shamed at any time of the day by a postman turning up with a parcel, only to find them unshowered and wearing worn plaid jammies or a threadbare dressing gown.
A few months later I decided that this lifestyle is psychologically unhealthy, at least for me, and joined a shared workspace co-op called Openspace. First and foremost this provides flexible work packages ranging from full membership (£100 a month for a desk, some storage space, high speed internet, some blog space on a shared website and use of other shared facilities such as a printer and secure backups) to the ability to just drop in with your laptop once or twice a month to get a change of scene or a reliable web connection.
Openspace also fits into my work and concerns nicely by being a social enterprise (by virtue of its not-for-profit, co-operative status) and its commitment to environmental and social functions such as recycling, using recycled products and green electricity and providing a networking point for other social and ethical enterprise.
Now I've been a member for several months, I thought it was time to evaluate whether this was a good decision, and decided that actually it's probably been close to a life-saver.
As winter draws in and daylight hours get unspeakably and depressingly short, dragging myself outside during the daytime would have been really hard to do regularly as pyjama-me. Somehow actually getting my arse in gear by 3pm or whenever it's getting dark at the moment seems like a massive effort when I don't actively HAVE to. But the bike ride down to Openspace forces me to get outside and get a bit of sunshine and exercise, and that's a very, very good thing for my mental wellbeing.
Secondly, one of the unexpected benefits of Openspace – even to its founders – has been the quantity of cross-fertilisation of work and projects that has come out of it. People have submitted bids together, developed artistic projects and generally passed round useful information about economic opportunities. With the credit crunch and looming economic nightmare of the next year or so, opportunities that I wouldn't have known about but for being in a shared space have made my financial situation that much more stable, at least for the moment.
Working at Openspace comes easier too, especially when I've got a big deadline looming – I'm pretty good at keeping my self-discipline going when it comes to deadlines, but my bathroom does tend to get suddenly cleaner and my kitchen floor washed when I've got a big one coming up. But being in a workspace somehow forces me to get my head down and get on with it, and that makes me that more productive.
A final small benefit has been that as the weather gets colder, it's nice to be able to head off to the office, where it's nice and warm, instead of staying at home, having to put the heating on at some eye-popping cost in fuel bills. Yes, I know I should wrap up in more jumpers, but there's only so many I can actually fit on, and if I'm going to work (ie type) my fingers still need to be out there in the air and not seized up from the cold. The cats are pissed off though – fewer nice hot radiators to weld themselves onto.
There's only one lovely Openspace, in Manchester, but I know that Edinburgh has the Melting Pot and the Hub network has places in a number of cities worldwide, including London and Bristol in the UK. And similar, if less ethically-oriented, setups can often be found by Googling terms like 'shared workspace' or 'co-working' for your town.

Fascists, fascists everywhere...

Well, who'da thunk it. Someone in the BNP has leaked their entire membership list and posted it on a Blogspot page. Given that coppers now get fired for this, and it is somewhat frowned upon in certain other professions represented - like teachers and nurses - I guess a few fash will be sweating for their jobs tonight. I'm sure their trade union reps will be sobbing in sympathy. Or not. A few posh types too - like former Chief Inspectors. Surely, old chap, one should just lurk on the more objectionable end of the Tory party with the other inbreds, not actually slum it with the skin'ead hoi polloi.
Hehehehe.
Interesting, though, to see the mainstream media take on it - absolutely loving it, but not quite daring to pop up a link to the actual site.

Writing course at Gorton Monastery

For anyone foolish enough not to be coming to ChomskyAt80, here's a quick plug for a writing course on the 29th November, bring run by Hyde freelancer Andrea Wren. I don't know Andrea well, but we met a few times at the late lamented ConnectMedia NorthWest get-togethers and she could certainly teach aspiring feature writers a thing or two about how to market themselves.

Another act of genius

Another act of genius from Marc Roberts. Oh, and as I omitted to mention last time I posted one of his cartoons, they've been popping up in all sorts of cool places, like Ethical Consumer magazine, New Internationalist and Realclimate.org, the kind of place journalists should be going for information on dangerous climate change rather than publicity-seeking Scandinanvian eejits with spurious credentials for talking about anything but themselves. Thank goodness for some decent research, like this. But then there's often a disturbing similarity between your average wordcount-padder when faced with a rampant self-publicist telling them something they want to hear, and a rabbit caught in headlights...

Reporting Poverty in the UK

Last Wednesday was the Manchester launch of Reporting Poverty in the UK, a guide for journalists based on research carried out by Glasgow Caledonian University.
The research looked at how the British press talks about poverty, and while perhaps not a surprise to someone with my attitude to the ethics of the mainstream press in this country, it did include some depressingly good illustrations of the way that some journalists think.
One illuminating quote from the editor of a national tabloid was along the lines of: "Fuel poverty is not a story. Poor people fiddling their gas meters is a story." So - thousands of people freezing in their homes over the winter isn't interesting, and fuel companies making massive profits off huge price rises isn't interesting, but a tiny and unrepresentative number of poor people finding ways to get round that is a valid subject for prurient, judgemental prying. What a delightful society we are.
A more comforting comment was from an anonymous female tabloid reader, who said something akin to 'I read the News of the World but I don't believe anything in it - not even the TV listings.'
The actual launch event, run by funders the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Media Trust, was excellent (and not just because of the really good lunch, much better than the somewhat suspect sarnies usually on offer. And a decent veggie selection).
With a reasonable balance of journalists and people from a wide range of organisations tackling poverty or working in marginalised areas (like Carisma from Home Sweet Home, Moss Side), there were some really active debates about how third sector organisations, especially those with tiny PR resources and budgets, can relate to the media, how they can protect their members and service users when journalists turn up wanting case studies, and how journalists can behave in a slightly more ethical and honourable fashion, respecting people whose life circumstances have put them in poverty.
Discussions raised issues like why the press seems to feel the need to stereotype and insult poor people - is it so that the better-off can deny to themselves that they might be benefiting from an unequal system? And is the kind of understanding and improvement in reporting that the event and report are trying to achieve eroded by developments in the media industry itself, where it seems to be increasingly difficult to get an entry into national-level newspapers and magazine without spending weeks or months doing unpaid internships. And who gets to do those in London, a ludicrously expensive city to work in? Rich, usually white, kids. Increasing yet more the distance between journalists and the people and communities they talk about. So, all the more need for people to take a look at the Media Trust/JRF guide, and try to absorb some of its lessons.

Cantankerous Frank gets arrested as an eco-terrorist

Marc Roberts is a genius Manchester-based cartoonist with a a big heart, lots of common sense and a stunning capacity for bile and vitriol regarding the many ways various human systems and organisations are fucking up the Earth. He's also terrifyingly prolific, and this evening's cartoon is a particularly marvellous comment on the state of the planet.

The Onion sez it again

Best bits of US election analysis I've seen so far...
"Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job"
and
"Nation Finally Shitty Enough to Make Social Progress"

4th November 2008

God, I hate US elections.
I hate being stuck on the other side of the Atlantic not being able to participate usefully in something which is going to affect the whole world so profoundly.
I hate that I end up with wishy-washy liberal sympathies for politically horrible Democrat candidates just because they're less obviously maniacally dangerous than the Republican version, even though in the end I know they'll be equally vile on most of the issues that matter, and even if they're not all the other vested interests will scupper anything worthwhile they might do.
I hate how furious I end up being at the American population for electing murderous fucking nutters, and how on one level I know that there are so many people who are disenfranchised and maybe they'd have voted differently (although part of me can't help suspecting that The Onion was right on the button here). But the other part of me is just thinking YOU BASTARDS ELECTED BUSH - TWICE!
And I hate that the media seems to have nothing else to report (except for BBC talentless waste-of-oxygen celebs saying stupid things) when there are so many things going on in the world, but to people who don't have power/money/their own radio show.