Chris Tannock, the Conservative spokesman on foreign affairs in the European Parliament, said all working people could pay a £10 fee to visit their General Practitioner, with extra fines for those who failed show up for an appointment.
The MEP suggested that the payments would help fund the cash-strapped National Health Service.
But his proposal was immediately ruled out by Andrew Lansley, the shadow health secretary, who said that the system would cost more to run than it would provide in revenue.
It is the second time in a month that the Tory leadership has had to distance itself from comments on the NHS made by Conservative MEPs.
Mr Cameron faced calls to sack Daniel Hannan after the MEP went on television in America to describe the NHS as a “relic” during a discussion about President Barack Obama’s proposed health care reforms.
After Labour seized on the row to question the Conservatives’ commitment to free health care, Mr Cameron described Mr Hannan’s views as “eccentric” and made clear his own strong support for the NHS.
Dr Tannock, who worked as a consultant psychiatrist before being elected as an MEP, outlined his suggestion during a discussion on Channel 4 News.
He said: "I would be totally in favour of small co-payments, small payments being made if you turn up to things and perhaps small fines being levied if you do not.
"I know they are controversial but I don't think people who are in a job would be against say spending £10 to see their GP or being fined £10 if they don't show up to an out-patients, so that's the sort of thing I would like to see."
Dr Tannock also suggested that doctors should face a pay freeze.
He said: "Right now the doctors in the NHS are the most highly paid doctors in the public health services in the whole of Europe, possibly the world, so maybe we may have to have a freeze on doctors' pay in the future."
But Mr Lansley said that the "great majority" of NHS health care should be "based on our need not our ability to pay".
He added: "Charles may say 'oh well £10 to see a GP' - well that would not make any difference to hospital care and frankly, if you tried to put in such a system, by the time you have done all the bureaucracy of raising the money and levying some fines, you would not be raising any money for the NHS anyway."
Last week we got the Home Secretary to cancel a far-right Islamophobic march of hate in Luton. This week, I need you to help us get a very similar march cancelled here in the Midlands - this time on the streets of Birmingham. A whole host of far-right activists and football hooligans plan on invading the city on Saturday 5th of September - with the sole goal of intimidation and whipping up interfaith tension. We need to stop them.
We understand West Midlands Police are concerned about this march - not least because when the hooligans took to the streets last month there was widespread disorder and 19 arrests. Unfortunately the police are reluctant to apply to the Home Secretary for a ban unless they have the support of the local council.
And as of yet, Birmingham City Council aren't willing to step up and stop this dangerous march. We've set up a tool which lets you voice your deep concern to the Council - and it only takes a minute to send a message:
What makes this event even more explosive is that the hooligans have planned their event to coincide with the England vs Slovenia football match - so the town centre will be filled with football supporters. The hooligans are hoping for maximum chaos - that's why we've got to act.
Getting the Luton march banned proved that we can make the authorities do the right thing. This time we're only running the campaign in the West Midlands - so we need you to take action, and then forward this email to all of your friends and family so that they can help as well. We can do this - but we all need to do everything that we can.
In yet another interview with the US Media, Daniel Hannan has praised Enoch Powell as one of his political influences.
The right-wing Tory MEP, who previously called the NHS "a mistake" that he "wouldn't wish on anybody" has now praised the fearmongering Conservative MP of the 60s and 70s, who was most famous for saying:
"In 15 or 20 years time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man. We must be mad, literally mad as a nation, to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre...She is becoming afraid to go out; windows are broken; she finds extreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children: charming, wide-grinning piccaninees...Here is their means of showing that the immigrant communities can organise and consolidate their members...to overawe and dominate the rest."
That speech was given in reaction to the introduction by the Labour Government of the Race Relations Act 1968 which prohibited discrimination on the grounds of race or ethnicity on the provision of housing, employment and public services.
The video is below, and Hannan praises Powell after 1 minute 50 seconds.
According to Paul Waugh, David Cameron is again unwilling to completely distance himself from his "eccentric" posterboy. Conservative HQ says had Hannan "explicitly praised Powell on race or immigration, David Cameron would have had a different response".
Personally, I don't think it matters in which context Hannan praised Enoch Powell: the praise as a hero of this at best ignorant and at worst xenophobic Conservative anachronism is unbefitting of any modern British elected representative, especially one who is employed to represent us abroad.
That said, David Cameron is not going to cut off his nose to spite his face, and - from a Labour perspective - we shouldn't want him to.
We know that the Tories have an unweildy right wing, which is loud and influential in spite of Cameron's own cuddly PR positioning. But we also know that Cameron sees Hannan as an asset - that's why he presented him with a podium, a microphone and a keynote at the Conservative Spring Conference just a few months ago.
So Labour should not be campaigning to get the Tories to sack Hannan, because he can do more damage to their modernisation attempts than we ever could. As the self-appointed international spokesperson for the Conservatives, he will not be able to contain himself in the future - and each time he speaks he reveals the hardened right behind our so-called "government in waiting".
Why deprive the Tories of their biggest, baddest, backfiring weapon?
I was saddened to hear of the death this week of Senator Teddy Kennedy, who has died aged 77. He lived rather longer than Mary Jo Kopechne, who was only 28 when she drowned in the car Teddy Kennedy drove off the road and into the Poucha Pond on Chappaquiddick in 1969, after a party. But hey.
Kennedy’s death has got me thinking about Labour Party political dynasties at Westminster. How healthy is it that so many of our Labour MPs come from political families? Labour Party members are imbued with egalitarianism and reject the idea of the hereditary principle, apart from when it comes to our MPs.
It’s not just the Benns, who are the Ming of Labour dynasties, with four generations of parliamentarians (John, William, Tony and Hilary) and a fifth (Emily) standing for East Worthing & Shoreham at the next election.
There are also plenty of other Labour MPs whose relatives were MPs before them. Stockton MP Dari Taylor’s father Daniel Jones was MP for Burnley from 1959 to 1983. Former chief whip Hilary Armstrong succeeded her father Ernest as MP for North West Durham. Ex-education secretary Estelle Morris is the daughter of former Manchester Openshaw MP Charles Morris and niece of former Manchester Wythenshawe MP Alf Morris. Greville Janner, MP for Leicester West from 1970 to 1997 is the son of Sir Barnett Janner, who was a Leicester MP from 1945 to 1970. Chorley MP Lindsay Hoyle is son of Doug, the former Warrington MP.
Sometimes the family connections transcend party lines. Burnley’s Labour MP Kitty Usher’s uncle is Peter Bottomley, and her aunt Virginia, which must make family Christmases interesting. Or take Alistair Darling. His great-uncle, Sir William Darling, was Conservative MP for Edinburgh South for 12 years after the Second World War, a fact I doubt he put on his selection CV.
Not all dynasties succeed. Tamsin Dunwoody failed to succeed her mother Gwyneth in the Crewe & Nantwich by-election. She was beaten by that evil toff Timpson, whose family firm cruelly exploits you by mending your shoes and cutting spare doorkeys. David Prescott failed to get selected by local party members in his father John’s seat of Hull East. Philip Webster in The Times reported:
"David Prescott found himself the victim of a whispering campaign in Labour circles with some unfriendly MPs accusing him of trading on his father’s name and others suggesting that it was bad for the party’s image to be seen to be handing a parliamentary seat from father to son."
Who might be next? Will Straw, son of Jack, is one to watch. He’s about to stick it to the Tories with a new website. And what about Ewan Blair? He’s interned for both a Democrat and Republican senator, has an MA in international relations from Yale, and his mother has helpfully told the Sunday Times that she would be "pleased and proud" if he became an MP.
Should we be concerned that being related to an MP makes it more likely that you succeed in politics? After all, nobody thinks it’s bad for football because Brian Clough’s son Nigel, or Alex Ferguson’s son Darren, have followed their fathers into club management. And no-one cares that Guardian journalist Patrick Wintour is son of Fleet Street legend Charles Wintour and brother of Vogue editor Anna, do they?
All kinds of professions and trades, from the army, to the law, to journalism, to running a butchers are populated by people for whom it’s ‘in the family’. And politics is such a strange trade, shrouded in such mystery and misunderstanding that it seems natural that those with some insight, such as the sons and daughters of MPs, should be the ones who pursue it.
And yet, isn’t politics meant to be different? It should not be seen as a family business, nor a profession to be followed like soldiering or the bar. That’s the Tory idea of politics, with families such as the Cecils in parliament for centuries, or the two Sir Tufton Beamishes, father and son, who represented Lewes from 1924 until 1974.
Labour politics should be about great causes and advancing the lives of others, not following a family tradition. Some of Labour’s most effective politicians over the past century have come from families with little or no tradition of politics: Keir Hardie, Ernest Bevin, Barbara Castle, Aneurin Bevan, Harold Wilson, or Denis Healey.
If our commitment to democracy and our belief in meritocracy means anything, it means selecting our candidates on their merits, not their surnames.
The Labour government has already made some tremendous efforts to reduce child poverty so far. These include Sure Start, increased child tax credit, working tax credit and the minimum wage. However, the 2010 target of halving child poverty has been missed by a long way. ‘Middle England’ will lose any remaining compassion to help pay towards ending child poverty unless they can see a coherent and precise strategy and evidence of this being implemented and producing results. Here are some policy solutions for a long term strategy to end child poverty:
Public service and redistributive solutions:
* State funded maids (yes seriously) as they have in France to help single mothers stay at work and keep the young kids looked after, washing, keep the house in order and meals cooked.
* Truly universal childcare 7 days a week, in every community. This will further increase gender equality in the labour market as well.
* A living wage.
* Tax cuts for the low paid.
* Much higher child tax credit for low earners.
* A preventive welfare state that helps prevents young teen pregnancies and other social ills from happening in the first place instead of just picking up the pieces afterward.
* Cohesive communities and an end to apartheid cities and sink estates. Community solidarity is needed. Incentivise housing developers to build mixed communities. What we have at the moment is middle and higher income residents ignoring and avoiding lower income residents and vice versa. Polarised residencies are a bad thing in themselves and are part of a divided society.
Economic solutions:
* Industrial Activism: Grow the number of well-paying private sector jobs using a smart state investing in the science, training and infrastructure that industry needs.
* Flexicurity: A flexible labour market complemented with a rapid and responsive state providing redundancy pay, benefits, training and job allocation for workers made unemployed, at risk of unemployment or about to be made unemployed. Wales’s pro-act and re-act could provide some answers.
* Make the job guarantee/training place for unemployed 18-24 year olds permanent and extend it to unemployed single mothers/fathers with low employability and little work experience.
* Introduce more progressive taxes on ‘bads’ such as fuel, cars and electricity and link them to citizens' incomes, in order to pay for the investments needed. Make sure these taxes don’t hit people on low and modest incomes. Much of the investments will pay themselves off through increasing the number of people in full time work.
Ending child poverty cannot simply be achieved through either increasing child tax credit or growing the knowledge driven economy alone, it will require both of these policies and many more. Labour needs to construct a coherent strategy to end child poverty and present it to the electorate, otherwise people may give up hope and interest thinking it’s impossible to ever achieve. This will also confirm that Labour is the most progressive force in British politics.
Ann Widdecombe has recently criticised David Cameron's selection process for Tory candidates, saying that it will lead to a Conservative government full of "second-class citizens". She’s concerned about older politicians who lost their seats in 1997 being passed over in favour of new, first-time candidates, and seems to think that selecting a more diverse range of candidates is primarily a tick-box exercise.
Now, Labour as a parliamentary party could probably be more diverse in terms of age, gender and ethnic origin, but at least we’re trying. All-women shortlists have contributed substantially to the growth of women’s representation within the Labour Party, while the Tories languish well behind. Women making up only 8.8% of Conservative MPs, compared to 27% of Labour and 14.3% of Lib Dem MPs. Discussions around ethnic minority shortlists illustrate how seriously our party takes increasing diversity.
Widdecombe’s assertion that she’d like more women and ethnic minority Tory candidates, as long as they get there on merit alone, is fundamentally flawed. In any sphere of public life dominated by older, white, ABC1 males, it’s going to be harder to come forward as a potential candidate if you don’t fit into that narrow category. Women aren’t so hard to find on the Tory benches because they’re less good than the men, but because they often don’t have the confidence or the opportunity to put themselves forward in the first place. As for Davey C’s efforts to attract more new PPCs, why not?
Surely it’s better to field candidates with new ideas, rather than those whose last brush with politics was failing to hold on to their seats twelve years ago. Being an active London Young Labour member, I could reel off a long list of names of fantastic, politically-minded and civically-motivated people young people who would make great MPs. Far better for the Tories to find some young people removed from the Westminster bubble and more in touch with their communities’ needs, than to keep selecting tired old has-beens.
So, you could vote for the Tories, a substantial number of whom think, apparently, that their non-middle-class white male candidates are mainly for show. Or, you know, you could vote for a party who believes that your ability to be an MP and represent your fellow citizens doesn’t depend on various biological details. Now there's something to think about.
Two people have been charged after a British National Party membership list was leaked onto the internet.
They are accused of breaching the Data Protection Act.
Dyfed-Powys Police said the pair were arrested as part of a joint investigation with the Information Commissioner's Office.
They are due to appear in NottinghamMagistrates Court on September 1.
The far-right BNP called for a police investigation last November after the names, addresses and contact details of some 10,000 of its members were published online.
A Conservative Party association chairman apologised "unreservedly" after saying he would select a female MP only "if they were attractive”.
Asked on TV if he was happy to support David Cameron's call to put more women in Parliament, Alan Scard said: "If they are attractive, yeah, I would go for it."
Mr Scard, 63, who is in charge of Gosport Conservative Association in Hampshire, said afterwards that his comments were made in jest.
He later issued a statement saying: "This was a tongue-in-cheek comment and I apologise unreservedly if it's caused any offence.
"As a proud parent of two girls, the last thing I would ever want to do is say something sexist. We will choose the best person to represent Gosport young or old, male or female, entirely on merit."
Mr Scard was speaking to Channel 4 News about his association's selection of a new candidate to fight the Westminster seat of Gosport.
Expanding on his attractive comment, he said: "I know it's a sexist thing to say but you could get the blokes saying, 'Oh you know, I would vote for her because she's really attractive', but then the other women say 'Oh I don't like her, she's too attractive'."
Tessa Jowell, Minister for the Cabinet Office, branded his comments "deeply offensive".
She told the programme: "These comments, which are deeply offensive and hugely patronising to women, are exactly the type of Tory attitude David Cameron claims to have got rid of. In the last two weeks we have seen Tories denying homophobia exists, condemning the NHS and now this blatant sexism."
A Conservative Party spokesman said that all female candidates were selected on "merit". He said: "These remarks were inappropriate and unacceptable, and Alan Scard has rightly apologised.
I welcome the well deserved comments of Marie Birchall the Tories should take heed and stop using sexist languages.
“Eliminating gender inequality and achieving women’s empowerment are essential to the achievement of all the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the upholding of human rights”
Dare I say it, but taken from the 2007 Conservative Women’s Group Policy Paper, this sounded like a step in the right direction when it comes to the role of women in international development for the Tories.
For too long, women in the developing world have been denied agency and seen simply as the passive recipients of aid. After all, isn’t giving women a shiny new bucket in which to collect water a much simpler endeavour than challenging the power relations that ensure the toil of collecting water is the sole preserve of women and girls? Thankfully, this approach to aid is undergoing a much-needed overhaul and on the surface at least, it seemed like the Tories were keeping pace.
So, as someone with a passion for gender and development – and as a Labour activist proud of the giant leap that was Labour’s establishment of DfID – I awaited the recent Conservative Green Paper on International Development with mild interest. With the recognition of the central importance of women’s empowerment and firm commitments to gender equality as a crosscutting issue throughout Labour’s recent White Paper, the Green Paper certainly had a lot to live up to.
The result? Spectacular failure. Despite making up more that 70 per cent of the world’s poorest people, women and the particular challenges they face barely get a mention. Apart from when it comes to reproductive rights, of course (as a woman, perhaps I am unique in being interested in how other policy areas – the economy, justice or the distribution of resources, for example – might impact upon me?).
But then it got a little bit worse. Whilst advocating for longer overseas placements for DfID staff in fragile States, the somewhat blinkered Green Paper sees the main problem as being “no wives and children are allowed”.
With this one Freudian slip, the true extent of the Tories lack of commitment to gender equality is revealed. Not only does Dave welcome more Daves into his Shadow Cabinet than women, he also assumes – or maybe expects – that DfID’s leading ladies will step aside and leave the tougher development jobs to the boys. After all, these guys will of course be supported by their ever-obliging wives.
Note to the Conservatives – the world has changed and not only is this an insult to the countless female members of DfID staff who work in some of the world’s toughest environments, it is an affront to every woman who has overcome pervasive discrimination to prove her equality with men.
Harriet Harman has recently received a lot of flack on Labour blogs for her outspokenness on gender issues but I for one am proud to be a member of a Party whose leadership confronts gender stereotyping of this nature, not further entrenches it.
Britain's biggest health union has warned that the Tories are not to be trusted with the NHS after David Cameron let slip his party's privatisation plans.
Mr Cameron made a desperate bid today to steady the ship following the uproar provoked by two senior Tories who slagged off the NHS on US TV.
Delivering a speech at BoltonTown Hall, Mr Cameron, whose party has threatened to slash public spending if in government, claimed that he would increase spending on the NHS.
But the devil was in the details - he went on to reveal Tory plans to open up the NHS to "new providers" and give people "greater choice" over services, two well-known euphemisms for privatisation.
Health union UNISON general secretary Dave Prentis said: "The events of the past week have shown that the Tories do not support the NHS.
"No amount of back-peddling from Mr Cameron will now convince people that it has their full backing.
"Anyone who thinks that the Tories are the party of the NHS is living on another planet."
The BNP's anti-Muslim lies have been exposed in a ground breaking new report, In Defence of British Muslims: A response to BNP racist propaganda, published by Quilliam, the world's first counter-terrorism think tank. The report is the first of its kind to forensically take on and take apart the BNP's anti-Islamic propaganda.
BNP leader Nick Griffin has described Islam as "a wicked, vicious faith" and "a cancer eating away" at freedom and democracy. Quilliam outline that this is a deliberate change of tack for the BNP, which is embarking on a "conscious shift in rhetoric away from a more general racism to something specific."
The report, published last weekend, details ten myths peddled by the BNP as part of their "systematic demonizing campaign" against Muslims, whom they seek to portray as "inherently violent and backward," and whose hidden agenda is the "Islamification of Europe." Among the lies undermined by the report are the BNP's claim that Islam is "a religion which treats women as second class citizens automatically." The report quotes Fatima Mernissi, a Moroccan Muslim feminist, who says that where sexism exists in the Arab world, "it is neither because of the Qur'an nor the Prophet, nor the Islamic tradition, but simply because those rights conflict with those of the male elite."
The report also highlights the widespread BNP practice of taking examples of individual Muslims committing crimes and extrapolating such isolated incidents to imply all Muslims are criminals. Examples include Nick Griffin blaming the hard drugs trade on Pakistanis on Newsnight last month; Griffin telling an audience of fellow travellers "gang rape is a phenomenon that comes from the Muslim community" and the "Islamification" of the West had partly "been done by rape".
Report author Lucy James said:
"Nick Griffin and his party have made a conscious shift in rhetoric away from attacking Britain's blacks and Jews towards attacking Britain's Muslims. To do this, they have sought to portray a minority of violent Islamists as being representative of all Muslims. This needs to be challenged by all those who cherish living in a free, liberal and secular society."
it now turns out that the Tories are being two-faced is usually a bit like criticising the ocean for being too salty. But Gordon Brown's right to use the word, when his rivals have excelled themselves with their twisting and turning over the NHS.
David Cameron insists that "we love our NHS." Of course he does.
It would be political suicide for him to say anything else when British voters overwhelmingly back a public health-care system.
No matter which party they support, the vast majority of Britons know that the NHS is a national treasure.
It's cheaper and more efficient than anything the private sector could ever manage. It works wonders daily in healing the sick, caring for the elderly and bringing new lives into the world.
It means peace of mind for each and every one of us, from cradle to grave - in stark contrast to the sorry failure that is the US system.
The US spends more than twice as much per person as Britain - but about one-sixth of the population still has no health care at all, except what little they can glean from charity.
Hundreds of thousands of people every year are driven into bankruptcy by the cost of a medical emergency.
And just about everyone lives in permanent terror of losing their job, because it also means losing whatever barely adequate health insurance they might get from their bosses.
A scared worker is a compliant worker, one who won't stand up and fight for anything, be it better pay, shorter hours or the right to join a union.
In short, exactly the kind of worker the Tories want us all to be. That's why the Thatcher government worked so hard to weaken, undermine and underfund the NHS.
And it's why Cameron's cronies are happy to cuddle up to the US extremists and free-market fanatics who are peddling a pack of lies about the NHS in a desperate bid to stop any health-care reform in their own country.
If they could get away with it, the Tories would happily smash the NHS and take us back into the US-style Dark Ages.
US President Barack Obama has accused health insurance profiteers of holding the nation hostage by denying coverage to sick people.
At a town-hall meeting in Montana at the weekend Mr Obama emphasised that expanding coverage to the 46 million US citizens without health insurance, which is expected to cost $1 trillion (£606bn), is his administration's top priority.
"We are held hostage at any given moment by health insurance companies that deny coverage or drop coverage or charge fees that people can't afford," he said, noting that it was "bankrupting families and businesses."
Mr Obama vowed to "fix" the US health-care system "when we pass health insurance reform this year."
The president blasted sections of the media for only focusing on his reforms.
"These are the stories that aren't being told - stories of a health-care system that works better for the insurance industry than it does for the American people," he stormed.
Republicans, right-wing sections of the media and the insurance and medical companies who make mega-profits from private health care have been accused of being behind a series of rowdy and disruptive demonstrations at recent town hall meetings.
The AFL-CIO union federation recently called on trade unionists to attend meetings to fight back and show support for Mr Obama's health-care plan.
At one such afternoon meeting last week in Pittsburgh, United Steelworkers members from their Women of Steel organisation attended a meeting where Democratic senator Arlen Spector was due to speak.
Throughout the meeting Ms Spector faced booing, taunts and orchestrated interruptions.
She was called a "a socialist, fascist pig," by one man who stormed out, accusing Steelworker union members who made pro-health care contributions of being "plants."
Others in the audience decried the health-care plan as "socialism" and equated it with other measures that Mr Obama has introduced, such as the economic stimulus package.
And there was another worrying development.
A Steelworkers official took a photo of a man who was part of the orchestrated opposition to the health-care plan which clearly shows that he was carrying a gun.
The man also brandished a flag bearing the legend: "Don't tread on me."
The mere fact that nearly million voters voted for the British National party in June's Euro-elections are certainly angry and no doubt racist to varying degrees, but how many of them would really be up for sending a gunboat down the Liffey? Very few, because there are surely not a million people so lunatic that they would want to start a war on these islands. Yet that would surely be the result of the BNP pledge of "welcoming Eire as well as Ulster as equal partners in a federation of the nations of the British Isles".
Just like the cheery talk of welcoming Ireland back into the union, the party's Derbyshire garden party over the weekend provides the flimsiest veil for a programme that is not only nasty, but rooted in delusion and paranoia. Alongside the tea, cakes and patriotic memorabilia – designed to create a "family" atmosphere and reinforce the half-respectabilty afforded by winning two Euro-seats – the Red, White and Blue festival featured a clutch of white crosses to commemorate people supposedly killed "as a result of anti-white violence". Persecution complex by day gave way to evening self-confidence, as far-right fanatics outside the camp gave fascist salutes and shouted "sieg heil".
We report today how the BNP shipped in fascists from overseas to address its gathering. The party leader, Nick Griffin, no doubt regards links with far-right parties abroad – many of which are much better established than his own ragbag outfit – as a way to make the BNP look serious. Tellingly, however, his attempts to form a grouping in Brussels failed, as even fellow extremists feared the damage that would be done by associating with the BNP.
It is not hard to see why. A handful of BNP leaders may nowadays don suits, but a large proportion of the activists, councillors and candidates remain boot boys, often with criminal convictions for violence. Mr Griffin's one fellow MEP, Andrew Brons, has a genteel manner but was, as a young man, involved with Nazi-style groups that engaged in arson attacks on synagogues. He has German, and quite possibly Jewish, ancestry making his embrace of the most exclusive form of British nationalism a source of psychological speculation.
The brutal mindset of Griffin himself was betrayed only last month, when he suggested that the Europeans should "sink several ... boats" carrying African immigrants. Mindful, perhaps, that few of those who had voted him would truly support drowning men, women and children at sea, he added as an afterthought that they might be thrown life jackets. The hope must be, as has already happened in some town halls, that the more the public gets to know the BNP the more they will lose patience with people who are as unpleasant as they are odd.
Four Charged As Far-right Festival Brings Chaos To Derbyshire Village
Far-right activists from Europe spoke at the British National party's annual gathering this weekend despite protests by more than 1,000 anti-fascists who blockaded the event for several hours.
Roberto Fiore, the leader of the Italian party Forza Nuova and a friend of the BNP leader Nick Griffin, spoke to several hundred people at the Red, White and Blue festival about the "threat to Europe from Islamic extremism" on Saturday night.
Fiore, who once said he was happy to be described as a neo-fascist, was joined by Marc Abramson, from the Swedish National Democrats.
Police arrested 19 protesters during the demonstration. The BNP said one of its members had been arrested.
Four people have been charged: three with public order offences and one with unlawfully obstructing the highway.
The annual Red, White and Blue event has been held on a farm owned by a BNP member near Codnor, Derbyshire, for the past three years, and is described by the far-right party as a family festival.
However, the mood at the event threatened to turn ugly on Saturday as far-right supporters outside the camp gave fascist salutes to protesters and shouted "Sieg Heil".
Weyman Bennett from Unite Against Fascism, one of the groups who organised Saturday's demonstration, said it had been a success.
"We managed to disrupt the event with peaceful direct action but the attendance of people like Fiore and the actions of some BNP sympathisers shows the real extremism that we are facing," he said.
The weekend-long festival and the subsequent protest brought chaos to the small Derbyshire village. Many residents said they were fed up with the festival.
Joe Osborne, 70, whose property backs onto the site, said that he feared there would be a repeat of an incident last year when he said men were goose-stepping down the street in the early hours of the morning and shouting "Heil Hitler".
"It really upset my wife. It may seem funny to them but the second world war is something that is very real to us."
Other residents blamed the disruption on the demonstrators. "We didn't have too much trouble with the BNP until the protesters came," said Simon Pitt.
Saturday's demonstration attracted trade unionists, teachers, students and anti-racist campaigners from across the UK.
Mubashar Yaqub, 18, who had travelled from Burnley with two friends, said: "Racism is a problem in our area and we just wanted to come and make the point that the BNP don't have any answers to the problems everyone is facing, and to let them know they are not welcome."
Human nature leads most of us to search for logic and reasoning in a series of seemingly connected events. That has surely led many to try and uncover the strategic genius behind Sarah Palin’s recent maneuvers that will catapult her to the Republican nomination in 2012. You can stop, there is no strategy.
Palin is unquestionably a phenomenon with an instinctual ability to capture America’s attention. But even though she has influence, she is not a leader. There is no plan to manipulate the anger and paranoia on the American right to advance her political fortunes; she merely reflects the hysteria because she believes it. She is irresponsible, but not cynical. While even her limited success is a sad commentary on the state of the American polity, Sarah Palin is not going to be president.
Whether it’s because she is picking a fight with David Letterman, resigning as governor of Alaska, pushing for higher carbon emissions, or claiming Obama wants to kill her Down’s syndrome baby, Palin has spent the summer in the headlines. Any politician would love to get her level of media attention and it’s natural to think there has to be some kind of plan or purpose for the media onslaught. But if you look at it closely, it’s more luck than strategy, intuition rather than evil genius.
Palin couldn’t have picked a better time to capture days worth of headlines when she made her resignation announcement on a Friday afternoon of the three-day Fourth of July weekend. Not much else was happening – and if there was a ‘plan’, it would have been the perfect time for her to announce she was leaving the governor’s job to pursue another political office or to build a political movement. She would have been marked as the frontrunner for the Republican nod in 2012.
But there is no plan because she simply abandoned her post because she didn’t want to do it any more. She stumbled into all the coverage by happenstance after delivering an incoherent statement that led to days of negative analysis and headlines and even George Will [a controversial conservative commentator] labeled her a quitter. The criticism may have endeared her further to the fringe on the right, but she is finished as a viable national politician.
But she can still command attention. It is easier to think that Palin doesn’t actually believe that Obama’s push for healthcare reform is masking a secret plot to exterminate unproductive members of society because to think that she does is terrifying. But that’s how you have to understand Sarah Palin – she’s not using the wing-nuts, she’s one of them. What do you have to believe about your political opponents to actually think their objective is to kill old people and children with learning difficulties?
Palin is fascinating, but not in a ‘look at the silly Americans’ kind of way. Her predominance represents the chickens coming home to roost for a Republican party that has embraced an anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism run amok. If Barack Obama’s life story says that in America, anyone can be president, Palin’s story would have been everyone can be president. Fortunately, this summer has proved that’s not true.
Ken Gude is the associate director of the International Rights and Responsibility Program at American Progress
