Back to square one

Well, I was edging towards voting Labour, but now.. well, I don't know what to believe - so it's back to square one.

Voter Says Respect Aides Attacked Him
An elderly man claims that he suffered a broken nose and wrist and a cut face when he was attacked after refusing to accept an election leaflet from supporters of George Galloway’s Respect party.

Disgraceful New Labour Smear Over Pensioner Attack
George Galloway, the Respect candidate in Bethnal Green and Bow, condemned New Labour 'dirty tricks' over the attack on a Labour-supporting pensioner.
...
The original argument was said to have occurred in Poplar. This is not within the Bethnal Green and Bow constituency – therefore canvassing on George Galloway’s behalf would seem unlikely. But anyway, we had no canvassers out at the time claimed.
* In his statement when interviewed by the police Mr Dobrovolski did not claim that he had been assaulted by a Respect supporter or that a leaflet had been left on his body. It was only seven days later, and through New Labour, that this allegation was made! The Metropolitan Police, in an advisory to the press, substantiate this.
* If he had, at the time, claimed a Respect attack, police would have visited and interviewed officials and senior members of Respect. There has been no contact from the Met. As evidence, the police would also have taken the leaflet in question, to forensically test it. This did not happen. Indeed this could not have happened, as the following will make clear.
* The most damning fact which disproves the account is that the leaflet in question is a postal leaflet, which was delivered directly to Royal Mail by the printers Lithosphere on Friday – a day after the attack! (A letter from Lithosphere, available from Respect, confirms this.) Not one copy was sent to any Respect office or outlet.

SIGH

At Long Last....

Despite living in the middle of an apparently hotly contested constituency, the only election bumf I'd received was a puny leaflet from the Greens. Despite all the trouble in Globe Road and Whitechapel, it seemed that all the campaigning was taking place through the media. Well, yesterday I got off the tube only to have a Labour flier pushed into my hand (rather impersonal, don't you think?) and then I arrived home to find I'd had a Respect pamphlet pushed through the door. Funny they were on the same day! Even more funny that they coincide with this:

Oona King Deletes 'Muslim' in Leaflets

Labour's Oona King was accused of double standards today after dropping references to Muslims in leaflets for predominantly white areas.
...
Two of Ms King's recent campaign leaflets contain key differences.

Under a panel contrasting her Commons voting record with that of her rival Mr Galloway, one of the leaflets states: "Oona voted to protect Muslims from hate crimes."

But in the other leaflet it says: "Oona voted to make incitement to religious hatred a crime."

The following section appears in the leaflet for Muslims: "Ken Livingstone added: 'Working hard for local people has not stopped Oona getting the Government to increase funding to Bangladesh. And her brave stand against human rights abuses of Palestinians has made her a leading campaigner for Palestinian rights'."

By contrast, in the other leaflet that passage has been replaced with: "Ken Livingstone added: 'Oona has been a great supporter of my neighbourhood policing scheme and, thanks to her efforts, by July Tower Hamlets will be the first London borough to have police on the beat in every local community'."

So that's why they're not doing door-to-door leafletting! They have to see what community you're from so they can pick out the matching pamphlet.

(Although it must be said that the leaflet I've got is neither of those)

Correction

A lot of crap is being written about the fair constituency of Bethnalle Grene and Bowe. I'm surprised that this is the only correction I've seen (especially as it's really quite a minor error). But anyway (in the hope that other election campaign observers will portray the area in a more realistic light):
From yesterday's Observer:

'Things get bitter for the real Eastenders' (News, last week) said 'of the 120,000 constituents about 50 per cent are Muslim' yet the 2001 census found only 39.16 per cent of the population of Bethnal Green and Bow was Muslim.

"They're all a bunch of crooks"

There's a good round-up of events so-far in today's Independent:

Why anger over war gives Galloway chance of deposing King

The East End is where cultures collide and the past is always present. Elements of modern, fashionable London, glitzy or grungy bars, and art galleries sit alongside remnants of an earlier era - rag-trade wholesalers, pie and eel shops, pubs offering "exotic dancers", the curry houses of Brick Lane, and the alleys where Jack the Ripper roamed. To say the Bethnal Green and Bow constituency has a rich cultural mix is an understatement.
(well, at least they've described it better than the previous newspapers)

Found by The Independent canvassing outside Wapping Tube station, he is so confident of the Muslim vote that he scraps a planned visit to a mosque and instead tears off to some tenement flats, a stone's throw from the gated enclaves of the City workers. He stops to shake hands with drivers at the office of Elite Cars, who greet him warmly. "I'm voting for him. He's stood up to Tony Blair over Iraq. The whole [war] thing is completely wrong," says a driver, Abdul Khalique, 37. His friend Nisar Ahmed, 36, agrees: "He's got 100 per cent of the vote around here."

Dissent to this line comes when he tries to give a leaflet to a smart Mercedes containing Abdal Ullah and his wife Aysha Qureshi. Mr Ullah, 29, it turns out, is an independent member of the Metropolitan Police Authority for the area, active in the local community, and he represents a different strand of Muslim opinion. He accepts the leaflet politely, but after Mr Galloway has gone he says: "I won't be voting for him, because he has done nothing for our community, whereas Oona King has helped us do things like create a prayer room for the local people." Both accused Mr Galloway of fomenting unrest in the Bangledeshi community. Ms Qureshi, 26, a solicitor, adds: "Of course we did not support an illegal war, but that does not mean we support Mr Galloway, who has taken faith relations to their lowest level around here for years."

...

At the nearby Redchurch café and bar, the owner Will Beckett, 27, a typical "incomer", says the lack of trust engendered by the Iraq conflict will influence his vote: "I'll vote for either the Lib Dems or Galloway. I'm a traditional Labour voter, but I can't bring myself to vote for Blair because of the war. I'd rather vote for someone with genuine left-wing credentials than for King." Behind the bar, Nancy Waters, 23, adds: "I'm not voting Labour. I feel ill at the thought of what has happened in Iraq, particularly the way we went in without United Nations backing."

...

Perhaps the last word should belong to Jimmy Rankin, 62, a former furniture dealer, whose substantial figure bulges across the table. He is clearly a man prepared to hold forth on such matters. Who will he be voting for? A scornful chuckle: "None of 'em. They're all a bunch of crooks, legal crooks, aren't they?"

Sigh.

Maybe I should cancel my appointment with the dietician...

Being fat 'lessens risk of early death'

Overweight people have a lower risk of early death than those whose weight is regarded as normal, according to a study of weight and mortality in the US in 2000.

The figures show that underweight is also associated with excess deaths, although not as strongly as high obesity.

Although the death rate does rise quickly in the very obese, the finding has brought an immediate accusation that the serious health consequences of expanding waistlines in developed countries have been overstated.

...

Barry Glassner, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California, said: "The take-home message from this study, it seems to me, is unambiguous.
"What is officially deemed overweight these days is actually the optimal weight."

Hmmm. So I won't feel bad about having just eaten a galaxy bar...

Osier

Just seen this...

'Islamists' hit Galloway meeting

A group of suspected Islamists have attacked a meeting of George Galloway's Respect party in Bethnal Green and Bow. Police said there were reports 20-30 Asian men had disrupted the meeting and there had then been a fracas outside.

Respect said the men had threatened Mr Galloway's life and talked of a fatwa. After the meeting a man was knocked to the ground and police arrested three.

The alleged attack on Mr Galloway's meeting at about 2100 BST on Tuesday on the Osier estate comes during an already bitter campaign, and hours after a Muslim Council of Britain event was also disrupted.
...

Meanwhile, A spokesman for Oona King said the candidate had been shouted at by a large group of Bengali youths wearing Respect badges or stickers while campaigning on an estate in the constituency on Saturday.

Kester Dean said: "They were shouting 'Bush and Blair murderers' and 'get out of our estate'. The car was covered in eggs."

He blamed the attack on the "poisonous atmosphere" generated in the campaign so far.

More more more (& the SWP)

The Observer is more serious:

Blonde-haired, white mannequins in technicolour saris pose in the window. A few doors along, squeezed between two leather goods shops, is an outlet for electronic gadgets. Guptee Wholesale Grocers boasts mangos, okra, stacks of tin thermoses, bags of yellow curry powder, sacks of Bombay Mix. Next door another leather goods retailer has gone out of business, and its windows are boarded up, marked with Bengali graffiti. There are few banks, building societies, no chain stores such as Boots or M&S: the only sign of permanence in Whitechapel is the enormous east London mosque, whose dome soars above the dingy shops and council flats. This is the poorest part of London's poorest borough, Tower Hamlets.

(oh here we go again)

But it was this bit that caught my eye:

Outside the mosque, Abdul Ahad sits with two colleagues. They run a Muslim job centre, and as we talk they are approached by a Somali couple who have recently settled in Tower Hamlets and are trying to find a 'suitable job' (ie, in an all-female workplace) for the wife. 'The election is important because we have a chance to change what is happening now,' Abdul tells me. Like his colleagues he is bearded, and wears a hat, but is in Western clothes. 'We have sex education that promotes sex because young children should not be exposed to these things; kids below 11 years are dressing up like adults, young boys and girls are doing obscene things. This never happened before sex education. Look at abortion - Britain has the highest abortion rates in Europe. Look at gay and lesbian rights ... this is not natural. And then you have television and movies and computer games promoting violence. Galloway shares the same moral values as us, he sees that religion is a stepping-stone to a moral society.'

And then there's this:

At the school gates of Raine's Foundation School, a few minutes' walk from the Labour headquarters on Cambridge Heath Road, two mothers stand waiting. They are white, middle-aged and, from their accents, East Enders. They claim to be totally unaware of the battle being waged for their votes, and when I ask who they will vote for they shrug and say they're not going to vote. Back at King's campaign office, her supporters agree that no one can rely on the white working-class vote.

There's even another article in the same paper that makes some interesting points:

The media never tell you but Respect isn't a new organisation but is dominated by the old Socialist Workers Party, which ran the anti-war movement. After the great demonstrations against the war, it hoped for electoral gains. In the May 2003 council elections, it flopped. The only seat it won was in Preston, where local priests ordered Muslims to vote for their candidate.

The SWP has learned the lesson and made its own entirely cynical switch. It hopes to ride the religious tiger by persuading devout Muslims to follow the lead of godless communists. Boring old causes have been dropped to facilitate the marriage. 'I'm in favour of defending gay rights,' declared Lindsey German, the SWP leader. 'But I am not prepared to have it as a shibboleth, [created by] people who won't defend George Galloway and regard the state of Israel as somehow a viable presence.'

As the line changed, the party's paper tried to reconcile anti-capitalism and religious fundamentalism by calling on the comrades to protest against Spearmint Rhino lap-dancing clubs.

Galloway's propaganda follows the same pattern. It features a picture of Oona King with a cheesy smile and a low-cut dress. The headline doesn't say 'Decadent Western Bitch', but then it doesn't need to.

The sight of Trots in burkas would be hilarious if it wasn't a symbol of the shambles on the left. From the 1970s, the number of people who believed in working-class solidarity fell by the year, to the immense detriment of immigrants. Instead of being met by a left which emphasised what they had in common with the native population, they were met by relativists who emphasised the separateness of their race and religion. Notoriously, the process had the unintended consequence of keeping immigrants poor and isolated from the mainstream.

If it's Sunday... it must be Bethnal Green

I open the Sundays and what do I find? Article upon article about the vote in Bethnal Green.

The Sunday Times piece is rather amusing:

Respect is an unlikely name for Galloway’s old-left party. It ought to be called something like the International Coalition of United Amalgamated Electorates and Voters. Respect is just so slackjawed, so mumbled; it’s the Ali G-joke party. It is also, of course, what middle-aged white folk think black kids say
to each other all the time. I understand that it just beat Innit as the name for
the party. The war is Galloway’s single issue, and I try not to mention it.

...

Oona talks with that practised new Labour ladies’ patronage, like a playschool teacher explaining the nature table to refugee children. You can feel the waves of lukewarm boredom eddying across the room. It was like listening to Paul McKenna in drag: one minute my eyes were feeling heavy, then the next I’d woken up. It was half an hour later and she was raffling a sewing machine.

I'm getting a bit sick of all this E2 bashing though - last week we were the most deprived constituency in the country, now (perhaps not unsurprisingly given its recent bad press) no-one wants to live here:

I asked all the young Bengalis if they wanted to bring their children up in Bethnal Green. Every single one of them said no.

More Andrea Dworkin

Here's an excellent piece by Susie Bright

The last post has made me look up the article in last week's Third Sector about the Lottery's donation of £45 million to the Schools Food Trust. ACEVO, the body that represents the chief executives of charities, has invoked the Freedom of Information Act in a bid to make public correspondence between ministers and the Big Lottery Fund.

The article quotes ACEVO chief executive Stephen Bubb describing it as "completely improper use of lottery money" and Lindsay Boswell, director of the Institute of Fundraising, calling it a "disgrace" that would result in charities losing millions of pounds.

More £ for the richest charities

Oh, honestly! Just read this in The Guardian: Viewers to vote on lottery cash

ITV is in discussions with the lottery distributor, the Big Lottery Fund (BLF), to launch a programme coinciding with the station's 50th anniversary celebrations in September. The programme, with the working title The People's Millions, is expected to give viewers the chance to vote for the charity most deserving of support, with sums as high as £50m on offer
...
Critics fear that BLF's more populist approach will favour children's charities and government initiatives at the expense of organisations working with the most marginalised groups in society. The Community Fund regularly received opprobium for making grants to asylum seeker groups and organisations working with prostitutes

Yup. I should imagine that charities that already get a lot of public support like the NSPCC will do well as opposed to, say, Asylum Aid...

A Blast from the Past...

Hurdygerdi
Andrea Dworkin has died. I'd forgotten all about her really - it seems a lifetime away when she was the femnist to read and quote. It's even weirder that we actually agreed with what she was saying. This must have been around 1989/90. Then all of a sudden queer theory came along and knocked radical feminism off its perch. Although I don't agree with a lot of what she said, I hated the way she was portrayed by the press as a fat ugly man-hater.

Anyway, this article from The Guardian makes some good points, including:

She had no time for the textual analysis of porn so beloved of academia; what she cared about was the women performing in the films, the harm they suffered, and what other women had to suffer as a result of men watching porn.
...

I remember being in a restaurant with her in London when she joked that she really ought to go on a diet, and did I know of any good ones?
...

Dworkin's feminism often came into conflict with the more compromising theories of others, such as Naomi Wolf. "I do think liberal feminists bear responsibility for a lot of what's gone wrong," she told me in 1997. "To me, what's so horrible is that they make alliances for the benefit of middle-class women. So it has to do with, say, having a woman in the supreme court. And that's fine - I'd love a woman, eight women, in the supreme court - but poor women always lose out."

It's probably better to read the whole article.

Think i'll vote Labour after all...

From today's Telegraph:
Jewish MP pelted with eggs at war memorial
The campaign for what promises to be one of the most bitterly contested parliamentary seats got off to an explosive start yesterday when the MP Oona King was pelted with eggs and vegetables as she attended a memorial to Jewish war dead.

Miss King, 37, the black Jewish Labour MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, was attacked as she joined mourners to commemorate 60 years since the Hughes Mansions Disaster, when 134 people, almost all Jewish, were killed by the last V2 missile to land on London.

The eggs missed her, but one hit a war veteran, Louis Lewis, 89, in the chest and an onion struck Richard Brett, a bugler from the Jewish Lads and Girls Brigade who sounded the Last Post at the ceremony.

The whole story's here

Bosses, eh?!

Honestly, I'm out of my job-from-hell, but still find that in my new place (which is a billion times better) there are those who continue to get up to their tricks. I'm not expecting everything to be plain sailing, but I had hoped that things were more transparent here.

Anyway, looking on The Guardian's website, there's an ad for a job in my team. We'd already been told about it, and we'd been assured that we'd be shown the job description before it was circulated externally. Guess what? The ad is the first time I've seen anything relating to the job. It worries me as it's asking for someone who has experience in the areas that I work on - and to be honest there's not enough work for me to do... So, ho hum, we shall see what happens.

Pot plants, Tesco and Billy Bragg

I see The Guardian's already been out perusing in Columbia Road:

George Galloway was in pursuit of a man carrying a giant pot plant on his head yesterday. Wearing a red and green rosette and clutching a bunch of colourful papers promoting his new party, Respect, the former Labour MP was in search of votes at the Columbia Road flower market in London.

The day before, on Bethnal Green Road, in the heart of the East End, Oona King, the sitting Labour MP, was pressing flesh outside Tesco and being heckled by a young Muslim man for voting for the war in Iraq.

The whole article's here

Is Bethnal Green really one of the country's poorest constituencies (as the article states)? It seems to me that there's a big mix of people from Somali refugees to city workers in gated communities. And I thought Bow was a step up from that.

It's good that Sir William of Bragg has dusted down his guitar to play a benefit for Sade, er I mean Oona, but it's a long way from Red Wedge.

I'm with the 'local resident' who's quoted as saying:
"Oona is a Blair patsy and supports the war, but I don't trust George either; he comes across as a self-promoter and I am not sure he will support the local area. I have been thinking hard about it. But I still have to make up my mind."

And they're off...

So at last, the date's been set. For the first time in my life I find myself living in a constituency that's going to see an interesting election, with 'Gorgeous' George looking to unseat Sade lookalike Oona King.

I've just finished reading John Harris's excellent So Now Who Do We Vote For? I have absolutely no idea.

Wonder if they had to fill in an application form?

Charities decry lottery funding of school meals plan
A row has broken out over the proposed use of £45m of lottery money to fund the government's programme to improve school meals.

The Big Lottery Fund has denied that the earmarking of its money for the new Schools Food Trust breaks its promise to keep National Lottery funds independent from government spending

The Schools Food Trust, the £60m quango announced by the education secretary, Ruth Kelly, this week to advise schools on healthier school meals, is part of the government's pledge to spend £280m on improving food in schools.
...
The news of the funding comes just days after Stephen Dunmore, the chief executive of the Big Lottery Fund, told Society Guardian that the fund would draw the line at bailing out statutory services and that "we've always said we don't want to fund activities that take place throughout the school day".