Help confine Westminster effluent to the sewers

You may want to sign up to a petition asking 17 Westminster MPs not to accept interns from CARE, a notorious faith-based 'educational charity' whose activities include sponsoring aversion therapy for gays, 'advising' civil registrars on how to avoid conducting civil partnership ceremonies and many other acts of spiteful petty ignorance.
CARE uses the Westminster internship program as a means of encouraging future politicians and civil servants towards their rather nasty view of humanity. In addition to spawning a new generation of career bigots, one Westminster lobbyist from a somewhat saner pressure group told me, they have open access to the most loathsome Tory big names, in return for providing them with the ‘research’ which tries to qualify their sickest policies.
CARE's best known Manx acolyte is David Anderson. Even sadder, when a few years back they were pitching some absolutely skin-crawling ideas to their Westminster allies one intern running around the corridors of power over there was his daughter.
On the Isle of Man CARE does note operate so openly, though their pig-ignorant tone runs through Tynwald disgraces ranging from a failed attempt to retain Section 38 of the Sexual Offences Act (prohibiting Manx schoolkids from learning that homosexuality is actually quite normal, not a disease or criminal subculture) through to current attempts to foist pro-life extremism on the terminally ill rather than offering choice and dignity (never mind actually listening to the poor sods). A few years back they did offer a rather odd ‘workshop’ to help local fundamentalists brand their businesses and pseudo-charities with ‘a Christian ethos’, but most of the fee-earning work is franchised to one of their puppet ‘charities’, Care For The Family, whose only open link to CARE is a trustee they share in common.
Do I need to explain any more?
For anyone interested in confining effluent to the Westminster sewers, rather than the Lower and Upper Houses, the petition is at http://www.change.org/petitions/mps-should-sever-links-with-the-christian-charity-care-which-co-sponsored-gay-cure-event .

Empty political question, textbook non-answer

According to this prize piece of astroturf (seehttp://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=42064) “Social Care Minister Chris Robertshaw has given an insight into levels of child poverty in the Isle of Man.”
He has done no such thing, because like homelessness the government has no means of determining it. A swift glance at the irrelevant collection of statistics this chump produced as an ‘answer’ to a planted question by ‘Doors To Manual’ Hall shows that.
As with homelessness, if ever pressed or offered a suitable framework the government would simply set up a bogus ‘consultation process’ and civil servants would say it was ‘impractical’.
Or in plain English, any genuine consultation or framework would reveal how callous and incompetent politicians and government departments are, and that much of the worst effects of such poverty can be directly attributed to government functions which simply don’t work or aren’t available when they are most needed.
Anyway, ‘child poverty’ is a red herring: a misleading and emotive term which belongs in the dustbin of ideas.
It is not children who live in poverty. They are not wage-earners, not even benefit claimants, and they don’t pay bills or rent houses. It is their parents, families and guardians live in poverty, and neither the government nor the useless offspring of our most venal employers who run the Manx ‘third sector’ want to change that.
Apart from anything else, what would they do if a significant percentage of Manx society wasn’t too scared of losing any job to demand decent pay or conditions?
Children ARE powerless, but that is a different problem, and one which is true for most Manx people in a pseudo-democracy. We are more likely to see a squadron of pigs fly over Tynwald than a conference of the great and the good addressing that issue. Why would they, when they are the main cause and the main beneficiaries of our two tier society?

A new generation of parliamentary privilege

An article (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=40226) by someone I recall as a local paper editor some years back caused me to raise an ironic eyebrow, and gave me a giggle or two. Nothing similar has appeared on radio or in the local print press yet, which doesn’t surprise me for the same reasons that it caused me so much amusement.
The thing is, I pottered about in Manx journalism 20 or so years ago when Hazel Hannan, then MHK for Peel, one day used parliamentary privilege to ask impertinent questions of the Minister for Tourism about Charles Kerruish. More specifically, she was trying to clarify what funding Kerruish might have received from the Tourist Board (as it then was) towards the costs of some holiday cottages he was having built, and with what guarantees.
Doubt later emerged as to whether they really were holiday cottages, and if any part of the possible grant conditions required him to pay back some or all of the grant if he, say, sold them on as private housing after a year or two because tourists didn’t rush to rent them – because tourists weren’t tending to rent a lot of holiday accommodation (or even to visit the island) at the time.
If this sounds familiar that might be because, some years later, similar questions about holiday accommodation were the undoing of a Chief Minister who Kerruish regarded as a protégé. They also went unreported until a court case some time after the questions were being asked, by which time most of the Manx public had obtained answers elsewhere.
Sadly, it seems only two journalists were in the Keys when Mrs Hannan made her enquiries. One was the hardworking Charles Guard from Manx Radio, the other was the equally conscientious and quite elderly Jennifer Leece, then working for the tiny Peel City Guardian, as was I.
Actually, this wasn’t unusual at a time before Johnston Press bought out the island’s two ‘rival’ larger newspaper groups. In fact it was something of a joke between Jennifer and Charles that the other papers only attended Tynwald if one of the MHKs who spoon-fed them was about to make a speech. Much of the time, so printworkers from that era who had to handle last minute page changes say, they just listened in to Charles’s reports and made notes, or used tip-offs from any MHK who was using them as unpaid PR, or just asked Fred Kissack (then Chief Secretary).
Charles, as I remember, did not include Hazel Hannan’s queries in his report that day. Perhaps, like Jennifer, he saw nothing startling in them. It was the usual practice, then as now, that any backbencher querying the actions of the political senility had been primed to do so by the subject in order that such wasters could make a carefully scripted reply to reassure the unwashed masses.
Jennifer, however, did report them, and they appeared in that week’s paper, as from my memory the editor also saw nothing remarkable and expected the Greatest Living Manxman (as he was then regarded) to make a routine explanation in due time.
Only he didn’t. Indeed, there were then claims the paper had misreported the questioning and the GLM even brought considerable influence to bear on both Mrs Hannan and the island’s smallest newspaper to retract all mention of such matters.
At which point the editor dug in his heels, backed the ever accurate Jennifer and said he would wait for the Hansard report to prove she had recorded it word perfect. Which she had. And then, as the editor also ran Manx Life, he continued to ask questions. Meanwhile, the island’s ‘national press’ remained silent, having simply not been there to hear the questions, even if they would be prepared to break the habit of a lifetime and for once demonstrate the gumption or tenacity to follow up.
Which they did not, as they also had not when senior civil servants (or even local police on at least one memorable occasion) ‘advised’ local newspapers not to follow up other stories in those years. The point being, unlike our shoestring operation, those papers received considerable income from government advertising and were expected, in return, to run numerous flattering stories helpfully and exclusively supplied to them.
There was, so I was told, an ‘understanding’ between senior civil servants and the two larger papers that government would prefer it if it was able to place public notices in two publications (as then and now required by various laws) but only pay once. Therefore it would sit back and wait while the papers got into a war for other advertising (which would handily also wipe out smaller, more troublesome publications) and reward the winner when the rival folded.
As it happened, Johnston Press was playing the same game on a larger scale around Britain, intent on monopolising the regional market which was then the only press growth area. When the two Manx rivals had near bankrupted themselves it stepped in, bought them both and captured the entire government contract. JP also found a huge potential one in return for bigging up drunken lunchtime pronouncements from finance sector figureheads who, in the name of all decency, should really be left to ramble incoherently into a hotel urinal until they pass out.
So, in these new and desperate times are we about to see elected politicians and the local press being told by senior government figures who lack even a public mandate what to ask, what to report, and about whom?
Or is just business as usual? In which case I predict the press won’t even need to be ‘advised’, as Manx journalists once were in quite a heavy-handed manner. They already know, and will.
As for the politicians in a parliament where procedure and access to power is controlled by characters who are not used to being questioned (or even having to suffer the indignity of seeking election)……
What do you think?

Equal rites, or just marital madness?

Thank goodness for Brenda Cannell – the only MHK with the gumption to ask an obvious question. i.e. ‘Why SHOULD the clergy's right to refuse to perform a marriage ceremony for a transsexual be enshrined in law?’
Sadly, she doesn’t appear to have actually asked it during the Keys debate. Even sadder, her colleagues wasted time with far dumber questions. See http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Clergy39s-rights-over-transsexual-weddings.5015015.jp for more.
For example, Geoff Corkish, the duly elected timewaster for Douglas West, who asked: 'Given that a member of the clergy cannot be compelled to conduct a marriage service where at least one partner has changed sex, if the person concerned withholds that and you can be fined £5,000 for making an un-authorised disclosure, doesn't this constitute a fine for telling the truth?'
Geoff, I know you used to do PR for the Steam Packet, so you have all the intellectual capacity of a short plank, but the answer is ‘No, it’s still illegal, even for an over-privileged, cross-dressing, superstitious windbag’.
Furthermore, the very purpose of the bill is to ensure the basic human rights of transsexuals, including the right to marry, therefore a transsexual has no need to give ammunition to a certified bigot, and it is none of said certified bigot’s damn business anyway.
Got that?
Actually, the more I think about it, the more I wonder why any sane person chooses a church marriage.
Think about it – if you were signing the contract to buy your home and the advocate started talking to an imaginary friend, what would you do? Even amongst Manx advocates (some of whom are demonstrably unbalanced and only in practice because of family ties), such behaviour will get you a stay in a nice room with padded walls.
Yet we think nothing of it when (sometimes not even with a shotgun pointed by an angry father) adult couples legally commit themselves to a lifetime together at a ceremony overseen only by a bloke who asks them to make their pledge using a fictional character as their witness.
If you think there’s equality before the law in the Isle of Man, let’s test it.
Try getting married here by a bloke dressed as a white rabbit, using Winnie the Pooh as your witness.

You are the missing link. Goodbye!

There’s an interesting addendum to my Partners in crime item on Sunday 8th.
Today they discussed the clauses to the Gender Recognition Bill in the Keys, and the House’s current champion knuckledragger couldn’t resist the cheap publicity. See http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Outrage-in-Keys-over-transexuals39.4964979.jp and piss yourselves laughing.
Ironic too that Houghton makes his comment two days before the bi-centenary of Darwin’s birth.
Proof that in the Isle of Man the missing link hasn’t just been found: the quality of political candidates is so poor it actually got elected.

Pimps, Parsons....and Politics

I’ve posted before on the efforts of the UK Home Office, aided by ‘God’s own pimp’ (the Rev. Steve Chalke) to change the laws on prostitution. Purely coincidentally (I’m sure) the plan is to push through changes this month in a way that would excuse yet more public subsidy of nice little earners badly disguised as charities that Chalke has been setting up in recent years (See Pimps, Parsons, Police & Prostitution on 28 Dec).
When in Shakti Man last week I was amused to see Stop The Traffik merchandising, based on the efforts of local evangelicals who ‘support’ teachers during ‘citizenship’modules. They pose as womens rights activists but don’t appear to know that Chalke registered the slogan as a trading name even before incorporating the company via a downmarket London company formation outfit and selling it on to some other right wing spookchasers linked to the Alpha cult.
Chalke could easily still be taking a cut, I suspect hiding involvement or possible control by merely acting as a ‘consultant’, not a director. This is the oldest trick in the book, and should fool no-one, especially in an offshore jurisdiction where 50% of the adult population administrate hundreds of such companies. Just goes to show, the folk trying to dictate Manx morality aren’t even bright enough to work as office juniors in the real world.
Thankfully UK churches aren’t managing to bamboozle the politicians as easily as they expected, and may have to wait a lot longer before they get their hands on the loot – if at all.
Witness these three Early Day Motions, for example.

EDM 523 / Prostitution and the criminal law / Tabled by Lynne Jones
‘That this House considers that the measures in relation to prostitution contained in the Policing and Crime Bill, though well-intentioned, are deeply flawed; believes that there is no justification for involving the criminal law in consensual transactions that cause no public nuisance; notes the opposition to the proposals from the Royal College of Nursing and other members of the Safety First Coalition, who call for an end to the criminalisation of prostitution, which they consider makes sex workers more vulnerable to attack; further notes that police evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee has cast doubts on the enforceability of the proposals on paying for the sexual services of a prostitute controlled for gain and therefore opposes these provisions in the Bill; and calls on the Government to make more effective use of existing laws against trafficking and sexual exploitation and to enlist the support of purchasers of sexual services to help expose those establishments that use trafficked women.’

EDM 525 / Definition Of A Brothel / Tabled by Lynne Jones
‘That this House notes with disappointment that the Government has failed to use the Policing and Crime Bill to honour the commitment in the Home Office report of January 2006, A Co-ordinated Prostitution Strategy and a summary of responses to Paying the Price, for an amendment to the definition of a brothel so that two or three individuals could work together from shared accommodation; and is concerned that the omission of this provision misses an important opportunity to allow women in the sex trade to work more safely, to have more control over their work and to make it easier for them to leave the trade should they so wish.’


EDM 524 / Policing and Crime Bill provisions introducing orders requiring attendance at meetings / Tabled by Lynne Jones
‘That this House notes that Clause 16 in the Policing and Crime Bill providing for the introduction of Orders Requiring Attendance at Meetings for those found to be loitering or soliciting for the purposes of prostitution is simply a rehash of the abandoned proposal in the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill for compulsory rehabilitation; considers that there is no evidence that compulsion assists in rehabilitation and agrees with the Royal College of Nursing that the proposal will lead to greater detention of some of the most vulnerable, stigmatised and marginalised people in society whose criminalisation helps institutionalise them in prostitution; and therefore urges the Government to concentrate instead on providing high-quality outreach programmes, independent of the criminal justice system, which offer healthcare and support, sexual health advice and drug rehabilitation opportunities that individuals who want to leave prostitution can access.’

With the Labour Party whipping the nation’s godbotherers and jam-makers up into the biggest frenzy over a folk myth since the white slave trade common sense like this is rare to find. But at least some are fighting back, and good luck to them.