Tim Farron on gay sex morality

My piece for PinkNews, published on 10 August 2015:

Comment: Tim Farron’s silence on the ‘sinfulness’ of gay sex is not good enough

CIA torture and mediaeval cruelty.

No more CIA torture: mediaeval cruelty belongs to the Islamists.

Today's Times (15.12.14) carries a piece by the socially conservative journalist, Melanie Phillips, entitled, "A painful truth: ‘torture’ can be morally right," with the strapline, “There are moments when, to save innocent life, you may have to dole out rough treatment.” The piece refers to the Report of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which censured the CIA for the brutal treatment inflicted upon detainees in the years 2001- 2006, and which was referred to by government officials as “enhanced interrogation techniques”.

Mrs Phillips makes a number of points in her article, such as the fact that the Republicans published a “106-page minority report listing example after example of the Democrats’ sloppiness, exaggeration and politicised cherry-picking,” and that the minority report criticised the Democrats for making errors in presenting “ambiguous or unsupported allegations as fact.” Furthermore, the Republicans claimed that “the decision not to interview key witnesses [...] led to significant analytical and factual errors,” and they challenged the Democrats’ claim that “aggressive interrogation yielded only false or no information,” as well as the flawed methodology used to produce the report, “which excluded information gathered by aggressive interrogation that corroborated or clarified scraps of previously obtained but unappreciated intelligence.” (Quotations are from Mrs Phillips’s article.)

I would not be at all surprised if there were some truth, or even a great deal of truth, in the above objections presented in the Republicans’ minority report. However, even if these “enhanced interrogation techniques” did lead to useful information that resulted in the capture of terrorists and the prevention of planned terrorist acts, the two most salient questions are, “When do ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ become torture,” and “Can torture ever be justified, even when it prevents the suffering and deaths of the innocent?”

In her article, Mrs Phillips defends the actions of the CIA and the interrogation techniques for which they are censured by the Senate Select Committee Report. However, she does not refer to the techniques as “torture”, and when she does refer to “torture” in her piece in respect of the interrogations, she muffles the term in inverted commas. No. Instead of “torture”, the techniques were merely “rough treatment,” "aggressive interrogation" and "limited ill-treatment," according to Mrs Phillips. It was a long time ago that I read George Orwell’s 1984, but let me try that one with the word “murder”: perhaps “co-human neutralisation” will hit the mark?

The interrogation technique used by the CIA that I regard as most repulsive is so-called “waterboarding”. If you would like to see a short demonstration of what Mrs Phillips is condoning, here is one carried out on a US Army Veteran and activist who volunteered to be waterboarded on the campus of Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. The waterboarding to which he was subjected is very mild and controlled compared to that inflicted on Guantanamo detainees.

By no stretch of the imagination am I a bleeding-heart, woolly liberal on issues of defence, national security, or the West using its military might to challenge Islamofascist states, which represent one of the greatest human evils on our planet. However, torture is unacceptable in any circumstances. Even if it were an effective means of obtaining information, which is highly questionable, it is always morally wrong. As much as I agree with most of what Melanie Phillips writes about the threat of Islamism, the vilification of Israel, the threat of a nuclear Iran, and the wretched attitude of appeasement towards religiofascist states and agitators, it is when I read pieces such as the one published today, and those that reveal her irrational, blinkered and deeply-entrenched homophobia, that I seriously wonder whether Mrs Phillips's human empathy and compassion genes have suffered some kind of fatal and irreparable malfunction, if indeed they have ever featured on her DNA at all.

Throughout history, those who have sanctioned or carried out torture have believed they were justified in doing so, whether that justification derived from a belief in the rightful supremacy of a certain religion, of a certain political ideology, of a specific dictator, or of a specific moral code. Whoever carries out judicial torture, whether in the USA or in ISIL, whether today or tomorrow, will always be all too able and eager to provide a similar, eloquent justification for their unconscionable actions, and their conviction of moral justification for doing so will be no less deeply felt than that of anyone who supports the views Mrs Phillips has expressed.

The crucial thing about drawing a red line where torture is concerned, and declaring it to be evil, inhuman and utterly unacceptable in any circumstances, is that this approach pulls the rug out from absolutely everyone who might be convinced their own reason for torturing is legitimate because it is exceptional. The grey area that apologists for CIA torture are trying to create is one that will increasingly be filled across the globe by the most abject and unimaginable human misery at the hands of those who are delusionally convinced they inhabit the moral high ground.

If we start to justify torture in certain circumstances, even by prettifying it with the euphemisms ““rough treatment,” "aggressive interrogation" and "limited ill-treatment" in the tradition of Orwellian Doublespeak that redefines “X” as “not-X” for the purpose of winning an argument, then we open very dangerous floodgates. Any despot or sadist, any fundamentalist religiofascist, any political tyrant, will be able to craft a justification along the same lines. It doesn't need to be a credible one. It just needs to be clever, so that he can claim to have a case that is comparable to that of the CIA torturers, and argue vehemently for its legitimacy. That will lead to more torture of the innocent, of those who dare to protest against tyranny, as well as of the guilty. 

At the moment, there is a great deal of consensus globally that torture is always wrong. It is not a universal consensus by any means, but it has still created a degree of taboo that leads most repressive states to deny that they are carrying it out, rather than to admit to or advertise it brazenly. Progressive states are also capable of imposing, and sometimes willing to impose, sanctions for such human rights abuses. That developing consensus is based on a prohibition of torture under any circumstances.

If progressive states open a loophole through which to pass electrodes and burning irons, then this developing consensus will be undermined.

A further salient factor that needs to be considered is that if a Western state engaged in the War on Terror tortures Islamist and suspected Islamist detainees, not only does that State lose its moral authority by doing so: it also encourages Islamists to treat Western detainees they capture in battle, or kindnap, in the same way. There is therefore a potential causal relationship between the USA torturing a detainee in Guantanamo Bay, and as US or UK hostage or captive being tortured by Islamists in retaliation. In October 2014, John Cantlie, who was kidnapped by ISIL and is still in captivity, reported that ISIL had waterboarded captives who had tried to escape: "Some of us who tried to escape were waterboarded by our captors, as Muslim prisoners are waterboarded by their American captors." There is the theoretical possibility that this statement was made under duress; though given the ruthlessness of his captors, if the idea had entered their minds at all, it would be hardly surprising if they had carried out this atrocity, as reported.

As well as encouraging Islamofascist militants to torture captives and hostages, the very fact that the USA is seen to be carrying out torture does nothing but fire up the hatred of the West in Islamofascist states and subcultures, and it shores up the propaganda that is being peddled by Islamist preachers and recruiting sergeants. 

Mrs Phillips presents the case for justifying torture in some circumstances – yes, waterboarding is still torture, Melanie Phillips, and even if you were Chief Wordsmith at the Ministry for Truth, it would still be torture. But if torture has compelling merit as a means to a very important end, then why should torture be restricted to unlawful combatants? Why should it not be legitimised in the UK's legal system in general if a detainee is withholding information whose non-disclosure could lead to the deaths of many people? And how many people would need to be under threat of murder for it to be justified? What if it were only one person? Would that one person's life not be worth saving by means of torturing someone with essential information? Why not torture the mother of a serial killer who is on the run, and who is likely to kill more people, if the police are convinced she knows where he is?

This is surely not the kind of society that decent, compassionate people want to live in. It is an Orwellian nightmare. If the West compromises its values to this appalling degree as a result of the War on Terror, then the Islamists will have succeeded in destroying the beautiful and compassionate values of our liberal nations that they hate so much, as well as our aspiration as civilised people to become even better than we are. They will have been victorious in delivering us to the world of the Middle Ages in which they still wallow.

At the end of her article, Mrs Phillips writes, “Our enemies are laughing at the Senate report."  I think not. Islamists thrive on demonising the USA. It is their lifeblood. They are therefore hardly likely to welcome a report from a large group of the USA's most senior politicians that opposes cruelty towards and maltreatment of Islamist detainees (and of those innocent people who are merely suspected of belonging to this category). On the contrary: such a report, based on the fundamental Western values of compassion, justice and human decency, completely undermines the hateful, toxic Islamist propaganda that fuels the zealous fury and hatred of successive generations indoctrinated into a cruel religiofascist ideology, and exposes as false its warped blanket misrepresentation of Western people and Western values.

Living up to the cruel identity that the Islamists are trying to impose on us does nothing but play into their hands, and into the hands of their recruiting sergeants. Islamists may choose to remain in the Middle Ages. We must not join them there.

© Gary Powell, 2014

This blogpost is based on comments I made today on the Times Online under Melanie Phillips’s article.

LGO Cabinet Office Submission 7.10.14

Local Government Ombudsman Watch submission for meeting of 7 October 2014 at the Cabinet Office with Rt Hon Oliver Letwin MP and Mr Robert Gordon CB.

Gary Powell, founder and former director of Local Government Ombudsman Watch.

“Governance Review of the Local Government Ombudsman Service” (November 2013) by Mr Robert Gordon.

Mr Gordon’s report is available at http://bit.ly/1cdzedL.

In point 10, Mr Gordon presents the following as one of the two key questions that represented the terms of reference for his report:

“Does the current structure and governance of the Local Government Ombudsman Service (as provided in statute and as operated in practice) encourage or inhibit the provision of a redress service which meets the generally accepted principles of good complaint handling?”

An investigation into the probity and impartiality of the LGO, considering the evidence provided to the select committee by users of the LGO “service” and published in the select committee report he was directed to read, was therefore clearly a part of Mr Gordon’s remit.

Mr Gordon refers to having had “40 meetings” in order to prepare his report (point 6) and having consulted “a wide cross-section of expert opinion” (point 9): yet his list of “acknowledgments” in Annex C consists of 37 individuals, many of whom work for the LGO, and not one of whom represents citizens who have used the LGO service at first hand and who have campaigned for reform or abolition of the LGO. LGO Watch has existed since 2003. Its two directors, Trevor R Nunn and I, have both had extensive evidence published by the CLG Committee and its predecessor, the ODPM Committee, in their reports following LGO enquiries since 2005.

The terms of reference of the Review include an instruction that Mr Gordon “will have regard to the report of the CLG Select Committee on the work of the Local Government Ombudsman,” (the report referred to being the 3^rd report, published in July 2012);  to “the external evaluation chaired by Richard Thomas, Chair of AJTC, following the recommendation of the CLG Select Committee”; and to “all other information and material available to him which he considers relevant, such as staff survey results.”

In the 2012 CLG Committee report http://bit.ly/Oh8opL, there was extensive damning evidence published that had been submitted by users of the LGO “service” http://bit.ly/Nhb0j7, including detailed submissions from the current director of LGO Watch, Mr Trevor R Nunn http://bit.ly/QSFhGR as current director of LGO Watch, and evidence from me http://bit.ly/MWMxnq informed by my experience as the previous director of LGO Watch.

There was therefore an excellent opportunity for Mr Gordon to learn from the published experiences of people who had actually used the LGO service, and who had been researching the LGO for several years and campaigning to expose its serious faults, and to include reference to our evidence in his report. Yet he did not do so. So we have here yet another report on the LGO where the experience and evidence of actual complainants and members of the public are brushed under the carpet; disregarded; treated as though they are of no value. Treated as though they do not exist.

The continued tendency of those charged with conducting “independent” reviews of the LGO to ignore, or even, in the case of Dr Kirkham – more about him later -  to flagrantly misrepresent the evidence of campaigners and complainants, reflects nothing less than an attitude of contempt towards members of the public who are revealing truths that are uncomfortable to a self-interested section of the political and civil service establishment.

The CLG Committee’s “Fifth Report” on the LGO.

Since Mr Gordon published his report, the CLG Committee has published a further report on the LGO http://bit.ly/1oHwXeJ. (Although it is published as the “Fifth Report”, and Mr Gordon’s report comments on the Third Report, I have been unable to confirm the existence of any Fourth Report, and no mention is made of it on the List of Reports from the Committee during the current Parliament http://bit.ly/1tnRg25.)

I had provided three detailed submissions for this enquiry that were published by the CLG Committee, even though the online publication of the Fifth Report lists them, refers to them as being “published written evidence”, yet does not link to them, so that anyone reading the report and wishing to read these (and other) evidence submissions would have a very hard time finding them http://bit.ly/1vBpBO1. As was the case with my submissions for the 2005 and 2012 reports, I provided incontrovertible evidence that demonstrated the LGO’s institutional pro-council bias and moral corruption, including this time a submission based on the damning LGO staff satisfaction survey that had been leaked to LGO Watch, and a submission demonstrating that the “Independent External Review” had in fact been largely carried out and drafted by a longstanding pro-LGO propagandist, Dr Richard Kirkham, who had been known to LGO Watch since 2005.

These three submissions can be read here:

http://bit.ly/1rHcl9U

http://bit.ly/1pJ9Q2z

http://bit.ly/1BCjomJ

Dr Richard Kirkham is the person who wrote an article in 2005 after the LGO had begun to come under scrutiny, entitled, “A Complainant's View of the Local Government Ombudsman.” This was a strongly pro-LGO article, with a very odd title. It was odd because Dr Richard Kirkham gave no indication in his article that he had ever been a complainant to the LGO, or that he had interviewed any complainants to the LGO in order to inform his article. He also made no reference to the evidence of widespread dissatisfaction on the part of complainants to the LGO, as evidenced by the MORI polls carried out by the LGO themselves, which were even damning after the LGO had been allowed to remove, at their complete discretion, 10% of the sample selected for interview by MORI.

Dr Kirkham also failed to accurately represent the substance and detail of the complaints submitted by Mr Nunn and by myself. All this, yet he decided to call his article “A Complainant’s View”. Yet Dr Kirkham was appointed by the LGO to be a member of the three-person team carrying out the so-called “Independent External Review” into the LGO. Not only that, but Dr Kirkham was described in the report as having undertaken the “bulk of the research and drafting of this Report for which his colleagues are most grateful." (p4). Please do note that, despite this review purporting to be “independent”, the LGO were allowed to appoint their own reviewers.

One of my submissions to the CLG Committee was based on the damning leaked 2012 staff survey. When LGO staff completed this survey, they believed that the results would not be made available to the public, and would only be circulated internally. The results were so shocking that a member of LGO staff leaked the report to LGO Watch. What their own staff said about the LGO as an institution, and about their senior management, is contained in the link above. When the LGO was questioned at the subsequent CLG Committee Oral Evidence Session, the Chair of the CLG Committee was clearly far more concerned about the report having been leaked than about the pitifully low level of confidence their own staff had in the LGO.

Loyalty to the LGO versus loyalty to the Nation’s citizens and taxpayers.

In 1995, when Sir Geoffrey Chipperfield’s report was published recommending abolition of the Local Government Ombudsman, it was regarded as politically incorrect to disparage ombudsmen, and Sir Geoffrey’s recommendations were unable to prevail in such a climate. My experience as director of LGO Watch led me to the conclusion that nothing has changed.

Where the LGO is concerned, a loyalty that leads to the suppression and misrepresentation of compelling evidence is a misplaced loyalty indeed. Furthermore, this kind of loyalty represents a profound disloyalty to the citizens of this country who are paying for a service that undermines their attempts to gain justice. The “political correctness” that has protected the LGO for so long is egregious, and indeed is just as egregious as the kind of “political correctness” that in recent years has protected criminals in Rotherham despite numerous complaints and significant evidence having been presented to authorities that did not want to listen.

The symmetry between the Rotherham phenomenon, where complaints and evidence were ignored again and again by the relevant authorities, and the LGO phenomenon, where the same thing has happened, is striking. Such is the ability of powerful institutions with significant resources at their disposal to bury serious and justified complaints, to sideline conscientious complainants who present compelling evidence, and to hide bad practice behind a fog of Kafkaesque subterfuge. It is my belief that the seriousness and extensiveness of the harm and injustice caused over a long period of time by LGO maladministration and bias may well be at least as serious as the harm and injustice suffered by so many children in Rotherham. Just in respect of the potential gravity of cases covered by the LGO’s remit, one only needs to remind oneself that the LGO is responsible for investigating complaints about adult social care.

It is my belief that the reaction of the general public to the Rotherham scandal, and to the way institutions ignored serious complaints of wrongdoing, represents a turning-point in the consciousness of the good people of this land, where the sense of resignation and hopelessness with regard to having one’s complaint against a powerful institution properly considered and responded to, is giving way to a sense of outrage at how we are being let down by certain institutions, and then by secondary institutions that are supposed to be monitoring the primary institutions and putting the injustices right.

The Local Government Ombudsman comes under the spotlight.

The LGO was first subjected to an inquiry by the predecessor to the CLG Committee, the ODPM Committee, in 2005.

The 2005 ODPM Committee Report on the “Role and Effectiveness of the Local Government Ombudsmen for England” is available online here:

http://bit.ly/18uL5FB

The content of the evidence provided by LGO Watch is summarised here:

http://bit.ly/1iAwmaZ

The effect of LGO pro-council bias on human lives.

The text of Mr Gordon’s report avoids any mention of the experience and evidence of complainants to the LGO published in select committee reports since 2005, and his report fails even to give any hint of the human misery and profound injustice that the LGO, with its current ethos, has caused and is causing. Associated with every episode of serious maladministration carried out by the LGO, whether through indifference, negligence, incompetence or blatant bias, is a human being who has the potential to be seriously harmed by that maladministration.

When I was director of LGO Watch, I used to receive e-mails from people who had clearly been caused serious injustice by their local authority, and then again by the Local Government Ombudsman who had given that authority a clean bill of health despite compelling evidence of maladministration with serious injustice. I had people telling me they were so desperate that they were seriously considering suicide, having run out of options. The LGO having unjustly found in favour of the council had only served to make matters worse, as the council could then refer to the finding in order to close the complaint and provide false vindication of what they had done to that citizen. The degree of callousness I witnessed that was meted out by the LGO to decent and very vulnerable people was absolutely appalling.

There is something distinctly Orwellian about the way the Local Government Ombudsman institution spends taxpayers’ money spinning its way out of difficulties, and how sections of the British establishment seem to be keen to keep a lid on the evidence of systemic maladministration, incompetence and dishonesty at the office of the LGO that has been exposed over the past decade by LGO Watch and others. This Orwellian character extends to those who wish to preserve the LGO’s status quo, and simply tinker about with the edges instead of abolishing the institution and replacing it with one that properly serves good citizens and taxpayers, rather than discriminating against them. It also extends to the reviewers who are unlikely to expose uncomfortable truths when that entails rocking the boat and upsetting their colleagues.

This is something I do not say as an iconoclast, or some kind of hot-headed, anti-establishment radical overstating his case. I am a political activist in the Conservative Party and, in many respects, a “conservative” with a small “c” as well. I am a patriot, and am proud of the degree of freedom, justice and democracy that the people of this country enjoy. On the whole, I am someone who supports the status quo; but I remain unwilling to see a rotten and corrupt taxpayer-funded institution betraying my fellow citizens, and betraying the fundamental British values of decency and justice: a betrayal that, far too often, has enjoyed the collusion of the very people who have the power to end this injustice.

Corruption at the Local Government Ombudsman’s office.

During the meeting at the Cabinet Office of 24 July this year, I outlined some of the evidence of serious systemic maladministration and corruption at the LGO’s office. The detail of this shocking maladministration, dishonesty and corruption can be read in the CLG Committee’s reports via the links above. None of the pre-2013 evidence in the above links was referred to in Mr Gordon’s report, and the existence of LGO Watch, now over ten years old, did not even get a single mention in it.

MORI customer satisfaction polls.

Those present at the 24 July meeting will have heard me talk about the LGO’s own MORI Customer Satisfaction Poll in 1999. The LGO was allowed, at its own discretion, to remove 10% of those initially selected for telephone interview by MORI.  Even then, the survey revealed a 73% complainant dissatisfaction level with its service. 61% of complainants expressed themselves to be ‘very dissatisfied’ with the final outcome of their complaint. Roughly 50% of those whose complaints had been upheld reported dissatisfaction with the outcome. This evidence was in the 2012 CLG Committee report, but Mr Gordon has made no mention of it.

The Local Government Ombudsman’s “Independent” External Review.

I have already referred above to the role of Dr Richard Kirkham as a key propagandist for the LGO who took over the bulk of the work for the LGO’s so-called “Independent External Review”. In 2012, the CLG Committee instructed the LGO to carry out an Independent External Review of its service. The LGO was however allowed to appoint its own reviewers, which was surely not a measure that inspires confidence in objectivity and impartiality. One of the three reviewers appointed was Dr Richard Kirkham.  Dr Kirkham, an academic at Sheffield University, was already as long ago as 2005 identified by LGO Watch as the LGO’s most enthusiastic non-employee propagandist, to the extent that LGO Watch set up a page on its website dedicated to Dr Kirkham in 2009. Yet Mr Gordon refers to this “Independent Review” uncritically throughout his report.

Where in his article Dr Kirkham did refer to evidence that we, as complainants, had provided to the ODPM Committee, he did so selectively, completely ignoring the detailed analysis of, and commentary on, the MORI Customer Satisfaction Survey that we had provided to the Committee, and ascribing to us views that we had clearly not expressed and did not hold.

Dr Kirkham’s 2005 article was a whitewash, and a model exercise in constructing straw men and ignoring inconvenient evidence. In Dr Kirkham’s own words from his 2005 article: “There has never been any serious allegation that the LGO act in any other way but according to the highest standards of public conduct.” (ibid., p 388). Dr Kirkham wrote this after reading the LGO Watch submissions to the ODPM Committee, and in full knowledge of the devastating results of the LGO’s own MORI Customer Satisfaction Surveys.

Staff Satisfaction Survey

One of the above links leads to a submission where I exposed what the LGO’s own staff had to say about them in their 2012 Staff Satisfaction Survey http://bit.ly/1CJydGk. Staff were informed the results were only for internal circulation, but a member of their staff leaked them to LGO Watch. The LGO published a document that was supposed to be a summary of and response to the survey. This “summary” was very selective, and it epitomised the LGO’s systemic dishonesty and attempt to hoodwink the public. One of the most striking examples of dishonesty in this summary was where the LGO wrote: “39% believe we provide a great service to our customers but 34% are undecided,” whilst completely failing to mention that 27% positively disagreed with the statement.

I have written at greater length on the 2012 LGO Staff Survey here:

http://bit.ly/YV4w6h

This 2012 staff survey was damning of the LGO institution, and the absence of any reference to the results in Mr Gordon’s report is striking. Here is just one of the many shocking findings of the staff survey: Statement: “Our LGOs demonstrate good leadership skills.” A total of 80% of respondents disagreed, with 46% strongly disagreeing.” Surely Mr Gordon should have commented on that finding alone in his report.

Summary

In the course of the past decade, the current director of LGO Watch, Mr Trevor R. Nunn, and I, have spent a great deal of time researching the LGO’s activities, trying to expose its subterfuge and dishonesty, and learning from the experience of the many users of the LGO’s putative “service” who have contacted us, as well as trying to help them on a practical and an emotional level as best we could. Some of those complainants did not have a valid case that fell within the LGO’s remit, and had not been treated unfairly either by the council or the LGO, and were clearly persistently vexatious complainants. They quickly turned their vexatiousness on us when we told them what they did not want to hear.

Nevertheless, many people had received a “double-whammy” of maladministration with injustice: first from their local authority, and then from the LGO. Mr Nunn and I have also observed how the CLG Committee and those entrusted with carrying out reviews of the LGO are very reluctant indeed to grasp the nettle and consider the considerable and extensive evidence provided to the CLG Committee that the LGO is corrupted, not fit for purpose, and not reformable on account of an entrenched self-serving and biased ethos.

The LGO is a public spending outrage. Given the extent of the injustice meted out by the LGO, and its incompetence, the greatest benefit to the good citizens of this country would be to abolish the LGO altogether and to replace it with regional or local appeals tribunals, ideally staffed by competent volunteers drawn from the local community. This would be a measure that rescues the taxpayer from a situation where he is currently paying an institution a large amount of money just to prevent him achieving justice should he suffer maladministration with significant injustice at the hands of a local authority.

In fact, the LGO is such an appalling outfit that the citizens of this country would even be better off if the LGO were simply disbanded and not replaced with anything. At the moment, many of those who have been wronged by a local authority end up having their injustice compounded when the LGO finds in that local authority’s favour despite compelling evidence, as it so often does. The local authority can then refer to the finding of the LGO to close down the complaint, and can refer to it in vindication should the media make any enquiries, given that unless members of the general public have used the LGO’s “service”, they have no idea how corrupt it is.

The LGO is a bureaucratic behemoth that is protected by a well-honed edifice of subterfuge and by its allies in various sections of the British establishment. LGO Watch has made enormous efforts to encourage responsible politicians to respond to the evidence of systemic corruption and maladministration at the LGO’s office. The indifference of the CLG Committee and of its predecessor, the ODPM Committee, to the compelling evidence we have provided, is disgraceful. The political establishment seems to be very reluctant to call into question the integrity of this institution, and has been simply disregarding evidence that it finds uncomfortable. This is having the effect of alienating citizens from those they elect to serve them, and further undermining public confidence in the integrity of our political structures and in the accountability of our politicians and our political system as a whole.

It is time for the “political correctness” that has been protecting the ombudsmen to be set aside, and for the LGO to be subjected to honest scrutiny: a scrutiny that must include objective and conscientious consideration of the very extensive evidence that has been supplied to the select committee over the course of a decade, and that has been brushed under the carpet as too inconvenient, too embarrassing, and too “off-message” to deal with. Up until now, those trying to expose the LGO have been treated by those with the power to bring about change and reform as though we were the problem. Rotherham should remain a stark reminder of just where this kind of paradigm can lead.

Gary Powell

October 2014

Brexit, equal marriage and the general election.

Could the 2017 Brexit referendum and same-sex marriage help the Conservative Party to win the 2015 general election?

 I can't help feeling that the EU in-out referendum promised by the Conservatives for 2017 could potentially be a significant factor that sways the general election in the Conservatives' favour. The wish to leave the EU is something that tends to be automatically associated with Ukip voters and a large number of Conservative voters, but there is also (perhaps surprisingly) considerable support (apparently over 30%) among those who tend to vote Labour and Lib Dem for leaving the EU http://bit.ly/1gbhsNp. Quite a number of people seem to have a tendency to generally vote in a certain way without having a particular loyalty to a political party, so if a particular policy has an overwhelming appeal to them, many will be prepared to switch in quite a radical way. Many people who vote do not have a great deal of interest in politics, let alone in making great compromises to support a party that champions a cause with which they strongly disagree; and my hunch is that there are more people who dislike our membership of the EU than we realise.

As the Prime Minister currently seems keen for the UK to remain a member of the EU, it is always possible that the Conservatives will soft-pedal the 2017 EU referendum in their general election campaign. Though recent indications that he seems more willing to threaten the EU with the prospect of our exit, should satisfactory reforms be denied, might well cause the soft-pedalling to stop. I would not be at all surprised if the Brexit turned into an issue that would galvanise the majority of the electorate.

The other factor that could significantly influence the probability of a Conservative victory in 2015 is, in my view, the Prime Minister's success, and indeed that of his colleagues, in modernising the Conservative Party and making it into an institution that champions inclusivity, diversity and social liberalism. Far too many people - many of them probably nonetheless natural conservatives - would still not vote Conservative today because they associate the Conservative Party with the appalling homophobic views and actions that characterised it in the 1980s and previously. The Prime Minister might currently feel minded to keep the tremendous commitment he demonstrated in legalising same-sex marriage low key during the election campaign, for fear of opening old wounds and alienating the social conservatives who opposed the measure but may have recovered enough to still vote Conservative in 2015. However, unapologetically celebrating and publicising the Conservatives' role in legalising same-sex marriage would send a very strong signal to sceptics in the electorate about how much the Conservative Party has changed for the better, and how appropriate it is these days for social liberals to vote Conservative. After all, the vast majority of the electorate either support same-sex marriage, or are indifferent to it. There is much more to gain than to lose by being unabashed about the Conservative Party's new progressive and inclusive identity, and its willingness to fight hard for social justice and equality.

© Gary Powell, 2014 

The above is a comment posted under the Times opinion piece by Daniel Finkelstein, 'And the winner of the next election is . . .' (27 August 2014).

Pink News

Pink News articles by Gary Powell

Here is a link to the list of published articles I have written for Pink News:

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/author/gary-powell/

Hamas and the IRA

The flawed comparison between Hamas and the IRA.

One of the arguments advanced by those who challenge the legitimacy of Israel's "Operation Protective Edge" against Hamas in Gaza involves a comparison between the bombing of highly-populated areas in Gaza in order to kill Hamas militants and destroy Hamas ordnance, and the approach the British Government took towards defeating the terrorist Irish Republican Army.

The point is correctly made that, if the British Government had tried to neutralise the IRA by bombing highly-populated areas where IRA terrorists and ordnance were located, resulting in hundreds of civilian deaths, there would have been a public outcry.

Yet this comparison between how the IRA was defeated and how Hamas must be defeated does not stand up to examination. 

The IRA was at no time committed to the unconditional global genocide of British people and to the unconditional annihilation of Britain. It was also not a foreign government that had been elected by the people of a foreign enemy administration. The IRA was not firing thousands of missiles onto British cities, hiding their missiles under houses, churches and schools, and encouraging civilians to remain in these locations to act as human shields. Bombing civilian areas where IRA militants lived and where their arms were stored would have meant bombing our own country in the case of Northern Ireland, and bombing a close ally in the case of Eire. Furthermore, once it was established where the IRA militants and ordnance were, our police force and army, or those of the Irish Republic in the case of Eire, were perfectly capable of turning up on doorsteps and dealing with them.

Comparing Hamas to the IRA in an attempt to undermine the justification for Israel's military action in Gaza does not stand up to scrutiny. It is yet another attempt to undermine Israel's right to defend its citizens against rocket and mortar attacks from a genocidal fascist power that has no regard for human life, whether that human life be Israeli or Palestinian.

© Gary Powell, 2014 

Switching the poles.

What if today's Israel were Muslim and today's Gaza Jewish?

"Confirmation bias" happens where a belief that carries a strong emotional investment is preserved because the person who holds it does not bother to seek out, or honestly consider, any evidence that might challenge it. The belief in question feels emotionally compelling, and one's own sense of ego might even be invested in it, so that any challenge to it might feel like a challenge to one's own identity and good judgment. Counter-evidence thus becomes something dangerous and potentially painful: something to be guarded against.  

One antidote to confirmation bias that is sometimes successful is the consideration of an analogy that is similar enough to the matter at issue to be relevant to its analysis, but where the element that is triggering the confirmation bias is replaced by something different. This can be effective enough to get people unstuck and to begin the process of cognitive restructuring. 

Confirmation bias has ensnared reporting on, and interpretation of, the current Israeli military action against fascist Hamas in Gaza. Whether the emotional charge that supports this confirmation bias is attributable to prejudice against Israel or prejudice against Jewish people in general, would depend on the individual who harbours the bias. Israel is being called upon to stop its military action against Hamas in Gaza, which is very tragically leading to the deaths of hundreds of Gazan citizens alongside the Hamas militants and the destruction of the Hamas ordnance that the Israel Defence Force is targeting: deaths that are being encouraged by Hamas deploying the strategy of human shields, and strongly encouraging Gazans to stay put when they have been forewarned by Israel that their neighbourhood would be targeted in a forthcoming strike. 

If Israel were to allow the Gazan policy of using human shields to be successful, it would have to continue to suffer Hamas missile attacks against its citizens with impunity, at least 10% of which penetrate the Iron Dome. And this, for as long as Hamas decide to continue with them. The Israeli people have clearly had enough of being terrorised with Hamas missiles, given that 90% of their population, which includes the bulk of their left wing, support the current Operation Protective Edge against Hamas in Gaza. There is no reason to believe that 90% of our own population would not feel the same if we were in similar circumstances. How many anti-Israel commentators would honestly and seriously expect the UK to exercise similar long-suffering restraint in the face of missile attacks by a genocidal fascist enemy government against our citizens? Would we be voting for politicians who failed to protect us from that? Would we have been able to fight against Hitler on that basis? 

Imagining the reversal of cultural religious polarity in the Israel/ Hamas conflict might be instructive in exposing the current confirmation bias against Israel. Imagine that Israel was a Muslim state and that Gaza was densely populated by Jews. Imagine that Jewish Gaza had elected an extremist religious administration whose charter called for the genocide of all Muslims worldwide and the annihilation of Islamic Israel. Imagine that this Jewish Gazan administration was firing thousands of missiles into Islamic Israel with the purpose of killing Islamic Israeli citizens, and refused to desist from doing so, even though it was the key to stopping the Islamic Israeli military action; that the Jewish Gazan administration was concealing weapons in or under synagogues, schools and hospitals, and launching them from densely-populated areas; that they were forcing Gazans to stay where they were to act as human shields after receiving warnings from Islamic Israel that their neighbourhood would be targeted. Imagine the Jewish Gazan administration was using international aid to build tunnels into Islamic Israel in order to kill citizens and kidnap soldiers: tunnels that had claimed the lives of many Gazan children building them and that civilians were not allowed to use as shelters. 

Where would international sympathies lie then? Would any Islamic state, surrounded by countries that wanted its complete annihilation, be expected to suffer missile attacks in perpetuity and with impunity from a neighbouring genocidal regime? Would the western media be as indifferent to the antecedent causes of the bloodshed - the firing of missiles to kill random civilians by genocidal religious extremists, and their refusal to desist - when the pictures on our TV screens were of Jewish human shield casualties caused by the weapons of an Islamic state trying to stop terrorist missile and tunnel attacks? Or are evaluation and reporting being influenced by the cultural religious background of the parties in this conflict?  

It is, of course, the intentions and actions of the conflicting parties involved that are of relevance here, and not whether they identify themselves as culturally "Jewish" or culturally "Muslim". Any state has a duty to stop a neighbouring genocidal regime trying to kill its citizens with missiles, and other terrorist activities. Tragically, there can be no just wars against genocidal oppressors without civilian casualties, as Britain itself experienced in World War Two. A state defending itself against a genocidal aggressor does not merit being singled out for condemnation in the international community simply because it identifies as Jewish. 

© Gary Powell, 2014