Ilford North Liberal Democrats

Sarah bulletin: 3 September 2010

Dear friends,

Back to school! Even though my schooldays are now a few years ago (!) I still have that post-summer feeling in early September - more than in January - of starting a new year. We started back in Brussels last week and I am now fully in harness again. I hope you all managed to get a bit of a break whether away or at home, and wish you the best for the year ahead.

Sir Cyril Smith

It is very sad to hear of the death of former Liberal MP Cyril Smith. My own closest contact with Cyril was in 1984 when I was the Euro-candidate in Hants East & Wight. Cyril, not being the most Europhile of politicians, was declining entreaties to go Euro-campaigning. But I (or rather my smart husband Steve) discovered that he had accepted an unrelated invitation to visit a school in Gosport. By dint of persuading him that from Gosport to Portsmouth was a teeny hop on the ferry, we pulled off a coup envied by other Euro-candidates! My colleague Chris Davies, who knew him well, says:

"Cyril wore his heart on his sleeve. He was proud of his achievements and passionate about two things, Rochdale and politics. Everyone knew him, absolutely everyone. He was forthright, and blunt, and people trusted him as an honest politician. But no-one should forget his total commitment to the political process with all its flaws. He could be a champion of great and noble causes, but he could also get down and dish it out to opponents."

RIP Cyril, and warmest thanks for your stalwart championing of the Liberal cause.

Devastating flooding in Pakistan

As you know, Pakistan has suffered some of the worst flooding ever seen, killing more than 1,500 people and making up to 4 million people homeless - and it's not over yet. Nick Clegg paid a visit to Pakistan earlier this week, and stressed how this disaster will have a "long tail" and that flood stricken areas will need aid for many years to come. The UK government has committed more than £60 million in aid not just for food and water but also this kind of longer-term support and the EU has now also pledged about the same amount.

If you want to donate to the emergency effort in Pakistan, you can do so through the Disasters Emergency Committee, an alliance of 13 humanitarian aid agencies here in the UK - they have already managed to raise £42 million, but any more you can give will be very welcome.

"Novel" food from cloned animals

A row erupted in August between the Food Standards Authority here in the UK and the European Commission about whether EU 'novel food' regulations cover the offspring of cloned animals - the Commission and the European Food Safety Authority claim they don't, the Food Standards Authority claim they do! This is clearly a very unsatisfactory situation, triggered by the revelation that meat and possibly milk from the calves of cloned cows had entered the food chain in May. MEPs in fact before the summer called for a complete ban on food from cloned animals - although there are so far no proven health risks to humans, cloned animals are more vulnerable to disease, have a very obvious adverse effect on biodiversity and arouse ethical objections so consumers have a right to labelling. The Commission is to make a statement about this next week in Strasbourg, so more anon...

Middle East peace talks

The first direct Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in nearly 2 years began yesterday in Washington under the auspices of Barack Obama. The US administration has set a tight deadline of one year, and although it is encouraging that the two sides have agreed to talk at all, there is little sign of agreement on any other issue. There was an interesting exchange of views in the Guardian letters pages over the summer between Baroness Jenny Tonge and Matthew Harris of LibDem Friends of Israel about whether Hamas should be included in any peace process and the historical blame game of who's responsible for the current mess.

My feeling regarding the Middle East peace talks is that for all that I want progress, we cannot neglect the need for security and respect for legitimacy of the state of Israel, so to just brush aside rejectionism of Israel by some Palestinian forces is unreasonable. For example, it was reported last week that Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority - and we're not even talking Hamas here - honoured the recent death of Amin Al-Hindi, one of the senior planners of the Munich 1972 Olympics kidnappings and murders. The PA has described him as a 'martyr', praised what he did and honoured him with a military funeral. Glorifying in this way what is a clear example of terrorism is unacceptable and should be condemned. But on the other side, the illegal settlement building must be stopped, and not just temporarily, and I fully subscribe to the views expressed by an Israeli academic in this article in the New York Times/Herald Tribune about the terrible damage extremist Israeli religious settlers are doing to secular Zionism and Israel's real interests.

Snooping on our personal data

I am very data protection-conscious, and every prejudice I have about databases was reinforced when I read in a Statewatch newsletter about how more than 200 civil service staff have been caught "snooping" on people's personal details in the Department of Work and Pension's Customer Information System database, which at 90 million records is thought to be the largest public sector database in Europe. Most of the cases involved employees looking up the records for acquaintances, crushes, neighbours or celebrities even when this is strictly forbidden. Such breaches can be very problematic from a security point of view, such as in Northern Ireland where the information can be used by sectarian groups for malicious purposes, but there are all kinds of other worrying implications even besides the outage of lax privacy standards. Why does this just go on and on? Clearly the disciplinary and legal consequences are not tough enough. Personally I have opted out of the NHS 'Summary Care Record' but it took 3 attempts.

Racism on the rise?

A number of developments over the last month seem to show a marked rise in the use of what can only but unpleasantly be called the "race card" in politics across Europe and the world. Most notable is France's new policy of so-called 'voluntary expatriation' of Roma people with a bribe of €300 in cash after stigmatising them as perpetrators of crime -- Sarkozy's way of seeking populist support and competing with the National Front in a bid to hold on to power, a la Berlusconi, who has played the same game in Italy. I took part in a discussion with the French Europe minister Pierre Lellouche this week and his explanations were not convincing.

I accept that under EU free movement law there are limits to the right to stay in another EU country - no more than 3 months without a job - and I also accept that insanitary squatter camps cannot be an answer. But the treatment of the Roma and their third-class status is a sensitive pan-European social issue; we are supposed to be halfway through a European 'Decade of Roma Inclusion' but discrimination and exclusion remain rife, especially in housing and education. Kicking a particular ethnic group around and scapegoating them is outrageous, with everything history has taught us. ALDE, the liberal group in the European Parliament, has secured a debate and resolution on Roma discrimination next week.

But that's not all - in Germany a board member of the Bundesbank, Thilo Sarrazin, recently published a book arguing that Muslim immigrants are undermining German society and Jews have a particular genetic make-up - views that have garnered a horrifying amount of support in the country. Add to that Israeli rabbi Ovadia Yosef's belief that "Abu Mazen [Mr Abbas] and all these evil people should perish ... God should strike them and these Palestinians, evil haters of Israel, with a plague", and we have quite an epidemic of incitement to hatred.

Scams and fraud

The new National Fraud Intelligence Bureau, set up by Lord Goldsmith's fraud review and operated by City of London police officers, made its first arrests this summer. The new body is in charge of stamping out fraud networks that can cost people hundreds of thousands of pounds. But I hope that one day they will not only limit themselves to UK-based scams, but also cross-border fraud. I was for example contacted last year by a constituent who had been caught in a Spanish lottery scam, and was robbed of nearly £90,000. The fact that it was a cross-border case and that the 'suspect' was in Spain made it very difficult for her to convince either her borough police or the Met to do anything about it - you would expect that in this day and age of EU judicial cooperation we could do better than that!

Shaker Aamer

The Foreign Office under the new coalition government appears to have responded to the arguments of human rights campaigners such as myself - and the family's Tory MP - and has appealed to the US for the release of Shaker Aamer, the last Londoner in Guantanamo. He lived in Battersea with his wife and children before he was illegally kidnapped and transferred to the high-security prison, although he has since been cleared for release. The previous British government was reluctant to push the United States to return him to the UK - the suspicion being that they were happy for him to be spirited away to Saudi Arabia - so this is a step forward. I hope for his sake, and that of his family, that he is returned to the UK soon. He may be a key witness at the torture inquiry on which again, it is the new government and not the old Labour one that has acted.

The 'Anglosphere' vs. continental Europe

If you haven't read it already, I highly recommend you take a look at Martin Kettle's Guardian Comment is Free piece about the 'Anglosphere'. He argues -- and I daresay it's true - that a map of the world refracted through the mind of a Londoner would look a bit like this:

"The City in the foreground, obviously. Perhaps Kensington eliding into the Cotswolds or the Welsh Marches in the near middle-distance. A strip of ocean with America looming large behind it. And, er, that's it. There would be no place for Scotland or Ireland in this map. No surprise there, perhaps. More strikingly - and more surprisingly if compared with the kind of mental map that might have been drawn 20 years ago - there would be no place for continental Europe either. Not France, not Italy even. Certainly not Germany or Scandinavia. As for Russia, forget it. All out of mind. All out of sight."

His point is that here in London/England/the UK we live very much in a news and entertainment Anglo-bubble made up of the British Isles, America, Canada, Australia and other former colonies. We know more about Australian and American elections and we do about Swedish ones, and more about Alaska then we know about Calais. The English language is both a global gift and our greatest curse, and we as Britons have to work harder to learn foreign languages and overcome the mental and political 'fog' above the English Channel. I am personally in favour of making a GSCE language pass a requirement for all university degree courses. At present, young Britons are definitely losing out on the European and international jobs market.

EHIC cards

The distressing story of the newlywed bride who fell 30ft off a balcony while on her honeymoon and may now be paralysed is a sobering reminder that even if you have your European Health Insurance Card (EHIC, which you can get here), you should still get travel insurance as it does not, for example, cover air ambulance repatriation. Although a great invention, the EHIC card only entitles you to necessary, state-provided medical treatment, not private care.

EU to ban waste collection?

The latest Euro-myth: the EU is going to prevent weekly rubbish collections. As my LibDem colleague Chris Davies explained in the Daily Telegraph, this is (if you'll excuse the pun!) rubbish. The EU Landfill directive, which is what the rumour is probably referring to, simply sets targets to reduce the amount of garbage we tip into holes in the ground in order to better use resources, reduce groundwater pollution and curb methane emissions. Certainly not a ban on regular rubbish collections, just an incentive to recycle more! It is entirely up to UK local councils how they organise collections.

Ian Tomlinson: police reputation at risk

Before the summer, the Crown Prosecution Service announced that it was not going to prosecute the police officer who was filmed kicking G20 protestor Ian Tomlinson to the ground, without any provocation, just minutes before he died. I and my London LibDem colleagues Tom Brake MP and Simon Hughes MP immediately wrote to the Director of Public Prosecutions to demand that he should at least prosecute for misconduct in public office or assault if not homicide (pictured above delivering the letter). The Met have since announced that PC Simon Harwood will face disciplinary proceedings from their end - I only hope that these will be held in public and will be fair. The public needs to see justice being done to avoid another surge in public cynicism towards the police. We will see what comes out of the inquest.

The Blitz

Next Tuesday 7 September will mark the 70th anniversary of the start of the London Blitz, which began with the bombing of London for 76 consecutive nights and went on for 8 months. More than 20,000 Londoners were killed and more than a million houses destroyed. Spare a thought next week for this nightmare that so changed the London skyline, and applaud the bravery of the people below who endured and withstood it. Without that military and civilian courage and endurance, Hitler would have won. It still gives me a shiver to reflect on that.

Best regards,

Sarah Ludford

P.S. Just to add how pleased I am that Mohammad Mostafaei, the lawyer who famously represented the Iranian woman Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani under threat of death by stoning, has been reunited with his family. He is currently in exile in Norway but his wife (who was herself held hostage by Iranian authorities a few months ago) and daughter have now been allowed to fly to Norway to join him. ALDE group is pressing for an urgency resolution next week about Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani herself.