Wisconsin Dems Demand Further Investigation Into 2006 Waukesha County Election
April 15, 2011 No CommentKathy Nickolaus says the vote numbers don’t add up because some municipalities don’t have modems to send the results. When the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel asked why the manual votes weren’t added later, she told them, “We do not change the ballots cast.” Yeah, something doesn’t add up : Wisconsin Democrats are now crying foul over election administration in heavily Republican Waukesha County — and not just in the recent Supreme Court race, in which County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus (R) announced the discovery of 14,000 untabulated votes from a whole municipality that put conservative Justice David Prosser ahead. In a letter to the state Government Accountability Board, which oversees elections, state Dem chair Mike Tate is now raising doubts about the county’s tabulated votes in the narrowly decided 2006 state attorney general race. Key quote from the letter: The Waukesha County Clerk website Tuesday said there were 118,342 votes for Van Hollen and 55,608 votes for Falk, a total of 173,950 votes. (There are an additional 97 write-in votes tabulated for a total of 174,047 votes assigned to candidates from Waukesha County.) However, at the top of the same page, the Waukesha County Clerk, under the heading “BALLOTS CAST – TOTAL,” the number of total ballots reported is 156,804. This is an under-reporting of 17,243 votes. I note with serious concern that this discrepancy is more than enough to have swung the statewide election against the Republican and for the Democrat. The Web page that Tate refers to can be found here . Tate notes in his letter that the county’s web site has been amended recently, in order to offer an explanation of how the number of “total ballots” reported is calculated, and how it can differ from the actual total number of votes.
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Tim Radford finds Bronowski’s history of humanity, The Ascent of Man – reissued with a foreword by Richard Dawkins – as compelling as ever Fame has a momentum all of its own, but that does not explain the enduring recognition accorded to Jacob Bronowski. In 1972 he was a little-known mathematician who knew a lot about the poet William Blake. In 1973, thanks to a 13-part television series on BBC2, he had become one of the world’s most celebrated intellectuals, and by the late summer of 1974 he was dead. The book spun from the television series went on to sell millions. Now, 38 years later, the BBC has reissued it, with a foreword by Richard Dawkins but otherwise unchanged. In the intervening years, a hundred popularisers, practitioners and science historians have tried to tell much the same story, each time with more up-to-date information and a more acute sense of contemporary awareness. So The Ascent of Man should have a decidedly dated feel. But it doesn’t – not, at least, to this reader. It proceeds briskly through what is by now the standard science-oriented western European version of human history – the Palaeolithic, the dawn of civilisation, the Greeks and the Romans, the Islamic empire, Galileo, Newton, the Industrial Revolution, Mendeleev, Pasteur, Darwin, Einstein and the nuclear age – and it still seems as good as any other history of discovery, and a great deal sharper and more readable than some. Some of the fluency stems from Bronowski’s greedy enthusiasm for intellectual adventure, including poetry (I still have his 1972 book William Blake and the Age of Revolution, and felicitously, a new scholarly monograph from Imprint Academic, The Happy Passion by Antony James, tells us a lot more about Bronowski’s output). Some of the fluency stems from Bronowski’s decision to put as much of the script for the TV series into the book as possible. “A spoken argument is informal and heuristic; it singles out the heart of the matter and shows in what way it is crucial and new,” he writes in his own foreword. But the enduring freshness stems from something else. Bronowski had a gift for identifying the themes and advances that would seem just as vital 40 years on. He also had a gift for sentences minted with precision, and Dawkins picks out two of them in his foreword: “The hand is the cutting edge of the mind … The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is pleasure in his own skill.” That is more than just an example of the Bronowski way with words. It is an illustration of his ability to stand just slightly off-centre, to see the unexpected in the familiar, and select imagery that has life, action, movement. He identifies the keen edge of a stone blade, the baked bricks of Sumer, the marble of Greece and the stone arches of Rome, as evidence of human exploration of the visible structure of matter. This same attitude helps him demonstrate that the hit-and-miss handiwork of the Bronze Age, the intricate craftsmanship of Samurai swordsmiths, and the not-quite-futile endeavours of the medieval alchemists, were all tentative explorations of the invisible nature of matter. Geometry, and Greek and Islamic experiments in mathematics, began to expose the importance of shape, distance, perspective and to reveal a vision of the universe “not as a series of static frames but as a moving process”. Ultimately, his journey leads him “through the gateway of the atom … in a world which our senses cannot experience. There is a new architecture here, a way that things are put together which we cannot know: we only try to picture it by analogy, a new act of imagination.” And the Bronowski imagination dances on, leading us to new insights: he talks about the fabrication of the 92 elements through stellar fusion from the universal raw material of hydrogen and pauses, just for a moment, to contemplate carbon “formed in a star whenever three helium nuclei collide at one spot within less than a million millionth of a second. Every carbon atom in every living creature has been formed by such a wildly improbable collision.” These are sentences formed by a mind that can compose imagery, and then select exactly the right words to represent the image. The additional puzzle is that he can express them so flawlessly in a language that, until he was 12, he had never heard. The book, of course, is in one obvious sense out of date: it stops at Crick and Watson, and von Neumann, and the notion of Homo sapiens as an egghead, a highbrow, the product of a brain determined by its shape and capacity. In 1973, the last Apollo astronauts had just left the moon, molecular biology had barely begun, computing was something cumbrous involving small memories and whirring tapes, and neuroscience was still stuck in its own Dark Age. But in another sense, The Ascent of Man is as compelling as ever. The brain, he understands, is not just an instrument for action. It is an instrument for preparation; it both drives the human hand and is driven by it; it is an instrument wired to learn, control speech, plan and make decisions. In the course of the last chapter, he reminds us that from the printed book comes “the democracy of the intellect” and that humans are primarily ethical creatures. These are the words of a man who studied the devastation of Nagasaki. All our science, all our endeavour, is for something. “We are nature’s unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny.” This is not just a book about science. It is a book about why science matters, and what it really tells us. That is not a message likely to go out of date in a few decades. Tim Radford’s geographical memoir The Address Book: Our Place in the Scheme of Things is published by Fourth Estate on 28 April Anthropology Evolution Neuroscience Physics History Science and nature Tim Radford guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Krugman: Obama’s Deficit Reduction Plan ‘Really Serious’; Ryan’s Is ‘A Sick Joke’
April 15, 2011 No Comment
It certainly isn't a surprise that Nobel laureate Paul Krugman was far more pleased with the deficit reduction plan proposed by Barack Obama this week than the one unveiled by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) last week. In Friday's New York Times column ” Who's Serious Now? ” the unabashed liberal declared the President's proposal “really serious” and the Congressman's “a sick joke”: Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, sounds upset. And you can see why: President Obama, to the great relief of progressives, has called his bluff. Readers are advised to notice how throughout his piece, Krugman was highly disrespectful and contentious towards Ryan. Is this really necessary? No matter what one thinks about his politics, Ryan is clearly one of the most intelligent, thoughtful, and serious people on Capitol Hill today. Such a man is deserving of respect by media members on both sides of the aisle. Unfortunately, that's not how “progressives” in the press see things today. Ryan to them is an enemy whose opinions not only need refuting, but also debasing. Folks like Krugman don't only want to win the political argument with Ryan; they want to humiliate and degrade him for having the nerve to offer ideas counter to their own. Such is not only the climate in Washington today, but also at so-called news outlets that are stoking the fires of hyper-partisanship as they hypocritically complain about the caustic tone in politics: Then people who actually understand budget numbers went to work, and it became clear that [Ryan's] proposal wasn’t serious at all. In fact, it was a sick joke. To Krugman, a plan to eliminate over $6 trillion in deficit spending in the next ten years is a sick joke. As you might imagine, he's far happier with the President's proposal: And then Mr. Obama laid out a budget plan that really is serious…[T]he vision was right, and the numbers were far more credible than anything in the Ryan sales pitch. The numbers were far more credible than anything in the Ryan sales pitch? As NewsBusters reported Thursday, there's nothing credible about Obama's numbers because he offered no specifics to back them up.
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Proposed changes to legal aid and immigration rules are at odds with the government’s action plan on domestic violence and could put more women at risk The director of public prosecutions issued a timely warning against complacency this week. Domestic violence was “serious and pernicious”, Keir Starmer reminded us . “It ruins lives, breaks up families and has a lasting impact. It is criminal. And it has been with us for a very long time, yet it is only in the last 10 years that it has been taken seriously as a criminal justice issue.” The DPP applauded the good progress that has “undoubtedly been made since those administering criminal justice woke up to domestic violence”. “But even if domestic violence remains a priority for the Crown Prosecution Service, there remains the wider issue of complacency.” According to the CPS, nearly 1 million women experience domestic violence every year and 750,000 children witness it. Two women die every week as a result of it. Legal aid has a vital role to play in creating an escape route for many battered women and children from bad relationships. “I left a controlling and abusive ex-husband who it then transpired was a child abuser, something for which he was later prosecuted and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment,” said a mother of two young children in a recent report published by the Rights of Women group. “I had to spend about six years fighting his various applications for contact with our children, despite the severity of the charges he was convicted for.” Without legal aid, the woman could not have afforded to see a lawyer. “This would have placed my two young daughters at very real risk of future abuse.” “No level of violence against women and girls is acceptable in modern Britain or anywhere else in this world,” declared the government in last month’s Action Plan . It was launched by Theresa May on the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day and expressed the government’s commitment to helping victims come forward. It’s not an original observation, but not all parts of the government machine listen to each other. Certainly, the Ministry of Justice’s green paper on legal aid appears to have been drafted without cognisance of May’s desire to protect battered women. Its proposals on domestic violence need to be binned. For the past 35 years Rights of Women has provided legal help to the victims of domestic violence. Its response to the legal aid green paper, which seeks to remove much of family law advice from the scheme, is a powerful testimony to the value of publicly funded legal advice at its most effective (and includes the comment from the mother of two above). It is all the more persuasive for being an evidence-based response drawing on a survey of 336 women: more than half experienced violence (58%) and the vast majority described that violence as domestic violence (81.6%). Just under half (46.6%) had reported that violence to the police or applied to the court for a domestic violence injunction. That last statistic is critical in the context of the MoJ’s proposals. Women experiencing violence will only receive legal aid if there is an injunction or conviction for a domestic violence offence. The mother who successfully fled her child abuser husband wouldn’t have qualified because she was not able to demonstrate evidence of the risk he posed to her children until after she separated. Lucy Cohen is a partner at the Bradford firm Williscroft & Co and reckons they take out injunctions to protect clients on average half a dozen times a week. “A lot of those that are vulnerable and need legal aid don’t have convictions or injunctions precisely because they’re so vulnerable. A lot of women we come across over issues of contact and finance have been victims of domestic violence but they don’t want to get an injunction, they don’t want to air their problems publicly, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t need help.” All the women respondents in the RoW research were asked for their reasons for reporting and not reporting violence. “My partner was emotionally, physically and sexually abusive. He would tell me that the police would not take me seriously and it would be his word against mine,” said one woman. “He made much of the fact that husbands are never convicted of rape of their wives in this country.” Cohen argues that ministers are paying lip service to the issue. She points to their definition of domestic violence, which excludes “emotional” violence. Such a view is strikingly at odds with other parts of the government, the supreme court and, frankly, a commonsense understanding of domestic violence. “It has long been known that psychological abuse within a domestic context can cause at least as much long-term harm to the victim as physical abuse,” said Lord Brown earlier this year . Apparently not in the MoJ. As I blogged recently , the issue topped the list of concerns expressed by the Alan Beith-led select committee. Finally, May – despite her declaration – is planning to change the domestic violence rule in the immigration rules. It enables people who are on a spouse or partner visa and experiencing domestic violence to be able to leave that relationship and apply for indefinite leave. According to the immigration minister Damian Green, 700 victims of domestic violence rely upon it every year. The Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association tells me the figure could be as high as 1,500. In a letter to the ILPA, Green says the UK Border Agency will continue to provide leave when needed to help protect women and girls “but settlement will not be automatic”. “For the very small number of cases of minor unspent criminality which would lead to a refusal under these rules, we will take a case-by-case approach.” Well, the numbers might be small, but that misses the point. “One person remaining in an abusive situation is one too many,” says the ILPA’s Alison Harvey. She believes it is “nothing short of astonishing” that a part of the Home Office is “allowed to rewrite the immigration rules” creating a risk for those in abusive relationships. “UKBA may say that it will look carefully at applications, but to no avail. The way the rules have been rewritten means that those survivors will not make the applications in the first place.” Joined-up government? I don’t think so. Jon Robins is a freelance journalist and director of the research company Jures , which runs the Justice Gap series examining different aspects of justice. It will publish a collection of essays with the Advice Services Alliance on public legal education next month Domestic violence Keir Starmer Legal aid UK criminal justice Women Jon Robins guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Proposed changes to legal aid and immigration rules are at odds with the government’s action plan on domestic violence and could put more women at risk The director of public prosecutions issued a timely warning against complacency this week. Domestic violence was “serious and pernicious”, Keir Starmer reminded us . “It ruins lives, breaks up families and has a lasting impact. It is criminal. And it has been with us for a very long time, yet it is only in the last 10 years that it has been taken seriously as a criminal justice issue.” The DPP applauded the good progress that has “undoubtedly been made since those administering criminal justice woke up to domestic violence”. “But even if domestic violence remains a priority for the Crown Prosecution Service, there remains the wider issue of complacency.” According to the CPS, nearly 1 million women experience domestic violence every year and 750,000 children witness it. Two women die every week as a result of it. Legal aid has a vital role to play in creating an escape route for many battered women and children from bad relationships. “I left a controlling and abusive ex-husband who it then transpired was a child abuser, something for which he was later prosecuted and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment,” said a mother of two young children in a recent report published by the Rights of Women group. “I had to spend about six years fighting his various applications for contact with our children, despite the severity of the charges he was convicted for.” Without legal aid, the woman could not have afforded to see a lawyer. “This would have placed my two young daughters at very real risk of future abuse.” “No level of violence against women and girls is acceptable in modern Britain or anywhere else in this world,” declared the government in last month’s Action Plan . It was launched by Theresa May on the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day and expressed the government’s commitment to helping victims come forward. It’s not an original observation, but not all parts of the government machine listen to each other. Certainly, the Ministry of Justice’s green paper on legal aid appears to have been drafted without cognisance of May’s desire to protect battered women. Its proposals on domestic violence need to be binned. For the past 35 years Rights of Women has provided legal help to the victims of domestic violence. Its response to the legal aid green paper, which seeks to remove much of family law advice from the scheme, is a powerful testimony to the value of publicly funded legal advice at its most effective (and includes the comment from the mother of two above). It is all the more persuasive for being an evidence-based response drawing on a survey of 336 women: more than half experienced violence (58%) and the vast majority described that violence as domestic violence (81.6%). Just under half (46.6%) had reported that violence to the police or applied to the court for a domestic violence injunction. That last statistic is critical in the context of the MoJ’s proposals. Women experiencing violence will only receive legal aid if there is an injunction or conviction for a domestic violence offence. The mother who successfully fled her child abuser husband wouldn’t have qualified because she was not able to demonstrate evidence of the risk he posed to her children until after she separated. Lucy Cohen is a partner at the Bradford firm Williscroft & Co and reckons they take out injunctions to protect clients on average half a dozen times a week. “A lot of those that are vulnerable and need legal aid don’t have convictions or injunctions precisely because they’re so vulnerable. A lot of women we come across over issues of contact and finance have been victims of domestic violence but they don’t want to get an injunction, they don’t want to air their problems publicly, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t need help.” All the women respondents in the RoW research were asked for their reasons for reporting and not reporting violence. “My partner was emotionally, physically and sexually abusive. He would tell me that the police would not take me seriously and it would be his word against mine,” said one woman. “He made much of the fact that husbands are never convicted of rape of their wives in this country.” Cohen argues that ministers are paying lip service to the issue. She points to their definition of domestic violence, which excludes “emotional” violence. Such a view is strikingly at odds with other parts of the government, the supreme court and, frankly, a commonsense understanding of domestic violence. “It has long been known that psychological abuse within a domestic context can cause at least as much long-term harm to the victim as physical abuse,” said Lord Brown earlier this year . Apparently not in the MoJ. As I blogged recently , the issue topped the list of concerns expressed by the Alan Beith-led select committee. Finally, May – despite her declaration – is planning to change the domestic violence rule in the immigration rules. It enables people who are on a spouse or partner visa and experiencing domestic violence to be able to leave that relationship and apply for indefinite leave. According to the immigration minister Damian Green, 700 victims of domestic violence rely upon it every year. The Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association tells me the figure could be as high as 1,500. In a letter to the ILPA, Green says the UK Border Agency will continue to provide leave when needed to help protect women and girls “but settlement will not be automatic”. “For the very small number of cases of minor unspent criminality which would lead to a refusal under these rules, we will take a case-by-case approach.” Well, the numbers might be small, but that misses the point. “One person remaining in an abusive situation is one too many,” says the ILPA’s Alison Harvey. She believes it is “nothing short of astonishing” that a part of the Home Office is “allowed to rewrite the immigration rules” creating a risk for those in abusive relationships. “UKBA may say that it will look carefully at applications, but to no avail. The way the rules have been rewritten means that those survivors will not make the applications in the first place.” Joined-up government? I don’t think so. Jon Robins is a freelance journalist and director of the research company Jures , which runs the Justice Gap series examining different aspects of justice. It will publish a collection of essays with the Advice Services Alliance on public legal education next month Domestic violence Keir Starmer Legal aid UK criminal justice Women Jon Robins guardian.co.uk
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Proposed changes to legal aid and immigration rules are at odds with the government’s action plan on domestic violence and could put more women at risk The director of public prosecutions issued a timely warning against complacency this week. Domestic violence was “serious and pernicious”, Keir Starmer reminded us . “It ruins lives, breaks up families and has a lasting impact. It is criminal. And it has been with us for a very long time, yet it is only in the last 10 years that it has been taken seriously as a criminal justice issue.” The DPP applauded the good progress that has “undoubtedly been made since those administering criminal justice woke up to domestic violence”. “But even if domestic violence remains a priority for the Crown Prosecution Service, there remains the wider issue of complacency.” According to the CPS, nearly 1 million women experience domestic violence every year and 750,000 children witness it. Two women die every week as a result of it. Legal aid has a vital role to play in creating an escape route for many battered women and children from bad relationships. “I left a controlling and abusive ex-husband who it then transpired was a child abuser, something for which he was later prosecuted and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment,” said a mother of two young children in a recent report published by the Rights of Women group. “I had to spend about six years fighting his various applications for contact with our children, despite the severity of the charges he was convicted for.” Without legal aid, the woman could not have afforded to see a lawyer. “This would have placed my two young daughters at very real risk of future abuse.” “No level of violence against women and girls is acceptable in modern Britain or anywhere else in this world,” declared the government in last month’s Action Plan . It was launched by Theresa May on the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day and expressed the government’s commitment to helping victims come forward. It’s not an original observation, but not all parts of the government machine listen to each other. Certainly, the Ministry of Justice’s green paper on legal aid appears to have been drafted without cognisance of May’s desire to protect battered women. Its proposals on domestic violence need to be binned. For the past 35 years Rights of Women has provided legal help to the victims of domestic violence. Its response to the legal aid green paper, which seeks to remove much of family law advice from the scheme, is a powerful testimony to the value of publicly funded legal advice at its most effective (and includes the comment from the mother of two above). It is all the more persuasive for being an evidence-based response drawing on a survey of 336 women: more than half experienced violence (58%) and the vast majority described that violence as domestic violence (81.6%). Just under half (46.6%) had reported that violence to the police or applied to the court for a domestic violence injunction. That last statistic is critical in the context of the MoJ’s proposals. Women experiencing violence will only receive legal aid if there is an injunction or conviction for a domestic violence offence. The mother who successfully fled her child abuser husband wouldn’t have qualified because she was not able to demonstrate evidence of the risk he posed to her children until after she separated. Lucy Cohen is a partner at the Bradford firm Williscroft & Co and reckons they take out injunctions to protect clients on average half a dozen times a week. “A lot of those that are vulnerable and need legal aid don’t have convictions or injunctions precisely because they’re so vulnerable. A lot of women we come across over issues of contact and finance have been victims of domestic violence but they don’t want to get an injunction, they don’t want to air their problems publicly, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t need help.” All the women respondents in the RoW research were asked for their reasons for reporting and not reporting violence. “My partner was emotionally, physically and sexually abusive. He would tell me that the police would not take me seriously and it would be his word against mine,” said one woman. “He made much of the fact that husbands are never convicted of rape of their wives in this country.” Cohen argues that ministers are paying lip service to the issue. She points to their definition of domestic violence, which excludes “emotional” violence. Such a view is strikingly at odds with other parts of the government, the supreme court and, frankly, a commonsense understanding of domestic violence. “It has long been known that psychological abuse within a domestic context can cause at least as much long-term harm to the victim as physical abuse,” said Lord Brown earlier this year . Apparently not in the MoJ. As I blogged recently , the issue topped the list of concerns expressed by the Alan Beith-led select committee. Finally, May – despite her declaration – is planning to change the domestic violence rule in the immigration rules. It enables people who are on a spouse or partner visa and experiencing domestic violence to be able to leave that relationship and apply for indefinite leave. According to the immigration minister Damian Green, 700 victims of domestic violence rely upon it every year. The Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association tells me the figure could be as high as 1,500. In a letter to the ILPA, Green says the UK Border Agency will continue to provide leave when needed to help protect women and girls “but settlement will not be automatic”. “For the very small number of cases of minor unspent criminality which would lead to a refusal under these rules, we will take a case-by-case approach.” Well, the numbers might be small, but that misses the point. “One person remaining in an abusive situation is one too many,” says the ILPA’s Alison Harvey. She believes it is “nothing short of astonishing” that a part of the Home Office is “allowed to rewrite the immigration rules” creating a risk for those in abusive relationships. “UKBA may say that it will look carefully at applications, but to no avail. The way the rules have been rewritten means that those survivors will not make the applications in the first place.” Joined-up government? I don’t think so. Jon Robins is a freelance journalist and director of the research company Jures , which runs the Justice Gap series examining different aspects of justice. It will publish a collection of essays with the Advice Services Alliance on public legal education next month Domestic violence Keir Starmer Legal aid UK criminal justice Women Jon Robins guardian.co.uk
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Peace campaigner loses attempt to appeal against mayor’s possession order, but can move tent on to pavement The veteran peace campaigner Brian Haw faces eviction from an area of grass in Parliament Square Gardens after losing an attempt to launch a legal challenge against a possession order granted to the mayor of London. Haw’s longstanding presence on the pavement on the east side of Parliament Square is not, however, threatened by the order, which relates to his encroachment on to a small adjoining part of the gardens where he has pitched a tent. Haw has come under pressure to quit his decade-old protest just metres from Westminster Abbey as the royal wedding approaches. After the appeal attempt was lost, co-campaigner Barbara Tucker said she did not believe the eviction had anything to do with clearing the area for the royal wedding – “it is about getting rid of our peace campaign”. Last month, the mayor, Boris Johnson, won a high court possession order to evict Haw and Tucker. Rejecting the application at the court of appeal, the master of the rolls, Lord Neuberger, and Lady Justice Smith ruled there was “no prospect” of any appeal being successful. They said the mayor was entitled to his order for possession without any further delay as “justice delayed is justice denied”. Tucker interrupted Neuberger as he gave his judgment, saying: “This is a cover-up. Are you finished now?” She and several supporters walked out of court as Smith announced that she agreed the application should be dismissed. Haw is being treated for lung cancer in Germany. Mr Justice Wyn Williams last month granted an order for possession and an injunction against Haw, from Redditch, Worcestershire, and Tucker, but the orders were not to be put in place until after any appeal. All Haw and Tucker have to do now, however, having lost the right to appeal, is to move their tents from the green, owned by the Greater London Authority, to the pavement, which is owned by Westminster council. The prime minister, the home secretary and the mayor of London have all vowed to clear the pavement of protesters before Kate Middleton and Prince William marry on 29 April, but so far have found no legal power that allows them to do so. The high court judge ruled: “Parliament Square Gardens [PSG] is not a suitable location for prolonged camping; such camping is incompatible with the function, lawful use and character of PSG and it is also inconsistent with the proper management of the area as a whole.” He said the campaigners’ tents and placards were occupying more space than was permitted. The pair would be allowed use of a three-metre length of kerb to display placards as that had been a part of the protest for several years, the judge said. Last July, bailiffs and police evicted demonstrators from Democracy Village – the scattering of tents, placards and home-made police boxes set up in the square in May 2010 – after the mayor was granted a possession order for the site, citing vandalism. However, the court remitted the question of whether it was reasonable and proportionate to enforce orders against Haw, whose decade-long presence on the pavement on the east side of Parliament Square was not challenged, except for his encroachment on to a small part of the gardens. Westminster council has launched legal action against protesters who occupied the footpath after being evicted from the green last year. Protest London politics Boris Johnson London Karen McVeigh guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Peace campaigner loses attempt to appeal against mayor’s possession order, but can move tent on to pavement The veteran peace campaigner Brian Haw faces eviction from an area of grass in Parliament Square Gardens after losing an attempt to launch a legal challenge against a possession order granted to the mayor of London. Haw’s longstanding presence on the pavement on the east side of Parliament Square is not, however, threatened by the order, which relates to his encroachment on to a small adjoining part of the gardens where he has pitched a tent. Haw has come under pressure to quit his decade-old protest just metres from Westminster Abbey as the royal wedding approaches. After the appeal attempt was lost, co-campaigner Barbara Tucker said she did not believe the eviction had anything to do with clearing the area for the royal wedding – “it is about getting rid of our peace campaign”. Last month, the mayor, Boris Johnson, won a high court possession order to evict Haw and Tucker. Rejecting the application at the court of appeal, the master of the rolls, Lord Neuberger, and Lady Justice Smith ruled there was “no prospect” of any appeal being successful. They said the mayor was entitled to his order for possession without any further delay as “justice delayed is justice denied”. Tucker interrupted Neuberger as he gave his judgment, saying: “This is a cover-up. Are you finished now?” She and several supporters walked out of court as Smith announced that she agreed the application should be dismissed. Haw is being treated for lung cancer in Germany. Mr Justice Wyn Williams last month granted an order for possession and an injunction against Haw, from Redditch, Worcestershire, and Tucker, but the orders were not to be put in place until after any appeal. All Haw and Tucker have to do now, however, having lost the right to appeal, is to move their tents from the green, owned by the Greater London Authority, to the pavement, which is owned by Westminster council. The prime minister, the home secretary and the mayor of London have all vowed to clear the pavement of protesters before Kate Middleton and Prince William marry on 29 April, but so far have found no legal power that allows them to do so. The high court judge ruled: “Parliament Square Gardens [PSG] is not a suitable location for prolonged camping; such camping is incompatible with the function, lawful use and character of PSG and it is also inconsistent with the proper management of the area as a whole.” He said the campaigners’ tents and placards were occupying more space than was permitted. The pair would be allowed use of a three-metre length of kerb to display placards as that had been a part of the protest for several years, the judge said. Last July, bailiffs and police evicted demonstrators from Democracy Village – the scattering of tents, placards and home-made police boxes set up in the square in May 2010 – after the mayor was granted a possession order for the site, citing vandalism. However, the court remitted the question of whether it was reasonable and proportionate to enforce orders against Haw, whose decade-long presence on the pavement on the east side of Parliament Square was not challenged, except for his encroachment on to a small part of the gardens. Westminster council has launched legal action against protesters who occupied the footpath after being evicted from the green last year. Protest London politics Boris Johnson London Karen McVeigh guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Peace campaigner loses attempt to appeal against mayor’s possession order, but can move tent on to pavement The veteran peace campaigner Brian Haw faces eviction from an area of grass in Parliament Square Gardens after losing an attempt to launch a legal challenge against a possession order granted to the mayor of London. Haw’s longstanding presence on the pavement on the east side of Parliament Square is not, however, threatened by the order, which relates to his encroachment on to a small adjoining part of the gardens where he has pitched a tent. Haw has come under pressure to quit his decade-old protest just metres from Westminster Abbey as the royal wedding approaches. After the appeal attempt was lost, co-campaigner Barbara Tucker said she did not believe the eviction had anything to do with clearing the area for the royal wedding – “it is about getting rid of our peace campaign”. Last month, the mayor, Boris Johnson, won a high court possession order to evict Haw and Tucker. Rejecting the application at the court of appeal, the master of the rolls, Lord Neuberger, and Lady Justice Smith ruled there was “no prospect” of any appeal being successful. They said the mayor was entitled to his order for possession without any further delay as “justice delayed is justice denied”. Tucker interrupted Neuberger as he gave his judgment, saying: “This is a cover-up. Are you finished now?” She and several supporters walked out of court as Smith announced that she agreed the application should be dismissed. Haw is being treated for lung cancer in Germany. Mr Justice Wyn Williams last month granted an order for possession and an injunction against Haw, from Redditch, Worcestershire, and Tucker, but the orders were not to be put in place until after any appeal. All Haw and Tucker have to do now, however, having lost the right to appeal, is to move their tents from the green, owned by the Greater London Authority, to the pavement, which is owned by Westminster council. The prime minister, the home secretary and the mayor of London have all vowed to clear the pavement of protesters before Kate Middleton and Prince William marry on 29 April, but so far have found no legal power that allows them to do so. The high court judge ruled: “Parliament Square Gardens [PSG] is not a suitable location for prolonged camping; such camping is incompatible with the function, lawful use and character of PSG and it is also inconsistent with the proper management of the area as a whole.” He said the campaigners’ tents and placards were occupying more space than was permitted. The pair would be allowed use of a three-metre length of kerb to display placards as that had been a part of the protest for several years, the judge said. Last July, bailiffs and police evicted demonstrators from Democracy Village – the scattering of tents, placards and home-made police boxes set up in the square in May 2010 – after the mayor was granted a possession order for the site, citing vandalism. However, the court remitted the question of whether it was reasonable and proportionate to enforce orders against Haw, whose decade-long presence on the pavement on the east side of Parliament Square was not challenged, except for his encroachment on to a small part of the gardens. Westminster council has launched legal action against protesters who occupied the footpath after being evicted from the green last year. Protest London politics Boris Johnson London Karen McVeigh guardian.co.uk
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Police remain unrepentant about using the collective punishment of kettling – but protesters are in an equally defiant mood One night last December, having already spent five hours trapped by the Metropolitan police in Parliament Square, I was imprisoned on Westminster Bridge along with 1,000 other mostly young protesters, in sub-zero temperatures, for more than two hours. We were held in such a tight space that some suffered respiratory problems and chest pains: the symptoms of severe crushing. This is kettling, and in its strategic brutality and unabashed doublethink, it is the perfect hallmark for the Cameron era. In a landmark ruling , the high court ruled on Thursday that the Met’s use of the tactic during 2009′s G20 protests was illegal. Their wider use of kettling, common throughout this winter’s student and anti-cuts protests, is currently being challenged at the European court of human rights. Despite the high court warning that it must only be used as a “last resort catering for situations about to descend into violence”, the Met are unrepentant. “At the heart of this case,” they responded, “lies a vital public order policing tactic that prevents disorder and protects the public.” They will appeal against the high court ruling, and continue to use kettling “where necessary”. While the tactic’s origin is German (from ” Kessel “), kettling is very rarely used by police forces other than our own; it’s such a British verb, somehow – a darkly comic inversion of the national obsession with the serenity to be found in a nice cup of tea. And for a newly politicised generation of young Brits, it has become a common, though brutal, reality. It felt “like I’d been in a car accident”, said one female student who had been kettled on Westminster Bridge. Invoking Hillsborough , a doctor present that night observed it was miraculous no one was killed – from crowd panic and surges that could have easily led to people toppling over the waist-high walls of the bridge and into the Thames below. Another video from inside the kettle that day was described as ” appalling ” by the chair of the Met watchdog, the Metropolitan Police Authority. Beyond the physical danger, kettling is collective punishment, in violation of the Geneva conventions : a response to the brick-throwing of a handful of protesters that affects the peaceful ones, too, no matter how old or young, how sick or well. More than that, it is de facto imprisonment without trial. It is also police brutality at its most devious – the strategic version of a baton to the head. You want to have your voice heard, to speak out about injustice? How about we smother your esprit de corps, shut you off from your fellow citizens, and raise your temperatures until you do break the law? The nomenclature used on the police side, meanwhile, exudes Wordsworthian calm: they call it “containment”, an attempt to mop protesters’ brows in the interests of everyone’s “public safety”. It is impeccable Orwellian newspeak. As David Lammy asked the home secretary, Theresa May (who was busy denying that a kettle had even existed) : “Is not the point of a kettle, that it brings things to the boil?” It is often observed that kettling is designed to dissuade people from coming out to protest: if anything, it has the reverse effect on those who’ve experienced it. As protesters finally shuffled out of the Westminster Bridge kettle in single file, after seven hours imprisoned in freezing temperatures without food, water, toilets or freedom of movement, I saw several of them look the police in the eye – for that was all they could see, beneath a riot shield visor and a raised black snood – and say, some with humour, some with anger – but all with total defiance, “see you at the next one, mate”. Freshly radicalised by these experiences, it is little surprise that on 26 March, so many young people chose to reject the police-approved TUC march and masked up, seeking freedom and solidarity in the anonymity of the black bloc . I say this to the police: why should protesters engage on your terms, when these are your terms? Police Protest UK civil liberties G20 Young people Dan Hancox guardian.co.uk
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