Randomly Selected Article or Link

I read recently city councillors saying the planning process is not political. Indeed, it is not meant to be. But it is ever more apparent that it is highly political with a “small p”.

I strongly supported the move to planning decisions taken at area committees, and advocated even more public participation than happens now. I hoped this would enable people (and councillors) to understand why certain decisions are taken, ‘owning’ the resulting decision as a local community and, crucially, bearing the costs of appeals against adverse decisions.

But now councillors appear to make the decisions they think people in the room would like them to make, whether right or wrong, and leave the appeals process to sort it out afterwards. That way they get the voters’ credit for defending local opinion and let the Planning Inspectorate take the blame for decisions that run counter to local feeling.

As a result, more than two thirds of appeals against decisions by the city council are successful; and all appeals against decisions made by councillors at area committees.

Councillors – you are not helping people to understand and own planning issues, merely raising false hopes that you must know are likely to be dashed by Inspectors. You are costing taxpayers money and delaying much needed development (particularly housing) by over a year. With deep regret, it may be time for planning decisions to be handled centrally again.

Naim Zidane, reported the Telegraph last week, is a 70 year old Palestinian who all his life has worked in a vineyard owned by the Italian priests at the West Bank Salesian monastery of Cremisan, near Beit Jala, not far from Bethlehem. They've been working together as a community for 120 years. But soon, it appears, the Israeli security barrier will drag this last West Bank vineyard into the Israeli side of the wall, just as they have ripped away the livelihoods of thousands of other West Bank Palestinians with the closing off of many olive groves over the past few years.

Meanwhile, last night, they once again attacked civilian infrastructure in another sovereign state, Lebanon, closing Beirut airport with rocket attacks, in reprisals against a geurilla organization, Hezbollah, sponsored and many say, I gather, controlled by a third, Syria, for kidnapping two Israeli military personnel. And in the past few days seventy Palestinians and one Israeli, including, as always, mostly civilians, and with them lots of children, have been killed in Israeli incursions into the largest concentration camp on the planet, the Gaza strip, also, it seems, because some of their fellow "countrymen" if Palestine can be called, yet, a country, kidnapped an Israeli soldier who was, presumably, on his way to maim and kill more Palestinians.

I really hesitate to post about Israel. If I am lucky my visitor numbers will rise. But probably at the expense of abuse that seems to be meted out against anyone who says anything negative about Israel. I'm a pacifist. And I understand that things have been difficult, shall we say, in that part of the world for several decades. I believe, I think, in a two state solution, not because I support Israel - if Israel hadn't carved itself out of the desert in the first half of the twentieth century I certainly wouldn't be creating it now. But it exists, and as a pragmatist, I believe there are a whole load of peace-loving Israelis, who arrived there and brought their families up there, hoping for some kind of peaceful co-existence with those who also viewed that land as part of their history and we should work for that peaceful co-existence.

But can you imagine the uproar there would have been if, say, the US military had gone about searching for those two of their soldiers, Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker, who were kidnapped by allegedly al-Qaeda linked insurgents in Iraq, by killing civilians and bombing civilian infrastructure there? Like the battle of Falluja? Despite all my misgivings about the US government's lack of respect for the rule of law, I cannot for the life of me see why Israel gets away with these things, almost unremarked upon.

Our seeming collective myopia disgusts me - note to any hardcore Zionists about to yell at me - not Israel per se, but us, who seem to let this violence trickle through in the inside pages of newspapers and down in the bottom half of the news hour, with hardly a mention, either to condemn, or to discuss solutions. Maybe this latest attack on the civilian infrastructure of a country that in recent years, despite the upheavals caused by the death of President Rafik Hariri a while back, has been getting itself back on its feet, will refocus attention on what's going on in the area.

Punishment attacks are the weapons of a desperate regime. They are disgusting. Against the rule of law. People who support, as I do, a two state solution (though I have to say with deep, deep misgivings about the carving out of settlements whenever it suits them leaving the West Bank looking like a land strafed with bomb craters like the Somme battlefield) will eventually lose sympathy and wonder what it is we actually support - which ones are the murdering terrorists. Because terrorism is exactly what's been going on in Gaza; state sponsored terrorism, and state sponsored theft as in the case of Naim Zidane's employers' vineyard.

And I for one am losing patience with it. Whatever the hurdles, whatever the attitudes of those they feel are ranged against them, Israel can be the "better man" in its response, respecting the rule of law. When I was young, I just about remember Entebbe - we were I think in Kenya at the time. We thought the surgical precision of Israeli special forces when they wanted to be was second to none in the world. Maybe that was naive (I was only seven I think and soldierly antics were exciting, not threatening), but it seems to me they have become little more than the terrorists they condemn. And if we lose patience with the situation, if we give up hoping for a peaceful, adult, settlement, then I would imagine that Israel's death throes could be as bloody as its birth-pangs. And we will not care, because we'll have grown used to the bloodshed, and really have stopped trying to work out who are the good guys or not.

As if getting your business park's planning permission wasn't a nice enough present, now the Labour party is going to give all the Abrahams money back! What a bargain.

Labour to return donations - Telegraph:

Gordon Brown has announced that more than £600,000 that the Labour Party accepted without disclosing its true origin will be returned.

Tristan points us to companies we might like to boycott who are now on he shortlist for contracts related to the ID cards and database:

ID Cards - companies to boycott:

El Reg gives us the list of companies able to bid for the ID cards contracts.
They are:

Accenture - BAE Systems - CSC - EDS - Fujitsu - IBM - Steria - Thales

Other ways to fight the ID card madness

But it got me thinking. Perhaps rather than just boycotting companies whose products, let's face it, most of us are unlikely to come into direct contact with other than IBM's (and even then having got rid of laptops to Lenovo probably not them), perhaps we should be more active. Perhaps we should start a campaign of mass action against senior officers of these companies, and major shareholders where appropriate. Like what the animal rights activists are doing but without the threats and violence.

After all, I would have thought that there are sound commercial reasons not to get involved. If a national ID cards scheme goes ahead there will be less scope for competition for creating computerised trust mechanisms in future. Of course the ones that get the contract will be in the money - at least until costs spiral and they get squeezed as with the NHS systems - but the losers will be locked out of ID and trust type systems for as long as the national scheme operates I'd suggest.

PS - I see from my logs that this post has made it onto some Accenture daily list of "negative" comments about them .  Good!  But to set your minds at rest, what I mean by "mass action" is shareholder action, using any influence we have in other organizations to get them not to do business with the companies who hope to be involved with the ID Cards, persuading like minded antiID card employees to not get involved and so on.  NOT Speak style attacks on executives, oh dearie me no!