Egyptians turn to unlikely source

As reported earlier today, Iran has followed Egypt in blocking access to online news sources such as the BBC, Reuters and Yahoo News. However, Egyptians are getting their news from an unlikely source- The Thorpe-Apps Report.

The Thorpe-Apps Report was founded by Andrew Thorpe-Apps in January 2011 and has become popular with young internet surfers.

The emergence of such sites makes it nearly impossible for national governments to effectively censor information on the web.

The Thorpe-Apps Report can be found at thorpe-apps.blogspot.com

Reflections on the revolution in Europe

Mass immigration into Europe in the past 50 years has profoundly changed the continent and is likely to change it even more over the next half century. Yet it is a subject so immersed in fear and wishful thinking that it often seems we still don't have a proper language in which to discuss it.

It is partly for this reason that Christopher Caldwell's new book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, will seem rather shocking. He asks some unusually direct questions: can you have the same Europe with different people? Why did mass immigration happen when so few people actually wanted it? Immigrants want a better life but how many of them want a European life? Why is minority ethnic pride a virtue and European nationalism a sickness? Is political correctness just fear masquerading as tolerance?

This 2009 work investigates the impact of mass immigration on Europe. Caldwell argues that the mass immigration by Muslims to European countries' cities is altering the culture of Europe because of a strong Muslim disinclination to assimilate to the culture of their new homelands. Muslim immigrants do not so much enhance European culture as they supplant it. Caldwell asserts that Muslim immigrants are "patiently conquering Europe’s cities, street by street".

Caldwell, an American journalist and senior editor at The Weekly Standard, insists that he is "instinctively pro-immigration" and conscious of the media tendency to "sensationalise stories against Muslims"

The most chilling observation in Reflections on the Revolution in Europe is that the debate over Muslim immigration in Europe is one that the continent can’t openly have, because anyone remotely critical of Islam is branded as Islamophobic. Europe’s citizens — as well as its leaders, its artists and, crucially, its satirists — are scared to speak because of a demonstrated willingness by Islam’s fanatics to commit violence against their perceived opponents. There exists, Mr. Caldwell writes, a kind of "standing fatwa" against Islam’s critics.

Martin Woollacott for The Guardian concluded that Caldwell "is right to argue that immigration on the scale that Europe has experienced constitutes a risky experiment to which we need not have submitted ourselves, and of which the final result is not yet clear. He is right that we frequently talk about it in stupid and dishonest ways. If his book sharpens a so far sluggish debate, it will have served an important purpose."

In a substantial review for the British Institute of Race Relations, Matt Carr argues that while Caldwell's arguments are "considerably more sophisticated", "there is virtually nothing in his book that would be out of place in any other examples of the 'green peril' genre". Carr further laments the book's "lackadaisical attitude towards factual accuracy", a "[tendency] evident on numerous occasions", and the "uncritical reception given to [this] artful anti-Muslim diatribe in liberal circles", "a depressing reminder of the extent to which its essential assumptions have moved from the political margins to form a new mainstream consensus."

Essex Police fill budget gap with more fines

Police in Essex will have to make devastating cuts of £50million over the next four years as part of the Govern-ment’s spending review. The figure is £5million more than Essex Police’s Chief Constable Jim Barker-McCardle predicted the force would have to slash when he spoke on the issue earlier this year.

The saving the Essex constabulary will have to make equates to the salaries of 19,230 frontline police constables.

The police budget in Essex will be cut from the current £267million to £217million by 2014/15.
The force has yet to announce how it will make the savings. Andy Bliss, Essex Police’s deputy chief constable, said it was inevitable jobs will be axed. He said: “We will study these figures in order to understand the exact consequences for the Essex Police budget. Together with the Essex Police Authority we will tailor our plans for savings to fit with the budget we are given.

“The Chief Constable has said before we will have to make major changes to the way we organise policing in the coming years.

“As more than 80 per cent of our budget is spent on officer and support staff salaries, there will inevitably be less staff employed by us in a climate of tighter budgets.

“We are currently working on a completely new blueprint for policing and are taking the opportunity to fundamentally re-design all aspects of how we deliver our services.”

Mr Bliss said although the Essex force had saved £17million in two years, it would continue to share resources with neighbouring Kent Police. He said the force would ensure it maintained a “visible and accessible presence”.

Essex Police has already ditched plans to recruit 600 new bobbies for the county’s streets.
Some towns in the county have begun to reduce the opening hours of police stations, while other measures, such as reducing overtime, not filling officer vacancies and reducing the number of squad cars, could be on the cards.

Essex Police has set up a “reform programme” to look at how the force can best meet the budget cuts.

ESSEX Police are preparing to cut staffing to save £50m by 2014. The force said that although final figures would not be confirmed until the end of next month at the earliest, “significant savings” would be necessary.
Deputy Chief Constable Andy Bliss said: “We will now study these figures in order to understand the exact consequences for the Essex Police force budget.

“Together with the Essex Police Authority, we will tailor our plans for savings to fit with the budget we are given.

“The chief constable has said before that we will have to make major changes to the way that we organise policing in Essex in the coming years.

“As more than 80 per cent of our budget is spent on officer and support staff salaries, there will inevitably be fewer staff employed by us as we move forward to work in a climate of tighter budgets.

“We are working on a completely new blueprint for policing and are taking the opportunity fundamentally to redesign all aspects of how we deliver our services.”

Mr Bliss added that although savings of £17m had been made in the past two years, there was scope to reduce spending further without affecting the high standards of policing.

Sharing the costs of services by working closely with other forces, particularly Kent, was already reaping rewards and there was potential for other collaborative work.

Spending cuts not radical enough

Whatever happened to the tough decisions? It could hardly be a tough decision to trim universal benefits for the well-off so spending in universities could be maintained and kids could still get a reasonably priced education.

But it was clearly too tough for the Government. As a result, even if they actually deliver on all their promises to cut spending and stick with it through to 2015, the state will have shrunk only to the size it was in Blair's first administration. Radical, it is not.

The reality is in fact that this squeeze is the same old stuff we had in 1976, in 1982 and in 1993, in other words on each of the previous occasions the government finances tipped over the edge, albeit delivered with more professional spin.

Simon Ward, an economist with Henderson, the fund management group, made that point succinctly enough yesterday afternoon. He noted that “total managed expenditure”, the ultimate measure of spending, would decline by 3.3% in real terms by 2014-15.

Hardly unprecedented. Real spending was cut by 3.9% in a single year in 1977-78 after the IMF rescue. Government spending as a share of total national income will fall from 47.5% this year to 41% in 2014-15, a drop of 6.5%. This is not unprecedented either. That same ratio dropped by 6.5% in the five years after 1982-83. It fell by 5.5% in the five years after 1992-93.

And that is the nub of the problem. We have been here before, and we are doing exactly what we did last time, whereas all the hype and spin had led us to expect that this time it would be different. We were promised reform; we have been given the tired old formula of cuts as usual.

 George Osborne announcing the cuts yesterday

Michael Gove pledges to increase school spending

Education Secretary Michael Gove has told MPs that real terms school spending will increase over the Spending Review period.

Mr Gove responded to an urgent question from shadow education secretary Andy Burnham on the government's £7bn "fairness premium" package, announced last week by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg. "This money will be invested in accelerating social mobility," he told MPs.

The package announced by Mr Clegg will include 15 hours a week of free nursery education for the poorest two-year-olds, at a cost of £300 million a year by 2014/15, and a "pupil premium" with funds handed to schools to help pupils eligible for free school meals - a measure of poverty - which will eventually be worth £2.5bn per year.

A "student premium" to help the poorest teenagers to go to university will also be set up, at a cost of at least £150m per year by the end of the Spending Review period.

Mr Gove said that the government had "inherited a two-tier school system with the biggest educational divide between the rich and the poor of any developed nation". He said just 45 pupils on free school meals got to Oxford or Cambridge each year - "as many children as one top public school - St Paul's School for Girls". He added: "That lack of opportunity is indeed a scandal, an affront to the nation's conscience. Thanks to the decisions taken by this coalition government, the policies are now at last in place to give every child a fairer chance."

Boris Johnson's lead narrows to 2% over Livingstone

Boris Johnson's lead over his opponent, Ken Livingstone, has narrowed to just two percentage points less than a month after his arch-rival was confirmed as Labour's mayoral candidate for the 2012 London election, according to a YouGov survey released today.

The polling, conducted during the week of the Conservative conference at the beginning of the month, bodes ill for Johnson ahead of the drastic coalition spending cuts to be announced on Wednesday.

Livingstone has made protecting Londoners from the cuts a key feature of his campaign, and has urged the capital's voters to "punish" Johnson for cuts imposed by his Tory ministerial colleagues.

A sample of 1,271 Londoners questioned during the week of the Tory conference, when Johnson held a re-election rally following his decision to stand again in 2012, showed 46% would vote for the incumbent, while 44% would vote for Livingstone. Just 4% said they would vote for the Lib Dem candidate, who has yet to be selected, and a further 7% said they would vote for "some other" candidate.

Asked who they would vote for in a straight choice between Johnson and Livingstone, the mayor widened his lead slightly, with 46% saying they would vote for him, compared to 41% for his Labour rival.
The figures are in stark contrast to a ComRes poll conducted on behalf of London media organisations last month, just days before the announcement that Livingstone had beaten Oona King to become Labour candidate.

The September poll found 45% of Londoners favoured Johnson, compared to 27% for Livingstone, who held the mayoralty for eight years under he was ousted in 2008, and 9% for King.

Johnson has sought to distance himself from the coalition cuts in his regular Daily Telegraph column, by insisting that London's infrastructure projects should be protected in the spending review, as well as expressing doubts about one of the key arguments underpinning the government's economic strategy.

But amid reports that his public lobbying has paid off, with funding for London's Crossrail project now expected to be saved, Johnson appeared to rally behind the spending review today as he criticised those "droning on" about the cuts.

In today's Telegraph column he argued that the measures planned for the deficit reduction programme were not about shrinking the state, but about "growth, growth, growth".

He wrote: "For months now we as a nation have talked about cuts and nothing but cuts, with the morbid fascination of an Oprah Winfrey discussion of self-harm. We know we have to go through with the operation. But we don't know quite how extensive the slicing is going to be, and we have been kept so long in the waiting room while the surgeon counts his scalpels that the foreboding has been allowed to grow.

"That is why it is so vital – as soon as the comprehensive spending review is announced – that we stop droning on about cuts, and start talking about the reasons for these cuts. They are not about shrinking the state. They are about growth, growth, growth – creating the conditions for a sustained economic recovery, and an economic recovery is a function above all of confidence."

But his warm words came with a warning to leave London's rising house prices alone or risk worsening the housing crisis and losing the confidence of high earners in the capital.

The mayor warned the government that proposals to deliberately "flatten" the market could lead to a sharp spike in prices as the economy improved.

He warned that such move would be "risky" in the short term and predicted that asking the middle classes to "wean" themselves off house-price inflation was "unachievable" in the longer term.

"If you tell people it is government policy that their house should effectively fall in value, then you will punch that confidence in the solar plexus – and you will make them less likely to invest, to take on new ventures and new staff," Johnson wrote.

"If the housing market tanks, then the financial system tanks too. People will be unable to get the mortgages to buy new homes, and developers will be unable to get the finance to build them, and the problem of supply will get even worse."

Johnson urged ministers to focus their attention on building affordable homes – for rent as well as purchase – instead, to deal with the population growth over the next twenty years.

Business leaders back spending cuts

Leaders of 35 of the UK's biggest companies, including BT and Marks and Spencer, have expressed their support for the government's planned spending cuts.

Writing to the Daily Telegraph, the bosses said there was no reason to believe Chancellor George Osborne's approach would undermine any recovery. They write it would be a "mistake" for Mr. Osborne to water down his programme for reducing the budget deficit in Wednesday's Spending Review.

They said: "Addressing the debt problem in a decisive way will improve business and consumer confidence.Reducing the deficit more slowly would mean additional borrowing every year, higher national debt, and therefore higher spending on interest payments. The private sector should be more than capable of generating additional jobs to replace those lost in the public sector."

In Wednesday's Spending Review, Mr Osborne will outline which areas of Whitehall's budget will be hit the hardest, as the government attempts to reduce the £155bn deficit. He has promised to see through the government's programme - designed to save £83bn over four years - saying it will "get us out of this stronger".