Whole Truth Coalition

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‘Dr Alan Maryon Davis said that people needed new laws to “save us from ourselves” and actually welcomed state attempts to “micro-manage” their health.

The president of the UK Faculty of Public Health, which sets standards for health professionals, said that recent campaigns to cut down on binge drinking, smoking and obesity were not as unpopular as generally believed. “On the contrary, there’s plenty of evidence that people want to see the government doing more to help us avoid big killers like heart disease, stroke and cancer,” he said.

“I see an increasing acceptance that we, all of us, need not only more information and guidance from government, but also more legislation to save us from ourselves”.’

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The Obama administration has been caught in a fresh torture controversy after it emerged that America threatened to cease all intelligence ties with Britain if it revealed that a British suspect held at Guantanamo Bay had been tortured into confessing to being part of a dirty bomb plot.

“Two senior British judges have expressed their anger and surprise that President Barack Obama’s Government has put pressure on Britain to suppress evidence of torture in US custody,” reports the London Times.

“Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones said they had been told that America had threatened to stop co-operating with Britain on intelligence matters if evidence were published suggesting that Binyam Mohammed, a British resident held at the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, had been tortured into confessing crimes.”

In their ruling, the judges, acting on behalf of the Foreign Office & Commonwealth Office, scorned the hypocrisy behind the Obama administration’s actions.

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Health Minister Ann Keen has been taken to court over allegations that she failed to exercise her duty to help a war veteran clear his name after a miscarriage of justice 47 years ago.

John Taylor, 84, claims he wrote more than 100 letters to his MP asking her to help him get compensation for his wrongful conviction of stealing £17 in 1962 - a conviction which saw him serve three years in prison. The conviction came after three men brought a stolen safe to the flat where he was sleeping, but it was quashed in 1998.

Mr Taylor, who was badly wounded while fighting in Holland during the Second World War, alleges his MP failed to act beyond writing to the Justice Secretary Baroness Scotland about his case four years ago.

She denies the allegation, insisting she “repeatedly made representations” on Mr Taylor’s behalf and sent acknowledgements to his letters.

Legal experts say the case, which is being heard at Brentford County Court, is the first of an MP facing action for breaching their “duty of care” to a constituent.

While MPs have no statutory obligation to voters, the Commons code of conduct says they have a “general duty to act in the interests of the nation as a whole and a special duty to their constituents”.

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And I am sure she won’t be the last to be sued. Sounds lke a great Campaign focus!

Why is the BBC obsessed with making working-class people seem racist?

Watching BBC news bulletins yesterday, it was very easy to believe claims that the current spate of wildcat strikes is inherently motivated by xenophobia. Constant emphasis was placed on objections to “foreign workers” per se, rather than fear of workers’ wages being undercut, which would seem to be the real issue.

The 10 o’clock bulletin gave us a good example. A voiceover by the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, (about 12 mins in) told us: “Beneath the anger, ministers fear, lies straightforward xenophobia.” Cut to woolly-hatted worker telling BBC reporter: “These Portugese and Eyeties – we can’t work alongside of them.” There we are: northern white bloke refusing to work with foreigners. Case closed.

Except, watch Paul Mason’s report on Newsnight, featuring the same interview (about 4:30 in):

These Portugese and eyeties – we can’t work alongside of them: we’re segregated from them. They’re coming in in full companies.

Even taking into account the dodginess of the use of “Eyetie” to refer to an Italian person, one has to admit that it would be very difficult to portray the second, full quote as racist or xenophobic. It’s a statement addressing basic workplace issues – British workers literally cannot work alongside foreign workers, as they are separated. There really is no excuse for editing and presenting a quote in such a misrepresentative manner, unless one is setting out to prove something – namely, that working-class people are racists.

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HITLER and Mussolini both had the ability to bend millions of people to their fascist will. Now evidence from psychology and neurology is emerging to explain how tactics like organised marching and propaganda can work to exert mass mind control.

Scott Wiltermuth of Stanford University in California and colleagues have found that activities performed in unison, such as marching or dancing, increase loyalty to the group. “It makes us feel as though we’re part of a larger entity, so we see the group’s welfare as being as important as our own,” he says.

Wiltermuth’s team separated 96 people into four groups who performed these tasks together: listening to a song while silently mouthing the words, singing along, singing and dancing, or listening to different versions of the song so that they sang and danced out of sync. In a later game, when asked to decide whether to stick with the group or strive for personal gain, those in the non-synchronised group behaved less loyally than the rest (Psychological Science, vol 20, p 1).

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville thinks this research helps explain why fascist leaders, amongst others, use organised marching and chanting to whip crowds into a frenzy of devotion to their cause, though these tactics can be used just as well for peace, he stresses. Community dances and group singing can ease local tension, for example - a theory he plans to test experimentally (Journal of Legal Studies, DOI: 10.1086/529447).

Meanwhile, the powerful unifying effects of propaganda images are being explored by Charles Seger at Indiana University at Bloomington. His team primed students with pictures of their university - college sweatshirts or the buildings themselves - then asked how highly they scored on different emotions, such as pride or happiness. The primed students gave a strikingly similar emotional profile, in contrast with non-primed students (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2008.12.004).

Interest in the idea of a herd mentality has been renewed by work into mirror neurons - cells that fire when we perform an action or watch someone perform a similar action. It suggests that our brains are geared to mimic our peers. “We are set up for ‘auto-copy’,” says Haidt.

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How interesting that this harmless-seeming slogan is now seen as in some way ‘extremist’ or ‘far-right’. What is wrong with it? What, above all, is ‘extreme’ about it? If we are a country at all, then surely we must put our people first? If we don’t, then what exactly is a country? In fact, if we don’t, can we consider ourselves even to be a country?

The whole idea of a nation is implicitly based on the truth that we care more about some people than we care about others. It is only possible to be effectively unselfish within a group of people that has some sort of family feeling. Such a feeling comes from a shared language, a shared history, a shared sense of humour, and is often also rooted in a shared faith and (in exalted moments) a love or reverence for landscape, music, tradition and other such things, often underestimated in their power to move and bind. A shared law helps.

That is not to say that we do not care about people in other countries. A strong and wealthy civilisation can and should do what it can (NB, what it can, practically and effectively, not what makes it feel good about itself) to help the oppressed or the impoverished of other lands. It should also be prepared to take in refugees, though by definition refugees are fleeing from something, not towards something, and cannot simultaneously be refugees and choosy about where they find asylum.

In fact, any country that is no a self-confident family, bound together by such ties, will not long be able to do any good either to its own people or to any other people. Britain is a telling example of this. As our national feeling for each other declines we become less able to look after ourselves. Step by step, this leads to national economic, social, cultural and military decline, and we cease to be able to look after others as well.

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A Union Flag at a police station was replaced by a gay rights flag in a move that has triggered a fresh row over political correctness.

The rainbow flag was hoisted outside Limehouse police station in East London to mark Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender history month in February.

Metropolitan Police rules state that only the Union Flag and its own flag can fly from force buildings.

Sir Paul Stephenson, the new Met commissioner, angrily ordered the flag to be taken down after being told of the controversy it had caused.

One officer said: ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw it.

‘The police are playing politics again. I can understand the need to show acceptance to people of all sexualities  -  but the Union Jack should never be taken down.’

A Scotland Yard spokesman said the decision to display the rainbow flag for the first day of LGBT history month had been taken by the borough commander, Chief Superintendent Paul Rickett.

But he added: ‘The Met policy is that only two flags should be flown: the Union Flag or the Met flag. The commissioner reaffirmed that he expects all staff to adhere to this policy.

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The Conservative Party accepted £200,000 from a slot machine tycoon’s businesses shortly after calling for softer rules on arcade gambling, The Times has learnt.

Four companies linked to Trevor Hemmings gave the party £50,000 each last year. Together, this made the companies the Conservatives’ largest independent corporate sponsor at the time. Only an investment fund controlled by the party treasurer, Michael Spencer, gave more.

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‘Ford and Vauxhall are raising the prices of their cars by as much as 5 per cent, just days after ministers announced a state-backed bailout package for the motor industry that could cost taxpayers billions.

The price of a Ford Focus is to go up 5.2 per cent, with average prices rising 4.7 per cent across the range. Vauxhall is set to announce similar rises across its range of six cars and one van within weeks.’

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‘The African Union Commission will be transformed into a new AU Authority, as a compromise step toward eventually forming a continent-wide government, the bloc announced today.

The decision came after a divisive day of talks on whether to create a new government for a “United States of Africa,” a move championed by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.’

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Londoners might have been startled last Monday to see a giant mock-up of a polar bear on an iceberg, floating on the Thames outside the Palace of Westminster. They might not have been so surprised to learn, first, that this was a global warming propaganda stunt and, second, that the television company behind it is part-owned by the BBC.

It was ironic that, last week, while the BBC was refusing to show an appeal for aid to the victims of Israeli bombing in Gaza, on the grounds that this might breach its charter obligation to be impartial, a rather less publicised row was raging over Newsnight’s doctoring of film of President Obama’s inaugural speech, which was used to support yet another of its items promoting the warming scare. Clips from the speech were spliced together to convey a considerably stronger impression of what Obama had said on global warming than his very careful wording justified. While that may have been unprofessional enough, the rest of the item, by Newsnight’s science editor, Susan Watts, was even more bizarre. It was no more than a paean of gratitude that we now at last have a president prepared to listen to the “science” on climate change, after the dark age of religious obscurantism personified by President Bush.

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To: The Rt Hon. Peter Mandelson esq;