TOP 100 ENGLAND SITES
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| Red knight Who is Liverpool's prospective new owner? bbc.co.uk |
Clothing prices rise for first time since 1990s The price of clothing and footwear have risen for first time since early 1990s, according to official figures, raising the fear that the era of cheap imports from the Far East is over. telegraph.co.uk |
BBC funding cannot escape George Osborne's cuts These frenzied negotiations will result in the corporation bearing either the cost of over-75s' licences or the World ServiceMore than 18 months after the Tories began campaigning in opposition for a cap on the BBC licence fee, the issue of the corporation's future funding is being decided in 24 hours of frenzied negotiations ahead of tomorrow's comprehensive spending review (CSR) announcement by the coalition government.At the 11th hour in the Whitehall CSR horsetrading process, the idea of switching the Β£556m-a-year cost of free TV licences for the over-75s from general taxation to the licence fee is back on the table β apparently because the Ministry of Defence achieved a better than expected settlement with the Treasury. So we are left with a frankly surreal public spending choice β an aircraft carrier with no aircraft, or the equivalent of several years' funding for BBC2. It was March last year when David Cameron, then leader of the opposition, first started talking publicly about freezing the BBC licence fee, an idea that prompted squeals of protest from the corporation.MediaGuardian.co.uk was told back in June by a senior BBC source that the over-75s free licence fee scheme was under discussion - although this was denied at the time by the government.Now Cameron's government is locked in last-minute talks with BBC executives about a proposal that could force the corporation to pay for free TV licences for the over-75s, currently Β£556m annually, but set to rise as the UK population's age profile gets older.That figure is already equivalent to a 15% cut in the Β£3.6bn annual licence fee. It certainly puts talk of a small reduction in the Β£145.50 annual levy into perspective. Implementing the plan would cost the same as BBC2's annual budget and close to the Β£604m the corporation spends on its nine national radio services and dozens of local stations combined.The BBC is so keen to avoid footing the bill it is offering to pay the World Service's annual Β£272m-a-year running costs as frantic negotiations with the government continue.The World Service is currently funded by a Foreign Office grant that was set to be slashed by between Β£70m and Β£90m as part of the chancellor George Osborne's comprehensive spending review tomorrow. The BBC would pick up the tab for funding either the free over-75s' licence scheme or the World Service from April 2013 for the remaining four years of its existing royal charter.Government departments are about to see their budgets slashed by between 25% and 40%, with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport due to be one of the worst hit.No wonder the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, wants the corporation to take its share of the pain at a time when his government is preparing a programme of unprecedented public sector cuts.BBC executives accept that hiking the licence fee at a time of economic hardship would not play well with the public. But they can also argue that cost savings at the BBC do not help to reduce the budget deficit, regardless of how painful they prove.The fact that the BBC is directly funded by the licence fee rather than through general taxation meant it was in effect shielded from the Whitehall budget cuts β and political interference.By asking it to bear the cost of over-75s' licences, the government has found an ingenious way of squaring that circle. It would save the Department for Work and Pensions more than half a billion pounds a year and enable ministers to claim that the BBC is doing its bit to help put the nation's finances on a sounder footing.Shifting the cost of paying for these TV licences to the BBC would also allow the government to dodge taking the blame for any future cuts to this subsidy β and leave the corporation to suffer the political fallout.The principle of using the licence fee for purposes other than broadcasting or content production had long been resisted by the BBC, but by agreeing to pay for the cost of digital switchover in 2006 β albeit in exchange for a higher overall licence fee settlement last time around β a precedent was set. That may prove to be a strategic failure if the corporation now has to pay for over-75s' licence fees or the World Service.Either option will hurt the BBC. There are currently 3.97m free licences for the over-75s, but that number will rise. The World Service is, at least, BBC-branded and could be funded, in part, through the profits made by BBC Worldwide, the corporation's commercial arm, which made more than Β£140m last year.BBCBBC licence feeTelevision industryRadio industrySpending review 2010Tax and spendingJames Robinsonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
MP cautioned for electoral fraud A Labour MP is given a police caution following an allegation of electoral fraud. bbc.co.uk |
Iraq war logs: who did the killing? | Michael White Whatever the mitigation, the man who pulls the trigger, sets the timer or plunges in the blade bears some responsibility for his actions. Yes?Of all the extraordinary and chilling details about the Iraq war logs which have tumbled out of Wikileaks' files into the pages of the Guardian this weekend, two strike me as being insufficiently commented upon. One is about the scale of the killing, the other concerns who exactly was doing most of it β which was not Americans. Here's David Leigh's summary. Here's James Meek's harrowing summary of a single day's carnage at the height of the quasi-civil war, 17 October 2006. Here's Simon Rogers's more extended analysis of the deaths with a warning footnote by Jacob Shapiro at Princeton University.It's grim stuff and does not detract from the core failure of the US-UK invasion of Iraq. Having easily removed Saddam Hussein from power and unwisely dispersed his army and bureaucratic machine, the coalition forces failed to impose order and secure the safety of ordinary Iraqis, large numbers of whom perished as a result. That failure has loomed large in the imagination of western liberals hostile to the war, as has the inept occupation which followed. But it has also obscured a central feature of the conflict β and blame β which was domestic and sectarian. Keen to blame George Bush and Tony Blair for all that went wrong, critics prefer to ignore the local angle.From what I have read so far of the 400,000 previously unpublished military field reports β expert and media analysis will take as much time and effort as Westminster MPs' expenses claims did β the labels "Sunni" and "Shia" appear less than one would expect. Perhaps it is the heat of war, perhaps some other reason.Yet consider the figures set out in Simon Rogers's tables. The war logs suggest 109,032 deaths, including 15,000 that the Iraq Body Count (IBC) survey was unaware of, far fewer than others claim, as Jacob Shapiro points out in his warning note.I'll come back to that. But look at the breakdown of the 109,032. Some 34,814 are ascribed to murder. We can argue about categories here. "Direct fire" is listed as causing 4,766 civilian deaths β presumably direct coalition fire β and "indirect fire" a further 2,087, alongside a lot of enemy and insurrectionist deaths, incidentally.But I take murder to mean what it sounds like and what James Meek's report suggests: mostly sectarian and criminal killings. Indeed, the breakdown reveals nine coalition troops murdered, 2,169 Iraqi forces, 73 enemy (the US definition) and a startling 32,563 civilians.The pattern is repeated under the second biggest category of deaths: improvised explosive devices (IEDs) caused 31,780 fatalities. These were not, I think, a coalition weapon, so can safely be attributed to Iraqi insurgents/criminals/terrorists, whatever label you prefer.Among the dead were 2,107 coalition troops whom you might have expected to be the main target of such devices and whose armour was often deficient, 5,990 Iraqi forces (ditto) and 3,455 "enemy" β presumably a mixture of suicide bombers and what the army in Belfast used to call "own goals".Among civilians β remember the marketplace bombs and the labourers queueing for work β the total was 32,563. That tallies up to two thirds of the deaths recorded in the war logs total as Iraqi on Iraqi or, let's not forget them, Iranian-funded jihadi on Iraqi, Muslim on Muslim.None of that exculpates an occupation that failed to fix security. But it does provide a context. After 30 years of brutal domestic oppression and aggressive wars against its neighbours β cynically back by western governments for geopolitical reasons β a Sunni tyranny was overthrown by the invasion.Into the domestic vacuum stepped all sorts of hobgoblins. The Sunni fought to reassert their lost privileges, to resist both the occupation and Iranian-backed Shia majoritarianism, long suppressed. They attacked those uppity oil-rich Kurds in the north and struggled to garner support from anxious and enfeebled regimes elsewhere in the wider Sunni Arab world. Attacked in their holy shrines and elsewhere, the Shia and Kurds were duly provoked.Whatever the mitigation, the man who pulls the trigger, sets the timer or plunges in the blade bears some responsibility for his actions. Yes?Not for the first time β think Israel/Palestine or Northern Ireland β everyone had the luxury of persuading themselves they were a beleaguered minority, feeling as fearful and sorry for themselves as trigger-happy Americans on patrol in east Baghdad. What a combustible mixture!So the war logs read as war logs would if we'd ever had them online before. In his early work, Naples '44, the writer Norman Lewis, a hand-to-mouth British intelligence officer with the allied invasion forces, reaches the painful conclusion that US forces had orders to shoot German prisoners in certain circumstances β and that some Mississippi farm boys had worked it out for themselves that this was wrong.So the shooting of two would-be-surrendering insurgents from a US helicopter (one with form of this kind, it seems) may be deplorable, but not surprising. Did not the late Captain Robert Maxwell MC β of pension theft fame β carry the taint of (allegedly) shooting German prisoners in his British uniform? He did. War is hell.Hand suspects over to fellow-Iraqi torturers? I bet they did and β deplorable though it may be β it does not take much imagination to see why. These guys shot my buddy last month β maybe β blew up five kids and a widow yesterday β maybe β and tortured someone's uncle β maybe β under Saddam Hussein. Should I worry too much what his fellow citizens may do to him in custody? Plenty of people behave nobly in war β and sometimes get killed for it β but plenty don't.I am therefore surprised the logs are not even worse and relieved that β as in so much US bibliography of the Iraq war β that British complicity or offence has (so far) surfaced only twice. The lads will be working on that.I don't join those maligning the Wikileaks operation's motives, its internal cohesion or impugning its patriotism. The Pentagon played God in Iraq, it is only fair that the other side gets a chance to see if it can play God too and achieve a better result.What I do feel moved to point out is that leaks are an asymmetrical form of warfare β like Apache helicopters or IEDs on the Afghan or Basra road β bound to damage the US and Britain more than it does their critics and enemies.Why? Because they are, for all their faults, open societies in which freedom of information laws exist as do very imperfect laws to protect whistleblowers. No bullet in the back of the neck for them. David Kelly's wife believes her husband killed himself, so does the pathologist, so even does Andrew Gilligan, on whose conscience the weapons scientist may rest as much as on Geoff Hoon's.So people do not leak with impunity β not more than once, anyway β important secrets from China, from Putin's Russia, from any states in the Middle East β even Israel, since Mordechai Vanunu spent 18 years in jail for leaking its nuclear secrets to the Sunday Times in 1986 and has been back inside for parole violations since.So FoI is largely a western weapon, more easily deployed against the west, and we can only hope β as I certainly believe β that honesty is the best policy in the long run. Let's believe we are right because we will not be allowed to say so if we are proved wrong.One last point here. As Shapiro points out, the war logs cannot be the last word on the Iraq war and occupation's death toll. But, even allowing for its likely failings, the war log total of 109,032 is still way short of the 655,000 deaths β including indirect ones β reported by Johns Hopkins University via the Lancet magazine in October 2006.Yet again, the Lancet's figures fail to tally with another source by some distance. The war logs surfaced too late for last week's edition. Let's see how the debate unfolds.IraqMiddle EastPolitics pastDefence policyMilitaryGlobal terrorismTerrorism policyUK security and terrorismIraq: The war logsMichael Whiteguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |