LABOUR'S DISMAL RIGHTS RECORD

The Guardian on Thursday reported the resignation of Lord Lester, Lib Dem adviser to Gordon Brown on Constitutional Reform in Labour's 'Government of all the Talents'.

On the 60th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights he described Labour's record on Human Rights since the passing of the 1998 Act as "deeply disappointing", saying also that:
[The Govt] could have...accepted the recommendations of the UN human rights treaty bodies,
the joint committee on human rights & NGOs to allow the people of this country the
individual right to petition against the government under the international
covenant on civil & political rights...the UK is alone in the EU in refusing to do so..

The Constitutional Reform package seems also to have been lost in the water. When Brown took over many of us were refreshingly surprised at his apparently forward-thinking measures on changing constititional anomolies.

But yet again this appears to be a Government that says one thing & does another : vaunting civil liberties whilst turning a blind eye to Guantanamo Bay & extraordinary rendition & promoting extended periods of detention without trial; attacking Mugabe's appalling record in Zimbabwe but failing to support a European Force to avert further humanitarian disaster in the Congo becuase they want to wait for UN backing.

When since did this government wait for UN backing ?? .................Strange logic !!

IT'S NOT UNUSUAL - LABOUR'S DODGY STATISTICS

Today's news about the Home Office massaging statistics on knife crime will only add to public disenchantment about the believability of data. Ever since the Tories so shamelessly redesigned ways of collating the unemployment figures - 24 times I think , at the last count - the British people have been refreshingly dubious about the difference between what is said at a national level & the evidence that we experience in our daily lives.

What is most concerning is the idea that a department of state might decide to design a survey to measure the effect of a policy & when the results still don't add up the way they want to, they will selectively publish the data that appears to show them in a good light: Hospital admissions for knives -27%; Serious knife crime aginst young people -17%; Young Victime sof crime on London -18%. Incidentally some of these figures only began to be recorded for the first time in March of this year - so how it is possible to measure the decrease effectively is unclear to me.