Check out this video of protesters live on air declaring Sky News to be the utter shite we know it is:

Eventually Sky had to cut away and just broadcast their logo for a bit. The protests were sparked after Sky presenter Kay Burley went mental at a spokesman for the protesters who were out in London and Glasgow (amongst other places) at the weekend, demanding electoral reform, which you can see below:

Kay Burley is also the journalist who brought us such clangers as claiming on September 11th 2001 “The entire eastern seaboard of the United States has been devastated by a terrorist attack,” as well as, most shamefully, asking the partner of serial killer Steve Wright, who murdered at least five women in Suffolk, “Do you think if you’d had a better sex life this wouldn’t have happened?”

What the current uproar on Sky News shows is that the Murdoch empire has bet everything on a Tory win, and sunk millions of its own money into promoting it. If they don’t get what they want, they’re likely to go absolutely crazy. How crazy? Check out Sky News political editor Adam Boulton pushing things with New Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell to the brink of a fight. He jabs his finger, and sways like a pissed rageaholic, throwing his not inconsiderable weight around. Alastair Campbell is an odious piece of human garbage, who before he was engineering election wins for neoliberals had a career writing fake letters to porno mags. Who would have thought someone could go so nuts that Alastair comes off looking like the reasonable one?

On Saturday 10th April, the world suffered one of the greatest losses of the 21st century. The Polish President, Lech Kaczyński, was killed in a horrific plane crash.

Now who is going to fight against those pesky gay pride paraders promoting a homosexual lifestyle and offending public morals?

Who is going to take a stand against promiscuous baby-murdering women’s libbers?

Who is going to bravely speak out in favour of the death penalty?

Well, probably his twin brother Jarosław, who helped him found the right-wing Law and Justice party, and was elected Prime Minister at the same time Lech became President, in 2005. Though Jarosław is no longer the Prime Minister, he is still hugely active in Polish politics, and is currently the leader of their party.

It's difficult to spot the evil twin when neither of them have beards.

The Creepy Twins and their Party of Creepiness have been at the forefront of Being Wrong About Pretty Much Everything for many years now.

They want to ban gay pride parades and any other recognition or acknowledgment of gay people’s existence, want to ban gay people from being teachers and believe that “the affirmation of homosexuality will lead to the downfall of civilization”.

Their party was terrified that the election of Barack Obama would mean “an impending catastrophe, the end of the civilisation of the white man”.

They want to give harsher punishments and longer sentences to people committing minor crimes, and execute major criminals, whilst at the same time taking away women’s control over their own bodies because life is sacred… even when it’s an unfertilised egg, or some uterine lining with a few more cells than usual.

They want to increase militarisation of Poland, and bring back conscription.

They want to deny the human rights of anyone they disapprove of, and they’re all round nutters.

So, sorry Lech, but we’re glad to see the back of you, and we wish your brother had been on the plane with you.

The Creepy Kaczyński twins rose to fame as child actors, age 12, in a film called The Two Who Stole the Moon, playing two cruel, lazy and nasty boys. I don't know what's more terrifying, fact or fiction...

Eric Carlin: "Government policy is pish, lol!"

Another expert adviser, Eric Carlin, has resigned from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, in protest at the government’s rush to ban Mephedrone.

Carlin is an expert in the field of drug prevention, public health and health promotion. His resignation from the council leaves the government’s already damaged drugs and scientific policy even more in tatters.

Over at his blog, you can read about his resignation, as well as his actual resignation letter to the Home Secretary, Alan “If it’s in the papers it must be true” Johnson.

Carlin writes of how he joined the ACMD hoping to take forward an agenda of research into why young people take drugs, and seeing how harm can be reduced, rather than just looking at drugs as a criminal justice issue. He has been disillusioned by the government’s lack of interest in these issues.

In his resignation letter he writes:

“We had little or no discussion about how our recommendation to classify this drug would be likely to impact on young people’s behaviour. Our decision was unduly based on media and political pressure.  The report was tabled to the whole Council for the first time on Monday; the Chair came to brief you before the whole Council had even discussed all of the report. In fact, I still haven’t seen the final version . . .

We need to review our entire approach to drugs, dumping the idea that legally-sanctioned punishments for drug users should constitute a main part of the armoury in helping to solve our country’s drug problems. We need to stop harming people who need help and support.

At the end of last year, I decided not to resign over the sacking of David Nutt, preferring instead to see how things panned out and to hope that the ACMD could develop a work programme which would help prevent and reduce harm, particularly to young people. I have no confidence that this will now happen, largely though not totally due to the lack of logic of the context within which the Council is constrained to operate by the Misuse of Drugs Act. As well as being extremely unhappy with how the ACMD operates, I am not prepared to continue to be part of a body which, as its main activity, works to facilitate the potential criminalisation of increasing numbers of young people.”

Says it all really, I think. Elsewhere, he writes of how “the criminalisation of young people does more harm than good”, as well as how other important work of the ACMD on harm reduction has been sidelined in the rush to ban Mephedrone.

“The latter process [the ACMD's rush to produce a report justifying the decision to ban Mephedrone] has left me deeply concerned, intellectually insulted and morally compromised. I contributed little to the discussion on Monday, confused and disillusioned that our focus was not on what we should recommend to understand and influence young people’s behaviour so as to prevent and/or reduce harm. Rather, we made a decision to ban this, the currently most publicly demonised drug, based mainly on its chemical similarities to other Class B substances. If that was the main criterion, how could one not agree with the decision? The problem is that the context of and rationale for our decision-making is a nonsense. What next? How many more new drugs are we going to ban, without an adequate evidence base about the impact of banning on young people’s behaviour re-use of drugs? Do we just keep on going? Rather than banning each new drug that comes along, we need to shift resources into social research about young people’s behaviours, how to influence them and investment in interventions to support demand reduction . . .

I’ve just been working with some young people who, honestly and seriously, told me that Cannabis, with all its risks, made them feel better about themselves, more able to assess their personal agency, manage their lives and feel more hopeful about the future. My current feeling is that the ACMD, with our focus on chemistry and legality, doesn’t contribute anything towards reducing the countless harms young people like these experience on a daily basis, including though not limited to harms from drug use. Moreover, we are colluding in the sustenance of a system which may in fact disadvantage even further some of the most disadvantaged people in our society.”

The Mephedrone moral panic has been a textbook example of how the madness of drugs prohibition is kept up, despite the fact that it causes huge harm to people in the UK and around the world. The government’s claims to be taking decisions based on expert advice lies in absolute tatters, their drugs policy a discredited echo-chamber for the lies of the corporate media. We have to stop letting the tabloids write our drugs policies based on nothing other than what will help increase their profits, and we have to start taking the drugs problems seriously and look at what approaches are actually going to help people.

END THE DRUG WAR!

Steward! Yes, excuse me, the gremlin on the wing has just informed me that this young woman's breasts are going to explode!

Ah, newspapers. We’ve already commented on their tendency to jump on (or in fact create) a headless chicken bandwagon in order to sell papers keep the public informed (for an excellent article on this subject, check out Charlie Brooker) and lately, a story came along that was, in many ways, harder for them to resist than a good old moral panic over drugs. It had everything; terrorism, a Carry On film edge, scary women’s bodies, modern science gone mad and, what all newspapers are looking for, something new for people to be afraid of. Buy this newspaper or you will DIE! Too bad it wasn’t at all feasible or, in fact, true.

“Terrorists ‘could use exploding breast implants to blow up jet’” warned the Telegraph. Cue panic in the streets! Anyone you know could be a secret terrorist with deadly breasts! Next time you sleep with a woman, how will you know her chest isn’t going to explode right in the middle of things?! Maybe that woman with the big breasts who’s on your plane to Disneyland is a threat to your children! But really, the only warning signs present here are to do with the nature of the article itself.

“Breast implants packed with explosives could be used to blow up an airliner, experts are said to have warned.” Well now, I count three obvious marks of hemming and hawing in just this once sentence. Terrorists could use explosive breast implants to blow up a plane? Well yes, I suppose they could, but I could also stuff a pet snake with condoms filled with plastic explosive, get it put in the luggage hold and do the same. That doesn’t mean I’m going to.

Then there’s that ever present word – experts. Experts said this, experts said that. When newspapers deploy this term they never explain what they mean by an expert, what qualifies their expert to comment and half the time they don’t even say who the expert is! It’s one of those catch all stylistic get outs that newspapers use in order to print any old shite they want. In this case, the Telgraph aren’t even confident enough to say definitively that their experts have made this warning. They’re only “said to have warned” of it. Now, what does that mean?

The Sun in all its glory. Don't buy it!

All is revealed once we get further into the article. The source of the Telgraph’s information is…The Sun. The Sun. That well known paragon of good, honest journalism. Apart from the nature of the paper the Telegraph are using as a source, this is yet another habit of modern newspapers, and it’s one of the most destructive and poisonous. They don’t do independent investigation (you know, actual journalism) but instead they just feed off of each other’s panic until you end up with newspapers screaming ridiculous things about exploding breast implants. Maybe though, just maybe, The Sun had a reliable source? No such luck; their source was Fox fuckin News. The biggest amount of work the Telegraph did for this story was to phone a plastic surgeon to see if it was at all possible to put an explosive implant into a woman’s breast or, in fact, a guy’s arse cheeks – isn’t it hillarious how they kept the bomb implants all gender appropriate?

I can’t believe that none of them thought to answer one very simple question. How on earth do you detonate a breast bomb? Nipple fuses?

Eventually, the air was cleared by an unlikely source – the bigoted, foaming at the mouth US neocon website World Net Daily. I wont link to it here, but a bit of googling should lead you to the right article if you so desire. Essentially, it seems, the Telegraph didn’t even attribute this ridiculous quote to the right person. They claimed that Joseph Farah, self proclaimed terrorism expert and editor in chief of World Net Daily, had warned of this new development in blowing things up. Instead though, it was actually one of his underlings at the site (who even they seem embarrassed by) who made this claim and then put the words in his boss’ mouth, probably to lend them more legitimacy (lol).

The upshot of all of this is that the whole story is a piece of nonsense, which UK newspapers printed without doing any serious investigation, and after yet again taking ‘experts’ at their word. And will they learn their lesson? Will they print an erratum? No, of course not. They’ll keep on doing the same thing, peddling shite to a mass audience, because it makes them money and fits with their owners’ agendas. It’s easy to drop a journalistic grenade among an already on edge population – it’s much harder to do the work of debunking the nonsense that papers print.

Despite choosing the slightly more family friendly title of “Why must our children pay? Invest in their education” SSY members, particularly those still in high schools support the EIS teaching union’s campaign against cuts. Whilst many other unions have either decided to accommodate to cuts, or fight them solely through industrial action the EIS are opening another front and trying to win over public support. The logic of their argument is clear – cuts in education are due to a financial crisis not of teachers or students making, and will result in poorer education for a generation of young Scots.

These cuts are being made at the same time that almost a billion pounds, £900 million is being cut from university funding across the UK, with SSY members being involved in anti-cuts campaigns like ACAN at Glasgow University.

The EIS site outlines the cuts below,

Already cuts are taking place in local council education budgets.

* 2,500 fewer teachers in classrooms than 2 years ago
* Teacher support numbers reduced
* Books, paper and photocopying materials etc. reduced
* The decision to cut the number of students to train to become teachers.

In the future this will mean

* Teacher shortages
* Increased class sizes
* Impact on teaching and learning, including the new Curriculum for Excellence
* A cut in equipment (including computers) and materials in schools
* A reduction in specialist provision, e.g. classroom assistants, learning support and music instructors
* Fewer opportunities to access further and higher education

They are also being proposed is the same time that its been revealed that inequality has increased under the Labour government – David Cameron and his Eton pals might have a chance to escape public sector cuts for his kids, but ordinary working people will see less teachers and therefore less attention for their children. In both high schools and further education, there is an attack on funding which will attack jobs and young peoples right to a decent education.

The SSP supports a “20’s plenty” campaign, for a maximum of 20 children to each teacher in class. Following this programme would have kept enough teachers employed to stop any of Labour’s previous cuts of Glasgow’s schools. The SSP was recently involved with the Save Our Schools campaign, which fought hard against these cuts.

Support the campaign against cuts in education, turn up to the rally,

THIS SATURDAY – MARCH THE 6TH

ASSEMBLE KELVINGROVE WAY, KELVINGROVE PARK 10.30AM

MARCH AT 11, RALLY AT 12 AT THE SECC

Remember 1998? It was the year of Titanic, it was the year Google was founded and it was the year George Michael was found doing naughty things in a toilet. It was also the year in which The Lancet, one of the world’s most respected medical journals, published an article that seemed to show a link between the MMR (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) vaccination and autism. The world went mental. Suddenly the papers were filled with headlines about how your healthy toddler was almost certainly going to develop this disorder the second the needle went in. In 2002 alone, 1257 articles were published about the scare. Thousands of worried parents stopped their children from getting the jag, deeming it to be too great a risk. What happened? By 2008, the country was in the grip of a mumps epidemic and measles was declared endemic in the UK for the first time in 14 years. What must have been a very difficult decision for parents to make could have been made a lot easier by this week’s news. The report was rubbish.

The Flawless Logic Behind the MMR Scare

The Lancet has made a full retraction of the article, the report’s lead researcher, Dr Andrew Wakefield, is facing a General Medical Council tribunal and the newspapers’ ten year run of scare stories has been made to look a bit silly. While the medical community has known for quite some time that there is absolutely no evidence of a link between MMR and autism, the newspaper scare stories kept the fear alive. Why? Because fear sells papers. Never mind the potential damage to people’s lives, the babies killed by measles, the old lady who dies because she’s scared to take her blood pressure tablets – readers are scared of what vital information they could be missing by not buying the paper. Pick up any copy of the Daily Mail or Take a Break and turn to the health section. Every day something different is giving you cancer, a different medication is apparently unnecessary or a new treatment is going to kill you. Its irresponsible reporting and it can damage lives. These articles aren’t written by doctors, they’re written by journalists and cobbled together from hearsay, taken out of context and bent to suit their message. No-one wants to hear about the 19,999,999 people whose lives were saved, let’s hear about the one person whose hair fell out! (and whose life was also saved, but that bit isn’t important) This is what capitalism is about: make money at any cost. Its easy to get taken in by newspapers and magazines pretending to care about your health but they just want you to stay scared enough to keep buying their rag. The whole MMR scare could have been over years ago if it wasn’t for the fact that it sold papers. Check out kill-or-cure.heroku.com for a full list of what the Daily Mail says will either cause or cure cancer and you’ll soon see that either they aren’t to be believed or we’re all going to die pretty soon. And don’t forget that if you ever do worry about biscuits causing cancer, the best person to ask is your doctor or pharmacist. If only That’s Life magazine asked them, some more kids might be alive today.

Peter White, who is standing to be elected as a Labour councillor next year, has shocked the world when he told the truth on Facebook earlier this week.

Regarding the Queen’s upcoming Diamond Jubilee in 2012, he stated:

What is the point of celebrating the Diamond Jubilee of someone who is born into a position of privilege, she is a parasite and milks this country for everything she can. She has more front than Margate asking for extra money from the civil list. Maybe she should sell a couple of her properties. Maybe if she wants Buckingham Palace to be maintained from public funds she should open it to the public. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with a public holiday but let’s have one that means something, rather than celebrating vermin.

Meanwhile, Leftfield were undertaking some investigative journalism, and discovered this shocking undercover picture of Her Majesty rehearsing for her next Queen’s Speech.

The Daily Mirror have continued in their fine tradition of providing us with important information about celebrities as a public service. This time, they’ve broken the news that Daniel Radcliffe, who plays teen wizard Harry Potter in some famous films, might have been caught smoking a joint.

According to other party-goers, he was staggering around saying “I love weed.” and let a girl draw a comedy beard on his face. Hilarious!

He has come out and categorically denied it, though. Aww. We were going to invite him to be keynote speaker at our next Legalise Cannabis event, but it looks like we’ll have to make do with this slightly less famous Harry Potter actor.

The Governments chief scientific advisor, shortly before enjoying a ketamine sundae

Chief drugs advisor to the Government David Nutt has been sacked from his post, after a string of “controversial statements” – the most recent being that LSD and Cannabis were less harmful than alcohol.

He’s already enraged the Government and Tory Tabloids by saying that Ecstasy was less dangerous than horse riding, and argued that Cannabis should not be upgraded to a class B drug.

The Government clearly are no longer interested in having scientists independent of party politics take part in an informed discussion about drug use in the UK. Ecstasy and LSD like all drugs are harmful, but they are not Heroin or Cocaine.

Most people who use Ecstasy or LSD do so recreationally, and the deaths caused by these drugs and the harm caused to families could be reduced if the Government supported a harm reduction strategy instead of a “just say no” policy which simply has no effect on most users.

Cannabis itself is clearly less harmful than Alcohol or Tobacco and it’s a disgrace that someone is fired for expressing the feelings of what the majority of Police, NHS workers and the general public know – that the abuse of Alcohol and Tobacco is much more widespread and damaging than that of Cannabis.

Leftfield isn’t “pro-drugs”, we are pro-recognising reality – people throughout Scotland and the UK use drugs regularly. Many of them have no intention of stopping because they don’t feel that drug use negatively impacts on their lifes.

Any drugs policy enacted by the Government should take alcohol into account and recognise that folk will take drugs, and do everything they can to reduce the harm it can do to people who do use them. The exception to this rule is Heroin, which is virtually impossible to take recreationally, and should be provided in a pure, safe form to addicts so they don’t die of overdoses and so they don’t commit crime to feed their habit.

Alongside that the Government should start considering why people abuse drugs – in Scotland, especially alcohol – as part of a strategy for people to have healthier lives.

SSY candidate for Drugs Tsar

Despite over 250,000 incidences of racism in schools being reported since 2002, the Manifesto Group have called their report on the issue “The Myth of Racist Kids”.

According to civil liberties organisation The Manifesto Group, young children are being branded racist before they even know what the term means – and playground spats are being turned into full-blown racial incidents.

Little kids might not know what the word ‘racist’ means, but they’re more than capable of having racist views. Try telling this woman that there’s no such thing as a racist kid.

Report author Adrian Hart said:

…such anti-racist policies can create divisions where none had existed…

So, not only is racism is a myth – but by being actively anti-racist, you are creating racism where previously there was none? WTF?!?!

In all of the news reports on this issue, The Manifesto Group are described as a civil liberties organisation. Seriously? Civil liberties for who? White people’s right to be racist? Fuck off!

Ignoring the issue of race does not solve racism – only active anti-racist politics can do that.

Racism is a very real issue for children across the world, and if you don’t believe me, look at the impact racism has already had on the lives of these children.