Tribune – Comment, news and reviews from Britain's democratic left

Let us put to one side the repeated spectacle of former spin-doctor Alastair Campbell berating political parties for getting too close to the tabloids and obsessing about spin, and turn to something wholesome and life affirming such as the Tolpuddle Festival. This weekend’s event, as regular Tribune readers – and indeed anyone else who has read the rest of this issue – will know commemorates the six Dorset farm workers who in 1834 were deported to Australia for daring to organise a trade union. After huge public outrage they returned in relative triumph. Last weekend, Australian trade unionist Maureen Lum, from Tasmania arrived at Stansted airport headed for the festival to sing many of her own self-penned songs, including a selection about Tolpuddle Martyr George Loveless, with the Grassroots Union community choir. George Loveless was transported to Van Diemen’s Land, as Tasmania was then known. But the UK Border Agency stopped Ms Lum because she did not have a performers’ visa. The fact that she was going on holiday and was not in any professional capacity cut no ice with stony-faced officialdom and she was put on the first flight back and deported right back. Liz Forster, from the Grassroots Choir, said: “We are all very upset by this unfair treatment. Maureen is the author of several of the songs that we will be singing. She does it as a statement of solidarity with other unionists. We’re sad but don’t know what to do.”  Nigel Costley, South West TUC regional secretary, said: “You would have thought that, after 170 years, things might have moved on.”

Someone who does think society is moving on is Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, that well-known “outsider” and maverick who moonlights as the leader of the Liberal Democrats, the junior partners keeping the Conservatives in power. In a cheery interview with Andy Grice of The Independent, Mr Clegg – of whom this column has remarked in the past has such a highly nuanced sense of irony it is often invisible to us onlookers – said of the News International scandal: “The pillars of the establishment are tumbling one after the other”. By way of explanation and illustration to his interviewer, he pointed out the pillars could all be viewed during a short trip along the Thames – News International, the City banks, Parliament and Scotland Yard. “You have politicians falling to their knees ingratiating themselves with media moguls. You have too many vested interests tied up with each other. You have a culture of arrogance and impunity,” according to Mr Clegg. At the same time, Mr Clegg, whose travails over the failed AV referendum, broken promises on university fees, and Chris Huhne’s speeding are gradually slipping off the pages and airwaves says he genuinely does favour a raucous and free press while he and his party soldier on until the next parliament making unpopular choices (which no voters actually asked them to make) and all in the public good.

Much repeated one-liner in the Twitterverse and shamelessly picked up by newspaper sketch writers, now being just as shamelessly recycled here (for those who may not have come across it). David Cameron’s Big Society wants people to hack themselves and not just leave it to the News of the World, The Sun or  the Daily Mail.

As the first African-American President of the US looks to election year his adopted hometown of Chicago’s newspaper the Chicago Sun-Times ran a story with statistics from the Economic Policy Institute. It said that in 2007, the “ best year of the Bush era”, white households had a median net worth of 134,280, compared with $13,450 for black households. By 2009, in the aftermath of the sub-prime mortgage debacle which devalued everybody’s properties,  the median net worth for white households had fallen 24 per cent to S$97,860. For black households, it had plummeted 83 per cent to $2,170. It quoted Algernon Austin of EPI’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy: “In 2009, for every dollar of wealth the average white household had, black households had two cents.”