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

In particular, the council wants to stop soup runs and rough sleeping in the area around Westminster Cathedral and has commenced a four-week consultation intended to close on March 25. It hopes to introduce a new by-law banning them by October. The issue – which has divided charities – may turn out to be a genuine acid test of the bona fides of the “Big Society”. The justification offered by Westminster council is that charitable provision only encourages dependency and traps recipients in a downward spiral of poverty and life on the streets. It says it has plenty of professional programmes for tackling homelessness. One of these, Supporting People, has had its budget cut from £17 million to £14.4 million in the coming year. Critics say Westminster’s real policy is to drive homeless people out of the borough entirely, a charge which is met with a shrug and a smile by some of its more hard-line councillors. The most even-handed research on the issue was published in 2009 by Laura Lane and Anne Power of the London School of Economics, Soup Runs in Central London: The right help in the right place at the right time? It addresses just why Westminster is uniquely such a focus for the homeless and applauds the Simon Community’s Street Cafe initiative. Housing Justice also casts a  much-needed perspective on the debate. Estimates of the numbers of people directly affected vary. Westminster says between 100 and 150 people sleep rough near the Cathedral, while other estimates say 1,600 people – ex-servicemen and women and Eastern European migrants prominent among them – are directly affected. The prospect of homeless people being swept off the capital’s streets while the rest of the world visits to attend the Olympics is not without precedent, but surely it’s not the kind of thing we would wish to see in London?

The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance. They do this by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and actions. Dissonance is also reduced by justifying, blaming and denying. US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has come out in support of Chancellor George Osborne’s  £81 billion of spending cuts and says Britain’s light touch regulation – intended to attract bankers from New York (whom he oversaw when he ran the New York Fed) to the Square Mile – was partly to blame for the 2008 banking crisis and was “deeply costly strategy for financial regulation”.

Says Mr Geithner: “I am very impressed – just as one man’s view looking from a distance – at the basic strategy that (George Osborne) has adopted. What he did was a very remarkable thing. At a time when it was easier to make tough choices quickly, because they were not problems created by this Government, he locked his coalition and the Government into a set of reforms that were very good.” The US has a deficit of $1.6 trillion or 11 per cent of GDP.  Fed chairman Ben Bernanke says its policy of printing money (quantitative easing) to buy back Treasury securities – $600 billion in the last round known as QE2 – has nothing to do with forcing up food and commodity prices or inflation in BRIC countries. At last month’s Davos economic forum, Mr Geithner had said that for the US rapid, drastic spending cuts were “not the responsible way” to deal with budget deficits.

Just as generations were encouraged to believe that student Gavrilo Princip virtually single-handedly started the First World War by shooting Archduke Franz Ferdinand, we appear to be in the early stages of the drafting of a new myth. We are now being invited to believe that the Iraq invasion, and everything that has ensued, is all the fault of a lying fantasist called Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, otherwise known as “Curveball”. Former US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who used Curveball’s dubious testimony to galvanise the United Nations into supporting the war, is said to be incensed and seeking to rehabilitate his tarnished political credibility.

A CIA station chief says his doubts about Curveball are vindicated. And just when we think the line between farce and bloody tragedy cannot get any fuzzier, we learn that 57-year -old computer expert Dennis Montgomery was paid more than £13 million after fooling the CIA that he had developed software to decipher coded al Qaida plots supposedly hidden in al-Jazeera broadcasts. On the strength of his “intelligence”, President George W Bush ordered passenger jets flying from London to be turned back over the Atlantic or face being shot down. A French investigation into the technology found it to be bogus. Mr Montgomery was behind claims that Somalian terrorists planned to disrupt Barack Obama’s inauguration. His software was also said to identify terror leaders from photographs taken by aerial drones. The CIA admits it was “played” or “had”, but no more is to be made of it.

Meanwhile, Dennis Montgomery awaits trial in Nevada on charges of passing dud cheques worth £1.1million to Las Vegas casinos. The dodgy dossier of Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell is – almost – quaint by comparison.

President Hugo Chavez appears to have had a sense of humour failure. He has ordered Venezuela’s telecommunications commission to block a private television company from screening a Colombian soap opera featuring a troublesome dog called Little Hugo, who has a domestic incontinency problem and who is owned by a girl called Venezuela who feels better off without him. What’s his problem?

Was it a “purple plotter”, an Orange Booker or a Tory diehard? Or was it one of the coalition’s spin-doctors or advisors?

Viewers of BBC television news have been trying to work out the political affiliation of the rat seen scurrying by Number 10 Downing Street earlier in the week.

Opposition MPs must, of course, tread carefully in their characterisation of such creatures, especially after Harriet Harman was forced to apologise for calling Treasury Chief Secretary Danny Alexander a “ginger rodent”. Quite who was most offended – redheads, rodents or Mr Alexander – has never been fully clear.

“Gorgeous” George Galloway this week offered to end the so-called “heavyweight deficit” at the Scottish Parliament in Holyrood, that he has identified, by tendering his own services.

The 56-year old, who represented a Glasgow constituency for 18 years as an MP, is standing on the city’s regional list in the May elections. Mr Galloway, a man who has always had an exceedingly high opinion of himself, called the current crop of Holyrood politicians – with the honourable exception of SNP leader Alex Salmond – “stumblebums who would think being called a non-entity was a compliment”.

The man whose career arguably never really recovered from his appearance on Celebrity Big Brother in which he impersonated a cat said, with all due modesty, he intends to bring “a touch of class” to Holyrood.

Tory Westminster hopeful Angie Bray has made a bit of a bloomer in her attempts to secure the three-way marginal seat of Ealing Central and Acton in west London. Former press officer Angie, known as “jolly hockey sticks” because of her bossy head of school manner, has sent out a glossy eight-page leaflet to constituents without paying sufficient postage. So that’s £1 from every voter who accepts the Royal Mail invite to collect their undeliverable package of propaganda.

Picture the scene: it’s the inner sanctum of Number 10 and one of the Prime Minister’s downtrodden minions has finally snapped. “It’s your effing policies that have ruined the country and I’m just not going to take it any more, you bullying fruitcake. You can shove my job where the sun doesn’t shine.” Or words to that effect. And with that, he storms outside. “Good morning, Chancellor”, says the policeman guarding the door. Yes, some duplicitous rascals have accused Downing Steet of having a bullying culture. They must be hunted down, given a Chinese burn, have their dinner money extracted from them and their heads flushed down the toilet. Not flash. Just Gordon. Or should that be “Flashman Gordon”?

The UK Independence Party has targeted its natural area of support and is pitching for the criminal vote. Its “specific policies” on rail says: “We will abolish the penalty fares regime which too often persecutes honest rail users.” Nudge, nudge, wink, wink – vote for the loonies and it’s a triumph for the fare-dodging community. When it is swept to power, however, UKIP will end free bus passes. But who cares? Pensioners can dodge a fare as well as anyone.