On its way

12:35pm

Daniel Finkelstein writes about the deliberately engineered shortages of the new iPhone:

First of all, they claim the demand for the device is unprecedented. This is either unremarkable - since it is a new device any demand for it at all would be without precedent - or untrue - if they are arguing that no device in the history of devices has ever experienced such demand then I refuse to believe it.

Second, it is hard to understand why the demand would have taken them by surprise. All iPhone users on the higher tarriffs are being offered the phone free of charge, while being allowed to keep their existing devices.

Wasn't it entirely predictable that all of them would apply immediately for the new phone?

And Apple have been stoking demand, emailing and texting existing users to encourage them to get the device as soon as it was available. Yet if manufacturing difficulties are responsible they would have known for months that they were encouraging customers to apply for a product that would not be available.

Thing is, they can't even organise a shortage properly. I spent a good time on Monday trying to order the new iPhone online, having pre-registered as an existing user. The site repeatedly crashed, most annoyingly after I'd finally logged on and gone right through to the last button. I pressed submit and it crashed. Grrr. 

I rang O2 to see if the order had gone through, and was told there was no trace (as I expected). Then they announced they were closing down the site as they'd run out.

So I didn't expect yesterday to be contacted by DHL and asked where I would be today to take delivery of the phone! I went back to look at my account and, weirdly, my order had suddenly appeared, as if it had always been there. And fingers crossed my phone is now on its way to me...
 

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MPACUK caught out

12:46pm

Fascinating. MPACUK, an extremist Muslim group, appears to have been caught red handed in an outright lie:

Could it really be true that the most respectable of UK media organizations, including the Society of Editors and Associated Newspapers, owners of the Daily Mail and the Evening Standard, were sponsoring the web site of MPACUK, an extremist Muslim campaign group run by a tiny and wholly unrepresentative group of radical activists? MPACUK, with its well documented track record of publishing anti-semitic propaganda with images taken from neo-Nazi web sites?

The logo is that of the Journalism Diversity Fund, a worthy venture which funds young journalists from ethnic minority and underprivileged backgrounds which are under-represented in the press corps to get onto courses and traineeships which will help them establish careers in journalism.

 

This morning's MPACUK web site carries their logo under the caption: Our sponsors/advertisers.

...So I emailed the Journalism Diversity fund to ask if they were indeed funding MPACUK at any level, whether advertising or funding a trainee from MPACUK or to do an internship with them.

Back came a response within half an hour. It was from the JDF administrator, who wrote:

 

I have never heard of the website you mentioned.  It looks like this organisation has copied the info from the Journalism Diversity Fund website and pasted it into their own website.

Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

I wonder how long the JDF logo will stay on the MPACUK web site? I've taken a screen shot of the logo up on the site, and I hope to upload it before long.

It's 12.45 and I've just looked - the logo is still up on MPACUK's site.

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Support Harry's Place

12:23pm

There are always good reasons for looking at Harry's Place, a site which does a sterling job at tracking and exposing the activities of the Islamist fellow travellers in the UK. 

But there's a particularly important reason for supporting the site now. It's being sued by Hamas:

Last Friday, in the wake of a closely argued debate about whether Mohammed Sawalha, the President of the British Muslim Initiative, had used the phrase “Evil Jew” or “Jewish Lobby” in a speech, Harry’s Place received a letter. The letter is from Dean and Dean, a firm of solicitors who are acting for Mr Sawalha. Mr Sawalha has demanded that we take down certain articles from Harry’s Place, and publish an apology “in the attached wording”.

The solicitors have failed to attach the apology that Mr Sawalha insists we publish. That omission matters little, as we have no intention of apologising to him at all, nor of taking down any article.

We have responded to Mr Sawalha’s solicitors, through Mishcon de Reya, who are acting for us.

Mr Sawalha claims that we have “chosen a malevolent interpretation of a meaningless word”. In fact, we did no more than translate a phrase which appeared in an Al Jazeera report of Mr Sawalha’s speech. When Al Jazeera changed that phrase from “Evil Jew” to “Jewish Lobby”, we reported that fact, along with the statement that it had been a typographical error.

Mr Sawalha says that the attribution of the phrase “Evil Jew” to him implies that he is “anti-semitic and hateful”. Notably, he does not take issue with our reporting of the revelation, made in a Panorama documentary in 2006, that he is a senior activist in the clerical fascist terrorist organisation, Hamas. The BBC report disclosed that Mr Sawalha “master minded much of Hamas’ political and military strategy” and in London “is alleged to have directed funds, both for Hamas’ armed wing, and for spreading its missionary dawah”.

...Mr Sawalha has been the prime mover in a number of Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood associated projects. He is President of the British Muslim Initiative. He is the past President of the Muslim Association of Britain. He was the founder of IslamExpo, and is registered as the holder of the IslamExpo domain name. He is also a trustee of the Finsbury Park Mosque.

The British Muslim Initiative has co-organised with Liberty, Britain’s most prominent civil liberties campaigning group, a  National Rally to Defend Freedom of Religion, Conscience and Thought. Speakers included Ken Livingstone, the Tory Party Vice Chair, Sayeeda Warsi, and the shadow Tory Attorney General, Dominic Grieve MP, and Andrew Stunell MP, the Liberal Democrat Spokesman on Community and Local Government.

All these people spoke on the platform of a group founded by a man who has been identified as a senior Hamas activist.

IslamExpo is also organised by the British Muslim Initiative, and was founded by Mr Sawalha. In past years, various government ministers, including Tessa Jowell, have spoken at IslamExpo. This year, a government minister, Stephen Timms, will be taking part in this event.

Stephen Timms will be speaking on the platform of a group founded by a man who has been identified as a senior Hamas activist.

Mr Sawalha is a trustee of Finsbury Park Mosque. The Muslim Association of Britain was assisted in their takeover of the Mosque from the jihadist cleric, Abu Hamza, by the Metropolitan Police. In other words, a mosque that was once controlled by an Al Qaeda supporter, is now controlled by a man who has been identified as a senior Hamas activist. Can you forsee how this is going to turn out?

Mr Sawalha is a man who prefers to conduct political debate by means of litigation. He hopes to bully those who oppose his vicious theocratic politics with threats of writs. I suppose that I should be relieved. Hamas’ usual technique is to murder those with whom it disagrees.

Mr Sawalha’s British Muslim Initiative put out a press release on 2 July 2008, describing us as “racist”, “underhand”, “plainly lying” and “pure evil”. We are none of these things. Yet, instead of seeking to sue Mr Sawalha and his organisations for the serious defamation of our characters which he has circulated, or demanding an apology, we took his arguments on.

Mr Sawalha operates by invective and legal threat, because he has no other answer to the case which we have advanced. This is the context within which he expects people to attend IslamExpo and other British Muslim Initiative organised events. How can there be genuine debate in these circumstances?

One final point. It used to be the case that groups like the Muslim Association of Britain and its sister organisations, the British Muslim Initative and the Cordoba Foundation, would angrily deny that the were the British franchise of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. Now, so it seems, they’re happy that the close links between these groups, and their members, be known. What Mr Sawalha is objecting to is not the reporting of his activism in Hamas. It is the suggestion that he is a racist. That is very telling.

Yesterday I argued that Hamas/the Muslim Brotherhood are likely to start representing themselves as the moderate wing of Islamism, and a bulwark against jihadism. That promise is backed by a threat: unless we co-operate with the Muslim Brotherhood, we’ll have to deal with Al Qaeda. The presence of government ministers and senior opposition figures on various British Muslim Initiative linked platforms suggests, either that they have successfully rebranded as the Islamists that the West can do business with, or that these senior politicians have been incredibly badly briefed.

The official thinking behind outsourcing terror prevention to terrorist-linked groups must be that many Muslims have an affinity for political violence that can only be kept in check by certain authentically vicious Islamists, who have agreed to behave well within the United Kingdom. That is precisely the thinking which underpinned the so-called “covenant of security” offered by certain jihadist groups in the 1990s. That covenant was quickly torn up, and the radicalised followers of the preachers of hate became terrorists: murderers of Britons of all faiths.

To make the same mistake again, by treating with Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood linked groups, would be a disaster for this country, and also for the vast majority of British Muslims who are not terrorists, and who are likely to be the primary victims of the Islamists in this country, as they are abroad. We all deserve better.

If Mr Sawalha persists in attempting to silence us with this desperate legal suit, we will need your help.

We won’t be able to stand up to them alone.

Not should they have to. This is not just Harry's Place's fight. It's imperative that anyone who believes in western liberal values, and who values our civilisation, stands up to these people. As David T writes at Harry's Place:
 

The presence of government ministers and senior opposition figures on various British Muslim Initiative linked platforms suggests, either that they have successfully rebranded as the Islamists that the West can do business with, or that these senior politicians have been incredibly badly briefed.

The truth is that they simply employ different tactics but that they are different branches of the same tree. Hamas is a  racist, genocidal, terrorist organisation, and the British Muslim Initiative is a front for it. It and its tactics must be exposed whenever possible.

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Modern slaves

9:12am

Why is it that international sporting bodies tend to be headed by people who are, to be polite, repellent?

The IOC - which has apparently cleaned its act up a bit - has historically been corrupt from top to bottom.

Motor racing's FIA is headed by Max Mosley. Enough said.

UEFA's old boss, Lennart Johannson, was a dreadful specimen. 

And as for FIFA's boss, Sepp Blatter: his latest outburst is typically ignorant and offensive. According to Mr Blatter:

I think in football there's too much modern slavery in transferring players or buying players here and there, and putting them somewhere. We are trying now to intervene in such cases. The reaction to the Bosman law is to make long-lasting contacts in order to keep the players and then if he wants to leave, then there is only one solution, he has to pay his contract.

I'm not going deal here with his failure to understand the purpose and nature of a contract of employment. But calling footballers modern slaves is simply disgusting.

Modern slaves don't earn £122,000 a week. Slavery is real and exists today.  This is modern slavery.

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Criminal justice ain't justice

9:39am

Here are three examples of our wonderful criminal justice system today.

First, the now traditional 'punish the victim' story:

For more than two years, Sydney Davis's house has been under siege from youths throwing stones. After two hours of bombardment in the latest attack and no sign of the police, the 65-year-old retired builder decided enough was enough. As a particularly large missile landed in his kitchen, he grabbed a plank of wood from the garden and ran towards the gang to scare them away.

The police arrived just in time - to arrest Mr Davis for possession of an offensive weapon. He now faces up to six months in prison. Yesterday Mr Davis said he was bewildered by the decision to prosecute him. He claims objects have been thrown at his house on 700 separate occasions. His windows have been smashed five times in eight months.

But heh, it would be quite wrong to punish criminals:

Burglars should no longer be sentenced to jail, official advisers have said. Unpaid work or a curfew would normally be a better way of punishing break-ins and thefts, said a panel that issues guidelines to judges.

This is my favourite bit:

For the first time, magistrates and judges could be ordered to listen to victims – or bereaved relatives – and be guided by their views on how an offender should best be punished. But, crucially, only messages of forgiveness would be taken into consideration. The views of those who demanded the harshest penalties would be disregarded.

Of course.

And if you want to kill someone, just make sure you do it with your bike and you'll get off with a fine:
 

The parents of a teenager killed by a speeding cyclist called for a change in the law after he walked away from court with just a £2,200 fine. Jason Howard was convicted of dangerous cycling for killing Rhiannon Bennett as she walked to a shop with friends.

Howard, 36, sped towards Rhiannon at more than 23mph, shouting at her to get out of the way. With no time to react, the 17-year-old horse management student was hit with the full force of the £4,750 custom-built bicycle, suffering fatal injuries as she hit her head on the pavement.

The two-day trial at Aylesbury Crown Court heard that as Howard, a line painter from Buckingham, sped towards Rhiannon on a quiet road near his home in April last year he shouted: 'Move, because I'm not stopping.' Howard admitted he could have avoided Rhiannon if he had slowed right down.

A question: why isn't that manslaughter?

 

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Sorry

5:18pm

Apologies to those of you who have tried to leave comments. There seems to be something wrong with the site (a couple of my piosts vanished into the ether earlier).

I've asked the powers that be to investigate.

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Help!

3:59pm

This is all a joke, no?

My nephew. Alex, is keen on a political career. I can say, with not a hint of irony or intentional humour, that he would make a better Prime Minister than Ms Harman. Alex is eleven. There is not a single issue or judgement call on which I would not prefer to rely on his decision than Ms Harman's.

On the other hand...it's the one way to guarantee Cameron victory, so it has some logic.

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Waste not: want.

10:16am

There's a superb piece by Carl Mortished in today's Times demolishing our increasingly embarrassing PM's latest nonsense:  

Food waste and overindulgence is a sign of new wealth. It is no accident that America is afflicted by so many diseases connected with overeating. It is because so many Americans are recent immigrants. If you have been poor or you fear poverty, an abundance of food is comforting and a symbol of your newly acquired wealth. We shouldn't blame the overweight office cleaner with a fast-food addiction any more than we should blame the skinny woman who nibbles at her posh lunch. Both are food wasters, but they are a sign that Britain is rich.

In a market economy, it is not the ration coupon that determines our consumption but our ability to pay for excess. And, up until recently, we were in a position to pay for excess. In 1984, the average British household devoted 16 per cent of their spending on food. That figure now stands at 9 per cent.

When times are good, when borrowing is cheap, we divert expenditure from things we might need in the future to stuff we want now. We drink and eat too much and dine in restaurants. Today the opposite is happening. Money is tight and we are receiving price signals - use the car less frequently, shop at discount stores, forgo the Friday night blow-out at the Tandoori.

It is the market mechanism, not exhortation, that will stamp out food waste. Let's hope it won't last, so we can soon go back to being profligate.

The notion that 'waste' is somehow a bad thing is one of those weird ideas that gets instilled in us with no basis in sense. Food is a product which is bought and sold. Its production is warped by subsidy and protectionism. But fundamentally, what I buy and then choose to do with it is no one else's concern. If I want to fill up my bath with strawberries and then jump in, most would think me bonkers, but it's no concern of theirs how I choose to spend my money. As for the idea that it's 'wasteful' - utter rot. One man's waste is another man's choice. I throw out apples when they are past it. So what if I bought two or three I didn't get round to eating or cooking with?

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Full marks so far

9:58am

Blimey. If it carries on like this, I'm going to be voting for a Conservative government for the first time in my life.

The party's education policy seemed to me the only positive reason for a Conservative vote. But Cameron's speech yesterday was superb. I was particularly taken by the clarity of his remarks on knife crime (my next book deals with politicians and criminal justice policy in depth, so I've been paying special attention). The evidence that prison works is overwhelming, especially on the young. The only chance we have of stemming the tide of knife crime is to lock up anyone caught in possession.

I was also taken with the force of Cameron's remarks on personal responsibility. Regular readers will know that this is a bugbear of mine.

I think this is the single best thing I have read from a senior politician in years:

We talk about people being ‘at risk of obesity’ instead of talking about people who eat too much and take too little exercise. We talk about people being at risk of poverty, or social exclusion: it’s as if these things — obesity, alcohol abuse, drug addiction — are purely external events like a plague or bad weather. Of course, circumstances — where you are born, your neighbourhood, your school and the choices your parents make — have a huge impact. But social problems are often the consequence of the choices people make.

(A line I like to use in talks - it annoys all the right people - is: "As Anna Karenina found out, choices have consequences".)

A terrific speech, and a hopeful one. But talking the talk is one thing. Let's see how Mr C walks the walk - how the Conservatives plan to build on the idea that people are responsible - and should take responsibility - for their own actions.

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Good and bad gestures

8:54am

I suppose this is two sides of the same coin.

At the weekend, we went to Portsmouth. I've never been before and my wife, who was brought up there, wanted to show me round. I didn't have particularly high expectations. But I couldn't have been more wrong. I've rarely been more more impressed with a tourist attraction than with Pompey's 'Historic Dockyard'. Everything about it confounds your expectations of British tourism and customer service.

First, it's very reasonable - £17.50 for an annual admission pass, which includes everything: HMS Victory, HMS Warrior, the Mary Rose, the museums, a 45 minute harbour boat trip, and lots more. Most places would charge a tenner just for one of them. All the staff were smiling, friendly and amenable. On the boat they brought round refreshments.

Really first class - a brilliant day out.

Last night, however, we saw the usual side of British service. After a wonderful concert at St James, Spanish Place, we went for dinner to Cafe Caldesi in Marylebone. I had a classic Genoan dish - fettucine, beans, pesto and potato. It was watery (as if the pasta hadn't been properly drained) and bland - the pesto had no flavour. I had three mouthfuls and left the rest. It was like eating starch. My wife's ravioli was not much better, and the wine we were served was warm and dull.

It wasn't cheap - my pasta was £14.50 - and I wondered how the manager would react when she cleared the table. Quite properly, it turned out, asking if everything was ok and then, when I told her it wasn't, being very apologetic and stressing how she liked feedback and hated it when customers did not enjoy their food.

This is going to go one of two ways, I thought. Either her words will be all talk, the bill will take no account of my comment, and we won't be coming back - worse, we will tell people not to go there. Or they won't charge us for the main course (my starter, I should add, was worse - my wife said it was like something from a Harvester) or at least they'll make a gesture by offering us coffee on the house and we will give them a second chance.

You can guess which way it went from the fact I'm writing this post. The full whack - £70 for the two of us. I didn't say anything, because I knew I'd have more impact writing this.

Why are so many British retailers - it's not just restaurants, clearly - so bad at this sort of thing? The tiniest gesture would have worked wonders.

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