Burma opposition politician Aung San Suu Kyi released

After fifteen years of house arrest, Burmese opposition politician and former General Secretary of the National League for Democracy Aung San Suu Kyi was today released by the ruling military junta.



Aung San Suu Kyi had been held under the 1975 State Protection Act, which allows the government to imprison persons for up to five years without trial,and the Law to Safeguard the State Against the Dangers of Those Desiring to Cause Subversive Acts.

Despite Aung San Suu Kyi's release, Burma remains a repressive country.

Over 2,200 political prisoners remain, and Amnesty International USA has prepared a letter which can be sent via the Amnesty International USA website to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), demanding they press the Burmease government to release all political prisoners.

You can also support human rights and oppose government censorship by funding Amnesty International's donation of radios for communities in remote areas of Burma.

Stewart Lee on tuition fees and university funding

Excellent interview with comedian Stewart Lee, someone I like very much, opposing the increases in tuition fees.



Good luck to all those on the Demo 2010 today. Over 25,000 people are expected to march today.

Iain Duncan Smith's unpaid work programme is a mistake

The long term unemployed, most of whom are working hard to find jobs in a tough economy, need the right kind of help to get into work - what little work is left after the cull of public sector jobs.

Iain Duncan Smith is the person who is meant to oversee the provision of this. However, his latest plans suggest that he has no idea what it is like to be unemployed and regards the unemployed as parasites.

This week, he will announce the introduction of four weeks of compulsory work in the community, which will involve the long term unemployed (that's anyone unemployed for more than a year) taking part in community work for local councils or charities.

A more sensible policy would be to get people to do one day a week volunteering where they can gain useful skills while having four days to look for jobs and sign on.

However, Iain Duncan Smith wants the long term unemployed to work, unpaid, for thirty hours a week, under his new Work Activity Scheme.

Looking for jobs isn't just a matter of emailing your CV to employers.Jobseekers spend hours looking through job sites or through adverts in newspapers. If people are doing unpaid work for thirty hours a week for a month, this gives this little time to look for work and no time to go to job interviews.

If people refuse to take part in four weeks' unpaid work, their Jobseekers Allowance may be stopped for up to three months or more.

Perhaps Iain Duncan Smith thinks that the unemployed are able to live off nuts and berries during this time, but people need to eat. I imagine that many will need to turn to crime or begging to keep themselves alive.

It is also worth noting the open-ended "or more". Could some people have their benefits suspended for six months or even a year for refusing to take part in the Work Activity Scheme? How are these people meant to stay alive if they do not break the law?

With many people with serious illnesses being forced on Jobseekers Allowance, we could end up with a situation where people with terminal heart conditions are being forced to work for thirty hours a week to stay alive.

donpaskini highlights four further reasons to oppose these plans:

1. It is a job killer.

There are lots of people who work as street cleaners, toilet cleaners, gardeners and other unglamorous and poorly paid jobs. If these policies go ahead, they will lose their jobs. No employer in their right mind would pay £6 or £7 per hour to employ street cleaners if they could get an unemployed person to do it for free.

In my local area, residents nominated one of the council's street cleaners as employee of the year. He's been working for more than thirty years, never taken a sick day and people always see him out and about working hard.

But our council's got to make £58 million in cuts over the next three years. So instead of getting paid £7.60 per hour for an honest day's work, he'll end up being made redundant - and presumably in due course get one of these "mandatory work placements" doing his old job but without pay.

2. These plans can punish or help - they can't do both.

Government ministers on the telly today said that these plans were intended to help people get jobs, not to punish them. But they are likely to make it harder for people to get jobs, not easier.

If you are an employer, having to choose between hundreds of employees, and you see an applicant's CV which states that he or she has completed a "mandatory work placement", then you know the following things:

- They haven't worked for a long time.
- They were workshy and so had to be forced to do menial jobs with the threat of losing their benefits.

Armed with this information, 99% of employers would throw their CVs in the bin and move on to the next one.

Now, you could have work placements which help people get the skills and experience to make it more likely that they can get a job. But, um, these already exist.

3. These placements don't give people proper experience of work.

Imagine if you turned up for work, and your boss bullied you every day. Or sacked you for being one minute late. Or you thought that something that you were being asked to do was unsafe, or you felt ill. But you couldn't do anything, because if you complained, or objected, then you could lose your job and have to live on nothing for three months. And even if you do a really good job, you don't get paid.

As currently presented, these placements aren't like giving people an experience of what work is like. They are like what work would be like in a world without any protections or rights for working people.

4. Or is it just a gimmick?

This government has already got form for putting forward "symbolic" policies, ones which don't actually achieve much, but which attract lots of media attention and give the impression that they are doing something popular.

Think of the constant announcements cracking down on the same few benefit fraudsters (none of whom ever seem to be affected by successive government crackdowns), or the cap on housing benefit, which is just 3% of their cuts to housing benefit.

It would cost billions of pounds to put everyone who is long term unemployed through a four week placement - money which we know that the DWP doesn't have.

So maybe the aim is to get a few pictures for the media of long term unemployed people looking like criminals on community service picking up litter - to send a message about the government's approach and use nudge techniques to modify the behaviour of unemployed people or some such.

Elzannie has five questions for the government about the plans:

1. Will the ‘volunteers’ in any way displace those already employed? Litter gathering and gardening as suggested in an article on the BBC news homepage should already be covered by local workers, for instance

2. Many of these ‘volunteer’ jobs will require some sort of training. Who pays the trainers or will they also be taken from those naughty, naughty individuals in the ranks of the unemployed?

3. Fares/Expenses: One assumes that in areas where the population of unemployed is in a higher ratio to the employed than others there will be less ‘volunteer’ jobs to go around. Therefore there will be fares/expenses involved in the logistics of ‘matching’ individuals and work. This will surely put the benefits bill up?

4. Insurance: These part-time/temporary workers will have to be insured. They may not be permitted to use machinery because training is insufficient and insurance would not cover.

5. At the end of the mandatory work period where are the jobs that our ‘volunteers’ are now raring to fill? Would I be cynical to suggest that nothing will have changed really? The real winners will be bureaucracy – a lot of forms will have been completed and possibly a few more civil service jobs created?

And the private providers that are organising the scheme of course. Oh but wait a minute – wasn’t that one of the ConDem pledges to cut down on bureaucracy and the Civil Service? I must have misheard that.

There is an alternative:

I believe that people should look for work when they are unemployed and accept any reasonable offer of a job. However, these proposals will help few, if any, back into work and will demoralise and further impoverish the unemployed.

Iain Duncan Smith should be ensuring that all jobseekers receive interview practice sessions, assistance with writing CV's and directions to vocational courses.

Also essential is that Jobcentre Plus advisers encourage clients to volunteer one day a week in the charity sector as soon as they sign on, instead of when they begin Stage 2 of their claim three months down the line.

These ideas will cost money in the short term, but they will cut the welfare bill and increase tax revenues.

I hope that Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Douglas Alexander will continue to vocally oppose these proposals. He has impressed me so far, unlike his Labour colleagues.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, whom I have been critical of in the past, has also made some good points:

I've got a lot of worries about that. I don't immediately think it's fair. People who are struggling to find work and struggling to find a secure future are, I think, driven further into a sort of downward spiral of uncertainty, even despair, when the pressure is on in this way.

It can make people who start feeling vulnerable feel more vulnerable. People are often in this starting place not because they are wicked or stupid or lazy but because circumstances have been against them. To drive that spiral deeper does seem a great problem.

Pro and anti comments at the BBC site.

Campaign to get John Cage's 4'33" to Christmas Number One

A campaign has been launched to get John Cage's composition 4'33", which is performed without a single note being played, to Christmas Number One.

Cage Against The Machine will send out an email to all who sign up reminding them to purchase the single during the week of December 13th, the beginning of the week before Christmas Day.

The campaign, which has the slogan "Let's make it a silent night on Radio One" will donate all its profits to a number of charities.

Using the pseudonym "Cagerage", the person who began the campaign comments: "The group started as something to amuse myself.

"I've got a bit of a history of creating ridiculous social networking things, and Facebook is a great platform for this sort of thing.

"Most of the groups I've set up, like the one that advocated turning all of the worlds rain forests into pizza delivery menus, die on their arses.

"But, for whatever reason, people responded to the idea of a "silent song" in the top spot at Christmas, and the thing has grown and grown, to it's current level of over 30000 members."

You can follow the Cage against the Machine campaign via Facebook and Twitter.

Housing benefit cuts: the truth

Supporters of the housing benefit cuts only like to talk about the £400 a week cap. They make the point that many houses can be found outside city centres for less than this.

Iain Dale, a blogger I enjoys, publishes a letter from a reader making this point:

To start with, a quick look on gumtree shows no shortage of 4+ bedroom properties in London. Yes, they might not be in Kensington but why should they be?

I doubt I will ever be able to afford to live in Kensington at any point and I earn a great deal more than the median wage mentioned as the cap. Just because people on benefits can't live in central London doesn't mean they all have to congregate in one big ghetto...

Next, the cap of £400pw is the equivalent of £1,738pcm or £20,857pa. I'm pretty sure that someone earning the median wage wouldn't be able to afford that amount after taxation is applied to their £26,000, let alone living costs. But to make someone out of work rent for such an amount is 'draconian'? Do me a favour.

I really can't believe the furore over this and in fact if anything the furore should be produced over the amount that is still being offered when people who have worked pretty damn hard can't afford a place themselves as rentals are kept artificially high in London due to DSS/housing benefits paying these amounts.

Several points:

1. It is true that payments are now made directly to the tenant rather than the landlord, meaning that people who have been made unemployed while renting can carry on doing so.

However, someone who wants to move into a new house, whether in Battersea or Plaistow, still needs to explain how they are going to pay the rent. Unless they can find someone else happy to act as a guarantor, they will need to tell the potential landlord or lettings company that they are unemployed.

If a family is already renting a house for over £400 a week, it will be very difficult for them to move. If a family needs to move, it may be the only place they can find that will take people on housing benefit is over £400 a week.

2. The £400 a week cap only applies to people who need a 4 bedroom house, i.e. families. Some people would have you believe that the cap applies to everyone.

Allowances are £250 for a one-bedroom property, £290 for two, £340 for three, and £400 for a four-bedroom property. How many 1 bedroom flats can be found for less than £250 a week within 2 hours' commute of Oxford Circus?

3. Housing benefit is not just paid to unemployed people. I've read Comment is Free threads where this has been pointed out to people posting "Hooray, let's get rid of the lazy scroungers", and this point is simply ignored by the next person who decides to post a similar sentiment.

240,000 low-paid workers and 170,000 pensioners will be affected across the country, according to a government analysis.

4. There is also a cap on the total amount of benefits a family can claim in one year. If other benefits claimed push the total amount of money above £26,000 a year, their housing benefit will be reduced.

5. Worth noting that even rich areas like Kensington have poor enclaves.

6. The limits on benefits are only one part of the cruel cuts. Anyone under 35 who rents a flat who becomes unemployed will have to move into a shared house, as the Tories believe that people not on benefits under 35 cannot afford to rent a flat, so people on benefits should not be able to (Labour were slightly kinder and set the age at 25). Why risk renting a flat if under 35 in this climate?

7. Another vicious attack is a 10% cut in housing benefit for those unemployed more than one year. Many people may be out of work for a year or two despite looking really hard every day. Clearly, housing benefit is being used as a punishment here, as people do not need housing benefit less after one year of unemployment.

8. If people's benefits are cut, they do not simply forage on nuts and berries. They need to find a way of making up the shortfall. Some will need ask their families and friends for money, people who may not have enough money themselves. Some will turn to begging, which may result in them being prosecuted. Some will turn to crime, at a time when police numbers are being cut.