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Miliband backs Johnson judgement

Ed Miliband

Ed Miliband defends his shadow chancellor

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Labour leader Ed Miliband has defended shadow chancellor Alan Johnson after he appeared not to know the rate of National Insurance paid by employers.

On Sunday, Mr Johnson said the rate stood at 20% – it is in fact 12.8%.

At his monthly press conference the Labour leader said he would accept Mr Johnson’s judgement over Chancellor George Osborne’s “any day of the week”.

Mr Miliband also called for higher taxes on bank bonuses – but the government played down the idea.

On Sky News on Sunday Mr Johnson said the “secondary class one-rate [National Insurance contributions] for employers” would have gone up 1% to 21% had Labour won the general election.

But he was later reminded that the current rate was 12.8%.

Asked at the press conference whether this threw into question the ability and judgement of the shadow chancellor, Mr Miliband said: “Alan clearly knows about these things.”

He added: “It’s the big things that matter in politics. The things that matter are your instincts and why we stand up for your judgements.

“I take his judgements over George Osborne’s any day.”

Mr Miliband said: “We are seeing from this government a casual attitude to the rise in living costs…

“If David Cameron is really concerned about jobs, he should do more to address a lost generation of young people.”

During the event in central London, also attended by Mr Johnson, Mr Miliband also urged the coalition government to tax bank bonuses more heavily.

He added that Labour’s one-off measure before it lost power had raised £3.5bn and that its Conservative-Liberal Democrat replacement levy would make £1.25bn. Mr Miliband described this as an effective “tax cut”.

However, the prime minister’s spokesman has played down the prospect of another tax on bank bonuses, saying the levy was intended to raise £2.5bn a year and was permanent.

He pointed out that Labour’s bank bonus tax was a “one-off” and repeating that kind of measure tended to generate payment avoidance.

At his press conference, Mr Miliband leader also defended his party’s financial record in government, saying it had been “within acceptable limits”, as a proportion of national income, before the global economic crisis hit.

He repeated his criticism of the coalition that it was cutting “too far, too fast”, which could damage economic growth.

Mr Miliband added that he and Mr Johnson agreed that the 50p income tax rate for top earners “should stay for this parliament and it is very unlikely that our priority after the next general election would be to cut the 50p tax rate”.

He said: “There are lots of other priorities that will take precedence.”

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Police criticised for ‘native’ Pc

Mark KennedyPc Mark Kennedy spent years working undercover in the green movement
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The solicitor for six green campaigners says police need to answer “serious questions” about an undercover officer who infiltrated their group.

The six were charged with conspiring to shut down the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in Nottingham in 2009.

Their trial collapsed after Pc Mark Kennedy offered to give evidence on their behalf.

The group’s defence lawyer, Mike Schwarz, also said he thought that Mr Kennedy had “gone native”.

Mr Kennedy told the defence team he would be prepared to help them, and the prosecution subsequently dropped their case.

Mr Kennedy had been intimately involved in the green movement since 2000.

Mr Schwarz, a solicitor at Bindmans law firm which represented the activists, was speaking in Nottingham after the collapse of his clients’ trial.

He said: “My clients were not guilty. They did not agree to join in any plan to occupy the power station. The evidence of Pc Kennedy presumably confirmed this.

“Yet that evidence, had it been kept secret, could have led to a miscarriage of justice.

“Serious questions must be asked relating to the whole policing of this protest, from the use of undercover police officers, to the use of expensive and legally questionable mass pre-emptive arrests, to the use of pre-charge unaccountable bail conditions, to the seemingly arbitrary nature by which the 114 initially arrested were reduced to the final 26 who were eventually charged.”

Twenty protesters were sentenced to a mixture of community orders and conditional discharges last week, after being convicted of conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass at Ratcliffe.

Mr Schwarz had earlier said he had “no doubt that our attempts to get disclosure about Kennedy’s role has led to the collapse of the trial”.

FIND OUT MORENewsnight on BBC 2Monday 10 January, 2230 GMTCatch up via iPlayer

He added: “It is no coincidence that just 48 hours after we told the CPS our clients could not receive a fair trial unless they disclosed material about Kennedy, they halted the prosecution.

“Given that Kennedy was, until recently, willing to assist the defence, one has to ask if the police were facing up to the possibility their undercover agent had turned native.”

Danny Chivers, who was one of the six defendants in the failed case, said Mr Kennedy was not just an observer, but an agent provocateur.

“We’re not talking about someone sitting at the back of the meeting taking notes – he was in the thick of it.”

Mr Kennedy would disappear for extended periods, saying he had to visit his “brother” in the US.

He was known to those within the green campaign as Mark “Flash” Stone, having earned the nickname because he always seemed to have more money than the other activists.

He lived a double life as Mark Kennedy of the Metropolitan Police and as Mark Stone, green activist, based in Nottingham.

In October 2010, Mr Kennedy was confronted by some of the activists after they found documents which revealed his true identity.

“He was one of the key people setting up Gleneagles 2005”

Danny Chivers Green campaigner

He admitted he had been a Met Police officer and had infiltrated their organisations, before then disappearing.

Speaking about the Ratcliffe-on-Soar protest, Mr Chivers said: “Mark Stone was involved in organising this for months – they could have stopped it at the start.”

Instead, Mr Chivers said the police officer helped recruit as many people as possible.

He also drove a reconnaissance party to the power station in his van and then hired a truck for the main protest, Mr Chivers added.

The activists’ plan was to try to shut down the coal-fired power station for a few days as a protest against global warming.

But in April 2009, when 114 people had gathered for a meeting at the Iona School in Nottingham, hundreds of police swooped on the building and arrested them all for “conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass”.

Ratcliffe-on-Soar was one of many actions in Britain and across Europe which Mr Kennedy was involved in, including the protests against the G8 summit at Gleneagles in 2005 which helped give birth to the Climate Camp movement.

“He was one of the key people setting up Gleneagles 2005,” said Mr Chivers, who also claimed the undercover officer drove protesters there in his van.

Activist websites are full of denunciations of Mr Kennedy by former close friends.

There is some abuse, but most say they feel “violated”, “betrayed” and “sickened”.

Ratcliffe-on-Soar power stationTwenty people were convicted over the Ratcliffe-on-Soar case last year

One writes: “He must be a deeply conflicted individual.”

When confronted, Mr Kennedy told the activists he left the police after the Nottingham arrests in 2009.

It is unclear whether this is true, or where he is now.

A CPS spokeswoman said: “Previously unavailable information that significantly undermined the prosecution’s case came to light on Wednesday, 5 January 2011.

“In light of this information, the Crown Prosecution Service reviewed the case and decided there was no longer sufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction.”

The Met Police are refusing to comment officially on Mr Kennedy and would not say whether or not he is still a police officer.

Find out more on BBC2’s Newsnight at 2230 GMT on 10 January

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

PM talking jobs with big business

Big four supermarketsAll of the major supermarkets say they will create many new jobs in 2011

David Cameron is due to meet the bosses of some of the UK’s biggest firms on Monday to discuss their plans to create thousands of new jobs.

John Lewis, Microsoft and all the major supermarkets are among those involved.

The prime minister, who will host the Downing Street meeting, said he was working on the “most pro-business, pro-growth, pro-jobs agenda ever unleashed by a government”.

But Labour leader Ed Miliband will warn cuts could create a “lost generation”.

The BBC’s deputy political editor James Landale said Mr Cameron wanted to show that his government was as focused on encouraging economic growth as it was on cutting public spending.

His meeting with business leaders will focus on what more the government can do to create jobs in the private sector.

For their part, the senior executives will promise to create thousands of jobs and apprenticeships in an attempt to generate some confidence in the economy.

Supermarket chain Morrisons says it will create 6,000 new jobs in 2011, with Tesco promising 9,000 and Sainsbury’s 6,500. Asda has pledged to create 15,000 retail apprenticeships.

John Lewis and Microsoft have promised 4,000 new jobs each and gas company Centrica, 2,600.

Mr Cameron said: “It’s time we looked forward to a positive, strong, confident Britain.

“This decision to betray young people is not just unfair, it is the wrong long-term economic judgment for our country”

Ed Miliband Labour leader

“By developing the right skills and jobs I am determined that the many, not the few, will share in the country’s prosperity.”

But shortly before the meeting Mr Miliband will use a press conference to accuse the PM of undermining many jobless youngsters’ life chances by ending Labour’s £1bn Future Jobs Fund initiative a year early.

Since 2008, the fund has paid for temporary jobs for 18 to 24-year-olds, who have been out of work for more than six months.

“This decision to betray young people is not just unfair, it is the wrong long-term economic judgment for our country,” Mr Miliband will say.

The government is also said to be considering ways to make the labour market more flexible, including making it easier for small firms to hire and fire staff.

It is expected to launch a consultation later this week to consider a range of reforms.

Among them is a potential doubling – to two years – of the length of time someone must be employed before they can bring an unfair dismissal claim.

Another possibility would be to require anyone bringing a case to an employment tribunal to pay a fee, returnable if they win, in an effort to discourage spurious claims.

The British Chambers of Commerce said employment tribunals were in “dire need” of reform.

But the TUC said the introduction of a fee would deter genuine claimants.

“Instead of a focus on the employment tribunal process, ministers’ time would be better spent looking at why so many companies, especially small employers, have such poor employment practices,” it said.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Flash floods hit Queensland city

A man is rescued by emergency workers after he was stranded clinging to a tree on a flooded street in ToowoombaOne man was rescued after the flash floods left him clinging to a tree for his life
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Flash floods have hit Queensland, killing one person with several more missing, as heavy rains continue to pound the Australian state.

A “massive” deluge of water overwhelmed Toowoomba, a city west of the state capital Brisbane, without warning.

A rescue operation is under way to reach those trapped in cars and on the roofs of buildings, officials say.

Eleven people have died since the tropical storms began in November, the worst flooding in the state in decades.

Some 200,000 have been affected across Queensland and neighbouring New South Wales.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has warned that the recovery will take a “long time back”.

Officials said the person who died was a female pedestrian.

The mayor of Toowoomba described the scale of the damage caused by the flash floods as “unbelievable”.

Mayor Peter Taylor said: ”It’s a real disaster scene where I’m standing at the moment in Russell Street, Toowoomba. There’s furniture and furnishings and it’s just blown shops away.

”We have a railway line about 60 or 70m suspended in mid-air and two cars that are virtually unrecognisable that have floated and smashed into the rail.”

Queensland Deputy Police Commissioner Ian Stewart said there had been many calls from people needing to be rescued.

“We’ve had multiple calls requesting urgent assistance from people caught in vehicles, caught on the street, caught in flood ways,” he said.

“This has just evolved. There has been no warning of this event.”

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Sudan’s second day of unity vote

Southern Sudanese women queue outside the University of Juba polling centre on 10 January 2010People have been queuing for hours to vote in Juba on the second day of the landmark poll

Voters in Southern Sudan have returned to polling stations for a second day in an independence referendum which is widely expected to result in the birth of the world’s newest state.

The BBC’s Will Ross says early turnout has not been not as heavy as on the first day of the week-long vote, but voters seem just as determined.

The poll was agreed as part of the 2005 deal that ended a two-decade civil war.

Some in the queues said they voting for friends and relatives killed by war.

Our correspondent, with voters in the southern village of Kotobi, say many fear elements in the north could still try to disrupt the process to block Southern Sudan’s independence.

But the mainly Muslim north has promised the south, where most people are Christian or follow tradition religions, it will not block its plans to secede if that is the result of the vote, as expected.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has said he will respect the outcome, but warned an independent south would face instability.

George Clooney

Clooney was in Sudan to lend his support for the referendum

For the referendum to be valid, at least 60% of the 3.8 million registered voters must take part.

South Sudanese leader Salva Kiir, casting his ballot on Sunday, urged people to “be patient”, in case they were not able to vote on the first day of polling.

The international community is watching the vote closely and US President Barack Obama said it represented a “new chapter in history”.

The action of Sudanese leaders would help determine whether Sudanese people move “toward peace and prosperity, or slide backward into bloodshed”, he said in a statement.

The run-up to the vote was marred by clashes between the south Sudanese military and rebels in the oil-rich Unity state.

There are also reports of fighting between southerners and Arab nomads over grazing rights for their cattle in the disputed oil-rich region of Abyei, long seen as a potential flashpoint which could trigger wider violence.

Sudan’s Historic Vote

Voters in southern Sudan queue for the independence referendum in Juba, 9 January

Voting: 9-15 JanuaryTo pass, 60% of those registered need to vote plus majority of ballotsVote a condition of 2005 deal to end two-decade north-south conflictMost northerners are Arabic-speaking MuslimsMost southerners Christian or follow traditional religionsOil-rich Abyei area to hold separate vote on whether to join north or southReferendum could divide Africa’s largest countryFinal result due 6 February or 14 February if there are appealsSouth would become continent’s newest nation on 9 July 2011National anthem and flag chosen, but not new country’s nameSudanese voters: Your stories

Abyei was due to hold a separate referendum on whether to join north or south Sudan but this has been postponed indefinitely because of disagreements over eligibility.

North and south Sudan have suffered decades of conflict driven by religious and ethnic divides.

Southern Sudan is one of the least developed areas in the world and many of its people have have long complained of mistreatment at the hands of the Khartoum government.

Last week Mr Bashir said he understood why many southerners wanted independence, but he expressed concern at how the new nation would cope.

“The south suffers from many problems,” told the Arabic news channel al-Jazeera.

“It’s been at war since 1959. The south does not have the ability to provide for its citizens or create a state or authority.”

Mr Bashir said southerners living in the north would not be allowed dual citizenship, and floated the idea of the two nations joining in an EU-style bloc.

The official result of the referendum is not due to be announced for at least four weeks, partly because of the logistical difficulties gathering the ballot papers from across a region the size of France and Germany that has few paved roads.

Sudan: A country divided
Geography Ethnic groups Infant mortality Water & sanitation Education Food insecurity Oil fields

Show regions

Satellite image showing geography of Sudan, source: Nasa

The great divide across Sudan is visible even from space, as this Nasa satellite image shows. The northern states are a blanket of desert, broken only by the fertile Nile corridor. Southern Sudan is covered by green swathes of grassland, swamps and tropical forest.

Map showing Ethnicity of Sudan, source:

Sudan’s arid northern regions are home mainly to Arabic-speaking Muslims. But in Southern Sudan there is no dominant culture. The Dinkas and the Nuers are the largest of more than 200 ethnic groups, each with its own traditional beliefs and languages.

Map showing infant Mortality in Sudan, source: Sudan household health survey 2006

The health inequalities in Sudan are illustrated by infant mortality rates. In Southern Sudan, one in 10 children die before their first birthday. Whereas in the more developed northern states, such as Gezira and White Nile, half of those children would be expected to survive.

Map showing percentage of households using improved water and sanitation in Sudan, source: Sudan household health survey 2006

The gulf in water resources between north and south is stark. In Khartoum, River Nile, and Gezira states, two-thirds of people have access to piped drinking water and pit latrines. In the south, boreholes and unprotected wells are the main drinking sources. More than 80% of southerners have no toilet facilities whatsoever.

Map showing percentage of who complete primary school education in Sudan, source: Sudan household health survey 2006

Throughout Sudan, access to primary school education is strongly linked to household earnings. In the poorest parts of the south, less than 1% of children finish primary school. Whereas in the wealthier north, up to 50% of children complete primary level education.

Map showing percentage of households with poor food consumption in Sudan, source: Sudan household health survey 2006

Conflict and poverty are the main causes of food insecurity in Sudan. The residents of war-affected Darfur and Southern Sudan are still greatly dependent on food aid. Far more than in northern states, which tend to be wealthier, more urbanised and less reliant on agriculture.

Map showing position of oilfileds in Sudan, source: Drilling info international

Sudan exports billions of dollars of oil per year. Southern states produce more than 80% of it, but receive only 50% of the revenue, exacerbating tensions with the north. The oil-rich border region of Abyei is to hold a separate vote on whether to join the north or the south.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Carcass photos force park changes

Animal carcasses at Knowsley Safari ParkMs Boyd took a number of photographs that were passed to the council and an animal charity
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A Merseyside safari park was told to change the way it dealt with dead animals after an ex-employee released images of carcasses left in the open.

Knowsley Safari Park photographer Penny Boyd complained to the local council over what she believed was unnecessary killing of animals and their disposal.

An investigation by Knowsley Council found a breach of animal by-products regulations, which the park addressed.

In a statement, it said “robust new procedures” were now in place.

Ms Boyd left the park in September after five years providing images for its guide book and other publicity materials.

She took photographs of dead animals including deer, bison and a baboon left in the open in an area inaccessible by the public and sent them to the local authority and Manchester-based charity, the Captive Animals’ Protection Society (Caps).

“The council and its partners have thoroughly investigated these complaints and, where any breaches were identified, appropriate action has been taken,” said a council spokesperson.

An environmental protection team inspected the site after the complaints were made and found one breach of the government animal by-products regulations, concerning a dead bison left out in the open.

Axis deer and blackbuckThe park believes some of the animals were moved for “maximum photographic impact”

Managers, who said they were unaware of the regulation, addressed the breach by constructing a building to store dead animals.

The council team also cited a possible breach of regulations on the use of firearms by staff, but an investigation by Merseyside Police found no offence had been committed.

“However procedural recommendations were made in respect of issuing weapons to keepers,” said a police spokesperson.

“This has since been implemented and audited by Merseyside Police.”

Liz Tyson, Caps director, paid tribute to the former employee for speaking out and said the photographs highlighted what she described as the “routine killing of animals surplus to requirements”.

“As we’ve seen here, corpses are sometimes left lying around for many days, creating an environmental hazard and contravening the law on proper disposal of carcasses,” she added.

In a statement, park general manager David Ross said the council had thoroughly investigated a number of allegations with their full support and action had been taken on the two “operation matters” identified.

“In terms of the images supplied by our former employee – taken in a private staff compound well away from areas open to the public – we believe that some carcasses have been moved around and displayed for maximum photographic impact,” he said.

Mr Ross said all the animals in the photographs were either stillborn, had been injured and put down or had died from natural causes or fighting.

“Of course, space is limited even in a park of this size and on occasion we may find ourselves with too many animals of a particular species,” he added.

“Our policy, whenever possible, is to move these surplus animals to other collections, and our keepers routinely inspect these new locations to check they are suitable before animals are moved.

“We are delighted that since April last year 190 animals of various species have been successfully rehomed in this way.”

The 550-acre attraction, which is about eight miles (13km) from Liverpool city centre, was opened to the public in July 1971.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.