United Nations
Here are two takes on the United Nations getting involved in the political row over the UK's problems with social housing, welfare benefits and the so-called 'bedroom tax'
I'll leave it to readers to decide for themselves - whether Barbara Ellen or Rid Liddle has the better of the argument.
Barbara Ellen in the Observer
Bedroom tax row: welcome to modern Britain, home of the boor
Brazilian UN investigator Raquel Rolnik says she has never faced such aggressive behaviour from any other country. It's shaming
Raquel Rolnik, UN special rapporteur on housing, was astounded by the behaviour of some British politicians. Photograph: Martin Hunter/guardian.co.uk
How embarrassing that some members of the government appear to have behaved in the manner of uncouth thugs – and towards someone representing the UN, which dared to question the bedroom tax.
Brazilian UN investigator Raquel Rolnik says she has never faced such an aggressive, hostile reaction from a country. Conservative chairmanGrant Shapps, seemingly incandescent, has written a complaint to the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, insisting that Rolnik withdraw her report as it is politically biased and she had not met relevant ministers or officials to discuss the policy. Iain Duncan Smith, work and pensions secretary, agreed, saying that Rolnik had undermined the impartial reputation of the UN.
Another Tory MP, Stewart Jackson, called Rolnik a "loopy Brazilian leftie with no evidence masquerading as a serious UN official". Sections of the media dubbed Rolnik a "Brazil nut", who once dabbled in voodoo, offering animal sacrifices to Karl Marx. There were other suggestions that Rolnik might want to sort out Brazil before she came meddling in British housing – ahem, kind of missing the point of the UN there, folks!
What provoked such a reaction? Is Rolnik really a "Brazil nut" or a UN special rapporteur, with five years' experience of carrying out housing investigations in countries such as the US, Croatia, Argentina, Israel, Rwanda, Palestine, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Israel and Algeria? During her visit to Britain to investigate social housing (organised, she claims, by the UK government in order to demonstrate that it was fulfilling its obligations to the UN Convention on Human Rights), Rolnik visited various British cities (Manchester, Belfast, Glasgow and Edinburgh). She met council officials and media outlets, and set up meetings with Eric Pickles, secretary of state for communities and local government, under secretary Don Foster and other officials, all, she says, listed in her report.
The trouble started when Rolnik observed that the bedroom tax (where people must pay for "spare" rooms through a deduction in their housing benefit) is causing great hardship and distress to the most vulnerable. Some people she spoke to were in tears; some said they even contemplated suicide, because they had nowhere to downsize to – owing to a shortage of smaller housing. Rolnik said that the bedroom tax could represent a violation of human rights and that Britain, which formerly held a good record on social housing, could face "going backwards in the protection and promotion of the human right to housing".
After she'd been attacked, Rolnik commented: "It was the first time a government has been so aggressive. When I was in the US, I had a constructive conversation with them, accepting some things and arguing with others. They did not react like this".
Oh dear. Welcome to 21st-century Britain, Ms Rolnik. This is where the embarrassment sets in. Rolnik makes it quite clear that she is fine with debate and also dissent. It is the hostility and aggression that she is astounded by. During her visit to the US, they had a discussion and came to considered conclusions, like… what are they called again?… grown-ups! In Britain, Rolnik was denounced, smeared, name-called, basically bullied and all but dunked into a pond to check if she was a witch.
Don't politicians have a duty to exercise a modicum of self-control? However upset they were by criticisms of the bedroom tax, it's the way they reacted to criticism that is key here. It would be nice if our representatives could be trusted to be statesmanlike, at least professional and dignified. Even nicer, if someone from the UN didn't go back with the news that members of the British government were the most aggressive and hostile she'd ever encountered. As I said, embarrassing.
This was the behaviour of small-minded bullies who prefer to go about their grubby business under the cover of national darkness and who don't appreciate someone coming in from the outside world and turning all the lights on.
Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times
Bedroom tax bad, animal sacrifice good for Comrade Brazil Nut
Brazilian UN investigator Raquel Rolnik says she has never faced such aggressive behaviour from any other country. It's shaming
Raquel Rolnik, UN special rapporteur on housing, was astounded by the behaviour of some British politicians. Photograph: Martin Hunter/guardian.co.uk
How embarrassing that some members of the government appear to have behaved in the manner of uncouth thugs – and towards someone representing the UN, which dared to question the bedroom tax.
Brazilian UN investigator Raquel Rolnik says she has never faced such an aggressive, hostile reaction from a country. Conservative chairmanGrant Shapps, seemingly incandescent, has written a complaint to the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, insisting that Rolnik withdraw her report as it is politically biased and she had not met relevant ministers or officials to discuss the policy. Iain Duncan Smith, work and pensions secretary, agreed, saying that Rolnik had undermined the impartial reputation of the UN.
Another Tory MP, Stewart Jackson, called Rolnik a "loopy Brazilian leftie with no evidence masquerading as a serious UN official". Sections of the media dubbed Rolnik a "Brazil nut", who once dabbled in voodoo, offering animal sacrifices to Karl Marx. There were other suggestions that Rolnik might want to sort out Brazil before she came meddling in British housing – ahem, kind of missing the point of the UN there, folks!
What provoked such a reaction? Is Rolnik really a "Brazil nut" or a UN special rapporteur, with five years' experience of carrying out housing investigations in countries such as the US, Croatia, Argentina, Israel, Rwanda, Palestine, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Israel and Algeria? During her visit to Britain to investigate social housing (organised, she claims, by the UK government in order to demonstrate that it was fulfilling its obligations to the UN Convention on Human Rights), Rolnik visited various British cities (Manchester, Belfast, Glasgow and Edinburgh). She met council officials and media outlets, and set up meetings with Eric Pickles, secretary of state for communities and local government, under secretary Don Foster and other officials, all, she says, listed in her report.
The trouble started when Rolnik observed that the bedroom tax (where people must pay for "spare" rooms through a deduction in their housing benefit) is causing great hardship and distress to the most vulnerable. Some people she spoke to were in tears; some said they even contemplated suicide, because they had nowhere to downsize to – owing to a shortage of smaller housing. Rolnik said that the bedroom tax could represent a violation of human rights and that Britain, which formerly held a good record on social housing, could face "going backwards in the protection and promotion of the human right to housing".
After she'd been attacked, Rolnik commented: "It was the first time a government has been so aggressive. When I was in the US, I had a constructive conversation with them, accepting some things and arguing with others. They did not react like this".
Oh dear. Welcome to 21st-century Britain, Ms Rolnik. This is where the embarrassment sets in. Rolnik makes it quite clear that she is fine with debate and also dissent. It is the hostility and aggression that she is astounded by. During her visit to the US, they had a discussion and came to considered conclusions, like… what are they called again?… grown-ups! In Britain, Rolnik was denounced, smeared, name-called, basically bullied and all but dunked into a pond to check if she was a witch.
Don't politicians have a duty to exercise a modicum of self-control? However upset they were by criticisms of the bedroom tax, it's the way they reacted to criticism that is key here. It would be nice if our representatives could be trusted to be statesmanlike, at least professional and dignified. Even nicer, if someone from the UN didn't go back with the news that members of the British government were the most aggressive and hostile she'd ever encountered. As I said, embarrassing.
This was the behaviour of small-minded bullies who prefer to go about their grubby business under the cover of national darkness and who don't appreciate someone coming in from the outside world and turning all the lights on.
Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times
Bedroom tax bad, animal sacrifice good for Comrade Brazil Nut
Dark, dark was the Paris night as Raquel Rolnik laboured away at her dissertation, the ghosts of so many French philosophers, from Descartes to Sartre, flapping around her head. She wrapped her hands around her ears but could not banish their clamour. There was only one voice she wanted to hear — her hero Karl Marx. But the bearded German was drowned out by these terrible Gallic shrieks and howls. What should she do?
It was an even darker night for the chicken, that night in Paris. It was a really, really bad night for the chicken.
Raquel took the chicken in one hand and the knife in the other. She held its head up, exposing the neck. She uttered a few words of portentous gobbledygook from the animist Candomble religion and then said, loudly, brandishing the blade: “This is for you, Karl. I offer this chicken to you for now and for eternity. Now please help me get my dissertation finished.”
The chicken squawked briefly, and then squawked no more. Later, amid the blood and feathers, the dissertation was finished.
A triumph, then. An earlier thesis of Raquel’s had been rejected by the university because it was too stupid. But this one did OK — Raquel had her master’s.
This is a reimagining of the night the Brazilian academic Raquel Rolnik, now a UN special rapporteur on housing, sacrificed a chicken to the ghost of Marx as she tried to finish her master’s degree in Paris. No chickens were harmed in the reimagining of mine. I may have taken some liberties with the script: we know, from Raquel’s sister, that she offered up the sacrifice — an ebo — that night in Paris, but we cannot be certain it was a chicken. That was poetic licence on my part. It might have been a goat, or a llama.
Rolnik is the mad UN representative who has caused our government anguish because she came over here, wandered around a few frowsy housing estates and criticised the proposed “bedroom tax” policy as if she had the slightest idea what she was talking about. A strange-looking creature, a member of the left-wing Brazilian Workers’ party who sports large plastic-framed spectacles seemingly liberated from Timmy Mallett.
She pronounced herself “shocked” by accounts of possible deprivation occasioned by the policy and instructed Cameron et al to rethink, right this minute, now. Earlier in the year she had been looking at some hideous slums in Indonesia but asserted that the UK’s bedroom tax was as pressing as a million people living in a sewer pipe on the outskirts of Medan. But then she is from Brazil, which has one of the worst housing crises, the largest collection of slums, in the known universe. Her immense talents might be better employed back home, you could argue. Next thing we will get lectured about women’s rights by some Saudi.
But Raquel is democracy is action, and you are paying for it. No matter how much the British government might moan, these days it is perfectly respectable for some failed politician from a Third World hell-hole to come over here at our expense (somewhere down the line) and tell us how absolutely useless we are.
Which countries do you suppose are on the UN security council, adjudicating on matters of security for the entire world, telling the likes of Denmark and Canada where they’re going wrong? Among others, those paragons of vacuum-sealed, watertight security, Pakistan and Rwanda.
Still, shame about the chicken.
It was an even darker night for the chicken, that night in Paris. It was a really, really bad night for the chicken.
Raquel took the chicken in one hand and the knife in the other. She held its head up, exposing the neck. She uttered a few words of portentous gobbledygook from the animist Candomble religion and then said, loudly, brandishing the blade: “This is for you, Karl. I offer this chicken to you for now and for eternity. Now please help me get my dissertation finished.”
The chicken squawked briefly, and then squawked no more. Later, amid the blood and feathers, the dissertation was finished.
A triumph, then. An earlier thesis of Raquel’s had been rejected by the university because it was too stupid. But this one did OK — Raquel had her master’s.
This is a reimagining of the night the Brazilian academic Raquel Rolnik, now a UN special rapporteur on housing, sacrificed a chicken to the ghost of Marx as she tried to finish her master’s degree in Paris. No chickens were harmed in the reimagining of mine. I may have taken some liberties with the script: we know, from Raquel’s sister, that she offered up the sacrifice — an ebo — that night in Paris, but we cannot be certain it was a chicken. That was poetic licence on my part. It might have been a goat, or a llama.
Rolnik is the mad UN representative who has caused our government anguish because she came over here, wandered around a few frowsy housing estates and criticised the proposed “bedroom tax” policy as if she had the slightest idea what she was talking about. A strange-looking creature, a member of the left-wing Brazilian Workers’ party who sports large plastic-framed spectacles seemingly liberated from Timmy Mallett.
She pronounced herself “shocked” by accounts of possible deprivation occasioned by the policy and instructed Cameron et al to rethink, right this minute, now. Earlier in the year she had been looking at some hideous slums in Indonesia but asserted that the UK’s bedroom tax was as pressing as a million people living in a sewer pipe on the outskirts of Medan. But then she is from Brazil, which has one of the worst housing crises, the largest collection of slums, in the known universe. Her immense talents might be better employed back home, you could argue. Next thing we will get lectured about women’s rights by some Saudi.
But Raquel is democracy is action, and you are paying for it. No matter how much the British government might moan, these days it is perfectly respectable for some failed politician from a Third World hell-hole to come over here at our expense (somewhere down the line) and tell us how absolutely useless we are.
Which countries do you suppose are on the UN security council, adjudicating on matters of security for the entire world, telling the likes of Denmark and Canada where they’re going wrong? Among others, those paragons of vacuum-sealed, watertight security, Pakistan and Rwanda.
Still, shame about the chicken.
