liz liz

Revealed: the truth behind 'sweet little old tax rebel'

By Andrew Johnson

Sunday, 22 February 2004

As she tottered out of magistrates court last week, Elizabeth Winkfield, 4ft 10in tall and 83 years old, stepped into the limelight as a figurehead for a growing revolt against council tax charges up and down the country.

Her refusal to pay £98 of her £747 council tax bill was greeted with cheers by supporters and has made her a martyr to a people's revolt gathering momentum. But The Independent on Sunday can reveal that publicity surrounding the case of Ms Winkfield was no fluke. Her very public court appearance is owed at least in part to behind-the-scenes engineering by the UK Independence Party - a minority right-wing political party that wants to see Britain pull out of Europe.

Ms Winkfield is a member of the UKIP, as is another pensioner who also made headlines last month when he refused to pay up. Last week's action was co-organised by the Devon Pensioners Action Forum - run by Albert Venison, 78, who has addressed UKIP meetings - and the UKIP itself.

John Kelly, a regional spokesman for the UKIP, said: "We are giving £11bn a year to the European Union. The issue with council tax is that the Government wants to set up regional assemblies. In the South-west, £1m of the £5m cost will be levied on the district council. It's a tax by stealth. They are making council tax payers support a political experiment. We had a public meeting in Axminster this month and Albert Venison spoke on our platform. But we are absolutely not trying to take over."

Ms Winkfield, from Westward Ho! in Devon, had not expected the legions of national newspaper and television reporters. Nor had she anticipated the large crowd of placard-waving supporters - half of whom are thought to be from the UKIP.

Ms Winkfield told The Independent on Sunday: "If I'd known what was going to happen I would have been terrified out of my wits. I was only expecting one or two people from the local press."

Friends say it was a claim at a UKIP meeting that a proportion of Ms Winkfield's council tax ends up in European coffers that sparked her anger over the council tax. "I told the UKIP and the action forum that I was going, and they must have told other people," she said. "I didn't ask them for any help or advice. Money going to Europe is one of the things I'm concerned about.The expenses of the council leader is four times my income. But if I was a millionaire I'd say the same."

Another pensioner, Fred Estall, 80, from Southampton, who appeared in court last month for non-payment of his council tax, is also a UKIP member. "I'm involved in the council tax campaign because of the UKIP," he said. "We're trying to get involved in local government, to get ourselves known. The council tax campaign was a good chance to get involved with the community, and so it turned out to be. It did start from my UKIP work, but I'm a member of the Meon Valley Action Group and that work is non-political."

The national campaign against high council tax rises is called Is It Fair? and affiliates local groups. It began last year when retired army major John Melsom and his wife Christine, from Hampshire, gave an interview to their local paper when council tax went up by 15 per cent. That led to a website, which quickly resulted in a national campaign.

"I never expected it to become so big," she said. "But no party politics are allowed. There is no political affiliation, although we've had a few of the smaller parties trying to jump on the bandwagon. But we've said no to all of them."

liz liz

lizzy

I'll go to prison, says council tax woman rebel, 83

An 83-year-old woman said yesterday she would go to jail rather than pay her full council tax.

Elizabeth Winkfield left Barnstaple magistrates court in Devon to cheers from supporters as a pensioners' revolt against above-inflation council tax rises spread.


Miss Winkfield is one of 820 members of the Devon Pensioners' Action Forum, which was created after the county council increased its tax by 17.9 per cent last April.

She faced a bill of £787.81p for her band C bungalow in Westward Ho! on the north Devon coast. She held back £98.80, deciding that, in line with inflation, she was prepared to pay only 2.5 per cent more than the previous year.

Miss Winkfield, who was wearing a suit she made herself and a hat from a jumble sale, was ordered to pay the council £99 and £10 court costs.

As 30 members of the action forum waved banners in support after the hearing, she said: "Even if I was a millionaire I would not pay it.

"I might die before I pay. If they send me to prison, then that is what will happen. I paid the 2.5 per cent increase but I cannot afford any more. I don't like the idea of prison but I would put up with it."

Miss Winkworth was one of 110 people issued with liability orders by North Devon magistrates on behalf of Torridge district council, one of the authorities collecting the tax for the county council.

Albert Venison, 79, who is organising the revolt, said his campaign was ready to contest all 54 county council seats next year.

Condemning the liability orders as "diabolical and unsympathetic", he said: "Miss Winkfield did absolutely brilliantly.

"It is a sad reflection on our society when an 83-year-old woman is taken to court because she owes 98 quid to the council. She has worked hard all her life. God knows, she must have paid enough tax over the years."

Torridge district council said: "With all other local authorities, we have a statutory duty to collect the council tax and have no choice but to apply the legislation as it stands."

liz again

Rebel pensioner: I'd be a fool to pay council tax



An 84-year-old woman is due back in court this week after again refusing to pay her full council tax.
Asked today whether she would ever be prepared to pay the full sums, Elizabeth Winkfield said :"If I give way now I will look a fool, won't I?
"I am not going to volunteer to pay."
The grey-haired 4ft 10in rebel is set to appear before magistrates on Thursday in Barnstaple, north Devon, over £128.58 she owes for her 2004-05 council tax.
Miss Winkfield, who lives alone in her Band C bungalow in Westward Ho!, is still being pursued by bailiffs for the £172.90 she owes after failing to pay her full 2003-04 bill from Torridge district council.
That outstanding sum includes sums for bailffs and summons costs.
'Too old to worry'
Miss Winkfield said today she was prepared to go to prison, adding: "I am too old to worry about it that much."
As for Chancellor Gordon Brown's Budget announcement of a one-off £200 payment for pensioners to help with council tax bills, she said: "It is a sop. He just wants people to vote for him."
Her protest began two years ago when her council tax rose by £114 to £747 and she paid the council just an extra 2.5% to meet inflation.
When her council tax rose by 6% to £793 for 2004-05 she again paid the council only extra 2.5% for inflation.
The pensioner's council tax bill for the 12 months to March next year is set to rise by 3.8%.
After her first court appearance, Miss Winkfield was critical of the way the Government "poured money down the drain" and gave millions a year to the EC.
"I would not pay the bill if I was a millionaire, and I am not refusing because I cannot afford it. I am making a stand because it is iniquitous," she said.
Miss Winkfield will be supported on Thursday by members of the Devon Pensioners' Action Forum, which has been campaigning for council tax reform.
Chairman Albert Venison said today: "We will have as many people there as possible."

Elizabeth Winkfield

How an 83-year-old woman became a council tax martyr (with a little help)

She was hailed as 'the rebel dressed in tweed'. But, asks Oliver Burkeman, is Elizabeth Winkfield the political innocent she appears?

Oliver Burkeman

The windswept Devonshire seaside resort of Westward Ho! has long had a single claim to fame - it is the only place in Britain with an exclamation mark in its name - and until last week there was no reason to suspect that Elizabeth Winkfield, of all people, was about to provide another. But then the diminutive 83-year-old former shopworker was summoned to appear before magistrates, having refused to pay the whole of a council tax bill she considered excessive. She walked out of the courtroom on Thursday to be greeted by a crowd of placard-waving supporters - and by the time Friday's Daily Mail arrived in newsagents, she was well on the way to becoming a national hero.

"The tax rebel dressed in tweed," as the Mail's front-page headline gleefully anointed her, seemed almost too good to be true. She was as different from the aggressive poll tax protesters as it was possible to imagine; she had never claimed benefits; she had never been in trouble with the law. As the national media descended on Winkfield's bungalow, Labour politicians seemed to severely misjudge the mood. "You have to face up to your responsibilities," an unsympathetic John Prescott told Winkfield during a joint appearance on the BBC's Breakfast With Frost.

You would have had to study last week's coverage in considerable detail to catch even a hint that there was a deeper story behind the sudden fame of Elizabeth Winkfield - an operation in which the rightwing UK Independence party (UKIP) turns out to have been centrally involved, laying the groundwork for a media sensation that the country's leading publicist, Max Clifford, last night admitted he had "engineered". "To begin with," says Mark Clough, a reporter for the Plymouth-based Western Morning News, who had been following the story, "I thought it was 'little old lady couldn't afford to pay'. But now it seems possible that Miss Winkfield was coming from a very different angle."

The Devon Pensioners Action Forum had been promoting the cause of elderly people unable to pay their soaring council tax bills for the best part of six years, but Albert Venison, the 79-year-old who runs the group from his Axminster home, had not exactly been inconvenienced by overwhelming national attention. "When we started, eight or nine of us formed a committee, and we held a public meeting in a church hall," he says. Membership increased gradually, reaching about 500. Many, including Winkfield, agreed that they would not pay any council tax rise beyond the rate of inflation, but few had been summoned to appear in court before her. "I think they're just picking people at random," Venison says, "and this time they picked the wrong one." Venison - who says his group is non-party-political, and that he voted for Tony Blair in 1997 - was widely quoted in the coverage of the Winkfield case, making the case for low-income pensioners, who become ineligible for council tax exemption if their income exceeds the £77 weekly state pension.

This does not, however, appear to have been the main reason for Winkfield's protest - and certainly not the main reason why it was catapulted to national prominence. The 83-year-old is an active member of another organisation, the UK Independence party, which is staunchly opposed to British membership of the European Union: when she became unable to drive three years ago for health reasons, a party spokesman said yesterday, she even donated her car to the local party so that it could be sold to raise funds. It was at a UKIP meeting, a Sunday newspaper reported, that she had heard about how some council tax revenue is spent on EU-level regional assemblies, motivating her to decide to withhold payments. "She argues that her council is guilty of making illegal payments to the SW Regional Assembly and a SW Brussels office, for which it has no mandate, and that council tax should be only for local services," reads a UKIP press release. (Fred Estall, 80, who appeared in court in January for refusing to pay his tax, is also a member.)

When Winkfield was ordered to appear in court, she told her friend David Johnson, another UKIP member. He told Nigel Farage, a UKIP member of the European Parliament who represents south-east England. And on Wednesday, the day before Winkfield was due to appear before magistrates, Nigel Farage told Max Clifford.

"[Farage] spotted her and he phoned me to say 'What do you think of it?' and I said 'It's a national story.'" Clifford told the Guardian last night. "You don't have to be a brain surgeon, do you? It's a little old lady of 83, who's bright, and got principles, et cetera, et cetera." The publicist, who had been doing public relations for UKIP for several months, seized his chance. "I planted it," he says. "If it hadn't been on the front page of the Mail, it would have been on the front page of the Sun the next day. I knew it was a front page."

Winkfield has been quoted as saying that she would have been "terrified out of her wits" had she predicted the media frenzy that followed. "She's a little old lady who's thrown herself into what she thought would be a local storm, and found it's a national storm, which I suppose I've engineered," Clifford says. UKIP made sure there were supporters ready to greet her at the court: John Kelly, the party's regional spokesman, estimates that about half of the placard-wavers were members.

Mark Croucher, national spokesman for UKIP, insists that the decision to involve Clifford was a charitable one - made after the story blew up. "Nigel Farage made that decision ... because Elizabeth couldn't keep up," he says. "Her house was surrounded by TV cameras and reporters. People wanted to buy her life story, so it was decided to direct everybody through Max."

A note on Winkfield's door yesterday explained that she was suffering from bronchitis and laryngitis and would not be speaking to the media. Her phone rang unanswered and she was understood to be at Johnson's house. There was an additional reason for her silence. She has sold her story to the Daily Mail for an estimated £10,000, and will appear on Tonight With Trevor McDonald tomorrow night. "She could have done 20 interviews but she's done none," Clifford says. "She's had quite a relaxing day because she's a little asthmatic today."

Working on behalf of UKIP, some of whose members have been linked to extreme right-wing organisations, seems an odd departure for Clifford, who has never made any secret of the fact that he is a Labour supporter. He remains one, he says, but opposes the government's position on Europe and has agreed to handle UKIP public relations until the election. He denies that Winkfield's involvement with the UKIP undermines her stand. "It's not a party-political broadcast. It's her standing up for what she thinks is right."

Winkfield, says one reporter who worked on the story, "always admitted that she was a member of the UK Independence party, but I think it was conveniently forgotten by the media. Everybody knew about it, but didn't really mention it, because it would have affected the story. They just wanted the pint-sized pensioner." Meanwhile, the impression continues to spread that Winkfield refused to pay the bill because she could not afford to: Venison says he has been telephoned by her local authority, wondering what they should do with the cheques people are sending them to help settle her account. And a new twist was added yesterday when Nick Raynsford, the local government minister, pointed out that, if Winkfield is only receiving her state pension, she ought not to be paying any council tax at all. (She has not revealed her income, but says she would have made the same protest had she been a millionaire.)

Winkfield may have been taken aback by the national storm that she has caused - or that, perhaps, has been caused on her behalf - but Albert Venison, at the Devon Pensioners Action Forum, does not think she is likely to be defeated by it. "She's quite an independent maiden lady, you know," he says. "She's used to knowing what she wants to do and going her own way."

HHGG commentary excerpt

This excerpt occurs at the beginning of the episode, where the main characters are delivered by an explosion to the restaurant at the end of the universe. As with the beginning of each episode of this or any serial program, there is a review of previous events in order to bring the audience back into the story as well as the reintroduction of the cliffhanger moment with which the previous episode ended. Unlike most serials however the HHGG also uses its introduction to tell strange ironic and usually absurd tales intended to amuse its audience.

There is a reminder within this introduction that the earth was in fact a giant computer run by mice and created solely for the purpose of determining the question to the answer 42. This answer to the question of the meaning of life, the universe and everything and the idea of earth as a program is highlighted by the use of a biblical reference and an absurd creation story from ‘another’ intelligent species . Thus the recurring themes of the importance of humanity, mostly harmless, aliens rule, 42 and the probability of the improbable are all reintroduced before returning to the narrative itself.

These themes are of course all intertwined as 42, the all important answer cannot now be properly questioned due to the untimely destruction of earth, raising the importance of the seemingly (until now) unimportant ape like creatures, who populated its surface. The double irony is that they are unimportant, but may now prove to be of great importance (and will later again prove to be of no importance of course). Their unimportance is emphasized by the use of jargon and hyperbole, ‘hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings, gigantic supercomputer,’ juxtaposed against the description of mankind as ‘strange ape like beings’ and ‘totally unaware’. All of this is of course both wildly improbable and totally absurd which is of course the fundamental driving force and intention of this work.

The discussion of creation by means of the biblical allusion, its antithetical response and the absurdist creation story which follows, all serve the absurdist intent of the author which sets the tone for the episode as well as leading nicely into the reintroduction of the creation story of the earth….

write stories for your paper

Choose from the stories below, those that would be found in your paper

(1 each and then one together)

then write them up, including headlines and seven paragraphs per story using,

• the inverted pyramid format
• everything we have learned about what goes in each paragraph
• everything we have learned about your paper and its particular,

• format
• interests
• political stance
• language usage

then write an analysis paragraph for each, describing why the piece was chosen and written as it was

The stories on the wire today are as follows...

- Zurich to become new finacial capitol of Europe, traders flocking to swiss financial cetre to avoid taxes

- England loses to Sweden and Holland defeats France by selfsame scores of 5-1 in World Cup football warm-ups.

- new study shows that while some immigrants do end up as criminals, more than 80% integrate effectively into British society and are adding to the economy within 10 years of arrival. Only 5% are shown to become members of the criminal community. Approximately 200, 000 immigrants arrive on British soil each year

- David Beckham explains his kissing an Italian model in Milan club was because it is the customary greeting. “It was on the cheek.”

- Meagan Fox says spanking scene in new French directed film “is important to the theme of violence and sadism at the heart of this metaphoric attack on American global imperialism.”

- English housing market continues to stay flat as elction approaches

- small dog tortured to death by two old women in Cardiff

newspaper specific work

Analyse your articles and consider them against what you have learned from the paper links

http://mediadepths.blogspot.com/2010/03/newspapers-in-uk-introduction.html


http://www.britishpapers.co.uk/

Consider structure, language (syntax & diction) in service of your paper's audience


Mel & Nic - The Times

Gus CaCa Max - Independent

Ika Seb - Guardian

AAAAs - Telegraph

Mich S - Sun

Syl Sar -FT

Ali Vinnie - Daily Mail

Mix - Daily Express

article structure

News analysis

read and annotate. then rewrite your Mcleod piece to 600 words, broadsheet style


Departing U.N. Envoy Urges Political Solution in Afghanistan
By ABDUL WAHEED WAFA
Published: March 4, 2010
KABUL, Afghanistan — The departing head of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, Kai Eide, warned Thursday that if negative trends were not reversed, there would be little that could restore peace in the country, and he called for balancing the military strategy with political efforts.
Speaking at his final news conference as the United Nations special representative in Afghanistan, Mr. Eide also cautioned against excessive militarization of international efforts here, a longstanding concern that has taken on greater significance as the American-led military operation grows and includes more nation-building.
He also warned that military operations against insurgents needed to be waged in a manner that did not impede efforts to negotiate a peaceful solution with them.
Mr. Eide’s comments came as thousands of troops from the United States, Britain and Afghanistan began to work to restore civilian services after finishing the huge combat phase of its effort to retake the Taliban stronghold of Marja, in the southern province of Helmand.
Mr. Eide, a Norwegian diplomat, announced late last year that he would step down from his post in Afghanistan when his contract expired.
His one-and-a-half-year tenure was marked by rising bloodshed and criticism of his handling of the fraud-plagued presidential elections in August.
His former deputy, the American diplomat Peter W. Galbraith, accused Mr. Eide of covering up fraud that helped President Hamid Karzai. Mr. Eide vehemently denied the allegations and said he had followed Afghan law. Mr. Galbraith was dismissed last autumn.
On Thursday, Mr. Eide said he would spend his few remaining days in Afghanistan pressing Mr. Karzai over recent moves that gave the president more control over the electoral process. Mr. Karzai recently gave himself the authority to name the five members of a purportedly independent electoral monitoring commission that reviews citizen complaints, and he has refused, so far, to make changes in the country’s other major electoral body, the independent election commission. Its members oversee election procedures and many Afghans view them as biased in favor of the president, who appoints them.
Mr. Karzai’s move to appoint the election complaint commission himself, removing the requirement that it have United Nations-appointed members, would reduce international oversight of future elections, and could undermine their credibility in the eyes of Afghans as well as foreign countries.
Mr. Eide said he had made “some progress” with Mr. Karzai in negotiations over the complaint commission’s panel, but offered no details. Previously, the United Nations had included foreigners on three of the seats of the commission, with the other two posts held by Afghans.
Mr. Eide, who is set to leave Afghanistan on Sunday, said 2010 would be the “most challenging” year since the American-led invasion toppled the Taliban in 2001, and it would be a critical period for the international community’s efforts in Afghanistan.
“It is a year where negative trends have to be reversed or they will become irreversible,” he said, but added that the world needed to have realistic expectations: “Decisive success within a year or two in a country marred by conflict is unachievable.”
Last year was the deadliest since 2001 for members of the NATO-led military coalition and Afghan civilians. Saying that “clocks in foreign countries tick faster” than change can occur in Afghanistan, Mr. Eide called for international patience with the slow pace of progress. He said that any resolution to the conflict needed to balance military and political approaches.
“I believe that a political process is indispensable for finding a solution to this conflict,” he said. “I believe the focus is too much on military side and too little on political side and civilian side, and our strategy has unfortunately been too much military-driven.”

Tabloid

that meeting

Write it up for a tabloid

Headline 3-6 words

Paragraph 1 20-25 words

Paragraph 2 15-20 words

post on your blog

openers

choose the top stories from two newspapers

1 Tabloid
Sun
Star
Daily Mail
Express
Times
Independent

1 Broadsheet
Telegraph
Financial Times
Guardian

discuss and analyse the headline, deck(if there is one) and first two paragraphs of the story