Wednesday, October 31, 2007 

Rulings galore, two right, one wrong.

The government has rightly lost its appeal against the decision that Learco Chindamo should not be deported to Italy upon the end of his sentence. In the ruling the judge makes clear that the Human Rights Act - widely blamed for the original decision - was only a minor consideration, and that his decision is based almost wholly on the 2006 EU immigration regulations. They state that someone can only be deported back to their country of origin if they pose a "genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat" to society. Additionally, the regulations place a restriction on the time spent in one country after which they cannot be deported back to another, the limit being 10 years. Chindamo came here when he was 5 or 6, and he's now 26, well over the limit.

In reality, the government never had a chance of overturning the original ruling, and its attempt to do so was only window-dressing. You could argue that in doing so it raised the possibility the Chindamo would still be deported back to Italy, bringing even further misery upon Frances Lawrence when that hope was subsequently extinguished. This was a difficult case, and Mrs Lawrence has been treated shabbily, especially in the way she received the original news and wrongly had the impression the Chindamo would be deported, no questions asked. Chindamo's apparent recognition of his guilt and rehabilitation, as affirmed by both his prison governor and another prison worker, itself an incredibly rare occurence, ought to have swayed the decision in any case. He appears to be a rare success story of how prison can work - to deport him to somewhere where he cannot speak the language would have been to punish him twice.

More troubling, via John Hirst, is this apparent ruling reported in the Telegraph:

A serial sex offender from Sierra Leone has been allowed to stay in Britain after a judge ruled that deporting him would breach his human rights.

The decision will be an embarrassment for Gordon Brown, who recently pledged to double the number of foreign criminals sent back to their native countries.

Mohammed Kendeh, 20, who has admitted indecently assaulting 11 women, was assessed by the Home Office as being at "high risk" of re-offending.

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But their attempt to deport him was overruled by an immigration judge last year.

The Home Office appealed the decision, but Mr Justice Hodge, president of the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal, has upheld Kendeh's right to stay in Britain.

Mr Justice Hodge, who is the husband of the minister Margaret Hodge, said that Article 8 of the Human Rights Act, which enshrines the "right to a family life", meant that the sex attacker could not be deported.


In this case the HRA does seem to have been the main factor. Despite what the Telegraph says, the only real comparison with the Chindamo case is that Kendeh was brought here at a young age and that he has very little (if any) in the way of family in the country he was to be deported to. Kendeh originates from Sierra Leone, not a European country, so the EU rules don't apply to him. The article doesn't note just what sort of family Kendeh actually has here that would mean a violation of Article 8 if he were to be deported, but it does seem perverse on this ground that the ECHR, designed to protect family and private life is being used to justify the continuing stay in this country of someone imprisoned for a variety of offences, including sexual assault. It's also not as if Sierra Leone is especially dangerous: poor, certainly, but he's unlikely to be the victim of torture, violence or otherwise if he's deported. It could be argued, like with Chindamo, that his criminality is the responsibility of this country considering the age he was brought here at, but to my mind in this case that shouldn't be a barrier to his deportation. This is the sort of ruling that undermines the good that the HRA has both done and continues to do, and opens it to the attacks upon it that are often lacking in accuracy.

The other major ruling was on control orders. While the law lords didn't find the 16-hour curfew regime in its entirety to be incompatible with Article 5 of the HRA, it did rightly overturn one of the biggest abuses within it, that neither those under the orders nor their lawyers could even know what the vast majority of evidence against them was. This was the Kafkaesque centre of the scheme, which left some of those previously held without charge in Belmarsh not knowing why they've been detained and now under curfew for years.

Liberty, one of the parties to the case, has said that it won't spark celebrations, but the latter ruling ought to be enough to puncture the last remaining justification for the scheme. The refusal to make wiretap evidence admissible, some of which makes up the cases against those held under the orders will now look laughable when the defence and the accused themselves will have access to the evidence against them. Those against control orders have always argued that they neither provide adequate security, as those who had absconded while on them have shown, while also being substantially illiberal, leaving those on them in unending limbo, unable either to prove their innocence or to have the evidence against them heard in open court, as the allegations are instead heard by a gathered "security" panel.

The refusal to prosecute the men under control orders has always been curious: is it because the evidence against them is so thin that the government will be embarrassed "ricin plot" style when the accused are acquitted, or is it because our security services are overly paranoid that their methods will be subsequently exposed? In either case, they are most certainly not strong enough arguments for the liberty to deprived from those accused, especially for the length of time it already has been. While it's unlikely that the government is suddenly going to see the light, the rug has now been pulled from under them, and the complete repeal of the control orders legislation in favour of prosecution or release is now ever more vital.

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10/31/2007 09:20:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Scum-watch: Encouraging cynicism and other tales.

Whenever public cynicism in politics is discussed, it's always the politicians themselves that get the majority of the blame. Some of it is quite rightly deserved, whether because of the lack of difference between the main parties, the spin and lies of the Blair era, or inability to almost ever answer a straight question with a straight response.

The media also though has to cop some of the blame. A perfect example of how newspapers wrongly claim that ministers have deliberately misled or lied to the public is today's Sun leader:

LABOUR’S shabby deceit over immigration exploded spectacularly last night as red-faced ministers queued to apologise for “misleading” the nation.

First they claimed 800,000 migrants had come to work in Britain since 1997. Then they admitted the statistics were out by 300,000 — and the real figure was 1.1million.

Now we learn there are at least 1.5million — almost DOUBLE the original estimate of only a few days earlier.


Rather than the wrong figures given by the government being down to simple mistakes, the Sun is claiming that this was a "shabby deceit", with the government's apology for misleading being sneered at. It's worth noting that not even the Conservatives, hardly slow to capitalise on such woeful inaccuracies, have attempted to suggest that the government deliberately fiddled the figures. In addition to this, the 1.5 million figure now being liberally bandied (originally put into the mix by the Tories) about is similarly misleading, as it includes the children of those who previously emigrated, as well as those who have gone on to take British citizenship.

But why should we be surprised? Labour tried to tell us only 13,000 migrants would come to Britain from eight new EU states.

The true figure was nearer 500,000.


The government's prediction was based on the other European nations not imposing limits like we have now on the Romanians and Bulgarians, when they in fact did. As a result, only Britain, Ireland and Sweden fully opened their borders, resulting in the vast numbers we've seen.

Fiddling figures is a Labour trademark. They fiddle public spending estimates, exam results, NHS targets, prison numbers, you name it.

Just how do you "fiddle" exam results or prison numbers? It isn't possible. The Sun is simply talking rubbish.

 The government’s embarrassment is all the greater because this shambles was unveiled not by the Tories but by Frank Field, one of Labour’s most respected MPs.

Frank Field is about as respected as the Tory turncoats are. The poor mite has never got over being dumped out on his backside after his welfare reforms were rejected by Brown back during Labour's first term, and he's beared a grudge ever since, something he freely admits. He's since dedicated his time to proving he was right all along, whilst failing miserably.

Gordon Brown must be thanking his lucky stars he scrapped the election which he had planned for tomorrow.

But with our population forecast to grow by 5million in nine years, immigration will still be the issue haunting Labour whenever polling day finally rolls round.


Possibly, especially when the biggest selling newspaper in the country tells its readers that the politicians are lying to them when they most certainly weren't.

Elsewhere today in the Scum, the Sun's readers are being told how marvellous they are as usual:

BRITAIN’S top security boss last night praised readers of The Sun for helping fight the war on terror.

Admiral Lord Alan West, former head of the Navy, revealed there had been a superb response to an appeal to be his “eyes and ears”.

He had called on our millions of readers to assist the security services by reporting suspicious movements and people.

And your tip-offs may have provided vital information in the constant battle to smash al-Qaeda plots and avert atrocities similar to the 7/7 bombings in London.


Of course. Perhaps their tip-offs might have helped towards only 1 in 400 searches under the Terrorism Act resulting in an arrest. In all there were 44,543 stops under the notorious section 44, a 34% rise over the previous year.

The interview is mostly the usual amount of garbage about the terrorist threat, with West now claiming it will take 30 years to combat the "terrorists intent on mass slaughter." He also says:

“We need to go to the root of it. Having English-speaking Imams in this country is extremely important.

“We are getting more and more Muslim youngsters who all speak English. Yet in some mosques, services given by radical Islamists are not in English.


As yesterday's rather good Policy Exchange report (PDF) (for a right-wing thinktank) made clear, the notion that extremism is all the fault of Imams, especially those who give their sermons in languages other than English is deeply misguided. The only reason the government is so concerned about those who don't speak English is that it means they can't easily monitor exactly what is being said. Abu Hamza gave his sermons in English. Sheikh Faisal gave them in English. Those caught in Channel 4's Undercover Mosque programme spoke English. Invariably, those involved in extremism tend to be able to speak good English, are decently educated and from a middle-class or stable background, while they come under the influence of extremism through their own research or discovery, not through listening to the speaker at the local mosque.

This however is the most hilarious statement in the whole piece:

We have wonderful civil liberties, something The Sun drives home all the time.

How true. This would be the same Sun that called those who opposed 90 days without charge "traitors", the same Sun which routinely ridicules the "civil liberties brigade", the one that supports ID cards, every police request for more powers and supports the notion of zero tolerance. Those wonderful civil liberties are no thanks to anything the Sun has ever done.

Moving on, here's a story to keep an eye on:

A SCHOOL was yesterday accused of MAKING teachers dress up as Asians for a day – to celebrate a Muslim festival.

Kids at the 257-pupil primary have also been told to don ethnic garb even though most are Christians.

The morning assembly will be open to all parents – but dads are BARRED from a women-only party in the afternoon because Muslim husbands object to wives mixing with other men.

Just two members of staff – a part-time teacher and a teaching assistant – are Muslim.

...

Sally Bloomer, head of Rufford primary school in Lye, West Midlands, insisted: “I have not heard of any complaints.

“It’s all part of a diversity project to promote multi-culturalism.”


The only other place this story seems to have spread to is the Mail, which illustrates the point with a photograph of a woman in a niqab, so the accuracy or otherwise of the report is currently up in the air. Might know more once it does become more widely reported.

Finally, the Sun treats its readers to another thinly veiled attack on Facebook:

A RANDY geek on the helpline at Tesco’s cheap internet access arm sent a saucy photo to a shocked mum – after using her personal details to track her down on Facebook. Furious Tania Roberts, 24, received the snap of technician Jamie Piper wearing only a green towel just moments after he dealt with her query. Fuming mum-of-two Tania – who complained to his bosses – last night claimed she was living in fear in case he was a stalker. She said: “I’m terrified of this nutcase coming round to my house.

All, naturally, without any mention that the Sun's owner also owns Facebook's rival, MySpace. As one of the wags in the comments says:

Oh dear. This sort of thing would never happen on MySpace!

P.S. Heather Mills this morning attacked the media over the withering coverage she's received. Whether she mentioned that the Sun calls her "Mucca" after it "exposed" the fact she had taken part in a sex manual I don't know, but she might have mentioned the same newspaper is currently running a sordid competition encouraging the women of Britain to get their tits out for a woefully small prize. The Sun's response to her claims:

When someone rightly accuses you of disgusting journalism, make sure you select a grab with the person responsible with her mouth wide open.

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10/31/2007 07:53:00 PM | | | links to this post

Tuesday, October 30, 2007 

Their figures are wrong, but their policies are rubbish.

Seeing as this blog on occasion is highly critical of tabloids when they get important figures either wrong, or in some cases, willfully wrong, it would remiss not to suggest that the government really ought to be able to better estimate/count the number of foreign workers that have arrived here since 1997. To be out by 100,000 would have been bad enough, but by 300,000 is ridiculous. It's true that estimating and confirming the numbers of those who arrive and leave each is not an exact science, but getting it wrong doesn't just hinder government arguments and those who wish to make their own political points from those figures, it also makes it doubly difficult for the local authorities who are the ones that have to deal with the new arrivals to request adequate resources, which in turn breeds the resentment that does nothing to help with local cohesion.

Who knows then whether the figures now being quoted by the BBC, that 52% of new jobs created since 1997 have gone to foreign workers, are accurate. It seems a figure that is likely to further up the ante and political pressure, especially when the latest polls are suggesting that Labour is falling even further behind the Conservatives.

Whether they will be influenced by Cameron's speech yesterday on immigration is another matter. Meant to be a "grown-up conversation", he deserves credit for not mentioning political correctness or racism, as so many others on the right would be wont to do, claiming that either one or the other or both stop a debate from taking place, one of the most ludicrous arguments there is, especially in a country where we've been talking about the effects of immigration for decades. (See today's Scum leader.) Beneath the lack of political sniping however, with there only being one real line of full attack on Labour ("Labour have no vision, no strategy, no policy") there's very little meat on the bones.

Cameron's biggest error is in conflating two entirely separate issues - migration and family breakdown, or as he refers to it throughout, "atomisation" - and attempting to connect the dots between the two. His main evidence that atomisation is occurring is the large numbers of those who are deciding, for whatever reason, to live on their own, claiming that "divorce and separation" accounts for 24% of the increase in the number of households. He doesn't even consider the possibility that this might be down to the rise in independence, ruthlessly encouraged by the Conservatives, but instead mainly family breakdown and immigration. Living longer factors in, but nothing else does. He then stretches this argument even further past breaking point, arguing that the rise in single households puts more pressure on the NHS (really? As opposed to families?) and even more resources, with those living alone apparently using 40% more water than two people living together.


That inevitably brings the jibe of this being a wet, damp argument. Cameron then considers our current level of "demographic change" to be unsustainable. Both immigration and family breakdown are too high. Again, to Cameron's credit, he accurately quotes the exact immigration figures from the most recent release from the Office of National Statistics (PDF), then he spoils it later on by claiming that "non-EU migration, excluding British citizens returning to live here, accounts for nearly seventy per cent of all immigration." This is strictly true, but it doesn't take into account the fact that 36% of 2005's immigrants came from either the old or new commonwealth, where those who have a British grandparent can come freely to stay in dear old Blighty, as Hopi Sen points out. Cameron is hardly likely to close the door on them, meaning that in actual fact, rather than 70% of all immigration coming from outside the EU, only 25% comes from countries which have no material link with us at all. Cameron wants to impose a limit, although neither he nor Labour want to come up with a figure on exactly what that is, although the Tories have suggested it would be lower than 150,000.

And that, really, is it. Sure, Cameron talks of imposing further limits on "marriages across national boundaries" which have a negligible impact on immigration figures, with the spouse having to have a "basic level of English", which sure sounds nasty and incredibly illiberal, considering how they supposedly want to be encouraging marriage. Can you seriously imagine that being put into practice? "Hi, I'd like to bring my wife back here so we can get married." "Does she speak English?" "Well, a little, she gets by..." "Sorry, no, piss off." Lovely. The plans for thwarting family breakdown are equally threadbare. Apart from Duncan Smith's £20 a week bribe to the already married middle classes, they'll also remove the "couple penalty" they claim is in the benefit system, which others are equally adamant doesn't exist.

Compared to Labour's points-system proposal, and especially considering that the Conservatives have had years to get this policy right, it's close to being intellectually bankrupt. Anyone can say that they'll limit immigration, without saying exactly what numbers that will mean in practice. It's not as though this makes any change from 2005, when billboards sprouted everywhere informing us that it's not racist to talk about it, or impose limits on it; that was similarly based on no actual figures, with asylum seekers being dumped on some island which was never even identified to be processed. The very least the Conservatives could have done is recommend that it's vital that local authorities have the power devolved to them to make their own estimates on the number of migrants in their area and then request any extra funds which they deem necessary. That would be a simple, effective reform that would do much to stem the problems that have cropped up in certain areas before they become too pronounced.

Cameron says at the end that "[they will] make clear how our approach joins up and fits together into a coherent long-term strategy." There's certainly no sign of that here so far.

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10/30/2007 08:55:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, October 29, 2007 

It really is all about the oil. Oh, and don't forget the arms deals.

The aftermath of a beheading in Saudi Arabia. There have 117 so far this year.

What word(s) is/are best to describe the government of Saudi Arabia? Dave Osler uses petrotheocracy, which has a certain ring to it. I've always enjoyed kleptocracy, which is perhaps best to describe China, for instance, and certainly goes some way towards summing up bribes in the region of £1bn to key members of the Saudi royal family. Autocracy, unaccountable, oligarchy, all are similarly suitable, but all lack a certain something. Perhaps we ought to look to the Liberal Democrats for insight, especially as Vince Cable has made a courageous stand to boycott his meeting with "King" Abdullah. Mike Hancock recently referred to those who forced out Ming Campbell as a "complete shower of shits", but even that seems a little too staid for my liking. How about a collection of theocratic, democracy denying, corrupt cunts?

Petty insults aside, the sheer gall of New Labour in inviting those ultimately responsible for the torture of four British citizens wrongly arrested for a series of bombings in the country shouldn't be surprising, but the pulling out of all the stops for their visit is the equivalent of a kick in the teeth to those who dare to suggest that the government ought to be consistent in its approach to all those who deny basic human rights to their people.

As has been pointed out, we'd never dream of inviting Robert Mugabe to have dinner with the Queen, or the head of the Burmese junta to meet both the prime minister and the leaders of the other main political parties, but as for the Saudi royal family, which if anything presides over a state far more vicious and discriminatory than that of the one in Burma, they're not just welcomed with open arms, we have ministers claiming that the two states should unite around their "shared values". Whether this means that we'll be banning women from driving, while making certain that they're covered from head to toe whilst out in public, re-instituting absolute monarchy, bringing back flogging, banning all religions other than Christianity and removing all rights to privacy is unclear; perhaps it'll just mean prolonged detention without charge for critics of the Dear Leader.

A better comparison might perhaps be made with Iran. Like with the examples mentioned above, it's hard to think of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad being invited to share tea and scones with Liz, or Ayatollah Khamenei shaking hands with David Cameron. Iran is simply beyond the pale; she sponsors terrorism and is building nuclear weapons, don't you know? Both sit on veritable seas of oil, but while if we proposed selling fighter jets to Iran Melanie Phillips would probably explode, Saudi Arabia is an entirely different kettle of fish. While Iran's executions of juveniles and other human rights abuses are possibly worse than those in Saudi, Iran at least has something resembling democracy when it comes to electing the president and the legislature, natives of Saudi Arabia have to make to do with essentially meaningless municipal elections, where women were denied the vote, although it's been solemnly promised they will have it in 2009.

All this moral equivalence doesn't really add up to much in the long run. It ought to be this simple: Saudi Arabia is an theocratic autocracy. Its strict state sponsored interpretation of Islam, and efforts to spread such an interpretation has greatly contributed to the rise of takfirist Salafism, the kind which al-Qaida takes its cue from. It is endemically corrupt, one of most corrupt regimes on the planet, and it effectively steals the wealth that should belong to its people. The fact that it supports either the "war on terror" or that if the regime fell the replacement could possibly be worse shouldn't really enter it to it. We ought to deal with it, of course, as we should with Iran. We need to help and encourage the reform process, but there's only so far that a reform process can go in such a country, completely unlike in Iran. What we should most certainly not be doing is inviting its rulers to have a nice chat with our own head of state with full regalia, or selling it weapons on a grand scale, which could conceivably be used against an uprising of its own people, especially when there are so many allegations that the deals have involved such huge sums of money going to those who negotiated them.

Instead, what we have at the moment is a country with an appalling record on all fronts holding all the cards. When the Serious Fraud Office gets close to uncovering the full scale of the corruption involved in the Al-Yamamah deal, they threaten to cut off their intelligence links and cancel their next big order, resulting in those with a hand in the till also mounting a specious campaign to call the inquiry off. Rather than calling their bluff, knowing full well that they'll continue to share it with the CIA even if they did act on their words, our former glorious leader ordered the attorney general to put a stop to such an embarrassment. As King Abdullah arrives and the criticism reaches fever pitch, he laughably suggests that Saudi intelligence could have stopped 7/7, thereby making everyone doubly aware of how vital it is that we continue to have close relations with his nation, even if his claims are about as credible as the ones currently being raised at the Diana inquest. If one of our political representatives has the balls to suggest that this visit isn't in our long term best interests and that he's decided to boycott it, Her Majesty's Opposition calls it "juvenile gesture politics", while they just think about all the additional arms deals they could do once New Labour finally enters the annals of history. Best to make a good impression, right?

Our relationship with Saudi Arabia is one of our sorriest in recent times. Even when outrages like the torture of our own innocent citizens take place, so careful are we to ensure that dealings continue in the fog of good vibes as they have for decades, we go out of our way to make certain that they can't apply for compensation from even the individuals responsible, let alone from the state itself. John McDonnell has said it best:
"We are feting this man because Saudi Arabia controls 25 per cent of the world's oil, and because we sell him billions of pounds' worth of weapons. It is an insult to everything Britain stands for to put these geopolitical concerns ahead of the rights of women, trade unionists and all Saudi people."
This was one of the men who Gordon Brown described during the leadership campaign as "simply not having support for their views in the Labour party." This royal visit has proved one thing. Brown and the others supportive of it are more happy in the company of a dictator than they are in those with whom they are meant to have common cause.

Related post:
Chicken Yogurt - Monsters Inc.

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10/29/2007 11:18:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Tabloid-watch: Star idiocy, Scum's support for the troops, and the Mail gets caught out.

You'd think, writing a blog such as this that often dwells upon the very worst behaviour of this country's tabloid press, that you'd quickly become inured, desensitised to the casual lies, hypocrisies, set-ups, smear jobs and entrapments that are part and parcel of the street of shame, and have been for decades. I sometimes wonder if things have improved in recent years, especially with the set-up of the supine but occasionally condemnatory Press Complaints Commission, and while the overt racism and homophobia that was often present in years gone by has either vanished or become layered and shadowed (the Scum refers to "Gypsies" as "Gipsies" so as not to be accused of fall foul of protests, for example), my conclusion is that there has been no real fundamental change. If they can get away with it, they'll do it.

Before we get to today's most egregious example of abuse, it would be amiss not to take a look at today's Daily Star. While the Daily Star is a newspaper in the same sense that Spinal Tap are a band, it's difficult to know where to apportion blame for today's ridiculous front page, either to the McCanns and their employment of a bunch of idiots describing themselves as private detectives, or to the Star for making up nonsense which a child could see through. According to the Star, private detectives believe that she is being held in Morocco by a "rich Arab family." Apart from it fitting the pattern of everyone being involved in the saga being a nationality other than our own, and therefore inimitably condemnable, why on earth would a "rich" family pay for a child to be kidnapped when it's so easy to adopt, or failing that, even paying to adopt? Such a scenario is about as likely as Madeleine being found tomorrow along with Lord Lucan and Shergar, all drinking in a bar in Haiti. Still, doesn't it fill you with joy that the money donated to the McCanns is being spent so wisely by such competent investigators, if things are indeed as the article describes?

Meanwhile, things are little less desperate over in the Scum. Despite their constant support for "Our Boys", it's deeply concerned that the British public doesn't feel the same about them, or at least in their view doesn't feel proud enough, hence its launching of a campaign to "Help our Heroes". There's nothing wrong with that of course, although whether starting up a separate charity to the British Legion, which already does an admirable job, is going to help is questionable. It's also true that this government has failed the soldiers immeasurably, both in terms of kit and in providing adequate compensation for those seriously wounded, as the desultory pay-outs have proved.

It's quite another thing however to suggest that the apathy showed to returning troops is due to opposition to the war, and not being able to differentiate between the politics involved in the Iraq war and their role in fighting it. I'd venture that while that does have a role, the lack of support at homecomings apart from family members and relatives is more down to the fact that there has no been tangible victory to celebrate. Just what have we achieved, for example, in Iraq? The Scum was about the only newspaper which tried to play up the withdraw to Basra airport as a victory, laughably claiming that the army had fought Shia militants into a ceasefire, while every other source reported that it was down to a deal which had involved the release of a number of prisoners. On a broader scale, we've replaced a murderous dictatorship with a democracy that attempted to run before it could walk, resulting in a murderous, sectarian anarchy that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, resulted in 2 million Iraqis fleeing the country and 2 million more becoming refugees in their own land. Is it much of a surprise that many don't feel like turning up and cheering our soldiers' return? It shouldn't be viewed as a snub to them; this is after all the season where everyone who appears on television has to wear a poppy lest they be accused of not remembering the sacrifices made in the past.

The Sun itself has misjudged the mood of the public at every turn. Its gung-ho support for the war, attacks on those who opposed it, from Robin Cook to George Galloway and disgraceful coverage of the Hutton inquiry went against the grain. It campaigned for a victory parade shortly after "official" combat ended and has opposed every attempt to further investigate how we came to enter the conflict. It mentions vandals allegedly targeting the homes of soldiers while they were fighting in Afghanistan, without bringing up the tissue of lies it cooked up late last year about "Muslim yobs" attacking a house that soldiers had looked into moving into. It weeps crocodile tears for those who have been injured without admitting that without its own propaganda for the invasion and support of Blair those scarred for life might not have been called into action. You have to wonder whether Murdoch will be dipping a hand into his own vast pockets to contribute something, especially considering every single one of his papers supported the war, and that he did so mainly because he was convinced that it would lead to oil at $20 a barrel. Oil has just touched its highest ever unadjusted for inflation level, $92.

Elsewhere today, the Scum is again resorting to talking up the various desperate women who are getting their breasts out on the MySun network:

MY Sun users are once again proving they are simply the breast.

As competition hots up in the search for this year’s Page 3 Idol, several girls have been uploading sexy pictures to their MY Sun blogs.

MY Sun has seen loads of girls show off their breast bits since it launched last year, and now girls are using it to drum up support as they bid to become Page 3 Idol 2007.


Interestingly, on MySpace, on which MyScum is based, nudity is against the terms of services and results in getting your profile removed. On MyScum, a supposed newspaper website, it's actively encouraged.

Finally, we come to the tale of the Daily Mail and the potential paying of Poles to break the law. Via FCC, the beatroot relates how a researcher from the Daily Mail had phoned up a friend in Warsaw and asked him to drive his car around law, breaking the speed limit in front of speed cameras and not paying the congestion charge:

Apparently, he had got a call from the Daily Mail (I can’t remember how they found him – but I am sure he will be telling us) asking him if he would like to drive a car with Polish number plates from Warsaw to England and deliberately park illegally. They also asked him to drive purposely over the speed limit in sight of speed cameras.

There had recently been a report by the BBC claiming that Poles had been parking all over the place and disregarding the highway code, as they knew that because their cars were not registered in the UK there was no chance of them ever receiving a summons to pay the speeding/parking fines.

...

A couple of hours later a 'researcher', Sue Reid (author of this story), at the Daily Mail offices telephoned me. I told her that though I was British my girlfriend was Polish and that she has a car registered in Poland. We were interested. We were not interested – but we were interested in getting the details of how low journalism has sunk in the UK.

Ms Reid said that she would offer me 800 pounds to come over and park illegally and speed, “Just ten miles an hour over the speed limit, no more…”. We would then go back to Poland and wait for the demands for payment of the fines. “We know this is going on but we want to prove it by having a foreign car here with a foreign driver for five days and driving and parking in London, Kent, East Anglia and Portsmouth,” said the Daily Mail researcher.

A photographer would follow us around, showing how we were breaking the law. And then, back in Warsaw, when we later failed to receive any demands for payment - as the British authorities would have no record of our vehicle – the Mail would publish the whole thing as an ‘exclusive’ on how Poles and others are breaking the law in the UK and GETTING AWAY WITH IT.

She even offered to put the girlfriend and myself up at her house in Fulham in London, if we had nowhere else to stay.

EU Referendum, which can't resist putting in a reference to its own distortions of what happened in Qana in Lebanon last year, also has the email from Sue Reid.

How is this any different to the fakery scandals at the BBC and ITV? If anything, this is far more serious than anything that the BBC did, especially as it involves paying people to break the law to prove a point. Just how does this sit with the Mail's uncompromising stance on law and order? As beatroot points out, this was the work of the Mail, not the Scum or the Star, designed to raise anger against minorities that may or may not have been exploiting a loophole. Are then the tabloids just as bad as ever? I find it hard to think otherwise.

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10/29/2007 07:03:00 PM | | | links to this post

Saturday, October 27, 2007 

Mail in trying to prove its own prejudices shocker.

Why is Gordon Brown so reluctant to be a liberal, asks Martin Kettle in today's Grauniad. The obvious answer is because he isn't one. If he was, he would have seen to it that his original soundbite, tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime would have meant exactly that, rather than only the former. He would have opposed all the dilutions of civil liberties we suffered under Blair, and would now abandon identity cards while opposing any further extension of pre-charge detention under which "terrorist suspects" can be held, instead of standing firm by both.

The other though is that he simply can't afford to be, at least not when his biggest friend and supporter, appointed to a panel to investigate whether the 30-year-rule on the release of documents should be abolished, so loathes liberalism, especially any sign that it might exist at the BBC. As Mellomeh points out in the comments of yesterday's post, Paul Dacre's Mail has lazily taken ConservativeHome's own solipsistic search for their own prejudices at the BBC and more or less published it word for word, with a few other examples of alleged bias at the corporation. CH's survey of course doesn't note whether the employees that describe themselves as "liberal" actually work in either the BBC's news or current affairs sections, where their "self-perpetuating institutional bias" as Samuel Coates describes it would be most influential, but that would be expecting too much.

You do however have to love the Mail's last paragraph:

But a well-placed insider said that staff who were Facebook members were likely to be warned to remove their political views from their profiles in the wake of the row.

Would this well-placed insider happen to be of the Mail's own creation? Surely not.

Most of the comments are the usual bag of bilious outrage:

Sory to say it but I stopped trusting the BBC long ago. They are an arm of Nu labour! - John Stretton, Albrighton, nr Wolverhampton

Yes, of course they are. That's why the BBC and "Nu Labour" went to war over Andrew Gilligan's reporting of the WMD lies, not to mention the countless other examples of where the BBC has been highly critical of government projects/policies.

Nothing new here. The BBC and The Guardian are the two cornerstones of Political Correctness in our blighted country...

Those less than 400,000 Grauniad readers sure have a strangehold over Britain, completely unlike the tabloids.

Like the others who have passed comment, I am not surprised by this, it has beeen so obvious in the content of the news and current affairs programs, what does supprise me is that the staff who register on Facebook are so blatent about it. Perhaps thier HR department will look at it and take it into consideration when the axe starts to fall on the overmanning dross. - Mike Woods, Colchester

That would be discrimination, wouldn't it Mr Woods? Oh, shit, I'm being politically correct.
And why are there 10,000+ BBC employees on Facebook anyway? Do these people not have enough work to do? They are paid with public money and I expect value for it. - David G, Carshalton, Surrey

How dare BBC employees have a private life?! I demand they be at their desks 24 hours a day!

For once, the voice of reason comes last:

It is simply that facebook is a young persons phenomena and most people are more liberal in their views when younger and become more conservative with age. Older and probably more influential employees of the BBC won't be on Facebook. - Sara, Cornwall, UK

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10/27/2007 08:45:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

The Madeleine circus rolls on.

I keep promising myself that I won't write any more posts on the McCann saga - and then I very quickly find I break those personal bonds. This isn't going to be overly long, although if this longest, most drawn-out of sensationalist crime stories doesn't run out of steam prior to Christmas, it might well only be prudent to suggest that it may merit a review in full at years' end.

The one thing that does appear to be self-evident now is that the sympathy for the McCanns is slowly ebbing away. This isn't necessarily due to the fact that they are almost certainly the only realistic suspects in the disappearance of their daughter, but more likely just through the general fatigue of the sight of both them and Madeleine, staring out at you whenever you enter the newsagent. I'm sick of seeing all of them, sick of reading the confabulated nonsense being concocted on a daily basis by men and women who are an insult to the definition of journalist, and continuously disgusted by the duplicity of the media in its role in first defending the couple from even the slightest of suggestions that they could have been involved and now in routinely damning them and drawing on the most basest of sources, especially those who seem to be eager to be paid for their lack of insight.

You can't just blame the media themselves though - the McCanns' use and now relationship with it has been a disaster from the beginning. They simply haven't managed to get the balance right, just as the press itself hasn't. Granted, you can't damn them too much for not understanding how the feral beasts operate, and their initial approach, in getting as much coverage as they possibly could in the hope that Madeleine would quickly be found if they got her image transmitted across the globe, was probably a risk worth taking. It always however threatened to drive a potential kidnapper to ground, locking Madeleine away where she would never be discovered, or into panicking and to use an unpleasant euphemism, disposing of her. Their subsequent appointment of a spokesman who is, as commentators have pointed out, little more than a spin doctor of the most oleaginous kind, has also thoroughly backfired.

The tabloid media as a whole has delighted in using the story to their own advantage. The faux empathy verging on emotional pornography which radiated from the coverage at the beginning quickly turned to the News of the World and Scum sponsoring huge billboards, posters and t-shirts with their own logo adorned all over them. Celebrities pledged money, their jets, and even inserts in their books. The "bungling" of the Portuguese police supposedly highlighted by the tabloids, often verging on xenophobia, only seemingly resulted in them increasing their briefings to their home media, who in turn denounced the British press and increasingly turned on the McCanns themselves. I watched last week's Dispatches documentary while away, which sent "five of the UK's best-qualified criminal investigators" to Praia da Luz to investigate all the leads, and while a couple were critical of the initial inadequacies of the search around the resort, the level of invective towards the investigation by the local police was notable only by its absence. By far the most revolting development though has been the Daily Express, the worst of the tabloid mentality summed up in a single paper, where Madeleine has not now been absent from the front page for months, the concept of making money out of collective misery far too good an opportunity to miss for Richard Desmond, a pornographer who last year paid himself £40m.

While I have never sought to pass any guilt on the McCanns themselves, either for leaving their children alone while they went out to dine, or for being possibly involved in their own daughter's disappearance, I'm fairly certain that all of us were aware from the beginning of how rare abductions of children from their own homes are: kidnapping whilst on holiday is next to unheard for. As the days, weeks and months have passed, with all the leads apparently drying up, the suspicion was always going to pass onto themselves. I genuinely hope they are innocent, mainly for their own sake. The best thing they could do now though is to completely step back from the limelight, sack Clarence Mitchell and make it clear to the press that they will be making no further comments whatsoever until any new leads turn up. They can still fund their own investigations into their daughter's disappearance, as they seem to be doing, but their own presence in the coverage is only exacerbating the increasingly chilly public mood towards them. At the moment, as perverse as it is, they're only encouraging the mentality which is leading the tabloids to sink even lower than they ever have before: the Daily Mail's current online poll is "Do you think Kate McCann's tears were genuine?", (other polls include is Nigella Lawson getting too fat and Has Strictly Come Dancing become too competitive) and the current results are perhaps indicative, 49% saying yes and 51% saying no. The media is foul enough without having to cover yourself in shit whilst utilising it.

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10/27/2007 07:43:00 PM | | | links to this post

Friday, October 26, 2007 

Buying the Lords.

Ey, calm down, calm down!

Last night's Question Time saw Charles Falconer appearing for Labour. Why the BBC wasn't able to track down any of the current 353 Labour members actually elected to the House of Parliament wasn't up for discussion, but it didn't stop Falconer, a man who has had his whole recent career as a politician handed to him by his former flatmate from defending that bastion of democracy the House of Lords, which coincidentally also provides him with the only legitimacy he has to talk about anything.

There are 99 different reasons for abolishing the House of Lords, the fact that Falconer is a member being 97 of them, with the affront to democracy that an appointed house of so-called representatives still existing in the 21st century and the corruption involved in the appointing of those "representatives" being the other two. Today's Grauniad helps to remind us of the just how the latter goes hand in hand with almost everything the Lords does:

A Labour peer has admitted taking money to introduce an arms company lobbyist to the government minister in charge of weapons purchases. The case of "cash for access" in the House of Lords is likely to ignite fresh concern about ethical standards in parliament.

The lobbyist paid cash for an introduction to Lord Drayson, the defence minister in charge of billions of pounds of military procurement, according to evidence obtained by the Guardian.


Quite why you would pay to meet such a man as Lord Drayson is on its own difficult to fathom. It's on the level of buying a ticket to see Jim Davidson, or putting your face into an angle grinder. Drayson, aka Lord Smallpox, is best known for the completely innocent coincidence of donating £50,000 to the Labour party at a time when the government was deciding who to award the contract for producing Smallpox vaccines to. Seriously, it was completely innocent; the National Audit Office said so, and we can trust a man like Sir John Bourn to have told us the complete truth. Shortly after being made a peer of the realm, Drayson made a further donation of £505,000 to the Labour party, a sort of reversal of how Blair and another Lord, Levy, were alleged to have offered, perhaps not in words but in nudges, peerages in return for loans.

The lobbyist, Michael Wood, who trades as "Whitehall Advisers" and has worked with those completely incorruptible arms merchants, BAE Systems, coincidentally has the equivalent of the key to city of the palace of Westminster, as he holds a security pass as a "research assistant" to the Tory MP and shadow defence minister Gerald Howarth. Howarth had the following to say when it was announced that Saudi Arabia would be purchasing BAE's hopelessly outdated Eurofighters:

"The decision by the Saudi government to purchase the Typhoon is welcome news for the UK defence industry and demonstrates the enduring relationship between Saudi Arabia and the UK.

"The UK defence industry continues to be at the forefront of cutting edge defence technology.

"The Typhoon is a truly world class aircraft and today's announcement confirms the esteem in which UK equipment is held worldwide."


As Politaholic points out, Doug Hoyle, the man accused of taking money from Wood to meet Drayson, stood down so that the Tory turncoat, Shaun Woodward could have his safe seat, realising that he would lose his safe Tory seat of Witney (now occupied by David Cameron) for changing parties. Hoyle was duly rewarded with a peerage.

As might have been expected, as this is after all the House of Lords, taking money to introduce a wannabe arms dealer to the minister for defence procurement isn't "specifically outlawed", although it is "frowned upon". Like so much else, rather than it being out and out sleaze, this just has a stink about it. The same stink that pervades a house that includes those who are there through no other reason than what family they were born into, others purely there because of the religion they belong to, and oh, then there's Digby Jones. Every single reason you could ever need for abolishing the place wrapped together in one bloated corporeal body.

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10/26/2007 08:14:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Conservatives in trying to prove their own prejudices shock.

Truly amazing research carried out over on ConservativeHome:

BBC employees went Facebook mad earlier this year with 10,580 now having profiles on the social networking site. Many of them chose to specify their political views as either liberal, moderate or conservative (there isn't a socialist option available to the chagrin of many). An advanced search reveals that more than 11 times the number of BBC employees on Facebook list themselves as liberal than conservative:

BBC - 10,580
BBC liberals - 1,340
BBC moderates - 340
BBC conservatives - 120

Oh god, it's true! How can we lefties now dare to suggest the BBC isn't a bastion of anti-conservatism, biased up to the nines? Doesn't this just show how we're deluding ourselves and protecting our own at the same time when we dare to defend the organisation?

Unsurprisingly, no. As Mike Power points out, even if you take this most unscientific of surveys at face value, it still adds up to roughly 13% of BBC Facebook members and around 6.7% of BBC employees who describe themselves openly as "liberal".

In any case, just what on earth does "liberal" mean? David Cameron, lest we forget, is constantly trying to convince us that he's a "liberal conservative". I don't have a Facebook account, so I don't plan to see if he has one or what he describes himself as, but how would a "liberal conservative" thusly announce themselves as? A "moderate", a similarly nondescript term? All it shows is that someone is attempting to prove their own prejudices, something the Conservatives tend to be incredibly proficient at.

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10/26/2007 08:00:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Scum-watch: Saying sorry.

One in a continuing series eyeballing the Scum's embarrassing apologies:

On August 6 we reported that Helen Green, Deputy Head Teacher of Newlands Primary School, Wakefield, had told pupils to write out the Muslim Call to Prayer as handwriting practice.

We also published an editorial criticising Mrs Green for setting the exercise. On August 10 we printed readers’ letters which were also critical of Mrs Green.

We now accept that Mrs Green played no part in setting this exercise. It was instead set by a supply teacher.

We apologise to Mrs Green for the distress caused by this error.

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10/26/2007 07:58:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Lookalike.

Could the "man" the McCanns believe abducted Madeleine have been discovered so soon?



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10/26/2007 07:32:00 PM | | | links to this post

Thursday, October 25, 2007 

An (almost) turning point on civil liberties.

After weeks of dispiriting convergence between the three main political parties, variously swapping and stealing ideas on inheritance tax, the environment and benefit reform, all without any uniting vision to tie them all together, it's to be welcomed that Brown, after promising so much change and so far delivering next to none has set out how he intends to be different to Blair on constitutional issues, civil liberties and further empowering parliament. To go with a cliche, you wait ages for a decent speech on policy and then two come along at once, as while Brown was talking at the University of Westminster on liberty, Jack Straw was in Cambridge delivering the Mackenzie Stuart Lecture on a prospective bill of rights.

Martin Kettle on CiF has already suggested that these were speeches aimed directly at Guardian/Independent readers and those who've been disgusted by the contempt that Labour over the last ten years has shown for civil liberties in general, and he's almost certainly correct. Straw opens his speech with

If you read certain newspapers you might be forgiven for thinking that human rights were an alien imposition foisted upon us by 'the other'. It is a misconception that has regrettably taken root.

and goes on from there. Straw sketches out how the European Convention of Human Rights came into existence, and it makes for grim reading for David Cameron and his ignorant, ahistorical call for a "British" bill of rights, making clear how it's both a legacy of the second world war and also of Churchill himself. Churchill is at times lionised without any regard for his own character flaws, his incipient warmongering and bellicose, first reaction attitude, but his horror at what "total war" inflicted upon Europe led to the protections we now so take for granted and which some want to destroy without any regard for why they were first introduced. It is undoubtedly his second greatest gift to this nation, and Cameron's populist, almost xenophobic policy of scrapping the Human Rights Act is an affront to his memory.

The tabloid press, especially the Sun, is unlikely to take kindly to Straw's speech, especially because it so effortlessly destroys so many of their paper-thin arguments. At times he invites valid ridicule - he talks of how the government would be damned if they "wilfully and knowingly" deported someone to gross ill-treatment and death, without any apparent knowledge that this government is continuing to do just that, whether it's sending "terrorist suspects" back to Algeria, or wanting to deport them to Jordan and other states known to practice torture on the basis of pieces of paper ("memorandums of understanding") from the respective government solemnly promising they won't touch a hair on their heads, or sending "failed" asylum seekers back to states as diverse as Sudan, the Congo, Zimbabwe and Iraq - but his overall message, especially his sneering at the "media uproar around human rights being a terrorists charter" is refreshing compared to what we were used to from Blair, Reid and Clarke, all of whom went out of their way to appease the most basest and baseless of tabloid accusations over human rights. He'll probably be ridiculed as being a soft idiot tomorrow, but it's clear that the corner has been turned. The rules of the game haven't changed after all, remember.

It's a shame then that the remainder of Straw's speech only repeats the nostrums which we've become used to: that there are rights, and with rights come responsbilities. This is the compromise which politicians have been forced into by the tabloid onslaught, the false dichotomy that somehow because we all know our rights we somehow at the same time don't realise that responsibilities come with them. Our rights, whether we're British citizens or not, are indivisible, and the promotion of the belief that somehow when we lose our freedom we also lose those rights is an incredibly dangerous one. Despite spending half of the speech outlining why Cameron's British bill of rights and repealing of the Human Rights Act would never bring justice closer to home or help get rid of current "undesirables", Straw himself believes that there may well be a need for a bill of rights and responsbilities, but he doesn't explain why one is necessary when the HRA is already almost fully comprehensive and the closest we've came to such a charter so far. If we wanted to expand it further, we could have signed up to the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, an excellent document which updates and takes the ECHR further, yet that was one of Brown's red lines, again thanks to tabloid pressure. There is possibly a case for a document, set down in law, which does outline what is expected of us all as citizens, but to connect it directly to a bill of rights is an awful sop to those who would have just one rather than both. Such a document would have to be incredibly carefully drafted so as not to be openly patronising as so much of the discussion on responsibilities has been, all horribly reminiscent of those school behaviour contracts which you were ordered to sign and which were ignored afterwards.

Rather than a bill of rights, what we really need is an actual written constitution, yet that seems to be one of the few things that neither Brown or Straw are proposing, although Brown says this is meant to be a "move" towards just that. Dumping the bill of rights and getting on with that instead would be a better idea.

Brown's speech on liberty then is one of the best he's delivered in a long time, although with his recent pedigree that wasn't that much of a challenge. The first half is an excellent historical narrative, from Magna Carta to the HRA, with quotes from Bolingbroke, Voltaire, de Tocqueville, Orwell, Himmelfarb, Stuart Mill, T. H. Green and Hobson; all of it striking in its difference to the former prime minister, who despite his mendacity was undoubtedly a powerful speaker, but one whose speeches sounded good rather than read good. The inevitable disappointment is that so many of the proposals he's putting forward are either tame or subject to drawn-out consultation. The idea that there needs to be any further consultation on whether to lift the ban on demonstrations within a mile of parliament is a joke: the prohibition makes a mockery of our democratic credentials, and all those men he quoted would have been disgusted by it.

Similarly, like with Straw, Brown has to make concessions to the tabloids, in his case appointing his friend Dacre of the Beast to a committee examining whether to lift the "30-year-rule" on access to government documents. Dacre's loyalty and err, brown-nosing has been rewarded remarkably quickly. The farthest he really goes is in rightly abandoning the Blairite plans to further limit the Freedom of Information Act, which he announces are to be dropped immediately, with a view to actually expanding the act further, with private companies bidding for public contracts also being potentially being brought within its scope, which is incredibly welcome and surprising considering Brown's reliance on the hugely wasteful private finance initiative. Whether words will be converted into actuality will be key. He also opens the possibility of the roughly 250 provisions which give access to private homes, increasingly exploited by entirely unaccountable bailiffs, being brought into a single code.

He is however wholly unconvincing on the need for ID cards, on which the objection is not really to the cards themselves but to the database behind them, while the fact that biometrics are being used by companies already is completely irrelevant; just because they are doesn't mean that the government should be. Out of the window at least has gone the argument for ID cards on the basis of preventing terrorism, but the need for them because of identity fraud is just as flimsy, with Brown's claims of parliament having put the relevant safeguards and accountability needed into the legislation simply untrue. He also says how he "is in no doubt about the desirability of a debate over pre-charge detention", yet there's little point in having a debate when both Brown himself and Jacqui Smith have time and again made clear that they favour an increase from 28 days, and when Smith has hinted that the legislation for an increase could come before parliament before Christmas. They don't seem to realise that an increase from 28 days has become the defining issue, the summation of all that has been wrong about Labour's approach to civil liberties. When we potentially have a longer "pre-charge" period than some dictatorships, something is clearly rotten, and no amount of spurious claims from the police or intelligence chiefs that longer "may" be needed are going to convince us otherwise.

The CiF comment thread on Kettle's piece is a good guide to how much further Brown and Straw could have gone. The "dangerous pictures" bill deserves to be withdrawn immediately; control orders are both illiberal and ineffective; those not convicted of any crime subject to removal to countries which are known to practice torture on the grounds that they are "not conducive to the public good" should be tried rather than simply got rid of; and the tightening of the prevention from harassment act to ensure that those engaged in legitimate protest are not prevented from doing so, all could also have been begun to be dealt with. In places Brown also falls into producing the same sort of chutzpah as that of Straw above, claiming that "our abhorrence of torture is and must be unequivocal", which must be a surprise to those who found themselves kidnapped by the CIA and taken to black sites, all with the connivance of a nod and a wink from the British authorities, who knew full well what was going on. Recent allegations have even suggested that there was a black site on Diego Garcia, the islands we kicked the inhabitants off, giving their home to the US military, from which attacks on Iraq have taken place.

Overall though, this was a good start, and an encouraging break from the past 10 years of hardly hidden contempt for the "civil liberties brigade". These words however must precipitate action, otherwise Brown will fall even further into the currently deserved sobriquet of bottling it.

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10/25/2007 08:27:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, October 24, 2007 

Elsewhere...

Both Sunny and Unity join the attack on Nadine Dorries, who just embarrassed herself on Newsnight, while Tom Bower writes one of the best articles to feature in the Grauniad's comment pages for quite some time.

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10/24/2007 11:07:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

I'm bitter, but I haven't been eating lemons?

Don't you long for the days when pop music was daring enough to be radical, when its main practitioners weren't drug addicts with nothing to talk about except their own innate self-pity, angst and brain-addling relationships? When social comment amounted to more than just saying "Britain is shit" and bands like the Enemy would have been bottled off any stage they dared to step on?

It seems then that we have a champion in Kate Nash. Yes, that would be the same Kate Nash who over the past year has been entertaining the nation with such profound lyrics as

You said I must eat so many lemons,
'cause I am so bitter.
I said "I'd rather be with your friends mate,
cause they are much fitter"

Her most recent single, Mouthwash, rather than being a completely empty, vacuous, vapid song shat out to help fill up an album being rushed out to follow up the bewildering success of "Foundations" is in fact a comment on the Iraq war. Here are the lyrics to Mouthwash in full:

This is my face, covered in freckles with an occasional spot and some veins.
This is my body, covered in skin, and not all of it you can see
And, this, is my mind, it goes over and over the same old lines
And, this, is my brain, it's torturous analytical thoughts make me go insane

And I use mouthwash
Sometimes I floss
I got a family
And I drink lots of tea

I've got nostalgic don't know
I've got familar faces
I've got a mixed-up memory
And I've got favourite places

And I'm sitting at home on a Friday night (2x)
And I'm sitting at home on a Friday night and I hope everything's going to be alright (2x)

This is my face, I've got a thousand opinions and not the time to explain
And this is my body, and no matter how you try and disable it, I'll still be
here
And, this, is my mind, and although you try to infringe you cannot confine
And, this, is my brain, and even if you try and hold me back there's nothing
that you can gain

Because I use mouthwash
Sometimes I floss
I got a family
And I drink lots of tea

I've got nostalgic don't know
I've got familar faces
I've got a mixed-up memory
And I've got favourite places

And I'm sitting at home on a Friday night (2x)
And I'm sitting at home on a Friday night and I hope everything's going to be alright (2x)

Even the most intrepid of literary critics determined to find a wider meaning or interpretation of the above would struggle to come to any other conclusion that the song is merely anything other than the insecure ramblings of a teenage mind unable to think about anything other than themselves. Nash, however, has other ideas:

“With ‘Mouthwash’ I read this play called Guardians about a female soldier who was pictured torturing Iraqis,” Nash explained to DiS.

“There’s a monologue from her and the one thing she says she couldn’t get out of her head was these women buy toothpaste, like they’re in a totally different world but they’re the same as her.

Perhaps not as ridiculous as some might first think, Nash explained:

“When you strip away everything from someone you have the same basic needs like brushing your teeth so this was saying don’t judge me... it’s a bit of a protest song really.”


Nash's own clutching at such pretentious straws would be more tolerable if so many other music critics hadn't fallen into raptures over her piss-poor compositions. In the wake of Lily Allen, who at least has an eye for some detail, even if it leads to similarly bad lyrics, the music industry, as incestuous and unimaginative as ever has sent out the call out for other young women with affected accents to sing about their inane thoughts. Instead of pointing out the fact that Nash, like other current indie year-long sensations such as the Kooks, are all the products of arts colleges and about as far removed from the working-class backgrounds they pretend to be from as is possibly imaginable, Kitty Empire and other so-called critics have lapped it up. She entered Pseuds Corner for the final paragraph of her review:

For all Nash's exciting newness, her observations can be as prosaic as they are fresh. Indeed, her genius is sometimes accidental. 'This is my body,' she lilts on 'Mouthwash', like some female Jesus, offering herself up for consumption.

Alexis Petridis is one of only a few admirable exceptions.

It's not so much that Nash is a one-off, but rather she epitomises the current wave of "indie" bands and performers. Taking their cue from the incredibly overrated Libertines, the likes of the View and the previously mentioned Enemy, who draw more from the Jam's music without bothering with their lyrics have both hit number one this year with their mundane ordinariness. When you consider that the View's most well-known song is about wearing a pair of jeans for four days, it's hard not to think that what was once counter-culture has like everything turned full circle. You can't help but welcome the likes of Ian Brown's "Illegal Attacks" (mp3) which has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer when the rest of the crop can't see beyond their own navel.

The Arctic Monkeys' second album, which eschewed the dreary obsession with clubbing and pubbing of the first album in favour of a wider view, Bloc Party's A Weekend in the City and the Rakes' Ten New Messages have been the few exceptions from this year's rather meagre crop of new music to dare to address issues such as terrorism, being in an minority and the emptiness of modern existence while not sacrificing the need to come up with a decent tune while at it. We perhaps ought to leave the final comment to John Brainlove:

I think the Iraq War was actually influenced by Kate Nash because she's so fucking brain splittingly awful in every possible way that she brings out the human genocidal impulse.

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10/24/2007 09:41:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

The downfall of Respect and any real alternative.

As seems to happen every few years on the remnants of the far left, the latest attempt at creating a common front seems to breaking apart. Respect, itself built in part on the ruins of the Socialist Alliance, seems to be on the brink of complete meltdown. Rather than the infighting being about the fragile coalition between some of the Islamist groups within the structure and the left-wingers, as long expected and predicted, its downfall seems to be down to the breakdown of relations between the Socialist Workers' Party and George Galloway himself, with Galloway complaining of the "Leninist" tendency of those in the higher reaches of the SWP. As the editorial in this week's Socialist Worker points out, this more than anything tends to suggests that Galloway's vanity and ego are once again getting the better of him: the SWP and the SW were among the few that didn't call Galloway on his intellectually bankrupt decision to go on Celebrity Big Brother, or his continuing preference to go on sojourns to Cuba and on tour while his constituents in Bethnal Green lack a representative in parliament. TWFY shows he's turned up in a mere 12% of votes in the current parliament, speaking a grand total of six times.

Lenin, Socalist Unity and Dave's Part all have more on the machinations going on. More than anything though, it shows that the current crisis in politics is affecting not just the main parties, but nearly all of them, perhaps with the exception of the Greens, who have of late being debating whether they should have an established leader or not, something they have previously looked askance upon. With the differences between the three main parties becoming fewer and less discernible, the left especially ought to be able to capitalise on the lack of genuine choice; instead, like all the rest it's turning on itself rather than taking the fight to its opponents.

It's more than apparent that any attempts to "reclaim" the Labour party are both naive and also doomed to failure. The need for a party to the left of New Labour has never been more vital, as Brown's unopposed ascent to the leadership of the party showed, yet the left is currently either cowed and impotent, as the party conference demonstrated, or more interested in tearing chunks off those within its own ranks. As Dave Osler writes, it's quite true that the far left has always had more than its fair share of arrogant control freaks, more concerned with their own cults of personality than in the interests of those who so desperately need representation, but this is no excuse for the miserable failure to even come close to something that could pick up more than a dozen votes at the ballot box. Respect was an admirable attempt, yet with Galloway at the helm, one of those rabid "anti-imperialists" who finds it easier to find common cause with oppressors, dictators and murderous "resistance" fighters (as his continued defenses of Hizbullah and the Iraqi "resistance"* have shown) than broad-based freedom movements it was always doomed to eventual failure, especially when it also has within it those who hold as some of their foremost beliefs ideas that are anathema to any real social liberal.

Is there an easy answer to any of the above? Probably not. Even by the standards of the far left, the sectarianism inherent amongst the various Trotskyist groupings is especially virulent in this country. Yet building a left alternative to New Labour without them is almost certainly impossible. As much as the Euston manifesto was rightly mocked and sneered at for its apologia for liberal interventionism with their real intentions masked under that banner, such a statement of belief might be the best hope for the left to come together. While the Euston manifesto was unashamedly internationalist, hardly mentioning anything about economics, for instance, such a statement would have to deal with both the former and with positioning on social issues which would instantly flush out the intolerant Islamists that Harry's Place is so intent on tackling. It might well be the only hope left to kick start the alternative that so many are waiting for.

*Talking about the Iraqi "resistance" in such broad strokes as Galloway does is to invite the valid accusation that you are therefore supporting the activities of al-Qaida in Iraq and the Salafist, takfirist jihadis of the kind that have massacred the Shias and others in the thousands through suicide bombings. There are some sections of the Iraqi insurgency, such as Hamas in Iraq and the 1920 Revolution Brigades, based more on the Islamist thinking of the Muslim Brotherhood than on that of bin Laden et al, that are non-sectarian and completely opposed to the slaughter perpetuated by AQI that are almost honourable, but that's as far as it goes.

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10/24/2007 08:47:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Scum-watch: More page 3 idol and hysteria over projections.

One of the few things I forgot to mention in yesterday's meandering post about the return of the Scum's depressing, soft-pornographic, vile page 3 idol competition (nudity) is that as with all the other little boy wank mags that encourage their readers to send in photographs of themselves or their girlfriends, there are little to no safeguards involved in determining the actual age of those who send in the semi-naked images. The Press Complaints Commission recently found that FHM had published an image of a 14-year-old girl topless, sent in by someone other than herself. Despite the Scum's righteous anger against the hidden scourge of paedophilia, it failed to report the ruling, probably because it is leaving itself wide open to the same thing happening to it. The only two criteria for submitting your image in to the Scum's compo are that you're over 18 and haven't had your breasts enhanced by plastic. It really would be a tragedy of the Scum were to fall victim to history repeating, wouldn't it?

Elsewhere in today's Scum, it comments on the Office for National Statistics' projection that by 2016 the population of the UK will have increased to 65 million and by 2031 to 71 million, mainly due to the effects of immigration:

FIVE million more people will be crammed into Britain in less than TEN years, official figures showed last night.

The UK’s population will hit a staggering 65million by 2016. And the explosion will be driven by immigrants.

The growth will be the equivalent of half the population of Greater London.

The Government’s own prediction shows our overcrowded island swelling by at least 2.1million immigrants.


Within the first four sentences the article has abandoned any pretense of attempting to approach what are projections based on the current data available in a calm manner. Our island is "overcrowded" and the new arrivals will be "crammed" in. It gets even more alarmist:

It could mean London ending up having Third World-style shanty towns springing up in the shadows of the City’s gleaming skyscrapers.

Where do you go from such obviously offensive, insensitive and ridiculous claims? To contradicting the report on immigration from last week that showed that on the whole, the public services have been coping admirably with the rise in immigration from eastern Europe:

Britain’s NHS and education systems are already under huge pressure.

The words "prediction" and "projection" only feature twice in the entire report, the latter only in relation to Liam Byrne's comments. Nowhere is it made clear that this entire report could turn out to be complete hogwash: it's an extrapolation of what the population will be if the exact same level of immigration continues over the coming decades. The figure of 190,000 comes from the ONS' corrected figure (PDF) of the level of immigration in 2004 and 2005, when the numbers of those coming from Poland etc were at their height. The last two years, especially the figures from so far this year, suggest that the levels have already peaked. The political and economic factors that have led to so many coming to the UK also may have already started to turn: the defeat of Poland's Law and Justice party in the election on Sunday, widely loathed by the young Poles who disproportionately make up the numbers that have came here over the last couple of years, might help to signal a return.

The ONS' figures are really only any help as a guide to what might happen, and judging by the government's reaction, crackdowns on immigration are only likely to heighten thanks to the current turning of opinion against those whom other reports have already made clear have helped enormously with our continuing economic growth. It's quite true that we can't just constantly mention the economic argument when defending the current levels of immigration; while the reports have mostly showed that cohesion has not been affected, such a continued rise in immigration certainly does risk a rise both in frustration and tension between the communities. The answer though is not to play the fear and anxiety card, as the tabloids continuously have, or to pretend that there is nothing to worry about, but to set out the reasons why too harsh a response to the current levels of migration will if anything only bring even worse problems, both economically and socially.

The Scum's leader column is slightly calmer, but only just. Quoting from it is pretty pointless, as the only thing worth responding to is it's argument that the government are doing nothing to prepare for the consequences, which is absurd, as the response of Liam Byrne has already showed. It too only notes that the ONS' figures are a "forecast" once, before going on to treat its predictions as gospel. After years of fanning the flames of fear of outsiders and in some cases preaching open prejudice, it's ever so slightly rich for the Sun now to be so concerned about social cohesion. If it really was, it would be calm instead of the diametric opposite. Its constant hysterical stance only does damage to its at times more than legitimate arguments.

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10/24/2007 07:54:00 PM | | | links to this post

Tuesday, October 23, 2007 

First they came for the torrent websites...

If you want an example of how some of the mainstream media, especially those who have to get the BREAKING STORY out as fast possible rely on press releases, you only have to look at the articles up on the BBC and Sun websites about the closing of the OiNK music torrent community. (Wikipedia entry here.)

The statements from both Cleveland police and the IFPI are available here and here. Compare and contrast as you wish. Thing is, relying on such releases as your primary source means that you're incredibly likely to repeat blatant lies and twisting of the truth from those justifying their actions.

The police claim in their statement that the operating of OiNK was "extremely lucrative" and "members paid donations via debit or credit cards, ensuring their continued access to the site". The former is highly unlikely, while the latter is completely untrue. While I was not a member of OiNK, mainly because I already have more music than I can listen to, I have friends that were, and unlike some other private torrent trackers, where you can donate to bounce your download/upload ratio back up to 1.0, OiNK was well known as being one of the most vigorous pursuers of those who failed to keep their ratio at the required level. As one former user has wrote on a forum:

Donations were completely voluntary. At most you received advanced search features which allowed you to break down your searches by year/artist/album/genre etc. You also gained immunity from the inactivity ban sweeps. They put it this way: "No amount of money you donate will replace the bytes you're not uploading." All that donations did was give you two invites, give you a star, make your irc hostname end in .donor, give you advanced search abilities and access to statistics, no ratio changes, nothing.

Running a site with 180,000 users would incur significant server costs. OiNK, again like other sites do, never begged for donations towards those costs. For the police to claim that this was "extremely lucrative" smells like the proverbial, and for the Scum to suggest the man arrested was making hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, extrapolating from the statement that "this is big business, with hundreds of thousands of pounds being made" is outrageous.

Similarly disingenuous have been the claims, repeated by the BBC and others from the IFPI's statement that OiNK was the "primary source worldwide for illegal pre-release music". The statement itself actually almost tells the true story in this passage:

Closed internet communities known as “ripping groups” often get demos, early mixes of commercial releases and promotional copies of pre-release albums in advance of release with a view to distributing the music as widely and as far ahead of release as possible. Each ripping group gains cachet amongst its peers for being the first to get new music and uses torrent sites to distribute the music as widely as possible.

The first part of the paragraph is true, while the second is the biggest of lies. Ripping groups, those within the "scene", as it's known, do compete with one another to release music first and before each other. However, far from using torrent sites and wanting to distribute the music as far as possible, such groups are actually adamantly opposed to the public spreading of their work and use IRC and private FTPs to distribute their releases within the "scene" itself. Inevitably though their releases are quickly distributed outside it despite their own opposition, and OiNK, being one of the most popular private music sharing sites, was often one of the first places they appeared. Occasionally users on OiNK might have acquired copies of albums before their release date and posted them there, but the vast majority of pre-releases are from the "scene" groups.

Part of the reason why OiNK is being blamed for the above is that the "scene" groups are a problem of the music industry's own making. The vast majority of the members of those groups are those within the record companies themselves, or those once or twice removed from them: those who receive the promotional copies ultra early through their links, whether they're reviewers, family members, workers, DJs or otherwise. The music industry has made attempts to stop such releases occurring, notably only sending out promo copies of recent Foo Fighters and White Stripes' albums on tape or vinyl, putting watermarks on the CD which can lead the ripped copy back to the individual responsible, "promobots", which repeat "this is a promotional copy" or whatever every so often throughout the duration of the CD, etc, but mostly these attempts have failed. They're never going to completely shut down leaks, but it's the height of hypocrisy to blame places like OiNK when the industry itself is chiefly responsible for its own downfall. Also of note is that up until last night the OiNK servers were still operable, far from the statement's claim that they were seized last week, only highlighting the mendacity in their public releases.

The music industry has to realise that while places link OiNK are never going to disappear, their current head in the sand approach to both the quality and digital rights management on most of the music available for "legal download" is only exacerbating the piracy "problem". In effect, they're actually laughing: places like iTunes are hugely popular even though they mostly provide crippled, far from CD quality music. They no longer even have to produce the discs that previously bumped up the cost ever so slightly in such quantites! OiNK was especially noted for its section dedicated to FLAC rips; near lossless quality copies of the CD. No popular legal download site currently provides music either in WAV or FLAC format (juno.co.uk and bleep.com are occasional notable exceptions), and part of the reason why the Russian allofmp3.com was so popular, apart from its low prices, was that it provided the user with choice as to the quality and format of what they paid to download. The industry control freaks are opposed to that exact choice. The only way progress will be made against such piracy will be if they open up, and they have so far showed no signs of being prepared to do so.

Slight update: Torrent Freak, as well as providing excellent coverage, reports that the man arrested has been released on bail. There's also an official "OiNK memorial" blog been set-up.

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10/23/2007 10:00:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Scum-watch: Thoughts on the return of page 3 idol and reoffending.

The Scum's vile page 3 "idol" competition (warning: nudity) has started up again, with the same pathetic prize as last year - a one-year contract with Page 3, as many teenage wank mag shoots as you can agree to, a holiday with added photoshoot and £5,000 - after which you'll be unceremoniously dumped back into obscurity.

As usual, my faith in humanity upon seeing the legions of young women willingly send in photographs of themselves semi-naked in the forlorn hope that they'll be selected to at least go through into the finals has plummeted through the floor. Why do they do it? Is it hubris on their part, or is it the exact opposite, the search for affirmation and acceptance through the exposing of their body parts? Is it simple pride, showing off what they have because they themselves adore how they look and want to share it with others, or again the apparently increasing belief, amongst younger teenagers especially, that glamour modeling is something to aspire towards?

I don't pretend to have any answers, mainly because I'm a butt ugly young male who consequently has never felt the need to shove a JPEG version of his pathetically average penis into anyone's face. It is amazing however what can constitute something sexually arousing to someone, as any quick trip into the cesspool of the internet will quickly alert you to. That's the other thing though - the internet has in effect flooded the market. Once the avid masturbator interested in the equivalent of readers' wives and girlfriends, which is what the page 3 idol competition in essence is, would have had to turn to the pages of the likes of Razzle and Escort, available from your local friendly corner shop, along with brown paper bag and the recommendations of the owner, who would invariably offer you something "harder" from under the counter. Now those women who would have once had pride of place in the centre pages of those crusty magazines, and as any peruser of older issues of such publications will be able to tell you, they were mostly the older, overweight lady, often outdoors and subsequently showing admirable contempt for the public decency laws, are left with desperately trying to gain attention on the plethora of websites dedicated to submissions from the public. They sink without trace.

I have nothing against exhibitionism, which is also what the page 3 idol contest adds up to. The main question ought to be however how many of those who are submitting their photographs to the Scum would have done if there was not a cash prize, the chance of national recognition and sort of fame, however faint, through doing so. The defenders of pornography, and while I dislike it intensely, I'm not ashamed to admit I use it, often point out that the women involved aren't necessarily the ones being exploited - although disproportionately those who have been abused, come from low income backgrounds or had generally what we'd define as miserable lives make up the numbers of those involved in it, as the tragic recent death of Haley Paige, a well-known US porn performer showed - they're exploiting those that are paying for the privilege of watching them au-naturelle. This clearly doesn't apply in the page 3 idol case, as they're making nothing out of it while the one-handed hordes of Sun readers and page3.com browsers sneer and jerk in equal measure at the collection of today's unlucky 25.

Disregarding the faux-philosophy and psychology behind why women involve themselves in pornography, if anything the page 3 idol contest does bring a whole new meaning to the idea of selling your soul to Rupert Murdoch. Getting your "tits out for the lads" while drunk is one thing; doing it more than happily for a national newspaper for nothing in return is quite another. It ought to show that the Sun, a publication which is nothing more than a propaganda vehicle for Murdoch which pretends to care what its readers' think and like ought to be thought of no better than the semen-splattered pages of Zoo or Nuts are. Instead, prime ministers and politicians bend over backwards to appeal to the base instincts of a pornographer who just happens to have acquired himself a media empire. The Scum is currently harrying Gordon Brown incessantly about the EU reform treaty - he ought to throw the Scum's exploitation of young women back in their faces. Murdoch isn't afraid to play dirty, as the constant lies printed in the Sun show, so why should those accused of selling this country down the river not respond like for like?

Take its response to the release of yesterday's figures from the Ministry of Justice (I shudder every time I write that Orwellian term) which while showing a 36% rise in those under the highest Mappa regime of supervision committing a serious offence actually recorded no real statistical increase, the numbers increasing year-on-year from 61 to 83, a rise of 22. It also doesn't note that as well as defining a serious offence as "any murder, manslaughter, attempted homicide, rape or attempted rape" it also includes arson, kidnap or armed robbery, as the Guardian makes clear. The Sun leader also erroneously claims that "almost 1,700 serious sex offenders committed more assaults while supposedly being monitored". The figures show nothing of the sort, instead showing that almost 1,700 were charged or cautioned for not keeping up with their requirements under their signing of the sex offenders register.

While statistics are never going to be any comfort to those who are the victims of those crimes, if anything it shows that Mappa is doing the best job it probably can. The fallibility of such organisations is never taken into consideration - some of those who reoffend simply could never have been stopped from doing so or showed no signs of being about to do so. The numbers committing a second serious offence could probably be brought down further, but unless we completely re-evaulate the criminal justice system as it stands, and start locking away those who pose such a serious threat indefinitely and disregard the possibility that they can reform, such recidivism is always going to occur. The question has to be whether we are prepared to lock away even more people than we currently do for even longer, when all the evidence suggests that doing so simply doesn't work.

The recent Guardian poll that suggested that the views of the public have now polarised between the two poles, to describe them crudely as the "harsher" and "softer" positions, ought to tell us that there is now the chance to change course completely. No matter how many times the Sun argues in its leader that the "only answer to swelling prison numbers is ... more prisons", it doesn't alter the fact we simply cannot build our way out of this problem. Polly Toynbee in one of her occasional decent pieces today made clear the way that even good figures that show crime is falling are spun to make them look the opposite.

To change this, Labour, whose policies as the Sun says have been appalling, although for entirely different reasons to why they think they've been, has to take the fight to those in favour of ever increasing draconian responses. Crime has dropped dramatically over the last ten years, and one of the reasons why despite that it continues to be such an issue of concern is that rehabilitation in overcrowded prisons simply isn't possible. To make them more effective, less people have to be imprisoned. This means more treatment for those addicted to drugs, and not inside prisons, but outside them. It means that the mentally ill who are stagnating in jails and only getting sicker need to be taken out of the system. Prison should return to what they were designed for: to protect the public from those who are a genuine danger to society, not as the dumping ground for the misfits and broken. It seems so obvious, but in the face of such hostility from the "popular" press has meant this has been impossible. Sadly, the time for this to happen, when the government had the support which such a move would be possible, has likely passed. This ought to be standard Liberal Democrat territory, but instead they were some of those most outraged by the tiny relative increase. Martin Kettle reckons there is a real choice (a theme I might return to when I have more time) but on crime and punishment, there certainly doesn't seem to be one.

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10/23/2007 08:09:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Call to arms - Mad Mel has moved.

Via D-Notice, I, err, notice that Melanie "Clinically Sane" Phillips has moved home from her previous, commentless own site over to the Spectator's execrable home of all right-wing thought, which does feature the opportunity to stick your two pence worth in.

While Mel has yet to sound off on her favourite topic of how Iran is plotting the second Holocaust, or "Londonistan", she has posted about the global warming "scam". A BBC journalist has already challenged her. Let's see how long it is before Mel begs to have comments on her posts turned off, or moderation kicks in.

Note to self - Phillips has two l's, you dipshit.

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10/23/2007 07:11:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, October 22, 2007 

They took 7.8 million of YOUR MONEY and who do we blame? Err, no one.

Back a little later than I expected, so I'll get back into the swing of things properly tomorrow. First, if like me you missed FCC's dissections of tabloid garbage, his posts last week following the government's publishing of its own report into immigration (PDF) are essential reading.

Next, here's a scandal that it seems wasn't. The report by Deloitte into ITV's various phone-in scams discovers that at least £7.8 million was defrauded from viewers who had no chance of winning competitions or influencing public votes. Peter Hain described it as "daylight robbery". One of the most egregious examples of how money was taken under false pretenses was on Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway, where those who weren't within an hour of where the show was filmed or suitably excited/telegenic/charismatic never had any chance of winning, which also has Ant and Dec (or is it Dec and Ant?) as executive producers. Like Manuel, they "knew nothing". Despite Michael Grade's previous bowel movement which declared that there would be "zero tolerance" towards any examples of fakery or deception of viewers, no one has resigned, and it seems likely that no one will be sacked, as Grade has now decided there shouldn't be a "witch-hunt". ITV have said that the money will be paid back, while Ant and Dec have promised that the money from the phone-ins on the next series will be given to charity. Never mind that Richard and Judy's attempts at giving the money fraudulently made back were far from successful: the problem has been solved.


Or at least that's the message that the middle-market tabloids have given off. While the Daily Mirror was the only one of the tabloids to give it a full-splash on Friday (the Sun cleared the front page to go with the suicide bombing targeting Benzair Bhutto in its final edition, previously having the ITV scandal in a sidebar, then featured it again the following day, again in a sidebar), the Mail had more important things on its mind, like the ring that Dodi never gave to Diana prior to them both coming to a sticky end. (Oh, and a suitably fruity photograph of the tennis coach who sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl. She "seduced" her; you can imagine what the Mail would say if it was a man in the same circumstances.) The Express isn't worth even looking at: Madeleine, where there hasn't been any new developments for weeks, still occupied the front page every single day.




How very different to the Mail's coverage of the BBC's own recent travails. When the BBC published its own findings into examples of fakery, none of which involved any defrauding of the viewer, but did involve some slight deceptions, the Mail declared it the "SHAMING OF THE BBC". After Blue Peter admitted that Socks the cat should have been named Cookie, only for it to be changed after they wondered about the suitability of the name, the Mail splashed with it, screaming "NEW LIES FIASCO SHAMES THE BBC". On the very day that the ITV report was the published, the Mail was shattering windows with its shrieking of "BBC TO SCREEN MORE REPEATS", despite for years calling for the BBC to be radically slashed and cut down to size. The Mail had previously splashed on one example of ITV alleged "fakery", that involving the death of a man in a documentary which it turned out wasn't, but that was during the silly season.

Just how do we explain this apparent attitude to ignore ITV's far more serious offences, which may well amount to fraud and definitely show a contempt for their very viewers? It can't be put down to the fact that the BBC is funded by every single one of us; ITV was taking the money off the public too. Is it just snobbery on the behalf of the Mail, thinking that its readers' won't have "wasted" their cash on such frivolities? If it is, this is incredibly blind: those who buy the paper might not have done, but their children are a different matter. Far more likely is that the Mail fears the effects of what a purge might well mean to newspapers themselves if they were held up to the same degree of scrutiny.

You don't have to read this blog or FCC to know that the tabloids lie on a daily basis; polls have consistently shown that the public holds around the same amount of trust in tabloid journalists as they do with estate agents, lower even than that in politicians. How often do journalists get the sack for getting it wrong? Apart from Andrew Gilligan, who ironically was completely in the right, you'll be hard pressed to find any such examples in recent memory or even history. If ITV were to go by the letter of zero tolerance, as Grade said, it would set a precedent also in the City itself. So far, just one member of the board of Northern Rock has resigned. No one at ITV has, or seems to be likely to. At the BBC, the Blue Peter editor's gone, as have others involved in the various bits of fakery. It's a weird scale when you add it all up: you can play naive, economically unsound games with the money of thousands of people and not have to face the consequences when it all goes wrong; you can defraud the public and cynically take their cash when they have no chance of appearing with Ant and Dec; but if you change the name of a cat that kiddies have voted for the name of, then you may as well hand in your notice straight away. So is the logic not just of media and their decision on what constitutes an outrage, but that of the market itself.

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10/22/2007 10:14:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, October 15, 2007 

Hiatus.

Being dragged away once again. Should be back next Monday. Keep it dusty.

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10/15/2007 11:11:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

So. Farewell Then. Menzies Campbell.

"Now we really are in the shitter."

Very little overall surprise that Ming Campbell has been unceremoniously forced out as Liberal Democrat leader, jumping before he became the victim of a death of a thousand cuts like Charles Kennedy; more that it has been both so soon and so sudden. There were murmurings at the Liberal Democrat conference, mostly stirred by the media who can think of nothing more boring than a week of actual discussion of new policies when they can challenge an under-performing leader, but it was assumed that there would be something of a more dignified hand-over approaching the changing of the guard in Labour earlier in the year, rather than this brutal and humiliating exit for Ming.

The challenge, more than anything, was two-fold: firstly, Ming simply wasn't Charles Kennedy. The country as a whole would probably have preferred chatshow to stay in the top job regardless of whether he needed to tackle his drinking problem. That he was also seen as being at least partially responsible for Kennedy's demise also didn't help. However hard Ming tried, and he did, with his speech at the conference being decent if rather frightening because most people had never seen Campbell visibly angry and so apparently determined to make the best of it, he simply couldn't be equal to the easy charm and ordinariness that radiated from Kennedy. Secondly, the Lib Dem's three main, easily identifiable, rallying cry policies have all either fallen by the wayside or diminished in value. Iraq is still a disaster, but it's one we're getting out of shortly; student top-up fees have been slightly lightened by the government's reintroduction of grants; and their 50p top-rate of tax on those earning over £100,000 a year has evolved into the more fashionable green taxes.

Add into this mix Cameron's success with the Conservatives, resulting in some floating voters' returning to the Tories, especially, if the polls are to be believed, enthused by the Tories' inheritance tax pledge, and this, rather than Ming's actual leadership are what has left the party in an apparent mess.

Ming's victory back in January last year was itself such a compromise. Simon Hughes had been the victim of an outting by force by the Scum, the Mark Oaten "scandal" had just occurred, while Ming's other main opponents, Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne had neither the recognition factor nor the support within the party to stand in the way of the heir apparent. At best Ming was only going to lead the party into the next election and no further: holding onto the gains made under Kennedy once two-party politics was re-established was to be his real challenge, rather than furthering them, impressive victories in a couple of by-elections or not, and even this strategy was undermined by the changes in the political wind and the Lib Dems' actual policies.

The biggest tragedy is perhaps that Campbell, out of all the current "big three" political leaders was by far the most honest, urbane and principled. He needed some prompting from Charles Kennedy before he was totally sold on opposition to the Iraq war, but he soon became associated as the only person in any position of authority that was asking the pertinent questions needed. The term "flawed prospectus" may not have been most passionate denunciation of an illegal conflict that has led to the deaths of so many, but it was Ming's way of landing a blow without opening himself up to any of the easy smears of either being a defeatist, an apologist or an anti-American. Despite his poor performances at prime minister's questions, where he seemed out of his depth to begin with, he improved, and he was always surest when in actual debate, not the mock Punch and Judy version served up on Wednesday lunchtimes. He shined on a recent Question Time, but doing so there was never going to turn the polls his way.

That was perhaps his downfall: he lacked the killer instinct that those who are really successful require. True, Charles Kennedy didn't have it either, but then he was up against Blair and Hague and Blair and Howard, a choice to make any believer in genuine political choice shudder. Again, that also hasn't changed under Brown and Cameron, but some seem convinced enough that it has to demand a change. The obvious successor is Nick Clegg: solid enough at Home Affairs, but one of the "Orange Book" liberals, and nowhere near as genial as either Ming or Kennedy. The Liberal Democrats might gain in the short term, but politics tonight in this country is the poorer for Campbell's unhappy, isolated resignation. The only bright spot is that his tenure came nowhere near to the disaster that was Iain Duncan Smith's of the Tories, and that is very little comfort.

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10/15/2007 09:19:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Usmanov-watch: Playing the victim.

From one revolting end of the Murdoch empire to another, the Alisher Usmanov charm offensive was back on yesterday in one of the most sycophantic, one-sided articles to appear in a so-called newspaper of record. Congratulations have to go to Mark Franchetti, who was completely taken-in and at times seems in complete awe of Mr Usmanov and his digs:

It was partly in an attempt to curb claims of a shady past that he invited me to his Moscow mansion and agreed to talk for the first time about the circumstances that led to his being imprisoned in 1980. Usmanov runs his empire from the headquarters of Metal-loinvest, his main company, in a lavish building in central Moscow fitted with Italian marble and heavy chandeliers. From there I was driven 30 miles along Rublovka, a road that cuts through a forest of firs to a “billionaires’ row” where Usmanov has a 30-acre estate beside the Moscow river. A 16ft-high metal fence encircles the property.

Usmanov, who never leaves home without a retinue of bodyguards armed with machine-guns, was working in a large, single-storey wooden villa which he has built as a private office next to his palatial house.

Casually dressed in a Lacoste polo shirt, tracksuit bottoms and leather slippers, he was sitting in an armchair, advising a friend on the telephone on how best to clinch a £1m deal. In front of him was a small table and a bell with which to summon staff.

In the next room, his personal adviser on equities was checking the latest share prices on a 30in computer screen.

Sipping tea after his phone call, Usmanov studied the screen with the analyst as they discussed whether to sell a large holding in a Russian bank. A butler delivered frequent messages or passed on one of several mobile phones on which the tycoon fielded further calls.


If you aren't throwing up already having read just that extract, then both Tim and Craig himself thoroughly fisk and destroy this partial, despicably craven meeting of convenience. Craig incidentally, despite never being served with anything approaching a writ, is described thusly:

Usmanov rejected the charges and threatened to sue Murray “if he can first prove that he is completely sane”.

Usmanov likes playing the victim, that's for sure. A venal bully with the full weight of his fortune and power behind him picking on those who dare to call him on his dubious past, and he's the one who's been wronged.

“I was a victim and when I came out I realised I had one last chance to make a success of my life. I won’t fall so low as to fight those who want to blacken my name. Let their slurs weigh on their conscience. Mine is clean.”

No, he's more than happy to slur his accusers by questioning their sanity while his shysters at Schillings and PR associates as Finsbury PR do the real leg-work. It may be down to last week's Usmanov story in the Sunset Times, about his connections with, err, corruption and fraud, allegations which curiously go unnoted in the interview that this piece of arslikhan inspired, but that doesn't acquit the ST. This is simply lazy, callow journalism from a newspaper that once exposed the Thalidomide scandal. How far away those days seem.

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10/15/2007 08:53:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Scum-watch: A year of knuckledragging.

It's been a whole year since the launching of MyScum, the Sun's witless and frequently racist comment and forum section, and the site has been asking for votes on the "best" of it for the past week. Perhaps they ought to have referred to the MySun section on this very blog first.

Let's have a look at just what passes for topical debate on the Sun's glorified web forum right now:



If you're rather disgusted by the Sun's website own passing of the blame onto "immigrants" (at least they used to blame the blacks, the Irish or whomever that week's folk devil was rather than a homogeneous block of multi-nationals in some cases fleeing oppression) then that's got nothing on some of the actual overt racism and xenophobia going on right now in the forums:

the eastern europeans are a clever lot,and have no feelings for the country they live in..they committ the most crime,they gamble openly on street corners,ive seen about a half a dozen of them the other day with a foldaway table,when the heat is off they open it and play that cheating game where you guess where the dice or stone is under the 3 cups,a few were caught in our local sun day market but only after they had taken hundreds of gullible shoppers,they were finaly arrested.. most are of romany decent or cheaper versions of the gypsies. are they kosavans ,serbs ,bosnians,or rumanian,im not sure,but they are not your average citizen.

Well lets look at the state of our NHS. First of all we have BRITISH citizens being smeared in their own FAECES in numerous NHS wards up and down the country. Now i've read that some patients are pulling out their own f****** teeth as NHS dentists are no longer available. Why do we have this problem when we pay the highest taxes in the world. I'll tell you why...It's because of the NHS WORLD SERVICE where we kindly agree to take care of every immigrant and his dog all in the name of liberalism! Are you prepared to be covered in your own **** with a pair of pliers in your hand so you can yank that wisdom tooth out for the sake of immigrants who want a better life at our expense?

I had the misfortune of going to Harlow,Essex on saturday, I was absolutly amazed at the amount of Eastern Europeans there. Its was like a third world country, had to get out the town can not stand the blighters!

All of the above are just the first posts in the threads. It's worth pointing out that there are some exceptions, but they tend to be in the minority. Truly a year worth celebrating.

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10/15/2007 08:25:00 PM | | | links to this post

Saturday, October 13, 2007 

Is it me, or do the Christmas is being banned stories keep getting earlier?

It usually at least takes until November before the tabloids start printing their annual lies and distortions about how Christmas is being banned thanks to politically correct councils, killjoys with nothing better to do than moan and health and safety fascists. The Daily Mail then has to be congratulated on being first out of the blocks this year, only two months and twelve days before the actual event:

Health and safety killjoys are threatening Britain with a Christmas blackout, council bosses warned yesterday.

Crippling insurance costs and absurd safety requirements mean many local authorities have abandoned their traditional lighting displays.


And so forth. You know the drill. Massive costs, compensation culture, elf 'n' safety rules, it's all here.

Know how that says "many" local authorities? The Mail article provides 3 examples, one from Clevedon, another from Sandwell and finally from Bodmin. Only the Bodmin case is backed up by a statement from a council spokesman. The other two quotes are from the Federation of Small Businesses, which laughably suggests that "Christmas lights excite consumers", and from the Association of British Insurers, neither of which set out any evidence that this going to be replicated across the country, even if the examples are accurate, which, going by past related articles, seems unlikely.

Let me, if I may be so bold, make a prediction. Your local town/city will still have the same familiar, gaudy, depressing, garish lights put up in the first week of November by the same familiar burly men. They will look exactly the same as last year's, except slightly less bright. No one will take any great notice of them. Half the time they won't be turned on. The council will have spent an inordinate amount of money putting them up and buying Christmas trees that would be put to better use elsewhere. Repeat until we're all dead.

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10/13/2007 08:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Bribing the middle classes Labour style.

After such a tumultuous, ignominious week for Labour, you would have thought that they would have retreated, taken stock, figured where they'd gone so hideously wrong, and moved on from there. No such luck. For some reason, Andy Burnham decided to give an interview to the Torygraph over how he believes that there's a "moral case" for the tax system to "recognise commitment and marriage".

If these were, as the Treasury has been furiously spinning, either Burnham's own views or related to comments about inheritance tax, the former would be fair enough while the latter would deserve to be vigorously challenged. As it is, especially considering the week we've just been through, there's only one prism through which this will be viewed: yet another attempt by Labour to shift onto the Conservative's traditional ground.

It's even more questionable when you consider two highly pertinent facts. Firstly, that Brown in one of his few memorable and entirely correct passages of his speech to conference, denounced the Tories' proposed £20 a week bribe to married couples:

"I say to the children of two-parent families, one-parent families, foster parent families; to the widow bringing up children: I stand for a Britain that supports as first-class citizens not just some children and some families but supports all children and all families."

Secondly, the time when such recognition of marriage would be wholeheartedly welcomed has long since passed. Just after the Tories first made their plans known, the audience on Question Time was almost unanimous in both picking holes in and making clear the inherent unfairness in such a scheme. Around the only people who did celebrate it were the moralist, right-wing newspapers: the Mail, Torygraph and Sun all saluting the discriminatory scheme, it has to be said not just on the grounds that it encouraged the establishment and "stability" of the family unit, but also because of the pound signs in their eyes: £20 a week simply for being already married! £1000 a year! When you consider that a married couple, simply for having tied the knot will be getting more back a month than the average person on income support will get in a week on which they have to live on, it only emphasises what an iniquitous and dubious use of taxpayers' money this would be.

Even after all of this, Brown and his acolytes seem blind to the dangers of trying to appease someone who holds the equivalent of all the cards. The Daily Mail, regardless of Dacre's friendship with Brown will never be brought onside, no matter how many of the Conservatives' clothes Labour decides to wear. To go to the Mail itself with this latest shamelessness would have been too brazen and obvious. Instead, Burnham chose the next best place to drop the latest sign that under Brown Labour will be just as opportunistic and shape-shifting as the party was under the helm of Blair. Then again, why should we expect anything else? Today's interview with Cameron in the Grauniad shows that he doesn't care about Labour's cross-dressing, as he knows full well that it only makes him and his party look all the stronger. Labour is only hurting itself, and the Tories are understandably overjoyed.

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10/13/2007 08:03:00 PM | | | links to this post

Friday, October 12, 2007 

Social democracy died long ago, Polly.

Unlike some others in the "blogosphere" who love to tear apart Polly Toynbee's twice-weekly prognostications in the Grauniad (she's columnist of the year, doncha know?), I usually just read her articles, filled as they are with a bizarre Labour love fetish, agree or disagree, and move on. Sure, she talks a lot of bull on occasion, but then so do most newspaper comment piece providers.

Today though she's having one of her twice yearly doubts about just how marvellous Tony/Gordon are. These inevitably follow the latest budget/pre-budget report, which again failed to allocate significant amounts of money to tax credits and abolishing child poverty. It happens invariably every year, but still Polly brushes it off and goes back to pleasuring herself with the clunking fist still foremost in her mind, unable to see the reality that should be staring her in the face: Labour's finished, and all it cares for now is staying in power and standing very, very slightly to the left of the Conservatives.

The really perplexing thing about all this is that Polly once admitted as much in a rare, truly honest piece back in January last year, when she wrote that the Social Democratic Party she was a part of back in the "bad old days" of Militant and Foot was to the left of where New Labour is now. She opined:

But there is a need for a party more radical than Labour, a party that says no to war and no to wasting billions on new nuclear weapons or nuclear reactors, that dares to talk of the greed of the rich, of boardroom kleptocracy and the duty of top earners to shoulder a fairer share.

She wrote that then, and must have believed it. She must have seen all the warning signs since Brown has taken over: after the competent start and the refusal to play politics with the almost immediate "terror" attacks, it's been all downhill. Where Blair once delighted in playing the hard man and trying his best to appeal to the Sun, Brown's every movement was calculated to please Paul Dacre and the Mail. First the u-turn on the reclassification of cannabis, the change on the supercasinos which so exemplified the Blair era of ultra-consumerism, mass-materialism and living for today, now replaced by the Scot son of the manse's almost puritanical stance which Dacre espouses almost as much as a "double-cunting" to his hacks. Like with Blair, such a ploy was doomed to failure from the beginning. No one, even on the soft centre/centre-right like Blair and Brown can keep such right-wingers on their side for long; after a while they start hankering for the real thing, as Toynbee in today's article herself notes, but even going by the short attention span that afflicts the tabloid press the change in tone after Monday's daylight robbery was brutal. The result was Tuesday's Daily Mail front page: vicious, wounding, and more than accurate.

Why only now then does Toynbee finally realise that it was this week that Labour's leaders left social democracy for death? For years she's put up variously with Labour's ruthless social ill-liberalism (notoriously writing one abysmal article on how the middle class is more concerned about ID cards and civil liberties than child poverty), the disastrous foreign policy post 9/11, its incestuous relationship with the rich and powerful and its complete contempt both for the truth and the public, at the last election urging voters to wear nose pegs and disregard Iraq to vote for the party, yet it takes a predictable and nowhere near as egregious as some of Blair's manoeuvres (rules of the game are changing, dropping of SFO's investigation into BAe, refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire during last year's Lebanon conflict, years of spin and lies) act of political shamelessness for Toynbee to get the message.

Toynbee writes:

We now have a centrist government in Europe's most unequal country. Our government stands somewhat to the right of Angela Merkel's coalition in Germany, to the right of economic policy in France, where Nicolas Sarkozy has absorbed social democrats. Fusion politics, like fusion music and food, is one description of this strange death of the centre-left. At least in Europe there are leftwing parties still to make the public arguments: in England, due to our malfunctioning electoral system, a political generation has barely heard the case for social justice.

Yet whose fault is this? Toynbee helped cut the Labour vote at the exact time when it needed it most in the 80s, and then she urged support for it when it deserved it the least. Through her undying belief that Labour's mild policies on redistribution have been making the difference, she might well have helped destroy any chance of the exact leftwing policies she yearns for being introduced. It's come to something when the Liberal Democrats are the only even slightly appealing mainstream political party, and they're flatlining in the polls, stuck with a decent and honourable leader but one who can't make the difference up. The need for a genuine alternative has never been greater, but Polly has helped towards ensuring that any such alternative is almost impossible under our current system.

Related post:
Mr Eugenides - Polly's Viking lets her down

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10/12/2007 08:31:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Iraqi employees campaign continues.

David Miliband has written about the FCO's policy on helping the "locally engaged staff" in Iraq on his blog. Dan Hardie writes about what else you can do in his latest post on the we can't turn them away campaign, but where better to stress the strength of feeling than on Miliband's own talking shop? Try your best to polite. Here's my comment, lest it isn't published:

Mr Miliband, I'll try to be polite in my response to this post, but when you fail to even mention in your entry why the locally-engaged staff need either financial assistance or resettlement, as you put it, it's difficult to take your claim that you feel strongly about this issue seriously.

As the many others above me have already made the point on why the current commitment simply isn't enough and excludes those who are in desperate need of safety, I'll instead approach this from a different angle. If reports in certain sections of the media are to be believed, you yourself were at best agnostic about the Iraq war. Whatever you feelings were then, it's apparent that our involvement in Iraq has been a disaster. At the very least 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died; the last Lancet report, which the Foreign Office privately indicated was based on credible methodology, suggested the toll could be as much as 650,000.

Let's not be involved in one more death in the poor benighted country than is necessary. These individuals risked their lives, and dared to dream in a better tomorrow for their country. To abandon them now would be the final insult and repudiation of their hope. I appreciate the difficulties involved, but those currently outside the remit of the announced change in policy deserve better.

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10/12/2007 08:08:00 PM | | | links to this post

Thursday, October 11, 2007 

The paintball jihad.

And so we come, inevitably, to the latest trial of alleged wannabe jihadist tough guys. If you've followed the previous trials of those few that think blowing themselves up will lead to their instant entrance to paradise, where their every want and need will be attended to by 72 of the highest class of virgins, none of your spinsters who never met the right man kind, you'll have noticed that they often have ideas high above their station, love to denounce the perfidious kuffar and when stripped down to the very basis of their being by the legal system, are revealed as arrogant, ignorant and laughably shallow men.

This lot, if the evidence put to the court over the last couple of days is any indicator, are perhaps the most pathetic so far. Courtesy of the 2006 Terrorism Act, Atilla "most certainly not the Hun" Ahmet and Mohammad Hamid amongst others are accused of receiving/giving "terrorist training". What was one of their favourite methods of inculcating in their pupils the way of jihad? Paintballing.

Yes, that favourite pursuit of office workers on team building exercises and the "sport" of choice for those who never grew out of shooting people with fake guns was being used by these sinister gentlemen in case they ever actually obtained a weapon that didn't just fire a painful round of emulsion. Who knows, maybe they even split themselves off into groups of "kuffars" and "jihadi lions" or perhaps "crusaders" versus the "mujahideen" and fought for hours until the kuffars called in an air strike that as well as killing the jihadi lions blew apart the group from the local secondary school who had been diving in and out of the undergrowth around them. Why go to Iraq where you might conceivably get hurt fighting for what you believe in when you can shoot colourful bullets at your bros near that home of Islamic insurrection, Sevenoaks?

Paintballing was only part of their sinister doctrine of preparing for holy war, however. The court heard that while using a farmer's field, the group did the following:

"They were seen to practise the tactics needed to defend themselves against an armed ambush. They were seen to adopt positions from which they fired imaginary weapons and pretended to remove the pin from grenades before throwing them. They were seen to perform leopard crawling, very low on the ground ..."

These guys had nothing on Marcel Marceau. Either that, or one had lost a contact lens and the police misinterpreted the group unselfishly helping their short-sighted member to find it. Still, you'll never know when you might have to conduct a battle entirely in mime. Put it on a management training course and they'd call it character building and exercising versatility through improvisation.

Despite such rigorous preparations for the upcoming jihad, Hamid wasn't that certain of their prowess of being able to kill the dirty apostates:

"We are supposed to take on two kuffars [non-believers]. One Muslim is supposed to take on two kuffars. Lucky if we could take on one kuffar."

Faced with the average airport worker, we can place bets on these particular self-proclaimed warriors getting their holy war straight back in the face. At times the trial has slipped even further into absurdity:

Mr Farrell also referred to a song that police secretly recorded Ahmet singing during a weekend visit to an Islamic centre in East Sussex in 2006.

Mr Farrell read out the lyrics: "Hey Mr Taliban, come kill the dirty kuffars; Hey Mr Taliban, boom, boom, boom; Come bomb England, before the daylight come; Inshallah [God willing], it shall be done."


Even though many strict Muslims consider music that contains instruments to be haram, here's one potential jihadi taking on the Banana Boat Song and performing his own personal nasheed parody of it. Never let it be said that these guys don't know how to have a good time; they're just exploding (surely bursting? Ed.) with jokes and good humour about murdering the innocent citizens of this country. What else would you expect from an associate of someone who told police that his name was Osama bin London?

These, remember, are the sort of people we're supposed to afraid of. The ones who pose such an immediate and dire threat to the life of this nation that for a while we were using emergency legislation to lock up "terrorist suspects" indefinitely without charge, and who are now involved in such "complex"and "ambitious" conspiracies that we require longer than 28 days in order for the police to build a case against them. Hospitals can kill more people than the 7/7 bombers managed through poor hygiene and infections, but we still worry and agonise over whether our laws need tightening still further against this shadowy menace of hatred and anger. Men like these aren't soldiers, lions, martyrs or whatever they like to call themselves: they're a criminal annoyance that ought to be laughed at and humiliated rather than feared. If these are the guys making the sky dark, then I'd hate to see what'll happen when those who did have the balls, if you can call them that, to go and fight in Iraq or wherever eventually return. End of western civilisation? They can't even throw a pretend grenade properly.

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10/11/2007 11:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

The New Party turns out to be the same as the old one.

More interesting than that there turns out to have been a number of errors/mistakes in An Inconvenient Truth (politician makes a polemic in which he exaggerates, labours the point and goes over the top with some of his scaremongering? Who would have thought it?) was that the man who brought the attempt to stop the government from showing the film in schools was a member of the "New Party".

(As an aside, it has to be said I don't much like the idea of AIT being a compulsory showing in schools, especially without it being made clear that it is both a polemic and a one sided view, with differing opinions also offered. Kids are not stupid; they know when they're being taught bullshit, and when it comes between choosing either Al Gore's view or Melanie Philips', I'm pretty sure who'll they'll plump for.)

Probably like most people, I'd never heard of this new grouping that was err, claiming to be new. The BBC's article notes that:

Mr Dimmock is a member of the "New Party", apparently funded by a businessman with a strong dislike of environmentalists and drink-drive laws.

When asked on the BBC's World Tonight programme who had under-written his court costs, he paused long and loud before saying that "someone on the internet" had offered him support.

The New Party's website is similarly disingenuous as to whom's paying the bills. The about page only announces the support of two hardly well-known figures:

The New Party is pleased to acknowledge the support of:

 * John Harvey-Jones
 * Vivien Saunders

John Harvey-Jones is a former chairman of ICI, and according to a highly sycophantic and probably self-written Wikipedia profile, a Wienerite, one of the heavy influences on Thatcherism and the "New Right". More well-known admirers tend towards the neo-conservative (at least when it comes to foreign policy, in Sullivan's case) school of thought: Andrew Sullivan, Mark Steyn and the ghastly Michael Gove like to be thought of as his disciples. Vivien Saunders, is err, a former golfer and golfing coach.

How about policies then? Considering that the New Party describes itself as "a party of economic liberalism, political reform and internationalism", it's not much of a surprise when clicking on their manifesto to learn that they're in favour of a flat income tax:

On present figures, the personal allowance would be £12,000 and everyone would pay 22 per cent of all earnings above this level.

This is about as grossly unfair as you can possibly get, and is the complete anti-thesis of "progressive" taxation, from a party that claims to be progressive. It doesn't stop there though. The New Party also wants to "cut the cost of the state", which for cut you can read slash and decimate, although they claim that this will mostly target bureaucrats, as no one wants to see nurses and bobbies lose their jobs. Quite how they'll manage not to do that when they propose to make £35 billion of savings as a minimum, not a maximum isn't explained.

They also claim to have a moral purpose:

Many of our problems today can be traced back to the loosening of family ties and the breakdown of shared values. The tax and welfare systems, far from supporting families, have contributed to these problems by undermining personal and civic responsibility.

Ah yes, it's all the fault of the welfare state, a familiar refrain of the Telegraph whenever something goes wrong! While their position on criminal justice and prisons is relatively liberal, their attitude towards drugs is of a similar moral bent:

Downgrading cannabis has not been a success. The police have had their job made even more difficult and there is evidence that a growing number of people are experiencing mental problems as a result.

This is errant nonsense, especially from a political party claiming to be standing for social liberalism. They're also completely clueless over the Human Rights Act:
The Human Rights Act is a misnomer, it serves no useful purpose and has been hijacked for political ends. Not only has it fuelled the compensation culture but it has also diminished the role of parliament by requiring the courts to make judgements on political matters. We shall therefore repeal the Human Rights Act. We would, nevertheless, remain signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights, and it would be a matter for parliament to determine its response to the judgements by the European Court of Human Rights.

Considering the Human Rights Act implements the ECHR into UK law, all repealing the HRA will do is make the route to justice even more distant, expensive and difficult.

Perhaps most enlightening though is their policies on the environment and climate change, or rather, the almost complete lack of them. They touch slightly on it in "facing the energy crisis", to which their solution is nuclear power, also mentioning "environmentally friendly towns". The rest is in their "Internationalism" section, which rapidly goes from concluding, despite the IPCC's findings, that "we must ensure that we do not rush into new taxes and controls without considering their real effects," to bringing up the old misnomer that the fact that India and China are developing at such rate that anything we do is a waste of time. Their solution is:

We should concentrate on developing and diffusing new technologies, revisit nuclear generation (which is now much safer and produces little waste) and provide positive incentives for developing countries to support cleaner technologies. The recently announced Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development which includes countries which did not support Kyoto is a welcome step in the right direction.

And that's it.

Why could their apparent aversion to anything more concrete be? After all, according to their PR bumpf on their challenge to the sending out of AIT, "climate change is clearly taking place". Delving a little deeper into their national policy committees, you soon find that their nominal supporters include:

Alex Black, who's a self employed Road Transport Contractor. His reasons for supporting the New Party are:

I was disillusioned with all other parties after visiting MPs & MSPs with no positive responses despite putting practical propositions forward. I organised & took part in the fuel protest, and was surprised at the level of support from the public. This encouraged me to think that there was maybe a chance for people getting more democracy from the system that the New Party was proposing.

Robert Dunward, New Party chairman, who has been involved in... the haulage industry and Sandy Bruce, the owner of the modestly named Sandy Bruce Trucking.

The rest are a rag-tag bunch of businessmen and small c conservatives, all apparently united by the mouth-watering prospect of paying the same rate of tax as those earning slightly more than the minimum wage and smashing the state, while sitting in the camp of believing that climate change is happening while also refusing to do anything about it. The only reason for why these natural far-right Tories are setting up their own party is that the actual Conservative party has turned into a centre-right cult with more in common with the right of the Labour party than their "progressive" vision of the future. The so-called New Party then in actuality wants to turn the clock back: right to the 19th century.

Update: Poor Pothecary has also turned his sights on the New Party, and discovers via the Scotsman that it was set up by Robert Wilson Menzies Durward, a businessman who cut his political teeth opposing the aggregate tax and drink-driving "witch-hunts". He's also behind the Scientific Alliance, (SourceWatch) which just popped up on the BBC News to criticise Al Gore's dual-taking of the Nobel Peace Prize. Spinwatch also has more.

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10/11/2007 10:47:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, October 10, 2007 

Brown in the brown stuff.

Even the most disgusting Gordon Brown/Labour toady will have to admit that Cameron today/yesterday (writing this at nearly 3:30am, I'm unsure which it is) annihilated Brown at the dispatch box. This was a powerful, potent and also accurate rebuke:

Never have the British people been treated with such cynicism. For 10 years you have plotted and schemed to have this job - and for what? No conviction, just calculation. No vision, just a vacuum. Last week you lost your political authority. This week you are losing your moral authority.

He might well have been practicing it in the mirror like his speech last week for days, but it was still the most stinging and punishing exchange for quite some time at PMQ's. It's still far too early to consider it a turning point or a tipping point, though. PMQ's is all well and good for the political obsessives and the Westminster village, but it's long ceased having a mass effect across the country as a whole. William Hague was widely regarded as often trumping Blair from 97 to 01, and a lot of good it did him.

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10/10/2007 11:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Increase the detention without charge limit or we'll have to shoot you.

Yep, that's Ian Blair, speaking at the "Safer London Foundation".

It's a disturbing thought that a man as tainted as Ian Blair is still currently the head of the Metropolitan police. His force and its handling of the day after the attempted suicide attacks of 21/7 is currently being laid bare in the law courts, where it's laughably being tried under health and safety grounds when it should at the very least be in the dock on manslaughter charges. His own ineptitude and lack of leadership within the force itself was exposed in the second IPCC report into the events of that day, which found that although secretaries knew that an innocent man had been shot dead, he still thought it was a failed suicide bomber until the next morning, as no one had bothered to tell him.

With all of the above in mind, we're supposed to take the man seriously when he appears in front of the home affairs select committee and once again calls for the 28 day without charge detention limit for terrorist suspects to be at the very least doubled. He doesn't have a single shred of evidence to support this further extension, but he does have the power of his own argument:

"At some stage 28 days is not going to be sufficient, and the worst time to debate whether an extension is needed would be in the aftermath of an atrocity."

This is a dubious basis for an extension at the very least. Considering the current threat we face is almost entirely from suicidal Islamic takfirists, who tend to take themselves with the others they murder, it's unlikely that we're going to require an extension should they launch an attack. Even if the attacks that take place aren't suicidal, the example of the patio gas canister bombers suggests that terrorist investigations now move incredibly swiftly; even if some of those apparently responsible for the first failed attacks hadn't decided to go kamikaze at Glasgow airport with only some petrol and a lighter, it seems that the police would have been arresting them within a couple of days, if not hours.

We do have to consider that there are those involved in the plotting of such attacks that don't take part in them, but again all the evidence so far suggests that 28 days is currently a more than sufficient time limit. The trial of Dhiren Barot and his co-conspirators showed that you don't even need to have explosives to be put away for a longer period than some murderers, and that was managed without any such drawn-out interrogation or investigation while the accused are in custody.

Ian Blair's argument is that we've got to prepare for the eventuality even if it never comes. This is a reasonably fair point to make, but it ignores the message it sends both to those already alienated and disenfranchised, that sections of the community are being increasingly labeled as the potential enemy within and that laws which were unnecessary during WW2 are now not just inevitable, but eminently acceptable and reasonable during supposed peace time. It also puts further pressure on the fragile state of civil liberties in this country; when we've got a longer potential detention without charge limit than some dictatorships, we really ought to begin to worry.

Blair also contradicts himself:

Sir Ian said terrorist conspiracies and conspirators were increasing, as was the magnitude of their ambition in terms of destruction and loss of life.

Fewer cases were under investigation but each was more complex in terms of documents, telephones and computers

Taking Blair at his word, the very fact that the conspiracies are increasing in magnitude and ambition of destruction and loss of life isn't necessarily a bad thing. It just shows that the those behind such plots are completely unrealistic, incompetent and naive. Dhiren Barot wanted to build a dirty bomb out of smoke alarms, and bring down buildings with limos packed with gas canisters. The first idea was hilarious, the second proved just as laughable by the failure early in the summer. The "liquid bomb" crew wanted to destroy however many airplanes using materials they were going to construct in flight, something that most scientists who commented on it also regarded as highly dubious. These so-called terrorists have big ideas and big egos, but when put into practice they're doomed to failure.

That fewer cases are also under investigation speaks volumes. What happened to those 30 plots, 2000 conspirators and the sky being dark due to the threat? That the cases are increasingly in complexity is no reason to extend the time limit: the police need to extend themselves to deal with complicated plots, not the time limit with which to do it in.

Most of all though, if there really was solid evidence or intelligence that there was an attack brewing that would need longer than 28 days before those in custody could be charged, would Ian Blair have been told about it? Seeing as everyone other than him seems to be in the know, perhaps it ought to have been his secretary or even his wife in front of the committee.

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10/10/2007 11:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

Tuesday, October 09, 2007 

Oh, Darling...

For the first time in years, the Conservatives tonight seem to be the ones defining the current political agenda, thanks to the panic-striken, knee-jerking antics of Darling and Brown. The idea behind stealing the policies or the ideas behind them of your political opponents is that you wait a favourable amount of time so that the general public forgets who came up with them first; only then can you take the credit, even if the pipsqueak that first mooted them then pipes up and complains.

The cliché says that a week is a long time in politics, and last week arguably proved the cliché, but it's an incredibly short time in the memory. For Alistair Darling in his first pre-budget report to announce an effective doubling of the inheritance tax threshold, even if it actually isn't that and is less generous than it looks on close inspection, not just smacks of desperation, it suggests that Labour now need the Conservatives, the party with no new ideas except soaking the rich and well-off while pounding the poor and sick to lead the way before they move. It's actually worse than that: as well as considering the Conservatives' uncosted, ludicrous inheritance tax policy as worth emulating, he also directly pinches the Liberal Democrats' proposal for taxing flights rather than passengers. That might be a sound idea as it stands, but this was meant to be the Brown government's first major chance to show both how it was going to be different to the 10 years of Blairism, but also to ridicule the Tories' spending plans and their lack of intellectual rigour.

What we got instead was reasonably solid, but disappointing in the extreme. The inheritance tax change is on much firmer economic ground than the Tories' laughable idea to charge non-domiciles £25,000 to pay for the raise to a threshold of £1 million, but just looks like a reaction to their hugely popular but spineless and indefensible new tax cut. Private equity bosses face an 80% rise in tax, but seeing as that they were only paying capital gains tax of 10% to begin with, a rise to 18% is hardly going to break their stuffed piggy banks. As Robert Peston also points out, this will not just affect them but also those who start up and sell their own small businesses, who pay capital gains tax when they do. That's a tax on aspiration, whilst inheritance tax is most certainly not.

As Chris says, this really ought to put the nail in the coffin of Labour as the party of the working class. About the only real reforms or changes in this report which affect them are that Darling's been kind enough to pledge an extra £30 million to go on tax credits, which have been notoriously badly managed. Larry Elliot explains that's only £970 million less than what Darling will be blowing on raising the IHT threshold. The amount of child maintenance a family can receive without it affecting their other benefits will also rise to £40 by 2010, while £4bn will be given to help those in what the BBC describe as "poor-quality" housing spruce up their dwellings. How very kind.

If this was going to be the statement which would have launched the election that never was, then for Labour's sake if no one else's it was for the best. It would have only showed how threadbare the ideas currently are on both sides of the so-called debate. Would those in the marginals, who went all weak-kneed at the chance of passing down their wealth and property without any being grabbed by the taxman have felt the same about Darling's proposals today? Why have the monkey when you can have the organ grinder? For all Brown's undisguised glee and grinning during Darling's statement, itself a horrible, frightening sight to behold, the Tories will be the ones left feeling delighted. They might have dropped their big, vote-winning policies in order to stave off an election, but now they've had that their decision to do that vindicated by Labour's instant response. With possibly two years to go until the next election, that's more than enough time for them to mold more dog-whistles to the middle classes, when Darling could have used today to start the argument against them. Brown's cowardice only shines through again.

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10/09/2007 09:05:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

I am an anarchist etc.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before it happened, thanks to the lunacy of the way the terrorism laws have been drafted:

A British teenager who is accused of possessing material for terrorist purposes has appeared in court.

The 17-year-old, who was arrested in the Dewsbury area of West Yorkshire on Monday, was given bail after a hearing at Westminster Magistrates' Court.

It is alleged he had a copy of the "Anarchists' Cookbook", containing instructions on how to make home-made explosives.

The teenager faces two charges under the Terrorism Act 2000.

The first charge relates to the possession of material for terrorist purposes in October last year.

The second relates to the collection or possession of information useful in the preparation of an act of terrorism.

It seems then that you can now be arrested and charged with a crime simply for owning a book which is freely available from Amazon and doubtless dozens, if not hundreds of book shops around the country.

It's doubly stupid for another reason. The Anarchist Cookbook is notoriously inaccurate, written as it was by a disillusioned 19-year-old man during the Vietnam era, with much of the information coming directly from military and special forces' manuals, as the author himself has wrote. If you want to lose a few limbs while making explosives that are unlikely to go off except in your face, then the Anarchist Cookbook should be your weapon of choice. It ought to be handed out to anyone who feels like carrying out a suicide bombing: hopefully what would happen to them as a result would bring the term back to its original definition.

Perhaps more instructive is that the teenager (who else?) was arrested in Dewsbury. Dewsbury was where Mohammad Sidique Khan lived prior to carrying out one of the 7/7 suicide bombings, and where arrests were made earlier in the year over the ongoing investigation into the attacks, with all those arrested, including Khan's wife, released without charge. Could it be that the police in Dewsbury are rather overreacting due to the town's most infamous recent son? The Crown Prosecution Service really ought to know better than to take such flimsy charges to court, but in the "age of terror™" even the slightest and silliest infringement of our too broadly drafted laws is seen to be actionable.

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10/09/2007 08:15:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Flapping like sheets in the wind.

Via Daily Mail Watch:

The Daily Express front page on Monday the 8th of October 2007:


The Daily Express front page on Tuesday the 9th of October 2007:

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10/09/2007 08:08:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, October 08, 2007 

The Brown inadequacy.

At the risk of upsetting Mike Power...

Just what, then, was the point of last week's dash to Basra and then Baghdad by Gordon Brown? Today's announcement in the Commons that by next spring the number of British troops in Iraq will be down to 2,500 only deepened the mystery; if Brown had really wanted to shaft the Tories he could easily have done what he told parliament today then, even if he would have broken his promise to make such new changes in policy in front of MPs. Why did he need to reannounce such a slight draw down in numbers when he apparently went to OK or at least discuss this further withdrawal with al-Malaki and other Iraqi ministers? He could have easily avoided all the justified accusations of spin and shifting the story away from the Conservatives by simply keeping his visit quiet for security reasons. The assumption has to be that this was meant to be a teaser, to be followed up by the meat today as part of the start of the election campaign, which most likely would have been declared tomorrow night.

All that was thrown out of the window once Brown understandably cowered in the face of the menacingly ominous polls. There doesn't appear to have been any contingency plan if it was decided, after nodding and winking for two weeks, that an election was just too risky, and the choices made on the hoof on Friday night led directly to the far more punishing kicking that Brown took today during his press conference. As Patrick Wintour set out in this morning's Grauniad, Team Brown first informed the 4 editors of Sunday broadsheets, then got hold of Andrew Marr so that a pre-recorded interview with Brown explaining his decision could be made the following day. Not only did this piss off ITN and Sky News by giving the BBC an exclusive, affecting their coverage, which was still far more scathing today than Nick Robinson's was, the resulting meeting of minds was so feeble, with Marr throwing numerous soft balls that it only increased the anger and tenacity of the questions put to Brown by the assembled hacks today. If Brown had instead taken the beating which he was always going to receive yesterday, touring studios or coming out and being completely honest and stating that he had considered an election but decided that it was simply too soon, he would have had a far easier ride. Instead, the bad news and humiliation was spread over three full days rather than just the two it could have been.

Watching Brown standing at the lectern, the cameras delighting in seeing his scribbled notes, each question the equivalent of another stab in the front was painful enough at home, and Brown as it went on looked more and more out of his depth. If Blair had been in the same position he would have kept the facade up; Brown simply couldn't, and it clearly showed. Whether the public will enjoy seeing a prime minister visibly squirm at the hands of the press should be interesting to find out, as Blair was only ever troubled when confronted with actual members of the public, as his appearances on various shows prior to elections and the Iraq war showed. Perhaps after Blair's seeming infallibility it might be novel, although if it continues Brown's hard-won representation for strength will quickly shatter.

It was important then that his performance in the Commons was far stronger, and this he more than managed, helped by Cameron's pre-occupation with the events of last week rather than what Brown's statement had actually just put forward. The Conservatives simply have never had a policy on Iraq, first blindly following Blair and then pursuing inquiries into it while never recanting their support or putting forward what they would either have done differently then or now, and they're not about to change that. Welcome as a call for an inquiry was, which David Cameron articulated after his backwards looking raid on last week's spin offensive, he missed the open goal taken up by Ming Campbell of just what point there was in keeping such a small number of troops at Basra airport for no overall reason. The "overwatch" stage put forward is just so much nonsense: both the government knows and the army know that their only remaining reason for staying in Iraq is because they safeguard the American convoys' transporting equipment and supplies from Kuwait through to Baghdad. Even after all this time, angering the Americans by making them deploy a few more troops to the south is strictly verboten.

That said, you perhaps sympathise with the Iraqis once you understand what's more likely to be put in place to protect those convoys once we do finally leave: the murderous, legally immune mercenaries of Blackwater, firing at the wind to "protect" their quarries which pay them so handsomely for doing so. Such sentiments aside, we know full well that the generals want out, and now, not at the end of 2008. A full withdrawal could easily have been organised for next spring, in line with all the other promises and commitments set out in Brown's statement. Instead, Brown again showed his cowardice rather than his courage, unwilling to rile the Americans that did so much to destroy his predecessor. If reports in the Torygraph are to be believed, he hasn't even learned the most vital lesson of his premiership: that the "war on terror", regardless of who's in the White House, fought in the way it has so far, has been the biggest disaster of this current century.

Equally pusillanimous was Brown's piecemeal, too little too late recognition of the sacrifices and contribution of the Iraqis themselves that have worked with the army, now increasingly facing a terrifyingly bleak future. The numbers we are talking about possibly being given refuge are in the hundreds, not the thousands, as Dan points out. To put such an arbitrary, unrealistic threshold of twelve months' service before we even give "a package of financial payments", let alone sanctuary here in the UK to such brave men and women who believed in the future of their country, regardless of the ways in which Saddam was initially brought down, is to potentially condemn some of their number to death. As Dan also identifies, to offer resettlement elsewhere in the Middle East rather than here is also to not necessarily put them out of harm's way; Syria and Jordan, countries where the vast majority of the 2 million or more Iraqis have fled, are both struggling to cope with the numbers of refugees, but are also unknown quantities at the moment. Their allure of safety may be deceiving. Any financial settlement is going to be need to be suitably generous to those who choose not to settle in the UK to make up for that shortfall in security.

It's not even as if there's going to be any major opposition to such packages or mass granting of refuge to those who have worked for us; the Sun ran an approving leader on Saturday that welcomed the assurances given to the Times, even calling it a moral obligation. They could hardly do anything else after having more than a hand in getting the war rolling in the first place. The Mail long ago dropped its support for the invasion, leaving perhaps only the Daily Express to raise noises, and who takes any notice of that busted flush any more? The government could afford to be far more daring, and it might be more down to the civil servants in the front line organising everything rather than the politicians for the stalling and so far weak acceptance of the need to act. Tomorrow's meeting, moved to Portcullis House, will emphasize this.

The whole circus of the weekend and today though only highlighted the current deficit that our politics are facing. Both Cameron and Brown represent more or less the same policies, with the Tories perhaps being the slightly harsher of the two, yet the merest switching of the polls in the marginals towards one rather than the other has supposedly triggered either a crisis or a period of navel-gazing for the prime minister. The election, had it been called, would have been nearly wholly meaningless, with both seeking power for power's sake rather than out of any real desire for actual change, despite the bluster of both parties. The Liberal Democrats have been slipping as a result, yet they are currently offering the only major critique of both parties' style and rhetoric, with Nick Clegg effortlessly on Newsnight exposing both Theresa May and John Denham's arguments as facile. The great shame is that we've been denied a contest which could have helped bring about the major step change that politics needs to get out of its current, seemingly inexorable decline.

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10/08/2007 07:58:00 PM | | | links to this post

Sunday, October 07, 2007 

Usmanov-watch: Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

Alisher Usmanov is a man without a blemish on his character. His stay in prison in Uzbekistan during the 80s was down to a vendetta being cooked up against him by the KGB. He only has the best of intentions in trying to gain control of Arsenal, and unlike the other Russian oligarchs, he made his money entirely legitimately.

That at least is what Usmanov and his collective of cunts at Schillings have been trying to get across to the media, with the pain of potential litigation if they deviate from their personally prepared script.

It's a great shame then that this view of Usmanov is somewhat shattered by a report in today's Sunday Times:

Arsenal tycoon Alisher Usmanov in diamond ‘fraud’ row The Russian tycoon who has bought a £120m stake in Arsenal, the Premier League leaders, has been accused in court papers of “fraud” and “unjust enrichment” in a dispute over one of the world’s most lucrative diamond mines.

Alisher Usmanov has been named in documents filed by lawyers acting for a firm controlled by the Oppenheimer family, the billionaire dynasty behind the De Beers diamond corporation.

...

The latest controversy concerns a court action in Denver, Colorado where hearings are due to start next month. At stake is the ownership of the so-called Grib Pipe, a fabulously rich diamond mine in the Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia.

The mining firm, Archangel Diamond Corporation (ADC) in which De Beers owns a controlling stake, claims it is entitled to an interest in the Grib Pipe, which was discovered in 1996. The Grib Pipe is now said to be one of the largest diamond mines in the world, with a prospective value of £4.5 billion.

But in the Colorado court papers, ADC has alleged that Usmanov and other Russian interests “engaged in fraud in order to deceive” it over an agreement it says it had to take a 40% interest in the mine.

...

The case stems from a decision in the late 1990s by the government of Boris Yeltsin to strip the assets of Western diamond firms and hand them over to a clique close to the Kremlin.

Foreign firms were encouraged to develop exploration and mining concessions with a view to improving the local economy. They say few in Russia expected that anyone would strike diamonds in the remote area.

Many companies, including Rio Tinto and BHP, withdrew after finding little of value. But in 1996 ADC unexpectedly struck a rich vein.

It was shortly after this, the court papers allege, that Usmanov and others who were involved with a big Russian oil firm became party to a scheme to drive ADC out of Russia and take over the diamond project for themselves. The Russian firm in the joint venture was privatised and after this, ADC was denied access to develop the mine.


We should be careful of course. Usmanov might be entirely innocent of these allegations. It does however somewhat shatter Usmanov's argument that his money was made entirely legitimately and without any help from the Kremlin. It's also just a coincidence that Usmanov was jailed in the 80s on fraud and theft charges, and here he is, just after he's tried to charm the media into believing it was all a conspiracy against him, being accused of err, fraud and "unjust enrichment", which I'm sure you'll agree is completely different to stealing. Usmanov claims his parents did not bring him up as a "a gangster and a racketeer", two of the charges Murray made against him, and he could well be telling the truth. He seems more than capable of developing those qualities later in life.

The Times' article also informs us of the PR firm that Usmanov has seemingly hired to transform his image from an obese, toad-like megalomaniac to that of a kindly, slighted benefactor. Finsbury Limited, Usmanov's choice, are just as boastful of their prowess as Schillings are. Finsbury count some of the following delightful companies as clients:

British Sky Broadcasting Plc
Daily Mail and General Trust plc
Northern Rock plc
Reed Elsevier PLC (responsible for the arms fairs held in London's Docklands every year)
Rio Tinto plc
Royal Dutch Shell plc
Equitable Life

You get the feeling that even they are going to have their work cut out spinning for this ghastly, mendacious bully.

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10/07/2007 08:14:00 PM | | | links to this post

Saturday, October 06, 2007 

Usmanov and Schillings watch: Indymedia latest to be threatened.

Seems like Usmanov's legal shysters, Schillings' tactics have been to let the dust settle slightly after the uproar over the taking down of Craig Murray/Bloggerheads etc, then to continue exactly as before.

UK Indymedia are the latest to be threatened:

Indymedia UK has been issued with a takedown notice [10th of September & 21st of September] from lawyers acting for Alisher Usmanov. The notice served to Indymedia charged Indymedia with publishing allegedly libellous accusations about Usmanov, one of the richest men in Russia, recently linked to a possible hostile takeover of Arsenal FC.

This only makes Usmanov's charm offensive this week, involving the flying via private jet of at least 9 British journalists to his offices in Moscow, then putting them up in a five star hotel all the more shallow. He says he's not a vindictive man and that some of Murray's allegations are beneath his dignity to respond to, yet his lackey of legal brown-nosing sycophants are still trying to remove all mentions and republishing of Murray's original post, while still failing to respond either to Murray's request for them to sue him or to even explain how inaccurate his allegations are, apart from their completely untrue argument that Usmanov was pardoned by Gorbachev.

If either Schillings or Usmanov think we're going to continue to take their attempts to silence all criticism of this deeply unpleasant man lying down, then they've got another thing coming.

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10/06/2007 11:10:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

The honeymoon's over.

Well, that's that then. After two weeks of febrile, wildly over the top speculation that Brown was about to take the risk of calling an election, he, as the Guardian's leader today called for him to do, has put an end to it all. No trudging around in darkness as fireworks go off around and about for the activists of all parties, and only the blankness and dreary weather to look forward to for us sad, lonely political anoraks.

As Nosemonkey also points out, the hyperbole now swirling around is also surely out of all proportion. Is this really in any way a crisis? While Brown's advisers and pollsters can most certainly be accused of hyping up the prospect of an early poll, and he did himself no favours whatsoever by bringing the announcement on NHS reform to Thursday and the spending review and pre-budget report to early next week, this is hardly the beginning of Brown's downfall. The honeymoon is certainly over, and that is more than partly his own fault, but the chances of the Tories now managing to keep themselves focused without once again falling into infighting are slim.

It's true this is a mess of Labour's own making, and Cameron will naturally try to exploit it as much as he can. How quickly though things change: at the beginning of the week this was "mission impossible" or "make or break" week for the Conservatives, while for now at least they look the stronger and more focused. Their job, far from challenging Brown to call an election, as they fatuously urged this week, was to make certain that he couldn't risk doing so, and in that they've succeeded. It doesn't seem to have been Cameron's speech wot won it however, but Osborne's uncosted and discriminatory inheritance tax proposals, which were far more of a dog whistle than anything that Brown put forward. Promising to cut a hugely unpopular tax that very few actually currently pay was enough to get those in the marginals and soft, well-off Lib Dems in the south-east to change sides, at least for the opinion polls'.

Those same opinion polls in reality offer very little comfort for Cameron. He's squandered a huge lead over the last few months; while everyone knew full well there would be a bounce for Brown once he took over, the Conservatives both managed to underestimate just how long it would last and to lose their faith in Cameron at the exact second as the polls for the first time turned against him. Even if Brown had thrown all caution to the wind and decided to take the Tories' on at their own game by seeking his own mandate, as they taunted him to do, the very best result the most optimistic current polls for the Tories predict is a hung parliament. The Liberal Democrats would almost certainly have then gone into some sort of coalition with Labour, despite their previous pledges not to do so: the possibilities of power would certainly be too much for the overwhelming majority of the party to resist.

In fact, such a result would have been overwhelmingly welcome. The shenanigans of the last two weeks have only confirmed what many have long feared: that the arrival of Brown, rather than heralding a return to the left, as the Tories scaremongered about, would if anything result in an even further shift of the political "centre ground" to the right. Brown's courtship of Paul Dacre, the supposed political weather vane of the middle classes has meant that the difference between Labour and the Tories has narrowed yet further. A popular new parlour game could be to guess how many policies they have that aren't almost exactly the same: the only differences this blogger can discern is that the Tories will scrap ID cards only to waste it on even more prison cells, keep the detention without charge limit for "terrorist suspects" at 28 days, shaft the single mother and those on incapacity benefit ever so slightly harder, and rob the super-rich to give to the already well-off. It's hardly 1983 all over again, is it?

Which would have only exacerbated the likelihood of an even poorer turn-out than last time, which increased by a massive 2% on the record low of 2001. A hung parliament could have helped change that: the Liberal Democrats could have demanded proportional representation in exchange for going into a coalition, ending once and for all the insanity of having to appeal to those who care only about what politicians are going to do for them, rather than for everyone. Ming could also have rightly followed up his call for fixed-term parliaments, putting a stop to any repeat of this week's exasperating charade. We've been denied that for now, but if there's no change in the lack of choice whenever the next election is called, the calls for the above are only going to inexorably grow.

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10/06/2007 09:37:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

We can't turn them away update.

Somewhat encouraging news on the We can't turn them away campaign front. The Times reports:

Iraqi interpreters and other key support staff who have risked their lives to work for Britain are to be allowed to settle in the United Kingdom, The Times has learnt.

Hundreds of interpreters and their families are to be given assistance to leave Iraq, where they live under fear of death squads because they collaborated with British forces. Those wishing to remain in Iraq or relocate to neighbouring countries will be helped to resettle.

After a two-month campaign by The Times, Gordon Brown is set to announce that interpreters who have worked for the British Government for 12 months will be given the opportunity of asylum in Britain.


The most reassuring word here is "hundreds". The campaign has always argued that we don't just owe the 91 known interpreters sanctuary here, but also all those who have worked for the army in Basra in any respect. They are just as potentially in danger, especially once a full withdrawal is finally completed.

The hope has to be now that this is actually followed through. Dan has already suggested that the person who leaked this to the Times may have gotten ahead of themselves, with apparently neither the army or the Foreign Office as of yet being aware of any change in policy. All the more reason for there to be as large a turnout as possible at Tuesday's meeting in Westminster.

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10/06/2007 09:25:00 PM | | | links to this post

Friday, October 05, 2007 

A tale of two tragedies and different police responses.


Peter Woodhams - Murdered by Bradley Tucker after a seven-month campaign of terror was waged against him by a gang of youths. Despite being previously slashed across the face and stabbed in the neck, the Independent Police Complaint Commission's findings were:

Officers failed to bring in forensic experts
No photographs were taken of the scene
A proper record of the attack was not made in officers' pocketbooks
Officers failed to contact the Woodhams family for more information
Anonymous phone calls identifying several suspects were not followed up by police
Two sergeants did not adequately manage the scene of the attack

As a result, a detective sergeant and a detective constable have been required to resign.

Jean Charles de Menezes - Brutally murdered by a member of the SO19 firearms unit, shot 7 times at point-blank range in the head after being "mistaken" for one of the men who had attempted a suicide bombing on the tube the day before. Despite two highly critical IPCC reports, one of which still yet to be publicly published, and a prosecution against the Metropolitan police on health and safety grounds, which is currently detailing the amazing incompetence and negligence of the Met on July the 22nd, no one has so much as been disciplined over de Menezes's death. In fact, quite the opposite has happened: Cressida Dick, the woman in charge on the day, has already been promoted to deputy assistant commissioner. Despite the second IPCC report into the police's response after de Menezes had been shot, which identified that Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman had known that it was likely an innocent man had been shot as early as 16:00 the same day, he instead continued to brief the media that the assumption was that it was one of the bombers who was dead. As for Sir Ian Blair, despite seemingly everyone apart from him hearing the rumours that an innocent man had been killed, he didn't learn of the deadly mistake until the following morning. Neither have been disciplined, let alone felt the need to resign.

For Peter Woodhams, justice has come far too late. For Jean Charles de Menezes, it seems unlikely to ever come. It seems that those in the front line are expendable, while the responsible commissioners are untouchable.

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10/05/2007 09:52:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Scum-watch: Biased in favour of itself.

It's Thursday afternoon in Wapping, and apart from all the rumours about a possible election and opinion poll reading going on, there's not a lot of news about. The leader writer(s) can't quite stretch out the whole column to be meanderings about will there or won't there be one, so what else can he/she/they fill out with?

Ah yes, the perennial favourite, bash the BBC!

THE BBC has learned nothing from its own confession that it is institutionally biased in favour of Brussels.

The Scum is presumably referring to a report published back in January 2005 that found the corporation needed to make its coverage of Europe "more demonstrably impartial", although it found no evidence of any deliberate bias whatsoever. (Nosemonkey at the time mentioned the report actually found that people perceive the corporation to be biased. Where could they get that idea from?)

A new study shows Radio Four’s Today programme gave FOUR times as much air-time to the commercial Glastonbury pop festival than to the crucial EU Constitution.

This is apparently referring to a study conducted by Newswatch, who rather than being an independent organisation appear to be a team you can hire to prove instances of "bias". On their track record page, they boast:

Our clients have included the Conservative Party, the cross-party think-tank Global Britain, and the Daily Telegraph.

Wow! That's quite a cross-section. They also say:

 We have also produced research papers that have been published by the prestigious think-tank the Centre for Policy Studies.

That would be the Centre for Policy Studies that was founded by "Sir" Keith Joseph and err, Margaret Thatcher.

How about the actual study then? Newswatch have kindly provided a 4-page summary on their website (PDF), which details that their research only concerned coverage of Europe on the Today programme from March the 19th of this year to June the 23rd. The Scum then is alleging bias on the corporation as a whole based on the contents of just one news programme.

Oh, and what do you know, the Scum's claim even then is completely wrong:

On June 23, the day that agreement was reached, Today devoted four times more airtime to the Glastonbury Rock Festival than to coverage of the eurosceptic case against the revised working arrangements.

Rather than the BBC giving four times as much coverage then to Glastonbury that it did the entire issue of the reform treaty, it in fact gave four times as much coverage to Glastonbury than it did to the Eurosceptic case against it. Newswatch doesn't mention whether it also gave supporters of the treaty about the same amount of airtime, probably for the reason it seems pretty obvious that this research was commissioned by a Eurosceptic organisation, although which one it's impossible to sure seeing as Newswatch hasn't owned up. It could be UKIP, about whom it says the following:

UKIP, a main conduit of views about withdrawal and further growth of EU powers, was not asked any questions at all during the survey about the revised working arrangements. Remarks by UKIP spokesmen in four appearances by the party occupied only around five minutes out of
238 hours of programming. On the sole occasion when there was a debate about UKIP concerns – relating to whether the EU brought benefits to the UK - the UKIP spokesman was treated unfairly.

Diddums! What exactly is the definition of unfairly here? That UKIP are barking mad and in the words of David Cameron, who has never spoken a truer sentence when he said they're "fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists, mostly".

Then again, it could be the Centre for Policy Studies themselves:

James Naughtie treated Ruth Lea, the guest who put the case for a referendum, more toughly than Professor Jo Shaw, who argued against one being held.

Really? Ruth Lea just happens to be... the director of the Centre for Policy Studies!

Oh, and if this is the level of critique and analysis, then it seems to have been money well spent:

The programme and its correspondents used biased terminology to apply to the revised working arrangements. From early on, they described the document as a ‘reform treaty’, in line with the EU’s own terminology, but seemingly disregarding the position of eurosceptics, who contended the document was the Constitution in all but name.

Maybe that could be because it's a fucking reform treaty? It doesn't matter whether it was called the EU Sticking A Bottle Up Eurosceptics Backsides' treaty, it's not a constitution because it isn't called a constitution like the previous one was, and if the BBC were to call it one, that would be just as biased and misleading as the Sun and Newswatch's own complaints. About the only really conclusive part of Newswatch's edited report was the following:

This was a period of major EU activity, but coverage of EU affairs on the Today programme slumped to a record low of 2.7% of available airtime for most of the 14 weeks, despite high-profile promises by BBC news management in the wake of the Wilson report that EU-related output would be boosted, and claims by the Director General that it has been.

I can't speak or defend the Today programme because I don't listen to it. If what Newswatch is reporting is true, then it's something than can be looked into and sorted out. The overall problem with coverage of the European Union as a whole though is that to many, include many otherwise political obsessives, it's both boring and at times impenetratble. In order to report on what's going on with a meagre sort of hope that someone will actually listen rather than tune out, it gets reduced to gimmickery. Incidentally, Mark Mardell, the current Europe editor, is one of those BBC journalists that usually does manage to report both informatively and with a levity that others ought to perhaps aspire too. Like the Sun however, Newswatch is looking at coverage of the EU solely through the prism of the Today programme: amazingly, it isn't the be all and end all of the BBC's news output.

Back to the Scum:

The BBC has virtually ignored the debate raging about the new Treaty — despite uproar in all parties and on both sides of the argument.

Rubbish. Just because the Scum's had it on the front page for days at a time because Murdoch is anti-EU for all the wrong reasons doesn't mean that the BBC has ignored it. There have been plenty of reports: a quick search on the BBC News website for "EU reform treaty" has more than four pages of recent articles, going back just to the beginning of September. Prior to that, OpenEurope, a group against the reform treaty had a number of appearances across the BBC's news programmes, calling for a referendum.

The same self-censorship is applied to immigration — another enormous issue not to be discussed in front of the licence-payers.

Now this really is an enormous lie. Just a couple of weeks ago the BBC gave blanket coverage to Cambridgeshire police's Julie Spence's comments on how the influx of migrant workers was leaving her force struggling to cope. It lead the radio bulletins all day, was the third story on the 10 O'Clock bulletin, and the Newsnight gave it top billing, complete with a discussion after their report with "Sir" Andrew Green and the Conservative shadow minister, rather outnumbering the Labour spokesman. Could the Sun be upset because as the BBC often does, it provided a more balanced side of the story than the tabloids did, with Mark Easton's report examining both sides?

It is not just because many of its editors and producers are lefties — though many are.

Guardian reading conspiracy alert!

It is an arrogant, lazy assumption that they know best — and ignorant audiences should not be disturbed by matters beyond their ken.

Completely unlike the Sun, which treats its readers like idiots by talking down to them, insulting them on numerous occasions and reprinting lie after lie after lie, or as on occasions like this, plays them for fools by taking the facts and then skewing them in their favour.

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10/05/2007 08:40:00 PM | | | links to this post

Thursday, October 04, 2007 

Top bloggery.

Justin on the Tories' lack of love and compassion for Blackpool, an old post from TrannyFattyAcid obliterating Usmanov's claim Gorbachev pardoned him, and Mr E on the media's role in the "downfall" of Britney Spears.

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10/04/2007 10:07:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Usmanov-watch: 9 out of 10 cats.

As something of an addendum to yesterday's post on Usmanov and the curious tale of the journos who didn't feel the need to disagree with anything he said after he'd provided them with a stay in a five-star hotel in Moscow as well as a trip itself in a luxury private jet, Tim has now listed the 10 journalists (Roger Blitz, FT) (David Bond, Telegraph) (Jason Burt, Independent) (Shaun Curtis, Scum) (Matt Dickinson, Times) (Richard Galpin, BBC) (Martin Lipton, Mirror) (Charles Sale, Daily Mail) (Matt Scott, Grauniad, and there may possibly be more) who went on this jolly outing. Of those 10, only Charles Sale of (amazingly) the Daily Mail was completely honest about how he (and they) came to be meeting Usmanov.

I'm not usually one to bash the "MSM" as a whole, mainly because for the most part the broadsheet press (and the BBC, etc) in this country generally manage to conduct themselves with something approaching a probity that doesn't require any sort of intrusive regulation, and quite right too. The tabloids, as even a casual reader will mostly know, are a different matter entirely. This sort of thing though is widespread, and as these pieces all prove, the broadsheet press can be just as complicit in it as any of the gutter rags. It'd be nice to think that bloggers are on the whole above this sort of thing, but that again is also mostly wishful thinking, as previous experiences involving Guido and others testify.

It also won't do to be too high and mighty about it. As any trainee hack will know, you sometimes have to scratch a back or lick an arse in order to get anywhere. We're meant though to have one of the most attack-dog media atmospheres of anywhere in the world, tenacious, unafraid to ask the difficult questions and potentially become unpopular for doing so. In practice, this is mostly complete rot, as the McCann case has showed. I'd go so far to say that some of the media is downright cowardly: they feel more than able to smear, attack and lie about those that can't defend themselves, but when it comes to those who can wield a big stick, as Usmanov certainly can, they instantly turn servile and unquestioning, especially when provided with top quality accommodation and all expenses paid beanos to Moscow.

The other thing to point out is also that the vast majority of these hacks are in effect working for incredibly rich and powerful men or women themselves: whether it's Murdoch, the Barclays, Lord Rothermere or Tony O'Reilly (Richard Desmond would be included in this list but it doesn't appear that one of his hacks was invited), they themselves tend to stick together. Too much questioning of other VIPs can bring swift retribution in whichever form they decide is best. You can't expect a Sun hack to start asking questions of someone about tax avoidance, for instance, without leaving that individual with a gaping open goal to shoot into.

To be frank however, we're the ones who are paying the wages of these people, whether we're clicking on the ads on their sites or actually buying the paper. To have to read all ten articles on the same matter to get a full picture of what was said and how it came to be said is an incredibly poor reflection on the state of the media, or at least when it involves reporting on the rich and currently not yet famous. We rely on these journalists to keep us informed, and not to mention how they came to be in Moscow is shoddy, if not to say dishonest. We deserve better.

Update: Tim received a reply from the FT which clarifies their position on matters of hospitality such as this. Also apologies to Richard Galpin of the BBC who is apparently based in Moscow.

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10/04/2007 09:10:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Express-watch: Diana: the lies.

If there's one headline that all newspapers should avoid using, it's THE TRUTH. Not only because the Scum infamously used it on the day that it printed the lies about Hillsborough, but because as we all know, the truth is a very loose concept.

It's an even more loose concept when it involves the Daily Express, and especially when it also has to do with Diana. Out of the three statements on the front page, only one is true: Diana was indeed on the pill. One would think that this would rather undermine the consistent, incipient claims that Diana was pregnant with Dodi's child, but not when you're the Daily Express or a conspiracy theorist. Rather, this proves that they were having sex and that she therefore quite possibly was pregnant, except if she was still taking the pill at the time, this would rather undermine the theory that she knew about it, that Dodi knew about it and that this was one of the reasons for why MI6/the Duke of Edinburgh/Muffin the Mule decided that she and Al-Fayed's son had to die.

All the above contradictions though are nothing to the average conspiracy theorist, and so the Express continues with its blatant misinformation. The Express claims that the inquest heard definitively that Henri Paul was not drunk, when it heard nothing of the sort. On the contrary, the court today heard that Paul had at the very least consumed two Ricards, and yesterday it heard conflicting evidence. The blood tests, which Al-Fayed in his fully swivel-eyed conspiratorial mind claims were "switched", showed that he was over both the French and British drink-drive limits, but those who saw him on the night claimed that he did not appear or seem drunk. That on its own proves nothing: you can look completely sober but still be unfit to drive due to what you've drunk, especially when you're mixing alcohol with drugs like anti-depressants.

Finally, it's true that Dodi had bought a diamond ring. You can make your own minds up on what he was going to do with it, but the simple fact that he had bought a ring does not mean that it was intended to be an engagement ring, let alone that he already asked Diana to marry him. Even if he had, what difference would it have made? Were MI6 so prepared for the eventuality and bugging their conversations that they would be able to organise such an op within potentially hours of learning of it? Leaving aside the spectacularly convoluted and complicated assassination plot necessary in order to kill the pair, with the driver apparently willing to sacrifice himself, or the "white Fiat Uno" being in exactly the right spot at the right time, does Al-Fayed's claim that the monarchy would be threatened by the step-father of the heir to the throne being a Muslim hold any water whatsoever? It would have meant precisely nothing - Diana had already had her title taken from her, and the royal family were already more than prepared to exclude her altogether and forget about her. She was a nuisance to them, but not one which meant that she had to be disposed of.

Can you honestly believe we've another 6 months of this shit to listen to? I don't think there's ever before been such a fantastical waste of time and money for the benefit of one lying, completely untrustworthy schemer with a more than open vendetta. When you consider that the government are denying an inquiry into 7/7, when 52 people died and where we still don't properly know whether the attacks could have prevented and how far the conspiracy went, it's even more aggravating, even if the two are separate issues. That there are newspapers prepared to back up Al-Fayed's bluster only shows how power, money and influence continue to determine far more than the deaths of numerous innocents does.

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10/04/2007 08:35:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, October 03, 2007 

"Well, that's it. That's what I believe."

Is it cos I is white?

If there's one thing you can't accuse David Cameron of, it's half measures. His speech wasn't just long; it was bladder pressurizingly lengthy. Delivered with only light notes, as both he and the Conservatives are crowing, it was in the region of 8,500 words of not very much. Prime example was that he just had to mention MySpace and Facebook, as every politician who wants to look vaguely "with-it" has to do, to help with a highly dubious point about having "to take what we're given" with politics, as if his entire speech wasn't an example of just that.

If anything, Cameron was taking his cue from Gordon Brown's similarly lengthy and rudderless speech last week. Both had no overall theme, a pedestrian stroll through their respective policies, without anything to draw it all together. Cameron's, if it's possible, is even more soporific; if I feel like dozing off speed reading through it, what was it like to actually sit there, in the probably stifling heat having to clap your hands together like a deranged seal every five minutes?

His real triumph, if you can call it that, was that his scattergun approach helps make it more difficult to object to the policies that were somewhat fleshed out. He rehashed the exact same things said by David Davis yesterday, for instance, but while his speech was aggravating and objectionable, Cameron has the quality to soften the blow. He still talked nonsense, obviously, like that you can't deport those responsible for gun and knife crime because of "Labour's Human Rights Act", or that Brown's speech was full of "dog whistles"; just ever so slightly rich from the man who wrote the dog whistling manifesto to end them all just 2 years ago.

Perhaps most significantly, he didn't mention inheritance tax once. The Tories' really big grab for middle class, middle England support, and he didn't cast minds back to it. Either this was because he felt he didn't need to, after the banner headlines, or that he wanted to be this person who is still all things to all men, rather than this tax-cutting, middle class subsidising traditional Tory pressing all the familiar buttons, just with a green tinge. Families were the biggest nod towards that front: 10 mentions, whether as the best welfare system or as the justification for ending the (non-existent) benefits bias towards single parents. Those who really don't need it are still going to get the equivalent of £20 a week simply for being married, a bribe of the sort that New Labour, for all its failed policies and quirks has never been as blatant to attempt.

Truly offensive and a hark back to the old nasty Tory party though was Cameron's promise that those on benefits who refuse a job "that they can do" will lose their money, while the ever wonderful private and voluntary sector will provide such brilliant jobs that no one ever will. We're talking about some of the most vulnerable, sick and depressed people in our society having their umbilical cord cut simply if they reject a job they don't feel up to or simply aren't suited for. So much for the broken society, but then those who might lose out are never going to vote Conservative anyway.

This wasn't an election winning speech, and Cameron never intended it to be so. It was a further attempt to mould him as this acceptable, friendly face of the Conservative party, an alternative to Gordon Brown, but without pretending to be anything like him, even if the vast majority of their policies are so similar that you couldn't get a cigarette paper between them. It was enough, and they'll now see what the wider response is. The real battle, if Brown is to risk an election as Cameron dared him to, is still yet to come.

Related posts:
Tygerland - More of the Same
Chicken Yogurt - Re-branding the herd
John Harris - Not Dave-ing, but drowning

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10/03/2007 09:36:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Usmanov-watch: Charm offensive by a charmless man.

There's a well-known trick in the world of PR that's meant to help journalists feel more sympathetic towards their client. If the client is suitably rich, they suggest that they stay wherever it is they live, and let the interviewers/hacks come to them, in an as luxurious fashion as possible.

Alisher Usmanov, no doubt paying not just for the services of Schillings, his legion of lackeying legal freedom of speech suppressing cunts, but also for the work of one of the most expensive PR firms, decided to take just this approach. It seems that a representative from almost all of the broadsheets' sports teams (Times) (Telegraph) (Guardian) (FT) was requested, and subsequently flown by private jet to see Usmanov in Moscow in the offices of his metals company. No expense was presumably spared, and inevitably none of the journalists who subsequently filed a piece so much as dared to question him further about Craig Murray's initial allegations, accepting his responses at face value.

Usmanov for example claims that he has next to no real links with Uzbekistan:
"I don't live in Uzbekistan. I am not even a citizen of Uzbekistan. I only visit the graves of my parents once a year."

Quite understandably, he doesn't mention his very real friendship with Islom Karimov, the current Uzbek dictator, or indeed that Gazprom, for whom Usmanov is the Gazprom Investholdings chairman, has control of the Uzbek natural gas reserves.

"Life is a sequence of events we cannot always control. Sometimes we are helpless against the circumstances life presents. Most obviously it manifested in the system we all lived under when the country was ruled by the Communist party."

As, after all, things are far different in Uzbekistan now than they were during Soviet times. I mean they don't still have the same president or anything.... Oh.

The most hilarious thing in all these reports is Usmanov's claim that it is both beneath his dignity to respond to all the allegations, and that he isn't a vindictive man. His hiring of Schillings, who have been sending out chilling legal threats to anyone who dared to link to Murray's original post, was purely the action of someone who wanted the truth to be known! It's all been a big misunderstanding: he just didn't want silly mistakes to be made. How wrong and mean we've all been!

I am dealing with the British ambassador to Moscow to run some huge cultural events. We are bringing great artists to exhibit in Russian museums. Why not ask him about the secret intelligence he has received on me?

Yeah, that's a great idea Alisher. I'm sure he'll be more than happy to share that "secret" intelligence with us. In any case, if it's the same intelligence that Murray received, as it doubtless is, he'll already know the truth but will have to bite his lip.

Decrying the “prejudice material” written about him, Mr Usmanov says he is tiring of firing off various law suits. Asked whether the continuation of such allegations would make him think about walking away from Arsenal, he says: “I’ll think about it.” But enemies were left in no doubt he would not shirk a fight. “If it is initiated to drive me out, I stay.”

Funny that. Craig Murray has still yet to receive a writ for his original allegations, but Usmanov claims he won't shirk from a fight. Strange that Schillings have already said they don't have any intentions to pursue Murray because they don't want to give him a platform on which to spread his views. They know full well that Usmanov would have a high chance of losing, and at the very least would be far more severely embarrassed than he already is.

Finally, to bring it all back towards the actual football aspect:

He also made it plain that, unlike Chelsea, Arsenal would have to pay their own way as a business rather than expect handouts. Usmanov may be a genuine fan of Arsenal – he even called Tony Adams “a real Gooner” – but he also referred to them as a “useful portfolio investment”.

Yes, you too can become a genuine fan of Arsenal as long as you're well briefed on their past by your PR advisers, as Usmanov obviously has been (although he gets at least three members of the 2002 double-winning team wrong). Then he gives the game away: anyone who describes a football club as a "useful portfolio investment" should never be let anywhere near the ground, let alone into the director's or chairman's box. Usmanov isn't just a phony, he's a vain, venal and pathetic man, and he will be fought every step of the way.

Related post:
Tim Ireland - Usmanov begins a new PR push

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10/03/2007 08:49:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Tabloid-watch: Glorious Diana humbug.

You might recall that earlier in the year Channel 4 came under heavy pressure, both from the tabloids and as a result of their fury, Prince Harry and William themselves, to pull a documentary that was alleged to contain images of Princess Diana lying in the smashed Mercedes in the Paris tunnel, being treated before she died. While Channel 4 quite rightly refused to remove the programme from the schedules, it obscured one image to "avoid any unwarranted intrusion into their [the Princes'] privacy or that of their families".

At the time Private Eye pointed out that the Scum, one of those newspapers noisily complaining about this latest unwarranted distress to the Princess's children, had in fact already previously published the photograph at the centre of the whole storm, also blanked out, splashing it on the front page when an Italian magazine went ahead with an article that used the already freely available on the internet photographs of the late Princess receiving treatment.

Fast forward to yesterday, which saw the opening of the inquest into Diana's death, only 10 years' after the fact, and the release of a number of previously held back photographs, including those that see inside the car a matter of minutes before the crash that killed three of the occupants and badly injured Fayed's bodyguard. They clearly show all three of those in the picture, Henri Paul, Trevor Rees-Jones and Diana, with her back to the camera, looking highly agitated and trying to get away from the paparazzi that were taking the shots we're now seeing for the first time.

How then did the tabloids (and Telegraph) react to the release of these potentially highly insensitive and upsetting set of photographs? Why, by splashing them all over their front pages with appropriately sensational headlines of course!




While these photographs are central to the inquest, there was no need whatsoever for them to be published in such a way, but then with the tabloids ever more desperate to boost their circulation it was no brainer decision, even if it shows how flagrantly hypocritical their faux-outrage over the Channel 4 documentary was, or indeed last year's publication of the same photographs by the Italian magazine, coming at the same time as some genuinely "shocking, sickening, outrageous" photographs were emerging from both Israel and Lebanon. Amazingly, the Express resisted the temptation to throw them on their front page, although I have no doubts that they're used inside. The Grauniad's coverage of the inquest, written in a humourous style by Stephen Bates, managed to avoid using them; the tabloids, regardless of their past attempts to savage anyone who dares to impugn either her memory or publish the graphic photographs of her passing, had no such qualms.

The whole inquest is a pointless, hugely expensive waste of time. We know how and why Diana died; as a result of a tragic car accident, exacerbated by the presence of paparazzi desperate for shots of both Dodi and the princess, something which was also not helped by how the driver, Henri Paul, having taken a toxic mix of anti-depressants and alcohol, was clearly unfit to be in change of a motor vehicle. It's also quite possible that both Diana and Dodi would have survived if they had been wearing their seat belts. All of this has already been set out in Lord Stevens' exhaustive report that considered all the conspiracy theories that will be debunked once again, this time in court, and found that they were complete bunkum.

This is all being done for the benefit of a man who is already certain of what happened. Whether it's because of vanity, guilt, pigheadedness, denial or a vendetta against the British establishment that denied him a passport is impossible to know for sure perhaps without a psychiatrist intervening, but Mohamed Al-Fayed is never going to be satisfied until a court decides that the accident was in fact murder, something which is never going to happen. Why we are continuing to indulge this wealthy egomaniac is the only question remaining about what happened that night, and it's one which the court cannot pass judgment on.

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10/03/2007 07:41:00 PM | | | links to this post

Tuesday, October 02, 2007 

Cynical about real political choice? Moi?

There's nothing quite like the conference season to restore your cynicism in politics. Say what you like about the Liberal Democrats - irrelevant, idiotic, idiosyncratic - they at least have something approaching an actual debate, discussion and vote on new policies. Compare that to both the Labour and Conservative conferences, so far distinguished only by their congratulatory backslapping and err, almost indistinguishable policies, and you'd almost be forgiven for wanting to turn yellow and become a Minger.

First though, it would be remiss not to mention today's flabbergasting act of political cynicism from Gordon Brown. For once, the Tory accusations of spin, electioneering and downright opportunism were more than valid. As oleanginous, creepy and rabid as Liam Fox is, it was impossible to disagree with his righteous anger about Brown's token mention of Iraq in his speech last week, only to fly to Baghdad during the Tory conference and announce a further draw down of troops. Even if we hadn't then learned that this further withdrawal was in fact nothing of the sort, with some of the 1000 soldiers who would be back by Christmas either already here or not even in Iraq currently, the truly shocking thing about this latest foreign policy debacle was that Brown had the nerve to go to Iraq at all, without at the same time announcing that all the remaining troops would be brought home almost immediately. The lunacy of remaining at Basra airport, supposedly as a backup force in case the Iraqi army or police need as at some point, even when we're told that a full handover will be possible within a couple of months, and with, surprise surprise, Basra quieter since we left, is self-evident. Our last act in Iraq could conceivably have taken place before Christmas - the final operation, to bring to safety the Iraqi employees who worked for our armed forces whom we owe a debt of both protection and gratitude to - and that would have been that. Instead, in a blatant act of political manoeuvring prior to the now almost certain calling of an election, Brown proved that he can still be just as deceitful, if not more so, than his predecessor.

The only mitigating factor was that today was just another day in the Conservative charade of pretending to be all things to all people, whether it was the presenting the alternative to authoritarian New Labour as being even more authoritarian, or promising to fix our "broken society" by shafting the ill and depressed into jobs they either don't want or can't cope with in order to redistribute to working couples. If you want a good giggle, you can read Ed Vaizey's hilarious CiF post about how the Tories are back on track due to their commitment to helping young people starting out in life; as WarwickLad in the comments puts it, by ensuring that the children of the well-off will have even less incentive to work or contribute to society, courtesy of their inheritance tax cut. Oh yeah, the Tories are back on track all right: a track leading straight to the buffers.

David Davis certainly wants to take them there. Reading through his speech, itself frequently broken up by self-indulgent video clips either involving individuals telling them how wonderful/right they are, or featuring those they've decided to champion for whichever fatuous reason, the only lasting impression you get is of, despite all Davis's protestations about how bad Labour have been over crime, immigration and terrorism over the last ten years, how little difference he's really offering. Davis wants less bureaucracy for the police; Smith last week offered them new computers for processing paperwork on the street and machines for taking fingerprints. Davis repeats a very recent news story about Devon police supposedly not being allowed to throw a life-belt to someone in the water without conducting a "risk assessment" first - in reality an on the spot evaluation by the officer of what might go wrong. The document Davis is referring to is in fact drawn up by the Devonshire police themselves, is a summation of their own policies on rescuing those in danger (it's not a requirement of the police to dive in to save someone - that's the job of the other, trained, emergency services, but naturally the vast majority would do anyway) and has nothing to do with the government, but anything will do to bash them; he also raises the story of the boy who drowned recently in Wigan when the community support officers didn't jump in to save him, except Davis refers to them as "uniformed officers" to obfuscate the point ever so slightly.

Next Davis refers to what happened to Nicholas Tyers, the fish and chip shop owner from Bridlington who performed a citizen's arrest on what Davis calls a "yob" and was himself arrested and charged with kidnap, only for the judge to throw the case out. What Davis doesn't mention is that the yob in question was 12 years old, and that the crime they performed a citizen's arrest on him for had happened the day before. All this is leading up to another inevitable - the rush to zero tolerance, which, amazingly enough, was what Jacqui Smith talked of last week. Davis lauds the completely incomparable example of New York once again to what could be achieved across the country, lifting his argument almost directly out of the pages of the Sun.

How will the Tories provide the extra prison places needed if zero tolerance were to be enshrined? By abolishing ID cards. The Tories' one decent, non-authoritarian policy on civil liberties apart from their opposition to longer detention without charge for "terrorist suspects", and they're going to spend the money saved from not introducing them on more cells, further entrenching the crisis in overcrowding which can simply not be built out of. It's a vicious circle - ever more people in prison leads to less effective rehabilitation and in turn more re-offending, but Davis has signed up to the fallacious Sun mantra that while the "bad people" are locked up they can't commit more crime. Who cares about what happens when they're released? The Tories are also still continuing with their head in the sand approach to the early release scheme, which they claim will lead to 25,000 inmates being let out around two weeks' early this year, even though the total has so far only hit just less than 6,500, and the prison population hasn't even dropped. If they hadn't been released slightly early the entire system would have snarled up, but seeing as they're not in power they can carp about instantly abolishing it.

So it continues. Davis' next wheeze is drug treatment programmes, which apparently work best when they are "abstinence" based. Perhaps we ought to get Davis addicted to crack or heroin and then see how he likes going cold turkey. On immigration the Tories will make sure it drops by putting a limit on economic migrants from outside the EU, which will of course be far removed from Labour's own impositon of a points system regulating who can come here to work, but to soften the blow Davis talks up the Gurkha who had to fight to live here, the Chinese cockle pickers, here illegally, and whom as a result the Tories woulld continue to promise to deport, but seeing as they're dead they can't point that out. The obligatory mention is next made to the evil that Smith also spoke of, human trafficking, talking of 10,000 women brought here and put to work as sex slaves; too bad that as in the US, the figures don't seem to stack up - Operation Pentameter, last year's operation find and free victims of sex trafficking, succeeded in freeing 88 victims. Human trafficking is a reality, but the numbers involved seem to be far below that politicians talk of. A police border force is announced again as well - a policy that Gordon Brown shamelessly nicked.

Oh, and Hizb-ut-Tahrir will be banned. So much for tolerance and respect, and a "hard-nosed defence of freedom". Radical Muslim organisations potentially far more dangerous forced underground than when they're out in the open don't apply.

Thing is, this isn't really entirely David Davis's or the Tories' fault. They've been hemmed in by New Labour, who've either stole the majority of their policies or been shoved so far to the right on home affairs by the constant screeching of the Sun that they've nowhere else to go. Davis seems in general to be something approaching an old style Tory libertarian, as his stance on extended detention and other matters has shown, that one gets the feeling that if he wasn't shadow home secretary the policy would be different. His, and his party's policies on that and ID cards are far more virtuous than Labour's disgraceful continuing attacks on civil liberties. It's just impossible to support the party's policies as a whole as because of how far right they've got to go to somehow outbid Labour. The above is proof of that failure, and how it's leaving the electorate in general with so little real choice.

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10/02/2007 10:19:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Usmanov-watch: Revealed as yet another grasping, greedy megalomanical oligarch.

Obese freedom-of-speech denying Uzbek oligarch Alisher Usmanov has finally had his true colours fully revealed. Far from investing in Arsenal because he's a fan of the team, as his PR advisers have been furiously spinning since his first purchase of shares, today's Grauniad reports that he first had designs on Liverpool:

Arsenal's second-largest shareholder, Alisher Usmanov, held exploratory talks over a bid for Liverpool before the club was sold to Tom Hicks and George Gillett in a £174m deal.

The then Liverpool chairman, David Moores, received a representative of the Uzbek billionaire alongside the two Americans and the Dubai Investment Capital group at a time when he was courting potential investors. But when it became clear that Moores would sell out entirely Usmanov chose to pursue a "meaningful" but minor stake in Arsenal.


Likely to make Arsenal fans even more suspicious of his motives is what he was advised to do after abandoning any designs on Liverpool:

His advisers recommended purchasing Tottenham Hotspur or Derby County outright...

Quite obvious then that Usmanov doesn't have even the slightest knowledge of Arsenal football club and its history. Nevertheless, he's been talking to the BBC about his future plans for eventually purchasing the club:

"We don't have the capacity today, but this is business and life is changing," he said. "Something that you can't do today, maybe you can do tomorrow."

How very true. One could suggest that life is changing in that Usmanov and his scumbag set of shysters, Schillings, would have once been able to stop any newspaper from printing the allegations that Craig Murray temporarily hosted on his website; now, thanks to the internet, Murray's original post, despite being removed under legal threat from its original place of publication, is still available at a wide variety of places that are incredibly easy to discover. You could also compare it to Usmanov's past: despite being imprisoned for corruption, he's now a billionaire businessman. Those two things are most certainly not connected. Remember that.

Something else can most certainly be discerned from this latest update on Usmanov's past and future dealings and plans though. He's cut from the same cloth as the Glazers: men without the slightest interest in the actual football club, the fans or anything other than how their investment will benefit them. Their only care is how it'll will extend both their own self image and their bank balance, and as last week showed, Arsenal is currently highly profitable. Not content with his dealings with such doyens of the international community as Islom Karimov, world famous for his boiling of opponents to his dictatorship to death, he wishes for his bloated reach to extend worldwide, to further polish his oversized ego to go with his grotesque, outsize body. In short, this man is a complete and utter cunt. Stopping him from gaining control of Arsenal should now be an obligation on all fans.

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10/02/2007 09:16:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, October 01, 2007 

The charge to the right.

For those of us who hoped, however desperately or naively that Gordon Brown really would bring a change, however small to the Labour party, last week was the evidence that showed if anything, Brown is prepared to push the political centre ground even further towards the right. However much we may loathe his motives for doing so, it was an astute political move, if nothing else. The success of last week, or at least the success as the press and the Labour party itself saw it, was to put the Conservatives into a hole: where do they go when Brown is so shamelessly stealing not just their territory, but even some of their policies?

If yesterday and today are any indication, it's the response that comes naturally: go even further right. Of all the people who you could choose to talk on foreign affairs, only the rabidly right-wing would decide on a figure as divisive or discredited as John Bolton, one of the architects not just of the Iraq war, but also of the whole neo-conservative movement. You wouldn't have known that from listening to him though, as he's now apparently embarrassed about his previous dalliances with the Project for the New American Century, to which he was a signatory to at least a couple of letters, even if he didn't sign its statement of principles. No, rather than a neo-con, he's a Goldwater conservative, and he doesn't share the "Wilsonian" views of the benefits of democracy that some of his fellow neo-cons do.

That's probably for the best, as he had either just or was about to call for the overthrow of the democratically elected president of Iran, wistful of the time when the "the US once had the capability to engineer the clandestine overthrow of governments". Nothing really new there, as after all, Donald Rumsfeld himself had previously mused on the overthrow of the Shah, who he considered to be a fine man, except for the torture, repression and all the rest, whom the CIA had maneuvered into place after Mossadegh was deposed. According to Bolton, Iran's nuclear program has gone beyond the point of no return, and "limited strikes", while not an "attractive" option, are better than the alternative. The UN, he said, to applause, is "fundamentally irrelevant", unlike for instance, a former UN ambassador with a mustache similar to a former Russian dictator's.

Away from the calls for even more bloodshed and dropping of bombs in the Middle East, this week, again according to the media, was make or break for the Conservatives, the Scum for one suggesting that David Cameron's task was close to "mission impossible". Labour's bounce, especially when the Conservatives had yet to have their own shindig was always going to be possibly overstated, and no betting man would have put down his money before at least seeing how they performed.

While we'll have to wait until Wednesday for Cameron's own attempt to galvanize both his own troops and potentially the public behind him, if Brown does call an election, he'll find it difficult to top today's naked attempt to blind the public with tax cuts that the vast majority will never actually pay. If the message of Brown's speech was at times puritanical, nationalistic or even jingoistic, then George Osborne's theme was aspiration, that most bourgeois of desires, that the vast majority of us grow out of once we realise that it's only available to the better off. Osborne's promise today to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £1 million was, however indirectly, an indication that the Conservatives have no real intention of trying to change that.

Before he came to it though, it was time for a whistle stop tour of all Gordon Brown's failures. He holds, according to a former civil servant, a "very cynical view of mankind", which according to Osborne is the "antithesis of our age". Forgive me for defending Gordon Brown, but I think he might just have something there: the current state of the world hardly suggests otherwise. Give me cynicism over "sunshine winning the day". Next he was responsible for Northern Rock, somewhat more plausibly, but wasn't this ever so slightly rich coming from the party responsible for the disaster on Black Wednesday, and only weeks after John Redwood, shortly to be praised by Osborne, suggested that all the red tape regulating mortgages be abolished, just as the disaster of the sub-prime lending in America took out a bank that had thought that the age of easily available liquidity would last forever?

That part of Redwood's report was strangely not mentioned, although his other recommendations, Thatcherite to the core and in direction contradiction to those in the quality of life review from Zac Goldsmith and John Gummer, were praised to high heaven. Osborne doesn't just believe in low taxes, he wants them every day of the year, not just December the 25th, in a vacuous soundbite to end all vacuous soundbites. Before the inevitable announcements though, it was back still to whacking Gordon Brown over the head; he doesn't just not get it, he also doesn't understand the new economy, whereas Osborne believes in the collective wisdom of free people, which is apparently how Google, Facebook and MySpace work. It seems that Tila Tequila is a Conservative too, as the people have chosen her as their representative from MySpace.

Finally, drearily, Osborne got to the meat, and you really wish he hadn't, so thin and so laughable was his argument. Rather than it being the huge rise in house prices, or the lack of housing stock, vastly depleted by err, the Tories' selling off of the council houses being chiefly responsible for young families finding it hard to get on the property ladder, it's in actual fact all down to Brown's stealth taxes, and the whopping £1,600 that those buying for the first time have to pay in stamp duty. Well, fear no more, because the Tories are going to abolish stamp duty for all first time buyers' on houses sold under £250,000. Their dream of making a tax cut look better than it actually is your dream too, or something. Aspiration, aspiration, aspiration!

That though was nothing compared to the next fiction to be served up. John Redwood's report had proposed abolishing inheritance tax, and it was widely briefed that there was going to be an announcement this week that it was going to become firm policy, and Osborne certainly wasn't going to disappoint. He was cannier than Redwood though: abolishing IHT completely could easily be portrayed as giving the ultra-rich a free tax cut, giving Labour more than enough to target. Instead, Osborne's ploy was to readdress IHT and make it only target the super-rich, as it was initially meant to. The applause as he announced that the threshold would be raised to £1 million was deafening: you almost expected him to take a couple of bows, so delighted were the Tory faithful at such wonderful news. You could almost see the pound signs reflecting in their eyes, the vast majority safe in the knowledge that they could pass down all the privilege they'd either earned or inherited themselves with no worries that the evil taxman would be taking it from them.

Too bad that the sums on how it was to be paid for simply don't add up: just how many non-domiciled Britons are going to sign up for the status when it costs £25,000 a year? Answer: not many. And wasn't there an inherent contradiction in the policy? Hadn't Osborne just moments ago said how the very rich, those it is still going to hit, already avoid inheritance tax? Where do the aspirational fit into all this? Aren't those who inherit their parents' former abode with no payments to make less likely to achieve for themselves when they have a cash cow courtesy of the luck of being born, or even due to the luck of whom their parents were born to? In reality, inheritance tax has become a bogeyman for middle England which is all too easy to take out and win major kudos for doing. Never mind that even the Tories agree that it currently only affects 6% of estates, and that Labour is already going to raise the threshold to £350,000, it's still enough to scare the journos on the Mail and Express with their well-off parents, the most likely factor behind the clamour for its abolition and resulting inching into the consciousness of the nation at large. There has always been a case for raising the threshold even further, to £500,000, or £750,000, respectively double or treble the average price of a house in south-east England, so it really does still hit the rich, but £1 million is the equivalent of abolishing it while not doing so. Paul Linford thinks Gordon might go one better and abolish it completely, but we shall see.

At the same time then as declaring themselves the party of aspiration, the Tories intend to still further rob from the ultra-rich to give to the reasonably well-off, entrenching their position while further damaging the already limited ladder of social mobility. In fact, they're not even satisfied with that: in order to destroy the iniquity of single mothers being better off alone through the tax system than if they're living with a partner, they intend to get the long-term sick on incapacity benefit on their bikes through the private sector to pay for it, and that's without even considering the blatant bribe of £2,000 a year to married couples, those weak links that are hard done by as a result of our hideous welfare state helping the unwell and out of work which thinks nothing of those that tie our society together, as Iain Duncan Smith so effortlessly identified.

It'd almost make you want to vote Labour, until you remember that new Labour in the age of change under Brown is the soft Conservative option. I used to think that those who complained about politicians being all the same weren't paying enough attention: turns out they were right.

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10/01/2007 07:55:00 PM | | | links to this post

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