Saturday, May 24, 2008 

Required reading.

Just some links for today:

Flying Rodent - Cameron: By-Election Victory a "Triumph for Managed Democracy"

As the Simpsons so sagely pointed out, it's funny because it's true.

Rhetorically Speaking - Nadine Dorries and her followers are *still* lying.

Grauniad - The scandal of the masters student who downloaded an al-Qaida manual from a US governmnet website who was arrested and held in custody for six days.

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Friday, May 23, 2008 

All change at Crewe.

Just like how it was a foregone conclusion that Labour would win the general election in 2005, the question was only by how much, it was much the same in Crewe and Nantwich yesterday. The swing to the Conservatives was slightly less than 20%, but the more stark figure was the majority of over 8,000. Mid-term blues, economic woes and everything else besides, to go from having a 8,000 majority in one of your safest seats to being beaten by over 8,000 votes three years later is nothing short of a catastrophe.

While the above and the horrendously bad Labour campaign strategy are the main reasons for the loss, it's the crystallisation of everything that has been wrong with New Labour which makes this defeat different. At long last, the hollowness of Labour's words has been exposed, and by, in the unpleasant euphemism, Labour's "core". New Labour's election strategy has been simple and up till now effective: firstly, stress economic competence and how wonderful the end of boom and bust has been, as well as the spending on public services; second, be as authoritarian on law and order as possible without pissing off the Grauniad-left too much and without pleasing the Sun/Daily Mail enough; and lastly, make clear how awful it would be if those Tories got back in.

All three of these things were in evidence in Crewe, except the economic confidence line had been reversed. Rather than stressing how wonderful everything is, which would be suicidal, the decision was to put that Brown and his puppet Darling would make everything all right again after the "global" circumstances have calmed down. This has always been a specious line when Northern Rock has been one of the biggest casualties of what used to be called a crisis of capitalism rather than a "credit crunch", and this was brought home by the anger in Crewe about the 10p rate, hitting home just as the bills are beginning to pile up. All of Labour's huffing and puffing over criminal justice policies in the past few months, the Daily Mail bribing over cannabis, Jacqui Smith's advocating of the police behaving in exactly the same way as the "yobs" themselves and the continuing, bizarre, obsession with 42 days, none did anything to placate the electorate, and nor did the blatantly xenophobic and insulting playing up of how the Conservatives don't support ID cards for either foreign nationals or us lucky normal citizens. Last, the playing up of the "toff" card was the substitute for "don't let the Tories wreck everything" ploy and it was both so pathetic, so desperate and so vacant that it should have been the final straw for the activists themselves.

The loss could have been mitigated somewhat if Labour had bothered to notice just one or two things. If you were going to do a personal attack, don't be so staggeringly obvious and unsubtle. Instead of targeting Timpson for being well-off or a "toff", attack him for being another identikit Tory politician in a sharp suit in either his 30s or 40s who doesn't seem to know what he's talking about other than what he's told by the higher-ups. Timpson's winning speech was stunning in its crassness and triumphalism; some might say he's entitled to be after such a campaign, but all I saw was the sneer which so often also appears to be on the face of George Osborne, who he more than resembles. It was impossible to do this though because of Labour's biggest mistake: Tamsin Dunwoody herself. If Timpson was unpleasant, then the fourth(?) generation of the Dunwoody political clan was both charmless and sour. Again, perhaps being given such a poisoned chalice excuses her mood somewhat, but being so directly to interviewers as she was is not going to help you win over the floating voter. Gwyneth herself might have had those qualities also, but she made up for them through her independence and contempt for New Labour, neither of which her daughter obviously had, as the campaign made clear. After all, what is more contemptuous, imposing a rich boy in a suit on a working-class town or a party which is meant to be all about equality and the dead-end of meritocracy sticking another Dunwoody on the ballot and expecting the electorate to not notice the difference?

Moreover, Labour missed the most gaping, open goal since the footing slipped from under John Terry on Wednesday. In one of his rare forays into the hostile world of the normal person, or at least those inclined to give him a harder time than others seem to, David Cameron was faced by an almost Paxman-esque local who demanded, three times, whether the Tories would reinstate the 10p rate. Each time Cameron refused to answer, for the reason we all know being that he and the rest of his party couldn't give a stuff about it in actuality but are playing on it because of the damage it's caused. How did Labour fail to seize on this, and not make clear that the hole had been filled (somewhat) and that the Conservatives were not even offering any solid policy on what they would do other than keep public spending at the same level as Labour initially before moving towards "sharing the proceeds of growth"?

Granted, doing either of these things was not going to win the seat for Labour. With a better run campaign however, it could have at least stopped the swing being so damaging that it really does look as if it's curtains, if not for Gordon Brown immediately, then definitely for Labour itself. Credit due to Cameron, he has the same knack as Blair occasionally did for capturing the moment, and his declaration that "this is the death of New Labour" is now going to be next to impossible to shake off. Coming with another wounding performance in the Commons on Wednesday, where Brown walked straight into Cameron's trap, for all his lack of difference with the Blair vision of a modern politician, Cameron now looks almost unassailable as the next prime minister. As others have stated, this result is still not a vote of confidence in Tory policy; it's still far too sparse for that. What it is however is a sign that voters now think that Cameron and his party are worth a go, so fed up have they become with Labour and also, sadly, Gordon Brown himself.

I say sadly because I still think that Brown had the qualities to be a great prime minister. Unlike Blair up until his messianic streak took him wholly and Major entirely, Brown does believe in what he's doing, and always has. He's however stumbled into the top job and not found it like he thought it would be; no longer can he play like he's still in opposition like he did at the Treasury, running an insurgency against Blair and his worst attempts at pitiful and needless reforms, making the right arguments and often winning. He can't distance himself any longer from the government as a whole; he is the government, and his continuation of the worst of Blairism while not making the changes he's promised has brought both the party and himself to the brink, although it was always Blair that did the damage in the first place, and continues to do through the memoirs and constant recollections.

Again then we go through the suggestions, advice and in some cases, pleas from both outsiders and insiders on what he needs to do. Again there is no sign that Brown is really listening. Both John McDonnell on the socialist left and Compass on the soft left urge and urge again that they stop the dismal triangulation and return to Labour's roots. Last week's draft Queen speech showed that Brown has no intentions of doing that, and he's hardly going to rip that up and start again. It would actually make him even weaker if he did that, welcome as it would be. The least worst thing he could do would be a reshuffle: acknowledge the walking disaster that is "Wacky" Jacqui Smith and sack her; get rid of Hazel fucking Blears and send her to the gulag; perhaps move Jack Straw to be chancellor; and swallow his pride and bring back some of the old big beasts, like Alan Milburn, Charles Clarke and Frank Field, if only because it's better for them to be inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in. Then more or less do what was suggested after the local elections, by getting rid of ID cards, bringing the troops back from Iraq, scrapping 42 days and most radically of all, abolish tax credits and raise the very poorest out of tax altogether while helping the reasonably well-off that also benefit through taking away in the first place less, all raised by either a windfall tax on the obscene oil/gas profits and/or by taxing the rich and especially the super-rich more.

All of this would completely wrong foot the Tories. They could play it as desperation and it might work but it would also truly show Brown to be listening. However, as we've seen time and time again when politicians have promised to listen, all they've done is carry on just as before. With no real chance of a leadership challenge, and with even the possibility of one only turning the electorate off more with the party gazing at its navel, Crewe and Nantwich along with David Cameron seem to have written Labour's epitaph.

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Giving a message to Hazel Blears.

Keeping it short and sweet, as you too might after spending the best part of the evening swapping round IDE cables and jumpers in a random fashion as that's apparently the only way to fix the piece of crap I'm currently laboured with, could someone be good enough to "give a message" to Hazel Blears by taking her out and shooting her in the fucking head?

Thanks in advance.

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Don't panic, but he might be Islamic!

So, a man walks into a Giraffe...

Err....

It does seem almost like a joke, doesn't it? Guy chooses a Giraffe restaurant, of all places, to go in (the one here advertises "global burgers" and is probably fair-traded and feng shuied out of the stratosphere), orders a drink, then goes to the toilets and explodes. Still, it was nice of this not quite Mr Creosote to go pop out where it was unlikely anyone else would have got hurt, wasn't it?

You also have to hand it to the police. The explosion took place at around 12:50 this afternoon. By just before 10, the police had managed to investigate to such an extent that they felt confident enough to know exactly why Nicky Reilly did what he did: apparently he is a recent convert to Islam, suffers from mental illness, and, in their words, was "was preyed upon and radicalised." That's a pretty decent turn around for any investigation, and the police's decision to announce their initial conclusions before any charges have been laid, and before the dust had even settled can only be welcomed. 42 days? Apparently all they really need is 42 hours.

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Wednesday, May 21, 2008 

The final words on Dorries (for now).

Unity provides all the necessary information on why Cameron shouldn't be allowed to get away with calling Gordon Brown a ditherer after his machinations over the abortion bill, but most sweet after last night's votes is Nadine Dorries' response: to carry on as if nothing happened.

Following yesterday's attempt in the House of Commons to reduce the upper the limit for abortions from 24 to 20 weeks, Nadine is to join forces with Labour MP Frank Field in a cross party to campaign to reduce the number of abortions, tackle teenage pregnancy and improve sexual health. During yesterday's debate on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, MPs voted on an amendment tabled by Nadine to reduce the upper limit for abortions from 24 to weeks to 20 weeks.

Nadine said, "While I am clearly disappointed that we were unsuccessful in the vote on reducing the upper limit for abortions, I believe we have achieved a great deal in making more people aware as to what the methodology of an abortion actually involves. Following the campaign I believe we have also brought into the public domain important information such as the viability of a foetus below 24 weeks, the issue of foetal pain and the long term consequences in terms of mental health for many women who choose to have an abortion. The vote may have been lost, but I feel we certainly won the arguments.

I have a great deal of sympathy when people say politicians - and MPs in particular - are out of touch with the views of the public. Opinion polls consistently show that the public wants to see a reduction in the upper limits for abortions, which is already one of the highest in Europe, yet yesterday the majority of MPs defied the views of the majority of their constituents and voted for the status quo.

However, I will continue to campaign for a reduction of abortions in the UK and the broader issues of tackling teenage pregnancy and improving sexual health, particularly amongst young people. I am delighted that following yesterday's vote I received a telephone call from the widely respected Labour MP, Frank Field MP, who told me that after listening to my speech in the House of Commons yesterday evening, he changed his mind and decided to vote for my amendment. We have decided to establish a new, cross party group to continue the campaign to tackle issues surrounding the rise of teenage abortions and pregnancy."

You have to admire Dorries' chutzpah: she couldn't even get the 200 supporters she repeatedly claimed she had to vote for the 20 weeks amendment, yet she and those who, um, decided that it wasn't worth the effort after all were the ones who won the argument. And indeed, they're right. When it comes to repeating mendacious bullshit, ignoring all the evidence from the studies in this country which show that the viability of the foetus under 24 weeks has not changed over the last decade or more, claiming that foetuses feel pain on the evidence of one doctor while others vehemently disagree and bringing up the issue of mental health when pregnancy has such a major effect on a woman's psychology without even considering the moral implications of seeking an abortion, Dorries and her band of followers are second to none. They can be truly proud of lowering the already base tone of politics in this country to its almost lowest ebb. Perhaps it doesn't need to be mentioned that Tony Blair too believed he had won the argument over 90 days detention; he never recovered from that defeat.

It also does little to add to Dorries' claims of overwhelming public support for a reduction when Marie Stopes yesterday unveiled their latest survey which showed that 61% of women of child bearing age supported the right to seek an abortion between 20 and 24 weeks. Previous polls reached different results, but this one asked specifically in which circumstances in which it would be acceptable, reflecting the real issues why someone might still need an abortion at such a period into pregnancy, rather than just abitrarily asking which limit they supported.

Most hilarious of all though is that Dorries will be continuing to attempt to find a "middle way". The "middle way" was Cameron's chatroom sofa supported 22 weeks; it failed by 71 votes. Maybe, just maybe, if Dorries hadn't been allowed to run the campaign, that vote might have been successful. As for Frank Field's new found relationship with Dorries, you couldn't be happier for such a wonderfully matched couple. If he really was impressed by Dorries' speech, so aptly described by Dawn Primarolo as "assert[ing] many things to be facts that are not," and completely overbearing in the emotional, factless sense, with her continuing to draw on her suspicious witnessing and involvement in late-term abortions, then he really has gone crackers. Either that or the old goat fancies her.

Round one goes against Dorries then. The next round might just concern her seat itself.

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Scum-watch: More wild rumours, thoughts on why some crimes get more coverage than others, and typical Facebook bashing.

Having spent yesterday speculating wildly and potentially tramuatisingly on the fate of Rosimeiri Boxall, the hacks on the Sun having seemingly decided that it won't do to just attempt readers to sympathise with her fate; no, you can't have open and shut, black and white cases when no one really knows what happened. To alleviate such a objectionable situation, the Sun today publishes yet more rumours, except this time on what Boxall had consumed alcohol wise:

VICAR’S daughter Rosi Boxall downed wine and spirits before she plunged to her death from a window, it was claimed yesterday.

Hostel resident Holly Dowse told how 19-year-old Rosi was drunk by lunchtime after boozing with two teenage pals.

Holly, 17, said the girls were sinking Lambrini — advertised as a sweet wine for "girls who just wanna have fun" — and strong almond liqueur Amaretto.

Holly, who lives in the flat below in Blackheath, South East London, said: "I went upstairs at midday to tell the girls to be quiet.

"They were in the flat with two boys. I could see they had bottles of Lambrini and a bottle of Amaretto.

"One was dancing around in a black corset while the other was being loud and giggling with Rosi. They all seemed well on their way to being drunk even then."


Ah, see, it turns out she was a binge-drinking yob all along! The point of reporting this "fact" seems to be to cast doubt on the initial picture entirely, as after all, if you're drunk and messing around you can quite easily fall out of windows. Is it really too much to ask for the police to be left to investigate what happens without the press publishing such contradictory churnalism? Of course it is.

On an almost related point, there's an interesting letter in the Grauniad today from a bereaved father over the lack of coverage of his son's violent death:

I, too, am puzzled by media reporting of killings (Brothers guilty of running down father-of-two, May 15). My 22-year-old stepson, Tom Easton, was stabbed to death in September 2006 in a recording studio, where he was helping disadvantaged young people develop their talents. Like Jonathan Zito, he was killed by someone with schizophrenia, who has now been committed to Broadmoor. Yet the national media coverage of Tom's death was virtually non-existent. This lack of interest can't be explained away by "black-on-black" killings, or by nasty people doing nasty things to each other, as Professor Peter Cole asserts. Tom was white, middle-class, at work and an innocent victim of a savage attack. As a family who have lost someone in these circumstances, we're certainly not interested in column inches. What we do want is more debate about what must be done to prevent these tragedies, and government action. That debate has been muted, which is why Through Unity, a coalition of families like ours, has been formed. Maybe together our voices will be heard above the din of press sensationalism and celebrity journalism.

Peter Sinclair
Chair, Tom Easton Flavasum Trust

It isn't an exact science working out why some cases make all the headlines and some don't, but it's difficult to dismiss the notion that it is (mostly) about class and race when there's some evidence to suggest that in most cases that is exactly why some are reported so volubly and others not. Jimmy Mizen is a case that provides a number of reasons why his death was so widely covered, and others, often involving either black youths or ethnic minority youths who died in different circumstances haven't: he was white; middle class; he was, in the words of his parents, a perfect son, a good Catholic, and already had an apprenticeship lined up; his parents were telegenic and more than prepared to talk to the media; and, which I also don't doubt was a factor, one of his sisters additionally has down syndrome, always likely to inspire further sympathy.

As to why Tom Easton didn't receive similar coverage, I do vaguely remember his case, so it wasn't completely ignored or forgotten. Why he didn't receive the same though, although he was white and middle class and filled all the other usual particulars for which cases usually gain coverage, might well be because of what he was doing. Unfortunately, cynicism is hard-set in for good reasons in most hacks, especially those on the right-wing tabloids, and you can bet that some would have thought, if not voiced, that Easton might have been asking for it for working with such hoodlums, or at least he was putting himself in harms way, unlike Mizen who refused to fight.

In a similar way, it's perhaps why
Sophie Lancaster's mother hasn't received the overwhelming sympathy or coverage that Helen Newlove did; she happened to a youth worker who believed in compassion, letting live and and forgiving, and despite initial and understandable soul-searching about whether she could continue in such a job, she's decided she will. Contrast that to Newlove: the woman out not for justice, but for apparent vengeance, who gives the kind of quotes the tabloids adore, such as saying how she'd give her husband's killers the lethal injection herself, while demanding that new, deeply authoritarian and illiberal laws be brought in to stop such youths killing in the future. When met with individuals who don't want to pursue a vendetta, or even, God forbid, forgive their tormentors, as Anthony Walker's mother famously did, they don't understand it or consider it worthy of further coverage, except to ask how they possibly could do such a thing. The embittered and angry always make for better copy than the reflective ones who want to move on.

It's obviously clear why some of the apparent "black-on-black" knife crime deaths haven't received hardly any coverage beyond the initial reports; no one cares when "scum" appears to have killed "scum", not even the police, who might for other cases have issued press release after press release, as the Metropolitan police did after the murder of Tom ap Rhys Price, while the death of
Balbir Matharu was met with little other than silence, from both press and police themselves, until Ian Blair opened his mouth about it.

We can't place all the blame on journalists, especially when they might well have got the story only for it to be spiked or not used later. Sometimes there generally is no reason why murders receive no coverage, apart from maybe the changing practices of the media, increasingly obsessed with the urban centres while ignoring rural areas. Even if not a particularly heinous murder is committed during a time of slow news or especially the silly season, it's always likely to receive more coverage than it might otherwise do. When cases do receive obviously less coverage because of the race or class of the victim, or as witnessed recently when involving less sympathetic figures such as
Fiona MacKeown and the Matthews clan, we ought to speak louder. It is an issue however that does require a lot more study and research for any clear conclusions to be drawn; until then, Peter Sinclair's suggestions are wise ones which ought to acted on. Unfortunately, in the current media climate, it seems unlikely that anything will change.

Speaking of which, here's how the Sun reports the news that "crooks" are turning to social-networking sites to sell their ill-gotten gains:

Naturally, the fact that a certain social networking site owned by the Sun's proprietor is also doubtless home to such activity is nary mentioned.

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Tuesday, May 20, 2008 

It was Dorries wot lost it!

It came down to the crunch, and after everything, not even the 200 supporters Nadine Dorries said she had bothered to turn up to vote for a reduction in the abortion limit to 20 weeks. All the hype about the vote being close turned out to be bluster, with the amendment being rejected by a majority of 142, 190 votes for to 332 against. All the attempts by Dorries to turn to complete emotion, raising the issue of the baby boy she witnessed struggling to breathe once again during the debate, after saying that she hadn't wanted to use it, have failed. This was after she told blatant lies about Labour MPs supposedly being on a three-line-whip to "attend" so that they knew which way they were to be expected to vote. Desperation doesn't even begin to cover it.

Who knows just how much of an impact the blogging campaign against Dorries has had, if any, but yesterday also saw another of the allegations against her, her connections with Christian fundamentalists, completely verified by Channel 4's Dispatches, showing Dorries almost arm in arm with Andrea Minichiello Williams of the Lawyers' Christian Fellowship. Dorries has been moved by the programme to hysterically post on her "blog" that she isn't a fundie, but then no one ever claimed she was. The allegation was instead that her entire campaign was being organised and funded by them, which the Dispatches programme more than demonstrated. For all Dorries' claims of being pro-choice, as she again claimed in parliament today, that she has been working with organisations completely opposed to a woman's right to choose either makes her a stooge, a useful idiot, or a liar. Among Williams' more interesting views is that the Earth is only around 4,000 years old, not even the usual 6,000 as others in the fundamentalist fold usually hold.

Especially gratifying during the debate was that "Red" Dawn Primarolo still has enough fire about her from the old days to call Dorries exactly the latter, albeit in parliamentary language: "She has asserted many things as fact which are not this evening." Equal amounts of opprobrium ought to fall on the Thatcherite throwback Edward Leigh, who declared that “One of the most dangerous places in Britain is in a woman’s womb." Perhaps he has something he'd like to tell us?

The most damage to Dorries though was probably from her own party's leader, with Cameron coming out in favour of 22 weeks rather than Dorries' 20 (Update: Cameron voted for both 20 weeks and 22 weeks, the reasons for which I might well go into tomorrow). Dorries, undermined from above, resorted yet again to distortion:

'Twenty-two weeks is meaningless. 'Large numbers of babies will still be aborted in a barbaric manner, they will still feel pain, and although it will be a victory in as much as the tide will have turned, it will mean that the 20-week campaign will carry on until we meet 20 weeks.

With 22 weeks defeated by 71 votes, the 20 weeks campaign is most likely going to have to wait another good few years before it starts its war of misleading yet again. In the meantime, some of us might well be moved to do everything possible to ensure that Ms Dorries loses her (safe) seat at the next election.

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We are ruled over by cu*ts.

Two separate issues that arrive on the same day could not more sum up the possibly permanent damage to civil liberties in this country.

The first, that apparently "calling" a religion devised by a science fiction writer with the sole purpose of enriching himself a cult is now an offence under the Public Order Act shows the depths to which freedom of speech in this country has now apparently sank. In one way, we shouldn't really be surprised: New Labour, also uniquely made up of individuals who spent their youths demonstrating on causes rather more left-wing than any they now espouse, has done more than any other government in recent memory to dilute the right to protest. Laws meant to deal with stalking have been abused by the police, stop and search powers under section 44 of the Terrorism Act routinely used to harass protesters, and most shamefully of all, the right to protest without prior permission within a mile of parliament barred altogether. In the aftermath of the Danish embassy protests, where a line was clearly crossed, the immediate response of the government was not to instruct the police to intervene in such circumstances, but to propose the banning of the burning of flags, as well as wearing masks on such demos.

All these new laws are less to do with actually stopping protest but with controlling it; they want to know who the trouble-makers are, whether the trouble-makers are entirely peaceful or not. This is why the police now routinely film all protests and take photographs of those on them, all for purely innocent reasons, naturally. It's why the police in London have taken to taking photographs of youths they now stop and search, even if they've done nothing wrong. It's all to add to their databases of potential offenders, don't you know? You don't want crimes to go unsolved do you? What are you, some sort of enemy of the people? We can get you on some technicality for that, surely.

It's that same sort of thinking, the kind of argument which the government knows it can get away with making which shapes the latest database to centralise more or less everything that you've ever done. The Times reports that a new database is being proposed that will collect every email and phone call you make along with the time you spend online all in one place, to replace the native ISP's which currently do the job at the moment. This is about as impracticable an idea as it's possible to imagine, but that doesn't make it any less sinister. As the Register points out, this is the sort of system that would be completely ripe for data-mining and fishing. It's not necessarily the government that we have to worry about from such huge databases, but from those that have access to them. Corporations would pay huge amounts to get a hold of such information, as would those other scum suckers, the tabloids, whom we already know use the other government databases as if they were extensions of their own libraries, with the government happily deciding that there was no need to tighten the penalties for doing so. With our government's brilliant record of losing huge amounts of such data, expecting them to be competent in dealing with the billions upon billions of such records is akin to trusting Nadine Dorries to tell the truth.

As with some much else of the government's attempts to please those demanding that something must be done, it also wouldn't be so bad if the proposals actually would do something to help prevent or cut crime. Instead, keeping the records of those using the internet or phone calls is a joke way of doing so in the 21st century, when so many don't bother to secure their wireless networks enabling anyone to use them free of charge whilst leaving no data trails of themselves via their IP address. More suggestions on how daft this is are offered by comment leavers on Mr Eugenides:

or using pay-as-you-go mobile phones, discarded after a short spell of use; or cars with false number plates; or sending e-mails from internet cafes or by 'stealing' someone else's unsecured broadband access; or any other easy ruse that would avoid the criminals' being caught by this pointless, repellent scheme.

So get a VOIP phone (a base model Cisco 79xx series goes for about $50 on eBay), a BSD or Linux server and the same again for the other end. Set up a VPN (any PFY worth his salt can do this). Now you can talk in private and there is not a damn thing your ISP or the fuzz can do about it, short of banning end-to-end encryption. With a bit of jiggery pokery there's no way they can even tell if you're making a call, as all you need is a little daemon to send data back and forth when the VOIP connection is idle. All cats (encrypted packets) look grey in the dark, so it stuffs their traffic analysis up.


The only ones getting caught out will, as always, be the incompetent and the law-abiding.

Still, if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear, right? Except the government losing all that information, of course. Typically, it's the powerful that gain and the powerless that will be even more at risk from this, just as the Scientologists through glad-handing the police appear capable of ensuring that no protester potentially offends their wonderful and completely legitimate religion. Similarly, if you happen to be wearing a uniform which identifies you as a member of the armed forces, then you too need more protection from anyone who might dare to insult you. As for being shot at in illegal wars, well, that's tough. Priorities? What are they?

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Scum-watch: Basking in rumour of suffering.

As I've noted before, one of the inherent contradictions at the heart of the Sun newspaper is that for all its campaigns for its own form of justice and disgust of the ubiquitous yobs, one of its major selling points is reporting those very same crimes in all their salacious, gory detail. This would be more acceptable if the Sun was certain of those very facts, but as past cases have shown, it regards such small matters as accuracy as secondary to getting the story out. The paper previously claimed that Rochelle Holness had been dismembered with an electric saw while still alive, before the post-mortem established that she had in fact been dead for 15 hours before her killer desecrated her body. Despite Holness's family making their anger and pain clear after the conviction of John McGrady at the newspaper for such disturbing but inaccurate reporting, the Sun never apologised and the story in all its disgusting detail still remains on the website. Similarly, last year the paper reported that Janet Hossain had been found dead in "sexy bondage gear" and speculated that she died after "a kinky game" had gone wrong; she had in fact been wearing her normal clothes and killed by a former lover, with sex playing no role whatsoever.

Today the paper splashes on the case of Rosimeiri Boxall, the 19-year-old who died after falling 30ft from a second-storey window. The facts in the case have already changed once: initially it was reported that Boxall may have been pushed, something that the police have since discounted. Completely ignoring the possibility that further information being released may also turn out to be erroneous, the Sun has gone into complete rumour mode. Quoting a "source" the newspaper reports:

We believe Rosimeiri was subject to a ‘happy slapping’ attack. She was assaulted by girls and the act was videoed.

"She was kept in the room for some hours. We don’t know how she came to be there in the first place but when she could take it no more, she jumped."


It also claims that:

Rosimeiri Boxall, 19 - known as Rosi - had been held captive and tortured for hours before her doomed escape in Blackheath, South East London.

The source might of course be completely correct; he/she might not. The issue here is that when a family is mourning the loss of a daughter, the last thing they want to see is her splashed almost across the full front page of a national newspaper, with deeply troubling potentially inaccurate information about what she suffered in her last hours. The thoughts for those struggling to come to terms with their loss however always come secondary to a newspaper beating its rivals to the punch and keeping the money rolling in.

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Monday, May 19, 2008 

Euphemisms and the same old same old.

Just when it doesn't seem that it can get any worse for Labour and Gordon Brown, out comes another a new poll that shows that the collapse in support for the party is continuing. The latest Guardian/ICM poll puts Labour's support at 27%: the lowest since the the poll series began back in 1984, with the Tories in front by 14 points, at 41%. Although it seems unlikely that would be the outcome at the general election, as Labour surely can't go any lower, it still suggests that the days of hoping for that almost mythical hung parliament may well be over: a result on this scale will gave the Tories a landslide akin to that of Labour's in 97. The country has also firmly turned on Brown, with 51% ranking John Major as a better prime minister, with 67% saying the same of Blair.

Some of that must surely be directly related to probably temporary anger about the 10p rate, or the listlessness consuming the government as the Tories look increasingly confident and like they're enjoying themselves for the first time in years. Osborne's response to last week's mini-budget was pure posturing without any real answer, but Cameron's skill at the dispatch box cannot be denied, running rings round Brown, the man who previously smacked down a succession of shadow chancellors, now apparently bereft of any answer other than to repeat the same old "achievements" with promises of how he'll lead us through the economic storm.

It's little wonder this is the case when the best thinking inside the mainstream Labour party is by Peter Hain, who's managed to work out that the party has to appeal to both Labour's "core" and to the "aspirational", rather than either one or the other. The problem is that Labour at the moment is appealing to neither, and has no apparent idea of how to do it. Hain's main points are about how to win back support in Wales, where the party was decimated in the local elections. The answers to that ought to be obvious, based on the reading of the results. Rather than going to the Conservatives, the Labour support either stayed at home, turned to the nationalists, Plaid Cymru, or to left-wing independents that may once have been associated with Labour. They didn't go because Labour wasn't speaking to the "aspirational" among them; they went because they stopped talking to them entirely, taking them for granted just as Hain's former colleagues in the cabinet have for the last 10 years. The 10p rate was the final straw.

What we're using here is euphemisms. It no longer seems politically-correct to refer to the "core" vote as working-class, or to the so-called "aspirational" as the middle classes, because that's what they are, and if anything, the euphemisms are far more patronising than the former labels. Equally meaningless is "progressive", which really deserves to be consigned to the dustbin of history. When both Hillary Clinton and David Cameron call themselves "progressive", when neither are in the slightest what was once meant by the term, it's time to abandon it. It's partly because the old terms have become insults, when they shouldn't have. The Sun and others disparagingly decry "Lefties", while some of us who consider ourselves lefties consider "right-wing" to mean much the same. Also guilty are the third-way proselytisers, who tried to tell us that right and left were obsolete, purely because they themselves didn't believe in either but in reality tended to be to the right of what the rest of us still understood as the political spectrum.

I raise these issues because they seem especially pertinent when considering the by-election campaign in Crewe and Cameron's claim for the Tories to be the true new progressives. Despite such revolting apologia from Hopi Sen and others of the usual suspects, the Labour campaign, if it can be called that, targeting the Tory candidate Edward Timpson as a "toff", hounding him with young activists dressed up in tails and top hats, is a sign of the sheer desperation and political bankruptcy of the party in 2008. We might all still quite rightly be obsessed with class in 2008, but to openly and cravenly use your opponent's wealth and upbringing as the main reason for why he shouldn't represent a working-class constituency is to admit that you have nothing else to say or, that if you tried, you'd be haplessly beset by the fact that your arguments would count for nought. It's all well and good to cry that they've done it before or are still doing it, but that's the equivalent of the child excusing his behaviour by saying his friend did it first. The child description is perhaps apt: the Labour smearing and leaflets attacking "Tory-boy Timpson" for his mansion and opposition to foreign workers getting ID cards is petulant and juvenile. The starting point for the Labour fightback ought to have been Cameron's appearance there last week, when he was filmed prevaricating weakly in front of a real person who asked what he would do about the 10p rate. They could say that Labour has now mostly fixed it, and that what the rest of Cameron and the gang are offering is the same old Thatcherism wrapped up in a kinder face, as epitomised by his speech on the economy today.

The reason why even that though would be next to impossible though is because it does almost seem as if history is repeating. After Blair became Labour leader after the death of John Smith, he spent the best part of the two years before campaigning for the election began to come across much as Cameron has, as the caring, different new generation of politician prepared to listen, having what Jon Cruddas has referred to as "emotional literacy". This means talking about Britain's "broken society" in much the same way as Labour might have done if out of power, but adding in the same old dog whistles of family breakdown which can be cured if you bribe the middle classes, use of the voluntary sector rather than the state, and believing in society, it's just not the same thing as the state, as if anyone ever said it was. The harsher side of the rhetoric however doesn't filter through: just the vacuousness does. New Labour offered the "new realities and the new paradigm" with the face of Blairism, far kinder than the old nasty Conservatives who said what they meant. Cameron has learned this is the way to do it now, except his vision is to the right of Blair's version.

That's what's so perplexing about the political environment at the moment. We've only just gotten rid of Blair and all he stood for, yet the public apparently wants his heir apparent rather than strange fusty old Gordon. There's no doubt that the public have not yet embraced the Conservatives; what they have embraced is change. Brown hasn't been enough of a change, yet Cameron is no change at all except in the aesthetic department. There's still the best part of two years for this to fully pan out, but if the Conservatives don't win Crewe on Thursday then it will be astonishing. The question will then be whether Brown can survive any further setbacks: at the moment there is no obvious alternative, but defeat in Crewe will only bring the spectre of defeat ever closer, and we all know what they can entail. The sad fact may well be that Labour is already doomed, but it no longer seems impossible that it won't be Brown who'll lead them into that dark night.

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Of conspiracies, conflicts of interests and prostitutes.

The conspiracy theorists will inevitably be swarming over the news that the prostitute who sold the story of Max Mosley's antics to the News of the Screws was the wife of an MI5 officer, and it is indeed a remarkable twist to what has been the Sunday gutter press "scoop" of the year.

Of more immediate interest is that Mosley has hired Quest, Lord Stevens' private security firm, to investigate whether he's been the victim of a "conspiracy" to discredit him. Although Stevens no longer seems to be writing the most reactionary column in the Screws' history, his involvement with the Murdoch paper surely presents something approaching a conflict of interest. Then again, if Mosley is paranoid enough to believe that someone is out to get him when he was stupid enough to think that being dominated by five pros would go no further than that room, then perhaps he deserves to be fleeced of his cash.

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