Thursday, July 31, 2008 

Scum-watch: Yet more pathetic BBC bashing.

Never missing an opportunity to attack the BBC, the Sun is fuming over the £400,000 fine imposed by Ofcom for various fixed phone-in competitions which no one had a chance of winning:

ONCE again, the BBC is fined for conning viewers.

Ofcom’s ruling should shame everyone in the Beeb’s management.

In a private company, heads would roll. Instantly.


If the leader writer had so much as bothered to bring themselves up to speed on what shows were fined and for what, they would have noted that Ric Blaxill, the 6Music head of programming resigned last year after it became apparent that he had been complicit in one of the deceptions that took place on Russell Brand's show. The most high profile casualty of last year's series of "fakery" scandals was Peter Fincham, the controller of BBC1, who resigned after the "Crowngate" hoo-hah. It's perhaps worth noting that both Blaxill and Fincham, having resigned from their jobs in public broadcasting were swiftly recruited by private sector broadcasters, with Blaxill going to the digital radio station Q Music, where he is programme director, and Fincham to none other than ITV, where he is director of programming.

In fact, it's instructive to look to ITV and see what their response was to the fakery scandals which consumed them last year, for more than one reason. Not only did this private company, which the Sun claims would have instantly called for heads to roll, not sack anyone, despite Michael Grade saying that zero tolerance would be imposed, but it defended to the hilt Ant and Dec after it was revealed that they knew nothing about the underhand methods used on their Saturday Night Takeaway show on which they were executive producers.

There is of course, as almost always with the Sun, a huge conflict of interest here. BSkyB, itself around 39% owned by News Corporation, the Sun's parent company, has a 17.9% stake in ITV. As well as being in competition with the BBC through its satellite and digital service, it is in direct conflict now also due to its stake in ITV. Even before this was the case the entirety of the Murdoch press has taken every opportunity it can to attack the BBC, but now it has an even wider commercial reason to do so.

The BBC’s reputation for honesty and integrity is now in tatters.

Yet this isn’t a private firm. It’s paid for by you, through the licence.

Which means no one carries the can, and the buck stops with no one.


Completely untrue, as the Ofcom report and the resignations show. In fact, you could more accurately say this about ITV. No one there has carried the can, the buck has stopped with no one, and it directly profited through the flawed phone-ins, something which the BBC did not. Not only did ITV deceive and take for granted their viewers, it also effectively stole from them. The muted reaction to the original revelation of how ITV took £7.8m from its viewers deceptively was almost entirely ignored in comparison to the BBC's transgressions, which profited them nothing and were mostly always only gone through with to keep the show going.

Snooty intellectuals at the BBC treat viewers with contempt.

That’s why they lazily faked competition winners.


If the BBC are snooty, lazy intellectuals, what does that make their counterparts at ITV and Channel 4 then, who didn't just fake competition winners, but profited from their viewers' failure to be able to win as advertised? I'm pretty sure that makes them fraudsters.

Rivals like GMTV faced massive fines for their errors. Yet the Beeb gets away with a tiny £400,000 fine.

Because, as Ofcom accepted, although those who phoned in on some of the programmes did lose their cash, the BBC didn't receive any of it. Other shows indicted were Sport Relief and Comic Relief, where the money went to charity in any event. GMTV by comparison was fined £2 million because viewers spent up to £40 million on competitions they had no chance of winning. At least with GMTV two executives did resign, unlike those at Channel 4 or ITV.

It’s high time the BBC lost its divine right to YOUR cash.

And was forced to fight with its competitors to survive.


It's high time that the Sun got its facts straight, started declaring its conflict of interests, and stopped moaning when such innovations as the BBC iPlayer show their rivals' programming up for what it is: complete and utter unmitigated crap. In a straight fight, there's only one broadcaster who would win, and it would not be Sky.

P.S. This post makes up the first proper entry on the Sun - Tabloid Lies dedicated blog, set-up by Tim from Bloggerheads. Other contributors will be soon be revealed also.

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Wednesday, July 30, 2008 

The Miliband tendency.

This was probably one of those days when the great British public, those who aren't sunning themselves or wisely ignoring the news completely, find themselves remarkably disengaged by just how insular and geeky political reporting and machinations are. The government's foreign minister writes an article for an national newspaper. Article is deeply average, but because there's not a lot of news around and because the media are desperately looking for evidence of a plot to unseat the Supreme Leader, article is bigged up until it is most certainly the setting out of a stall for a leadership bid. Pandemonium breaks out on the streets as the country tries to take in the massive implications of this latest development. The law lords ruling on the dropping of the SFO inquiry into the BAE slush fund for comparison, unless I missed it, didn't even make it onto the News at 10 on the BBC.

Admittedly, the said article doesn't so much as mention Gordon Brown, and the press conference this afternoon with Miliband himself fending off question after question about its provenance will have done nothing whatsoever to reassure Brown himself of Miliband's true intentions. Jeremy Corbyn probably accurately summed it up, saying:

"Look at the timing, and look at the article itself. We are right at the start of the holiday season, and it is hardly a deep and thoughtful essay."

To which you can only reply, quite. For if this is Miliband's unofficial start to his own leadership campaign, it's certainly a deeply underwhelming one. There is not that much that is startlingly wrong with it; there just isn't anything that's spectacularly brilliant about it.

In fact, its contents can be summed up thus: we [New Labour] must not assume that we've already lost, even if the polls show that we're going to be annihilated; we must stop boasting about how brilliant we've been, but nonetheless all our wonderful success occurred under our former leader, Mr Blair, who I just happened to advise until I became an MP; even though I've just said that we must stop boasting about how brilliant we are, that Mr Cameron's wrong about us being a broken society because look how crime's dropped and how all these other things for which I haven't provided evidence for have dropped since we entered power; now, that Thatcher, she was pretty good wasn't she, inspired Mr Blair, and both of them were radicals while Mr Cameron is just a lightweight; Cameron, he hasn't got any policies, except for ones fairly similar to our own, and highly reminiscent of how we won in 97, decontaminating his brand whilst being suitably vague; that's enough Tory bashing for the moment, now we have to prepare for the upturn even though the downturn still hasn't hit properly yet; something about the public services; The Tories just don't get it do they?; oh, and finally we won by offering real change, change which our current leader isn't offering, so get ready to vote for me instead!

It's hardly Kennedy, is it? Not sub-par Obama class, even. Miliband does, it must be said, deserve credit for finally saying something against Cameron and their broken society nonsense, but it's nowhere near strong enough, nowhere nearly powerfully argued enough, and without any real background to emphasise the point. He's also right that the Tory belief that everything can be magically solved by either involving the voluntary sector or the private sector is completely unrealistic, but it gets lost in the general weakness of the argument. If this is the best that Labour has to offer, it's hardly going to cause Cameron to lose any sleep.

In any case, Miliband isn't going to win the leadership through fighting the Tories, if that is of course what this is the opening salvo of. He'll do that only through making the case that he can learn the lessons of the Blair and Brown years, the mistakes and the successes, and at the moment he only seems to have taken the positives from the Blair era and the negatives from the Brown era. As undoubtedly a Blairite and not a Brownite, that isn't surprising, but if there is one thing that Labour needs, it's someone who can either unite both wings, or can tell one wing once and for all that they can go and swivel, and if they like being right-wing so much, they can join the Tories and reign in perpetuity if they so wish.

Also more than apparent is that Labour continue to underestimate both Cameron and the Conservative resurgence. As addressed previously, for a while you could call Cameron a shallow salesman without any policies, but it simply isn't accurate any longer and just won't wash. Miliband is wise enough to realise that the attack has to be harder, but he doesn't seem to have recognised yet exactly what the Conservatives are doing, which is bizarre, because it's exactly what Labour was doing in the run-up to 97, when Miliband was none other than Blair's head of policy. Despite my dismissal of it last year, I've been devouring the Alastair Campbell diaries (which sums up just how sad I am, really), and what you can instantly note is that either Coulson or someone in the Tory camp has been taking notes right from it. The difference is that unlike New Labour, the Tories, rather than being positive, as they were with "things can only get better," Britain deserves better and other vacuous soundbites which didn't do down the country but rather the party of government, has decided to be negative but still keep with the same overall message. Britian is broken, things are pretty grim, but the Conservatives, rather than the washed-up and out of ideas Labour party are the only ones that can fix it. The New Labour victory was built, exactly as Cameron is doing now, on "decontaminating the brand", which came through Clause 4 and removing almost anything truly out and out left-wing from the agenda. The Tories are doing the same, but are throwing out the right-wing message now because they're confident enough that they'll win in any case.

There, for all to see, is Labour's biggest failure, and also its betrayal. In being so desperate to win, they abandoned their core and are now reaping what they sowed. The Conservatives, realising what they did wrong, have learned from that mistake. First make yourself electable, but don't become so obsessed in doing so that you forget what you're actually for. Miliband is right in one thing, which is that it is still feasibly possible, if remote, that Labour can win the next election. It'll just take far more courage and real change, not just the phony change so far offered by both himself and Brown, for that to happen.

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A victory for the arms dealers, the kleptocrats and the government.

It's been buried thanks to the oh so exciting David Miliband article in the Grauniad, but the House of Lords today made a ruling which will potentially affect the rule of law and justice in this country for decades to come. Overruling Lord Justice Moses and Sullivan, who had came to the decision that the Serious Fraud Office had acted unlawfully in dropping the investigation into the BAE Systems slush fund, after the Saudis threatened not just to withdraw their co-operation on counter-terrorism, but also specifically made the chilling comment "that British lives on British streets" were at risk were it not be stopped, the law lords have very narrowly decided that the SFO director was acting lawfully.

Unlike Moses and Sullivan, the law lords have taken the view, like the government, that such threats are either a "matter or regret" or a "fact of life". It doesn't matter how outrageous the threats were, how if they had been made by a British citizen that he could have been charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice, as both the attorney general and Robert Wardle followed the correct procedures in deciding to drop the case, the Royal Courts of Justice were wrong in declaring that the initial decision was unlawful.

Legally, this can be understood and accepted. It however frightfully ignores the much larger, bigger picture: that the UK government was to all intents and purposes being blackmailed by one of its supposed allies. That is of course if we accept that the threats were to be followed through, which in itself is by no means clear. Even if the Saudis had withdrawn their counter-terrorism co-operation, all such information is now pooled between the main intelligence agencies, meaning that the CIA for one would have forwarded it on to MI5/6 as a matter of course. To give the impression that this threat was more real than it was, the Saudi ambassador expressly made the statement that "British lives on British streets" were at risk if the inquiry was not dropped. Rather than tell the Saudis to get off their high horse and make clear that due to the separation of powers such an investigation could not be called off by politicians, the government meekly gave in, as Moses and Sullivan initially ruled. Robert Wardle, the director of the SFO, had little choice but to cancel the inquiry, as it was clear if he didn't the politicians, including the attorney general, would go ahead and do so anyway.

It takes a moment to digest exactly what sort of precedent this sets. This ruling more or less means that any foreign power, whether an ally or not, can threaten our national security whether directly or indirectly in any case where one of their citizens or otherwise is being tried or even investigated, and we the citizens can do absolutely nothing to challenge the government if it decides that such threats are serious enough to drop that investigation or trial, as long as they have acted appropriately, as the law lords decided Wardle and Lord Goldsmith had. Say that by some miracle or another that the man accused of murdering Alexander Litvinenko, Andrei Lugovoi, was captured and to be put on trial. Russia wouldn't even have to necessarily threaten violence to stop the trial, all it would have to do is threaten to sever ties on helping with national security, or to not pass on information it has on terrorist activities, and the government could therefore conclude that as more lives than just one are being threatened, it would be perfectly lawful for the prosecution of Lugovoi to be dropped.

In practice, it's unlikely that such an extreme case would ever occur. No, what instead is apparent here that from the very beginning the government wanted the SFO inquiry into the slush fund dropped, not because the Saudis were making threats, but because BAE themselves wanted it dropped. It's been established time and again that BAE may as well be a nationalised company, such is the power it has over ministers. The Guardian's expose which initially altered the authorities to the slush fund connected with the al-Yamamah deal was severely embarrassing, even if it didn't have New Labour's fingers all over it. It proved what long been suspected: that BAE and the government had provided the Saudis with massive sweeteners so the deal went ahead, potentially over a £1bn in bribes, which enabled Prince Bandar to buy a private jet, and which was also spent on prostitutes, sports cars and yachts among other things. All of this is helped along through massive public subsidy: up to £850m a year. In other words, we are directly funding the Saudi royal family's taste in whores and vehicles, while its people suffer under one of the most authoritarian, discriminatory and corrupt governments in the world. Despite everything else, it really is all about the arms deals and the oil. The government got its way because it realised it could rely on the spurious defence of "national security". Moses and Sullivan didn't fall for that. The law lords don't either, and one of them, Baroness Hale, even made clear that she was very uncomfortable with having to overrule them, but had little legal option other than to.

The government response to the initial ruling, which understandably horrified them, was to completely ignore it except to appeal against it. There doesn't seem to have been any reaction today either. The groups that brought the initial challenge, CAAT and Corner House were far from silent:

Nicholas Hildyard of The Corner House said:

"Now we know where we are. Under UK law, a supposedly independent prosecutor can do nothing to resist a threat made by someone abroad if the UK government claims that the threat endangers national security.
"The unscrupulous who have friends in high places overseas willing to make such threats now have a 'Get Out of Jail Free' card -- and there is nothing the public can do to hold the government to account if it abuses its national security powers. Parliament needs urgently to plug this gaping hole in the law and in the constitutional checks and balances dealing with national security.
"With the law as it is, a government can simply invoke 'national security' to drive a coach and horses through international anti-bribery legislation, as the UK government has done, to stop corruption investigations."

Symon Hill of CAAT said:

"BAE and the government will be quickly disappointed if they think that this ruling will bring an end to public criticism. Throughout this case we have been overwhelmed with support from people in all walks of life. There has been a sharp rise in opposition to BAE's influence in the corridors of power. Fewer people are now taken in by exaggerated claims about British jobs dependent on Saudi arms deals. The government has been judged in the court of public opinion. The public know that Britain will be a better place when BAE is no longer calling the shots."

This ruling, as if it needed stating again, is far, far more serious than last week's involving Max Mosley. The media however on this case, with the exception of the Guardian or Independent fully supported the government's craven surrender, and will do the same over today's decision. When it personally affects them and their business models they will scream and scream until they're sick; when it potentially means, however spuriously, that "lives are at risk", they jump straight behind the government, and, of course, the money. Such is how democracy in this country works. The rule of law, justice being blind and everything else associated always comes second.

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Tuesday, July 29, 2008 

Reality television, self-destruction and Jodie Marsh.

It's been alluded to in the press a few times of late, but it's worth dredging up here yet again as an example. In the very first episode of I'm Alan Partridge, in a desperate attempt to get a second series of his chat show, Knowing Me, Know You, Alan pitches a variety of brain dead concepts for programmes at the commissioning editor, including, most famously, Monkey Tennis. First shown back at the tail-end of 1997, in those intervening 11 years the idea no longer looks so absurd. In fact, if you set it up like the idea that if you give enough monkeys enough typewriters and enough time they'll eventually write Shakespeare, but instead give them enough racquets, enough balls and enough time, compared to Big Brother it would be exciting beyond belief. Will the monkeys ever play a rally, serve an ace or master the backhand smash? Tune in tomorrow just in case they do!

Commentators have been writing the obituary for reality television for almost as long as it has existed. At the weekend, supposedly prompted by the fact that Australia has cancelled Big Brother and that ratings for the show have fallen to 3 million (which is in fact the fairly average amount the show has been getting for the last couple of years) Rachel Cooke in the Observer went to investigate its health. While her article covers all the bases and is one of the better pieces on the genre's continuing lifespan, the most fascinating part is the interview with Jodie Marsh, who along with Jordan and Kerry Katona (both of whom existed prior to their forays onto reality television, but whom vastly improved their profiles due to it) is probably the other most recognisable female face which the shows have bequeathed us.

Marsh is a conundrum for the simple reason that unlike so many others who have attempted to shoot to fame on the coat-tails of the latest invasive camera show, she is quite clearly of above average intelligence. She could, if she was prepared to put effort into it, be something far other than the sum of her current parts, which include comedy sized breasts (paid for by one of the weekly one-handed lads' mags), comedy sized lips (courtesy of a Five show) and an apparently unfixable nose, which she broke whilst playing hockey at school. Instead, she's plunged herself into the world of reality television, not because she wants to just be famous, although that's part of it, but because she wants to be rich.

The trouble is that Marsh is a walking example of the maxim that money can't buy you love or real friends. It doesn't help that, judging by this interview and past ones, she seems to be thoroughly unpleasant and self-absorbed beyond belief, but again, that also hasn't prevented others from rising up the greasy pole. No, what overwhelmingly hits you reading the conversation between her and Cooke is the fury which seems to be sitting just beneath her skin. Also apparent is that this all too overwhelming anger is not just directed against those who have either slighted her or who she's worked with and thinks have taken advantage of her, but also against herself. The woman who formerly boasted of the fact that her breasts were real while Jordan, her erstwhile rival's, were not, has since had those same implants inserted into her already generous bosom. How else can you describe her decision to continue with such programmes as "Jodie Marsh: Who'll Take Her Up the Aisle", the inference being that not just will the husband she's looking for take her hand in marriage, but also be allowed to, as James Joyce's wife once begged her husband, "bugger [her] arseways," fitting neatly into that very modern, pornographic obsession and fetish that anal sex, probably because of the power it gives the male whilst giving the female none of the pleasure, is far superior to stuffy normal vaginal intercourse. It's hard not see, without getting too psychoanalytical, that Marsh's behaviour is self-harm on a scale which is far beyond what we usually associate with those who cut or otherwise hurt themselves, either as a cry for help or to "help", as they see it (and I include myself in this) with getting their pain out, while also providing all too vivid physical wounds to go with the mental ones.

Some will doubtless look at Marsh and feel that the blame rests purely on her own shoulders for the way she's lived her life. She has entered freely into the shows she's taken part in, knowing full well that she will be used just as much as she uses the producer's money afterwards. Unlike the aforementioned Jordan and Katona however, the difference between them and her is all too obvious to see: while both of them have been advised and have agents which have steered them reasonably effectively, with Katona a customer of Max Clifford, Marsh has for one reason or another relied purely on her own wits. They have ensured that their clients have not become the victim, or the one who is primarily being used; Marsh instead has made a whole host of terrible decisions, and has been fed on parasitically instead of making the deals that the others have.

In this, Marsh is perhaps the summation and ultimate tragedy not just of reality television, but of the way the tabloid media and culture works. Bullied at school, as she sets out in the interview, she sought solace in the thought of becoming famous, as none of the woman on the front pages of the men's magazines could ever be accused of being ugly. She then swiftly contradicts herself, making clear that no one should judge her on how she looks; yet it was her desire not to be that led her onto those self-same magazine covers. After all, how could she not be beautiful? She is little less than a walking fuck doll, the supposed male fantasy: blonde, large breasts, even if not real, luscious lips, and with a mind as filthy as a dirty protester's cell. Yet none of these things have made her happy. None of these things have brought the real success she craves. And very few men except a former boyfriend of Jordan's seem to want to go near her.

Perhaps, apart from her own bad decisions, the real reason why Marsh has not achieved the success of her rivals is that she embarrasses those who have made the rest of them. They're the ones who have set-up the rules, created the celebrity culture, and shoved all of this down our throats, yet Marsh's chutzpah and path of self-destruction is too much for them. She is simply too much; she's tried too hard, and she's followed all the rules far too closely. She is, in short, a monster of their own creation, and that repels them.

I'm not one of those indulges the view that this part of our culture instantly means that we have an entire generation of Jodie Marshes waiting in the wings to join her once they reach the required age. What is of concern however is that those who have grown up with reality television and what some call the raunch culture have not yet reached their coming of age, so we do not yet know what the overall effect will be. While I disregard the view that watching violence encourages violence, as it is hardly ever provided as aspirational, what is clear is that there is peer pressure amongst teenage girls, bullied perhaps like Marsh was, to look like the young women on this week's Zoo or Nuts, to act almost purely as their walking fantasies, indulging their every whim. As the National Post article I linked to at the weekend said, how did we know when first embracing "low culture" that it would become the only culture? It's not entirely true of course; there are other role models, other cultures, other trends. It's just that it's this one that seems so prevalent, and the one which is undoubtedly the most pernicious and troubling. Jodie Marsh, in her misery, is a warning, and might well be reality television's real lasting legacy.

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Holidaying in your own misery.

I do realise that it's the silly season and that means that almost anything is far game when it comes to filling up the newspaper, but is it possible we could do without the fatuous, shallow or attempting to be humourous analysis of just what Gordon and Sarah Brown and David and Samantha Cameron are invoking through their choice of dress and poses? Yes, they're partially to blame for letting the photographers take the shots in the first place, but they're probably doing it with the proviso that they then fuck off and leave them alone for the rest of their holiday.

It's almost enough to make you wistful of the days where the Blairs denied the publication of where they'd gone on security grounds. Their two-fingers up message to anyone who thought it was tacky to stay with one of the biggest political crooks of all time, or to make use of the Cliff Richard villa was at least fundamentally honest; we don't care what you think and we'd rather you left us alone for at least a couple of weeks a year. You can't help but get the feeling this might yet be repeated once the Camerons are safely in 10 Downing Street.

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Monday, July 28, 2008 

Brown should go with dignity.

It seems almost perverse, only slightly more than a year after he finally took the job, to be suggesting that it is already time for Brown to relinquish it, but events have swung both so swiftly and decisively against him that is quickly looking as though it's the only option remaining. Governments which are beset by in-fighting and plotting, and that is undoubtedly what is now happening within the Labour party, on a scale probably not even seen during the days of the supposed September letter writing plot against Blair in 2006, do not last long, and despite "big beasts" such as John Prescott and others calling for the plotters to take a holiday, that is clearly not what has happened.

Brown faces essentially three options. The first is that he decides to stand down now and allows a leadership contest to take place, without the need for bloodshed or the sort of fallout which many argue destroyed the Conservatives almost up until the election of David Cameron, even if they did subsequently win the 1992 election after Thatcher was forced out. The second is that he is overthrown, or forced to go, probably through either Jack Straw or Geoff Hoon telling him that he has lost the confidence of the party. The third is that he toughs it out, and whether or not he develops a strategy before the Labour party conference for fighting back, the end result will almost certainly be defeat at the next election.

Indeed, undoubtedly whoever leads the Labour party will be defeated at the next election. The only question remaining is how heavy that defeat will be, and whether it will crush the Labour party to the extent which New Labour crushed the Tories in 1997, or if the polls are accurate, potentially even more devastatingly. While we can only surmise and caveat predictions for what will happen, under Brown the party's defeat threatens to be as catastrophic as that suffered in Glasgow East. This wouldn't just be a disaster for the Labour party or the left in this country, but for democracy itself. The only real opposition to Blair for his first two terms was from his own backbenchers, and eventually, the media, and it wasn't so long ago that commentators were denouncing the elective dictatorship which the first past the post system essentially provides to those who win by a huge margin. Under Cameron the presidential style of government could be even more profound and autocratic; few of the Tory backbenchers seem likely to raise much protest at whatever their policies will be once in office. The one main sticking point might well be the area which so plagued Major: Europe.

In the interests not just of the Labour party itself, but in the balance of power then, Brown's resignation now would be welcome. There are still a few good reasons for why he should fight on, though. Beyond a shadow of a doubt there is no instant successor, or by any means any suggestion that they would necessarily do any better. None of them, whether they be David Miliband, Alan Johnson or even John McDonnell have either the profile or the support within the party itself to quickly become the presumed next in line. Then again, how many could have named David Cameron prior to his decision to run for the Conservative party leadership? While both he and George Osborne were lined up as being the next big things by Michael Howard, the big money to begin with was on David Davis, with his apparent failure to connect with the audience at the Conservative party conference, or more cynically, the media, considered to be the final blow to his campaign.

Another good reason is that Brown standing down would suggest once and for all that the Labour party has stopped caring about the running the country and is instead again fully back in in-fighting mode, further wrecking its opportunities. While there is a good chance of this taking place, and some again link Major's final downfall to his decision to stand down from the leadership and fight to be re-elected, could Labour really fall any further? The drift that has become impossible to ignore over the last few months has become all encompassing, and Brown shows no signs whatsoever of being able to turn it around. His last remaining defence seems to be that he is still best placed to bring the country through the economic downturn, and while this seems, after his "no more return to boom and bust" soundbite being well and truly exposed to be laughable, it still probably rings true with many. Stability rather than uncertainty, even if the stability is akin to a table with three legs, is always preferable.

Lastly, if Brown did stand down, whoever became the next leader would almost certainly have to call an election far sooner than the 20 months down the line which is currently envisaged. Not only would Labour be at an immense disadvantage because of its lack of cash, but a snap election would probably not give the party's fortunes as much of a chance to recover. One either next spring or next autumn could still see the credit crunch biting, and with Cameron remaining in the ascendant.

There is though one remaining reason for why Brown should go now. For both his own sake, and for the sake of his dignity. Despite all the jibes against him, and all the endlessly unamusing insults which fill the messages boards and comment sections, Jock/Bottler McBroon and worse, his departure now would be seen as tragic rather than pathetic. He would be the aspiring leader who once he had got there simply found that it wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and that with events conspiring against him, he simply couldn't manage to be the successor to Blair that so many hoped he would be. Blair himself said it was not ignoble to want to be prime minister, and while it might well be strange and weird, it certainly isn't. Furthermore, we've seen what happened as a consequence of Blair's refusal to go: the collapse in Labour support which Brown hasn't been able to bring into check. Brown must not now repeat that same mistake. Unless he wants to be remembered, increasingly, like John Major now is for tucking his shirt into his underpants and shagging Edwina Currie, he should recognise his weakness and let the next generation take over. Failure with dignity is not ignoble; failure without it most certainly is.

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How tabloid journalism works part. 94.

It's the silly season, it's a Sunday, and you haven't got anything approaching a front page story. Do you a: put in the effort and attempt to find a new angle to the problems facing Gordon Brown? b: continue to go on alarmingly about the moral decline in society because a rich man who enjoys being spanked has won a court case or c: turn the most innocuous addition to a social-networking site which just happens to be a rival to the one owned by your own proprietor into a super splash?

There's just no contest if you're a Sun "journalist", is there? I'm not on Facebook as I don't have any friends, but even I know there's a whole plethora of "poke" applications, such as giving one of your friends a virtual sexually transmitted disease, as well as literally dozens of similarly hilarious things. There isn't however at the moment a moral panic about STDs, but there certainly is about knives. "TEENS VIRTUALLY KNIFE EACH OTHER ON INTERNET" still doesn't quite cut the mustard though; no, you have to go the classic tabloid route of getting a quote from an organisation or an individual who has suffered through whatever it is you're railing against. Hence the Scum made a call to the uncle of murdered teenager Robert Knox, and what do you know, he's disgusted by it:

“The stupidity of having this on their site is unbelievable. And they deliberately use the street term ‘shanked’, which is even worse. They are targeting the kids who are on street corners carrying knives.”

Yes, of course "they are" gramps; keep taking the pills. This brilliant quote however gives the paper their headline:
Shank’ website is aimed at the kids who carry knives.' And voilà, where there was previously no story, have we now got one for you!

To call this pathetic, shoddy and disingenuous journalism is to put it too lightly. Not even in the wildest of imaginations can anyone begin to claim that this glorifies or is likely to encourage anyone to commit a crime involving a knife; it's nothing more than a joke between friends. It does however serve another agenda, which is the Sun's continuing low-level campaign to run story after story which is either critical of Facebook or an article expressing horror about something that's happened relating to it, while the paper never deigns to mention its humongous conflict of interest. Indeed, when probably the biggest bad news story of them all to do with social networking websites was released last year, involving the number of sex offenders who had profiles on one of them, the Sun strangely didn't run with it. It couldn't have possibly been because the site was MySpace instead of Facebook or Bebo, could it?

Still, perhaps it was worth it for this comment, which is either a quite brilliant piece of satire, or something rather more frightening:

Some of you appear to be missing the point - young people are becoming acclimatised to knife crime as a normal part of life, the more it is treated like a bit of a joke the more it becomes subconsciously acceptable.

We have a group here in Sheffield petitioning to get the Sheffield United's nickname changed from 'the Blades', knife crime should never be associated with fun. Also we want the swords removed from the badge, it's only a matter of time before it progresses from knife crime to sword crime.

Probably even more hilarious though this weekend was the former Archbishop of Canterbury writing in the News of the Screws that the other victim of the Max Mosley judgement was public morality. On the same page as Carey's bilge you can read such enlightening and moral stories as "RONALDO: Blonde had sex with Cristiano in hotel room" and "VICE: Student had sex with 3 men while high on valium." Such reporting is not of course salacious, sensationalist or purely to make money out of other's behaviour, however depraved, but obviously to shame them into altering it.

You can far more effectively make the case that the News of the World for decades has been coarsening the public sphere with its warped sense of what is and isn't newsworthy, or indeed, that its practice of "public interest journalism" has directly led to the celebrity culture which Carey would doubtless decry, but none of this is of any consequence when you're doubtless being paid a hefty sum for only slightly more than 250 words. Perhaps even more humourous than this humbug though is those that have taken it seriously: witness Dave Cole doing such. You have to wonder whether even Carey was pretending to be troubled. The reality is that it is not Mosley, judges or the HRA or ECHR that are "dangerous or socially undermining" as Carey puts it. Dennis Potter never put it better:

I call my cancer Rupert. Because that man Murdoch is the one who, if I had the time (I've got too much writing to do). . . I would shoot the bugger if I could. There is no one person more responsible for the pollution of what was already a fairly polluted press. And the pollution of the press is an important part of the pollution of British political life, and it's an important part of the cynicism and misperception of our own realities that is destroying so much of our political discourse.

The same can be said of the deeply immoral but "moral" Daily Mail, the same Daily Mail that thinks nothing of going after lower-class targets that have just lost their daughters, but which sympathises so deeply when life deals "their people" a bad hand. There is only one freedom in which Murdoch and the Mail truly believe in, and that is the freedom to make money.

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Saturday, July 26, 2008 

Weekend links.

If you wanted an example of how skewed and completely disoriented British politics is at the moment, you could do worse than examine today's Sun leader:

IT will take more than a seaside ice cream to cheer up Gordon Brown this weekend.

Sitting on his deckchair, the PM will be wondering if the tide is going out on his Premiership.

Labour’s sensational defeat by the Scottish Nationalists in Glasgow East is bound to whip up more “Gordon must go” hysteria.

For sure, Mr Brown has his back to the wall. But no one is ready to publicly challenge him and step into his shoes.

With the economic climate, there will not be an election for almost two years, however much the Tories demand it.

Mr Brown should recharge his batteries during the holiday. The workaholic PM needs a clarity of vision for the country on his return.

Have a good break, Gordon.

which is almost craven in its sycophancy to a dying political leader, and compare it to the Grauniad's, which you would expect to be closer to the Sun's:

Those who hold Labour's future close to their hearts may not thank a newspaper for concluding that the way forward is problematic and the decisions finely balanced. But that is the truth. The case for loyalty is strong and the case for change impressive too. The worst thing would be to sustain public loyalty and private disdain for a man who seems, right now, to turn everything he touches to lead. It is not in Labour's soul to be brutal to leaders, and nor, at this point, should it be. The risk of change still outweighs the gains - if only because the advantages could prove illusory while the dangers are real and apparent. It can seem every article about Mr Brown preaches the need for him to find energy, clarity and vision. Such demands may be commonplace, but that does not make them wrong. Mr Brown's government is crying out for a renewed sense of purpose; he can best secure that by developing an agenda that reflects his genuine passion for social justice. If he is to remain in charge, he owes his party and the country that much.

Also worth rereading now is Martin Kettle's piece from July the 4th, alerted to me by Anthony Barnett, which now seems prescient and far more powerful than it did then.

Elsewhere, some of the links shamelessly stolen from Mike P's far superior newspaper round:

Torygraph - Millions of profiles from DNA database passed to private firms

Matthew Parris - Labour is lucky. They can ditch him now.

Pauline Kael & trash cinema - Not long before she died, Pauline Kael remarked to a friend, "When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture." Who did?

Deborah Orr - New Labour has only itself to blame

Also worth noticing apart from the main piece on Glasgow East is Orr's comments on the loathsome Tony Parsons:

Parsons is not wrong in saying that women who have breast implants inserted for vanity – generously he excludes women with "genetic defects" or a mastectomy – are likely to be "insecure, neurotic or nutty". But he also describes his many sexual encounters with silicone-stuffed women, and how disappointing to the touch those mammaries prove to be.

This can only suggest that Parsons is himself attracted to women who are "insecure, neurotic or nutty". No wonder he's unaware of any female repulsion against breast butchering. It can only be down to the company he prefers to keep.


Indie - Sorry, says dominatrix who betrayed Mosley

We'll get it right next time - Ballad of East Glasgow

OurKingdom - The lessons of Glasgow East

QuestionThat - Who's Off-Message?

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Friday, July 25, 2008 

To oblivion or half-way there.

The response by Gordon Brown and the top of New Labour to the catastrophic by-election result in Glasgow East would be comical if it wasn't so deeply sad. It truly is a purest example of the clichéd deer in the headlights - a party that simply has no idea what to do except to keep on doing what it's currently doing. Witness Brown yet again inform us all of how he feels our pain. Witness Des Browne laughably suggest that everyone unite around Brown, as if that wasn't they've been doing, or to suggest that no one votes for disunited parties; they're not voting for you at the moment either though, are they?

The loss of Glasgow East is a terrifying prospect for New Labour because it indicates that the perfect storm which can irrevocably destroy the party is potentially gathering momentum. In Wales and Scotland, Labour is not to any great extent being pressured by the Conservatives; the Tory vote was actually down half a percent last night on the general election. Instead, they're fighting against either the nationalist parties, which are undoubtedly to the party's left, even if their nationalism is parochial and self-serving, and the Liberal Democrats, who despite their apparent recent shift to the right, are still far preferable on most factors to Labour. In England however, the party faces the prospect that despite everything, it isn't right-wing enough. It has to be remembered that the Tories won the popular vote in England in 2005. It was hardly likely to improve upon that next time round, and indeed, it's now staring disaster in the face.

We can take the idea that Labour faces collapse too far, especially when just dwelling on by-election results which are never going to be indicative of what's going to happen two years down the line, and Brown today dropped a huge hint that he will be waiting possibly the full 24 months before having to call the election. At the moment though the picture is utterly bleak: even in the worst of times, Labour should have managed to hold on to seats such as Crewe and Nantwich and Glasgow East. They are overwhelming Labour's rock. For them to be giving Labour such a kicking is a warning that the party, unless it changes its way dramatically, is facing utter oblivion.

The party however has absolutely no idea where to go from here. In fact, it seems to be perversely enjoying the hammering it's receiving. Why else would the party have let James Purnell stand up on Monday and deliver his kicking to the "undeserving poor"? This was a constituency in which a significant percentage of its voters are either dirt poor and in work or dirt poor and out of work. Both, potentially, face becoming the guinea pigs of Purnell's plans. Meanwhile, they can see that despite the regeneration that has occurred in their area under Labour, it's the SNP that are actually in government in the devolved parliament, and what's more, they've abolished prescription charges, they've abolished tuition fees, they haven't introduced the vagaries of the market into the health system, and they haven't tried to appease the very worst imaginings of the right-wing press at every available instance. Come now, who would you have voted for? The only real surprise is that the margin of victory was just 365 votes: that is undoubtedly down not to the national party, but to the efforts of the local party and also Margaret Curran herself. The blow has been so much the harder because Labour had been playing up so much the fact that they were certain they had it in the bag. Not for the first time, it seems that someone can't count.

Perhaps the reality is finally hitting home: it doesn't matter how many relaunches you have, however many times you feebly suggest that you feel pain for the people who you have continuously either kicked in the teeth or not done enough for, or however many changes in policy the unions or Neal Lawson suggest, Labour is simply not going to win the next election. The mood of the country, and that includes the different perspectives in Wales/Scotland and in England, has changed. Again, this isn't by any means all Brown's fault, he's simply picked up the poisoned chalice, however much you can blame him for not putting something aside for the inevitable downturn. He also can't do anything about the so-called "credit crunch", or the rising prices of fuel or food, which the SNP so opportunistically but understandably focused on. Getting rid of him will do nothing to save the Labour brand. The only thing he can do now is what News International is over Max Mosley: limit the damage. It doesn't matter now how much he potentially pisses off the right-wing press, what does is that he makes certain that Labour are not destroyed for a generation because of both his and Blair's mistakes. That does involve listening to the unions, to stopping the attacks on those that can least defend themselves and even, as Tony Woodley suggests, evicting the Blairites. Make clear to everyone that if you're going to go down, you're not going to take everyone with you. That now, apart from ensuring that the slowdown doesn't turn into a deep recession, should be Brown's priority.

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Woman E breaks cover.

Somewhat astonishingly, Woman E of the Max Mosley case has come out of the shadows to give an interview. Even more astonishingly, she's given it to Sky News. Potentially sensational is the fact that not more than two weeks after she was meant to give evidence in court, an appearance which she apparently cancelled as a result of being "mentally and emotionally unfit" to do so, is that although she is tearful during the interview, she seems more than happy to be setting the record straight as she sees it.

It's perplexing that Sky has snatched up the interview for the obvious reason of the links between the satellite broadcaster and the News of the Screws, all ostensibly controlled by Murdoch himself. Even more mystifying is that she deals a further hammer blow to the News of the World's story, making clear that there was never going to be a Nazi theme, but rather a German theme, as the original emails and contact between Neville Thurlbeck and Woman E's husband made clear. It's very rare indeed that the Murdoch media potentially attacks or undermines another section of it, although it is not entirely unprecedented.

There can only be one reason as to why it's decided to do so in this instance - damage limitation. Michelle (as she is now being referred to) has an explosive story, and if she were to take it to the BBC, or God forbid, one of Murdoch's main tabloid rivals, they could have absolutely gone to town. As it is, Sky, rather than Michelle, is the one in control. This can be seen in the way that Sky has given the News of the World ample room to defend itself against Michelle's charges, and Kay Burley does grill her rather intensley on what the differences are between a German prison scenario and a Nazi one, although without landing a blow.

Even so, the News of the World must still be furious. Perhaps it could be said that they're only reaping what they've sown, in first offering Michelle £20,000 and then only paying her £12,000. What's clear is that they've used her just as much as many other of their targets have been. What it most certainly also does is ask questions about why Michelle did really decline to give evidence: she may well have been "mentally and emotionally unfit" then, but was it an eventual fit of conscience on her behalf also, or the Screws' continued failure to "take care of her", as it were?

It will also reopen the conspiracy theories, as also mentioned is the fact that Michelle's husband was an MI5 surveillance officer. Was his offering of the story to the News of the World not his first involvement with the paper? Did MI5 really not know about Michelle's double life, as she claims? Or was his resignation over the fact that with his cover blown, they were likely to investigative whether he had also previously approached the newspaper as a source?

To see just how strange Sky's decision to get the interview is, even if as a damage limitation exercise, you only have to look at today's Sun to see what Murdoch's own response is. The article on the ruling is hilariously biased, hardly mentioning any of Eady's findings but focusing almost solely on his comments on how Mosley did to an extent bring the troubles on himself, and Myler's own response to the ruling. The Sun dedicates its entire leader column to it also, claiming laughably that the ruling will affect the Sun reader's right to know. It also disengenuously repeats the lie that this is an EU law interfering in British affairs - the European Convention on Human Rights was drawn up far before the Common Market even existed, in 1950, and was voted into British law by the Commons in 1998. It hoightly demands the right to print what it thinks is in the public interest, not what a "lofty and privileged" judge thinks is. This of couse completely ignores the fact the Sun is signed up to the Press Complaints Commission code, which also states that the sort of investigation that the Screws used are only valid when the public interest is being served. If Mosley had gone through the PCC and not the law courts, he would probably still have reached the same result, going by the evidence, although that isn't certain.

Michelle's decision to go public now also completely opens her up to potentially huge retaliation by the Screws on the Sunday. She still might regret going public, and while we have learned little more than we did yesterday, it does suggest that the Murdoch press are running terrified of the consequences of a story that it must have believed would only be a nice little earner.

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In praise of... the death of Peter Andre and Jordan.

Whichever Grauniad leader writer was responsible for this Pseuds Corner-worthy abortion on unusual names ought to hang their head in shame:

Celebrities Peter André and Jordan mixed up their mothers - Thea and Amy - to come up with Princess Tiáamii for their daughter, achieving a neat feminist counterbalance to patrilineal surnaming (though they may not put it that way).

It's already bad enough that you've had the desperate luck to be born into a family of such complete and utter cunts, but being given a name which is going to haunt you long after they've shuffled off this mortal coil (hopefully in the most violent and painful way imaginable) really perhaps ought to open them up beforehand to legal action.

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Thursday, July 24, 2008 

Eady lays down the law.

Some, when hearing that the privacy suit brought by Max Mosley against the News of the Screws was to be heard in front of Mr Justice Eady, were confident in predicting that Mosley would be the victor, purely on the grounds that Eady has been one of the judges at the forefront of creating a privacy law through the precedents set by various rulings, especially since the introduction of the Human Rights Act, with its right to a private life having to be balanced against the right to freedom of expression. It's certainly true that his rulings involving Khalid bin Mahfouz are deeply worrying, concerning as they do information which has in no real sense even been published here, leading to the introduction in the United States of the Free Speech Protection Act, so angered they have been by Eady's rulings that have prevented legitimate investigations into Mahfouz's links to terrorist funding from being published.

Ratbiter (who may or may not be Nick Cohen, if anyone knows for certain please drop a comment in) in yesterday's Private Eye opened his piece by mocking Eady's supposed impartiality. However deserving of criticism Eady is for some of his other work, reading in full his judgement today (PDF) ought to show that he had no option other than to rule in Mosley's favour.

It's indisputable, going through, to come to any other conclusion than one which involves the News of the Screws being deeply in the wrong and that their defence was a complete shambles from the get go. When first contacted by Woman E's husband, the prostitute who filmed the S&M session for the Screws, there was absolutely no mention made of any Nazi connotations. Simply, the husband had a story about Max Mosley. Neville Thurlbeck, rang the husband back later in the day without ever making a recording or notes of his meetings with either Woman E or her husband, which is undoubtedly bad journalistic practice to begin with. Woman E's husband regaled Thurlbeck with how Mosley had been involved with his wife, who was a dominatrix, for the best part of year. All of this is recalled from paragraphs 148 onwards, but this one (152) is worth quoting in full:

Mr Thurlbeck asked Woman E’s husband when she would be likely to be attending another of the S and M parties and whether she would be prepared to wear a hidden camera. The original intention was to expose in the News of the World the Claimant’s interest in sado-masochism and his use of prostitutes and dominatrices. There had up to that point been no mention of a Nazi or concentration camp theme. The husband enquired whether there would be “something in it for us” and Mr Thurlbeck indicated that the News of the World would make sure he was paid. No discussion of actual amounts took place at that stage.

It was only afterwards, in a second call, that Thurlbeck claims that Woman E's husband told him there was to be a Nazi theme at the next session with Mosley and the four other women. Again, he didn't make any note or recording of this, but his statement to the court ran like this:

“[The husband] said that this was fascinating because [his wife] had told him that the Claimant had ordered a German theme, that there would be a German-speaking dominatrix at the sex party (in addition to [his wife]) and that the dominatrices had been asked to wear military uniform. [His wife] had been told all of this by a woman whose name was [Woman A] who [the husband] told me was the senior prostitute/dominatrix. From speaking to [the husband], it was apparent that it was [Woman A] (rather than [Woman E]) who liaised directly with the Claimant regarding his instructions for the sex parties. [Woman A] then arranged the parties and their themes."

As Eady later notes:

It is perhaps curious that, at this stage, when giving his account of what he had been told previously, Mr Thurlbeck should omit any reference to a “Nazi theme”. Again, it rather suggests that “German” may have simply been glossed into “Nazi”.

Furthermore:

I am prepared to accept that Mr Thurlbeck and Mr Myler, on what they had seen, thought there was a Nazi element – not least because that is what they wanted to believe. Indeed, they needed to believe this in order to forge the somewhat tenuous link between the Claimant and his father’s notorious activities more than half a century ago and, secondly, to construct an arguable public interest defence. ... The belief was not arrived at, however, by rational analysis of the material before them. Rather, it was a precipitate conclusion that was reached “in the round”, as Mr Thurlbeck put it. The countervailing factors, in particular the absence of any specifically Nazi indicia, were not considered.

When Mr Myler was taken at length through dozens of photographs, some of which he had seen prior to publication, he had to admit in the witness box that there were no Nazi indicia and he could, of course, point to nothing which would justify the suggestion of “mocking”
concentration camp victims. That conclusion could, and should, have been reached before publication. I consider that this willingness to believe in the Nazi element and the mocking of Holocaust victims was not based on enquiries or analysis consistent with “responsible journalism”.

While disregarding that there was a public interest argument in Mosley being exposed for variously, the allegations of criminality, i.e. that the level of the S&M was such that Mosley himself was being assaulted, dealt with from paragraph 110 onwards and "depravity and adultery", from 124 onwards. He does however agree that if there had been a Nazi theme then it would most certainly have been in the public interest for Mosley to be exposed, which he sets out in 122 and 123.

In case you missed the Screws' original publishings of the allegations against Mosley, they're summarised from paragraphs 26 onwards. In the Screws' hyperbolic style, they don't pull any punches whatsoever, describing Mosley as a "sex pervert", and in the next week's paper as a "vain deviant with no sense of truth or honour."

Eady's decision might have been different had Woman E given evidence. She however, for the supposed reason that she was "mentally and emotionally unfit" to do so, did not appear. Neither, as a result, did her husband, who just happened to work for MI5, from which he has since resigned. If she had, she may well have contradicted to a believable extent the evidence given by all the other dominatrices involved, as well as Mosley himself. As Roy Greenslade argues, Eady may well have been justified in halting the hearing there and then, such was the weakness of the case and the evidence given by the Screws' editor Colin Myler, and the reporter, Neville Thurlbeck. Instead, piece by piece, and devastatingly, Eady picks apart the idea that there was a Nazi theme, beginning from paragraph 44 onwards. Some choice parts are:

There was a suggestion that some of the women were wearing Nazi clothing, but Mr Thurlbeck himself ultimately recognised in a memo, after publication, that what was worn was simply “foreign uniform and ordinary blazer”. He had been addressing in the same email the rather incongruous possibility of a “Nazi blazer”. As the Claimant himself pointed out, if there had been a desire to create a Nazi scenario it would have been easy to obtain Nazi uniforms online or from a costumier. The uniform jacket worn by Woman E had been in her possession before either the 8 or 28 March gatherings were organised and had not been obtained specifically for that purpose. It was there to be seen in a photograph on her website which Mr Thurlbeck inspected.

In the first scenario, when the Claimant was playing a submissive role, he underwent a medical inspection and had his head searched for lice. Again, although the “medical” had certain unusual features, there is nothing specific to the Nazi period or to the concentration camps about these matters. Moreover, no German was spoken at this stage – not least because Woman B appeared later, in time only for the second scenario.

Mr Thurlbeck also relied upon the fact that the Claimant was “shaved”. Concentration camp inmates were also shaved. Yet, as Mr Price pointed out, they had their heads shaved. The Claimant, for reasons best known to himself, enjoyed having his bottom shaved – apparently for its own sake rather than because of any supposed Nazi connotation. He explained to me that while this service was being performed he was (no doubt unwisely) “shaking with laughter”. I naturally could not check from the DVD, as it was not his face that was on display.


The first scenario begins with the words “Welcome to Chelsea” and the Claimant uses
the nom de guerre “Tim Barnes”. One of the “guards” is referred to as “Officer Smith”. These factors lend no support to the Nazi role-play allegation; indeed, they would appear to be inconsistent with it. Moreover, the use of the word “facility” is neutral. It is after all an English and/or American word and has no especially Nazi connotations.

In the second scenario, the young women “victims” wore horizontally striped pyjamas. That may loosely suggest a prison uniform but, yet again, there is nothing to identify the clothing as of the Nazi era. Photographs were introduced by Mr Price, for what they were worth, to show that the uniforms worn in concentration camps tended to have vertical stripes. Pictures were also produced to show a group of people running in the recent London Marathon wearing “prison” costumes. These too had horizontal stripes; yet no-one would imagine that they were in any way making reference to concentration camps or “mocking” their victims (as the News of the
World alleged of the Claimant). I was also referred to the invoice for those particular costumes which were obtained for £11.91 each from a “joke” supplier. I did not find any of this evidence especially helpful, since what matters is the simple fact that prison uniforms worn for S and M role-play do not in themselves echo concentration camps or involve “mocking” the victims.

The use of German on 28 March, in the second scenario when the Claimant was playing a dominant role and Woman B was also present, was said to be largely to please Woman D rather than at the Claimant’s request. Odd though it may seem to many people, as does much fetishist behaviour, I see no reason to disbelieve Woman D’s explanation. In any event, she had been interviewed on a weblog at the end of February when she made exactly the same point. So it was plainly not made up for this litigation. In any case, it is clear that the Claimant threw himself into his role with considerable enthusiasm.


Although Mr Thurlbeck thought the use of German highly significant as one of the Nazi indicia, it is noteworthy that neither he nor anyone else thought it appropriate to obtain a translation before evaluating the material for publication. It contained a certain amount of explicit sexual language about what the Claimant and Woman B were planning to do to those women in the submissive role, but nothing specifically Nazi, and certainly nothing to do with concentration camps.

There was, of course, plenty of spanking, and references to “judicial” penalties, but the only passage which is relevant for this purpose relates to an occasion when one of the women was lying face down on the sofa while being given intermittent and rather lack-lustre strokes with a strap. There seems to be some sort of game involving rivalry between blondes and brunettes. At one point, the dark-haired woman lying on the sofa raises her head and cries out “Brunettes rule!” Within a moment or two, a voice from off-camera can be heard (accepted to be that of Woman A, who is indeed blonde) gasping out words to the effect “We are the Aryan race – blondes”.

Not surprisingly, this has been fixed upon by the Defendant as being a reference to
Nazi racial policies. It is said that the reference to “Aryans” cannot bear any other interpretation.

When asked about this, the Claimant said that he had no recollection of any such
remark being made and, indeed, that it was perfectly possible that his hearing aids would not have picked this up in all the excitement. This naturally invites a certain degree of scepticism, although there is no doubt that the Claimant is a little deaf (as emerged during the course of his evidence) and does wear hearing aids.

What is clear, however, is that the remark was unscripted and that it occurred amid a
good deal of shouts and squeals (of delight or otherwise). One had to listen to the tape several times to pick out exactly what was going on and indeed nobody had spotted “Brunettes rule!” until the middle of the trial. It is also clear that there was nothing spoken by the Claimant on this occasion which reflected Nazi terminology or attitudes. There is no reason to suppose that it was other than a spontaneous squeal by Woman A in medias res.

It is probably appropriate at this point to address another remark from time to time used by Woman B. She uses the term “Schwarze” when she is acting out a dominant role in relation to one or more submissive females. The suggestion was that she was pretending that they were black and racially abusing them. She explained, however, that in German the word is used to refer to a dark-haired woman (or brunette) – such as herself. She said “I am a Schwarze”. It had no racial connotations, so far as she was concerned. Although Mr Warby invites me to reject this, since the German word could also refer to a black person, I see no reason to disbelieve her. It seems more natural to interpret her remark in context as referring to the woman’s dark hair (which she had) rather than to dark skin (which she did not). Mr Warby also submitted that
the references by the two women to blondes and brunettes are not connected. Since they occurred within seconds of each other, I believe that is unrealistic. In any event, it could hardly be suggested that the blondes were accorded any more respectful treatment (as “Aryans”) than the brunettes. One of them is abused as a “dumb ass blonde” (in German) and the spanking is indiscriminate in this respect.

All of this is of a piece with how we know the News of the World operates. Truthfulness and accuracy coming second to huge splashes. Just in the last few months the paper has paid out damages to Cherie Blair, Katie Price and Peter Andre and Robert Murat, all for inaccurate or completely untrue stories. For years it's given not just house room but the front page on numerous occasions to Mazher Mahmood, who has now also on numerous occasions been exposed as being a fantasist, who uses entrapment to snare his victims before ruining their lives. His splashes on the Victoria Beckham kidnap plot were of his own imaginings, while the same was true of the so-called "red mercury" plot, in which all of those on trial were acquitted.

As for Neville Thurlbeck, as yesterday's Private Eye (1215) made clear, his history is less than spotless also, having tricked Colin Stagg, having promised him £20,000 if he took a "truth drug" which showed he had not carried out the killing of Rachel Nickell, or lied on oath or to the police. He passed with flying colours for the reason he was completely innocent - but the NoW seized on a minor discrepancy, splashed with "I LIED ABOUT RACHEL" and denied Stagg a penny. He also completely made up a story about a naturist B&B being a brothel, claiming that the wife of the couple who owned it had offered him a "full sex session with me and my husband for £75". In fact, he offered them £75 to have sex while he watched, and seeing an easy way to get some extra cash out of a spotty moron, they accepted. Thurlbeck claimed in the subsequent story that he had declined the offer, when in actuality, as the couple's security tapes showed, he had not only watched them, but masturbated while doing so.


It comes as little surprise then to learn that Thurlbeck attempted to blackmail two of the other women involved. As Eady writes:

In order to firm up the story, therefore, Mr Thurlbeck decided that he would like to publish an interview with at least one of the participants and, if possible, contributions from all of them.

In pursuit of this objective, therefore, he sent a number of emails. On 2 April he sent identical emails to Women A and B in these terms:


“I hope you are well. I am Neville Thurlbeck, the chief reporter at the News of the World, the journalist who wrote the story about Max Mosley’s party with you and your girls on Friday.

Please take a breath before you get angry with me!

I did ensure that all your faces were blocked out to spare you any grief.


And soon, the story will become history as life and the news agenda move on very quickly.


There is a substantial sum of money available to you or any of the girls in return for an exclusive interview with us. The interview can be done anonymously and you[r] face can be
blacked out too. So it’s pretty straight forward.

Shall we meet/talk?”


He became more insistent the following day:

“I’m just about to send you a series of pictures which will form the basis of our article this week. We want to reveal the identities of the girls involved in the orgy with Max as this is the only follow up we have to our story.

Our preferred story however, would be you speaking to us directly about your dealings with Max. And for that we would be extremely grateful. In return for this, we would grant you
full anonimity [sic], pixilate your faces on all photographs and secure a substantial sum of money for you.

This puts you firmly in the driving seat and allows you much greater control as well as preserving your anonimities [sic] (your names won’t be used or your pictures).

Please don’t hesitate to call me … or email me with any thoughts.


Regards and hope to do business.


Neville Thurlbeck, chief reporter, News of the World”


This would appear to contain a clear threat to the women involved that unless they cooperated with Mr Thurlbeck (albeit in exchange for some money) their identities would be revealed on the following Sunday. He was as good as his word and attached photographs and also some extracts from their websites. This was obviously to bring home to them the scale of the threatened exposé.

The threat was then reinforced the same day with a further email to Women A and B:

“Ok girls, here’s the offer. It’s 8,000 pounds for an interview with one of you, with no name, no id and pixilated face. And we pixilate all the pics I send through to you this morning.

BUT time is running out for us and if you want to come on board, you need to start the ball rolling now. Call me … if you want to.

Best, Neville”

Perhaps to their credit, the two women concerned resisted these blandishments and
thus risked the further exposure he had threatened.

This is a pure example of how the journalism practised not just by the News of the World, but by the entire Murdoch stable works. You might recall that last year the sex blogger Girl with a one track mind was threatened in almost the exact same fashion by the Sunday Times, that supposed august organ, stooping to the same level as the red-top tabloids to expose her actual identity.

It's therefore completely impossible to have any sympathy for the News of the World whatsoever. They created this story from the get go, not with any great public expose in mind, but with the pure intention of making money out of someone else's private life. There can't even really be any defence provided by the fact that the women were prostitutes, because again, as Eady notes:

Another argument thought up by the Defendant, or rather its legal team, was that the Claimant had been keeping a brothel. This would not bear close scrutiny and is certainly not consistent with the evidence. By the time of closing speeches, this line of argument had been abandoned. It seems clear from the authorities that for premises to fall within the definition of a brothel it is necessary to show that more than one man resorts to them for whatever sexual services are on offer. The only man enjoying the activities in this case was the Claimant himself. He paid for the flat and Woman A arranged parties there with various dominatrices for his (and apparently also their) enjoyment. This was not a service offered to men in general. He was the only one paying, although I was told that it was a standing joke among some of the regulars that they had so much fun that they ought to be paying “Mike”. There was never any question of a business being carried on there or the Claimant taking a cut of the proceeds.

As it happens, some of the women were rather reluctant to accept the description “prostitute”. (For the purposes of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, the term is defined by reference to providing “sexual services” in return for payment: s.51(2) of the Act.) Several of them offer a variety of services on their website (usually spanking or being spanked in various guises) but expressly warn that they do not offer specifically sexual services. They apparently made an exception in “Mike’s” case and threw in a bit of sex, as it were, as an “extra” between friends. Indeed, sometimes they were not paid at all. As they liked the premises and found the atmosphere relaxing and congenial, things developed from there, Indeed, although the Claimant’s sexual
activity as revealed in the DVD material did not seem to amount to very much, some of the women stayed on after the party was over and indulged in same sex action purely for their own entertainment.

Indeed, quite apart from Mosley paying the women, what seems to have united them against Woman E is both that they thoroughly enjoyed what they did with him, and also that she had broken one of the unwritten rules of the S&M scene in which they were part: that no one talks about it to potentially disapproving ears, and they certainly do not sell their stories. Woman E has apparently been ostracised from the community since as a result.

The last remaining fig leaf some will bring up is the moral issue itself. After all, Mosley was cheating on his wife, and she apparently, despite the potential slight injuries he might have suffered as a result, never had an inkling that he enjoyed being spanked and dominated. Does the exposing of it to his wife, while not justifying it any means by law, justify it in a moral sense? Some will obviously come to different conclusions on that. That his wife has apparently accepted it, and is also apparently supporting him though seems to suggest that even she might secretly be devastated, she is not to such an extent that she is thinking of leaving him.

The reality is that this has been coming for a long time. For far too long the tabloids in this country have been allowed to get away with blatant intrusions into others' privacy where there is absolutely no public interest whatsoever. Again today Sienna Miller is launching an action against the Sun and News of the World for publishing naked photographs of her, despite last year winning damages after they published, you guessed it, naked photographs of her during filming for a movie yet to be released, presumably on what was a closed set. The implication is obvious: that they simply don't care about the consequences when it potentially boosts sales as a result, or in the new digital world, leads to more one handed online clicks to their website. The Mosley case is just one particular new egregious example. No one thought the Screws was going to win, but everyone tomorrow and already online is screaming that this means the end of investigative journalism as we know it.

It's nonsense of course. These are the last wounded cries of a few select hacks and partisan publishers that know that at long last the great game may be coming to an end. This is half the reason why the tabloids so loathe the Human Rights Act: it's not because it's a criminals or terrorist's charter, it's because it has the potential to damage their business model once and for all. The facts are that they have brought it all upon themselves. Eady himself denies that this case sets a new precedent or is landmark in any way:

It is perhaps worth adding that there is nothing “landmark” about this decision. It is simply the application to rather unusual facts of recently developed but established principles. Nor can it seriously be suggested that the case is likely to inhibit serious investigative journalism into crime or wrongdoing, where the public interest is more genuinely engaged.

Sir Smacks Mosley may not have been the figure we would have liked to have triumphed over the Screws in such a way. It is nonetheless a completely warranted and welcome victory.

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Wednesday, July 23, 2008 

Kamm's the man!

I'm a bit slow on the uptake on this, but I've just noted, via Matt T, that Oliver Kamm has been elevated from writing the occasional column for the Times to being a full-fledged leader writer.

This is of course a triumph not just for Mr Kamm, but for blogging in general. It proves that you too, as long as you're right-wing pretending to be a leftist, spend most of your energies stalking one of the world's leading intellectuals without laying a glove on him once, and defend the indefensible to the hilt, can become one of those individuals that can boast that you've sucked Rupert Murdoch's cock. This medium truly is changing the prevailing mainstream environment.

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The clunking fist.

When Gordon Brown finally ascended to the job he had so coveted just over twelve months ago, I suspect that most of us, or at least those of us who had regarded Tony Blair for his last few years in office with the same sort of respect as we do a dead skunk, didn't possibly think that things could get worse, or indeed, that the odds were good that such forgotten little things as honesty and accountability would improve, with there was also likely to be less pompous and sanctimonious grandstanding.

For the first couple of months, over Brown's so-called honeymoon period, this actually seemed to be happening. Announcements were being made to the Commons rather than to the press; the cabinet was meeting regularly and debate within it was actually encouraged; and even if a little underwhelming, with some finding it rather sad, Brown's pledge to "do his utmost" as he stood in Downing Street surrounded by cameras felt authentic, compared to all the flannel that we had been used to from Blair.

All of this evaporated in one ill-fated, ignorant decision: not to call off the election after Brown had Grand Old Duke of York style marched his troops to the top of the hill, but to instead go and visit the actual troops in Basra during the Tory party conference, and also to pledge that some of them would be shortly returning home. This understandably on the part of the Conservatives caused widespread anger; not just to be upstaging them, which could be forgiven, but to be playing politics with the armed forces and their loved ones back home for short-term possible gain. Ever since then Brown has floundered.

If this had happened to Blair it would have been forgotten swiftly. Blair could do almost anything, whether it be his overall responsibility for the death of Dr David Kelly because his spin doctor, knowing that the BBC potentially had information which could critically damage both him and his boss, went completely over-the-top in his quest to prove the allegations of sexing up were untrue, or being interviewed by the police over the loans for peerages scandal on the same day on which his press and ministerial team were doing their best to bury it, as his ever loyal attorney general walked over to the House of Lords and announced that the SFO were abandoning the corruption inquiry to the Al-Yamanah weapons deal between BAE and the Saudis, and despite being covered in the proverbial, he still emerged smelling of roses. I suspect that Blair would never have inspired such visceral loathing if he had ever betrayed signs of vulnerability, admitted that he had got something wrong or even if anyone ever laid a real glove on him in a political sense; but they didn't.

Gordon Brown, on the other hand, as others have mentioned, seems to have at the moment the reverse Midas touch. Everything he goes near doesn't turn into gold; it turns into excrement. Take yesterday, in the Commons on the last day of the parliamentary year, where you'd expect both he and the opposition to be de-mob happy. What's more, he had some sort of good news to report. Having just visited Basra again, this time, thanks mainly to the continuing ceasefire of Sadr's Mahdi army after a brief uprising earlier in the year, the city's security has vastly improved, meaning that even though the remaining British troops there are on "overwatch", training the Iraqi army, all troops might now be out, or all but a very minor force, by 2010, with the majority out early next year. We can quibble that we should have never gone in in the first place, that they ought to have been out long ago, and that all Brown is doing is in reality waiting until we find out who the next US president is going to be and what his plans are, but it's possibly the beginning of the end rather than the end of the beginning.

Cameron though, understandably, stands up and raises the point that Brown's posturing last autumn wasn't really fit behaviour from a prime minister. Mark Lancaster, who's served with the TA, went so far as to ask for an apology. Brown's response? He accused the Conservatives of playing politics with the armed forces.

Doubtless, Blair would have done pretty much the same thing in Brown's position. He however would have done it nimbly; Brown's problem is that he has the same sense of subtlety as Jodie Marsh has in the clothes department. Blair called him the clunking fist, and he is, there's no doubt about that. But it's in the truly literal sense, in that you can see him making his move a mile off, and he does in it such a blundering, clumsy manner that it doesn't just offend for a moment before it's forgotten, it sticks in the memory. Tony Blair had chutzpah in spades, but always got away with it. Brown's chutzpah leaves him not looking vulnerable, but looking like both a knave and a fool.

Again, you could perhaps even forgive this if Brown had kept his promises on honesty and accountability, but as the problems have mounted up, this too has been quickly forgotten. You can put a certain amount of blame on the media hysteria over knife crime, but last week's fiasco with Jacqui Smith going round the studios announcing that youths were to be taken into hospitals to see victims, only to deny this was the case a day later when they suddenly realised it wasn't a very good idea and that the presentation in any case was hopeless, was a case in point. That however compared to yesterday's rushing out of 30 end-of-term statements, which can only be described as burying them as even when the newspapers aren't busy they hardly bother to report the happenings at Westminster. Of those rushed out, 10 were prime ministerial statements, a direct breach of the ministerial code, which just incidentally, is enforced by... the prime minister.

Even allowing for the fact that some things are forgotten and may not have genuinely been ready to be announced until yesterday, this is surely cynicism of the highest order. It's not also if this has only occurred this year; last term there were 27 statements on the last day of parliament. The number in Blair's final full year of office? 17.

While this is clearly not on the same level as Blair's attempt to bury his meeting with Inspector Knacker, it was that we had come to expect it from the king of spin. From Brown, some of us naively thought that things would be different. Perhaps again though the biggest failure is that Brown's spin, when he's attempted it, has been dire. Alastair Campbell may have deeply distorted and helped bring politics down to its current level of contempt and cynicism, but at least he was good at it. You would never have seen Blair sitting next to a gun in a helicopter, just to begin with. Brown's real failure is not to have led his party to its lowest ratings in a generation; it's that he's failed to be honest with himself, and in doing so, he's left the door wide open for David Cameron, just as agile as Blair, to skulk in.

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Tuesday, July 22, 2008 

Mercury prize shenanigans.

It's time for the Mercury Prize again, the award everyone likes to pretend is slightly more democratic and not based on pure popularity and record sales like the Brits are. Before we even get to the eventual winner and doubtless yet more disappointment over the unjustified win, there's the nominations themselves:


There's the usual token jazz record and token folk record, alongside the complete crap, provided admirably by Adele and Estelle. The small mercy is that Duffy wasn't nominated as well.

Again though, it's the amount of completely overlooked albums that rankles most. Seriously, no Portishead? No Mystery Jets? No Foals? The Foals album seems to have split opinion, or at least has on Drowned in Sound, but Portishead and the MJ albums have been both critically acclaimed and have apparent mass support from fans. Then there are the records you would have liked to have been nominated, but which were never probably going to stand a chance. Future of the Left, High Contrast, with the best drum and bass artist album in years, Johnny Foreigner, Youthmovies, Los Campesinos!, Errors, iLiKETRAiNS, ¡Forward, Russia! (although their debut was better), Wild Beasts (I confess I haven't been sold on their charms yet, but many others have been), These New Puritans, all would have been welcome additions, if only because of the extra interest it would inspire in them, not to mention the sales.

Going by that methodology, the appearance of Adele, Radiohead, Robert Plant and TLSP on the list is worthy of critique. Can anyone truly say that any of those is a worthy album of the year? I doubt even the most ardent Radiohead fanboy would say that In Rainbows is either their best work or the record they should have won the Mercury for (that would have been OK Computer), and while the TLSP album isn't terrible, Alex Turner is hardly lacking publicity or cash.

As for the rest, most are decent choices. British Sea Power still haven't recreated the majesty of their debut with Do You Like Rock Music? but it's still a vast improvement on Open Season. Elbow probably deserve some sort of recognition, mainly because of their consistency, but I doubt will trouble the judges too much. I haven't heard much by her, but Laura Marling has always struck as a slightly more intelligent Kate Nash/Lily Allen hybrid, although her contribution to Young Love by the Mystery Jets helped make it the song it was. Neon Neon have hardly broken any new ground, but again Gruff Rhys perhaps deserves something simply because of his work rate, when not with either the Super Furries or doing his solo stuff, of which Candylion was probably better than Stainless Style.

Which leaves us with Burial, whom is surely the most worthy potential winner on the list. Remaining completely anonymous, he's delivered two majestic, transcendent albums of mournful downtempo dubstep, with Archangel alone deserving of a prize. His anonymity might though count against him; he's hardly likely to turn up and perform, or even collect the prize if he wins, and last year Lauren Laverne claimed that the award was decided on the night after the Klaxons' performance. Let's just hope against hope that it isn't Adele.

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Sleeping in the jacuzzi.

Remember that just over a month ago our prisons were so cushy that prisoners were opting to stay inside rather than experience freedom and that others were attempting to break in? Such conclusive evidence has been decidedly backed up by the prison inspectorate's report on Doncaster prison, dubbed by Erwin James Doncatraz:

Some inmates are living and sleeping in toilets because of jail overcrowding, a report says.

HM Inspectorate of Prisons found Doncaster jail's two-man cells had been turned into three-man cells by putting an extra bed in the toilet area.

Doncaster jail, run by the private firm Serco, holds almost 1,000 male prisoners - 200 more than it can accommodate in uncrowded conditions.

The Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales, Anne Owers, said using the toilet area as accommodation was "unacceptable" and called for the practice to end.


This itself raises the question of where the prisoners did administer their deposits; "slopping out" was meant to have been banned years ago. You have to admire the thinking behind stuffing an extra bed in the toilet area on one level: now that's private sector efficiency and productivity in action. Whether Serco are paid by how many prisoners are in the premises at any one time is surely beside the point.

Could this initiative use of cell space possibly be related to this?

Incidents of violence and self-harm have also increased.

Thankfully, things in some areas have improved since Anne Owers' last visit. It would have been rather difficult for them not to; Owers then said conditions in some areas of the prison were "squalid", that less than a third of ethnic minority prisoners thought they were treated well and that the "first night centre" put prisoners in danger from others, making 156 recommendations on which to improve (PDF).

All of which hardly provides even the basics for any sort of rehabilitation. Speaking of which, also convienently shoved out on the last day of parliament before the recess, the justice committe more or less ripped Labour's criminal justice policy to shreds:

The Commons justice committee found Labour's flagship criminal justice reforms had been a "significant contributor" to prison overcrowding.

"We urge the government to address sentencing policy in a more considered and systematic way and to reconsider the merits of this trend," the cross-party committee of MPs said.

The Criminal Justice Act 2003 was the centrepiece of government plans for delivering clear, consistent sentencing. But MPs said the act had "fallen short of its aims".

The committee blamed a desire to appear tough on crime and a failure to inject sufficient resources into community punishments for a rise in short jail terms, which they said could lead to increased reoffending.

"There is a contradiction in stating that prison should be reserved for serious and dangerous offenders while not providing the resources necessary to fund more appropriate options for other offenders who then end up back in prison," the committee's Liberal Democrat chair, Alan Beith, said.

"Short custodial sentences are very unlikely to contribute to an offender's rehabilitation; in fact, short custodial sentences may increase re-offending."

Vulnerable groups such as women, young people and the mentally ill were found to be particularly susceptible to being imprisoned even though "their needs could be dealt with both more effectively and more appropriately in the community".


The solution to all of this is simple: build even more prisons, ones that will have overcrowding built into them. Oh, except, the review that recommended the "titans" was, according to the committee:

a "deeply unimpressive" review of sentencing by Labour peer Lord Carter that they said was based on "wholly inadequate" consultation.

Carter's report was "a missed opportunity for a fundamental consideration of problems with sentencing and provision of custodial and non-custodial facilities in England and Wales", the MPs found.

No surprises there: all the evidence suggests that the truly effective prisons are local, small ones which don't completely remove the offender from their local community and help with their resettlement and opportunities once they're inside. Titan prisons however are far more attractive to the government because they don't need to go through the hassle of going through multiple planning processes across the land, instead building some of them near to already existing ones. They're also tough: just look at that word, "titan". Ooh, that's hard, isn't it?

Who cares whether those within prisons are reformed while they're inside, the point is that while they're inside they can't commit crimes, right? That's the view the government's pandering to, one which cares only for immediate results and tomorrow's headlines and not for the long-term. There isn't however any dispute between the Conservatives and Labour on this: both are convinced that more people need to be locked up despite everything that suggests it simply doesn't work. To do otherwise would mean having to challenge the orthodoxy on the right and in the tabloids which has bequested us the current mess. Perhaps if ministers themselves had to sleep in toilets it might concentrate a few minds.

Related:
David Ramsbotham - We need a royal commission into our prisons


Update: I just noted I misspelled "jacuzzi" in the title as "jazuzzi". Whoops.

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Scum-watch: Heartless libel? That's our job!

The Sun is disgusted by the vicious libel thrown at the McCanns by the former Portuguese policeman who aims to profit from Madeleine's disappearance by publishing a book:

But the couple’s torment is only made worse by Portuguese ex-cop Goncarlo Amaral, who is claiming Madeleine died in their holiday flat.

The implication that they were responsible, accidentally or otherwise, is utterly groundless. Otherwise, this inquiry would never have been shelved.

Amaral may hope his heartless libel will divert attention from his own clod-hopping police work.

But in trying to make a few seedy bucks, he feeds the cruel conspiracy theories that will haunt the McCanns all their lives.


Quite so. Speaking of heartless libel, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the Sun, along with its sister publication the News of the World and connected news channel Sky News last week contribute to the £600,000 damages awarded to Robert Murat? I bring this up again because if you only read the Sun online you sure as hell wouldn't know about it: not only have they not republished the apology they should have ran last week in the paper online, but in its only report of Murat's settlement it didn't mention that it was among the publications that had committed similarly heartless libel.

Indeed, while Amaral may feed the cruel conspiracy theories, the Sun is feeding the cruel conspiracy theories surrounding Murat, as it has failed to take down clearly libelous and untrue stories such as a nanny's claim that she see saw him at the "Maddie" flat as well as one claiming that he was conducting an affair with the friend that was also paid £100,000 in damages. In the nanny's story, Murat is referred to as an oddball, the stock in trade description that haunted others such as Colin Stagg who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The McCanns though are helpless victims, who can be sympathised with while they are simultaneously exploited by a media that has no boundaries and which has profited far more from the disappearance of a little girl that Amaral likely ever will. Murat and anyone else can just go and hang.

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Film review: Donkey Punch.

Since the collapse of the Hammer studios, British horror has often been exactly that: horrible. While it's unlikely that anything will ever be produced on these shores that manages to equal The Wicker Man, the last decade has seen a few flourishings of potential talent. Although both largely derivative, 28 Days Later of the zombie genre and The Descent of the slasher/body count/monster picture, both showed that when both funding and thought is available, commercially successful offerings can still be produced. If you include Shaun of the Dead with those two, and perhaps even London 2 Brighton (which is probably the finest British film of recent years), then the point can be expanded even further. Even so, such films still often require all the help they can get. The makers of Donkey Punch must then be delighted with the Daily Mail's reaction courtesy of Amanda Platell: the most vile film she's ever seen, made with OUR MONEY, via the UK Film Council, although much of the funding would have been provided from those who waste their money on lottery tickets.

The Mail has had a history of giving huge plaudits and attention to films which it finds morally repugnant, therefore driving people to go and see them. It said of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre that if a ever film should be banned, then this it. It was in the vanguard of bringing the mostly pretty bad "video nasties" to wider acclaim, campaigned against Crash, and most recently lambasted Hostel. Some hits, some misses there, but always missing the point that declaring you're outraged about something eminently available will also make it instantly more attractive, and with censorship and bans now largely history, even more pointless than previously.

Donkey Punch was always going to be controversial. After all, when you name your film after an apocryphal sex act, a sex act which is carried out in full glare of the camera, although unless I missed something it didn't in this case involve anal penetration as the mythical move is meant to (supposedly punching the back of your partner's neck as you're about to orgasm makes the sphincter tighten even further), you're instantly courting attention and potential opprobrium. Although I haven't seen Skins, Donkey Punch has been compared in its attitude and filming to it, and coming from the Film 4 stable, it's not exactly surprising. Perhaps a better comparison though would be to the one-off late night versions of Hollyoaks, except with better actors, a much improved, wittier script, more bloodshed and a tension which although doesn't quite reach the heights or gory excesses of Wolf Creek, or the aptly named Haute Tension, still builds up to a fairly pleasing denouement.

Three young working class women from Leeds, either in their very late teens or early twenties have escaped from northern drudgery to Mallorca. Going out partying, they meet three southern middle class lads, one of whom swiftly steals a bottle of Champagne after one of the girls requests it. Suitably impressed, they retire to the beach, where they inform the girls that this is their last weekend in Mallorca and that they've been working on a yacht, whose owner has conveniently flown off somewhere and left them in charge. After a slight amount of hesitation from Tammi, played by Nichola Burley, who herself wasn't sure of the trip to begin with, they go out to sea, where the debauchery begins in earnest. Drugs, and then sex are the order of the day.

So far, so predictable, and so pedestrian. Having taken ecstasy and a hit off something resembling a crack or meth pipe, two of the girls have had their inhibitions lowered enough to allow themselves to be filmed naked kissing, which nonetheless still rings alarm bells of credulity, before the more audacious Lisa, played by Sian Breckin, invites the suitably dense and achingly nonchalant cool guy Bluey, played execrably by Tom Burke to engage in coitus. Filming all this for posterity is the shy, impressionable and younger Josh, who thinking he's only going to be able to jerk off while watching the two young women fuck his friends, is kindly allowed by Lisa to take over from Bluey while he grabs hold of the camera. About to climax, Bluey tells Josh jokingly to "go on, do it!" While it's not clear whether he's alluding to the previous discussion of unusual sexual practices, where donkey punching was mentioned, or to Josh blowing his load, Josh takes it upon himself to do the former. Tragedy occurs.

It's here where Donkey Punch finally comes into its own. The male group understandably panic, and figure that if they dump Lisa's corpse out in international waters, and say that she fell overboard, all of them will get off and put this terrible incident behind them. The two remaining young women, terrified, but not bowed, also understandably disagree. Their refusal to go along with the plan doesn't matter; Lisa is to be fish food.

At this point the film could have all gone to pot: as satisfying as a I Spit on Your Grave style rampage of revenge from one of the girls for what's happened to thier sister, even if not in blood, would have been, it would have stretched the film to breaking point, even if they had been further brutalised. Instead, it turns into a dripping, almost classical in scope orgy of chaos as one by one the bodycount increases. Incidentally, Amanda Platell has got the complete wrong end of the stick in her own criticism, mainly because what's clear is that the revenge that does come is being meted out by the females against those who have first tricked them, abused them, tried to control them and then finally resorted to out and out murder. If you wanted to get close to Pseud's Corner territory, you could even see it at a large stretch as a film depicting the class war in actual motion: the northern proletariat striking out at the southern, public school educated bourgeois twits who have oppressed and exploited them for most of the film's length, even if at times they have been too trusting to begin with and gone along with their enemies. When Josh, even after the death of Lisa orders the two remaining women, surrounded by the lads to sort them out a meal, it's impossible not to see the sexist overtones which are afterwards hurled back in the most vicious way. In a way, it's little more than an updating of the laughable, ideologically bankrupt cautionary message of Last House on the Left, but both films equally have far more power than just to shock and wag the finger.

The one overwhelming problem which almost blunts the attack is that moments of comedy horror creep into two of the death scenes. If accidental or through sloppy film-making it could be understood, but it's clearly meant to be seen that way. As a result it undermines the tension that has been built up, and almost breaks the spell completely. It's mainly down to the subtle but excellent performance by Burley as Tammi that the momentum is not affected.

Despite Platell's endorsement, much of what's here, apart from the orgy and punch itself, which are as you would expect fairly graphic, there's nothing here in the violence or gore stakes that you won't have seen before, mainly because it would be out of kilter with the film itself if there was. It's also perverse to see it as part of the torture porn genre, which is purely nihilistic and indulges in depravity because it can; the script here is too strong, the characters, if not completely three-dimensional fairly well-drawn, and the social commentary far too prevalent. If there was one word to describe the torture-porn genre, you'd be inclined to use grimy, as both the locations, the filming and the scripts are exactly that. Here instead there is gloss, and while I wouldn't say that it is anything approaching realistic, up until the film's title sequence it's nothing that is beyond the realms of imagination.

While not a classic by any means, Donkey Punch stands above most of the recent American offerings that share similar motivations, and does suggest that a new generation of British film-makers and also actors can escape from the drama/comedy/soap-oriented hell to the big screen without making such drivel as Sex Lives of the Potato Men or Three and Out, Daily Mail approved or not.

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Monday, July 21, 2008 

Everyone written off.

A few months back Johann Hari wrote a fairly decent article urging Labour, almost certain to be defeated at the next election, to spend its last couple of years in office engaging in the sort of radicalism that it has either completely eschewed over the last decade or rejected because of the fear of being knifed by the Tories or the right-wing press. The argument, so it goes, is that when you've got nothing left to lose, you might as well go out with a bang.

James Purnell seems to have acknowledged that spirit but got it completely the wrong way around. Yet another of the young uber-Blairites whose balls don't seem to have dropped yet, he's instead decided that he's going to do the Conservatives' job for them, to their almost unbelieving delight; probably because it'll save them the effort of doing the whole job, having to just add even harsher methods on to the end of it once they're elected. Instead, the real enemy is immediately Labour backbenchers who might not accept this new welfare paradigm which must be instituted for all our sakes.

Like with all the other Blairite excesses, the presentation and Unspeak which festers the green paper (PDF) is glossy and brazen respectively. It's even called one of those wonderful managerial names which, as Simon Hoggart has often pointed out, if turned backwards wouldn't be worth saying. We've had Every Child Matters, now we've got No One Written Off, to give the impression that these plans have been drawn up with the individual at the sharp end, inside the welfare system, at the heart of the scheme. This couldn't be further from the truth: the only intention the government has is of cutting down the ever growing number of those on Incapacity Benefit, putting the recommendations of investment banker David Freud, who had ran a review, into practice. If you're thinking that it's counter-intuitive to get an investment banker to ring the changes in a system where you're dealing with some of the most vulnerable people in society, then it might be helpful to know that he too has been subsidised by the state: he went cap in hand to John Prescott over the channel tunnel, asking for an extra £1.2bn on at least one occasion. Freud decided that he knew better than those that actually assess the claims for incapacity benefit, and claimed that only a third were genuinely incapacitated enough to not work at all. Like with Purnell himself, it doesn't seem likely that Freud has ever experienced genuine hardship, let alone personally: both went to public schools before following on to Oxford.

What rankles most about the Green Paper is not its actual proposals, it's what it's alluding to. It's the casual wink and a nod, again so often part of Blairite thinking, that is so exasperating. The government pretended to be shocked when the proposals were "leaked" to Sky News on Friday, as opposed to be passed them so as to build up a head of steam over the weekend. Having given them to Sky News, they obviously went straight across to the pages of the Sun, which was delighted with the government at least getting tough on the scroungers, the work shy, the feckless and the fraudsters and sung its praises. As Justin says, this is little more than demonisation, pandering to myths and fantasies while attacking those that need help the most for very short term political gain.

The new proposals are based on the classic carrot and stick approach, although this is a New Labour style huge great stick combined with the smallest carrot they could buy from Tesco's. Incapacity Benefit is to be abolished altogether, as is income support eventually, all to be replaced with just two main benefit schemes: either ESA or JSA. No longer will those on incapacity benefit simply be abandoned, "written off"; instead they'll either be in one of two sections of ESA, either the "Work Related Activity Group", where they'll be on a programme of back to work support, or in the "Support" group, where they'll be able to go on the WRAG programme on a voluntary basis, and receive an higher basic rate of benefits if they do. In other words, Labour is planning to abolish pretty much all of the welfare state's current back to work programmes except for Jobseeker's Allowance and Jobseeker's Allowance Diet. Or Lite. Whichever you prefer. If you're unfortunate enough to be on JSA and don't manage to find a job within three and six months, you'll be expected to "intensify" your job search activity and "comply" with a "challenging" back-to-work action plan. After 12 months, despite Purnell praising Job Centre Plus to high heaven for their fantastic work just a couple of paragraphs back, you'll be put onto a scheme provided by a private, public or voluntary sector provider, although you may as well skip the middle one as an option. Then you'll have to perform four-weeks "full-time activity" i.e. work as a minimum. If you haven't then killed yourself or picked the most menial job available just to escape from the horrors of this programme, after two years you'll have to take part in "full-time activity" the entire time. Whether you'll be given time off to actually find a real job isn't mentioned.

If I'm making this sound all rather unpleasant, if not a little nightmarish, then that seems to be the general idea. Make the bastards so miserable that they'll do anything to get into work, even if it is of the sort that makes them wish they had been written off. The thing that makes it seem so sinister is that throughout, those who are either on ESA or JSA are described as "customers", as though they're choosing to either be sick so they can live on what is little more than a pittance or out of work so they can experience the same. It doesn't seem to matter that there are gaping holes in this plan, such as exactly what this "full-time activity" will amount to: the press seems to think that it's going to be picking up litter and cleaning off graffiti, which for a scheme that is meant to providing skills seems to be following Purnell's idea of turning advice on its head. Seeing as those on community service are already going to be doing this, and, oh, that there already people employed who also do this, just what's going to be left for any of them to do? It also completely ignores that being on benefits other than JSA is already not "passive", as some love to make out, as if there aren't any opportunities already provided to get back into work. It makes for good spin, but it certainly isn't true.

The thing that troubles most however is just what the point of this venture is, and just what savings are to be made from making being sick or out of work even more unpleasant than it already is. The jobs most who are out of work are going to go into are ones which are low-paid, and unless they're too young to claim tax credits, they're going to be straight onto to them to top-up their earnings, negating any major savings. At the same time, the private and voluntary sector who help with getting the long-time unemployed back into work will be paid the savings that the state makes from that person entering employment, with up to £5,000 being mentioned in some places. The state then doesn't save or benefit; they do. Purnell claims that he wants to make the benefits system simpler; the easiest way to do that would be to abolish tax credits altogether and take the poorest up to the lowest middle earners out of paying any tax whatsoever by making the rich and ultra-rich pay their fair share. This would however make too much sense and mean offending the Confederation of British Industry and the non-domiciles. Is the point of these changes then to increase the well of overall human happiness, New Labour becoming utilitarian by deciding that work is generally good for well-being? Why on earth would it change a habit of a lifetime by doing that now?

All our proposals are driven by a core belief – using the power of a responsive State to increase people’s life chances, opportunities and capabilities.

In line with that, Purnell has been selling his proposals in the Guardian, along with some pedestrian attacks on David Cameron by claiming that all of this is in the name of tackling poverty. This, as we've seen before, has become Labour's last all out gasp for compliments and to be recognised as being fundamentally decent; we're helping the kids escape from poverty! Except, of course, that they've succeeded in altering overall inequality not one jot. At best what these proposals will do is take individuals that are in dire poverty and put them on the path to borderline poverty; a great achievement, as I'm sure you'll agree. That leaves us then with the very last defence. If Labour doesn't do it now, then the Tories will introduce something even harsher. This is the line taken by none other than... Johann Hari. And so we have come full circle
.

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Scum-watch: We would never invade anyone's privacy!

There is of something endemically hilarious and hypocritical about a tabloid newspaper being outraged at how our privacy is being threatened, considering much of their profit and stories come exactly from someone's privacy being infringed, for whatever dubious justification, but it's especially breathtaking when it rants like this in the editorial column:

AN Englishman’s home is his castle.

But now it emerges that State officials can use 1,000 different laws to enter our homes and check up on what we’re doing.

Big Brother Britain seems out of control.

The Sun supports CCTV cameras which make our city streets safer.

But people are fed up with the clipboard brigade poking their noses in our lives.

Over-mighty councils use anti-terror laws to catch dog-foulers.

Now snoopers can march right in to see if we’re breeding rabbits.

Or practising hypnosis.

Gordon Brown promised us an end to meddling.

It’s high time our privacy was protected.


while invading the privacy of a girl who's found herself caught up in a storm because of her relationship with a Rolling Stone:

BUSTY Ekaterina Ivanova shows the charms that lured Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood into bed.

The 20-year-old posed topless for these racy photos just MINUTES after bedding geeky ex-lover Will Jones for the first time.

In one raunchy snap, Ekaterina – who sloped off to Ireland with married Ronnie two weeks ago – gives a cheeky thumbs-up to the camera while lying naked in bed.


Yep, Ivanova's former squeeze has sold photographs he took on his phone to the Sun. How this is justifiable and not a breach of Ivanova's privacy is not explained. It will however doubtless delight the one-handed mob that rule online. It is also worth pointing out that the News of the World and the Sun were among the top users of busted data information seller Stephen Whittamore.

Meanwhile there is yet another bad news story about Facebook, this time of a young mum whom had her photographs taken off the site and used on one of a pornographic variety. This could of course never happen to anyone on MySpace (prop. R. Murdoch), and even if it did, you can bet that the Sun would be the first to let us know. In any case, you can rely upon the MyScum users to ensure that the abuse doesn't end there:

3 kids at 22? Sounds like you've had far too much sex.

Because as we all know, copious sex instantly means copious amounts of kids.

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Saturday, July 19, 2008 

Weekend links.

Lee Griffin - Those irresponsible child drunks (a revisit)

Jason Burke - The not-so-winnable war against terrorism

Deborah Orr - For many in Glasgow East, Labour picked up where Thatcher left off

Robert Fisk - When propaganda turns out to be fact

Howard Jacobson - Military service, crocheting and ping-pong – that will separate the men from the boys

And the entirety of the Magistrate's Blog is worth a look, one I keep forgetting to add to the sidebar.

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Friday, July 18, 2008 

Crime stat porn and thoughts connected.

Try as they did, opposition politicians yesterday were fighting a losing battle in trying to get some sort of advantage out of the latest crime figures. With the apparent rise in knife crime and teenagers killing each other in record numbers in London, it ought to have been a reasonably easy task. The figures though told a completely different story, and one which is also increasingly difficult to dismiss: after stabilising over the last couple of years, the large falls once again accelerated in 2007/08. Crime as recorded by the British Crime Survey (PDF, references are made throughout the post to the relevant pages), more authoritative because of its huge over 40,000 survey sample showed it to have fallen by 10%, while police recorded crime fell by 9%. In fact, the only figures to show a rise were homicide, which rose by 2% from 759 to 784, drug offences, which were up 18%, mainly because of the continued, possibly soon to end confiscating and warn policy on cannabis and gun offences, which also rose by 2%. Everything else, as recorded by both the police and BCS, either remained stable or fell.

Dominic Grieve, David Davis's replacement as Tory shadow home secretary tried to claim that violent crime had risen by "80%" under Labour, but this ignores the fact that violent crime as measured by the BCS has fallen by an astonishing almost half since 1995, 48% down. Because of the way the police recorded crime changed in 2002/03 figures are now not comparable prior to then, but while the police recorded a 25% rise in violence against the person between then and 2005/06, this has since fallen by 9% to 0.96 million offences (page 21). Where Grieve got his 80% figure from is a mystery.

It was instead left to the tabloids to shriek about the figures which previously they hadn't much cared about. They mostly played down the collected for the first time figures by the police in which knives were used in a crime (attempted murder; wounding with intent to do grievous bodily harm (GBH); wounding or inflicting grievous bodily harm (i.e. without intent); robbery of business property; and robbery of personal property) which totalled 22,151 attacks or offences in total (page 75), which showed that more than 55% of police recorded crimes involving a knife took place in either London, Birmingham or Manchester, while in large areas of the country there were by comparison a tiny number, such as in Cumbria where there were 73, North Yorkshire in which there were 66, Norfolk 67 and Dorset 47 (the Guardian has a handy interactive map), to instead look at the BCS figures on violent crime involving a bladed instrument.

The BCS in total recorded 2,164,000 violent incidents against adults in England and Wales in 2007/08 (page 62). Of these, 6% involved a knife (page 63). Extrapolating from this, this is where the headlines and leading paragraphs of around 130,000 offences involving a knife came from. Further distorting and potentially worrying people, this was then broken down to 350 a day or to a "knife attack" every four minutes. It doesn't matter that these figures are essentially meaningless when you can't get a full rounded figure in the first place from 6% of 2,164,000, they nonetheless occupied the front pages and screamed about the reality of life in "Blade Britain". What few of the papers bothered to go into was the caveats that are involved in these figures which help greatly in understanding that these are simply not instances of people getting stabbed or even attacked. For example, just over 51% of all violent incidents resulted in no injury whatsoever (page 72), while the most common injuries that were suffered were minor bruising or a black eye (28%), severe bruising (15%) and cuts (13%) (page 73). In only 12% of violent incidents was any form of medical attention sought, with 9% seeing a doctor and just 1% requiring an overnight stay in hospital. Of the 2,164,000 violent incidents, around a third were incidents of stranger violence (page 71), while another third was, more surprisingly, acquaintance violence. Domestic violence accounted for one in six violent incidents. The overall risk of being a victim of violent crime was 3.2% (page 70). The overall risk of being a victim of any sort of crime was 22%, the lowest since the BCS began in 1981.

It wasn't even as if the tabloids could claim there had been any huge rise in knife crime, as the statistics in fact mainly show the opposite. The use of knives in the 2,164,000 violent incidents was actually down 1% to 6% from the 2006/07 survey, although the figure was not stastically significant (page 76). The figure involving knives used in violent incidents has also stayed broadly stable since 1995, hovering around or below 8%. Also interestingly, the Metropolitan police, which have been collecting figures with crimes involving knives separately from other forces also recorded a fall. The Met recorded 10,220 knife enabled crimes in 07/08 (page 76), 16% down on last year, figures which were 4% down on the previous year. As korova on Mask of Anarchy points out, mostly ignored but also in the figures is the fact that 7% of violent incidents involved a blunt or "hitting" instrument, which can do potentially as much if not more damage than a knife, but which have been lost sight of in the current atmosphere. We are not then suffering from a knife crime epidemic. The reality according to the figures is that we're experiencing a stabilising effect and no real rise in knife crime. What is happening without question is that young people, especially in the cities are carrying knives, and are increasingly prepared to use them, as the latest terrible death of a teenager shows. That's the main reason why we're currently having such potentially adverse and over the top media attention, along with the fact that alongside the mostly black victims, three of those who have died have been white, middle class, and either had telegenic, hospitable and eloquent parents or semi-famous relatives.

The problem is, as we all know, that fewer and fewer people believe the statistics. Two-thirds believed that crime had risen over the past year, but as often seems to be the case, only 39% believed that crime had risen in their area. The same pattern seems to apply to those who think that the NHS is nationally getting worse even while they think that their local services are actually fairly good. It's hard not to link this directly with media coverage: faced with the number of young deaths in London, who wouldn't after all believe that crime is rising? With all those front pages this morning, again, who wouldn't believe it also, even if they read the articles in detail, where most do make clear that according to the statistics, if they care to believe them, that crime has fallen apparently spectacularly? This is where Louise Casey's recommendation for a independent statistics board might help, but only if it potentially has teeth which can challenge the media picture.

Also related but also without an answer is exactly why crime is falling so significantly, again, if we are to believe the statistics. This incidentally isn't just happening here but across the Western world, so unless everyone's on the fiddle it's an almost global picture. The Guardian's editorial suggests the reason is that we've all gotten richer but that we've also gotten older, and crime, as the BCS itself shows, is predominantly a young man's game. Criminologists themselves admit that don't know, which in itself is refreshing; others point towards better security. The government's policies also have to be considered; perhaps the record numbers in prison have contributed to the fall in crime? If so, that itself puts those of us on the left who think there are already too many people in prison, let alone without adding more capacity, especially when those inside cannot get adequate treatment for the drug problems and mental health issues which so contribute to crime, in a difficult position.

In summary, there is no knife crime epidemic, or at least one isn't reflected in the statistics. Crime itself is at its lowest point for a generation, and again, although it doesn't feel like, Britain is now probably the safest it's been overall since the early 1980s. The real difficulty is in convincing the public themselves that this is the case, and not exaggerating the real problems we do have into a picture of a broken society. The biggest difficulty of all is that we don't seem to have any answers whatsoever.

Related posts:
Richard Garside - Knife crime: perception vs reality
Little Richardjohn - I live in Peckham. I feel safe.
Cassilis - You can't just ignore the inconveinent numbers

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Investigative blogging, the Tories and watching the ministerial written statements.

A whole load of investigative blogging has been going on of late, especially over at the Ministry. Unity first uncovered that one of the individuals who officiated on the employment tribunal in the case of Ladele vs Islington shares a name with a person who was previously the chairman of governors at an independent Catholic girls' school, quite obviously a potential conflict of interest when ruling on matters of discrimination involving a registrar refusing to officiate on civil partnerships.

Next, in response to the Charity Commission report on the Smith Institute, which although critical did not find the smoking gun that Guido amongst others hoped it would over its connections to Gordon Brown, Unity raises the question of Policy Exchange and its extreme closeness to Cameron and co, which bears much of a resemblance to that which the Smith Institute has been criticised over. While trying to gain full advantage from the report, Guido happens to link to the Centre for Open Politics, which models itself on the American Sunlight Foundation. Their gambit is:

Our work is inspired by and based on the work of the Sunlight Foundation in Washington D.C. We are committed to helping voters, bloggers and journalists be their own watchdogs, by improving access to existing information and digitising new information, and by creating new tools and websites to enable all of us to collaborate in fostering greater transparency.

Underlying all of Sunlight’s efforts is a fundamental belief that increased transparency will improve the conduct of politics itself and the public’s confidence in the political process.

All well and good, you might think; more transparency in politics is exactly what we need. You would expect however that those who have set-up this Centre for Open Politics would be, well open about their politics and transparent in their reasons for setting it up. The slightest Googling by Unity, and amazing as it may seem, it turns out that COP's founders, Harry Cole and Amanda O'Brien are respectively formerly Vice Chairman/Treasurer of the Edinburgh University Conservative Association, as well as running some of the recruitment drive for the youth Tory organisation Conservative Future, while O'Brien is likely to be the same Amanda O'Brien who's currently the deputy chairman of Essex Conservative Future. What's more, the domain name for COP's is registered at the self-same building out of which MessageSpace operates, which just so also happens to be associated with Guido.

Elsewhere meanwhile Cameron's decision to publish the expenses of the vast majority of his MPs might well backfire after it was noted that 78 of them are using their allowances to pay for the party's "Parliamentary Resources Unit", the Labour equivalent of which MPs have to pay for out of their own pockets. The Tories are on the defensive and confident they'll be found not to be breaching any rules, but John Mann has asked the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards to investigate.

Even more interesting for those of us keeping an eye on the habitual liar and fantasist which is Nadine Dorries is that her expenses show that she spent £2,938 on the services of Media Intelligence Partners. As Tim on Bloggerheads notes, the services provided by MIP are Media strategy', 'Media relations', 'Crisis management', 'Media Training', 'Public relations and political consultancy', 'Identity management' and 'Analysis and research'. According to the Green Book rules on what can and cannot be charged to the taxpayer, expenditure under the Incidental Expenses Provision is not permitted for "Advice for individual Members on self promotion, or PR for individuals or political parties." Dorries used taxpayer cash on MIP during her campaign for the abortion limit to be cut to 20 weeks. Could it be that she's been caught bang to rights yet again misusing her expenses, after previously using Commons notepaper inappropriately and funding her website also from the IEP?

Finally, Matt Wardman brings our attention to the government's usual habit of flooding out written ministerial statements just before parliament goes into recess and the silly season begins in earnest. Well worth watching.

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Thursday, July 17, 2008 

A system unchanged by scandals part three.

Robert Murat got his day in court and £600,000 in damages, but even he must be wondering whether it will change the way that the tabloid press in this country operates. Looking at the Sun and Daily Mail websites tonight, neither has mentioned the settlement announced in the high court. The only mention the Sun has made of any sort of settlement being reached is contained in a "Staff Reporter" story from Tuesday which doesn't mention that the Sun itself or the News of the World have agreed to pay him damages.

With damages to Murat of £600,000, six figure payouts to two of his acquaintances whose names were also dragged through the mud, and overall legal costs, Roy Greenslade estimates that it will have cost the four groups, Express Newspapers, the Mirror Group, Associated Newspapers and News International in the region of £100,000 per paper. Again, in the long run, we're talking of peanuts here. These are still peanuts which will have to be accounted for, and who knows, some employees may well lose their jobs as a result of the costs. That won't however stop any one of these newspapers from smearing individuals in exactly the same way as they did Murat. As elucidated before, it's far too profitable and the negatives are too few to make them think twice before declaring on their front pages that a man is a paedophile or that a missing girl DEFINITELY WAS in that man's villa.

Greenslade mentions that the dedicated legal teams on each paper has to take some of the blame. I'd agree, but I think the real blame lies with one individual only: the editor. They are the ones who decide what and what isn't ultimately printed, and each one in this instance thought that it was perfectly acceptable to print libel about a man whose only crime was wanting to help the police find the little girl that had gone missing close to where he lived. Here then is a roll call of shame: Rebekah Wade; the Sun. Colin Myler; News of the World. Paul Dacre; Daily Mail. Veronica Wadley; Evening Standard. Kenny Campbell; Metro. Richard Wallace; Daily Mirror. Tina Weaver; Sunday Mirror. Bruce Waddell; Daily Record. Peter Hill; Daily Express. Martin Townsend; Sunday Express. Dawn Neesom; Daily Star.

The other main reason why this will have no effect whatsoever on it happening again is that the newspapers have hardly even acknowledged that they've done anything wrong. The only way to make anyone take notice on these occasions when such repeated and hysterical libel has been committed is for the newspaper to be forced to print the apology on its front page, like the Express and Star both did after the action by the McCanns. Having seen the Daily Mirror and Sun front pages tomorrow, neither so much as mentions Murat. The Sun even has a story claiming that the McCanns are about to be cleared, just to rub it into Murat that he'd have more luck trying to get blood out of a stone than forcing a tabloid newspaper to own up to its errors.

If anything therefore ought to put the final nail in the coffin of the myth of self-regulation this ought to be it. Tina Weaver for example sits on the Press Complaint Commission's main board which decides on the cases brought before it for adjudication, while Paul Dacre is the chairman of the code committee! Digitagit summed it up very nicely in the comments on another Greenslade piece:

As with the Mosley case, the toxic combination of greed, vanity, self-importance, affected outrage and false morality is a trait common to all our popular press and is just repulsive beyond belief.

Indeed. These self-same newspapers preach at us day in and day out about law and order, respect and morals, and when it comes down to it, they are just as guilty if not more so than anyone else in society. Only a complaints body with genuine teeth, that could perhaps stop a newspaper from publishing for one day when they commit such outrageous libel, or which personally fines editors or proprietors like Ofcom does could potentially stop this rot.

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Wednesday, July 16, 2008 

Cameron, the broken society and the wider left.

Reading the Grauniad's interview with David Cameron and the accompanying article, it's very difficult not to become depressed that after 10 years of Blair, within a couple of years we're going to be under the thumb of his very real heir, and with not just the Labour party but the entirety of the left raising barely a whimper of defiance.

Cameron's broken society gambit is almost certainly the one detail that makes me despair the most. He knows it's not true, we know it isn't true, the government knows it isn't true, even the Times, whose sister paper has done the most to perpetuate the notion knows it isn't true, and yet I don't think I can recall a single politician, whether they be Labour or Liberal Democrat who has directly challenged Cameron to provide some real evidence that British society is any sense broken. Here's Cameron's incredibly weak case for it:

He denies he is giving a false picture of Britain by talking of a broken society, saying: "There is a general incivility that people have to put up with, people shouting at you on the bus or abusing you on the street, or road rage. There is a lot of casual violence; and I think it is important to draw attention to it."

It doesn't seem to matter that I somehow doubt Cameron himself has been on a bus in years, if ever, but this isn't a picture of a broken society. It may be a picture of an uncivil, rude, selfish society, but what it is not is a broken society. This is anecdotal evidence writ large: I reasonably regularly travel on buses and I've never seen people shouting at each other, let alone shout at me; more likely is that everyone will be ignoring each other or desperately hoping that the few noisy ones that are stop talking so loudly about their sex lives. I've seen bus drivers themselves try to cause trouble by picking people up when they don't say please and thank you (incidentally the one who did this only picked up those that also happened to be black) but again, not random shouting and slanging matches. I have been on occasion abused on the street, but that's the sort of thing you have to put up with when you're four-eyed and an ugly bastard; as on the previous post, some people either to need to grow a backbone or get over themselves. Road rage, as someone recently pointed out, didn't exist as a term back in the late 80s, and what's also developed since the late 80s is the congestion and delays which so often prompt it. Then there's the casual violence that according the BCS has dropped by 40% since 1995.

Cameron, rather than being compared to Blair, likes to be compared to Obama. The difference is that if either Obama or McCain tried to claim that America is a broken society, a claim that probably has more merit than the notion that ours is, considering the crushing inequality, far higher crime rate and pitiful minimum wage, not to mention an even more pervasive notion of individualism, then they would be absolutely crucified for not being patriotic about their own country. Thankfully we're not anything like that here, but what we are instead is intensely cynical, incredibly self-critical and with a tendency for self-loathing. Those are all qualities that I myself have in abundance, so I'm not pointing the finger. They do however lead us to exaggerating and making out that things are far worse than they actually are. Cameron's broken society rhetoric can be directly linked back to Blair's own "tough on crime" soundbite, even if it was created by Gordon Brown. That itself was connected with the James Bulger murder, which despite being a horrific one-off was enough to set us back on the "prison works" road which hasn't altered for over a decade. Cameron is now working off the back of the rise of knife crime to claim that society is broken. It's just as dubious then as the notion that prison works was, but because it's so current and can't be argued against because of the immediacy of such terrible crimes, it's difficult to argue against.

Labour's response to all this is to claim that David Cameron is a PR merchant who doesn't have any policies. For a time this could wash: he is the former while he didn't have the latter. That simply isn't true any more. He remains the PR merchant with a spin doctor in Andy Coulson behind him to rival Alastair Campbell, but the Tory party does now have policies. Not brilliant ones, but they're enough, just as Labour was suitably vague prior to 97. What's more, they instantly appeal even if they fall apart after a moment's study: their fuel escalator idea is a fantastic concept, easy to understand but which is completely out of step with their so-called green credentials; locking up yobs with knives is populist and difficult to argue against while being a terrible idea; and his broken Britain stuff is brazen and defining but empty.

What's more is that he's combining it with the ruthless streak that such politicians who crave power have. He's also already compromising, hence letting it be known that the Tories may have to raise taxes before they can cut them because of the huge borrowing debt and the black hole in the public finances, whilst looming over Boris in the Mayor's office like Blair would have liked to have done over Ken. He already has the sort of public image which Blair gained, and which Brown would kill for, with decent popularity ratings, and his performance over the last year has won over the doubters in the Conservative party itself.

As far as I can see it, the left has two choices. Either the Labour party picks itself up out of its desperate misery, viciously goes on the offensive against Cameron and completely challenges them over every little detail, over whether we have a broken society, over public spending pledges, over what their foreign policy would be, and the left joins in with it, even if deservedly detached, or the left has to disconnect completely from Labour now. You see it on Comment is Free and elsewhere, how the left, despite its complete disengagement and resentment in places with Labour is getting all the blame for what's gone wrong and none of the credit for what's gone right. The real danger is that the left and its causes get dragged down with Labour, and out of not just power but out of any influence for another generation.

This is why it makes me so despondent when rather than challenging the Conservatives and potentially forcing them to improve their plans, the left seems more concerned with such petty, ridiculous and banal matters as whether or not we should use the word "chav". Yes, a tiny minority of individuals are stupid, wear awful clothes, listen to terrible music and act like imbeciles; if some people want to call them chavs let them get on with it. There are more important things to be concerned with. If the last 10 years have taught us anything it's that someone with charisma is an incredibly dangerous thing. Unhinged by even the slightest disagreement amongst backbench supporters, Cameron has the potential to be far more destructive than Blair ever was. We're almost certainly going to have at least five years of Tory rule, so let's at least ensure that there's some sort of opposition, shall we? Or we can go and shoot ourselves now. There, comrades, are the options.

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The youth crime action plan.

After the understandable explosion of coverage over the weekend after the deaths of 4 men in London alone on the same day, including the 20th teenager to have been killed in the city this year, the reaction to the actual Youth Crime Plan itself, which has been long in the drawing up, has been almost entirely muted.

Partly this was because over the weekend the government managed to yet again get itself in a frightful muddle of its own making. Spurred into action by the immediate howling that something must be done from the newspapers, and also to respond to the Tories' pledge that anyone caught carrying a knife would be sent to prison, Jacqui Smith toured the studios on the Sunday making clear what the tough community punishments would be, as opposed to locking the miscreants up for God knows how long. This would involve restorative justice sessions, taking teenagers into hospitals to see victims of violent crime, face to face meetings with victims, and community sentences of up to 300 hours to be carried out on Friday and Saturday nights. Because Jacqui Smith was suitably vague, doubtless because all these measures had been thought up incredibly quickly, she gave the impression that teenagers were going to be taken into accident and emergency wards to see victims almost as soon as they had been wheeled into be patched up. The media ran with this, and then also got a father who had lost a child to knife crime in one instance saying that he would have nothing to do with seeing the perpetrators of his son's death face to face. It was apparent this wasn't what the government was suggesting, with them instead giving the possibility that offenders would be taken onto normal wards to see victims of violent crime, and only then if it was agreed with the individuals themselves and the doctors, and that only those who wanted to take part in such restorative face to face schemes with those who had carried knives would be considered for such sessions, but the media screamed U-TURN when Jacqui Smith stood up on Monday and gave a more substantial account of the proposals.

The whole avoidable escapade overshadowed the fact that this was actually a far better and more likely to work scheme than the blunt instrument of the Tory prison for anyone who carries a knife nonsense. No one challenged the Conservatives over the very basics of such a plan: with prisons already overcrowded and close to total capacity, how on earth would they provide the spaces needed for such a draconian policy? The completely useless answer to this is that the Tories plan to sell off some of the Victorian prisons and build new ones (as originally proposed by our friends at Policy Exchange). That this doesn't solve the problem at all, makes you wonder who wants to buy the prisons in the first place, especially in the current climate, and is in the neverland realm of time doesn't seem to matter. How exactly would prison solve anything anyway? We already know that prison for the young either doesn't work, or in fact equips them for an entire life of crime rather than deliver the sharp shock that might be necessary to get them out of carrying a knife, but it's a populist, easy proposal which you can make in opposition and not get called upon for.

The Youth Action Plan generally seems to have understood for the first real time under New Labour that the tough talking, eternal crackdowns and constant new initiatives have not worked. All they have done is just wetted the appetite for more of the same, and given the consistent impression that it's what we're going to get. This change in tact is almost certainly the work of Ed Balls, who's managed to persuade, with the Supreme Leader's help, the more Blair-inclined Smith and Straw of the virtues of a welfare based approach. Out has gone the distraction that was the ABSO, first introduced by Straw but not really used habitually until David Blunkett was home secretary, and in has come the view that targeting of those most at risk of turning to crime, the crucial involvement of parents and the setting up of dedicated local youth offending teams, involving all the local services, from the police to the social services to the schools, all involved in monitoring progress and intervening if necessary.

As identified by Mark Easton, the real heart of the report itself is not in the new measures proposed, but in the research behind it to back up its own suppositions. Hence 5% of youth offenders make up 50% of the actual crime committed, the hard core that do so much to give the vast majority a bad name. Equally, it identifies the factors that so increase the chances of someone being a prolific offender rather than one who might get in trouble once or twice during their childhood. Predictably, being a member of a "delinquent" group vastly increases the chances of offending; what doesn't however is a person's temperament, with both infrequent and prolific (high rate) offenders having broadly the same chance. What does make the difference is maltreatment as a child, if a parent is convicted of a crime, ADHD diagnosis, and low socio-economic status. Nothing ground breaking there either, but it has the useful effect of confirming what you already think that you know. This might be where specific targeting and targets can get over their deservedly bad name: specifically intervening where there is potential trouble ahead can in this instance make all the difference. Understandably, this does raise concerns about the nanny state, interfering in the family structure and the potential demonising of individuals; if however we are to make progress and as a result stop the mindless impression that everything is permanently getting worse and that the next generation are going to bring us all down, it might well be a necessary evil.

There are, as Lee Griffin especially has noted, some of the more harebrained ideas still in the plan. The eviction of families from council houses should they consistently fail to comply with successive orders, parenting ones as well as ASBOs, is a barmy idea which either just puts the problem somewhere or potentially makes the family homeless which makes a bad outcome even more likely. It simply isn't going to happen, and is probably only in there for the benefit of the tabloids and to make the whole deal same harsher than it otherwise is. Lee also objects to "unpaid work in the community" on Friday and Saturday night for child criminals, which I think is actually not so bad an idea. It's clearly just another harsher way of saying community service, and carrying it out on the nights when most teenagers go out will be the sort of punishment that might just get through to the minority that if they decide to act like morons or plague people to death that they'll have their leisure time to do so taken away. The only problem is just who will supervise it and given up their own weekends. Where I do agree with Lee and others is on the completely disproportionate mass curfew orders which the government is encouraging, which stigmatise youth as a whole rather than dealing with those who are a pain. Most the time it's not even that they're actually committing any sort of offence, it's that they're daring to be on a street corner or outside at all. There was a local news report the other week about anti-social behaviour where one guy who didn't want to be identified's chief complaint was that some of the youths had "called him names"; for fuck's sake people, grow some sort of a backbone. Especially illiberal is the Redruth saga, where kids who dare to be outside after 9pm during the school holidays are to be marched back home and their parents potentially given orders to keep them inside and otherwise, when they haven't broken any rule but have transgressed over the threshold of being young and outside at night.

On the whole however, the plan is mostly sensible, level-headed, backed up by evidence and might just well actually confront some of the most intransigent problems in some communities that we face today. It's a break with the tough on crime without being tough on the causes sense that has blighted policy for the last decade. The real tragedy is that it's likely to be thrown out the window by the Conservatives before it's even had a chance to work.

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Express-watch: Distorting a government report? Surely not?

Let's keep this one relatively brief, as I have no intention of giving the Express any more hits for their blatant rabble rousing. You might recall last year that the Express distorted a Sheffield council report which was a plan for averting possible tensions in the city into a "ethnic baby boom crisis" which was due to precipitate "race trouble".

They've done much the same thing today, albeit on the front page, with it screaming that even MPs now "FEAR RIOTS IN BRITAIN".

The report which the Express is referring to is from the Communities and Government Committee, available here, entitled "Community Cohesion and Migration". Not once in the entire report is the word "riots" used. Nowhere in the report do the MPs responsible so much as suggest that they fear riots or even mass disturbances will break out as a result of a failure to integrate. About the closest they get is here, in the conclusion:

The continued under-funding of migration pressures at the local level increases the risk of community tensions escalating, particularly given that the majority of people in the UK already believe that some groups, such as immigrants, get unfair priority access to public services.

The Government needs to take immediate action to address public concerns about migration, and to defuse tensions before they lead to disturbances.

The report incidentally debunks that immigrants get unfair priority access to services, something the Express didn't see fit to mention. The committee then suggests that tensions need to be defused before they lead to "disturbances"; not that they fear riots are going to break out. It for instance states this:

Some degree of tension between individuals is not necessarily problematic and can be seen as an indication of a healthy democracy. The problem is when tensions escalate to a point where they negatively affect community cohesion. Open disturbances between migrant and settled communities are rare. Thankfully, to date no disturbances have occurred on the scale of those which took place in Burnley, Bradford, and Oldham in the summer of 2001 between settled Asian and white communities—though there have been localised disturbances in areas such as the Caia Park estate, Wrexham, and Boston, Lincolnshire.

Although they may not be widespread, we are still concerned about tensions between migrants and settled residents, and how through addressing the underlying causes of these tensions disturbances may be prevented from arising. Our evidence, particularly from our visits, indicated that there are many tensions relating to practical issues and fears over the changing nature of communities, and the pace of that change, as well as concerns about the pressures placed on public services from migration.

Again then, they're concerned about tensions which may lead to disturbances, they don't fear that riots are about to break out. The Express is engaging in blatant scaremongering.

Let's go through the Express report in a little more detail:

IMMIGRATION is the single biggest cause of public concern, an influential group of MPs warned yesterday.

Actually, they didn't. Directly above the report introduction, they quote a MORI poll from January 2007 which found that 1 in 5 were most concerned about migration, above even crime and terrorism. To suggest this might now be slightly out of date would be stating the obvious: the current hot concerns are the economy and knife crime, with immigration having taken a back seat, especially as there is ancedotal evidence that suggests that there are now more Poles returning home than coming to work in Britain.

The MPs’ devastating report concluded that migration has had a significant impact on communities and local services – greater even than crime and terrorism.

Again, it doesn't. That's quoting from the MORI poll and not the conclusions of the report at all. The closest in comes is in these two nuggets:

Public concerns about the effects of migration cannot simply be dismissed as racist or xenophobic. Tensions often arise on real practical issues, such as the proliferation of Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMOs). (Paragraph 16)

The rapid pace of change experienced by many communities has led to increased local public concern about migration and can negatively affect community cohesion. (Paragraph 24)

The Express:

It also revealed that tensions were rising between some settled ethnic communities and new arrivals because of increased competition for “race equality” resources.

The report:

The Community Development Foundation (CDF) told us that it was aware of new patterns of racial prejudice and hostility between settled Asian and Caribbean communities and new ethnic minorities, who MAY (my emphasis) resent the increased competition for ‘race equality’ resources.

There are of course problems, as the report makes clear, in some communities where migration has suddenly exploded where previously there was little to none. The Express though for some strange reason doesn't mention that of two of the three places visited by the committee which have experienced problems with migration and tensions as a result, both Burnley and Barking and Dagenham have a large British National Party presence. The BNP have four seats on the Burnley council, while they have 12 in B&D. The BNP might have moved in on such fears, but they could also have helped them to spread through their campaigning. Still, isn't it nice to see the Expresss doing its own bit for community cohesion?

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Tuesday, July 15, 2008 

A system unchanged by scandals part two.

If the payout to the McCanns by the Express group over repeated, completely untrue allegations, not just about their "involvement" in the abduction of their own child but also about their sex lives was embarrassing, then the truly unprecedented payout to Robert Murat by not just the Express papers but every single one of the daily tabloids with the exception of the Daily Sport, three of the Sunday tabloids and also the Scotsman is an indictment of a journalistic culture that regards the lives of those who are being written about as being of no concern whatsoever.

After the apology and payola for the McCanns, Murat's chances of a settlement were always going to be greatly increased. While the McCanns settled on going after the Express because of its clear for all to see race to the bottom, by far the most egregious offender against them, Murat was smeared by all and sundry, leaping to the most lurid conclusions based on the tiniest glimpses of so-called evidence. The Sun, for example, claimed that his computer had child pornography on it, and that he looked at various other questionable sexual websites; that Murat has since had his computers returned to him and no action has been taken for possession of child pornography suggests that these allegations were completely groundless. Anything that might suggest he was in any way strange or abnormal was also seized upon, such as the apparent fact that he joined in with children when his former employers hired a bouncy castle, or that he had been "in a hurry" when hiring a car. The Sun (again) even aired allegations it knew to be completely false, quoting a taxi driver who said that he had driven Murat, who had Madeleine with him on the night she went missing. That this couldn't have been possible because Madeleine had not disappeared at the time he claimed to have driven them didn't stop the paper from printing such abject garbage.

The award for starting the entire ball rolling though has to go to the Sunday Mirror and their reporter Lori Campbell. As Private Eye noted at the time, the paper already had form, having carried an interview the December before with a man called Tom Stephens, who had known some of the prostitutes murdered in and around Ipswich. The police swooped on this clearly distraught individual and swiftly released him after it became completely clear he had no involvement whatsoever with their deaths, distracting the investigation from the real quarry, Steve Wright. Campbell, with a heightened sense of what's creepy and what's not, decided that Murat's behaviour was akin to that of Ian Huntley's after the disappearance of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, and noblely reported her suspicions to the police: "[G]iven the unimaginable horrors which Madeleine's parents were enduring, it seemed the very least I could do," she said at the time. Murat's real crime it seems was not to have tried to get away from Praia da Luz, as you might expect someone involved in the kidnap of a child from the area to do, but instead to stay and help. Indeed, Murat had been helping the police with translating. For his concern about the missing child, he was treated to the finest which the British press has to offer. Lori Campbell meanwhile was nominated for Reporter of the Year at the British Press Awards.

Roy Greenslade has outlined three reasons for why this story has so revealed the British tabloids' true colours, lest they really needed exposing anyway: firstly, because this was happening in Portugal, hence they thought they could get away with pushing their coverage further towards the line than they could if this had occurred on British shores. This was undoubtedly a factor, but what also influenced their reporting what that they felt that they could simply get away with it in any case. Without the Express group going too far over the McCanns themselves, Murat would have almost certainly failed in bringing any sort of action. In an interview with the BBC he said his own savings had gone; his mother's were also beginning to dwindle, reducing his chances of bringing an expensive action down to almost nil. As it was, if the McCanns could get some sort of settlement, Murat almost certainly could also, and the firm acting for him, Simons Muirhead and Burton already act pro bono on human rights case. Whether they'll be waiving their fee in Murat's case is unclear.

What's more, it was financially viable in any case for the papers responsible to do so. Murat may receive £550,000 damages; split that 11 ways and it adds up to just £50,000 a newspaper, which to the Daily Mail and Sun especially is absolute peanuts. They've had a year of fun, boosted their circulations, brought in far more than that through their race to the bottom, competing with each other as to who could print the more lurid stories, and at the end of it they have to cough up a whole £50,000? To spout a cliche, they literally must be laughing all the way to the bank. Sure, it's embarrassing that they're going to have to apologise, although it's not clear whether the apologies will be front page specials like the Express's ones to the McCanns were, but has it any way affected the Express or Star in the long term? Of course not. They're still printing the same old crap as they were previously, and if a few readers take umbrage, that's a casualty of the game. This time round those disgusted by the tabloid's behaviour can't even switch to a different rag to show their displeasure: all of them were at it (unless they switch to a broadsheet, which is unlikely). A man's life and his subsequent employability doesn't matter one jot to the editors, the journalists responsible or the owners and shareholders; if it did, there would been grovelling apologies and payouts to Colin Stagg, completely ruined by the press campaign against him. He is instead being compensated by the state, when it should have been editors who demand law and order and tough penalties for everyone other than themselves who paid up.

Greenslade's final reason for why this occurred is that the press has been pushing against the contempt laws in this country for years, and that is undisputably the case. He's missed out a fourth, and most important reason though: churnalism. The whole Madeleine McCann disappearance fits entirely into Nick Davies' rules of production, the very first of which is run cheap stories. This might have taken place in Portugal, and so have had higher costs than cheap stories over here, but these were easily recouped by rises in circulation. In fact, journalists didn't have to necessarily even be in Praia da Luz, where nothing much happened anyway. The Express, for instance, spent most of its time copying out of the local Portuguese press, which was just as guilty, if not more so of printing complete garbage. Secondly, once the ball was rolling, it had to keep on going, meaning journalists had to come up with something even if there was nothing new to report. To suggest that complete fabrication in some cases did not take place would surely be a naive statement. This also inspires ninja turtle syndrome, where if one paper is printing it, the others have to regardless of its veracity.

I wrote after the payout to the McCanns that it changed absolutely nothing, and neither will this latest admittance that they went too far. The benefits of doing so are too large while the penalties are so few and so weak; Murat was very lucky, while the newspapers this time round were unfortunate. The libel system, and indeed, the Press Complaints Commission were drawn and set up not to protect the genuinely little people who find themselves in the crossfire through being in the wrong place at the wrong time, they were drawn up to protect the rich and the famous and the newspapers themselves respectively. The PCC is utterly toothless while the libel laws are now rightly being described as a worldwide disgrace. The vested interests and industry standards are so vast however that any change is simply unconsciousable, whether by politicians or those within the organisations themselves. Only when the public themselves actually stop buying the despicable rags will they be forced to change their ways. They show no signs of doing that.

Related:
Enemies of Reason - Murat & libel

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Monday, July 14, 2008 

Lily Allen's war against knife crime!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

The BBC doesn't help itself against accusations of dumbing down when it opens its report on knife crime on the news at 10 by quoting Lily Allen asking everyone to stop stabbing each other on her MurdochSpace blog. In case you were interested in what else La Allen was telling people about in her post, here it is in full:

got bored of the pink , I can't believe i'm posting a blog about my hair , sooooooo " the hills" kinda sorta finished the album , hopefully a single out soon , but i'm definitely gonna post a new song or two this week . I'm starting Bikram yoga tomorrow , YAWN . . That pic of me up there is in my new flat , i've been in for a week and it's been an OK move , I've been sofa surfing and living in hotels for two years , so it's really weird being in this place alone , and don't get too excited burglars , i've got metal roller blinds that go down at night and a panic button by my bed , no panic room though . food for thought . it has been a tough week though , you may have heard my nan passed away , last weekend , we were close and even though she had been very ill for the last few years , it was a big shock , and surreal to find out at Glastonbury . But i went up to see my grandad in Kings lynn (where they lived) and drove him down to Wales where we will bury her on friday. All very sad , but he is doing well and being very brave . I love my family . Anyway the point is my nan would have killed me if I went to her funeral with pink hair , so there is another reason . Anyways in other news , I'm getting a dog from Battersea dogs home , i found her on the weekend , and after a visit from a rehoming officer hopefully, i'll have her by next week . She's called Honey and she's quite fat (insert dogs like their owners joke here) , but very sweet , she's a mongrel . There were so many Stafforshire Bullies there it was so sad . People should really think about getting puppies from breeders or breeding them for that matter , if you saw all those poor dogs without a home with their sad little faces , you wouldn't even think about buying dogs from people who profit . I'm starting Bikram yoga tomorrow , YAWN . . please can everyone stop stabbing each other in the UK , it's really sad , my thoughts are with all the families affected by these heinious crimes . we need to have a knife amnesty , we should put on a big concert to raise awareness and stop the violence , Boris , if your listening , call me man speak soon peeps x xx

Now, if someone took it upon themselves to stab dear old Lily, then that might just be a incident of knife crime we could all unite around the positive benefits of.

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Americans not getting irony shocker.

The cliché is official then - Americans really don't understand irony, or at least, Barack Obama's campaign team doesn't. You can perhaps imagine why their campaign might not like the New Yorker's front cover because some of those who don't get the joke (or who do, but will cling to it as a propaganda tool) might use it against them, but to call it "tasteless and offensive" seems to show that the ones who don't get it are also those whom it was meant to appeal to.

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George has written a sketch!

There's very little that's more attractive than a passing pop-psychological explanation for exactly why we are what we are and how to influence individuals into working towards the greater good. The latest is Richard Thaler's book Nudge, which has wonderfully bewitched the Tories: firstly because it doesn't involve throwing money around and secondly because it's American in origin.

Here then is the latest wheeze from little Georgie Osborne on how to encourage households to be more energy efficient, via the Grauniad, following their article on Saturday on Nudge:

First, social norms can be used to promote energy efficiency. A Conservative government will require household energy bills to contain information enabling families to compare their energy consumption with that of similar homes. As we have seen from pilots in America, this information can have a massive impact on energy consumption, as households who are using more than the average reduce their energy use to come into line with the norm. And as long as households that are using less than the average are given some sort of positive recognition - for example a special mark on their energy bill - they don't increase their energy use to fit in with the average. Without the use of any intrusive tax or regulatory instruments, overall energy consumption falls.

This rests on a few underlying assumptions: firstly, that householders actually care about being energy efficient. This may be true of trendy middle class families that want to boast about how low their carbon assprint is, and will want to keep up with the other Joneses in battling each other to bring it down, but will it of others who couldn't care less what their neighbours do and find it rather an invasion of privacy that their levels are broadcasted to the whole surrounding estate? Secondly, it accepts as a given that householders will compete to bring it down because of the overwhelming embarrassment of committing a crime against the environment. Thirdly, has there ever been a more worthless form of "positive recognition" than a "special mark" on a bill? To suggest this might reduce householders to infants who are promised a reward if they behave is putting it mildly. It also reminds me of a scheme that ran for the first couple of years of secondary school, where you received "commendations" from teachers for especially good pieces of work, and received a certificate when you reached a certain number. The flaw in this scheme was obvious - it rewarded the naturally bright and the hard working while ignoring those that did work hard but who didn't achieve the same level of quality in their work. Add in how those who rejected the "norm" of working hard and sneered at the "swots" laughed at the scheme and it was little surprise when it collapsed in on itself.

All of this seems to ignore the obvious reason to become more energy efficent - not to compete with the neighbours in the atypical Daily Mail style, but to bring the bills down. Moreover, the whole scheme smacks of something that I'd hoped that we'd moved on from: the incredibly flawed idea that "naming and shaming", because that's what this is, albeit in a much more subtle form, encourages people to moderate their behaviour. It doesn't; it instead makes them more defiant and in the eyes of some makes those who are worth looking up to. Crime or becoming more energy efficient, I'd wager things would be little different.

It's understandable why this is attractive to the Conservatives - not content with wanting to introduce markets to every public service around, they now think it's the perfect way to get neighbourhoods to work together. It also rests however on what they have in the past derided as paternalism, which is this undoubtedly also is. Osborne ends his weak article with:

Our work with the world's leading behavioural economists and social psychologists is yet more proof that the Conservative party is now the party of ideas in British politics. Gordon Brown needs to get on board with this new agenda, and fast. If he doesn't, he shouldn't be surprised if he gets nudged out of office sooner rather than later.

Or perhaps Brown will instead not be moved by passing crazes which change with the wind, which the Conservatives seem to be clutching at to pretend they have new ideas rather all the same old ones. It's hard not to picture the chinless George Osborne as Eric Idle and Brown as Terry Jones, with Osborne ending his tirade of innuendo by finally asking Brown what "it" is like.

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On the uselessness of lists.

In general drawing up huge lists is a thankless, pointless task which tends to prove precisely nothing. That most of those who do are self-obsessed narcissists convinced of their own righteousness (and I include myself here) doesn't help. Therefore including Andrew Neil, Tessa Jowell and three Grauniad no-names in compiling their "Media 100" list is hardly likely to inspire confidence. It's no surprise therefore when Carolyn McCall (Groan Media Group CEO) and Alan Rusbridger are both in the top 40.

You know they're just talking bollocks though when this is how they describe Rebekah Wade, who is at no.30, whereas Paul Dacre who still controls a paper with a lower circulation, it's worth remembering, is at no.4:

"Politically I think it had almost zero influence at the last election, and will have even less at the next one," said one panellist. "It has ceased to be the player it was at the heart of British media and politics."

To call this total nonsense would be perhaps putting it too lightly. If you honestly think that a newspaper with a circulation of 3 million, read by probably closer to 8 million has no influence then you're living in a fantasy world. A rather nice fantasy world, it has to be said, but still one that doesn't exist in reality.

You can in fact argue the opposite. While the Daily Mail undoubtedly punches above its weight, and almost everyone agrees that in the not too distant future it will usurp the Scum as the biggest selling daily, it was the unholy alliance of the Murdoch press with Blair that helped ensure that he stayed with us for as long as he did. Although it took a very long time, the Grauniad finally said it was time for Blair to go in around 2005. That left the only papers that really supported him the Times and the Sun. The Mirror doesn't count - although it's unlikely it will ever abandon Labour, it has long since lost any major influence and it always favoured Brown over Blair. No, what helped keep Blair from going under after the Iraq war was the unstinting support of the Sun - its fanatical hatred of the BBC and diabolically slanted coverage of the Hutton inquiry distorted the process out of recognition with the reporting elsewhere. While sympathetic towards Michael Howard, it never offered anything resembling support towards the Conservatives, and with most of the public also unconvinced by Howard, Labour returned in 2005, despite the Blair millstone around the party's neck, even if the Tories did win the popular vote in England.

This pact was always because of the overwhelming Wapping influence on Blair - constant deference towards the Sun's leader line, instant recognition of the latest demands it made, and impeccable rushing to accomodate and help with the next day's headlines. The reason why the Sun's influence has waned now Blair has gone is because Brown has always been far closer to Dacre and the Mail then Wade and the Sun. This hasn't altered the editorial line much, as it is still overly supportive of Brown, showing that Murdoch is still yet to be convinced by Cameron, no matter how similar to Blair he is. This though disproves the idea that somehow the Sun will even be less influential come the next election: already we've seen Cameron making his play on knife crime in the pages of the Sun, something they've unsurprisingly championed. The battle will shortly be joined, and the choice will be made. Will it be as much as a defining moment as the Sun's change to support Labour in 97? No, because the media has overwhelming changed since then. To pretend it won't have any influence is the view of someone who wishes it didn't.

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Saturday, July 12, 2008 

Schillings after Murray again and weekend round-up.

The freedom of speech denying shysters at Schillings are once again threatening Craig Murray, this time before he's even published anything. Unity has the letter from the scumbags, reproduced here in full:

PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL
Mainstream Publishing Company (Edinburgh) Limited
7 Albany Street
Edinburgh
Scotland
EH13UG

BY POST AND FAX: XXXX XXX XXXX
OurRef: SMS/JXR/ww/A131/3
ON THE RECORD
NOT FOR PUBLICATION
08 July 2008

Dear Sirs

The Road to Samarkand - Craig Murray

We represent Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Spicer OBE, C.E.O. of Aegis Defence Services Limited (”Aegis”).

We are instructed to write to you with regard to ‘THE ROAD TO SAMARKAND- INTRIGUE, CORRUPTION AND DIRTY DIPLOMACY’ (”the Book”) written by Craig Murray and due to be published in September 2008 by you (http://www.rbooks.co.uk/search results.aspx) to be sold in England and Wales by Random House Sales Department.

We have reason to believe that the Book may contain serious, untrue and damaging defamatory allegations about our client.

Please confirm by return whether the Book is due to be published in England and Wales in September 2008 and if so, the exact date. Please also confirm whether the Book is due to be published in any other jurisdiction, setting out each jurisdiction, together with the publication date and publisher concerned in each case.

Importantly, we require you to confirm by return whether or not the Book contains any reference to our client, and if so, we require you to set out in full each and every reference to our client in its entirety to give our client the opportunity to take legal advice and to respond to any allegations in good time prior to publication.

Any widespread publication of the Book containing defamatory allegations concerning our client would be deeply damaging to our client’s personal and professional reputations and would cause him profound distress and anxiety. We remind you that you would be responsible for that damage and any subsequent republication of the allegations. We also put you on notice that you will be liable for any special damage or loss suffered by our client as a result of the Book and we reserve all our client’s rights in this regard.

We note from your website http://www.mainstreampublishing.com/news_current.html that Mr Murray is due to speak about the Book at a ‘Mainstream author event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival’ entitled ‘Lived Lives’ on 12th August 2008 at 4.30pm in the RBS Main Theatre, Edinburgh. We hereby put both you and Mr Murray on notice that all our client’s rights are reserved in relation to any defamatory comments or publications made by you or Mr Murray in relation to that event.

Please immediately take into your possession all drafts of the Book pre-publication, all notes, emails, correspondence, memos, images and other documents relevant to the publication of this Book, and preserve them safely pending the outcome of this dispute. They will need to be disclosed in due course if litigation has to be commenced. Also, you will need to disclose the financial arrangements for the sale and licence of the Book to other publications.

In the circumstances, we require that you confirm immediately that you agree to undertake on behalf of Mainstream Publishing Company (Edinburgh) Limited not to publish any libels regarding our client in any editions of the Book or at all.

We require the above undertaking by 4pm on Friday 11h July 2008, failing which we will have no option but to advise our client with regard to making applications to the High Court for an injunction to restrain publication and/or for pre-action disclosure. You are on notice that we will seek to recover the costs of any necessary applications from you.

We await your response by return. In the meantime all our client’s rights are reserved, including the right to issue proceedings against you without further notice.
Yours faithfully

SCHILLINGS
cc. Craig Murray Esq.


As Murray himself says:

Schillings are a firm of libel lawyers dedicated to prevent the truth from being known about some deeply unlovely people. They managed temporarily to close down this blog (and several others) to keep information quiet about the criminal record of Alisher Usmanov. Now they are attempting to block the publication of my new book in the interests of mercenary commander Tim Spicer, one of those who has made a fortune from the Iraq War. It is sad but perhaps predictable that private profits from the illegal Iraq war, in which hundreds of thousands of innocent people have died, are providing the funding to try to silence my book.

Libel law in the UK is a remarkable thing - Schillings can go for an injunction when I haven't published anything about Spicer yet and they haven't seen what I intend to publish. People might conclude that Spicer has something to hide. You will see that they also are attempting to censor not only the book, but what I say at the Edinburgh Book Festival on 12 August. I can assure you that they will find it impossible to affect what I say about Spicer at that event.


Craig provides more information about Spicer and the mercenary outfit, sorry, I mean private security group, Aegis, that he is CEO of here, here and here. Aegis have used their legal talons before to shut down the website of a disaffected former contractor who had embarrassed the firm by hosting "trophy videos" of Aegis mercenaries, sorry, employees, shooting at Iraqi vehicles for no apparent reason. Having provided defence for a ghastly oligarch with a criminal record and with other serious allegations made against him, Schillings are now providing cover for those who have profited so handsomely from the Iraq war, lest anyone say anything unhelpful about their brilliant role in bringing democracy to that benighted country. It's difficult to give lawyers a worse name, but Schillings seem to be trying to up the ante considerably.

Elsewhere Harry's Place are also facing legal action from other unpleasant individuals, but then, who cares about Harry's Place?

Other things worth reading/perusing today:

Anthony Barnett: a new poll shows less than 10% of Labour members support 42 days

Erwin James interviews four young men in a YOI, and their stories are hardly typical of the evil yobs that the tabloids like to imagine are those who perpetuate knife crime

The always good value Marina Hyde on Abu Qatada

Three quite wonderful articles/posts by Rachel North

Oh, and today is this blog's third birthday, like you care. It feels more like twenty.

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Friday, July 11, 2008 

David Davis and the end of Labour.

The coverage of the end of the Haltemprice and Howden by-election has been as dismal not just as the weather but also the coverage with which it began. We were told by those comforting journalists inside the Westminster bubble that this was a brave but barmy decision by a vain loner that was doomed to failure. It's ended with it being described as a brave but barmy decision by a vain loner that has failed. No doubt that makes those that began the coverage in such a way feel that they were right all along; that the public doesn't give two figs for civil liberties, let alone the human rights of "terrorist suspects", and that Davis was only one step removed from the actual loonies that fought the by-election alongside him.

The number of those that turned out in H&H, despite the weather, despite some students being away, and despite the lure of the Yorkshire show says otherwise. Turnout was at 35%, which although hardly great is not bad for a by-election, and especially one fought effectively on a single issue, as this one was. It's worth remembering that at the last election H&H was one of the Liberal Democrats' top targets, with Davis at the top of their so-called decapitation strategy. He won with a majority of 5,000, so this wasn't a safe seat until the Lib Dems stood down and cowardly Labour refused to put up a candidate. That Davis tripled his majority shows how despite all the media blathering about complaining individuals in the constituency, there was still a groundswell of enthusiasm and support for his stand, and with the Greens taking second place, on a ticket of reducing the time suspects could be held down to a single week, it showed how the debate was by no means dead. Also worth pointing out is that even on the 35% turnout, Davis received a higher percentage of votes from the constituent electorate than Labour managed in 2005, who received just 22% of the popular vote.

It goes without saying that the big question still remains: has Davis's stand changed anything? The answer to that is both yes and no. Yes because more than any other recent politician or any recent political issue, he's directly reached out to the public themselves and tried to garner their opinions and views above those situated around Westminster. He's directly enthused many that were becoming cynical about the intrinsically selfish nature of politics: giving up your job as shadow home secretary, when in a couple of years' time you're almost certain to become the actual home secretary can be described as both principled and foolhardy as it has, but it also signalled a politician not on the make or above involving the actual people who elected him in the first place. It also has inspired a debate on 42 days, although not as wide a one as some of us initially hoped, but also on civil liberties as a whole. It was clear that Davis for a time had both Labour and the "popular" sections of the media running scared: first ensuring Brown responded to Davis's charges with a speech which failed to even mention him, and secondly humiliating the Sun without him having to even mention the name Kelvin MacKenzie. One day he was "Crazy Davis", then the next week he was praised by none other than the Sun's deputy editor, which is a reverse ferret that you can't help but applaud.

As for whether Davis has seriously challenged the prospects of 42 days getting onto the statute books, the verdict is much less clear cut. The Lords were always going to reject it, but as Martin Kettle pointed out this morning, Manningham-Buller has surely killed all chances of it passing this year now. Her position is almost undoubtedly shared by MI5 at large, and they seem to be furious, not at Davis or the Conservatives for blocking the legislation, but at Labour and Brown for playing politics with an issue they believe should be above such posturing. Davis alone though was never going to end the bill simply by resigning, but by doing so he surely has helped those who were previously sitting on the fence with deciding whether they should speak out or not.

What's more, he has also certainly succeeded, whether he rejoins the shadow cabinet or not, with formulating Tory policy if they do win the next election. No way can they now attempt to introduce an extension themselves, which despite the current position was always a possibility when you have the likes of George Osborne and Michael Gove who were suspicious of Davis and a leader who is trying his best to ape Blair with his friendly attitude towards the Murdoch press.

The biggest impact however will be strangely, but completely acceptably on Labour itself. It's not just been the dealing and bribing which won the vote in the first place, promising billions to the DUP and making clear that abortion won't be introduced in Northern Ireland, it's been their attitude towards Davis and those who oppose 42 days from the beginning. The loathsome Tony McNulty was at it again today, accusing Davis of vanity and then comparing him to Homer Simpson. It doesn't seem to occur to them that this is their last gasp, that it'll be them in a couple of years who'll be the ones going "Doh!" as the results pour in. In any event, being compared to Homer seems preferable to comparing yourself to Heathcliffe.

There have been so many issues which could have completely ostracised the left from Labour, whether it be their obsession with the private finance initiative, the desire to thrust business into education as much as they possibly can, the casual stealth breaking up of the health service and eventual selling off to the highest bidder, the abominable and murderous foreign policy post 9/11 and the kowtowing to the right-wing press, but after all those things, it's been not 90 days but 42 days that has finally caused the schism. We expected that from Blair in his last mad days, but we didn't from Gordon Brown. Back in 2005, I suspect many like myself voted Labour, not because we believed in the party or in those leading it, but because we had a decent local MP that had either voted against the war or had prevaricated before abstaining, as mine did, and had also opposed the worst anti-terror measures prior to 7/7. Compared to Michael Howard, Blair still seemed preferable on those grounds. That MP has now gone, as have many others, and repeating the vote this time would be a waste, not that we're going to make that mistake anyway.

John Kampfner writes in the Telegraph that some Labour MPs are now fearing a complete meltdown whenever the next election is called, and it's hard not to see that coming to pass, at least on a similar scale to the landslide in 97 against the Tories. It's not just the MPs themselves that are demoralised, it's those that put Labour there in the first place too. It may have taken 11 years, countless betrayals and policy blunders, and it's unfair on Gordon Brown, but I think it's safe to say that most have had enough. Most of all what's put me off has been the behaviour not of those who supported 42 days, but those who were actually opposed but are so bitterly partisan and patronising to the Tories for whichever reason that they've spent the entire Davis campaign wind-bagging and mocking despite sharing the exact same opinion as him. Davis was right: this was the time to say enough was enough. Enough is enough. Labour's time is up.

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Jon Gaunt in police are politically correct shocker.

Jon Gaunt is horrified at our politically correct police:

I told him the little scrotes on the street would just laugh at him unless he could back it up with force.

He got upset, not at my allegation but at my use of the word “scrotes”.

He said it was inappropriate language to use against young people.

This political correctness would have made even Lambeth council blush with anger and demonstrates everything that is wrong with our police service.


Gaunty is of course completely right. When you can't call teenagers that are outside after 9pm at night during the school holidays "scrotes", it won't be too long before you won't be able to describe Gaunt as a fat, bumptious, oleaginous, simple twat.

And we can't have that, can we?

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Thursday, July 10, 2008 

Max Mosley, the News of the World, and the fight between press freedom and personal privacy.

There are some cases or matches where it would be wonderful if both sides could lose. Chelsea versus Manchester United in the Champions League instantly springs to mind; Polly Toynbee vs Richard Littlejohn on Question Time; Iran against Israel; BBC3 against the equivalent crap on Channel 4.

So it almost is with Max Mosley against the News of the World. On the one hand we have a man who is hand-in-glove with Bernie Ecclestone, who makes up for what he lacks in height with vindictiveness and avarice; on the other we have the News of the Screws, undoubtedly one of the worst "newspapers" the world has ever seen, which makes its money out of scandal, sex, lies and populist right-wing politics of the most venal kind. Add into this my own little "incident" with the Screws' finest, Mazher Mahmood, and we have the situation so succinctly summed up by Alien vs Predator: whoever wins, we lose.

As much as the battle between Mosley and the Screws is over the issue of privacy, and how far the press can go in seeking out scandal, along with what truly defines the public interest, it's also a wonderful insight into how one of the most ruthless tabloids of them all operates. The anecdote of how the woman, known only as Woman E, who filmed the orgy and who today withdrew from giving evidence for the Screws, was first offered £25,000 but in the end was only paid £12,000 will be familiar for those with a similar penchant for Private Eye, who recall the story of Iraq veteran Justin Smith, who was even given a contract for £15,000 for an interview before the Screws then decided it was worth only £1,000, £1,500 tops. Colin Myler, the News of the Screws editor, also admitted in the court that he didn't know that the hack responsible for the eventual story, Neville Thurlbeck, had planned on fitting Woman E out with a camera, which seems like something that other reporters might have discussed with their editors first. Nor did they set out with the intention of capturing a "Nazi themed" orgy, which is now their defence for exposing Mosley; rather they thought there was going to just film an S&M orgy. Myler also admitted that he himself had been filmed having sex, so he knew what Mosley probably felt like, but he didn't elaborate.

Equally hilarious was Thurlbeck's own suggestion that the News of the Screws needed to film the orgy because of the "very, very high" standard of proof required by the paper. This is the same newspaper which has recently settled cases against it brought by Cherie Blair and the loathsome Katie Price and Peter Andre over allegations made by their former nanny. It's also the self-same newspaper which has been home for years to the fantasies of Mazher Mahmood, who brought the paper such exclusives as the plot to kidnap Victoria Beckham, which turned out to be almost entirely concocted and based around entrapment, and the group of men accused of attempting to purchase the non-existent "red mercury", whose trial ended with all of them being found not guilty.

Also intriguing is just where the security services might fit into all this. It was revealed some time back that Woman E's husband worked for MI5, and subsequently resigned because of his wife's activities; now it emerges that it was in fact he that first went to the newspaper with details of Mosley's S&M habit. It might simply be a coincidence, but it was enough to get Mosley to investigative whether there was any "conspiracy" against him, and this latest tidbit to emerge might further those inquiries.

The News of the World's defence though is on three counts, each of them generally spurious: that there were Nazi elements at play; that Mosley's high-profile job meant he had a responsibility to behave himself and exposing him was in the public interest; and that there was an element of criminality, because in one scene Mosley bled after being spanked, and this act of violence was against the law. The Screws' claims about the first are looking threadbare on account of all four of the other women involved in the "sick orgy" testifying that there was no Nazi element, and although they were moments when the mentioning of the word "Ayran" suggested that this could have been possible, it's mostly come across as far from being cut and dry that that was what they were acting out. On the second, how many people can honestly say they knew of Mosley prior to the Screws outing him? Perhaps you might have heard his name, but if you have little interest in either the fascism which his father represented or in Formula 1, which is far more associated with Ecclestone than Mosley, then it seems doubtful. The last count also ought to be ignored, as Mosley was clearly consenting and had organised the orgy in the first place. For there to be a crime, there has to be a complaint made, and there hasn't. This does raise the spectre of the "Spanner case", as Dave Osler alludes to, but you'd hope that we've moved on the years since then. Even if we haven't, the S&M in the video is nowhere near on the scale of the Spanner case anyway.

Mosley's whole argument is built around the point that the orgy did not have a Nazi theme; but even if it did, who cares what a man and five consenting adults, even if they are being paid, decide to do in the privacy of their own S&M dungeon? While the connotations for Mosley are serious because of the history of his family, if a group of adults who enjoy what they're doing want to dress up in uniforms and torture each other ala Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS, it's of no business of anyone else's. The state, let alone tabloid newspapers, have no right whatsoever to pry into the bedroom of private individuals unless a complaint is made by one of the participants later. This is where the public interest and when the wider public have a right to know becomes difficult; in my view, only when the individual involved is both of high standing, and either because of his activities potentially not doing his job properly, or being outrageously hypocritical, does there become a public interest case for his sexual activities to be exposed.

The Blunkett case is both the most recent and probably one of the most controversial examples of where this potentially both falls and lies. It can be argued that when Blunkett was first exposed as having an affair with Kimberley Quinn, it was neither affecting his job nor did it expose him as being outrageously hypocritical. He made a few remarks and comments about families, as Home Secretaries are wont to do, but he hadn't professed to being either a family man or putting the family at the centre of his policies. At the time, both the Independent and Guardian didn't mention the exposure. However, when it later emerged that he was challenging Quinn over the paternity of her second child, and as later made clear by himself, suffering from depression as a result of the case, then it did enter the public interest, as it also would have done once it became clear he had been involved with the speeding up of Quinn's nanny's visa.

This understandably puts the press in a difficult position. Politicians generally, regardless of who are they are, are considered fair game, and none to my knowledge has challenged the allegations in a similar way to Mosley currently is. Also to be considered is just where the line between the rich and the famous and their relationship with the media ends; some undoubtedly forward details of their affairs to the press both to make money and to increase their profile, while stories of sex in the News of the Screws involving "ordinary" people are also ten a penny. Worth recalling is the case of Garry Flitcroft, a footballer who won a temporary injunction against the Sunday People, which planned to expose his extra marital affairs. There was clearly no public interest justification by the People, as this hardly added up to a "serious misdemanour", and most of those on first hearing the injunction presumed that it was a household name. When it eventually came out that it wasn't, most were thoroughly nonplussed and wondered what all the fuss had been about. Much the same was when Ulrika Johnsson made her allegations about being raped public; when Matthew Wright inadvertently blurted out that it was John Leslie most thought she was talking about, hardly anyone knew who he was.

The complaint, especially from the tabloid media, is that what we might end up with is a judicially decided, through the precedents set by various rulings, privacy law. The ostensible objection to this is that parliament is the only place where such a law should be debated and passed, but this ignores the fact that the power of the press, especially the Daily Mail and News Corporation, behind the Sun/NotW/Times etc is such that no such law would ever get past even the suggestion stage. We saw what happened recently over the incredibly mild proposals put forward by the Information Commissioner for journalists caught using private detectives to spy on individuals to face the potential of being jailed; the Mail roared, the Sun howled and the Telegraph bleated, all making the "investigative journalism" defence, and the government backed down.

The paradox is that while the media is all powerful, so are the ridiculous libel laws, which are currently enabling foreign individuals accused of terrorist financing to pulp books which make such allegations against them, even if they've never technically been sold here. The libel laws are however open only to the rich, who can afford the lawyer fees, as legal aid isn't provided in libel cases. The obvious solution would be to change the stifling libel laws, while also setting up a privacy law, but as argued above, this simply isn't going to happen. We're caught potentially in the worst of all worlds: with a privacy law which protects the rich and the powerful but not the likes of those who had their lives ruined by Mazher Mahmood, and with libel laws which protect the rich and the powerful but not those who find themselves viciously attacked for some alleged misdemanour by the tabloids. The thing is that if this happens, the tabloids will have no one to blame but themselves. For years they've thought nothing of stalking celebrities, considered fair game, regardless of the potential consequences, taking photographs of them on the beach, asking dubious questions about their health or whether they're pregnant, with them able to pay the occasional libel damage due to their wealth. At the other end of the scale they accuse the most vulnerable in society like Colin Stagg of being murderers, perform hatchet jobs on anyone who crosses them as a public service, and think nothing of pontificating on crime and demanding tough sentences for everything under the sun, all while breaking the law themselves by spying on royals or just anyone they think they can get an eventual story about. If Sir Smacks Mosley brings to end such an era, who except the pitiful editors and hacks themselves will complain?

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A form of justice at last for Baha Mousa.

These are not just so-called injuries, these are the Sun's so-called injuries.

It's wonderful news that the family of Baha Mousa and 9 other innocent Iraqis who were viciously beaten and tortured by British soldiers are to be paid almost £3m in compensation.

More interesting though is how this news is going to be communicated to readers and others by certain media organisations that did their best to either ignore our personal Abu Ghraib shame or to play it down. As you might have known, the biggest, most unquestioning supporter of "Our Boys" was at the forefront of it. After all but one of the soldiers court martialled was cleared, a result of what the judge described as a complete closing of ranks, with the words "I don't remember" being used over 600 times by the various witnesses according to one of the lawyers involved, the Sun published this following leader comment:

COMMON sense prevailed when two British soldiers were cleared of abusing Iraqi prisoners.

Major Michael Peebles and Warrant Officer Mark Davies served with courage and bravery in the most difficult conditions.


This ludicrous show trial — which has already seen four other soldiers cleared on the judge’s orders — has been a waste of time and money.


These men risked their lives in Iraq but were repaid by being hung out to dry.


Every aspect of investigating so-called crimes within the military needs to be re-examined. Our servicemen and women deserve nothing less.

These "so-called crimes" have now been recognised by the Ministry of the Defence, but only after being forced into holding an independent inquiry by lawyers acting for the Iraqi men. The MoD, in the form of Colonel David Black, was also dismissive after the court-martial collapsed in such ignominy:

[Our Boys needed to be able to work] “without looking over their shoulders inhibited by the fear of such actions by over-zealous and remote officialdom”.

Such over-zealous and remote officialdom has now apologised "for the appalling treatment that you suffered at the hands of the British army. The appalling behaviour of British soldiers made us feel disgusted." Not so those within the army and the media however that did everything they possibly could to pretend that that such appalling treatment had either never taken place or had been the work of one lone soldier who bravely owned up to his part in beating Baha Mousa and two of the other men detained with him. Donald Payne's punishment for his role amounted to a year in prison, a discharge from the army, and the loss of his pension. No one else is now likely to charged or prosecuted in connection with the incident.

Comparisons will doubtless be drawn with the compensation payouts to those who have lost limbs and suffered other injuries while in service in both Iraq and Afghanistan, often derisory settlements which are an insult to their commitment and sacrifice, but they do know what the consequences of their decisions are when they join up. Baha Mousa and the other men were simply in the wrong place in the wrong time, and mistreated by soldiers that had not been trained properly and whom were under the impression that such techniques had been authorised. Whether they were or not is still open to question, but the payments to the men will help to close the chapter on what went wrong. The independent inquiry, which will hopefully get to the very bottom of what did, although putting too much faith in it would be unwise, should provide the lesson on how this is to be avoided in the future. Perhaps the real blame should however lie with the politicians that signed us up to the illegal, murderous folly of the war in the first place.

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The best press in the world.

EXCLUSIVE TO THE SUN AND DAILY MAIL

MAN WEARING BIRD NEST GOES SHOPPING SENSATION

EVIL TERRORIST BUYS KITCHEN ROLL, DIET COKE, HAS THE NERVE TO USE FACIAL MUSCLES

MORE AMAZING PICS AND LOADSA WORDS PAGE 94
EDITORIAL PAGE 95: WHY CAN'T WE STRING MAN UP BY HIS BEARD?


(apologies to Private Eye)

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Wednesday, July 09, 2008 

'Dr. Death' Believed to Be Living in Chile...

....and there I was thinking he was living here, writing books about himself.

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If we churn, churn, churn, churn, churn, churn, churn....

We haven't looked at any examples of transparent churnalism in a while, and on a day in which there is one which is deadly serious and another that is not so, it seems as good as any:

THESE chilling pictures of teenagers brandishing guns and knives were found in just ONE DAY on the Bebo website.

The users’ homepages glamorise gang violence — despite 19 young people dying in vicious attacks in London this year.


Incredible as it may seem, teenagers tend to do a lot of stupid things, and posing with weapons in a feeble attempt to look tough or hard is not exactly a new development. The only difference is that now with the rise of the social networking, on any slow news day the put-upon hacks on both local and national papers can easily put together a story purely through browsing Facebook/MySpace/Bebo and exposing some new scandal of the how the young live so dangerously.

There are just a few problems with this story. First, the Sun provides absolutely no evidence whatsoever that they even were on Bebo to begin with: there's no screen grabs of the pages with the profiles showing the images, so we have to completely take the Sun's word for it that they were on the site. You also can't now go and attempt to find whether they were or not because Bebo has now "frozen the profiles", again, something you have to take the Sun's word for, although the only profile name they give in the article, "Craks Capone" did exist, and is now "unavailable" (At least one of his "friends", again a rather loose term on social networking sites, lives in Norwood/Heath). Then there's the fact that nowhere does the Sun mention whether the images they've exposed are of individuals actually living in this country; it's not as if Bebo isn't a global site, even if it is especially popular with school age children in this country.

With all that in mind, we then have the relatively slight problem of this not exactly being just an issue on Bebo. Amazing as it may seem, there are doubtless pictures of youths with weapons on Facebook, and shock, horror, MySpace. You know, the social networking website that just happens to be owned by the Sun's own parent company, and which mysteriously never receives any bad press while Bebo and Facebook have in the past been criticised on a large number of occasions in the Sun. Perhaps there's also a clue to why the Sun's chosen Bebo to embarrass on the front page of Bebo itself, which currently has as one of the featured profiles the "STOP Knife Crime" campaign group. Meanwhile, over on MySpace, second in the blog charts is this thoughtful piece: Are All Women Whores Till Proven Otherwise???

Far be it from me to suggest how Sun hacks do their job, as that's obviously what Red Rupert and Rebekah Wade are paid for, but it would have been just ever so slightly fairer if they'd investigated all three of the major social networking sites, took screen grabs of the profiles with individuals showing off their weapons, also proving that they happen to live in the UK, and then presented the shocking evidence to the salivating public, i.e., you and I. This would however have taken far more time than simply banging out 250 words accompanied by photographs you have to take on trust are from Bebo and feature UK youngsters, precious time that may simply have not been available to Vikki Thomas. This is of course also the tabloid media we're talking about, where too much effort, rather than attempting to make the best of the medium available to you, is simply trying too hard.

Trying too hard is not something that afflicts the PR industry in attempting to get the most daft references to their company into the press. Previously we had the ridiculous story of the teenager that wanted a taxi but ended up with a cabinet because of her mockney patois, which just so happened to also advertise the company that provided the cab, innit, that the teenager didn't want. Today there's the equally preposterous story of a woman who put her bra on "while in a hurry" who just didn't happen to notice there was a baby bat nesting in it until five hours later. Now, never having needed to wear a such a constraining item of clothing I wouldn't personally know, but somehow the idea of not realising there's a living creature in an item of clothing next to your skin, and such a sensitive area of epidermis to boot, for five hours, doesn't wash. Luckily, not only is the woman in question attractive and willing to pose in just her bra, she's also more than willing to make clear that all this occurred while she was working at the
Holiday Inn near Norwich International Airport.

The Churners were on the spot, tipped off by none other than 5cc, but the story has spread far further than even the tabloids now, also infecting the Independent, Torygraph and the BBC, as well as numerous other news sites worldwide, although it appears to have started via the Eastern Daily Press. You have to credit whoever thought the story up, as it's been one of the most viewed reports throughout the day. 5cc speculates it might have something to do with the new Batman movie also, but that part of the original article is one of the few parts of it that hasn't been copied and pasted into all the subsequent ones, so it seems far more likely this was an attempt to get trade over to see the famous Abbie Hawkins at the
Holiday Inn near Norwich International Airport. The fact that this is lazy journalism of the lowest kind, with apparently no one actually bothering to check whether this isn't a pathetic attempt by Holiday Inn to bypass advertising costs doesn't seem to matter when it's a story apparently too good to be true and gives the excuse of being able to show a woman in the flower of youth with large breasts either in your newspaper or on your website. Still, at least it shows more creativity than yet another "worst lyric" poll, which is where this post's title comes from.

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Tuesday, July 08, 2008 

Dave's raves pt. 94.

The farce is strong in this one.

Do you ever get a sudden feeling that you've been dropped, without any warning whatsoever, into a parallel universe? Everything seems exactly the same, but scratch the surface of your existence slightly, and you discover to your horror that everything's backwards. The sort of world where the Labour party still stands for the working man, where Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps is funny, and where Rupert Murdoch is known as Red Rupert (credit: PB).

I got that dread feeling when reading David Cameron's latest rave about the Broken Society™. In general terms, it's actually a rather good political speech; unrelentingly Conservative, naturally, but it makes sense, which is more than you could ever say for the majority of Blair's attempts. It's this section on personal responsibility, which has always been the stock in trade Tory excuse for doing naff all, which seems so completely bizarre:

"We as a society have been far too sensitive. In order to avoid injury to people's feelings, in order to avoid appearing judgemental, we have failed to say what needs to be said. We have seen a decades-long erosion of responsibility, of social virtue, of self-discipline, respect for others, deferring gratification instead of instant gratification.

To which you can only respond, has Cameron never picked up almost any newspaper, ever looked at an internet message board, or indeed read any blog? Far from becoming too sensitive, we are as a society demand that there must be someone to blame when something goes wrong; if someone puts a step out of line, we sure as hell let them know about it; and most of all, we make judgements every minute of the day based on the most shallow information we have to hand, informed by our own personal prejudices.

As Chris argues in two posts, at its root Cameron's argument comes down to class. Cameron is not talking of his own roots when he emphasises that we've failed to say what's wrong and what's right, otherwise we'd have to bring back up that embarrassing fact that Cameron and two of his closest political allies were members of the Bullingdon club. Classic recent examples of this, and how the middle classes get defended while the "lower" classes and different races get it in the neck could not be more emphasised than the treatment meted out firstly to Fiona MacKeown, a traveller who left her daughter with two adults while on holiday who was tragically murdered, whom was pilloried in the Daily Mail by Allison Pearson, whom also just happened to be the staunchest defenders of the McCanns, giving the game away by saying how "these sort of things don't usually happen to us", and then by the Shannon Matthews case, who received far less of the coverage than that given to the McCanns, almost undoubtedly because of casual snobbery. When it became apparent that her disappearance could have been a scam, the entire neighbourhood in which she lived was likened to Beirut, although not presumably the modern-day Beirut but the civil-war fused city of the 80s, and her family itself was described as a real life reflection of the one in Shameless.

The reality is that we find ourselves assaulted daily by the moral warriors that have set themselves up as arbiters of what is right and wrong while they themselves refuse to open up their own lives to similar scrutiny, probably because most of them have details which they want to keep well hidden. One can't help but be reminded of Paul Johnson, one of the crusaders against such vice, who was subsequently exposed as regularly receiving spankings from Miss Whiplash. Somewhat hilariously, after he jumped ship from the Mail he denounced the paper for being "bad for society" for printing exactly the kind of why-oh-why despairing he had contributed.

In fact, what Cameron's speech and thoughts are clearly threatening is the age old separating of the poor and downtrodden into deserving and undeserving:

"We talk about people being "at risk of obesity" instead of talking about people who eat too much and take too little exercise. We talk about people being at risk of poverty, or social exclusion: it's as if these things - obesity, alcohol abuse, drug addiction - are purely external events like a plague or bad weather. "Of course, circumstances - where you are born, your neighbourhood, your school, and the choices your parents make - have a huge impact. But social problems are often the consequence of the choices that people make.

It also certainly helps when you're born into a family that can afford to send you to Eton and can pay for the damage you cause to restaurants once you're at university. This seems to be where the New Blairite Conservative party and the Post Blairite Labour party appear to be parting on policy: the Conservatives now seem to be saying that regardless of your circumstances, regardless of how hard you try, it's all down to the choices, often the extremely early ones that you make before full maturity, that will define where you get in life. This seems to ignore the number one thing that everyone learns early in life: that it isn't fair, and if you're unlucky enough to be born into a family on the borderline poverty line, it's really really unfair.

The really pernicious thing about this apparent new line in Conservative policy, turning away from the spurious compassionate one, is that this comes just when social mobility itself has almost completely collapsed. This isn't because of a collapse of personal responsibility, a failure to condemn bad behaviour or otherwise (certainly not the abolition of grammar schools, as argued by those who were lucky enough to attend them while everyone else suffered), it's because equality of opportunity has slumped. The drawbridge has been closed, and now Cameron thinks it's the perfect time that those who have failed both through their own fault and no fault, to be told exactly what he thinks of them and why they're such miserable washouts.

With all this talk of the Broken Society™, broken families and complete social breakdown, you'd think that the Tories might have something approaching a plan to turn all these things around. And they have (PDF). It just turns out to be as similarly wanting as their analysis of personal responsibility and public morality, as the only real policy on helping families staying together is that old bung to give families up to £20 a week simply for being a couple, which will delight middle class families that have been together for years but will do nothing whatsoever to stop others from splitting up, while discriminating against the single parent families that need the most help in the first place. The other stuff is just laughable: a health visiting service to help parents cope with raising a young family? Isn't that nanny statism at its worst which ought to be providing by the private sector? "Relationship" lessons for young people when we ought to perhaps concentrate on reforming sex education first, which it would go hand in hand with?

Yet you can understand why this is all so attractive. It feeds directly into everything which the Daily Mail and Telegraph rail against, that the welfare state creates dependency, that anything other than the traditional nuclear family, itself only a recent construct, will lead to a moral breakdown which directly feeds into the knife crime we see on the streets, and the idea that you can no longer say what is right and wrong. That this is nonsense, and is in fact motivated by one thing, which is the fear of being told you're wrong and getting criticised, which is in reality what some rail against as "political correctness", i.e. the right not to be contradicted, doesn't affect the overall feeling that everything is permanently getting worse and will keep on getting worse. It leads directly to the hilarious chutzpah of Tim Montgomerie saying that the Conservatives are now the real party of social justice. He's right, as long as you define social justice as the right to stay in exactly the same position you are when you're born for the rest of your life. The sad thing is that Labour or indeed the wider left doesn't seem to have an answer to any of this, and it looks like we'll paying for it for years to come.

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Monday, July 07, 2008 

Responding to accusations of Islamophobia with Islamophobia.

Trevor Kavanagh, the Sun's ex-political editor, and still largely the real ideological power behind the paper due to his closeness to Murdoch, doesn't usually devote his weekly column to Muslims or Islam, preferring to spout the same right-wing rhetoric which has flavoured his pieces for years. Today however he dedicates his column to Muslims and Islam, with it headlined "Islamophobia... or cold, hard truth?"

His reasons for doing so are not immediately clear, or wouldn't be if the only news source you subjected yourself to was the Sun. The clues are however there:

This time, he [Peter Oborne] is making the argument that the British media is anti-Muslim.

He cites invented incidents which portray Muslims in a bad light and incite attacks fuelled by religious or race hatred.

...

The accusation that the media — with a few badly researched or unchecked stories — is fomenting race hatred is in itself a trivialisation.


Kavanagh doesn't feel inclined to inform his readers that these invented incidents and badly researched or unchecked stories, which can and do foment race hatred, appeared in his own newspaper. The Sun in fact is the newspaper most featured in the pamphlet published along with Peter Oborne's Dispatches documentary, entitled Muslims Under Siege (PDF). Not only does it draw further attention to the story of the Muslim bus driver who allegedly ordered his passengers off so he could pray, a story we now know to be completely untrue and one which the bus driver is taking legal action over, with the story removed from the paper's website, it dedicates the entirety of its first chapter to another well-known completely untrue story about Muslims which featured here and in the Sun: the myth of the "Windsor Muslim yobs." Even now one of the Sun hacks responsible for the piece, Jamie Pyatt, denies that it was wrong: rather the police were being "politically correct" for not admitting that Muslims had been responsible. That there was no evidence whatsoever to even suggest Muslims had been near to the house that had been vandalised, and that those who actually lived in the road were the more likely "yobs" to have vandalised the house the soldiers had looked at because they felt that they might lower the tone and at the same time lower house prices cannot be allowed to get in the way of a brilliant Sun scoop, even if it is one that potentially inspires hate against Muslims as a whole.

Even those two articles are not the only ones which the pamphlet flags up; it also mentions another untrue story about Muslim medical students in Leicester supposedly refusing to comply with new regulations requiring staff to wash up to the elbow and therefore putting patients at risk of infection. As there sometimes is with such stories, there was the very slightest kernel of truth to it: one student had asked about the new regulations, not even objected to them, and from this swirled the eventual Sun story. Some other Muslim students had also expressed reservations about being bare below the elbow, but not one of them had actually refused to comply with the regulation, and as the pamphlet makes clear, after following Muslim students around the hospital while they worked, all were doing as they were required.

It's clear then what Kavanagh is really responding to: Oborne and his team so much as daring to question the Sun's brilliant public-service journalism. He can't however sow doubt in the average Sun reader's mind that its own stories lack credibility and in some cases have been completely untrue. Instead then he attacks Oborne in a typically roundabout way. He doesn't actually at any point demure from the fact that the media is anti-Muslim; he instead attempts to justify why some are Islamophobic.

What this amounts to in actuality is a list of generalisations, a couple of quotes and the most shallow allusions to what life is like for women in Middle East majority Muslim countries:

Hmmm. Well, what about my criticism of Muslim immigrants for their self-imposed isolation and reluctance to integrate? Wasn’t the same true for some Orthodox Jewish communities?

Maybe, I replied. But Jews — who are themselves increasingly the target for hate attacks — are not trying to bomb Britain.


Neither of course are 99.99% of British Muslims, and those that are abide by a twisted perversion of Islam that is being increasingly opposed by British Muslims themselves, but to say that might not justify the Islamophobia which Kavanagh thinks is perfectly OK. That Muslim immigrants have also historically not isolated themselves, rather that those around those where they have settled have "fled", is also not worth mentioning. Integration and isolation are two-way streets, and both communities have further steps they should take. Multiculturalism hasn't failed, there simply hasn't been enough of it.

In the past, I have also questioned the “provocative” trend by British-born Muslims to start wearing tribal costume and the hijab.

It's a good thing that Kavanagh places "provocative" in quotation marks, as hardly anyone can seriously argue that either is truly "provocative". Very few Muslims wear "tribal custume" apart from on Fridays when some do on the traditional day of prayer, and while the hijab is an issue of dispute within Islamic theology and is influenced more by cultural rather than religious issues, the headscarf, as much as even I dislike it, is a fact of the religion. If Kavanagh had called the niqab provocative then he might have something approaching a point, but again, only tiny numbers wear it, and there still has been little proof provided that those who do choose to wear it are doing so because their family or husbands demand it.

And I touched on the appalling fact that many women are treated as chattels.

All this, Peter Oborne concluded, amounted to “Islamophobia”.

Is he right? Does severe criticism of a creed or its teachings justify the accusation of hate?

Or is that just a way of shutting down the debate, just as critics of the EU are branded Europhobes?


It's instructive that Kavanagh invokes the EU, his other favoured hate target. It'd be nice if Kavanagh provided some examples of where critics of it are branded Europhobes however, outside the columns of Polly Toynbee, as almost always critics of the EU are referred to as Eurosceptics. The reality of course here though is that there isn't a debate, and there can't be one when the debate is so coloured by the very journalistic stories as those pointed out above, and especially when as the study by Cardiff University found, only 5% of stories involving Muslims discuss their own problems, and when only 2% make clear that Muslims support dominant moral values. Kavanagh also confuses Islamophobia with the definition that those accused of it hate Muslims; rather, it also infers that those accused of it are spreading fear of Muslims and also fear them. This is most applicable with the insane idea that Islamists are somehow plotting to take over Europe or will be within a century the majority in Europe: it spreads fear, and those that spread that fear often do hate Muslims.

Here then come the quotes:

In the wake of 9/11, the Muslim head of Al Arabiya TV, Abdul Rahman al Rashed, said: “Not all Muslims are terrorists but, with deep regret, we must admit that almost all terrorists are Muslims.”

Is he an Islamophobe?

No, he's just making a trite and ahistorical comment. Only recently have Islamic terrorists motivated by a millenarian Salafist ideology come to the forefront of current worldwide terrorism; beforehand Muslims may well have been terrorists, such as the PLO, but their religion was second to their nationality. It was the nominally Marxist Tamil Tigers that populised suicide bombings, which Hizbullah, then Hamas and Islamic Jihad and then finally al-Qaida co-opted. Terrorism goes back through the ages, and is also not just a tactic by individuals or groups, but can also be used by nation states, whether against their own populations or other countries.

Try watching Syrian-born Dr Wafa Sultan on YouTube as she challenges a furious cleric to name a single Jew or Buddhist suicide bomber.

“Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by killing people, burning churches and bombing embassies,” she storms.

Is she Islamophobic? Or simply spelling out the facts?


Simon C on the comments on Lenin's helpfully provides a number of links to others who habitually take it upon themselves to burn churches. The British colonial headquarters in Palestine was also for instance bombed in 1946 by the Irgun, a Jewish militant group.

Now we have the generalisations:

Muslim men are entitled to beat their wives and take more than one wife. Women are automatically suspect, banned in some communities from showing their faces or limbs because they are sexually tempting — to men. Visit an Arab country, or watch TV shows about them, and you will see plenty of men and boys.

Women appear rarely and, when they do, are covered head to toe. The rest are under virtual house arrest, living behind closed doors in ignorance and isolation.

We cannot interfere in the way other countries order their societies.

But such barbaric treatment of women has been imported and thrives here.


Kavanagh is producing the most extreme examples from the most extreme states, such as Saudi Arabia, and providing them as reasons for why Islamophobia is acceptable. That this is an attempt to smear Muslims as all the same, and ignores the vast cultural differences between such Muslim majority countries as Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan to name but a few, not to mention the differences between the different strands of Islamic thinking, whether it be Sunni, Shia or Sufi, again matters little. The irony is that the states which tend to be the most extreme are the ones which his newspaper, through its allegiance to America, helps to prop up. This is without pointing out that the Sun and female emancipation are far from being synonymous, unless you associate female emancipation with the freedom for women to get their tits out for the lads. Kavanagh realises that he can't claim the same happens here however, so he's forced to somewhat scale back his claims:

Forced marriages are common. Honour killings and beatings are far from rare. Women are refused education or a chance to learn English.

Yet again, that this is little to do with Islam itself and is much more influenced by cultural background is not mentioned. The idea that British Muslim women who have grown up here are refused education or a chance to learn English is completely risible, and for those who emigrated here is simply not backed up by even the slightest of evidence. Forced marriages and honour killings are a challenge which need to be tackled, but blaming Islam rather than the individuals themselves out carry them out is a typical hate tactic.

I receive emails from women Muslims crying out for help. One, Gina Khan, has written eloquently in The Sun about oppression of women in a male-dominated society through arranged marriages, polygamy and the veil. Is she Islamophobic too?

Or is she a lonely voice on behalf of millions of women who are being ignored and gagged by a politically correct establishment which is too timid to face the truth?


No, she's speaking out strongly on the behalf of those who are facing horrendous ordeals because of the family they were born into. This though ignores the point which Oborne and the pamphlet are making: they're not arguing against legitimate criticism of Islam, especially over the points which Khan has raised, which most certainly need to be dealt with. They're concerned with the casual way in which Muslims are treated as either a threat of something to be feared, and the ignorant, abominable and completely untrue newspaper coverage which fuels this. For being concerned for some of the most vulnerable in society, they're accused by Kavanagh of being a politically correct establishment. That the Sun, Trevor Kavanagh and Rupert Murdoch are also doyens of the establishment once again matters not one jot.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Roy Greenslade writing in the Guardian noted with approval that the Sun dedicated a leader column to a statement of the obvious, but one with a decent point: "Islam is not an evil religion," and people "must not play into the hands of racist bigots." Today, 3 years on from the 7/7 attacks, the Sun not only publishes an article by its ex-political editor defending Islamophobia, it also publishes this:

THE family of evil 7/7 bomber Shehzad Tanweer held a party at the fanatic’s grave – on the third anniversary of the London terrorist outrage today.

The sick celebration has been branded an “insult” to July 7 victims and their relatives.


First of all, who cares, especially as this is supposedly taking place in Pakistan and not the UK? Secondly, what is the point of this article, other than to inspire similar revulsion and hate? On a day which ought to be dedicated not only to remembering but also to fighting against the intolerance which helps to lead to such attacks, it also publishes these comments:

I doubt it. Infidels don't count so why would they be remotely upset about the terrorist attack? Loyalty is to Allah, and it is unfortunate for them that a Muslim had to die in committing his heinous act. Tanweer was brought up in the UK with this education, and it is why there are plenty more Tanweers about. It is a mistake to ascribe Western moral values to the way of thinking that creates Tanweers and his ilk. Political correctness now prohibits thoughts that people are actually different in their views.

Most Muslims proclaim horror at all of these types of attrocity but they do sweet FA about it - time to get off your butts and get your houses in order & stop playing the percecuted victims.

if u know where the party is held why don't u just bomb them back

Who are these sick people? The UK has become a haven for scumbags like this, if anyone protests they will say that they are being discriminated against, stupid laws that help them and let this country head for the gutter.

surely it is time for the socalled good muslims to tart to condemn these fanatics. if they do not then they are all as bad theres no wonder that there is racial tension. I read today that a group in england had sent the brother of one of these bombers to pakistan so that relations could be better. I wonder if he went to this so called party - if so he should bebanned from returning here and if he has returned he should have his passport taken away as well as his benefits.

The Muslims under Siege pamphlet concludes with:

We think we should all feel a little bit ashamed about the way we treat Muslims in the media, in our politics, and on our streets. They are our fellow citizens, yet often we barely acknowledge them. We misrepresent them and in certain cases we persecute them. We do not treat Muslims with the tolerance, decency and fairness that we so often like to boast is the British way. We urgently need to change our public culture.

The above is the Sun's response to the need for that change.

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Saturday, July 05, 2008 

Peter Oborne on Islamophobia and Chris Dillow on James Purnell.

The ever reliable Peter Oborne has an excellent article on Islamophobia in the Daily Mail of all places, ahead of a Dispatches docu on Monday. He mentions the Muslim bus driver who "ordered his passengers off so he could pray", which you might recall from these couple of posts and on 5cc:

Take the story in a red-top newspaper (The Sun) earlier this year about a bus driver who apparently ordered his passengers off his bus so that he could kneel towards Mecca and pray.

It was taken up by those who want to exaggerate and exploit divisions in our society and added to the growing list of perceived outrages committed by Muslims in this nominally Christian (though largely secular) country of ours. Pictures of the driver on his prayer-mat went the rounds.

Except it didn't happen like that. The truth was that his bus had been taken out of service by an inspector because it was running late, and the passengers switched to the one behind - not an unusual occurrence by any means, as bus travellers know.

The driver, with his bus temporarily idle, took the opportunity of a break and used it for his prayers. Meanwhile, as CCTV cameras show, the passengers waited for no more than a minute before boarding the next bus and going on their way.

That is the explanation the bus company would have given if it had had the chance. Instead, the newspaper chose to believe its one informant, a 21-year-old plumber, who had arrived late on the scene, jumped to the wrong conclusion and seen the chance to make some money by selling the story.

In these disturbing times, when Muslims are seen as fair game for any mischief or mendacity, the newspaper jumped at it. 'Get off my bus: I need to pray', screamed its headline, and another Islamophobic nail was hammered into the coffin of inter-racial harmony in this country.

Not that Oborne has convinced the Mail's commenters:

The headline should read 'Is post war Britain anti-British?'

- Doris, Yorkshire, 4/7/2008 9:21

This is neither a phobia nor is it a prejudice.

- A Guy, London, England, 4/7/2008 10:01


Other essential reading is provided by Chris who destroys James Purnell and his proposed ultra-Blairite welfare reforms.

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Friday, July 04, 2008 

On the travails of Boris and throwing things out the pram.

Justin asks what those of us who suggested some on the left were throwing their toys out of their pram on the election of Boris Johnson are feeling now that only 2 months in things seem to be going rather badly for Bo-Jo.

More than fair enough, as I used more or less those exact words at the time, although it should be pointed out I more objected to the view that people had voted for Boris for a joke rather than because of his record or policies against Ken's.

My second point was about the idea that Boris would be a disaster, and Liberal Conspiracy handily has a rather extensive list of "gaffes and controversies" already. The thing is generally the rather thinness of the list. Is Ray Lewis's resignation really a mistake on Boris Johnson's part or is it Lewis himself not being completely honest on his past? It looks embarrassing at the moment, but in a few months I would wager that no one will even remember who he was. Similarly, the hoo-hah about James McGrath and his swift despatching in fact reflected the fact that Johnson and the Tories as a whole are determined not to get caught up in the drip-drip of scandal which dogged Ken Livingstone towards the end of his tenure. That Lewis jumped ship far sooner than Lee Jasper did, even though the list of offences against Lewis, apart from his direct lie over being a JP is more minor that against Jasper also shows how sensitive and concerned the Tories are over Johnson's potential for embarrassing them.

The Independent Forensic Audit Panel sure looks like an attempt to defame Livingstone after the fact and is to be condemned, but accusing Policy Exchange of running things behind the scenes is pretty poor. The point about Socialist Action was that it was some far-left cabal, and let's face it, Policy Exchange is centre-right Cameroonies writ large with a grudge against Muslims. It's little surprise they're involved. Have to agree over Simon Milton, if only because of his links with Shirley Porter.

The Rise festival thing is a typical Tory u-turn, but whether many Londoners will care or not is another matter. Drinking on the tube, as some of the commenters suggest, isn't really a gaffe; if anything was a gaffe it was the utterly moronic parties on the last Saturday on the tube which were only going to end up one way and helped justify the unjustifable. Again, it might come down to what your definition of gaffe is on the press conferences, it seems more like an atypical politican's decision.

Now, a real policy disaster ought to have been the doubling of the bus fares on the poor, but again, what do you expect from any sort of Tory? The time to pursue Johnson over his real intentions was during the campaign, but instead what most on the left managed was either "Boris is an idiot and whoever votes for him is an idiot" or "he'll be an incompetent disaster". This list doesn't really show that he's incompetent; it shows that he's a Conservative politician.

The good thing about Johnson's victory is that now some virulent and ruthless individuals are dedicating blogs and other things to watching him, something we know the Evening Standard won't do, but as well as exposing his failures what also needs to be done is to build an alternative that can win the Mayorality back in four years' time. At the moment there's no one at all on the scene, or even an alternative party. We're still more concerned about what Ken thinks than anyone else, and he's not going to run again and he's not going to win again. It's not even as if some of us on the left really want Boris to fail because it might perusade the country at large that Cameron and co can't be trusted with being back in power: so many of us are fed up with New Labour in any form that the Blairite Tories look just like another set of bastards in slightly sharper suits and with slightly posher accents. In any case, we shouldn't be throwing brickbats at each other, but instead be uniting to find that alternative. Boris was never a better option than Ken, but pretending that he was an idiot or obviously going to be incompetent was a poor ploy. Next time we have to do better.

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Even more thoughts on knife crime and the Sun.

ChrisC objects in the comments on my previous post on all things knife crime, saying the statistics do not say that crime is falling. Going by the police statistics on violence against the person, he's right, which have been rising exponentially since the way they were recorded was changed in 1999. The past couple of years have seen this level off and the figures become stable. I am correct however when I refer to the British Crime Survey figures, considered more authoritative, which paint a completely different picture, with violent crime have fell by 43% since 1995. The police figures he links to conclude there were around 1,000,000 offences against the person in 2005/06 as reported, while the BCS for the same year measures over 2,500,000, a drop from a peak of 4,000,000 in 1995. Crime itself by both measures has also been falling since 1995 (PDF), but as we know all too well, it doesn't feel like that and very few outside police/political/judicial circles believe it.

The major flaw in the BCS when it comes to the current apparent epidemic of knife crime is that it doesn't survey under-16s, who are also those who are in the front-line of muggings for expensive gadgets, such as mp3 players and mobile phones. This is to change, as was announced by "Wacky" Jacqui Smith, but for now it is still the best measure we have. Also to consider is that increasingly those who are the victims of violent crime are turning up to hospital without reporting it and giving asinine stories when asked what happened to them. There have been trials in Scotland in hospitals that have attempted to link the numbers of those admitted to A&E with stab wounds etc with the eventual number of crimes reported, and to highlight how big the discrepancy is. This is something that most certainly needs to at least be considered south of the border, as the only way we'll ever get to the bottom of how the deep the problem is through valid, unquestionable statistics from all sources, police, BCS, hospital, even schools, as Lee Jasper(!) argues very eloquently on CiF in an excellent post which has a number of good suggestions of how to tackle knife crime without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Also vital is that the independent body Louise Casey recommended in her report for crime statistics of all varieties is established, which will hopefully put a stop to the selective and partisan reading of the crime figures.

Also very interesting on the statistics score is this post by the BBC's Mark Easton, who's digging on hospital patients with various wounds is rather eye-opening:

Between the years 2002-3 and 2006-7, the number of these children admitted to hospital with knife wounds in England "almost doubled" we are told. From 95 cases to 179. A rise of 88%.

However, over the same period, the numbers of under-16s admitted to hospital with gunshot wounds has gone down from 253 to 181. A fall of 28%.

So, 84 more children were admitted with stab injuries than five years earlier. But 72 fewer children were admitted with gunshot injuries.

If no distinction is made between knife and gun injuries, the headline might read "teen violence stable.


and:

Given the particular anxiety over youngsters with knives, I looked at the most recent data for under-16s and spotted something quite surprising. Of those 179 children admitted to hospital last year, 72 or 40% were in London.

Knife fights appear to be a particular and growing problem in the capital. Juvenile disputes are too often resolved with a blade.

It is a different story in the North West of England. In Manchester and Liverpool it is gunshot wounds that the hospitals are predominantly dealing with.

Between 2002-3 and 2006-7, London doctors treated 33 children with wounds from firearms. In the North West, medics patched up an astonishing 251.

During the same period, London A & E departments admitted 225 children with stab wounds compared with 117 in the North West.

What do we conclude from all this? Well, I don't think these figures tell a story of increasingly ferocious juvenile violence sweeping the land. Instead, they offer clues to the nature of predominantly urban gang culture.

If you don't believe me, consider this. In 2002-3, not one school child was treated for a stab wound anywhere in central and south east England outside London. How many victims were there in this large and populous region last year? None.


This is what I've been arguing here on the previous post and before. While there are serious, apparently intractable problems in London involving knife crime, and gun problems in Manchester and Liverpool, of which we've heard relatively little since the tragedy involving Rhys Jones, outside of the major cities there is not some huge crisis involving weapons, especially not "a Dark Age of lawlessness" as the Sun so hyperbolically put it. The emphasis on London is understandable - it is the capital city, reflects England and Britain as a whole and is where the media is encamped, and so of immediate concern to them and their children. For those of us outside of it however who simply don't recognise this picture of a land in constant fear of teenagers carrying blades, it rankles. While it would be crude to describe what's happening in London as a moral panic, as 18 teenagers this year already have lost their lives, what is noticeable is pattern of coverage. A couple of years ago the main concern was guns. At the beginning of this year it was drunken feral teenagers kicking adults to death for little to no reason. At the moment it's knives. The circle will probably square before too long.

The Sun itself, predictably, is in no mood for introspection or such analysis. Like with previous victims of crime where it's difficult to determine who's using who, the Sun is relying on emotion, this time from Ben Kinsella's distraught and clearly in mourning sister Brooke. Her suggestion is for national service to be brought back seems to be more one of desperation than of complete seriousness:

“I want politicians to consider bringing back National Service. If these evil people want to fight so badly, let them fight for their country. If they want to pick up a weapon, let them fight for a good cause.

“We’re losing hundreds of innocent boys in Iraq and Afghanistan, so we may as well send these criminals overseas to fight. The only way to stop this is to do something extreme.”


It doesn't seem to have been put gently to her by the Sun journalists responsible for the interview that the last thing the army needs are "evil people" when they're fighting what is not a typical war but one against an insurgency where public support of those in the area is crucial, and that training already violent young individuals to been even more ruthless in survival tactics is not the greatest of ideas, but then the paper isn't interested in realism. It simply wants her words to move minds for its own agenda.

There is this rebuke to the Sun's continuous demands for more prisons without thinking of the consequences however:

“I want to see proper prisons brought back,” she said. “It’s like a badge of honour for kids to be put in prisons these days. Inside, they gain more respect and make contacts which they use to become even harder criminals when they’re released. They’re in for a couple of years and when they come out they’re treated like heroes.”

Although what a "proper prison" is is anyone's guess.

Again, not that this alters the Sun's editorial view:

EACH day seems to bring more horror than the last.

The Sun warned yesterday that we are sinking into a Dark Age of crime.

And now we learn of the ghastly slaughter of two fine young French students in a London bedsit.

Even in the current climate of violence, the savagery of their murders leaves us numb with horror and revulsion.


Those murders are clearly an exceptional case, and as PDF reflects, it would be a major surprise if burglary really was the primary motive when such extreme violence and brutality was used. As we've seen though, to call this a "Dark Age of crime" is to ignore the evidence in front of your face.

As The Sun has repeatedly said, our political leaders, the police and the courts must show they grasp the seriousness of the crisis we face.

That means more arrests, stiffer sentences, more jails.

But more must be done to break up the gang culture.

Many will agree with grieving actress Brooke Kinsella, who calls in The Sun today for a return of National Service.


Quite. If there's one thing that'll break up gang culture, it'll be ordering them about and splitting them into regiments.

Brooke, whose brother Ben was killed by a knife gang, believes a tough spell of compulsory military life would stop teenagers drifting into street crime.

She believes it would instil in them discipline, respect and common decency.

Actually, she doesn't say anything like that all, or if she did it's not included in the interview write-up. The only thing she says about it is what I've quoted above. Looks like the Sun is trying to develop the idea for her or put words in her mouth. Either way, it's still an unworkable suggestion.

National Service was created to prepare a generation of young men to defend us from an enemy abroad.

Now the enemy is within.


Now the language is similar to that regarding the terrorist threat. Of course, if there was now a successful attack, the mood would swiftly swing from concern about knife crime to exploding brown people again. In both cases talking of an enemy within is over-the-top and unhelpful, but again that doesn't seem to matter.

Decent young people would feel outraged that they were having to suffer because of a mindless minority.

But the crisis we face is engulfing everyone.

That means nothing — including National Service — can be ruled out in our battle to end the savagery.


As we've seen, the crisis is not engulfing everyone, and it would be nice if the Sun could admit that it isn't. Once you've built your prospectus around eternal terror or insecurity on the streets though it's difficult to back down. Using such potentially counter-productive and discriminatory tactics will do nothing to solve the crisis that does exist, and will instead embitter a whole generation out of the desire that something must be done.

Then again, it could be worse. You could think that giving kids PlayStations for telling us what their lives are like is a good idea, as does the completely brainless Polly (what is it with that name?) Hudson via Anton Vowl.

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Big Brother as a microcosm of society.

It's silly enough to attempt to extrapolate from problems in the capital what problems are affecting the country as a whole, so when you start to attempt to extrapolate from the inhabitants of one house, even if it is the Big Brother house, what's wrong with wider society you really ought to just quit while you're ahead.

Kudos have to go then to Alan Finlayson who having viewed the latest series of Big Brother (which up till now I've succeeded in not mentioning) has decided that we are a selfish society. To begin with you don't have to watch one of the most vicious and pernicious of television programmes to recognise that, but to state that the individuals who inhabit the Big Brother house are selfish is akin to describing Hitler as really rather nasty or John Inman as really rather camp. There are three main reasons why someone thinks that going on Big Brother is a good idea: one is to boost their own ego; second is to attempt to become famous; and the last is to try to win the prize money at the end and become loved by the public at large at the same time. All three of these things mean that at some point you're going to have to be extraordinarly selfish or guilty of avarice, otherwise you'll get voted out first, and the few individuals who are nice or normal tend to get booted out early on because they're considered boring. The first series was largely an experiment with mainly normal people, and although it started the phenomenon off, it couldn't just be that continously or people would stop watching. Instead it's turned into a microcosm of the celebrity world as a whole - noisy, unpleasant, garish, hypocritical and utterly vacuous. As a nation we may be selfish, but the vast majority of people, including the young that habitually get it in the neck are still polite, kind, intelligent and a joy to be around. Big Brother levels of alienation, hatred and threat have not become the default mode for society at large -- yet.

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Thursday, July 03, 2008 

Anonymity or bust.

Somewhat related to the previous post, as Unity notes on Lib Con the government has published its "solution" to the law lords' ruling on anonymity. His conclusion could have been predicted:

In short, its just what we’ve come to expect from emergency legislation - a badly conceived and prejudicial mess in which political expediency takes precedence over civil liberties.

You can understand why the government has rushed to legislate - the prospect of various unsavoury individuals, to put it lightly, being freed, including potentially the gang "killers" of Charlene and Letisha Shakespeare on what will be described as a "technicality" is enough to get a party of government scared at the potential consequences. Some of the blame has to be however levelled at the police, who unlike the government greatly encouraged the expansion of anonymous witnesses while knowing full well that it had not been properly defined in the legislation which introduced it in the first place. Rather than making clear that it could only be considered as a last resort in cases where otherwise the guilty would go free, it was instead starting to be offered as a first resort, as evidenced by them making clear that the law lords ruling would not affect anyone who was frightened of giving evidence in the Ben Kinsella case, where three individuals have now been charged with his murder anyway.

It isn't just the police though - Louise Casey proposed it for the disabled and elderly who had been victims of anti-social behaviour in her criminal justice system review. The bill does at least contain the clause that a judge will have to consider the possibility of a witnesses' potential to be dishonest before granting an anonymity order, but it still can't be challenged by the defence. While, as with almost everything else at the moment, there isn't a simple solution, witness protection programmes, while expensive, could potentially stop this problem in its tracks. Failing that, as Michael Clarke suggests in the comments, a potential compromise could be allowing the defence to know who the witness is - but restricting them on pain of being expelled from the Bar Council and also being held in contempt of court of revealing the identity to the defendant themselves. The right to a fair trial needs to be paramount - and bad legislation brought in to fix a a temporary problem threatens that.

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Scum-watch: Yet more on knife crime.

It's a brand new day, it's time for another brand new hysterical Sun leader on knife crime. First though, the Sun is urging every one of us to join in their aptly named "crusade" against knife crime by wearing a stylised "K" designed by Ben Kinsella himself. A noble venture, but as usual it's worth wondering whether the Sun would care so much or be pushing this so hard if Kinsella hadn't happened to have a semi-famous sister, or had been a colour other than white, as most of the victims of knife crime have been. It has been discussed here somewhat before, but it's taken the deaths of white "good" middle-class kids for the press to start shouting at the sky over street violence.

The Sun leader is as always a classic of the genre, hilariously over-the-top while proposing a solution which is no better if not worse than any which a politician has championed:

STABBING someone again and again until they die is the purest form of evil.

Those are the heart-rending words of actress Brooke Kinsella as she launches a campaign — backed by The Sun — to end the curse of knives and gangs on our streets.


It's a good thing we've decided on what the purest form of evil is. Maybe we can get down to agreeing what the less pure forms of evil are - leaving the toilet seat up, stealing candy from babies, etc. That this is the umpteenth campaign by the Sun to end the curse of knives and gangs doesn't seem to suggest to the hacks that it will do precisley nothing to stop the next jumped-up kid from sticking silver into the chest of another; or maybe it does, and they know full well that sales come from constant overreactions and scaremongering.

Our society is at a crossroads.

We are sliding rapidly into a Dark Age of lawlessness where human life has no worth and the only rule is the rule of a bloodstained knife.


That the number of murders has fallen recently, and that outside the major cities where there are undoubted serious problems life continues much as it has for decades doesn't seem to get in the way of the tabloid writer's reaching for the hyperbole. As a recent BBC in-depth look concluded, the number of knife offences overall has remained largely static over the last few years. What has changed is the age of those carrying them, with the age of those dying after knife attacks also falling. A couple of years ago the moral panic was about guns; while that is still a problem too, the subject has now changed to knives. In another couple of years it'll probably change again. The number one reason given for carrying weapons is insecurity, the sort of insecurity which the media itself has a hand in establishing. City and town centres at the weekend are lawless hellholes filled with binge drinkers; hoodies stand on every corner just waiting to do you over; every young person is potentially carrying a knife. If you get the impression that everyone your age is carrying a weapon, you might be inclined to as well.

This is why the Sun's proposed solution is so completely daft. Its coverage has helped to fuel a vicious circle, and now it proposes automatic jail sentences for everyone caught carrying a knife. It doesn't seem to matter that innocents and the scared will be caught up in this crackdown, those inspired to carry one for protection. While such behaviour can't be condoned, giving them a four year prison sentence, especially when you're below 16 for carrying a knife is the criminal justice policy of the madhouse. Four years' stay in a young offenders' instutition, alongside the genuine criminal fraternity and the other deeply troubled, mentally ill youth that make up the population is about the last thing that's likely to lead to someone deciding not to be so foolish again. It's the kind of thing that robs someone of their little remaining faith in society, embitters them and takes them out of the world at the precise time when they're maturing through social contact with those not just their age. Fines similarly are not the answer - hefty community service punishment, restorative justice sessions with those who have been victims of knife crime and help to get out of the gang culture if they're part of one is far more likely to have results.

The Sun however just wants the circle of going permanently in and out of the prison system to go on and on:

Those knives are out there because thugs have no fear of the consequences of carrying one.

The price of carrying a knife on the street HAS to be automatic jail.

Not a caution or a fine but JAIL.

That means we need to build more prisons.

Not next year or in five years but NOW.

We are looking at a catastrophic breakdown of law and order that threatens every family.


Of course, the crime statistics as we've noted time and time before say the opposite - it's just now that the serious problems which are still there beneath the surface have started to hit those who previously avoided them. Similarly, "thugs" don't carry knives because they know they can get away with it, they carry one because of either fear or status. It also doesn't matter that the Sun has consistently demanded new prisons without once providing an answer to where they're to be built, where the money to do so is to come from, or who's going to run them, it just wants them NOW.

His sister is haunted by the fact that the last faces Ben saw were the gloating brutes who murdered him.

That thought should haunt our politicians too.


Which again feeds into the idea that politicians can protect us from such crimes. They can't. All they can do is attempt to control it - and the controls which the the Sun wants are unlikely to help with that.

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Wednesday, July 02, 2008 

The undemocratic task force.

In a way, it's almost verging on chutzpah for Kenneth Clarke, former member of the Conservative government which foisted so many unpopular and regressive policies on Scotland first as an experiment to now be offering solutions to a problem which he had a hand in cultivating in the first place. One of the main reasons why Scotland finally achieved devolution and a parliament was undoubtedly the poll tax, levered first on the nation which had steadfastly refused to become a part of the Thatcherite revolution and therefore deserved the contempt with which it was treated, but we should perhaps let bygones be bygones. On the whole, Clarke and his "Democracy Task Force's" paper (PDF) on the West Lothian question is worthy of praise, praise of which more in the final paragraph. It's just that it comes to such a simpering compromise in its conclusion that's unlikely to be accepted, and that will do very little to staunch the sense of grievance which some feel about where the power now lies in the UK.

First though the conundrum itself. Devolution in Scotland has left the unhelpful constitutional problem of Scottish MPs being able to vote on legalisation that affects only England and/or Wales, the Welsh assembly not currently having the same powers which have been devolved to Scotland. This problem wouldn't be so bad if the MPs in Scotland were spread more equally across all parties, but the Labour party has overwhelmingly had Scotland as its personal fiefdom for quite some time. This is gradually starting to be broken, with both the Scottish Nationalists themselves and the Liberal Democrats making gains, and could be much extended at the next election with Labour's collapse in popularity and with the SNP in power in Edinburgh, but at the last election Labour had 29 Scottish MPs, the LDs 12, the SNP 6 and the Tories a very lonely 1. Added into the problem is that most of the Scottish Labour MPs are either one of two things: mostly completely loyal and therefore unlikely to rebel against the Labour whip; or either ministers or former ministers, not to mention the prime minister himself. This has led to bills affecting only England, such as the votes on tutition fees and foundation hospitals being carried only by Scottish Labour MP votes. With the Tories likely to sweep the board in England at the next election, but with certain victory still in doubt, it's feasibly possible that Labour could still cling on to a majority but only through their Scottish seats, with the Tories the defacto party in power in England.

One of the other factors which the Clarke report doesn't touch on much is that the Conservatives already have won the popular vote in England, as they did at the last election, yet because of first-past-the-post still received 100 fewer seats than Labour. This will undoubtedly be even more pronounced at the next election, with the Tories likely to wipe out Labour almost completely south of a decent chunk of the Midlands (London is a different matter), yet the Conservatives continue to oppose proportional representation because they realise that even though the system works against them, they'll still be able to get a decent majority if they win well, let alone if they win big. This was more defendable when the vast majority voted for either Labour or Conservative, but that is no longer the case when the Liberal Democrats won over 22% of the vote last time round, not to mention the votes the other minor parties received despite there being next to no chance that any of the candidates would actually win any seats. The report however meekly dismisses proportional representation out of hand, with the simple response that "[W]e do not favour either practice [PR or US-style separation of powers] in the UK as British political culture would take a very long time to adapt to either practice." This simply isn't good enough.

The Clarke solution is instead of pure "English votes for English laws" a poor substitution for it that would make very little overall difference. Rather than simply barring Scottish MPs from voting on legislation which doesn't concern their own constituencies, the task force proposes that Scottish MPs would be barred from taking part in the committee stages and report stages of a relevant bill, while being allowed to vote on both on the second and third readings. This would still however leave non-English MPs with the ability to vote down a bill at the crucial third stage. Clarke is rather pleased that this would still leave the UK government with an effective veto if it felt that the bill damaged UK interests as a whole by urging its members to vote down the amendments made to it in committee stages at the third reading.

If this sounds complicated, then it is. If you're reading this in the first place then you're likely to have some sort of remedial interest in politics, but for those out there that don't this is about as confusing as it gets, like attempting to explain what colour something is to a blind person. It also falls down because it ignores the simplest solution, if we're also going to reject PR: that English votes for English laws makes the most sense and would be easy to institute. The other argument made by some is for an English parliament, or full English devolution, but this isn't a solution or option which I've ever been tempted by: what's the point of establishing yet another devolved instutition when we have a perfectly acceptable one already in use, if only it can be acceptably modified to make it work both more fairly and better than it currently does? The break-up of the union this also might herald is also a red herring; Scotland still seems unlikely to go independent any time soon, however much some both north and south of the border might like it to, and any changes on the constitutional level over the West Lothian question are hardly likely going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

It is of course Labour that is stalling any solution on either front. It didn't shoot down Clarke's "solution" for the exact reason that it keeps their strangehold on Scotland and also potentially England in tact. It's the best of all worlds in short-term polticial terms: the West Lothian question has been answered, but things carry on as before. That this trickery won't trick English voters themselves doesn't seem to enter into the equation. It's strange however why the Conservatives are still so mealy-mouthed with their policy. They could have proposed something that would have made everyone except the Labour party immensly happy, yet they've done the opposite. You can understand why they reject PR, as they fear that it could keep Labour and the Lib Dems in a coalition for potentially all-time, especially when they can still win big as long as they're slightly more popular than Labour under FPTP, yet on this they have potentially everything to lose. The best thing that can in fact be said for Clarke's task force's report is that it's short and to the point, unlike so many other policy documents. That it took four years to produce rather dampens down even that accolade.


Related posts:
OurKingdom - The Madness of Ken Clarke
OurKingdom - Cameron wanted English nationalism, not the West Lothian question, answered
Paul Kingsnorth - A radical answer to the West Lothian question

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Snobbery? On my internets?

Most would agree that the worst threads on Comment is Free occur beneath every posting on Israel and Palestine, as the interest groups on either side flock via Google Alerts or GIYUS to commence battle whilst boring everyone else to tears. There are other posts that attract high amounts of criticism, and excluding ones by radical feminists, which usually deserve it in spades, it almost always seems to be when the person in question writing is below the age of 30. This was true of the Max Gogarty meme, who although a poor writer and son of a hack hardly deserved the scorn which was poured on his head from all across the internet.

Enter Majid Ahmed, a state school student from Bradford who achieved 4 A grades at A-level, but who unfortunately was convicted of burglary when he was 15, on the basis of which he had his offer of acceptance to study medicine from Imperial College London rescinded. Having admitted his mistake, in which he was a bystander rather than someone who participated in any actual robbery, most would accept that shouldn't bar him from a place on a college course. The crowd on CiF of course has other ideas:

But would I want to come to you with my health problems? Probably not.

Majid - you sound self-pitying.

OMG what a story of woe. How can anyone keep banging on, with a straight face, about how they have overcome such hardships only to be stopped by some terrible snobbery.

This may surprise you matey but lots of people grow up facing hardship and gain good results and have to struggle to make good. However what they don't do is burgle a house and then bitch about how their conviction is proving a barrier.

Often people living in tough conditions have those conditions made much worse by their bad neighbours who break into their houses and make tough conditions tougher.

To be honest I don't want to visit a doctor who has served time in jail for crimes they have committed.

I find it crazy that you feel like a victim, rather than hold up your hands and admit that your poor choices have led to this situation. The real victims are the people who have been subjected to your dishonesty. Get over it and stop bitching.


You ask whether the outcome would be different had you hired professionals to draft your appeal - but you can write an article for the Guardian - are you being funny?

You claim you were goaded into breaking the law by friends, then you claim you were innocent but pleaded guilty. How you dealt with the police and the criminal justice system showed no sense of personal integrity. You chose immorally in breaking the law and then chose immorally again in pleading guilty while still considering yourself innocent.

There is no word of any sense of personal shame or of reform, only whinging in this article.

One of the lovely things I have found in working with many young Asian men and women in deprived backgrounds in their profound understanding of right and wrong, which is picked up in the family. This seems to have passed this candidate by.

The place will go to someone who was too busy studying to get a criminal conviction.

I spend a lot of time in hospital with a chronic and serious illness. While I am there I often see and talk to medical students on the wards as well as junior doctors. I don't want to consider the possibility that any of the people that the hospital lets loose on the wards have criminal convictions. Patients are often in a very vulnerable situation and the hospital staff as well as student doctors, nurses and physios etc must be beyond reproach.

You made a bad decision at 15 and now have to live with the consequences. You say that you didn't know you had no right of access to the dwelling but that you did know that they were a bad crowd - this should have been a major clue about their "new chill out pad" and as a dwelling is another term for someone's home I think it is clear that you knew it was not the home of one of your friends.

You seem very adept at working the cultural minority angle. Saying you didn't want the shame of your mother accompanying you through the courts so you had to plead guilty. Nonsense! If you were innocent of the charge then going to court to prove these would have been far less humiliating for your family than having a son who is a convicted burglar.

Get over your false sense of injustice. Medicine is a hugely competitive course and many students with four or five grade A 'A' levels and without criminal records get rejected for the course. Further, many people grow up in impoverished circumstances and successfully pursue their dreams without either burglarising someone's home or blaming everyone but themselves for their own stupidity. And, as for nothing in your life having been easy? Well, you seem to manage self pity with great ease.

Thank you Imperial; you make the right decision.


Snooty individuals on CiF not acting like vindictive cretins, perhaps?

There are of course a few lone voices like this ahem, rather sensible chap:

Majid, ignore all the sour and bitter people on here that seem to think that committing a criminal offence when you're young and stupid ought to preclude you from having something resembling a life for the rest of your days; most of them probably did things mightily similar to you at the same age but didn't get caught. Re-applying to another college is a good idea however, as Imperial clearly aren't interested in your potential and only see you as a potential liability.

And we of course wonder why the youth of today are how they are.

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Suitably rewarded.

Unlike with gorgeous pouting Andy Burnham and his deliberately suggestive remarks on heart-melting, hand-wringing phone calls, there really doesn't seem to be anything in the letter sent by Geoff "Buff" Hoon to Keith Vaz, except a rather poor joke between friends. Anyone with half a brain, which apparently rules out David Cameron, could see that Hoon was referring to rumours that Vaz had been offered a knighthood in return for his support on 42 days, and was doing so sardonically. Such use of punctuation and sarcasm doesn't translate well when you're reading the letter out in parliament.

This doesn't of course rule out that Vaz wasn't suitably bought off like the DUP were, something that Diane Abbot for one suggested. It does seem strange that the committee you chair one month produces a report which makes clear that it considers 42 days completely unnecessary, and the next you then decide that it in fact is entirely needed and that the government has delivered all the needed safeguards. It might just be that Vaz, like the other most egregious Labour members, felt that Gordon simply had to be saved for the nation and so voted the correct way in the same loyal fashion they've displayed since 1997. We might have to wait for the next or next few honours' lists to find out.

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Tuesday, July 01, 2008 

Victimhood, Jill Saward and civil liberties.

The anger and thirst for change that victims of crime often display, and the power that they subsequently have because of their misfortune has been discussed here before. Unlike Helen Newlove however for example, Jill Saward has decided to go to the electorate with her concerns, rather than promoting them through the prism of a tabloid newspaper campaign, although it's worth mentioning Saward's first article was in the pages of the Sun. For that, she deserves the same credit and praise that David Davis received for his stand on civil liberties. Putting your money where your mouth is and being prepared to argue the case in public rather than through the media is a step up from hollow campaigns where it's unclear where the media brand ends and the political principles begin.

Saward couldn't really have chosen a more inappropriate beginning to her article on Comment is Free though:

Not all men are rapists or sexual predators.

It's just that only men are, and that only they are potential rapists or sexual predators. That is Saward's point, is it not?

It's worth putting in a little background here. Jill Saward was the woman raped in the "Ealing Vicarage" attack; her father was the vicar. The judge in the case when it came to court gave those responsible a longer sentence for the burglary than for the rape, and said that the "the trauma suffered by the victim was not so very great." Deplorable certainly, and Saward's campaigning since then has certainly helped many in similar circumstances to overcome or at least come to terms with what happened to them. It is perhaps worth noting though that Saward is married to a journalist; something that always helps with getting publicity for such a campaign.

What's more, Saward is standing on what she says is a true liberty platform, calling for people to be "safe at home, safe at work and safe on the street." In this, Saward has entered into the same sort of thinking which was has led to the current set of criminal justice policies in this country, which was ably identified recently by Ian Loader. As globalisation has undermined the previous utopian ideal of the government being able to provide a job for everyone for life, or being able to secure at the least a decent standard of living, something that for a distinct minority is still a dream, attention has instead turned to the idea that the government can and must provide another form of security, a physical one, at both all costs and all the time. This, too, is another utopian unachievable fantasy, which to even start to fulfil would require the government to be able to step in as soon as human nature begins to manifest itself, but is one which has been bought into because through otherwise draconian policies it can begin to be moved towards. This thinking was understandable when crime was at its peak, from which it has since sharply dropped, but as Loader notes, the public due to how the government has responded to the original concern now no longer believes the statistics that say it is has fallen, and the popular media, if not the public themselves, who now seem to be divided over whether prison works or not, still demand endless punitive crackdowns.

As a result, and with the rise of technology, this has inspired the view that all crime is both eminently solvable and that this process can be greatly helped by the latest scientific innovations. It matters little that these innovations, such as the DNA database, are insecure and far from infallible; when the victims' rights are forgotten, or when notable and powerful commentators constantly suggest that they're being forgotten, the potential for injustice through presumed progress greatly increases. Saward, far from being concerned that the DNA database, through holding the data of thousands of completely innocent individuals holds the possibility that someone completely innocent may one day be connected with a crime they didn't commit through potentially unquestionable evidence (and as MrPikeBishop points out in the comments, the Omagh bomb case, which subsequently collapsed with the low carbon copy DNA process being questioned, first identified a 14-year-old boy from Nottingham as prime suspect) is instead convinced that one of the best ways of of preventing, or at least solving crimes of a similar nature to what she suffered is to establish a universal DNA database.

Like with the other victims of crime which pursue change in order to attempt to stop what happened to them from occurring again, it can't be disputed that Saward's heart is in the right place; it's that the method she suggests is strewn with unknowables which could in the long run cause more harm than good. The problems with a universal DNA database are manifold: would such a database even work when there are 60 million profiles on it, without throwing out numerous false positives or identifying dozens of people that would have to be methodically eliminated? Would criminals not attempt to adapt to it by contaminating crime scenes? How would we react if someone was falsely accused and imprisoned on the basis of DNA evidence once we'd reached the universal stage? This is without going into how the 60 million profiles would get onto it in the first place, and whether all those entering the country, whether as tourists or to live here would be required to give samples before they were allowed in.

Saward's argument is also coloured by her view that this would somehow be righting the injustice of the innocent already on the database by adding everyone else that err, also happens to be innocent. This is both a logical fallacy and correcting an injustice with even more injustice, something which should always be resisted. It's also not entirely clear with Saward is actually arguing against a straw man; David Davis released his personal manifesto on Friday, which made clear that he wants the "1 million innocent" on the database removed and the serious criminals left off put on it. There obviously however has to be some sort of compromise on the removal of the data of the innocent, as I've suggested before, because of the undoubted use the database has provided in identifying some of the most serious unsolved cases of rape and murder, such as that of Sally Anne Bowman, whose mother incidentally was another who joined Helen Newlove in putting together a manifesto in oppositon to that of Davis's. Those arrested but never charged should still have their data taken from them to ensure that they are not potential suspects in any unsolved crime, but if no crime is subsequently linked to them after a period of a number of years then the information should be destroyed. This would be relatively easy to achieve, but whether we could trust the police to do so would be another matter.

Some in the comments have questioned Saward's data on those whom have been the victims of sexual attacks, but it's the data on those who have been found guilty through the use of the database which has been directly challenged by GeneWatch, in response to Gordon Brown's recent speech on Liberty which was obviously directed at David Davis but which failed to mention him. Their conclusions were (PDF):

• The figures cited by the Prime Minister refer to an estimate of DNA matches, not solved crimes;
• The reported matches are not actual matches obtained with individuals’ profiles retained on the NDNAD following acquittal or charges being dropped, but are an estimate based on a number of unverifiable assumptions;
• DNA matches are not successful prosecutions and many matches occur with the DNA of individuals who are not the perpetrator of the crime, including victims and passers-by, or are false matches

Saward's arguments are in fact symptomatic of the view that the "criminals" have all the rights and that the victims have none. This has always confused the rights of suspects who are innocent until proven guilty with the rights of those whose name the case is being brought in, but Saward goes one step further than they often do in questioning the right to silence, as she does on her website:

For example, if the police have reason to believe that a person may have driven a few miles over the speed limit, that person is obliged to tell the police where they were at the time of the alleged offence. They have to assist the police; otherwise they can be punished to the same extent as if it were proved they were responsible.

But if that person was suspected of stabbing a young man to death; that person has the right to remain silent. He or she does not have to tell the police where they were – or even provide an alibi. They do not have to assist the police at all and they are not punished for not doing so.

The right not to incriminate yourself is treated by some as a sacrosanct part of our civil liberties. Why?


I'd say that if Saward doesn't understand why that is then she doesn't understand the criminal justice system at all. It's for the prosecution to prove its case, not for the defendant to have to prove his innocence, especially when the state is all powerful and has all the resources at its disposal while the defendant potentially has none. The right to silence is a fundamental part of that.

The thing that rankles most about Saward's campaign and also that of Newlove's is the disingenuousness of their arguments, and especially their personal victim status. It's true that much more could be done for most of the victims of crime, but the answer is not a rebalancing of the system as it is now, but more care before and after trials itself for them. Saward herself is right to be aggrieved at how she was treated in court, but when it comes to Helen Newlove, for whom the CPS, the state and the media at large bent over backwards to help, to claim the same thing is to go beyond what the state can reasonably be expected to provide. Indeed, both expect the state to provide constant safety and protection, something that it simply can't deliver. And fundamentally, Saward's case is flawed from the very beginning with the idea that men rape because they can get away with it. Only the most pathological do so. The others rape either because they can at that moment in time, and don't think of the possibility of getting caught, or do so out of power, which overwhelms any idea that they may be caught. Anger about being a victim is never a good place to come from in changing policy, and when it also makes it more difficult for those opposed to be critical as a result, it increases the possibility of systematic injustice from otherwise good motives. That is why David Davis, or indeed the Green candidate, deserve support and not Jill Saward.

Related post:
Though Cowards Flinch - Outflanking David Davis... to the right

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