Saturday, November 15, 2008 

War on personal freedom, Baby P and weekend links.

Paying for sex to be criminal offence, says the headline, or rather paying for sex with someone "controlled" by someone else is to be made a criminal offence. Ignorance will not be an excuse, and presumably neither will be the person saying they aren't controlled by anyone else before someone hands over their money. This seems to be a part of this government's apparent master plan: first they remove your civil liberties, watch you everywhere you go through the world's largest number of surveillance cameras, capture as many people's DNA and fingerprints as they can and create the world's largest database of such material, creating all the structures necessary for a very modern police-state, ready for any party with such tendencies to take control, then while waiting for that to happen they get bored with just removing political freedom and move on to personal freedom as well. Not only is paying someone to have sex with you going to become a criminal offence, but the government (and the opposition) both want to censor the internet, much like the Australians are apparently planning to do. Meanwhile, the Home Affairs Select Committee suggests banning happy hours, and the Home Office is gearing up to reclassify cannabis from Class C to Class B. Sure, they've let a few concessions through, such as dropping 42 days, mainly because the House of Lords would never have let it through, and scrapping SATs for 14-year-olds, but they carry merrily on their way with the rest. Meanwhile, we're distracted by witch-hunts, first against television presenters and then social workers.

The government's potential "naming and shaming" of ISPs that don't take down offensive material quickly enough they seems like an excellent idea to me. I'll be the first to join up with any ISP that refuses to give in to government censorship, or the one that comes bottom. Just remember, it's all for the children.

Speaking of which, the clamour surrounding Baby P is still undoubtedly the story of the weekend. First the more thoughtful comment: Freedom from Choice and Five Chinese Crackers both target Littlejohn's take, Janice Turner says that "Lurid images and salacious details distance us from suffering by turning tragedy into a modern penny dreadful",Chris asks some questions, Tom Freemania notes the move from Guardian-bashing to welfare-bashing, Catherine Bennett juxtaposes the Jersey non-murder child's home with Baby P, Deborah Orr warns against a rush to judgement, while Sophie Heawood puts the left-wing case for saying that what surrounded Baby P was wrong. Mike Power, married to a social worker, gives his take in response to a comment of mine:

The Maria Colwell case and its aftermath was extremely significant in a way that the present case and, indeed, Climbie, were not. The problems with Climbie (which have been largely underplayed) were largely to do with extreme management dysfunction, partly caused by serious mental health problems, inexperience, together with cultural relativism and inverted racism. Any experienced senior social work manager could have seen what was wrong and sorted it out in an afternoon had they been allowed to.

Most of Laming does nothing to address those issues and in the view of most experienced child protection specialist Laming hasn't saved and will not save a single life.

The real point here, as I have stated before, is that there simply is no story. This case is a little more horrific than usual (although there have been plenty of nasty deaths since Climbie that have never been reported beyond a short piece in the local paper) and it happened in 'loony left' Haringey. Beyond that there is little to distinguish it from many other child killings that happen (on average once every 10 days). It's a moral panic + political opportunism + classic tabloid tub thumping.

I had to laugh when I heard Brown say he will do 'everything in his power to ensure that another innocent child is not tragically killed'.

Yeah, I thought, maybe in Haringey, but certainly not in Iraq or Afghanistan.

From the other side, Peter Hitchens claims that if Baby P's family was middle-class he would have been taken into care (obviously hasn't read the report which states that there was attempts made to do that but the legal threshold for doing so had not been reached, while PDF mentions the rumours that the mother was privately-educated), Dominic Lawson hilariously combines welfare with feral to make familiar points, and Lorraine Kelly, veteran of the worst tabloid comment piece of the weekend award, claims that Baby P's plight should have been obvious to anyone.

The nastiest stuff of the week on Baby P though comes not from commentators but from the readers themselves. Not satisfied with being told that one of the social workers involved is suicidal, they naturally wish to provide the rope:

What you waiting for, you have a chance unlike that little boy!

i AM A GOOD READER OF FACES AND WHEN i LOOK AT THIS WOMEN,SOMETHING TELLS ME SHE HAD NO INTEREST IN HER JOB OR PROTECTING THIS CHILD ONLY IN HER BLOODY WAGES,SHE ALSO SHOULD BE BROUGHT TO TRAIL WITH THE REST OF THIS SICK COUNCIL.FOR THIS TO HAPPEN TWICE IN THE SAME BOROUGH IS UNBIEVABLE,SACKING IS TO GOOD FOR THEM,THEY JUST GO ON WITH THEIR MISERABLE LIVES

well whats stopping you i am sure 99% of the population would buy her a rope you are all a disgrace i bet your children will have a good christmas on the money you earn for doing nothing

GIVE ME HER ADDRESS AND I SHALL POST HER A NICE LONG ROPE TO HANG HERSELF, OR ANYTHING ELSE SHE NEEDS, I AM CERTAIN ME AND FELLOW SUN READERS ALSO THE GENERAL BRITISH PUBLIC WILL BE GENEROUSE WITH OUR DONATIONS, BELIEVE US WE SHALL GLADLY CONTRIBUTE ANYTHING SHE NEEDS TO END HER VILE EXISTENCE..............VILE BITCH LIKE THE BEAST WHO BORE THIS BEAUTIFUL CHILD

There are however a few pleas for reason, including one from someone who claims to know the woman involved:

I know Maria too, she is extremely caring, diligent and competent - how can you judge her without knowing the outcome of any enquiry? Even mass murderers and terrorists get a fair trial. As a social worker myself, I am ready to quit this work where we are 'damned if we do, damned if we don't'. I am not trying in any way to justify or excuse any poor practice, but this witch hunt is an absolute disgrace. What you won't hear no doubt, is about the many children's lives that have been saved or improved by Maria's dedication - the stakes are terribly high in social work but who out there hasn't at some time made a terrible error of judgment - none of you ever injured anyone in a car accident that was your fault? Never made a mistake in a job where you're working 8-7 (no extra pay or time off given or asked for) where every one of your clients is at equally at risk? Shame on you all - I am absolutely devastated at baby P's death but wish his natural father had been as concerned about his beautiful son's welfare during his life as he is now - and wish doctors and police would take more notice of social workers when they express concerns instead of dismissing us as time wasters - believe me, there is more than one side to this absoultely terrible story.

Oh, and there was this:

I think some of you are being a LITTLE harsh! 'Eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth' springs to mind. She DOESN'T deserve to die! Sacking, fined, possibly even jailed or whatever but killing herself wont bring Baby P back! This is a horrible case but the main people to blame are the sick horrible disgusting mother and step dad and the other man. The Social Services are partly to blame BUT they were tricked by the mother. Yes they should of done better but death is a bit extreme

Death is a bit extreme.

Away from all of that, Laurie Penny writes of her meeting with the Poppy Project, Chris (again) imagines himself as George Osborne, Justin discovers that Ed Balls doesn't hate the poor after all, the Heresiarch talks Prince Charles and his desire to be defender of all faiths, Paul Linford celebrates the reversal on the Post Office Account and Matt Foot relates how there is no justice for those brutalised in Genoa during the G8 summit back in 2001.

No contest this week in the worst tabloid comment piece of the weekend, although the The Times' blaming of the welfare state came close, with its sister paper scooping the crown for its emotionally pornographic demand for (no) justice editorial.

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Friday, November 14, 2008 

Land of the rising scum.

Martin Kettle in the Groan notes that none of the media bothered to report some interesting other details from a survey which they did use to show that the public doesn't think much of politicians:

The survey asked the public how much they trusted 17 different professions to tell the truth. Top of the list as usual were family doctors, trusted by 94% of the public, followed by headteachers (83%) and judges (82%). Ministers and MPs indeed trailed far behind, trusted by 27% and 26% respectively - as the red-tops were quick to point out. At the very back of the line, though, came another group, tabloid journalists, who were trusted to tell the truth by a miserable 10% of the population. Yet this particular finding has not been published in any newspaper until now.

Even this, though, only scratches the surface of what this striking survey revealed about public attitudes to the media in general and to the tabloids in particular. Tabloid readers, the survey found, are more likely than the readers of broadsheet papers or of no newspapers at all to believe that standards of conduct in public life are low, are getting worse, and to think that the relevant authorities are not upholding the right rules. Given their exposure to the sort of stories quoted above, perhaps this is not exactly surprising.

What may surprise, though, is the scepticism of readers towards tabloids. The survey asked their opinion of the papers. Do they "do a good job of keeping politicians accountable?" Yes, said 43%. What about "help the public to learn about what is happening in politics?" Not so sure. This time only 31% of readers thought they did.

Then the figures become really dire. "Generally fair in their representation of politicians?" Only 13% thought that applied to the tabloids. "Look for any excuse to tarnish the name of politicians?" A massive 90% agreed with that one. "Focus on negative stories about politics and politicians?" Almost the same, 87%. And finally, "more interested in getting a story than telling the truth?" This time an overwhelming 82% of tabloid readers concurred.


These findings are of course wholly unsurprising and completely accurate. Yet as Kettle goes on to point out, only the likes of the Daily Star defend their coverage on the grounds that it's to give their readers a bit of fun in the morning. The others, as Paul Dacre argued on Sunday, with a straight face claim that their "extensive coverage of public affairs is the glue of democracy". He later went on to say that it was the liberal media and in effect its contempt for the popular press which was affecting its standing:

The problem, I would argue tonight, is that this unrelenting and corrosive drip, drip, drip of criticism of the press does huge harm to our standing in the eyes of the politicians, the regulators, the judges, the public and, most pertinently, I suspect, to newspaper sales.



Unless then we accept that the pernicious liberal media, including the BBC that according to Dacre drips poison about the tabloid press roughly every half-hour, has such a hold on the public imagination, including that of tabloid readers themselves to the extent that they think what they read is nonsense and often inflammatory, it appears that the problem is all Dacre's and his friends' own.

Another example of how the tabloid's extensive coverage of public affairs is the glue of democracy is provided by the Sun's continuing campaign over Baby P. Whether this is today's or tomorrow's leader I'm unsure of, but it really is one of the purest examples of using empty, cynical emotion to in effect demand mob rule that's come along for a while:

HIS bright blue eyes stare out at us beseechingly.

But it’s too late. Nothing can bring back Baby P from the tears and agony that marked his last hours on Earth.

What we CAN do is not rest until those who abandoned him to his fate have paid the price.

What we must also do is demand that Baby P’s killers — his evil mother, her sadistic boyfriend and their paedophile lodger — are locked away for so long that they never see the light of day again.


Perhaps instructive in all of this is that while social services are taking all the blame, the others that were involved in Baby P's case are almost all in the background. While it was mentioned yesterday that the HSS did attempt to take Baby P into care - only for the legal advice to come back saying that the threshold for doing so had not been met - the police also had carried out investigations into his mother and whether there were grounds for her to be charged with abuse. The Crown Prosecution Service also decided that there was not enough evidence for them to do so. This is again despite all the apparent signs with hindsight that now look obvious - the numerous injuries, the two hospital visits, etc etc - all of which is being seized upon to call those involved with him idiots, which is probably around the mildest insults thrown their way.

The Sun complains about the ministers shuffling the letters sent by the whistleblower around, when in fact the concerns raised were directed to the proper channel to consider them, the Commission for Social Care Inspection, who despite being a quango in flux as Mark Easton says, did raise them with HSS, where they were satisfied that the allegations made by Nevres Kemal had either been dealt with or were not as serious as she claimed.

Gordon Brown vows he will do everything in his power to stop another tragedy.

That must mean the sacking of Sharon Shoesmith and every social worker and official involved.

So long as these dangerously complacent people remain in their jobs, no child at risk in Haringey is safe.

Look at the face of Baby P and then — if you haven’t already — please fill in our petition below.


But were these people dangerously complacent or did they simply make terrible mistakes that are going to haunt them from now on? Again we have the appeal to the dead child's face, the plea to sign a petition that will do nothing to stop a similar tragedy from happening, and the whipping up of a storm which is already in danger of causing far more damage than is necessary. Much the same is of the opening of this article with the newly released uncensored version of Baby P's face, so over the top and out of kilter with what it actually shows that it strikes you as unreal:

THIS is Baby P.

A gorgeous, blond-haired, blue-eyed tot with a heart-melting smile.

The Sun is today publishing the first picture ever of the little boy who died in the most tragic circumstances.

In this heart-wrenching photo he gazes up at his photographer in search of the love and affection he was so cruelly denied.

The photo was taken by a childminder as Baby P happily toddled around her kitchen.

Except he isn't smiling, he quite clearly isn't looking at the photographer but off into space and it's only heart-wrenching because the writer wants it to be and because the editor is demanding that this is the line to be taken.

It isn't only the tabloids - I turned off This Week last night because Andrew Neil had abandoned all pretence of impartiality in his summary before introducing of all people, Jon Gaunt, currently blaming the Guardianistas and the metropolitan elite which pays his wages, and politicians and bloggers on all sides are now trying to make hay out of the death of a child - but they're the ones that are acting as they always do without any real regard for the lives of those they're interfering with. Thing is, as circulations decline further, as they surely will, the sensationalism we have now is only likely to get worse. With little else to define them from their competition, their stance on matters like this will grow in importance. The real question has to be though if their readers dislike what the papers do so much, why do they keep buying them? Is it masochism? Is it because they've always bought them, or their parents did? Is it for what else they produce other than their politics? Or do they lie to their interviewers? I as usual don't have an answer. Anne Karpf however provides again what maybe the real target ought to be:

Curiously, most of the frenzied debate this week has not been about the perpetrators of these crimes but about those who supposedly could have prevented them - social workers. Consequently, we know far more about child protection services and their deficiencies than we do about what makes women damage and kill their children or stand by while their partners do so. There is a profound reluctance, it seems, to look beyond the final stages of these children's lives, to try to understand how those who bore ultimate responsibility for their care could have turned into those who ended their lives or were complicit in abusing them.

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Thursday, November 13, 2008 

Nick Davies gets it right again.

On the ruling out of any murder at the Haut de la Garenne care-home on Jersey, Nick Davies called it back in May. Perhaps understandably he's rather pleased with himself in tomorrow's Graun.

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How not to learn the lessons of Baby P's death.

If the circumstances of the death of Baby P are all too depressingly familiar, so too has been the reaction to it. While politicians for the most part, excepting yesterday's tawdry antics and an example we shall come to, have sensibly and quite rightly stayed above the fray, the reaction in certain sections of the press is all the less salubrious for both its predictability and its savageness.

The Sun, to focus on but one paper, is demanding the resignation of the five people critically involved, whether they be the head of Haringey's children's services department, Sharon Shoesmith, who has it be must be stated not done herself or her council any favours, the three social workers, and the paediatrician who examined Baby P two days before he died. Whether anything could have been done to save a child that already had a broken back and six broken ribs at that point is impossible to know. Typically, the paper itself is not demanding the sackings; its "readers" are. In his column in the same paper, Kelvin MacKenzie, quite possibly one of the least qualified individuals to comment, demands to know why the baby wasn't taken away at birth from a:

[woman who] came from a family of drunks, never worked and watched porn all day. Her council house — she had to have one, didn’t she? — stank.

Much the same line is pursued tomorrow by Jon Gaunt, a man who himself spent time in care as a child, who variously blames "an unelected and elected Metropolitan elite [who] impose their warped views and social engineering on our country" while additionally "the ultimate responsibility lies with them [Labour] and the Guardianistas they have created in every section of public life."

Such reactions, along with the blaming of the rise of the underclass, the welfare state, social workers, society and everything else in-between are understandable. The natural reaction when something so shocking and apparently preventable happens is to demand for heads to be severed, blame to apportioned and for it to never happen again. Yet the sad roll call of names where much the same has happened before is undeniable both in its power and the lesson that we can never abolish risk, or prevent individuals determined to harm children from being able to do so. From Dennis O'Neil in 1945, to Maria Colwell, Stephen Meurs, John Auckland, Wayne Brewster, Jasmine Beckford, Kimberly Carlile and the most recently notorious case, Victoria Climbié, all the more haunting for the photograph of the smiling, beautiful little girl without an apparent care in the world that always accompanies the reports that mention her. The NSPCC's page of statistics on child homicide notes that the overall rate of child murders has stayed broadly the same since the 70s; things do not appear to be getting worse. However slightly reassuring that is, and it is a reassurance that also means that despite all the advances and countless reviews since then that things have also not got any better, we ought to try to get things into some sort of a perspective.

This is why asking questions like who will resign for Baby P, as the usually admirable Lynne Featherstone does is not the way to go. The Sun puts it even more coldly: "a price must be paid for his life." This is despite no one now being able to resign for Baby P; the chance to save him has gone. Likewise, pretending that resigning or sacking those responsible is in some way going to bring some sort of legacy from his death is similarly doubtful. The result of a witch-hunt, especially against the social workers, is likely to have the opposite effect: more children taken from families into a care system which often does not merit that very name. On the other hand, the system is currently, like with everything else, so heavily loaded with meeting legal requirements set by lawyers that taking a child into care is fraught with difficulty. In Baby P's case, the review notes that on the 25th of July 2007 (PDF, page 4), almost two weeks before he died, social services were advised "that the threshold for initiating care proceedings was not met." This was despite a police investigation into the mother, and two visits to hospital which concluded it was more than possible that his injuries had been the result of abuse. Ed Balls in his statement yesterday spread the blame across the agencies, and the investigation into child safety in Haringey has been implemented as a result.

The best summation I've found of why what has happened will happen again and what ought to be learned and potentially changed to try to prevent it as best we can was from 5 years ago, before the Laming report was released. Dr Chris Hanvey wrote:

As long as we continue, as a society, to have a deep ambiguity about children, seeing them as angels or villains; so long as we refuse to listen to what we already know from research and so long as we refuse to acknowledge that work in child protection is skilled, highly stressful and requires years of experience; until we all take much greater collective and individual responsibility for the safety of vulnerable children within our own communities, we are unlikely to stop the tide.

No blame was implied, no political accusations thrown, no insults levelled at Guardianistas, just how we ought to examine ourselves. Sadly it seems we are doomed to keep repeating these mistakes.

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Wednesday, November 12, 2008 

A real horror show.

Who with any sense whatsoever would be a social worker? Lambasted for taking children away unnecessarily, demonised when inevitable if horrifying mistakes are made, it must surely rank up there with opting to become a traffic warden and refereeing in the least appealing professions available.

It doesn't help of course when politicians, as well as the media and now message board ranters are in effect baying for blood. David Cameron and Gordon Brown may not have been actively calling or in effect justifying violence against those convicted of the shocking abuse of Baby P as some have today, but their use of a dead child not as a political football, but as a political corpse, as others have already justifiably defined it, was not just unedifying, it was a shaming spectacle.

Cameron opened up reasonably enough at PMQ's with asking the prime minister why the head of Haringey social services had been the one that had conducted the internal inquiry into what had gone wrong. This was perfectly fine, and more than valid a question to bring up. He should have known however that Brown was hardly likely to give a straight answer; he never does. Apart from that though decisions were obviously going to be made today on what further measures were to be taken: the inquiry in full had only just landed on the minister's desk this morning, after the trial itself had finished, as Brown explained. Ed Balls, schools and families minister, has since announced that an inquiry to be conducted by Ofsted, the Commission for Healthcare Audit and Inspection and chief inspector of the constabulary will be undertaken into the safeguarding of children in Haringey. This decision presumably had not been finalised at 12pm this afternoon, otherwise Brown would have mentioned it. In the circumstances, although Brown can be accused of not showing the empathy that perhaps his predecessor might have done, it was hardly a snub.

It was then that all hell broke lose and that both sides failed to realise just what the petty back and forth would look like to the wider country. Cameron's anger, first with the lack of an answer after the second question, coupled with barracking from the Labour MPs, led him to repeatedly slamming his finger down, getting the age of the mother involved wrong (she is 27, not 17 as he said) and finally swiping his notes completely off the dispatch box. For someone trying to claim that he's similar to Barack Obama, who throughout his campaign never appeared to lose his cool, it was a poor performance. His anger might well have been righteous, but it was never going to achieve anything.

Brown for his part was not angry, just detached and by comparison apparently uncaring. This actually probably isn't fair; undoubtedly he does care, he just was never going to win in a battle with a far more accomplished empathetic speaker. His cheap jibe though that Cameron was making a party political point was equally unfair; Cameron may be many things, but he was not at that moment doing that. It was only afterwards, with the two men facing off in an interminable battle of who would back down first, with Cameron asking for an apology and failing to get one, that the whole affair became wholly shabby and distasteful.

Parliament at prime minister's questions is of course always a bear-pit, and it always will be. For all Cameron's original claims that he wanted to end Punch and Judy politics, he's never really attempted anything of the kind. Realising that he was not going to get an answer, or at least not one then, Cameron ought to have moved on. Brown for his part should not, despite being prodded by Cameron over his tactics, have suggested that it was party political. Cameron likewise, although perfectly entitled to ask for an apology, should have again let it go. All while this was going on the barracking by MPs on both sides continued; only the speaker, almost pleading, having to intervene 3 times to silence the cat-calling, emerged with any dignity whatsoever. As Simon Hoggart writes, no one intended for it to turn out the way. Once it had however, both sides should have recognised the damage that was done not just to their respective parties and personal images, but to the further image of Westminster itself and apologised for how it had got out of hand. Instead, as Justin notes, MPs scored points and bloggers likewise did, further deciding who had came out the better. The reality was that no one did. We can and must improve upon this.

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The plot thickens over Qatada.

No surprises whatsoever to learn that the leak to the Sun that Abu Qatada was allegedly plotting to flee to Lebanon or the Middle East appears to have emerged directly from the Home Office:

Today, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission was told reports in the News International newspaper on Monday, claiming Qatada planned to flee to the Lebanon, appeared to be based on a briefing from "within government".

Andrew O'Connor, for the Home Office, told the commission the alleged briefing was "unauthorised" and of "great concern" to home secretary Jacqui Smith.

"If, as it appears, much of the report in Monday's edition of the Sun was based on a briefing from within the government that briefing was unauthorised. That report is of real concern and inquiries are being made," O'Connor said.


It doesn't mention that the briefing appears to have extended beyond just the allegation that Qatada was intending to flee, with yesterday's paper claiming that Omar Bakri Muhammad was directly involved in the supposed "plot" to get him out of Britain.

If Bakri's involvement is part of the evidence being used by the government to revoke Qatada's bail, then it is not part of that which was presented in open court. If it makes part of the secret evidence which is yet to be put before the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, then surely that makes the leak of it to the Sun even more serious. On the other hand, it might have been obtained by the Sun of its own volition: their obsession with Bakri Muhammad despite his exile in Lebanon is cheap and frequently nasty, especially when the paper demands that Muslims condemn his opinions as if he was a mainstream Islamic voice or somehow speaking for them.

Regardless of the leak, the evidence put openly against Qatada to justify the revoking of his bail was incredibly weak, with the main claim that a senior al-Qaida leader, Abu Yayha Al Libi, posted a personal message to Qatada on an "extremist website" the most curious. This appears to be a reference to an 8-minute audiotape released by the al-Fajr media group to the jihadist forums back in July, translation with subtitles on Liveleak, just a day after the first images of Qatada going to the shops during his time allowed out of his house were published. CBS News in their analysis of the tape suggested that it could have been a message to Ayman al-Zawahiri or bin Laden himself, but to make it public over the forums seems a strange thing to do, as would they suggestion that they could visit the battlefield to raise the morale amongst the mujahideen, which could potentially be suicidal. Messages between the leaders of al-Qaida have been intercepted in the past, and there's no reason to believe that even with the potential for them to leak that they would start openly issuing messages to each other across the jihadist forums. It's possible then that it was a message meant to be sent to Qatada, although the tape is vague enough to be anywhere near certain, and if so also suggests that his standing within the highest reaches of al-Qaida is undiminished despite the allegations that he served as a double agent prior to his arrest.

Even if we accept that as fact, and that's jumping to conclusions, there's no evidence to suggest that the message had reached Qatada. He is after all banned from using both mobile phones and the internet, and the government is not suggesting that he has breached those rules, or at least not in open court. Whilst the Daily Mail has alleged he was in contact with a "known terrorist" (Yasser Al-Sirri, who although convicted in absentia in Egypt was cleared on another charge by a court in this country, and was involved in attempts to free Ken Bigley before his execution by the forerunner to al-Qaida in Iraq) who was not on the list of those banned from seeing him, it's difficult to believe with all the security surrounding Qatada, with all his visits having to be approved, that the photographs of them both together are anything especially sinister. Qatada's counsel argued that he had known nothing of the message until it was raised yesterday, and the judge, along with the other accusation made in the open against him, that he had breached the terms of his bail by recording a video of him preaching, with his counsel arguing that all it amounted to was a private talk to his children on the importance of Eid, agreed that neither claim was enough to have his bail revoked. The "secret" evidence against him has yet to be heard. One would imagine that it will have to be far more serious and damning than the above for SIAC to agree to the revoking of his bail.

Equally doubtful is that the government will allow him to leave for a third-country, as his solicitor and sympathisers are apparently looking into. Palestine will not be considered an acceptable destination for obvious reasons, and the chances of any country voluntarily offering him sanctuary, especially when the US government can find no takers for Chinese detainees held at Guantanamo Bay and found not guilty of any offence, are slight to say the least. None of this alters the fact that Qatada's continuing effective detention without charge, with few putting much stock in the House of Lords overturning the decision by the appeal court that he cannot be deported back to Jordan to face trial because the evidence against him was obtained via torture, is wholly unacceptable. As said yesterday, the government needs to make a choice: either build a prosecution case against him and face admitting that he was something of an asset to the security services, as Hamza and Bakri both were to certain extents, or introduce intercept evidence which could help in the bringing of that case. Deportation back to Jordan ought to have been the absolute last resort, not the first.

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Tuesday, November 11, 2008 

Clarence Mitchell bursts Paul Dacre's bubble.

Notable in Dacre's speech on Sunday was the absence of a mention of the name Madeleine McCann. After all, little Maddie has been undoubtedly the biggest story of the last year, and only since the summer and the apparent evaporation of any remaining leads, alongside the unfortunate legal actions launched against all of the tabloid titles, but especially the Express and Star, has apparent gravy train come to an abrupt halt. He did however praise the brilliance of Fleet Street, while condemning those, especially in the malevolent liberal media, who do so much to do down our superb popular press:

Now, in these difficult times, is the time to celebrate that light.

 For all their many imperfections, British papers – which are full of journalists who work extraordinarily long and difficult hours, often on very low salaries – do a pretty good job, which is why I suspect there is much less corruption in this country than in Europe. In a world of Mandelsons hobnobbing with dubious Russian oligarchs on luxury yachts, Campbells making up dossiers on which we went to war, and of a rampant centralising state that year by year seems intent on eroding basic civil liberties, newspapers are the only brakes on the increasingly arrogant – and, in the case of the EU, unaccountable – behaviour of our ruling classes.

...

Let’s be proud of our industry. Let’s stop this drip, drip, drip of self-denigration. Stand up for the illumination at the top of the lamp post.

Yesterday Clarence Mitchell, the spokesman for the McCanns, had his say on this "illumination at the top of the lamp post" at the same Society of Editors conference:

"The British press out there in Portugal, and I'm not singling out any particular publication, were - I'm afraid to say this and I don't like to say this because I'm a former journalist myself - they were lazy," he told the conference.

...

"However, when the British press made inquiries they came up against a stone wall so they resorted to sitting in the local bar, which had the lethal combination of free Wi-Fi and alcohol, and that became the newsroom predictably enough.

"It meant that they then sat every morning just going through whatever had been leaked to the Portuguese papers, 99% of it totally inaccurate lies, 1% I would say distorted or misunderstood through cultural differences in some cases.

"This was then put to me, I would then deny or try to correct it, that would be a quote from me, 'Mitchell's balanced it', that was balanced journalism, and off it went."


We shouldn't however blame these self-same journalists though, as it was, as Mitchell went on, their editors whom were making the demands of them (although kicking the likes of Lori Campbell is surely somewhat deserved):

"I had certain reporters from certain groups almost in tears some mornings saying, 'If you don't give me a front-page splash by 4pm I'm going to be fired," he added.

"I can understand the pressure they are under but when I said 'I can't help you, we honestly haven't got anything of value or anything to warrant that coverage' nevertheless a front page would then duly appear in certain titles."

Mitchell added: "Things that were allegations or suggestions in the Portuguese press were hardened up into absolute fact when they crossed the Channel."


Undoubtedly Mitchell is referring primarily to the Express, which had decided that Madeleine should be the front page story regardless of other news or whether there had been any developments, but the demands being made of hacks was undoubtedly much the same across the "popular" press.

The reason why Dacre dared not mention the McCanns is because the tabloid coverage of her disappearance was a masterclass in what journalism should not be, but what Dacre believes sells: empty, soulless emotional pornography, crass xenophobia, rampant ignorance, offset by leaping to conclusions on the slightest of new information, casual pointing of the finger of blame, and depending on your publication, either knee-jerk defence of the McCanns or equally knee-jerk accusations that they were fully responsible, all due to the fact that they knew this stuff was selling, with very little care, except for the McCanns themselves in some quarters, for what this coverage was doing to real lives and real people. The legal payouts have been chicken-feed to what they most likely made, not necessarily in putting on sales, but in ensuring that the sales stayed mostly on the same level as the year before, which in the current conditions is a major success. And they still honestly try to claim that they have ethics, or morals, or that unelected, unrepresentative judges are more of a threat than they are.

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Man disguised as bird nest attempts escape, news at 11...

It's hard to take seriously the idea that Abu Qatada was somewhere even close to slipping his onerous bail conditions and fleeing to the Middle East, possibly Lebanon. Under his 22-hour a day curfew, he must have been one of the most watched individuals in the country, with doubtless if not MI5 sitting outside his door watching his every move, some similar poor sod from what was Special Branch or the Met doing exactly the same. He wasn't like the individuals on control orders who successfully fled, who were apparently so poorly monitored that it's tempting to suggest that they weren't considered that much of a threat; he is now, with Hamza in Belmarsh and likely to be deported to the United States to serve out the rest of his days in one of their living hell prison facilities, the most well-known and supposedly dangerous Islamic extremist in the country. Losing him would have been unthinkable.

Similarly unthinkable is the supposed idea that Omar Bakri Muhammad was the "mastermind" behind the endeavour. It's interesting of course that both Qatada's re-arrest and now Bakri's role have been leaked to the Sun, the paper which has done the most to exaggerate and overplay the terrorist threat whilst supporting measures such as 90-days detention without charge, around the only newspaper that did so. Views differ massively on Bakri: some agree with his own claim that he's a harmless clown, a loudmouth with only a tiny and dwindling band of supporters, not helped by the revelations in of course, the Sun, that his daughter is a poll dancer with plastic tits paid for by Bakri himself, while others believe that his sects and cells, if successfully closed down, would destroy the majority of the threat overnight. As with most opposing views, the reality is probably somewhere down the middle. Bakri is the almost cuddly jihadist who can be relied upon to make a fool of himself whilst the attention given to him furthers the impression that many Muslims hold similar views, but his groups and followers have in some cases moved on from words into deeds.

The Sun claims that Bakri, in an audio recording you would have to suspect was intercepted by the security services or at least passed on to them, said:

"There are two ways to help (Qatada). One is maybe try to help him against the kuffar (non-believer) to remove all these restrictions. Or by smuggling him outside the country if you can find a way.”

“Try to help him financially or socially – whatever way you can.”

It wouldn't be surprising if this was as far as the supposed plot to get Qatada out of the country might have went. After all, Qatada's release on bail, even on such restrictive conditions, was a huge embarrassment to the government. We still don't have any idea just why Qatada can't be prosecuted when there is such a copious amount of material available on him that could be used against him; additionally, like with Hamza and Bakri, we also just don't know how far security service involvement with him personally went. Allegations have been openly made that Qatada was a double agent, hence perhaps why we have been so determined to deport him and be rid of rather than chance the possibility of such evidence coming out in our rather more transparent justice system than Jordan's equivalent.

In reality, Qatada's sending back to prison solves absolutely nothing except removing the embarrassment of more photographs appearing in the tabloids of Qatada merrily going out to the shop to buy kitchen roll and Diet Coke. It keeps him out of the public eye, but the chances of the House of Lords overturning the Court of Appeal's ruling that he can't be sent to Jordan to stand trial because the evidence against him is tainted by torture are minuscule at best, as they should be. He can't be kept locked indefinitely forever, however much that would be what both the government and the security services would like; either they need to come clean over his role prior to the breaking down of the unwritten covenant where he and other extremist preachers were allowed free reign as long as Britain itself was not a target, or they need to introduce intercept evidence which would help in the bringing of a prosecution. However vile a person is, or how reprehensible their views are, keeping them either in prison without charge or under a control order without charge indefinitely is just as offensive as the possibility of his escape. A decision one way or the other has got to be made.

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Monday, November 10, 2008 

The Daily Mail in the flesh.

Andrew Neil once wrote that if you want to know what Rupert Murdoch thinks, you should read the Sun's editorials. Not the Times', the Sun's; Rupert doesn't really do subtlety. It's much the same with Paul Dacre. The Daily Mail after all couldn't really be a person writ large, could it? There's too many contradictions, too much foaming hatred, so much casual cynicism combined with values that went out with rationing. No one could be like that, could they?

Dacre's latest extended utterances prove drastically otherwise. Having previously, and somewhat hilariously, delivered the Cudlipp lecture, the late great editor that Dacre doesn't deserve to even lick the boots of, railing against the "subsidariat" and the BBC, he was given the lectern at the Society of Editors bash. Clocking in at just over 7,500 words, it covers more or less everything that Dacre and by extension the Daily Mail loathes. First though he goes through what originally inspired him:

Hugh Cudlipp’s “Publish and Be Damned”, and Arthur Christiansen’s “Headlines All My Life” were my much-thumbed bibles. All those glorious memoirs by James Cameron, that brilliant reporter, were my text books.

And yet you still turned into the man you are today.

Before we've even got anywhere, he's straight in with the out and out bullshit:

I am, however, delighted, over the years, to have made my own small contribution to the chattering classes’ dyspepsia with the Rothermere press – but then no day is too busy or too short not to find time to tweak the noses of the liberalocracy which effectively run Britain.



Ah yes, the "liberalocracy" which effectively runs Britain. Fact of the matter is, like with Murdoch, no government could ever be right-wing enough to satisfy Dacre or the Mail, just as there'll probably never be a government left-wing enough to satisfy me.

How Dacre became the man he is today:

At university, I edited the student newspaper. I’m afraid I took a product that looked like the then Times on Prozac and turned it into a raucous version of Cudlipp’s Mirror complete, I shudder to admit, with Page 3 girl students whom I dubbed “Leeds Lovelies”. 

We mounted an undercover investigation, complete with photographers, into seemingly respectable pubs that were putting on strip shows. Family entertainment it wasn’t.

His hypocrisy then was already fully in action. Leeds Lovelies on one page, investigation into strippers doing the same thing on the next. Brilliant!

Open sentimental twaddle about the old Sunday Express follows:

So what was the editorial formula identified originally by the brilliant Scottish editor John Gordon and followed with ruthless will by John Junor? Firstly, the paper never, ever, forgot who its readers were and what interested them and their families. Secondly, it told everything through the prism of people. 

Page 3 of the Sunday Express said it all. The lead article under the title “Meeting People” was an interview - not with the kind of half-baked trollop who passes as a celebrity these days, but with, say, the mother of a newly chosen British Nobel Prize winner.

 Next to it was a large cartoon by Giles whose genius for clean, gloriously warm family humour is matched today only by the Mail’s magnificent Mac. Why this genre of cartooning - which combines superb draftsmanship with a timeless universal humour that often contains great truths - is dying out is a subject for another speech. Anyway, underneath was the “You the Lawyer” column addressing the problems of every day life such as fencing disputes and dog bites. What paper today would have such a low-key, non-newsy page 3. Yet all human life was on that page.

All human life, as long as it was suitably middle class, obviously.

Skipping a whole load of nonsense about the good ol' days, how columnists these days don't know their born, how it's all the fault of the state and some justified poking at Richard Desmond, he gets to the start of his main points.

Donning my hat as Chairman of the PCC’s Editors’ Code Committee, I would like to talk to you a little about where we are on regulation and press freedom issues. 

About 18 months ago, I, Les Hinton of News International and Murdoch MacLennan of the Telegraph, had dinner with the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.

How very cosy. Ignoring the first two concerns he raised, which were reasonably noble, it's his last two which are the interesting ones:

Thirdly, there were the very serious financial implications for newspapers of the Conditional Fee Arrangement, the no win, no fee legislation. Introduced as a well-intentioned measure to help the poor have access to the courts, it was being ruthlessly exploited by unscrupulous lawyers who were ramping up their costs in media cases. Publishers were being faced with huge bills, sometimes running into millions, to defend even the most simple, clear-cut cases.

 Costs in CFA cases, as many of you here know, can be almost infinite with lawyers entitled to “success fees” of up to 100% on top of their actual bills. This gives them a positive financial incentive to take relatively straight-forward cases, worth just a few thousand pounds, and run them as long as possible. Adding insult to injury, CFA claimants can take out very expensive ATE (after the event) insurance policies to protect themselves against costs. If they win, the paper has to pay the claimant’s premium, but if they lose - and this is the cynicism of it all – the insurer rarely enforces the charges because the claimant invariably cannot afford to pay. 



Let me give you an example: Martyn Jones, an utterly inconsequential MP, sued the Mail on Sunday over their claim that he had sworn at a Commons official. The Mail on Sunday believed it had rock-solid witnesses and decided to fight the case. In the event, they lost and were ordered to pay £5,000 in damages. The MP’s lawyers claimed costs of £388,000 – solicitor’s costs of £68,000, plus 100% success fees, barrister’s costs of £63,000, plus 100% success fees, VAT and libel insurance of £68,000. Associated’s costs were £136,000 making a total of £520,000 costs in a case that awarded damages of just £5,000 in a dispute over a simple matter of fact.

 Can it really be right for a QC in a libel case to be paid £7,000 for a day in court whilst the same QC, prosecuting or defending a serious case at the Old Bailey, may receive less than £600 a day – less than a tenth?

Perhaps predictably, Dacre leaves some crucial facts out of this recounting of the libel case involving Jones. The trial was held in front of a jury, although Justice Eady was the judge in charge, and it reached a majority verdict in favour of Jones. The Mail on Sunday claimed that he had told a House of Commons security guard to "fuck off"; Jones claimed that he had in fact said to the security guard that "I don't give a shit what you are, you should know who MPs are." The jury sided with Jones, and presumably also with the claim from Jones's lawyers that there were "at least a dozen untrue assertions" made which had been "cranked up, spiced up and sexed up" so that it became a "grotesque distortion" of what really happened. Perhaps if the MoS had settled it might not have had to pay such costs, hmm? In any event, what Dacre is describing is extraordinarily rare. As has been well documented, only the rich and famous can usually afford to bring libel cases, with there being very few law firms that will contest cases on a no-win no-fee basis. Jones was lucky; the MoS was not. Boo hoo, isn't the world awful?

The result is that today, newspapers – even wealthy ones like the Mail – think long and hard before contesting actions, even if they know they are in the right, for fear of the ruinous financial implications. For the provincial and local press, such actions are now out of the question. Instead, they stump up some cash, money they can’t afford, to settle as quickly as possible, to avoid court actions – which, if they were to lose, could, in some case, close them. Some justice!



Dacre wilfully exaggerates. Even costs of £520,000 to the Mail group are relative peanuts, and that was about as most extreme a case as you can imagine. The reality is that most who think they have been treated unfairly go to the Press Complaints Commission - where their treatment is often not much better.

The fourth issue we raised with Gordon Brown was a truly frightening amendment to the Data Protection Act, winding its way through Parliament, under which journalists faced being jailed for two years for illicitly obtaining personal information such as ex-directory telephone numbers or an individual’s gas bills or medical records. This legislation would have made Britain the only country in the free world to jail journalists and could have had a considerable chilling effect on good journalism.

 The Prime Minister – I don’t think it is breaking confidences to reveal – was hugely sympathetic to the industry’s case and promised to do what he could to help.

 Over the coming months and battles ahead, Mr Brown was totally true to his word. Whatever our individual newspapers’ views are of the Prime Minister – and the Mail is pretty tough on him - we should, as an industry, acknowledge that, to date, he has been a great friend of press freedom. 



Again, Dacre exaggerates completely. The amendment to the DPA was to stop the sale to journalists via private detectives of information obtained from companies' and sometimes government databases. This information was and is hardly ever, if ever, used to uncover genuine scandals, and even if it was, the journalists in those cases would be protected as usual under a public interest defence. What the DPA amendment would have helped put a lid on was the casual obtaining of information on anyone who crosses the media, almost always either celebrities or those accused of crimes outside the realm of the political sphere. At the trial of Stephen Whittamore, the prosecution alleged that some of the material they delivered to journalists was on two actresses then in EastEnders, the family of Ricky Tomlinson, and a former Big Brother contestant. Quite a chilling effect the amendment would have had on good journalism, I'm sure you'll agree.

In any event, the government quickly backed down, especially in the face of private lobbying by Dacre, Hinton and MacLennan, as Dacre goes on to boast:

Thirdly, there is to be action on the “scandalous” greed of CFA lawyers. That adjective is not mine, by the way, but Justice Minister’s Jack Straw’s in a recent speech on the subject. For following Number 10’s intervention all those months ago, there have been many constructive meetings between the industry and the Ministry of Justice on what to do about CFA.

A few weeks ago, I, Rebekah Wade and Murdoch MacLennan saw Jack Straw who assured us that, in the next few months, he is set to unveil proposals to reform CFA, including capping lawyers’ fees.

...

It was agreed that the Data Protection Act should be amended so that journalists would have the right to seek out protected information if they had a “reasonable belief” that their actions were in the public interest.

 And, more pertinently, the Act was amended so that the jailing clause cannot now be implemented unless the Secretary of State seeks approval from Parliament to activate it.



That they already had that "reasonable belief" obviously didn't matter. With the jailing clause unimplemented, the industry can carry on in exactly the way it was doing before.

So that is where we are. The industry has been warned. We must make sure our house in order. Under the auspices of PressBoF, we have produced a guidance note on DPA that has been sent to every paper in Britain. Now it is up to all of us to ensure that our journalists are complying with the Act. At Associated, we are holding seminars on the subject and have written compliance with the Act into our employment contracts. 

At the Editors Code Committee, we are considering whether the current provisions of the Code on data protection and our Guidance Notes, as well as the wording in the Editor’s Codebook, can be strengthened.

Why is it that I don't believe a single word of this? Probably because it was the Mail itself, without even including the MoS, that made the most use of Whittamore, with over 952 transactions. Dacre must have known and sanctioned every single one of them, and then he is one of those responsible for updating the current PCC code! The same newspaper which rages against misuse of government data and the loss of it broke the law in numerous instances and has got away with it. No wonder Dacre is so triumphant.

The parts on Justice Eady now come into view:

But there is one remaining threat to press freedom that I suspect may prove far more dangerous to our industry than all the issues I have just discussed.

 Put to one side the United Nations’ recent attack on Britain’s disgracefully repressive libel laws that have made London the libel capital of the world – something that should be a bitter source of shame for our judicial system. Concentrate instead on how inexorably, and insidiously, the British Press is having a privacy law imposed on it, which – apart from allowing the corrupt and the crooked to sleep easily in their beds – is, I would argue, undermining the ability of mass-circulation newspapers to sell newspapers in an ever more difficult market.



Here then is Dacre's thesis. He doesn't really care, when it comes down to it, about who he and his friends in the media expose in three-in-a-bed sex romps; what he cares about is that the exposing of the rich and the famous is in his view what makes people buy newspapers. Without it, the industry will be further damaged, and the state will have to step in. To suggest this is nonsense would be to give it too much respect: it is crap of the highest order. The Sunday tabloid press, which delivers the scandals and the sex in spades, is already falling of a cliff circulation wise. By contrast, the broadsheets, both daily and weekly are holding up fairly well. The tabloids have to face up to the fact that their readers are increasingly being lost to the internet, where no holes whatsoever are barred. The broadsheets on the other hand are doing OK because they rely on their quality: something which the tabloids simply do not provide, and that includes Dacre's paper, which most agree is the best tabloid regardless of the politics. Would a privacy law further heighten the drops? Probably, but it probably wouldn't make much difference.

In any event, we are not having a privacy law developed in front of our eyes - yet. That might depend on the verdict in the upcoming trial involving Sienna Miller and the Big Pictures photo agency. Just to emphasise how the tabloids don't learn, the Sun and News of the World today settled with her over the publication of nude photographs, awarding £35,000 plus costs, or a pittance as it is to News Corp. Miller has been serially offended against: the Star paid her £15,000 in September over similar photographs and the Sun and News of the World paid her £37,500 last December over, you guessed it, naked photographs. Some will hardly be predisposed to Miller because of her alleged behaviour, but surely the right not to be effectively stalked by paparazzi to the extent where you fear for your life, which is what Miller has been, is one which the law should recognise.

This law is not coming from Parliament – no, that would smack of democracy – but from the arrogant and amoral judgements – words I use very deliberately – of one man. 

I am referring, of course, to Justice David Eady who has, again and again, under the privacy clause of the Human Rights Act, found against newspapers and their age-old freedom to expose the moral shortcomings of those in high places. 



Two cases in particular underline this threat. 

Two years ago, Justice Eady ruled that a cuckolded husband couldn’t sell his story to the press about another married man – a wealthy sporting celebrity – who had seduced his wife. 

The judge was worried about the effect of the revelations on the celebrity’s wife. Now I agree that any distress caused to innocent parties is regrettable but exactly the same worries could be expressed about the relatives of any individual who transgressed which, if followed to its logical conclusion, would mean that nobody could be condemned for wrongdoing. 

But the judge – in an unashamed reversal of centuries of moral and social thinking – placed the rights of the adulterer above society’s age-old belief that adultery should be condemned.



Because Dacre cannot dispute Eady's rulings in a legal sense, he instead turns to morals to try to traduce him. The problem with this is obvious - the country has moved on. Unless hypocrisy is involved, or those involved are mega famous, no one really cares any more. We still disapprove of adultery, but we don't think those involved should be shamed just because they're famous. Dacre however thinks this is exactly the way it should be, that shame is what newspapers are meant to provide, but it isn't. They're supposed to inform, educate, and entertain. Shaming celebrities does none of those things.

The other problem is that the Mail is hypocrisy on stilts itself. The paper is wholly immoral - it thinks nothing of accusing innocent people of terrible crimes with no evidence, such as Robert Murat, who unsurprisingly doesn't warrant a mention in this speech, not to mention Colin Stagg. While it defended the McCanns to the hilt, because they were "its people", the second that Fiona MacKeown came to public attention in a similar plight she was smeared, her home broken into and pictures taken of her dead daughter's bedroom, and attacked by the same columnists who cried fake tears of sympathy for Kate McCann. It ran the most vicious and mendacious campaign possible against the MMR vaccine, now responsible for increased cases of measles up and down the country. It breaks the law with impunity, as we have seen. And then it imagines that it has the right to deliver lectures on what is and what is not moral, as Dacre goes on to do:

Recently, of course, the very same Justice Eady effectively ruled that it’s perfectly acceptable for the multi-millionaire head of a multi-billion sport that is followed by countless young people to pay five women £2,500 to take part in acts of unimaginable sexual depravity with him. 

The judge found for Max Mosley because he had not engaged in a “sick Nazi orgy” as the News of the World contested, though for the life of me that seems an almost surreally pedantic logic as some of the participants were dressed in military-style uniform. Mosley was issuing commands in German while one prostitute pretended to pick lice from his hair, a second fellated him and a third caned his backside until blood was drawn. 



Now most people would consider such activities to be perverted, depraved, the very abrogation of civilised behaviour of which the law is supposed to be the safeguard. Not Justice Eady. To him such behaviour was merely “unconventional”. 

Nor in his mind was there anything wrong in a man of such wealth using his money to exploit women in this way. Would he feel the same way, I wonder, if one of those women had been his wife or daughter? 

But what is most worrying about Justice Eady’s decisions is that he is ruling that - when it comes to morality - the law in Britain is now effectively neutral, which is why I accuse him, in his judgments, of being “amoral".

Dacre then is the only one who can decide what is and what is not moral. The whole point of the Mosley case was that the News of the World claimed it was a Nazi orgy; it was not, as Eady painstakingly pointed out. If it had been a Nazi orgy, the News of the World would have had a public interest defence; it wasn't, so it didn't. Fact is, Dacre thinks that what goes on in other people's bedrooms is his business; it isn't, and it is no business of the government's either. If Dacre really thinks that some mild BSDM is "unimaginable sexual depravity" he has a very very poor imagination. As for his comments about the way Mosley "exploited" the women who were more than willing to take part and who subsequently testified for his defence, with him suggesting that Eady might have been more concerned if they had included a daughter or his wife, that says far more about Dacre's own insecurity than it does about anything else.

In the sporting celebrity case, he rejected the idea that adultery was a proper cause for public condemnation. 

Instead, he declared that because family breakdown was now commonplace, there was a strong argument for “not holding forth about adultery” or, in other words, attaching no greater inherent worth to marriage than to any other lifestyle choice. 

Thus no moral delineation was to be made between marriage and those who would destroy it, between victim and victimiser, between right and wrong.



We're talking about three people's private affairs here, not the breakdown of society as we know it. One person's infidelity is not about to bring this country down; Dacre's sophistry has to be seen to be believed.

In the Mosley case, the judge is ruling that there is no public interest in revealing a public figure’s involvement in acts of depravity.

 What the judge loftily calls the “new rights-based jurisprudence” of the Human Rights Act seems to be ruling out any such thing as public standards of morality and decency, and the right of newspapers to report on digressions from those standards.

Except Mosley was not a public figure. He was not a hypocrite. He was just someone who the News of the Screws could make money out of. They couldn't care about the morals involved, as you'd expect; that was the excuse, just as it is here with Dacre. Or perhaps it isn't; maybe he really cares about morals whilst being completely immoral himself.

But most worrying is that when it comes to suppressing media freedom, the good Justice Eady is seemingly ubiquitous.... 

It was he who was going to preside in Tesco’s libel case against the Guardian, which was, in the event, recently settled out of court. 

It was the same Justice Eady who, in Lord Browne versus the Mail on Sunday, ruled that BP’s shareholders had the right to know that Browne had lied to the court – but did not have the right to know details of his conversations with his boyfriend, despite the paper’s case that they had serious public-interest implications. 

Again, it was Eady who found in favour of a Canadian folk singer called Loreena McKennitt, who had objected to the publication of a book about her by a former adviser, Niema Ash. Ms McKennitt did not claim that the book was in any way untrue, merely that it infringed her right to privacy. Never mind Ms Ash’s right to freedom of expression.

Except Eady was more than fair to the Guardian, despite his reputation. Browne's case is difficult, but in the main he came down on the side of the media. In the case of McKennitt, Eady's original ruling was then backed by both the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords. Hardly all the blame can be placed on his shoulders in that instance.

And it is Eady who, almost unnoticed here, has the distinction of having provoked the US Congress – in what’s dubbed the Libel Tourism Bill – to consider making English libel judgments unenforceable in America. This follows the judge’s decision to allow a Saudi banker to sue a New York author in the London courts even though she hadn’t published her book in Britain. Not for the first time, it seems that our colonial cousins can teach us a thing or two. 

But surely the greatest scandal is that while London boasts scores of eminent judges, one man is given a virtual monopoly of all cases against the media enabling him to bring in a privacy law by the back door.

Dacre makes about his only salient point here. This was a disgraceful decision by Eady, but is all about our libel laws, not the unwritten laws on privacy. The best course of action would be a re-writing of both: removing only the rich and famous from being able to sue for libel, whilst ensuring London cannot be used to silence critics worldwide, whilst protecting individual privacy against press intrusion. Neither though is about to happen, as, although newspapers complain about both, for the most part they are thoroughly happy with the situation. Their belief in freedom only extends as far as their wallets.

English Common Law is the collective wisdom of many different judges over the ages. The freedom of the press, I would argue, is far too important to be left to the somewhat desiccated values of a single judge who clearly has an animus against the popular press and the right of people to freedom of expression.

This is another fair enough point, but it's not as if Eady is purely making it up as he's going along: he's drawing extensively on past rulings and interpreting Articles 8 and 10 of the HRA; if he wasn't, he would be subject to far more criticism than just from those concerned with libel tourism and tabloid editors.

I personally would rather have never heard of Max Mosley and the squalid purgatory he inhabits. It is the others I care about: the crooks, the liars, the cheats, the rich and the corrupt sheltering behind a law of privacy being created by an unaccountable judge. 

If Gordon Brown wanted to force a privacy law, he would have to set out a bill, arguing his case in both Houses of Parliament, withstand public scrutiny and win a series of votes. Now, thanks to the wretched Human Rights Act, one Judge with a subjective and highly relativist moral sense can do the same with a stroke of his pen. 



All of those adjectives, apart from corrupt, could be applied to Dacre just as much as they could those he attacks. He describes what Gordon Brown would have to go through, but he doesn't mention another trial he'd have to pass: the opprobrium of the media, and that is not covered by public scrutiny. Put simply, the unaccountable media with all its power would not accept it, and they would ensure it would never pass, even though their actions have led to its effective creation. Here exposed then is why the likes of the Mail and Sun so hate the HRA; not because it's a criminals' or terrorists' charter, but because it directly affects their business models. They have to remember that the HRA was passed by parliament, that they had the opportunity to oppose it then and failed, and that it was the HRA that has helped to establish the Reynolds defence.

All this has huge implications for newspapers and, I would argue, for society. Since time immemorial public shaming has been a vital element in defending the parameters of what are considered acceptable standards of social behaviour, helping ensure that citizens – rich and poor – adhere to them for the good of the greater community. For hundreds of years, the press has played a role in that process. It has the freedom to identify those who have offended public standards of decency – the very standards its readers believe in – and hold the transgressors up to public condemnation. If their readers don’t agree with the defence of such values, they would not buy those papers in such huge numbers.



This may as well be Dacre's justification for the witch-hunt against Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand. It doesn't matter that the Mail has its own individual view of what public standards of decency are, as long as people keep buying the papers that justifies support. This is abject nonsense - people buy the newspaper they do for numerous reasons, not just for its political or moral outlook. This is simply the fig-leaf which those who think they have a right to decide what's right and what's wrong cover themselves with.

Put another way, if mass-circulation newspapers, which, of course, also devote considerable space to reporting and analysis of public affairs, don’t have the freedom to write about scandal, I doubt whether they will retain their mass circulations with the obvious worrying implications for the democratic process.



This is nothing more than blackmail covered with eye-watering cynicism. The same person who goes on to lionise the press and how wonderful it is is here suggesting that the gutter press needs scandal to survive. Nice little free press you've got here, be a shame if something was to happen to it. The proles need scandal, whilst we provide them with the finest news coverage in the world at the same time. What isn't there to like?!

Now some revile a moralising media. Others, such as myself, believe it is the duty of the media to take an ethical stand.

Did Paul Dacre just claim to have ethics? No, seriously, Dacre's taking an ethical stand? If he ever genuinely did, the ethics would snap beneath him in an instant. Not satisfied with descending into parody, Dacre then further suggests just how completely mad he is:

Why does not half an hour go by that the high priests of the subsidariat, the BBC, can’t resist a snide reference to the popular press, again blissfully oblivious that all too often they are following agendas set by those very popular newspapers whose readers pay their salaries.

Yes Paul, the BBC is always sneering at the "popular press". Please, keep taking the medicine.

He warms to this further theme by attacking Flat Earth News and Nick Davies without so much as mentioning the name of either:

Again, blissfully oblivious to the need for self-criticism of their own papers – the sine qua non of such pages is, by and large, that the liberal media can do little wrong while the large-circulation press is invariably scurrilous, malign and beyond all salvation. 

There was, of course, that recent book that savaged the behaviour of virtually every national newspaper. The book, which began with a presumption of guilt, was itself a pretty sloppy piece of journalism, full of half-truths, anonymous sources, gossip and urban myths presented as facts, and the very selective reporting that it accused papers of employing. And heaven forbid that its author should have observed the basic journalistic nicety of checking those facts with the parties concerned.

Could it possibly be because the liberal media is that which is also the least complained about, the least likely to have to settle damages out of court, and the least likely to be taken to court, and when it is, it's also more likely to win, as the Guardian did twice during the 90s? The tabloid press meanwhile continues to show itself invariably up as it is, as during the Mosley trial: unaccountable, lazy, disreputable, and downright nasty. It would be nice also if Dacre bothered to bring up examples of just where Davies was wrong in Flat Earth News, although I suspect it's because the book dedicated a whole chapter to the Mail, whilst the Mail itself has mentioned it twice, and that was prior to actual publication, even while the "liberal" press which he so disdains discussed and argued about its findings at some length. Half of this is because the tabloid press presents itself as infallible; the broadsheet media does not.



Fair enough. Newspapers should be constantly criticised. If you dish it, you should take it with bells on. The problem, I would argue tonight, is that this unrelenting and corrosive drip, drip, drip of criticism of the press does huge harm to our standing in the eyes of the politicians, the regulators, the judges, the public and, most pertinently, I suspect, to newspaper sales.

 In good times, such a poisoning of the well is unhelpful, to say the least. Today, with large parts of our industry fighting to stay alive, it is damnably, unforgivably and depressingly damaging. 

I am not a Jeremiah. I passionately believe that Britain has the best newspapers in the world and – indeed, our papers today are as good as they’ve ever been. Nostalgia be damned.

Gosh, anyone feel deja vu after Hazel Blears' similar rave last week? It couldn't be that the tabloid press gets everything it deserves could it, when it demands accountability at the BBC over authorised comedy pranks and then no one resigns when dozens of stories about Robert Murat result in huge payouts? In Dacre's eyes though there's nothing wrong with it, and after all, who are we to argue? He's the Daily Mail in the flesh, and the Daily Mail can never be wrong.

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In the shitter with Gary Glitter.

Paedophiles, as we know, are the incarnation of evil. Where once murderers and rapists could be satisfied that their crimes were the ones that would guarantee them the most exposure in the following morning's press, the condemnation and public fury descending firmly down onto their shoulders, these days they have to share the mantle with closeted onanists being prosecuted for downloading images of child abuse, not to mention the cuddly neighbourhood jihadists, who can be relied upon for providing something for the average person to get angry about on a slow news day.

The dream then for the tabloid press is when fame meets underage sex. In the 90s we had OJ Simpson, who despite being acquitted of murdering his wife and her friend has not worked since and is now in the slammer on a separate offence. Michael Jackson then upped the ante, but was also acquitted, with his career also stalling as a result. Gary Glitter, or Paul Gadd, as he was born, has instead broken the mould: not just was he convicted of possessing child pornography, he then took the classic, almost cliched child abuser pilgrimage to Thailand, via Cambodia, where he was swiftly convicted of sharing his bed with two children. Forced to return to the United Kingdom, he will now almost certainly be held in reserve, much like Omar Bakri Muhammad is, for when the Sun doesn't have much news and needs something to fire up its base.

It turns out then that those jokers over at the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance had set as part of GCSE music coursework the task of "composing a song that relies on tempo and/or style for its effect." The paper recommended some songs that the student could listen to for inspiration: alongside Freddie and the Dreamers, Queen, Gloria Gaynor, Dexy's Midnight Runners and Meatloaf, there's Mr Gadd himself, with "I'm the leader of the gang (I am)". Perhaps not the most astute choice in the circumstances, but not one surely that warrants such frothing outrage. It's not as if the paper had offered Glitter's song as the only example of what was required, after all; and as far as tempo and/or style goes, it's hard not to admit that Glitter knew how to use both, even if the music was far from original or that anyone would now listen to it outside of a wave of nostalgia.

You could also accept that recommending one of Glitter's songs as an example increases the possibility of him receiving extra royalties, and no one likes the idea of a unrepentant paedophile receiving funds from the general public. That though really ought to be as far as it goes. We don't ostracize the likes of Roman Polanski, despite his conviction for the sexual assault of a 13-year-old, although the fact that he was both a survivor of the Holocaust and had his first wife murdered by the Manson family does mean he's a far more sympathetic character, or boycott his films. We don't regard Nabakov as unacceptable or his novel Lolita as obscene because of its content, and we don't campaign against the use of Wagner's music, despite his anti-semitism and subsequent appropriation by the Nazis. Phil Spector, if eventually convicted of murder, seems unlikely to have his work blacklisted either. Why then does the "recommending" of Glitter's music to anyone inspire such revulsion and irrationality?


He said: “He’s a convicted paedophile jailed for sexually abusing kids. It’s completely inappropriate to recommend him as listening material.

“Boys and girls of 15 or 16 who select this song will go straight to the internet to find Glitter’s music. I dread to think what they may find searching online for him.”


Err, his music, plenty of jokes about him and information involving his convictions, perhaps? Searching for Glitter isn't suddenly going to lead to a treasure trove of category five child pornography, and besides, we're talking about 15 or 16-year-olds here. If they don't already know about Gadd and his record then they must have lived on another planet.

The Deputy Head, who asked not to be named in case his daughter is penalised in the exam, added: “A national exam board should have the basic common sense not to recommend past works of a paedophile to teenagers.”

There goes Polanski then. Like with homosexuality, we don't know for obvious reasons how many past authors or artists we now treasure may have been sexually attracted to children: allegations have been made for example against J.M. Barrie, although nothing has ever been proved in that case, as well as Lewis Carroll. Why though should what someone did ever affect what they also produced, or rule it out as suitable material to be studied? Why for instance should Chris Langham be ostracised or ridiculed from ever acting again because of his conviction for possession of child pornography? It's as if we've decided abitrarily what offences are unforgivable, or rather, some in the media have, and those that have made mistakes have no possibility of making amends.

But Dr Michele Elliot – director of children’s charity Kidscape – insisted the papers be reissued.

She said: “AQA need to get Glitter off there. It sends totally the wrong message to paedophiles’ victims. Thousands of children take this exam. If they buy his song it could be a nice earner for him.

“One way to show we dislike his abuse of children is to cut off the money he lives on. It’s in the hands of AQA to do that.”


The idea that kids are going to go out there and instantly buy his stuff because a GCSE paper recommends they do is nonsense. Our history teacher recommended we read Mein Kampf, which we respectively declined to do. What they might do is go and search and see if they can get the song for free from somewhere, or even more likely, go and search YouTube for it. Failing that, they might ask their parents if they have compilation CDs with some of his stuff on it. How also is presenting one of Glitter's songs as an example for how to construct their own sending "totally the wrong message to paedophiles' victims"?

Anti-child abuse campaigners Shy Keenan and Sara Payne called use of Glitter’s song “disgusting”.

They said in a statement: “This stonking great child molester should crawl back under the rock he came from, not be celebrated for his music. We’ll campaign to have any reference to him taken out.”


No one's celebrating his music; it's being used as an example for one piece of coursework. Do you people have problems with comprehension?

You'd be forgiven then for thinking that listening to one of Glitter's songs would be enough for the average child to be overcome by the paedo-waves, turning them more susceptible in just 3 minutes. The reaction and the Sun's part in it any event swiftly resulted, predictably, in AQA removing the song from the paper, something that will doubtless cost them a ridiculous amount of money to erase a non-mistake because a few jumped-up self-righteous morons imagine that we'd be better off if we could throw some people and some of their work straight down the memory hole. Remember, this isn't the British Isles, it's the paedoph-isles. Or something.

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