Saturday, December 06, 2008 

Weekend links.

As might be expected, the overwhelming topic in the weekend's comment pages is Shannon Matthews. As also might be expected, the Matthews case is obviously further proof of why the welfare state desperately needs reform; it doesn't matter, for instance, that her latest partner had been working, or that taking extreme cases make for extremely bad policy changes, however much the writers bleat that they accept it isn't the norm: the norm will be affected as a result. Similarly potentially hypocritical is the apparent fact that Matthews had no morals because she had so many children from so many different partners; her crime is not that she had sex with different men, but that she got pregnant by them. After all, six or seven sexual partners by the age of 33 is by modern standards most likely below average; I knew girls at 18 that were already approaching or had reached that total, to say nothing of the young lotharios of the opposite sex. The same papers which would be horrified if Matthews had aborted them are the ones disgusted by their very existence, or rather by the fact they are the ones having to pay for them.

But enough of my own incoherent sort-of riposte. Lorraine Kelly and Amanda Platell make the case set-out above, and Platell predictably attacks the Guardian for the crime of headlining its profile of Matthews as only a "domestic drifter". More accurately presumably would have been "chav scum with a face like a bag of nails that couldn't keep her filthy legs shut". Libby Purves and Polly T provide something approaching a defence, while Deborah Orr, as a commenter points out, reaches into her "Sociology for Beginners" handbook for ways to pretentiously label Matthews.

Away from all that, Matthew Parris wonders if the very speed at which we know can learn things potentially threatens our liberty, Unity takes a closer look at the benefits lie-detector story, 5cc examines the Christmas is being banned stories from this year so far, Back Towards the Locus sees that the Indian police are considering using a "truth serum" on the only surviving terrorist from the Mumbai attacks, while Paulie compares Johanne Kaschke with Maria Gatland.

Worst tabloid article of the weekend can only go to the Scum's leader column, which has immediately leapt at blaming the social workers in another case of a baby being killed by a parent. The same paper deceived by Karen Matthews demands that all those "who have failed children must go". We'll be waiting a long time before the journalists on that paper admit to getting anything wrong ever.

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12/06/2008 10:20:00 PM | | | links to this post

Friday, December 05, 2008 

Mother of all moronic headlines.

Prize for the worst headline of the year must undoubtedly go to the Mirror, via 5cc:

How in fuck's name did no one on the paper manage not to notice that rather than describing Karen Matthews as "pure evil", their sentence actually suggests that it's her offspring that are?

Then again, considering the humbug that's descended from today's papers, especially from the Sun, the Mirror's crimes against the English language are probably the least of it. As a correspondent to the Guardian's letters pages noted, the same journalists that failed to see through Karen Matthews' lies and deceptions are the same ones that have been leading the witch-hunt against the Haringey social workers. The Sun even has the audacity to blame social services in this case, even when it was their £50,000 reward that Matthews was after, having succeeded in manipulating them more than any other media outlet. As Polly Toynbee notes:

Interestingly, the Sun accuses social workers of failing to detect the elaborate lies of Baby P's mother or the men living in the house, who hid in a trench in the garden when officials called. Yet in the Matthews case, Sun reporters were even more gullible. They put up the £50,000 reward money to find Karen Matthews' "little princess". They noted a message scrawled on Shannon's wall that she wanted to go and live with her real father, without unearthing the true story of her home life. Lousy social workers they would make - and lousy reporters too.

Quite. As said yesterday, no one emerges from this well, and Mr Eugenides has a decent post up critical of the hacks on all papers. Rather than introspection, the blame game has started up all over again.

Update: the Heresiarch in the comments disagrees:

Nice try. But "of" here is not indicating a possessive genitive, but rather appositional, qualifying the noun "mother". Thus, KM is also a mother "of 33 years", and a mother "of low moral character", without either of those being her offspring.


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12/05/2008 11:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Solidarity, brothers!

One of the great untruths about the internet when it comes to libel is that more or less anything goes, and that it's fairly easy to get away with saying the most outrageous things about absolutely anyone. This is only the case when you get a great lumbering bulk of an individual or company weigh in, disgusting enough people that a Spartacus-like uprising manages to take place. It happened with Usmanov, when this blog amongst others was threatened by Schillings, resulting in the material which Usmanov had wanted to be squashed being spread like wildfire.

It'd be nice if something similar now occurred in defence of Dave Osler, Alex Hilton and John Gray, all of whom are being targeted by Johanna Kaschke, who is, to put it mildly, a fascinating character. The trouble began when allegations arose of Kaschke's links to the Baader-Meinhof group, links which she vehemently denies. Far more interesting though is Kaschke's political nymphomania. Prior to April 2007, Kaschke was a member of the Labour party, and on the shortlist to be the party's candidate at the next election for the seat of Bethnal Green and Bow, currently held by George Galloway. Whether it was, as the East London Advertiser reports, their highlighting of Labour attempting to change the law to defeat a campaigner in the High Court over public housing, or that she only received one vote, as Dave Osler suggests is unclear. What is known is that Kaschke didn't stay long in Gorgeous George's organisation: she quickly shifted to one of the various Communist Party sects. Unsatisfied by her shift to the far left, she then forgave Labour and got back together with the party, before finally seeing the light and shifting to the right, settling on becoming a Conservative activist, seen earlier in the year with none other than Boris Johnson. Kaschke appears to have undergone a changing of political colours which sometimes takes place over a lifetime within the space of under a year.

Kaschke also seems to be rather precious about her own blogging output being so much as quoted by others, so instead we'll have to make do with just linking to it and quoting what she has said on other people's blogs. On her MySpace blog, for instance, she criticises George Galloway for being litigious, without any apparent trace of irony. Over on John Gray's original post on Ms Kaschke, she manages to contradict herself within a sentence:

I do not want you write anything about me anymore, I shall not comment about the ridiculous content of your shit blog, so just take it off. Its really ridiculous that you slate a fellow union member. you are an arshole.

She goes on:

He cheapskate, it may have escaped your non existing attention that Dave Osler has removed his blog connecting me with Baader-Meinhof, because he pays attention to his legal obligations, which is something I cannot say about you. I am asking you to remove the Baader-Meihof logo and name in connection with my name for the last time now before legal action may commence against you.

Her own internal contradictions don't however seem to bother her too much. Back in April last year she moaned to the ELA about how Labour had been "hijacked by a bunch of ultra-conservatives". She now happily links to amongst others, such ultra-conservative organisations as the Taxpayers' Alliance and the Libertarian Alliance. Indeed, Kaschke's rather strange political shiftings and what they might mean led to one of her complaints, after she was described in Dave Osler's comments as "one cherry short of a Schwarzwalderkirschtorte", which is the German, I believe, for bat-shit crazy.

One can only hope for a happy outcome. In the meantime, I think we can all agree that Kaschke ought to examine the precedent set by Arkell vs Pressdram.

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12/05/2008 11:19:00 PM | | | links to this post

Thursday, December 04, 2008 

The European Court of Human Rights rides to the rescue, again.

It's indicative of how disjointed the debate in this country often is on crime and punishment that it's taken the European Court of Human Rights to tell us that the retention of the fingerprints, cellular samples and DNA profiles of those never charged or convicted of any crime is not just unwarranted and untenable but also immoral. The House of Lords, which usually acquits itself fairly well on such matters, rejected the appeal by the two men from Sheffield with little of its usual flair or insight. The ECHR's unanimous decision by 17 judges that the policy breaches Article 8 of our own HRA could hardly be more authoritative.

The difficulty with the keeping of such profiles has always been that no one argues with the potential that the DNA database has for solving crimes where justice has previously not been done. The case of Mark Dixie, to mention just one example, who was arrested after a disturbance in a pub and had his saliva and fingerprints taken as a result, led to his being convicted of the murder of Sally Anne Bowman, a case which might have otherwise remained in limbo. There is still more than justification, I feel, for all those arrested to provide samples which can then be checked against unsolved crimes. The question is what, if there are then no matches, should be done if no charges are brought or after a certain length of time has elapsed with the person not re-offending.

The review which the Home Office is having to set-up to provide an answer to the court, due to report back in March, might well begin to provide some answers. It ought, for example, to be fairly easy to remove the data of those who are either not charged or who are subsequently found not guilty from the database once the full facts become known, just as information from those under 16 ought to be dealt with in an entirely different matter. Yet as Afua Hirsch writes, the database and systems used are disparate and confused, where it can be impossible to learn whether simple requests for the destruction of the material held have actually been met. Likewise, with the information that is apparently held on the database, it ought to now be fairly easy to contact those who have their information held who have never been charged or subsequently acquitted and ask them whether they wish for it to be destroyed, or whether they have no problems with it being kept. Again, with the general incompetence that this government has involving both databases and the retention of information, it's impossible to imagine this happening.

Like with the way it has conducted itself on many other issues involving civil liberties, the government and the police have wanted to create an almost all encompassing database by relative stealth. The only individuals, for instance, to have advocated a full database of everyone's details have either been victims of crime or certain honest individual senior police officers and judges. The change to taking samples from everyone, whether they were charged or not, was the way of getting around a huge row which the government wasn't going to be about to have. This compromise kept everyone apart from Liberty and the Henry Porters of this world relatively happy, until they themselves had the misfortune to be arrested or come into contact with the police and they themselves were subject to the data harvesting, which we are informed even Damian Green underwent.

Recent developments in any event ought to have knocked the idea of the all encompassing database on the head: techniques are now used to match DNA to relatives rather than individuals, and with 33% of those under 35 having a criminal record outside of motoring offences, it's only a matter of time before such a database will have coverage of 80 to 100% of the population. Even less reason then for every innocent individual to have their personal samples stored.

If the government was anywhere near where it ought to be on such matters, it could adopt Germany's current model on the holding of samples: samples are destroyed if they are no longer required for criminal proceedings, those on the database are reappraised every 10 years to see if they are still relevant, and only federal state investigators rather than ordinary police forces have access. Instead, if the government decides not to try to legislate its way out its mess, and even that would be subject to challenge, it will probably grudgingly try to implement the more haphazard approach identified above. All we have to look forward to now are the screams from the Sun of unelected European judges interfering with our laws, yet again...

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12/04/2008 11:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Some last words on Karen Matthews.

Evil, as it is, is an overused and generally meaningless word. Even when used to described psychopaths and their crimes, where no remorse is shown and where none is forthcoming, empathy being a completely foreign concept which they have never experienced, it fails because it is a catch-all, because it cannot even begin to truly explain why someone, even in those circumstances, could do what they did and live with themselves, let alone with others around them.

It's therefore even less than helpful to use it to describe Karen Matthews, as Detective Superintendent Andy Brennan did today in what even if printed in the tabloids would appear hyperbolic. Matthews real crime, after all, was not abuse, although the apparent drugging of her daughter Shannon with the tranquilliser tamazepam on at least three occasions prior to her "abduction" might well indicate that and could well have been happening at a lower-level (or equally that Shannon herself had problems sleeping and was given it by her parents without consulting a doctor), but deception. All the more galling for everyone involved is that Matthews seems to have been able to turn her tears on and off like a tap, a consummate actor that could play people far above the level that most were ready to give her credit for. There were the indications, of course, and now with additional hindsight they will be all the more apparent, but Matthews more or less convinced everyone: the media, even if some sections of it hardly went out of their way and hardly hid their snobbery; the police, half the reason why Brennan doubtless described Matthews in the way he did, he himself being deceived by her; and indeed this blogger, who got his apology in early for monstering Allison Pearson over her criticism of Matthews' parenting.

The coverage in the press tomorrow will be doubtless all the more bitter, personal and hysterical because of how they themselves were fooled, although already some are claiming they moderated their coverage for fear of falling into "stereotypes", i.e. suggesting it was all Matthews' fault for acting like a stray bitch in heat and having so many different partners while daring to live on a council estate which the Sun, that bastion of working-class conciousness and pride, described as "like Beirut, only worse". The Grauniad, not known for mass working-class readership, had to do something approaching a more balanced view.

I wrote around the time that the press got bored with the idea that the McCanns were innocent bourgeois salts of the earth abroad that if it subsequently turned out that they themselves were involved in Madeleine's disappearance that the fury and hatred directed at them would be possibly beyond anything seen before, because of how they had been played, and while the coverage did subsequently turn, as the libel settlements have shown, none of the criticism which they faced, outside of the Express and Star and online forums, reached the contempt which some had for Matthews before anyone knew what had happened to Shannon. Some of that bile we have instead witnessed directed at those involved in the Baby P case, where "decent mums" without irony on social-networking sites discussed how they would torture his mother to death.

Should we take anything else from the Shannon Matthews case, apart from having our own perceptions and immediate reactions pulled out of joint, our trust in others' apparent grief and playing to the cameras made more circumspect and potentially cynical? If nothing else, we ought to at least take note of the way the Dewsbury estate pulled together in a way which those that talk about Britain being broken and how welfare dependency breeds idleness and fecklessness would not have expected: they searched high and low, held collections, distributed posters, taxi drivers waived fees and helped those searching get around and regardless of their effort, will almost certainly be tarred with the same brush as Matthews and Donovan now will be. They were duped like everyone else, or put their concerns to one side as even they could not imagine someone sinking so low. Evil was not involved, but introspection on all sides ought to be the order of the day.

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12/04/2008 11:58:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Gregg's diagram.

Via Bleeding Heart Show, have a fantastic explanatory diagram from Paul Gregg's welfare report, which he's rather more accurately rechristened "scrounger processing":

Don't know about you, but this has truly enlightened me to the merits of the government's intent to extend lie detector tests. We can hook Professor Gregg up to one and see if even he can tell us what the gibbering fuck it's supposed to represent and/or mean.

Then again, Gregg is an appropriate name for someone tasked with selling the benefits of, err, benefit reform, considering that most of those re-entering the workplace at the moment have a choice of not working and working at one of the ubiquitous sandwich shops from hell.

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12/04/2008 11:57:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, December 03, 2008 

New Labour in rude decline.

Perhaps the government had the Queen herself in mind when it limited this year's parliamentary legislation to just 12 bills, leaving Liz to expel just below 700 words in the yearly parade of inanity, tradition, and as the Queen inexorably ages, insanity of getting her to dress in full ridiculous regalia to read line after line of jargon written on goatskin vellum. On the one hand, you have to admire her refusal to start reading it in a funny voice, or break wind or belch after the bills she doesn't think much of, such is the onerous and ludicrous nature of the state opening of parliament; then again, perhaps if you'd lived in the lap of luxury for your entire life, only having to make the occasional trip to meet Johnny Foreigner in-between state banquets and shooting small/and or large animals unable to defend themselves, you'd put up with the occasional indignity as well.

In any case, this latest Queen's speech, due to the paucity of any real eye-catching initiatives, perhaps lays bear what has driven New Labour since its establishment better than any pretentious newspaper article or even book attempting to explain their success. While the economy boomed, and especially up until the Iraq war, most managed to either shut out New Labour's worst social and illiberal excesses, or they were helpfully covered by education and health reform bills which came as thick and fast as the crime ones. This time round, with the government boasting that its main priority will be dealing with the busting economy, and with the focus on the public services perhaps rightfully jettisoned to actually allow the reforms that have been put in place to take root, although a NHS constitution is proposed, the vindictiveness and general unpleasant nature of the crime, welfare and citizenship bills stick out to a far greater extent.

The main criticism being thrown at the government, as it always is at those coming towards a general election, is that it has run out of ideas. This is not the case in this instance: New Labour has ideas, it's just that they're epitomised by their intellectual poverty. You would have thought for instance that the first recession since the early 90s would be a bad time to start out on the most "radical" and punitive welfare reform of New Labour's three terms. You don't cut the safety net when a far greater number are either jumping or being pushed, unless of course you intend to keep the rise in benefit payments down to make up for your lackadaisical and far too late gestures at making those who prospered during the boom pay their fair share. Instead we have James Purnell, who has never had a job outside of wonkery and a short stint at the BBC, insisting that New Labour is rude health and that a recession is the perfect time to "increase the help" to those who need it to find work. This "increasing of the help" is the line which the government has taken, intended to suggest that it won't be cutting benefits or abandoning anyone or making them do unpleasant things such as unpaid work if they're useless enough not to be able to find any.

Then again, you shouldn't really have expected much else from a government who employed an investment banker who boasted he knew nothing about welfare prior to writing a report on it (not entirely true: he begged for a state subsidy of £1.2 billion over the Channel Tunnel, which is roughly 10% of the annual incapacity benefit bill) and which isn't willing to admit that its proposals were based on the preposition that the number of jobs available would continue to increase. The other fatal flaw is that it's completely uncertain whether these plans will actually result in any overall savings, due to how the government intends for the private and voluntary sector to pick up the slack, paying them for every individual they manage to get into a job. Then, just to add the cherry on the cake, it comes up with such obviously barmy and offensive ideas as how single mothers should be preparing to return to work as soon as their child hits the ripe old age of 1; obviously caring for the baby comes second to attending interminable meetings at the local JobCentrePlus (sic). If you thought that was bad, then extending lie detector tests across the country after their apparent success in trials, all to weed out the fraudsters that cost the Treasury far far less than those who avoid their taxes really ought to convince you of how a Labour government is intent on betraying those it is meant to represent. Similarly, it doesn't matter that proper polygraph tests are often no better at detecting whether someone is lying than by chance, and that is after decades of research and developments, ones based on voice alone are considered reliable enough to be used to dock benefits from people often already anxiety-ridden or depressed. Some might suggest that if it's good enough for the dolescum, why can't politicians be permanently hooked up to the same machines in the public interest? Couldn't that potentially save us far more in the long run than any harassing of some of the most vulnerable in society?

Much of this isn't being pursued out of anything as noble as sorting out a system which certainly does have its problems and which can be abused, but rather because Brown is intent on continuing the doomed Blair agenda of at least gaining the right-wing tabloids' acquiescence by being as right-wing socially and on criminal justice as the party can manage without setting off mass internal protest. Crucially, this has recently coalesced with the feminists remaining in the party, resulting in the almost farcical reforms on prostitution, where someone who fails to determine adequately whether the person they're paying for sex is controlled for another person's gain can be charged and potentially convicted of rape. This coalition of opportunity was never more accurately described than by john b:

I’m especially impressed/depressed by the bit where they effectively admit that government policy on prostitution is based on the Venn intersection between Julie Bindel and Nick Griffin. That’s basically a summary of the current lot’s policy on everything, isn’t it? - if you can find something so bloody stupid that gibbering rightwingers *and* gibbering Trots think it’s a good idea, they’ll promote it.

It isn't just that though which makes you despair of the other crime policies outlined in the speech, but instead the government's apparent determination to stamp out almost anything that might resemble the citizenry daring to enjoy themselves. Hence lap-dancing clubs, something truly making people up and down the country rise up and demand change, will be reclassified as sex establishments, same as sex shops and sex cinemas (which don't exist, to the best of my knowledge), and so increasing the numbers that will oppose them opening up, just as the same individuals oppose any change in their area regardless of what it is. Likewise, local authorities will have the power to ban cheap drink promotions, anyone selling alcohol will need to sign a now compulsory code of conduct, while measures to further clamp down on anyone drinking in public or underage will be introduced. As usual, there is no inclination to look to why we have such an apparent drinking problem or binge culture, which might well pose some unwelcome questions about quality of life, working hours and wage slavery; instead just roll out the bans, the higher fines and the new powers. That in a recession some might well think the government ought to lighten the burden and even encourage you not to sink in a depression akin to the economic one seems to be anathema; instead it's time to attack all the bugbears of the rightwing press which only simmer during the boom but explode in indignation during a bust.

So it also is on the introduction of rules towards gaining citizenship. No longer will it simply be enough for you to show a rudimentary understanding of English, know enough about the country to outwit some of the contestants on the Weakest Link and pledge allegiance to our unelected monarch; unless you want to wait an extra two years, you'll have to perform voluntary work as well. Paying tax and not breaking the law it seems are no longer enough; they have to show they really want to enter our glorious multicultural society where all are welcome and no one is discriminated against by err, having to jump through as many hoops as the most jaded official can come up with. No one seems to have an idea what this voluntary work will be: it can't be picking up litter or cleaning off graffiti, as that's what those who can't find a job are going to do, equally taking that job off those newly having to declare that they are on "Community Payback", who have already also taken that off those paid by the council to do it.

This then is New Labour in apparent rude health. Instead it's a party exposed, something long overdue, as lacking in any rigour and exhausted by its own long-term policy manoeuvres, reduced to just a husk of its former self, its true nature fundamentally apparent. This could well be the last Queen's speech before a general election. It ought to be Labour's last. The sad thing is that the Conservatives will only offer even worse.

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12/03/2008 11:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

Tuesday, December 02, 2008 

From Stalinesque to Kafkaesque.

While opposition politicians talk of "Stalinesque" arrests and newspapers suddenly decide we're living in a police state, not helped admittedly by a Home Secretary with an apparent tin ear and a police force that wouldn't know subtlety if it shot it 7 times in the head, a genuinely Kafkaesque farce has been continuing concerning someone not as obviously deserving of protection as Damian Green.

Abu Qatada has then been sent back to jail, not for breaching his bail conditions, and not because there was any actual evidence that he was going to breach them, but because secret evidence which Qatada and his lawyers could neither see nor challenge suggested that due to a change in circumstances the chance that he might attempt to abscond had increased.

To suggest that the decision is baffling is to put it mildly. None of the evidence which the Home Office presented in open court in front of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission came close to convincing the commission that Qatada was either about to abscond or that he had breached his bail conditions. Indeed, despite presenting such diverse "evidence" as the fact that Qatada had recorded his children a message on the importance of Eid, had mp3 players, memory cards, video tapes and computer discs in his possession, and that a senior member of al-Qaida had recorded an audio-tape addressing a sheikh on the state of the jihad in Afghanistan, which also called if possible for the sheikh to come and inspire the mujahideen on the front line, the Home Secretary herself, or those acting for her, accepted that Qatada had not breached his bail conditions.

Qatada then finds himself back in prison due to evidence which he has not been informed of, cannot challenge and which in any event only increased the risk that he might attempt to abscond. If nothing else, it's an indictment of the police and security services that despite the imposition of some of the most severe bail restrictions of recent times, with Qatada tagged and only allowed to leave his house for 2 hours a day at set times, doubtless followed during that time and with his house and calls bugged, they still couldn't guarantee that they would be able to track him down were he to attempt to escape or someone to attempt to help him.

Interestingly enough, especially considering the on-going outcry over the arrest of Green, the taking back into custody of Qatada was punctuated by leaks to the Sun, presumably from the Home Office, first of Qatada's renewed detention and then the allegation that Omar Bakri Muhammad was, rather less credibly, "masterminding the plot" to get Qatada out of the UK and to Lebanon, where Muhammad has lived since his presence here was ruled to be not conducive to the public good. As the "evidence" involving Bakri was not given in open court, it either made up part of the case heard in secret, or was just the complete and utter nonsense which the paper often prints about Bakri. While we're hardly likely to become aware whether it was used in the secret sessions, if it was that's a potentially far more serious breach of security than anything that Green is currently alleged to have done.

Qatada finds himself then in utter limbo. Unable to return to Jordan where his trial was tainted by torture, facing the possibility of two further appeals against that decision, both to the Lords and the ECHR, regardless of which way the verdict goes, although it's very unlikely that either will rule against the precedent set first by Chahal vs the UK, which established that those at risk of torture in their home state could not be deported, and recently reaffirmed by Saadi vs Italy, in which the UK intervened, he finds himself back in prison despite never being charged with any offence in this country. The government continues to claim that he poses a "significant threat to national security", yet he has no way of proving the opposite, with his appeal for Norman Kember to be released from the clutches of his abductors in Iraq, hardly the actions of a true takfiri, completely discarded. In the event that he finds a third country willing to take him, it seems unlikely that the government would actually let him leave. He seems destined to spend a few more years yet in a maximum security prison cell, at taxpayers' expense, when if the government could be bothered to attempt to build a criminal case against him, or heaven forfend, make intercept evidence admissible to increase the possibilities of doing just that, the whole mess of attempting to deport him could be brought to a close. The reality is that whilst we are not a police state, for some of those who reside in this country our government is determined to make it as much like one as possible. While everyone screams for justice for Green however, those trapped inside the control order system, not to mention Qatada, continue to suffer.

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12/02/2008 11:17:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Tracking tabloid hypocrisy.

The thing about arguing against the excesses of the gutter press is often that those they target are little more pleasant than the papers themselves. Even when you consider the utter hypocrisy of the tabloids attacking Paul Burrell for making money out of his relationship with Princess Diana, something they've been doing for over two decades, there's little doubt that going from the princess's rock to helming reality series' in the US and Australia and promoting "Royal Butler" wine is somewhat plumbing the depths. That doesn't however mean that you should be allowed to get away with printing such trash as "BURRELL: I HAD SEX WITH DIANA" by paying his brother-in-law to "remember" conversations they had 15 years ago, and then fail to allow the man himself to deny such scurrilous allegations.

Much the same is the case with another bastion of good taste, Simon Cowell. There's nothing quite like making a good amount of your yearly wage out of humiliating those who have the temerity to believe that they have something resembling a talent - which, after all, is conspicuous in its absence in Cowell himself. There has been at least one recent case of someone who auditioned in front of Cowell subsequently committing suicide, although the woman in that instance was apparently more "obsessed" with another female judge. Nonetheless, however much of an arrogant git Cowell might be, he has the right like everyone else to a private life. Hence the apparent revelation that a "tracking device" was attached to his car, in a letter sent around to media organisations by his lawyers Carter-Fuck, is another sign of the kind of desperation which is still afflicting the tabloids in the media environment.

Paul Dacre, of course, just a couple of weeks back told us that "[U]nder the auspices of PressBoF, we have produced a guidance note on DPA [Data Protection Act] that has been sent to every paper in Britain." Fat lot of good that obviously did. In the same speech Dacre boasted about how he, along with representatives from the Telegraph and News International had successfully lobbied the government to drop the threat of journalists being jailed for obtaining information via deception, i.e. using private detectives as almost all the press instutitions in this country had to get information from government databases. Tracking devices are just as illegal as getting the likes of Stephen Whittamore to break the law for you to track the activities of celebrities and their relatives. It would be nice for Paul Dacre to explain how the use of such a device would be in the public interest, and how and why the journalist responsible for attempting to spy on Cowell shouldn't lose his job as a result.

It is after all the same newspapers responsible for such intrusion into private lives that so rail against the state doing exactly that. The ones currently screaming blue murder over the arrest of Damian Green and how the arrest of an opposition politician means we are living in a police state, but who when not fulminating against the government think nothing of indulging in almost identical practices to that of the police and security services just to be able to be ahead of the game when it comes to the celebrity exclusives which in Dacre's terms now provide the press with the means to be able to report on politics at all. Take away the scandal, he more or less argued, and you can forget their contribution to our democracy entirely. Nick Davies in Flat Earth News (criticised by Dacre) argued that the Whittamore case had came very close to bringing down the entire edifice of the media's "dark arts", and that it was only continuing now under far more cover. Doubtless then the discovery of the "tracking device" on Cowell's car will probably give them further pause for thought, at least for a while. Then they'll be back to harassing celebrities for our amusement.

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12/02/2008 10:14:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, December 01, 2008 

The finest press in the world.

ARE THEY BRITISH?*

*No.

ARE WE GOING TO APOLOGISE FOR SUGGESTING UP TO 7 OF THEM WERE?*

*No.

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12/01/2008 11:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

News of the Screws in telling lies shocker.

The Press Complaints Commission adjudication into the News of the World's super-splash back in June, headlined "BURRELL: I HAD SEX WITH DIANA" is another wonderful insight into the world of Sunday tabloid journalism, if not tabloid journalism in general.

A classic story of one man's word against someone else's, Burrell in making the complaint accepted that the PCC could not rule on whether the report was accurate or not. Instead, he complained that the newspaper had not contacted him to put the allegations against him. The Screws argued firstly that it feared Burrell would attempt to get an injunction to stop publication, which is the latest excuse for not putting the claims to the person about to be drawn into a firestorm, and secondly that Burrell was a "self-confessed and notorious liar."

That tells you how much the paper cared about the actual veracity of the claim. If Burrell's such a notorious liar, why should we believe the claims of his brother-in-law about a conversation the two had 15 years ago? The Screws claimed that it had the backing of an "anonymous source", as well as the backing also of Burrell's brother-in-law's son, both of whom had signed affadavits. This though was irrelevant to actually putting the allegations to the person in question, who, as the PCC ruled, should have had the opportunity to deny such prominent claims against him, with the possibility that readers would have been misled into believing he accepted the allegations by there not being any denial.

The entire story was one which the like of the News of the Screws dream of. Completely impossible to prove, and also completely impossible to disprove, while being sensational and completely lacking in any integrity whatsoever. Who after all cares if Burrell had been having sex with Princess Diana, or indeed he hadn't? The only people who do would have been Diana herself (and possibly her sons, who have in the past made clear their distaste for the necromancy the papers practice), who is still very much dead, and Burrell, already disgraced for admitting to lying to the Diana inquest, meaning the paper could say whatever the hell it liked. The News of the Screws after all has never ever been about journalism or investigations; its number one priority is to make Mr Murdoch pots of money, which it still does. Anyone who gets caught in the crossfire is completely inconsequential, as this ruling will be, just as the collapse of the trials involving the "fake sheikh" and the recent victory by Max Mosley were. The ends always justify the means, and until the PCC can do more than just force newspapers to print their adjudications, they will keep on having complete contempt for the self-regulatory code they signed up to.

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12/01/2008 11:58:00 PM | | | links to this post

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