Wednesday, December 31, 2008 

Playing dead with wingnuts.

Do you know what those dastardly Palestinians are doing now? They're only pretending to be injured or dead! David Frum (he came up with the term "Axis of Evil") quotes Barry Rubin:

And the casualties are disproportionate: Hamas has arranged it that way. If necessary, sympathetic photographers take pictures of children who pretend to be injured, and once they are published in Western newspapers these claims become fact.

Rubin of course has absolutely no evidence whatsoever for such a claim, and even if it was true, Western newspapers are unable to verify the facts because Israel isn't allowing any foreign or Israeli journalists into Gaza. Here for example is a child just pretending to be seriously injured:

While here's one of Lama Hamdan pretending to be dead while her family bury her:

Back in reality, al-Jazeera has footage of what it's like to be right next to an Israeli missile strike:


While Flying Rodent has a comprehensive round-up of the various torturous justifications for Israel's action.

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Best music of 2008 part 2 / 16 best albums of 2008.

16. The Young Knives - Superabundance

Having been Mercury nominated for their debut, the Young Knives were always likely to face a "difficult" second album; having failed to breach the mainstream, they went with the good old concept of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", and while Superabundance is not as stripped back as Voices of Animals and Men was, the quality especially of the singles was as good as not better. The real highlight though was "Counters", quite possibly the most upbeat and happy song about committing suicide that has ever been written, complete with dog barks.

The Young Knives - Counters


15. Benga - Diary of an Afro Warrior

With dubstep making its major breakthrough as a genre with Burial's nomination for the Mercury prize showcasing the "downtempo" crowd, Benga catered for the rave crew with an album which along with the works of Skream is some of the best that it has to offer. "Night" was the crossover smash, but "26 Basslines" is the one that has delivered for those with a more acquired taste.

Benga - 26 Basslines

14. These New Puritans - Beat Pyramid

Although 2008 has been far from a seminal year for music, These New Puritans along with a few other bands on this list were doing their best to buck the trend. Clocking in at just half an hour, Beat Pyramid is a whirlwind which if you blink you might miss it, but alongside the experimentalism which permeates it is the utter brilliance of "Elvis", the superb "Swords of Truth", and lyrics about Michael Barrymore masturbating in the suburbs of Milton Keynes.

These New Puritans - Elvis

13. Johnny Foreigner - Waited Up Til It Was Light

2008 saw a revival in indie-pop breeziness which Johnny Foreigner were at the forefront of. Featuring male and female call and response type vocals, their songs may have not been about much in particular but sometimes they don't have to be, such is the catchiness and brilliance of the hooks on offer. "DJs Get Doubts" served as one of the few downtempo by comparison numbers, while single "Salt, Pepper and Spinderalla" and "Eyes Wide Terrified" with its great big riff after the breakdown showed the further potential they undoubtedly have.

Johnny Foreigner - DJs Get Doubts


12. Late of the Pier - Fantasy Black Channel

Another of the dance music influenced indie bands to have emerged this year, along with Friendly Fires, Late of the Pier made the wise decision to get in Erol Alkan to produce. While he scored a miss with his work with the Long Blondes, who sadly broke up after their guitarist and song-writer suffered a stroke, his knob-twiddling with LotP was perfectly judged. "Space and the Woods" and "Focker" were obvious stand-outs, but it was the older "Bathroom Gurgle" which still packed them in with its stand-out brilliance. Where they'll go from here is anyone's guess, but Fantasy Black Channel is still one of the year's finest albums.

Late of the Pier - Focker

11. British Sea Power - Do You Like Rock Music?

When it's as exuberant and extrovert as parts of British Sea Power's ouerve is, while always providing introspection such as "Canvey Island", it's almost impossible not to. While their debut is still probably their best work, the decision to work with Efrim Menuck of GY!BE and A Silver Mt Zion fame at his studio in Canada, as well as with GY!BE's producer undoubtedly coloured it, and not just with Efrim's dog's barks being audible on "No Lucifer", which he also provided an alternative mix for. There is no getting away from the absolute stand-out, the single "Waving Flags", which I rather overlooked for yesterday's best song of the year. How many other bands would write a paean to the drinking prowess of the Eastern Europeans moving here to work and turn it into a hit?

British Sea Power - No Lucifer (Efrim Menuck Mix) (No Lucifer B-Side)

10. Fuck Buttons - Street Horrrsing

It wasn't the greatest year for post-rock, an genre that does seem to have finally run out of steam, with A Silver Mt Zion's average at best 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons, Errors' debut and Mogwai's The Hawk is Howling the best other efforts, but Street Horrrsing, if indeed it can be classified as post-rock beat them all. Combining the best of post-rock with pure noise, hardcore screaming buried under static and synthesisers and the sheer beauty and clearness which gradually builds into the deafening crescendos which seem familiar on even the first listen, Fuck Buttons more than punched above their weight.

Fuck Buttons - Sweet Love for Planet Earth

9. Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles

As indeed did Crystal Castles. Their brand of music simply shouldn't work: glitches, bleeps, beats and 8-bit core combined with Alice Glass's shrieks and screams, all designed to only appeal to the nerds that have long occupied their rather insular scene. Instead the glorious technicolour of the music when all combined together produced a crossover hit that no one expected, lest of all Crystal Castles themselves. Again, it's difficult to see how they'll progress, but that's for another day.

Crystal Castles - Xxzxcuzx Me

8. Los Campesinos! - We Are Beautiful We Are Doomed / Hold on Now, Youngster!

In a year in which Guns 'N' Roses finally released Chinese Democracy, the fruit of 14 years of labour, Los Campesinos! made not just one but two albums, both so perfectly judged, infectious and filled with chanty vocals combined with perfect musical accompaniment that you just wanted to applaud them for the effort alone, without even considering the music itself. When there are such witty and sarcastic scenester songs as "My Year in Lists" and "You! Me! Dancing" though, they more than deserved it.

Los Campesinos! - You'll Need Those Fingers for Crossing


7. Bloc Party - Intimacy

Last year's effort by Bloc Party nestled the number one slot, quite possibly ranking far too high for what was a great follow-up album but one which still lacked something. Perhaps influenced by the fans of Silent Alarm's unhappiness at the production of Jacknife Lee on AWITC, Okereke and co split their third album between Lee and the debut's Paul Epworth, creating a balance that worked for the most part. "Mercury" as a stand-alone seemed nonsensical and like "Flux" unnecessary, but when compiled with the rest of the album it took on a new lease of life. Built around lyrics inspired by Kele's break up with his partner, there is still the odd clunking line like "Trojan Horse's" opening "you used to take your watch off before we made love, you didn't want to share our time with anyone", but for the most part the music made up for it. Opener "Ares" "Setting Sun" like drums heralded what was to come, and "TH"'s riff was beyond sick. Combined with the downtempo, poignant brilliance of "Biko", the combination of dubstep and choir on "Zephyrus" and the building "Ion Square", Intimacy was a far better follow-up than many expected.

Bloc Party - Idea for a Story (Mercury B-Side)


6. Mystery Jets - Twenty One

Along with Late of the Pier, Mystery Jets employed Erol Alkan in a bold and inspired move, reinventing their indie-prog sound and fusing it with 80s indie pop. At times it seems absolutely effortless, and the song of the year "Two Doors Down" is the centre-piece. Along with "Flakes" and "MJ" Mystery Jets were the most improved band of the year, as well as the least expected.

Mystery Jets - Man in the Corner (Demo) (Two Doors Down B-Side)

5. Elbow - The Seldom Seen Kid

What else is there to say about Elbow and the Seldom Seen Kid which hasn't already been written? Constant articles relate how winning the Mercury prize couldn't have happened to either a nicer guy in Guy Garvey or a more deserving band, having had to record the album themselves after they were dropped by V2. While I would have preferred Burial to have won, the Seldom Seen Kid is still undeniably a triumph which they should have been rewarded for long ago. "One Day Like This" is an anthem from a band that doesn't try to write them, and with it Elbow helped to soundtrack the summer, or what there was of it.

Elbow - The Fix

4. Foals - Antidotes

Supposedly involved in a spat with other bands over how "middle class" they are, Foals were with the exception of the number one in this list the breakthrough of the year. Combining the aesthetic and time signatures of math-rock with straight up indie, fantastically hummable guitar lines and riffs with the almost at times deadpan vocal delivery of Yannis, the hype was more than deserved.

Foals - Unthink This (Olympic Airways B-Side)

3. Portishead - Three

How many other groups could be away for so long and still turn in such an utter sonic masterpiece as Three? Beth Gibbons' vocals are just as anguished and chilling as before, while the music itself was at times so jarring yet compelling that you had to wonder if you speakers were malfunctioning. If they weren't, they might well have been after "Machine Gun", as punishing a track has been released in a long time. Here's to hoping they don't leave it so long again before releasing a follow-up.

Portishead - We Carry On

2. TV on the Radio - Dear Science

There is something deeply unfair in how TV on the Radio, despite delivering three utterly superb albums have still not achieved cross-over success. Certainly, the critics themselves and indie snobs have been wetting themselves over them now since they first emerged, yet it hasn't translated into sales. If any album deserves to, it's Dear Science, which takes the rough edges from both previous efforts and turns them into second finest record of the year. DLZ was the stand-out, which hooks you in from the very first listen.

TV on the Radio - DLZ

1. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes

In the beauty stakes, not a single record this year came even close to topping the majesty of Fleet Foxes' self-titled debut. The harmonies, orchestration and arrangements are not just meticulously organised, but even when on album closer "Oliver James" Robin Pecknold is left singing acappela it feels as if there is more warmth and depth than a lone single voice should offer. A record which combined so many influences was still so simple and refreshing that it could be used in any mood, or any time of day. Perhaps 2008's only true masterpiece.

Fleet Foxes - Oliver James

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Tuesday, December 30, 2008 

Best music of 2008 part 1.

Best Song
Mystery Jets - Two Doors Down

In what was a poor year for singles generally, Two Doors Down by Mystery Jets just about edged out One Day Like Today by Elbow, either Geraldine or Daddy's Gone by Glasvegas or any of the singles released by Foals for the best 2008 had to offer. Having started out as an indie group with a inclination towards progression, for their second album they ditched both one of their dads and their original sound, and brought in Erol Alkan and plenty of 80s influence. The results were astounding, with not just Two Doors Down but also Half in Love with Elizabeth and Young Love featuring Laura Marling just a sample of one of the most well-judged follow-ups of the year. Surely overlooked for the Mercury prize, Mystery Jets deserve far more attention than they have received.

Best Remix
Adele - Hometown Glory (High Contrast Remix)

Having just branded Adele one of the worst artists of the year, it's nice to show just what can be done with even her brand of affection. Taking the acoustic emptiness of the original and turning it into one of the undoubted drum and bass tracks of the year, High Contrast sped up the vocals, kept the piano for the breakdown and dispensed with much of the rest. There's even an instrumental version lest Adele's warbling start to get on your tits.

Best Cover
Lightspeed Champion - Back to Black

AKA Dev Hynes, Lightspeed Champion emerged from the ashes of Test Icicles and went from one extreme to an apparent other. While his album was mainly disappointing after the strength of his demos and first couple of singles, it was his cover of the much covered Back to Black which took it back to the basics and was all the better for it. Other contenders were Mystery Jets' version of Somewhere in My Heart by Aztec Camera and Guillemots' Live Lounge version of Sam Sparro's Black and Gold.

Best Reissue
Mogwai - Young Team

Just over 10 years on from the release of the 'gwai's debut, a properly mastered version was finally issued, making Like Herod even more punishing than ever. Along with the excellent Hawk is Howling, 2008 was easily their best year since the release of Happy Songs for Happy People.

Tomorrow, or sometime - Best Albums of 2008.

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Most disappointing and worst music of 2008.

New Order - 80s Album Reissues

When CD sales are dropping off a cliff, you would expect that one of the corners of the market that record companies would be going out of their way to cater for would be the obsessive fan, the type that buys remasters and expanded reissues. When Rhino announced that New Order's five 1980s albums were to be given just that treatment, as Joy Division had been last year, those self-same fans presumed that all the stops would be pulled out, and the tracklists suggested that they had. The horrible revelation only occurred once those suckers actually purchased them: far from going back to the original masters, a good number of the tracks on the bonus discs had been sourced from vinyl, and not pristine mint vinyl, but vinyl which had decidedly seen better days. Although for the most part the albums themselves had been properly re-authored, the bonus discs were littered with errors, with some online posts suggesting that in total the set had over 300. Faced with those they had aimed to please raging at the lack of effort, Rhino has said that the reissues will be, err, reissued in 2009. How the replacements will be sent out has however still yet to be explained, and considering that your humble narrator bought some of them from Zavvi, some will doubtless have to buy them all over again. It does almost make you understand why some record companies deserve to go under.

The Courteeners - St. Jude

When the Guardian had the audacity to only award the Courteeners' debut album one star, with the reviewer Maddy Costa suggesting that singer Liam Fray's lyrics were misogynistic and that he came across as "sneering, arrogant and aggressive", Fray became the first badly reviewed personality to take to the paper's response column to right the wrong. While Costa got the wrong end of the stick over "If it Wasn't for Me", which is clearly about a male friend who only hangs around Fray to get the "average girl with bad teeth", she wasn't far wrong in her other analysis. Fray doesn't just come across as sneering, arrogant and aggressive, he also seems to be self-obsessed and, like all the best artists, to hate his own fans. The songs which aren't about him, his band and his mates are about the other damaged individuals surrounding him who he also seems to loathe. Hence "Kimberley", in which he hopes "Cocaine Kim" is treated nicely for the two remaining days she has to live.

Fray isn't to blame, incidentally, he's just hopefully one of the last sufferers of "Libertines" disease, which infects those who think they can write lyrics while playing rudimentary music which otherwise would get them absolutely nowhere. Good can come from "Libertines" disease: see the Arctic Monkeys' last album, having got self-obsession, clubbing and pubbing out of their systems with their first, as well as the misogyny of "Still Take You Home". Fray however can't even begin to hold a candle to the Monkeys' worst lyric, and neither Pete Doherty or Carl Barat at their worst had the arrogance to tell a fan out of their head to get their "hand off of my trouser leg" as Fray does on Cavorting, a whole song dedicated to him sneering at the drug-addled that had to get themselves in such a state in order to enjoy his band's show. Probably as a result of the band's outraged fan base, all two of them voted repeatedly and succeeded in winning the Grauniad's inaugural "First Album" award, even when 50% of the votes were with the paper's critics. Nothing quite like consistency, is there?

The Ting Tings - That's Not My Name

Like some of the other artists featured here, the Ting Tings are not completely irredeemable. Their song "Great DJ" for instance was pleasant enough, and succeeded in not being too grating. Apart from their dreadful moniker and their biggest hit, "That's Not My Name", what really stands them out, or rather doesn't, is just how average they are. Their album title owns up to this, called "We Started Nothing", and they sure didn't. When a band is so average, it does however make you wonder how they got "big" in the first place, and the Ting Tings were helped along by the BBC, who inexplicably at Glastonbury last year featured them as "one to watch". Probably far more influential is the fact that singer Katie White is, as Alexis Petridis described her, "so pretty that you feel like giving her a round of applause just for existing", which always helps.

However much you might want to not hate them, That's Not My Name was a song both so ubiquitous, so jarring and so completely dreadful that it's impossible not to. Shouted rather than sung, with a vacuity which would make most of our politicians blush, it informs us that Ms White doesn't like being called "bird", "darling" or "Stacey", and that they are "not her name". The one consolation is that whenever someone recognises her she probably finds herself being subjected to a even worse rendition, or at least you hope so. The other silver lining is however indirectly I was introduced to the idea of getting your rat out via them, when one of my friends who had free tickets to see them was pleased to note that a drunk guy at the end of every song ordered White to do just that.

Katy Perry - I Kissed A Girl

The music industry is a cynical business, but the cynicism and marketing behind Perry is even by their standards approaching breath-taking. Plucked from obscurity, having previously recorded a Christian gospel album, I Kissed a Girl was a song so terrible on so many separate levels that it seems incredibly fitting for 2008 as a whole. It wouldn't be so bad if Perry, or at least those who write her songs weren't so intensely hypocritical, yet one of the other songs on her album is "Ur So Gay", which denounces a boyfriend for being effeminate. Whether this is the same boyfriend which she then hopes on "I Kissed A Girl" wouldn't mind her indulging in some bottom-level lipstick lesbianism is unclear, but it seems to sum up the entire conflicted nature of much of the mainstream towards homosexuality. After all, let's face it: a song by a young man about wondering what it's like to kiss one of his peers, especially when it "felt so good, it felt so right" with him liking it seems to have been unlikely to have topped the charts in a similar fashion. Perry hardly improved matters when she said of "Ur So Gay":

"It’s not a negative connotation. It’s not, 'you're so gay,' like, 'you're so lame,' but the fact of the matter is that this boy should’ve been gay. I totally understand how it could be misconstrued or whatever...I wasn’t stereotyping anyone in particular, I was talking about ex-boyfriends."

In other words, phony lipstick lesbianism makes money, as does insulting former boyfriends by calling them gay. No contradictions there whatsoever then.

Adele / Duffy

2008 has not been an exactly stellar year for music, with a few notable exceptions. In fact, it's hard not to suggest that the musical apocalypse seems to be fast approaching. The only music that seems to sell physically is either Take That, Abba or by artists endorsed by reality television, and with it the album as we previously knew it seems to heading for demise, as do the shops that stocked them. The one bright spot for the "old" music industry is that it's hit on something that is making them some easy money: give the public what they already like in ever decreasing quality. Last year we had Kate Nash, the low-rent Lily Allen, if there could be such a thing. The biggest artist of last year though was undoubtedly Amy Winehouse, before she went completely off the rails. Hence the search was on for the new stars that sound like her but are less likely to inject crack cocaine into their eyeballs. Quickly found were Adele and Duffy, producing much the same sounding material as La Winehouse but without the key factor that made some of Winehouse's songs so successful: soul.

Rather than Back to Black and Love is a Losing Game, both veritable masterpieces of the genre by comparison, Adele and Duffy have served up Chasing Pavements and Warwick Avenue, the video for which featured Duffy in tears throughout, although not apparently at the triteness of either the song's contents or her own performance. Again, the machinations of the industry itself were obviously at play: Adele was on Later with Jools Holland before she had released a thing, supposedly because of her undeniable brilliance rather than because of bungs changing hands. It wouldn't matter if no one bought the damn things, but Duffy has unsurprisingly became the biggest seller of the year. Take the unpredictability out of Winehouse and you have nothing except music for your bourgeois dinner party, which is the niche which both Adele and Duffy have filled.

Alexandra Burke - Hallelujah

Complaining about the X Factor or Simon Cowell is utterly pointless, such is the stranglehold that both seem to have not just on the nation's psyche but on music apparently itself. The problem is that after however many series' of first Pop Stars, Pop Idol, The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent, the number of artists waiting to be discovered has almost certainly been fully mined. Last year's BGT "discovered" Paul Potts, who had despite his evident talent not got far in making himself a career as a tenor. With even him gone, this year's decided on George Sampson, a teenager who could breakdance. Badly. Likewise, this year's X Factor had a paucity of real star talent that wasn't related to someone who had already been successful or who you didn't want to strangle on sight. After the ritual humiliation of those stupid enough to imagine they can sing in tune, it was narrowed down to an Irish kid with a ridiculous name, a boy band ripping off Boyz II Men and Alexandra Burke, who just happens to be the daughter of a former member of Soul II Soul. Hardly a complete unknown then. Predictably, having won and stretched her mouth to proportions the average human can only dream of, Cowell's shit machine took to massacring Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, which his record company happens to own the rights to. Burke's version isn't just the worst cover of this year, it might well be the worst cover version of all time. Not content with changing the lyrics, destroying all the tautness, tension and heartfeltness of the original, there just has to be a choir brought in at the end to finish the job. Every cliche box was ticked, every amount of warmth rung from it, all ready to be delivered to the nation to devour as only the truly brain-dead could, selling 900,000 copies within two weeks of its release. You couldn't even escape and stick up two fingers by purchasing Jeff Buckley's cover, the rights to which were also owned by Sony BMG, as the clever dicks on Facebook thought they were doing. The message is obvious: resistance is futile.

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Not concealing their enjoyment.

One thing I've noticed over the last couple of days is that despite the predictable calls for revenge from ordinary Gazans, none have been openly celebratory about the prospect, or felt that such actions would be completely praiseworthy, let alone worth cheering. If anyone has, drop them in the comments.

How different this seems to be to quite a few Israelis quoted, not to mention some newspaper editorials. We've had the woman from Sderot who said what was happening in Gaza was "fantastic", the civil defence official that said he would "play music and celebrate what is happening" and Yoei Marcus in Haaretz who writes

I will not conceal my enjoyment of the flames and smoke rising from Gaza that have poured from our television screens. The time has finally come for their bellies to quiver and for them to understand that there is a price for their bloody provocations against Israel.

This is without mentioning comment from Yediot Aharonot which was ecstatic about how the element of surprise meant that the number of people killed was increased, and Ma'ariv, which borrowed from the US lexicon and said, to paraphrase slightly, that "we shocked and awed them". Not the most neutral source, but Angry Arab has also posted saying that Al Arabiya played footage of Israelis "dancing and cheering" the attacks. It's reminiscent of the children who wrote messages onto the shells that were to be used in Lebanon in 2006.

One can only speculate as to the differences in response. From a psychological point of view, you might put it down to the Palestinians of Gaza being in shock at the suddenness and vehemence of the Israeli attacks, especially if the rumours circulating that there was in fact an informal 48-hour truce in effect between Hamas and Israel are substantiated, which Israel breached with over 100 tons of explosives. Their anger and need for vengeance might come later; at the moment their first instinct might well be to survive. Why though are some of the Israelis so ecstatic at the violence being meted out? It's not as if Israel has been under siege from suicide bombers now from a number of years, and the rockets, feeble as they are, only affect a tiny proportion of the country. We often hear about how the Palestinians are taught hatred for Israel from an early age, and how such violence against the Jews is normalised, yet strangely they don't seem to be baying for blood in the same way as the Israelis are. It would be very easy to put it down to the bullied becoming the bully, or how Israeli blood is deemed to be worth far more than Palestinian blood, yet what other explanations are there? Can it all be frustration at the impasse between Hamas and Israel, and the failure by Kadima to stop the rocket fire from Gaza, even while blockading and trying to starve the territory into submission?

It's perhaps instructive that it's taken four days for the "Quartet" to call for an "immediate ceasefire". Instructive in that it probably means that Israel has already run out of things to bomb, or at least things that can however vaguely be linked to Hamas, as the US was until today completely supportive of Israel blowing the living fuck out of anything while placing all the blame on Hamas, much like it took the best part of two weeks for them to do anything in Lebanon, while they waited to see if the IDF could strike a knockout blow against Hizbullah. Further evidence was the apparently positive response by Israel to a French call for at least a temporary ceasefire, although it could well be waiting to see whether Hamas has many of the apparently advanced Grad rockets it's obtained, which have hit the farthest into Israel those fired from Gaza have ever reached. Again, it shows that Hamas, however many people want to paint them as lunatics dedicated to the destruction of Israel, does show restraint: it's only used the more advanced weaponry that has come into its possession when such destruction has been unleashed against both them and Gaza. One suspects however that the current conflagration has further yet to run, and that more Palestinians will be killed before Kadima decides that its electoral prospects have been improved.

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Monday, December 29, 2008 

We are all Gazans now.


To call some of the language used by Israeli leaders and others to defend the mass murder being visited on Gaza sickening is to not even begin to do justice to the immense suffering of the people of that benighted territory. Some are more coy than others, trained over years to be more sensitive towards those who might not understand just how dreadful things are to be an Israeli when suicidal terrorists fire rockets at you every day. When one citizen of Sderot then calls the 320 and rising deaths in Gaza "fantastic", we somewhat accept it, knowing that she herself has suffered from the rain of missiles which often fall on her home town.

Israeli officials themselves cannot be quite as honest, nor quite as cruel. The closest they have come is Ofer Shmerling's remarks to al-Jazeera that he would "play music and celebrate what the Israeli air force is doing." The same men and women that wax lyrical and play imaginary violins about how Sderot is under constant siege, how Israel disengaged from Gaza and all it got in return was rocket fire think nothing of openly celebrating the death currently being unleashed from the sky. One drop of Israeli blood may as well be worth one Palestinian life, such is the disparity between the two.

Most enraging and troubling though are the euphemisms, the distortions of language, the unmitigated Unspeak being directly practised by the likes of Tzipi Livni and Ehud Barak. Livni talks of "changing realities" in Gaza; what she means is destroying every single thing that has a connection to Hamas, however slight. In practice, what this "changing of realities" means is the targeting of a single police officer with a Hellfire missile. As most of the police officers in Gaza are members of Hamas, this apparently makes them, at least in Israeli eyes, completely legitimate targets. That most of them have nothing whatsoever to do with Hamas's security apparatus is irrelevant, that some of them were traffic cops and that some of them were only in training also makes no difference. They are therefore not considered to be civilians, so according to the UN "only" around 70 have been killed so far, although they call it a conservative estimate. At least seven civilians were killed in that strike at just one police officer, yet this is not regarded as a terrorist act. When a Palestinian stabbed three settlers in the West Bank, almost certainly as an act of revenge for the on-going operations in Gaza, the Israelis wasted no time in describing him as a terrorist. Both acts are equally indefensible, yet the international community, especially the US, goes out of its way to condemn Hamas while not even so much as chiding Israel for the way it has decided that all-out war against an elected party of government is a perfectly acceptable course of action. Livni's "changing of realities" means that Gazans will loss relatives, friends, brothers, sisters; a very brutal changing of realities. Yet she hides behind her words, condemned by no one outside of political commentators.

Ehud Barak, the "defence" minister, made a highly similar and familiar comment. He said their "intention is to totally change the rules of the game". Tony Blair said almost the same thing after the 7/7 terrorist attacks in this country, leading directly to the government's attempt to introduce 90 days detention without charge for "terrorist suspects". Yet Israel's rules of the game have not changed: just like in 2006 when ambulances, airports, power stations and the Beirut suburbs were all legitimate targets, in Gaza today universities, mosques, police stations and lone officials that may or may not be connected with Hamas can be either obliterated or smeared across the pavement with impunity. The only thing that has changed is that the Kadima government has decided that with six weeks to go before an election that Likud, its right-wing rival is likely to win, now is the time for all-out war against Hamas. For the Gazans, this changing of the rules means that the slow stranglehold they live under has been transformed into one where more than 0.2% of their population can be wiped out without anyone hardly batting an eyelid. 0.2% of the American population would be 61,011; more than 10 times the 3,000 deaths which were enough for a war on terror to be launched that is without apparent end.

When attacks on the person are being carried out so brazenly, attacking the language which justifies it might seem perverse. It is however the twisting of language, the refusal to spell out what such spinning means in the "reality on the ground" that helps stop those responsible from being held to account. War crimes, like in Lebanon in 2006, are being committed by both sides. It just so happens that the war crimes of only one side are, as then, being denounced.

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Saturday, December 27, 2008 

Weekend links.

An utterly piss-poor weekend in the papers, so thankfully there's been some truly excellent blogging over the last couple of days. Daily Quail doesn't just skewer the Mail's article on Falinge, Jamie Sport completely tears it to shreds in fine comic style. Back Towards the Locus also launches a superb assault on Michael Gove's staggering claim that the Iraq war has been a British foreign policy success, fisking it into oblivion.

Elsewhere, Andrew Hickey on Lib Con states why he isn't a libertarian, Paul Linford and Flying Rodent provide some of the first reviews of the year, Craig Murray recounts his own encounters with Harold Pinter, as does Anthony Barnett, while the Guardian republishes a Pinter comment piece from 1996, while also saluting him in a leader. Anton Vowl attacks the completely ignorant comments by Andy Burnham regarding prospective internet age ratings, Ben Goldacre summarises all his columns this year in one handy place and Juan Cole delivers his yearly top 10 myths about Iraq. Finally, there's the Shiraz Socialist Tin-Foil Hat of the Year award to vote early and often in.

And that's your lot. No worst tabloid comment piece this weekend, and hopefully I will get onto those long-awaited best/worst lists next week.

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The cynicism of a terrorist state.

Founded on guilt and terror, Israel is a state that continues to present itself as the perennial victim, surrounded by hostile nations that would like nothing more than it to be pushed into the sea, inhabited by a people they refused to even acknowledged existed for decades who habitually launch murderous attacks against the innocent civilians of what was once the only democracy in the Middle East. When it strikes back, as it always does, never having started the miniature conflicts which break out every so often, it is always doing so to defend itself and its citizens; it even gave the Palestinians the Gaza Strip all to themselves, and what was their reward for their generosity? To have thousands of rudimentary rockets fired into their country! What nation would put up with such threats to their people?

Every so often however, the mask slips. The last time was the Israel-Hizbullah-Lebanon war. No one disputed that it was Hizbullah that had invited some sort of response with their attack which killed a number of Israeli soldiers while kidnapping others; it was however the staggeringly disproportionate response, resulting in the deaths of over a thousand Lebanese civilians, while Israel fired in hundreds of thousands if not millions of cluster bombs, killing and injuring hundreds more over time, which showed to many for the first time that Israel was not the one forever wronged, but also an aggressor, a bully that cared just as little for the lives of the innocent as the terrorists it was ostensibly fighting against.

The mask has again slipped today. After a six-month ceasefire in which Hamas and the other Palestinian miltant groups mostly sat by as Israel attempted to starve Gaza into submission, almost achieving the former but completely failing to destroy the spirit of resistance which has long characterised the Palestianian people, Israel has unleashed what can only be described as mass slaughter. Israel's supposed justification is that since the ceasefire was ended, Hamas and other groups have massively stepped up the shelling of the towns close to the Gaza border; while true, the home-made rockets and mortars smuggled into the Strip rarely hit their targets, and even when they do, they even more rarely injure, let alone kill. Their main function is fear, as the Israelis themselves even acknowledge. Knowing that they cannot get away with claiming that such rockets pose an existential threat to the Israeli state, the Israelis instead focus on the mental harm which they cause: 33% of children in Sderot apparently suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. They are however less inclined to discuss not just the mental health of children in Gaza, but also their physical health, which the International Committee of the Red Cross in November said was approaching chronic malnutrition as a direct result of the Israeli blockade.

We perhaps ought to have seen this coming: yesterday Israel allowed at least 40 trucks of food and humanitarian supplies to enter Gaza. A security official told YnetNews.com that this was because "
there are segments of the Palestinian population in Gaza which do not support terror, and we cannot neglect them." Instead it was to allow the Gazans to stock up for the siege, so that Israel would not be criticised quite as much by the so-called international community when it began its air strikes, which have killed at least 205 Palestinians and injured over 700. Hospitals have been overwhelmed, mosques have appealed for blood to be donated, and doubtless some of those "who do not support terror" have been killed as well as the Hamas policemen that seem to have been the main target. If this is an attempt by Israel to try to overthrow Hamas, then it seems doomed to failure; Fatah has been routed in Gaza, and however much Israel tries to blame Hamas, its words are completely and utterly hollow to overseas observers, let alone Gaza residents. Increasingly, Gaza residents are instead turning their anger on the Arab nations, which they regard as doing worse than nothing. Egypt, which has also been involved in the blockading of Gaza through refusing to open its entry into the Strip, is coming in for the most criticism, especially after Egypt's first minister was photographed hand-in-hand with Israel's equivalent, Tzipi Lvini.

There has been one apparent Israeli casualty, a 58-year-old man killed when rockets struck a synagogue. Since the end of the ceasefire, there had been no deaths on the Israeli side from the rocket attacks, attacks which were nonetheless described by Israeli politicians and officials as "unbearable". The futility and idiocy of the Qassam attacks was mercilessly shown when a rocket fell short of its target yesterday and instead struck a house in Gaza, killing two schoolgirls, yet for many Palestinians, even those critical of Hamas and the other militant groups, they are the only way of striking back against Israel. Why should they roll over and play dead when that is exactly what the Israelis want them to do? Why should they stop the rocket fire, even if they could, while Israel refuses to lift the siege, when it is only interested in the overthrow of Hamas, despite its legitimate election victory?

Even if those involved are primarily Jewish and Islamic, this is still meant to be a time of peace on earth, of goodwill to all men. In fact, that seems to have almost certainly entered Israel's military calculus: hit the Palestinians when the West is more interested in the sales and themselves, and you're less likely to have to face down such bitter criticism.
Increase the idea that they've brung it on themselves, that they're the ones truly responsible, and that Israel, as ever, is the only one capable of defending itself from those that are determined to bring about her destruction Also influential was doubtless the approaching Israeli election, with Likud ahead in the polls; after all, when has a little war ever harmed anyone's electoral chances, especially one where it's unlikely that many on your own side will be killed? One can but hope that the mask has once again truly slipped, that such killing can never be justified, and that all sides back down. But as we saw on Christmas Day, both Faith and Hope have now died.

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Wednesday, December 24, 2008 

Christmas Eve miscellany.

Just a few words and links today. Here's what I left on the Grauniad article regarding Zavvi's entering administration:

Can I be so bold as to put in a defence of Zavvi? Perhaps it's just my local store, but the prices in there, at least on the new releases are usually competitive or better than HMV's, the staff are far friendlier and helpful, and you actually felt like they cared about you. It's all well and good saying support your local independent, but the sad fact is that they hardly exist any more: it's either Zavvi and HMV or the utter hell of a supermarket. Music is no longer an art to these people; it's become a commodity. If Zavvi and eventually HMV goes then we'll have genuinely lost something for good.

David Semple writes of the best Marxist analysis of the financial crisis he's come across so far.

Aaron puts in a superb rant on the bailiffs issue, and my post was also cross-posted over on Lib Con, sans the description of Green as "fat and greasy", should you feel the need to read a load more comments.

Anton Vowl rips into the Sun and its fetish over "Our Boys", while the paper itself complains about the MoD refusing to pay for gifts from the public to be sent over to them, which is quite obviously what public money should be spent on rather than anything else.

Finally, if you want to read something cracked from err, someone cracked, these thoughts on Pope Benedict's speech from our old friend Johanna Kaschke are rather unique.

Anyway, have a good Christmas, and I'll be back in a couple of days with some tedious best and worst of 2008 lists that we all love so much.

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Tuesday, December 23, 2008 

Flagrant injustice.

On the 19th of December the prison population stood at 82,918 (DOC), 1,807 places from "Usable Operational Capacity". Operation Safeguard, which involves the use of police and court cells to hold prisoners, "remains activated", and the early release of prisoners to help with overcrowding is also still in operation. This time last year the prison population was 80,707, showing that although the massive rise in prison population since Labour came to power has slowed, it still continues to grow.

It would be nice to imagine that all of those 82,918 individuals spending Christmas in their cells thoroughly deserve to be there, but two thoroughly different cases over the last couple of days show the vagaries of the court system.

How many, honestly, would genuinely argue that a custodial sentence for Robert Holding is either appropriate or likely to protect the public? Holding, a milkman aged 72, rather than also selling orange juice and yoghurts to his customers ran a more exotic sideline, supplying cannabis resin to fellow pensioners. Whether they were genuinely using it as Holding argued for "aches and pains" is open to question, but even if they weren't, who exactly in this scheme was losing out or being harmed? Furthermore, Holding pleaded guilty at the earliest opportunity, and although the article doesn't mention it, it seems likely to be his first offence. Either a fine or at the most a community service order would surely suffice and have seen justice being done; yet Judge Lunt warned Holding that when he passes judgement the "likely outcome is an immediate custodial sentence". This is taking the so-called "drug war" and indeed our laws regarding Class C drugs, as cannabis will remain until the government reclassifies it and as result increases the likelihood of not just the "dealers" like Holding going to prison but also his customers, to ludicrous extremes.

If such apparent injustice doesn't bring the law and the courts into disrepute, then surely injustice piled upon injustice does. The Cardiff Three were convicted after police techniques which were subsequently described by the lord chief justice as "almost passing belief". Not in question was that three witnesses who gave evidence against them were treated in a similar fashion - but yet 20 years after the murder of Lynette White, all of them found themselves being sentenced to 18 months in prison after they were convicted of perjury. Two of them, Leanne Vilday and Angela Psaila, who at the time had been working as prostitutes, pleaded guilty, possibly misguidedly but presumably because they expected that doing so would lessen any custodial sentence. The third defendant, Mark Grommek, pleaded not guilty on the grounds that he had committed perjury under duress, again, something not contested by the court. They were however all convicted on the grounds that the duress they had suffered was not of the kind which was likely to make them either fear for their lives or believe that they were likely to suffer serious injury, making their testimony voluntary rather than involuntary. The judge in the case, Mr Justice Maddison, ruled that despite Grommek's testimony that he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown due to the police's actions, he still had "ample opportunity" to tell the truth. Maddison even accepted that the police's conduct had been "unacceptable in a civilised society", yet he decided that 20 years on, when those really in the dock should be the police themselves, sentences of a year and a half were the best course of redress.

How exactly is the public by served by all 4 individuals spending time in prison? We certainly aren't by the cost, which averages out, according to a written answer given in parliament in April 2006, at a staggering £40,992 a year. Ultimately responsible are not the judges and police that enforce the law but instead our politicians, who are completely hooked on punitive measures and increasing the prison population, which has risen by 25,000 since 1996. Both Labour and the Tories seem to imagine that despite all the evidence to the contrary, they can build their way out of overcrowding. The Tories even want to cancel the early release scheme, which would swiftly result in the police cells being filled again, at further exorbitant cost to the taxpayer. By the same token, it's been noted repeatedly that when judges believe there to be a punitive mood, either in the public or in politicians, or indeed both, they pass harsher sentences. Often whipped up by the tabloid press, the evidence in fact suggests that such punitive prison policies are dropping in popularity: a recent poll gave an almost equal split between those who thought prison worked and those who wanted alternatives.

On the whole, the courts do a decent job, and mainly get the balance right. It sometimes takes cases like those of Robert Holding and the second Cardiff Three to force reform through, to show that such expense and waste is not the answer. We shouldn't expect however that those so wedded to authoritarian crime polices will have their minds changed, regardless of the evidence of such flagrant injustice.

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Monday, December 22, 2008 

Quick, slow, Quick, Quick, slow.

(Not Cap'n) Bob's Interceptor.

It's a fitting tribute to the investigatory skills of our finest anti-terrorism officers that Bob Quick should be so, err, quick in pointing the finger at the Tories for "planting" a story in the Mail on Sunday regarding his wife's car hire business, which he then complained was potentially putting his family at risk, despite the family's home address being advertised on a far from inaccessible website.

This is after all meant to be the man who'll be in charge should there be another terrorist attack, someone with qualities such as remaining calm in a crisis, unflappable, not liable to send in CO19 after another Brazilian wearing a denim jacket. Even if we accept that the Tories have indeed being trying their hardest to gain politically from the utterly foolish raid on Damian Green's office, something which judging by the polls they've failed to do, and have also been putting pressure on the Met to drop the inquiry, the level of paranoia Quick is apparently suffering from to immediately pin the blame on the Conservatives - and not just to do it privately, but to brief the Press Association with your suspicions, accusing the party of acting in a "corrupt way" - shows a fairly shocking lack of judgement for again, someone in his position.

Being in the limelight can obviously do very strange things to you, especially when you have been thrust into it unceremoniously and found yourself at the centre of a furore over breaching the very heart of democracy, as can being concerned for the safety of your family. It does make you wonder whether, as well almost being able to act with something approaching impunity, the police also seem to imagine that they can also say anything, regardless of evidence, and also get away with it. Surely the most ill-advised notion of all on Quick's part was that rather than letting the simmering row over Green's arrest die down over Christmas, as it was always going to, followed by the quiet dropping of the inquiry, he has instead brought all the more attention towards himself and invited the accusations that this just overwhelming proves the closeness of the current crop of senior police officers to the incumbent party of government.

The allegations that Sir Ian Blair presided over a politically correct police force were always ridiculous - chance would be a fine thing - but far more dangerous is the idea that Labour and the police are in cahoots, one not helped by the disgraceful initial lobbying by the police for 90 and then 42 days, which only succeeded in turning ever more of those who might have been sympathetic against it. In reality both the Conservatives and Labour have increasingly kow-towed to police demands for new powers or laws, mainly because they turned the prevention of crime into a battle over who could be the toughest. Having failed to provide total job or economic security, governments have instead turned to the idea that they can provide total personal security as a failsafe, when they can of course do neither. Labour's authoritarianism, especially under Brown and Smith, although how quickly we forget past home secretaries and their own excesses, has been more noticeable because Brown cannot defend it as well as Blair could or simply doesn't have the inclination to, and because Smith, like John Reid, actually seems to relish playing the hard (wo)man, an ultra-Blairite thug when being a Blairite has become deeply unfashionable. Combined with her apparent inability to suffer shame when she blames Boris Johnson of all people for politicising the police, you can hardly blame those who have taken to calling her "Jackboots Jacqui". Thing is, if she knew she'd probably wouldn't mind in the slightest.

Similarly, it would be nice to think that Labour's decision to step back from direct elections to police authorities was because it had realised that was unlikely to increase accountability and instead only increase the politicisation of the police - instead it's hard not to imagine it was because they knew it was hardly likely any of their representatives would be the ones to win the popular vote. All sides, Labour, Conservative and the police need to find a way to retreat from their current positions and realise that this is doing none of them any good, but doing that after all consider themselves to be unfairly slurred is easier said than done.

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Paying your debts.

This is an incredibly late April Fool, surely:

The government has been accused of trampling on individual liberties by proposing wide-ranging new powers for bailiffs to break into homes and to use “reasonable force” against householders who try to protect their valuables.

Under the regulations, bailiffs for private firms would for the first time be given permission to restrain or pin down householders. They would also be able to force their way into homes to seize property to pay off debts, such as unpaid credit card bills and loans.

The government, which wants to crack down on people who evade debts, says the new powers would be overseen by a robust industry watchdog. However, the laws are being criticised as the latest erosion of the rights of the householder in his own home.


The government, which wants to crack down on people who evade debts. I can think of a few individuals and companies which have been known to evade their debts, or as they are sometimes also known, taxes. How about sending the bailiffs after the likes of that fat greasy fucker Philip Green, who paid his wife £1bn into a Monaco account to avoid having to hand over any of his quite legitimately owned moolah? Why don't we hire the goons when Rupert Murdoch is next in town to loot his office, all the while pinning him down so tightly that he can't breathe?

Or perhaps we could set them on probably the biggest debtor in the country, or as he's otherwise known, the prime minister. I can just imagine the burly bastards shoulder charging Number 10's door, gathering all the Brown's belongings, including his children's toys, and putting them outside while the heavens open, Brown unfortunately being winded after getting obstreperous and asking them whether they know he is and then pleading with them that he will eventually be paying back that £645bn, honest. Fair is fair, after all.

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Saturday, December 20, 2008 

Weekend links.

It's nice to see that the idea that we have ever had an "independent nuclear deterrent" has finally been punctured, thanks to the very timely decision by the Ministry of Defence to offload its one-third ownership in Aldermaston to a Californian company. That'll be our independent deterrent, produced, maintained, kept and only able to be used with American permission. It's always been a joke in any event that we would ever use it unless the Americans were using theirs as well or had first, but it's still refreshing to see it confirmed.

Elsewhere, it's the mish-mash you might expect on the Saturday before Christmas. Starting with the blogs, David Semple has a look at Jon Cruddas and says if he's the future of the left we're well and truly fucked. Dave Osler has by comparison seen the past, which is a Thatcher nutcracker. Shiraz Socialist has the ten telltale signs that you're a Christian fundamentalist, the Daily (Maybe) still wants Labour to win, in difference to myself, and the Heresiarch examines Christmas myths. D-Notice and Tygerland have also posted their best of lists.

In the papers, Yeukai Taruvinga writes easily the finest piece of the weekend on the suffering of Zimbabwean asylum seekers even as we perpetually condemn Mugabe, Matthew Parris calls the prospect of a bail-out for the car industry a bung, and Andrew Grice says there's no chance of an election in 2009.

The runaway winner of the worst tabloid article of the weekend goes easily to Amanda Platell, who calls the police investigation into the murder of Rachel Nickell "one of the most incompetent ... in living memory." By the same yardstick, that must therefore make the Daily Mail one of the most incompetent newspapers in living memory, considering that up until very recently it completely believed in the guilt of Colin Stagg. Oh, and then she attacks the BBC for using film footage of Nickell after her parents requested them to stop doing so. They in fact requested the media to stop using images of her full stop - a request not heeded by the paper in yet another article on the murder in today's paper. Hypocrisy twice over - how very Daily Mail.

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Friday, December 19, 2008 

Still weird and still never wrong.

You won't be surprised to learn that despite the quite possibly unprecedented apology made to Colin Stagg by the Metropolitan police yesterday, not a single one of the newspapers which played just as significant a role in ensuring that he became a social pariah could find it within themselves to admit that they might have something to be sorry for also. After all, that sort of thing doesn't sell newspapers and it might make some of their readers question the integrity of both the journalists themselves and the paper they read as a whole. No, the story's moved on; now it's about the police incompetence, the paranoid schizophrenic with Asperger's syndrome who was able to kill again and the fact that he lives a so-called "cushy" existence in the highest security mental hospital in the country.

Stagg's tormentor in chief isn't quite finished with him yet though. The Daily Mail can't break out of a habit of a lifetime, so even as it grudgingly admits that he wasn't a killer, it just has to get in a few digs to the ribs:

£706,000, an apology from the Met and Colin Stagg is still bitter

Yes, how dare someone that's just "won the lottery" be "bitter"? After all, it was only 16 years of being suspected of one of the most notorious crimes in recent history despite being completely innocent; anyone else would be satisfied with their lot in life and glad that it wasn't longer.

He issued a statement of thanks for the ‘grovelling’ apology - and posed with a brand-new £27,000 Toyota Rav4 he bought himself as a ‘present’ with his compensation.

Ah yes, a 'present'. Only in the Daily Mail could something so innocuous be sneered at.

Inside were books on witchcraft, an altar and a black-painted wall decorated with chalk drawings of horned gods. Pictures from pornographic magazines adorned other walls. Books on the occult are still on the shelves, but a 50-inch plasma TV now dominates the living room and a new flameeffect fire adds a homely touch.

You really would think the Mail could lay off the snobbery for just one time, but no, apparently not.

Stockier now than when he was arrested, Stagg added: ‘I never want to talk about the case again as long as I live.’

He is not quite as media-shy as he claims, however. He wrote a book about his experiences, has given interviews for cash - and has just spent months with a BBC film crew. But his girlfriend - for whom he has bought a new patio, and lavished presents on her children - insisted to the Daily Mail yesterday: ‘Colin just wants to get on with his life like a normal Joe Public.’


What a hypocrite - how dare he make some more money when he's already won the lottery? He might not have kept his promise to stop talking to the media - but why shouldn't he when he's finally got what he wanted and when a high profile BBC documentary might also help put the record straight?

And still it goes on:

Miss Marchant confirmed that Stagg retained his interest in the occult, ‘but not in an evil way’ and said he was an extremely intelligent self-taught individual who ‘flies through the Times crossword’, but at heart is just ‘a normal regular guy’.

In other words, he's still weird, and we were completely justified in repeatedly suggesting he might just have been the sort of twisted psychopath that could carry out such a horrific crime. Oh, and he reads a rival newspaper.

The Mail's entire coverage is a catalogue of archetypal sensationalism, reflection completely absent from it, with the contempt for Stagg still apparent. The intro to this particular article is almost pornographic and wholly unnecessary, especially after Nickell's own family called for an end to the pain they suffer when the case is constantly recalled:

He probably watched her for a little while.

Almost certainly, he would have walked towards her at first, just to check her face. Maybe he even smiled.

This was the way Robert Napper stalked his prey before turning back to pounce on them from behind, usually with a knife at their throat.

Sometimes, in the dark, he would spy on them for hours in what they assumed was the privacy of their homes.

But here on Wimbledon Common, he selected his victim in the full glare of a summer day. Rachel Nickell was 23, blonde and beautiful, an ex-model and devoted young mother.


The whole cache of photographs of the young Napper the Mail has seems to have been handed to them by his father, whom the paper interviews. As a result, it's remarkably coy about his father's own apparent role in Napper's descent into mental illness, which the Guardian fills in:

During his first 10 years of life, he witnessed brutal violence meted out by his father, Brian, against his mother, Pauline. Such was the trauma suffered by Napper and his siblings that when the couple divorced, all four children were placed in foster care and underwent psychiatric treatment.

It seems Napper suffered more than his siblings, undergoing treatment for six years at the Maudsley hospital. As he reached puberty, he was psychologically damaged further when a family friend assaulted him on a camping holiday. He was 12 years old.


Another article summarising the police blunders opens thus:

The story of how one of Britain’s biggest murder inquiries descended into a disgraceful shambles which wrecked reputations starts on Wimbledon Common shortly after 10.30am on July 15, 1992, when Rachel Nickell’s body was found by a passer-by.

The Mail of course had no role in this disgraceful shambles which wrecked reputations. They just published what the public wanted, or even when their writers were sympathetic towards Stagg, they still had to write about how unpleasant he was, John Junor going beyond mealy-mouthed in writing that:

it is certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility that he was indeed innocent.

Even in the Mail's main article, despite all the evidence now showing how Stagg was almost certainly completely fitted-up by a desperate police force that was under pressure from the likes of the Mail, it still uses weasel words and quotation marks, all to suggest that perhaps it was justified after all, such as here:

Their misguided ‘obsession’ with Stagg was compounded by what one senior legal figure described yesterday as the ‘mesmerising’ influence of Paul Britton, the controversial forensic psychologist who compiled a profile of Rachel’s likely killer.

Yes, it was misguided, but it obviously wasn't an obsession. If it was, surely the Mail's coverage down the years was as well. Perhaps it's just covering itself. Perhaps the Mail's journalists are just heartless bastards. Who knows? Still, obviously Rachel's parents deserve the same treatment given to Stagg:

Senior officers were forced to make an unprecedented public apology to Stagg, currently enjoying a £706,000 compensation payout.

Astonishingly, there was no such apology to Rachel’s family - even though detectives were compelled to admit that had Napper been apprehended back in 1989, Rachel need not have died.

"Currently enjoying"; says it all, doesn't it? There was in fact such an apology to Rachel's family, delivered at the same time as John Yates said sorry to Stagg, and in any event, at least publicly neither Rachel's parents nor her partner appear to blame the police to any great extent, her father in his statement saying in effect that the benefit of hindsight was a wonderful thing. Likewise, there was no apology from them to Stagg over how down the years they had urged a change in the law so that he could be tried again, although they have undoubtedly suffered just as much at the hands of the media as he has.

The Sun, thankfully, is much fairer in its treatment of Stagg, its article on him without any of the sneering of the Mail's. It even nicely skewers Keith Pedder, who always believed in Stagg's guilt sudden Damascene conversion to his innocence, without an extra word:

“I do feel sorry for him. He has paid a terrible price for a man found not guilty of murder.”

It would be nice to imagine that Pedder is genuinely sorry for what he inflicted on Stagg, but the money made from his books, now if not already heading straight for the pulping plant, probably means that he's in a decent enough position to be able to now feel contrition.

The Sun can't of course keep such fairness going; it simply isn't in its nature. Instead then yet more photographs of Nickell's son Alex are published, whilst the chutzpah of the Sun's story is almost sick inducing:

Reclusive Andre, 46, moved with Alex to a remote Mediterranean town to rebuild their lives — keeping their past a secret from locals.

But obviously not from the hacks which have plagued them both ever since Nickell's murder.

For sheer tastelessness, the Sun's main article on Napper's crimes wins the award. Headlined:

Ripper loved to butcher blonde mothers in front of their children

It attempts and completely fails, except in the exploitative sense, to compare Napper's crimes to Jack the Ripper's. Never mind that Jack's victims were prostitutes and Napper's weren't, and that the only thing that really connects them was the ferocity and savageness of their attacks, it takes the analogy to breaking point and beyond.

The Sun's overriding concern though is attempting to create outrage over Napper's so called "cushy" existence in Broadmoor, underlined by how he's allowed to feed the chickens and rabbits within view of a long lens. That he is criminally insane and such a danger that he will spend the rest of his life in mental hospital is obviously not enough of a punishment for his horrific crimes; after all, Philip Davies MP and Shy Keenan say so.

And the Sun's leader, naturally:

And the question The Sun asks today is this: Can it be right that a man who has so savagely taken the lives of others is allowed to live such a cosy life himself?

The Sun of course doesn't know whether his life is cosy or not; it just knows that he's allowed outside to feed farmyard animals. It doesn't matter that as well as a place for those convicted of crimes, Broadmoor also holds those convicted of none, who through therapy might eventually be released; Broadmoor ought to be the equivalent of Alcatraz, purely because of the nature of the crimes that some of those held there have committed.

Common decency demands that the way our justice system treats him reflects his crimes.

Should we let someone come in and rape him every so often, then? What is to be gained from locking someone so obviously damaged by his upbringing up all day and all night until he finally expires? Should his mental health be allowed to deteriorate even further, making him even more dangerous, as such treatment will almost certainly result in? The Sun doesn't say. Our rights just aren't being served by him seeing the light of day at all.

The Sun knows best, just as the tabloid media as a whole did. It knew then that Stagg was guilty and it knows now that it was the police blunders that doomed Nickell. It can never be wrong; it can never admit that it was just as mistaken, just as complicit as they were. And they accuse others of being totalitarian.

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Thursday, December 18, 2008 

Callous, mercenary and unfeeling scum.

At long last, Colin Stagg has finally received what he always wanted: an apology from the Metropolitan police for their twisted and cowardly pursuit of him. Convinced that he was the killer of Rachel Nickell, mainly because he fitted the psychological profile drawn up by Paul Britton, they took advantage of a vulnerable, lonely sexually inadequate man and attempted, through what Mr Justice Ognall described as "positive and deceptive conduct of the grossest kind" to get him to incriminate himself. Despite their complete failure to get him to do that, with Stagg in actuality denying repeatedly that he had killed Nickell to "Lizzie James", the Met's undercover officer, he was still charged with murder and held on remand for 13 months.

This is not just a story about a miscarriage of justice, of police incompetence and arrogance, although that is there in abundance, it's also a damning indictment of the vast majority of the press in this country. Through open collusion in some cases with the police, they too decided that Colin Stagg was Rachel Nickell's killer, despite the complete lack of evidence. Instead they focused on the fact Stagg was "weird", that he had a couple of books on the occult, that one of his rooms was painted black, that he had "paper knives". They salivated at how he had been found guilty of indecent exposure, despite the fact it had happened at a known part of Wimbledon Common where nudists sunbathed as the result of a misunderstanding, meaning they had an excuse to call him a "pervert", that catch-all term which instantly damns anyone in the tabloid press to instant penury. Most of all, they believed the police themselves, so certain were they of Stagg's guilt, the back-scratching which at the time went on as one journalist freely admitted, resulting in the sort of witch-hunt more associated these days with when social services fail to save the life of a child.

Right up until Robert Napper was charged with Nickell's murder, with him today pleading guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, they hounded Stagg with a vehemence which ought to shock us, but which doesn't because we're so used to the denizens of the tabloid press demonising and smearing individuals even before they have been convicted of any crime. The Daily Mail was one of the biggest culprits, year after year featuring the familiar hatchet job articles about how Stagg had evaded justice through a technicality, on how he couldn't be tried again if new evidence emerged because of the double jeopardy rules, since changed by New Labour, featuring the demands of Nickell's grieving relatives, and then the serialisation of the open profiteering by Keith Pedder, the officer in charge of the original investigation, who wrote at least two books about how Stagg had got away with murder. The People republished the letters which Stagg exchanged with Lizzie James, sexually explicit as Stagg hoped to appeal to the officer who was the first to suggest pain and humiliation, upping the ante each time. As the BBC special Innocent: The Colin Stagg Story just made clear, James' claims got ever more ridiculous, including that she had been groomed by a Satanic-type group that eventually resulted in group sex and the sacrifice of a woman and child, but Stagg, desperate to lose his virginity, kept going along with it, a woman for the first time showing interest in him. That epitome of tabloid television, the Cook Report, was similarly determined that Stagg was guilty, ignoring a lie detector test that he took that showed he was telling the truth, instead demanding he take a "truth drug" as well. When he refused, it obviously proved that he was the murderer after all.

Let's not pretend though that Stagg was the only victim of the media frenzy which has continued to this day. What had started as the media helping to find the person responsible for a horrifically violent and shocking crime became instead a story that sells newspapers: the continuing tragedy of the beautiful murdered part-time model, further sentimentalised through the son that had clinged to her, even putting a piece of paper on her almost severed head, apparently as a makeshift plaster. Whereas in some cases the victim and the media join forces, in this instance it instead appears that the contact between Nickell's relatives and gutter press was always grudging. In a statement read to the court, Nickell's father Andrew gives some insight into what they went through:

The next loss is your anonymity. Your life is trampled on by the media. You are gawked at in supermarkets. You are avoided by so-called friends who think some bad luck will rub off on them.

...

You become ever more wary of strangers. You reveal nothing because they might be media or have contacts with the media. Copies of your phone bills are obtained and friends abroad ring up to try to discover where your grandson lives.

...

Every day Rachel's name is mentioned, her photograph published or her home videos shown, everything comes flooding back.

In a further statement outside the court, although also thanking the media for their continued interest, Andrew Nickell also requested that after today the media stop republishing her photograph or using the wearingly familiar home videos, one that seems unlikely to be granted.

As also alluded to in the court statement, Rachel's partner also became deeply disillusioned with the persistent media attention, taking their son and going to live in France partially as a result. Writing in 1996, he described the media in the following terms:

Callous, mercenary and unfeeling scum ... you've got people on your doorstep every day, people following you around in cars taking pictures of you, people peeping over fences and Rachel's face appearing in the paper every day with any tenuous link ... it's one of those stories that's become part of British culture."

Almost unbelievably, despite knowing full well that Andre Hanscombe left the country to try to get his son away from the consistent media attention, the Sun recently published a photograph of Alex obtained while he was walking his dog. His feelings and those of his relatives have always played second fiddle to the story itself, and the media's own profit from it.

How then has the media itself so far responded to today's events? Has it, like the Metropolitan police, got down on its knees and begged forgiveness from Colin Stagg for helping to ruin his life, making him unemployable, vilified, insulted, attacked, spat on? Of course not; doing that might hint towards their own fallibility, and besides, it might set a precedent. Only when ordered to by the courts or forced to by the Press Complaints Commission do the tabloids say they got it wrong. No, instead they've now got a new story: the Met's incompetence and their failure to catch Napper before he killed again. This is a story they've known about for years, and one which a truly investigative media might have pieced together themselves. Indeed, they almost did. The Daily Mail, chief amongst Stagg's tormentors, even splashed the day after Napper was convicted of the murders of Samantha Bissett and her daughter Jazmine with the headline "DID HE KILL RACHEL TOO?" Yes, as it turns out, but they instead turned their attention back to Stagg and their belief that he was the guilty party. It was left to Paul Foot in Private Eye, who always believed Stagg's innocence, to link more clearly Napper to Nickell. In fairness, both Pedder and Britton dismissed the similarities, Britton writing in his book "The Jigsaw Man" that it "was a completely different scenario", despite the extreme violence in each case and the child being present, even if Nickell's son was not killed as Bissett's daughter was. Britton, like the media, seems completely remorseless about how his profile destroyed Stagg and also resulted in the real killer escaping justice for almost two decades.

Amidst all the screams about the "SEVEN blunders that let Rachel Nickell madman kill and kill again", the real story here is of the media's abject failure both to hold the police to account themselves and also to investigate the other possibilities. By coincidence, two other miscarriages of justice were also resolved today. Suzanne Holdsworth, found guilty at her first trial of the murder of a two-year-old boy in her care, was cleared, partially as a result of an investigation by John Sweeney for Newsnight, the second miscarriage of justice he has been involved in resolving, while Barri White, convicted at his first trial of the murder of his girlfriend Rachel Manning, was also cleared of any involvement in her death. His case was featured on the BBC programme Rough Justice, as well as appearing in the back pages of Private Eye. In both of these cases it was the media so loathed by the gutter press that helped to prove their innocence. The really sad thing is that they might be the last of their kind: Rough Justice has been cancelled while Newsnight's resources are being continually slashed. The so-called popular media, the one which is supposed to give the people what they want, which in Paul Dacre's words will cease to exist if it cannot report on scandal, cannot or refuses to report on the real scandals. Wedded to churnalism and journalism which is cheap, fast and easy to produce, they claim to be the voice of the people while repeatedly failing them. If the tabloids and those who produce them have any conscience, they too tomorrow will apologise to Colin Stagg. Instead they'll already be on to the next nearest scapegoat.

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Wednesday, December 17, 2008 

Abu Beavis does prison (having already done al-Qaida in Iraq?)

There seems to be a surprising lack of comment regarding Bilal Abdulla, convicted yesterday of his role as Abu Beavis in the Beavis and Abu Butthead do jihad plot and today sentenced to 32 years in prison. Surprising because, on the surface at least, Abdulla is the first verifiable example of genuine blowback against this country as a result of our involvement in the war against Iraq.

Unlike the 7/7 bombers and others since who have blamed their actions on foreign policy, Abdulla is the only actual Iraqi to have so far played any discernible part in terrorism plots in this country. Born here, but having gone back to live in Saddam's Iraq when he was 5, he personally witnessed the sanctions regime which crippled the country, resulting in the deaths arguably of 500,000 children, a figure which the US secretary of state at the time, Madeleine Albright, described as worth it. It doesn't seem however that he was fully radicalised until the invasion in 2003, losing at least one friend from university in the sectarian violence which emerged in the anarchy created by the development of the insurgency. He blamed not just the Americans, but the Shia also, according to one of his friends in Cambridge being fully supportive of sectarian warfare, as long as it targeted Iraq's long subjugated majority.

At the end of 2004 he came to study, as mentioned above, in Cambridge. Here's where it's difficult to know when his full radicalisation took place: it's known that he was a member or at least associated with the radical Islamist group Hizb-ut-Tahrir, but HuT usually serves as a stepping stone between the caliphate which HuT supports and the murderous, worldwide caliphate which appeals to the takfirists of al-Qaida. In any event, it was in Cambridge that he met Kafeel Ahmed, an Indian born Muslim also apparently radicalised, but more by the usual methods of alienation and anger over the perceived treatment of Muslims worldwide, as well as the inequality and injustice often served to the Muslim minority in his homeland. Together they would they come up with the plot to target the Tiger Tiger nightclub, using incredibly amateurish bombs that failed to detonate, in one case because it lacked an oxidiser and in another because the wiring had come loose. When that failed, they settled on an apparent suicide mission which succeeded in as much as Ahmed died, but sadly for their chances of receiving the much debated 72 virgins, without killing anyone else.

Most of interest here though is just what links Abdulla had with the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq, or as it was formerly known, al-Qaida in Iraq. Accounts seem to differ: the Guardian and BBC seem to discount the idea that Abdulla had anything more than a passing acquittance with the group, apparently in contact with some representatives of it online, and who might have helped, while the Times, quoting those all important security sources, claims that Abdulla during his time at Baghdad University came into contact with the forebears of al-Qaida in Iraq, even fighting with them before he left to come to Cambridge. This seems less believable: al-Qaida in Iraq at the time was still establishing itself, by no means yet the group which managed up until the middle of last year to control vast swathes of the "Sunni Triangle", still mostly a sect centred around Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. His group did not pledge allegiance to Osama bin Laden until late 2004, just the time that Abdulla was leaving to come to this country.

More feasible was the prosecution evidence that in May 2006 Abdulla had returned to Iraq and stayed there for three months. Their case was that it was during this time that he joined up with the now far more powerful al-Qaida in Iraq, known at the time as the Mujahideen Shura Council. Again, there is conflicting stories of just how involved he was: the Guardian reports that Scotland Yard found little evidence he was personally involved in the insurgency, while the Times' sources suggest that he had planned to be a suicide bomber, only for his handlers to decide that with his qualifications and passport he should instead target this country. The evidence that he was the first member of al-Qaida in Iraq to attack this country rests mainly on his will, which was directed to the "Soldiers of the Islamic State of Iraq", and on an audiotape, released only a couple of months back featuring the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq, in which the group very belatedly claimed responsibility for the London and Glasgow failed attacks, even ascribing the failure to a mistake made by the bomb-maker, which, as it turns out, is in at least one of the cases eerily accurate. At the time I was suspicious that the group should so belatedly, and mid-trial claim responsibility for the attack, especially as the ISI has been so emasculated over the last year, reduced to only a fraction of its former power. With the additional evidence now though, the claim looks far more credible.

Worth mentioning at this point is the fact that Abdulla was a doctor and Ahmed was an engineer, something that attracted more comment than it probably should have. While few of those dedicated to al-Qaida's ideological bent are as well qualified or with such bright potential prospects as Abdulla and Ahmed, poverty and poor qualifications are not generally good signifers of radicalisation, as the leaked MI5 document suggested. As Majjid Nawaz of the Quilliam Foundation pointed out on Newsnight, Osama bin Laden is an engineer, following in his father's footsteps, while Ayman al-Zahawiri is a doctor. Intellectuals with similar interests to Abdulla and Ahmed have often been well represented in the jihadi movement, it's just that as is often the case in other armies and terrorist groups, it tends to be those considered expendable that do the actual fighting. Hence Abdulla was considered too good to be a suicide bomber, or at least in Iraq, especially when at that point there was still more than enough willing young "martyrdom seekers" without such credentials.

Regardless of Abdulla's alleged links to al-Qaida in Iraq, it seems he received little in actual funding, if any, from the group itself. Nor did he apparently learn to make bombs whilst there; it was Ahmed instead who apparently set himself that task, experimenting in India. The bombs were originally described as similar to those used by AQI, but this was erroneous; AQI had resources far removed from patio gas canisters, hence their horrific and continued success at car and suicide bombs, and considering how unlikely it was that Abdulla would get his hands on actual explosives, it would probably have been wasted anyway. They instead settled on a plan which was always going to be difficult to pull off, and as a demonstration by the BBC's resident explosives expert showed, even if the bombs had gone off, it seems hardly likely that they would have resulted in the carnage which the prosecution itself claimed, let alone the "thousands" of deaths even more sensational press coverage has suggested. If they had succeeded in getting the 4x4 into Glasgow Airport, and the car bomb had successfully ignited, there could have been a very dangerous fire which could have quickly raged out of control. People could have died in the panic and smoke, but most likely not in the numbers claimed. This was a suicide mission where those most likely to die were the two men in the car, as it so proved.

There will obviously be debate about whether Abdulla did have links with AQI prior to coming to Britain, and where and when he moved beyond simple anger and hatred of American and Britons, from being a passive Islamic radical to being a radicalised jihadist prepared to kill people, but no one is denying that our role in Iraq had a substantial role in his radicalisation, perhaps even providing the catalyst that persuaded him that violence and murder could be justified as revenge for the calamity that Iraq was between 2004 and mid-2007 when he launched his assault. This should not be seen as being an argument for not involving ourselves in action like that in Iraq again, or as a veto on action because terrorists might attack us as a result, but as the evidence that has long been disputed by those in power who ignored those, both outside government and inside it who warned that the invasion of Iraq would result in more insecurity and more terrorism, not less, and that al-Qaida itself would win a massive propaganda victory, with more recruits than it could ever than have imagined. That has long been their modus operandi: they know they cannot possibly defeat this country or the United States, but what they can do is draw us in where they can attack and kill the "infidels" and "crusaders" far easier than they can ever manage in our own countries. Prior to the invasion of Iraq, al-Qaida in that country did not exist. We created it just as much as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi did.

The good or bad news, depending on your perspective, is that Abdulla, if he was involved with AQI, was poorly trained and that he picked a partner in jihad whose bomb making skills were just as poor. Undoubtedly however other Brits have fought with AQI, and might well have already returned, far better "educated" in the "university of terrorism" than they were, also potentially without wider links to al-Qaida central or other known extremists. While the threat remains often exaggerated, what is clear is that those who apparently slip through the net such as Abdulla are potentially far more dangerous than those trained in Pakistan/Afghanistan and known about. We cannot be blamed for the situation in Pakistan, however much grievance you imbibe; we can for what we have created in Iraq. Abdulla may be a one off; he might be just the beginning.

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Tuesday, December 16, 2008 

Do we really want Labour to win the next election?

As critical as this blog often is of piss-poor journalism which makes assumptions based on the "facts" as they currently are, such group-think obviously occurs on blogs as well. No one supposedly saw the financial crisis coming, apart from a few Cassandras, just as no one saw 9/11 coming. Likewise, ever since the end of Gordon Brown's so-called "honeymoon", blogs and political journalists, including this one, have been almost unanimous in their conclusion that New Labour is finished and that the Conservatives are going to form the next government, although the size of their win is what has prompted the most debate. Some, it must be said, still favoured the idea that we were heading for a hung parliament, but the opinion polls which suggested leads at some points of up to 20 points for the Tories dampened down even that.

Here we are then, having declared the downfall of Labour, and yet thanks almost solely to the bleak economic outlook and the perceived handling of it so far by Brown and Darling, Labour are back within touching distance of the Conservatives, with tomorrow's ICM poll for the Grauniad, which only last month showed a 12-point Tory lead, now suggesting that Labour are just five points off. All things considered, it's still difficult to imagine Labour getting a result at the next election which doesn't either reduce their majority down to almost single figures or wipe it out completely, and we are after all just heading into the recession rather than coming out of it, when it will be the bleakness of January and February rather than the slightly more upbeat feeling of approaching Christmas which might finally prompt some to more squarely place the blame for the recession rather than just side with those who they think will best steer us through it. An awful lot can also yet happen before Brown has to call the election in 2010, but the possibility of a fourth consecutive Labour term is now much higher than it seemed to be just six months ago.

Thing is, because we assumed that the Conservatives were going to win, we put more thought into how bad they would be as the new government than we have into the idea of just how awful a fourth Labour term might turn out to be. After all, it's not as if the third term has exactly been a resounding success, is it? Fair enough, going by the first two terms with Blair in change we ought to be grateful that we haven't been plunged into another war, but having had two on the go, both intractable with our troops providing little more than target practice for insurgents of all stripes in both Iraq and Afghanistan, things haven't exactly improved on that score. If anything, we seem ever further bogged down in Afghanistan, the casualties exponentially multiplying, with no one having the apparent slightest idea how we're meant to progress from here, dealing with a corrupt government that barely exists outside Kabul and an insurgency which we're not prepared to talk to, whilst that self-same insurgency gains ever more presence in the country itself. Elsewhere in foreign policy, the hope that Brown's ascendancy might mean the end to the almost open encouragement of force such as in Lebanon in 06 was rather blown away by the open siding with Georgia during this summer's conflict, which achieved exactly zilch.

On the home front, the best that can be said is that for the most part the money invested in the public services hasn't been wasted as some on the right would like to portray it. Waiting times in the NHS are right down, and while the Darzi report was presented, most of the reorganisation that defined the Blair era is either over or has been jettisoned. Education is less rosy: still almost half fail to get 5 "good" GCSEs, and the government's policy of raising the leaving age to 18 will do nothing to help on that score. Also chilling has been the growth of the academies where the joy of learning itself seems to have been completely forgotten, instead replaced by dull conformity that seems more at home in an old dystopian novel than in the here and now. The pace of reform has been much the same as in the NHS, and again, there's little to show for it.

The other biggest growth industry under Labour has been the prison population, now permanently above 80,000, with "titan prisons" proposed; the "good news" to counter-act that has been, unless you completely distrust the figures, that crime has almost fallen off a precipice. Ignoring the debate over whether violent crime has increased or decreased, where you can rely on either set of stats to defend your case, the risk of being a victim of crime is at its lowest since the British Crime Survey began, yet no one believes it, partially because the authoritarian triangulation on crime has not ceased. At the same time the picture on civil liberties has never looked bleaker: ID cards, 42 days detention without charge probably only temporarily postponed, demonstrating within a mile of parliament still banned without permission, databases galore waiting in the wings, the largest number of CCTV cameras in the world, the largest DNA database in the world and much more besides.

It's the economy where for once this is an actual distinct choice for perhaps the first time in 14 years. Either a fiscal stimulus of some variety with either Labour or the Liberal Democrats, in either case adding up to more borrowing, or the Conservative policy of getting the banks lending again as the main priority. If in power, the Tories would probably be doing something similar to what Labour is, but instead they can stand on something resembling the moral high-ground. Likewise, their plans are no longer to match Labour's spending, but similarly they still haven't decided whether they're going to cut taxes straight away or not, apparently not. Combined with this has been irresponsible scaremongering from the Tories of the country going bankrupt, or facing ruin through borrowing more, when almost every economic talking head believes the current level of borrowing, astronomical as it is, to be manageable.

If Labour got back in, we could expect the continuation of much of this, potentially with knobs on. However much those of us on the erstwhile left have been critical of the Labour, we've still mostly held the belief that the Tories would be worse, myself making the argument repeatedly that they represent the new Blairites, who once in power would do the sort of things that Blair wanted to do but was prevented from by backbench rebellion and opposition from the likes of Brown, holding the purse strings and his influence over domestic policy. The question has to be asked with Labour's chances of winning the next election increasing whether this is still the case. Is Labour honestly any better than the Tories would be? The differences, despite the economic upheaval, still seem to be approaching the marginal. As ghastly as the idea is of George Osborne being chancellor, of Nadine Dorries being any sort of minister at all, would we in the end note any great difference? Remarkably, you would never have imagined the Tories as being the party of civil liberties up until recently, opposed to ID cards and the petty surveillance that has become the norm. That, on its own however, especially when you certainly consider that much of the opposition would probably flake away once in power, is not enough to make the thought any less encouraging, especially when combined with their policies on "fixing" the "broken society" and the return to the open bribing of the middle classes. It would of course be nice if neither could form the next government, but the closest we could feasibly manage would be a Lib Dem-Labour or Tory coalition, where their influence might well lessen the blow but then also corrupt those who see them as some sort of alternative, however laughable that also seems.

Getting tired or bored of a government after three terms is to be expected, but it's only when that government itself becomes tired or bored of being the government that it falls. This was what happened after 1992 to the Tories, and did seem to be happening to Labour, yet the recession which should have buried the chancellor who claimed to have abolished boom and bust has instead energised the zombie that was shambling towards the bullet. Let's not kid ourselves that Labour has been in any way genuinely refreshed by it, but it does now still have a purpose which it perhaps didn't prior to September this year. It can still win a fourth term. It's whether it deserves to, and frankly, it doesn't. But neither do the Conservatives deserve to form a government. We the electorate seem to be stuck between a rock and a hard place, or rather between two parties only distinguishable almost by their sameness. Some might say we deserve better; I wonder if we do. Perhaps only when we have become fed-up with the offerings of both will we deserve better, and that still seems some way off. Perhaps we can flip a coin in the meantime. For now, we probably would be better off with the devil we know, but by the torturous way I've come to that statement through this post hopefully suggests just how conflicted I am, someone who ought to be a natural Labour supporter. Labour might not be finished just quite yet after all.

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They've only stolen all our jobs!

What goes through the minds of journalists working on a newspaper when they know that the information they are putting out is either demonstratively false or likely to be found to be demonstratively false? An example, if an obviously extreme one, is provided by Peter Chippendale and Chris Horrie in their history of the Sun concerning the paper's coverage of the Hillsborough disaster:

As MacKenzie's layout was seen by more and more people, a collective shudder ran through the office [but] MacKenzie's dominance was so total there was nobody left in the organisation who could rein him in except Murdoch. [Everyone in the office] seemed paralysed, "looking like rabbits in the headlights", as one hack described them. The error staring them in the face was too glaring. It obviously wasn't a silly mistake; nor was it a simple oversight. Nobody really had any comment on it—they just took one look and went away shaking their heads in wonder at the enormity of it. It was a "classic smear".

No one can on the Daily Star can possibly make the same excuse for today's front page, unless Dawn Neesom is rather more fearsome than she has been made out to be and prepared to use her kick-boxing training against her own hacks,ly Star, Daily Star-watch, Muslim bashing, churnalism, racism, immigration, immigration figures, or Richard Desmond himself was personally involved:

They haven't just taken all our jobs; they've stolen them from out of our hands!

There is instead a rather more simple explanation for the Star's front page, the Express's copy/paste and the similar effort in the Sun, doubtless amongst others: churnalism. As 5cc quickly found out, the origin of these claims is that old favourite of utterly unbiased and completely reliable figures on all matters immigration, Migration Watch. Their press release on the subject has everything that put-upon tabloid hack needs for a quickly cobbled together story; all that has to be added is the huge headline and red lettering.

And, as 5cc explains, it's crap, unsourced or badly sourced like the tabloid stories themselves. As he also points out:

The great thing about this one is that it contradicts its own conclusion with the real reason so many jobs have gone to immigrants in recent years:
The British born working age population also fell during this period, so the proportion in work remained unchanged at 75.4%.
So when the report goes on to say:
These employment statistics are not, in themselves, absolute proof that the employment of British born workers has declined as the result of East European immigration but it is hard to find another explanation.
It looks a bit silly. The other explanation is just one paragraph above.

The journalists responsible for pumping out this bilge in most of the circumstances almost certainly don't agree with or indeed believe it. They just do so because if they didn't they find themselves out of a job. Even so, it does represent something of a continuing campaign by the Star to be the most "outrageous" paper when it comes to tackling such thorny issues as Islam and immigration. A couple of years back you might remember it took a NUJ mutiny for the paper not to run a page 6 "burqa babes special", while more recently it led with "BBC PUT MUSLIMS BEFORE YOU!". In today's paper, apart from the front page splash, there's a similarly doubtless half or not even half-true report about how a "multi-faith area" in Lewes prison had a crucifix removed from it, lest it apparently offend Muslims. The reason for why "the multi-faith space" must supposedly double up for both faiths is made plain in the last independent inspectorate report into the prison:

Worship facilities were very poor. The Christian chapel was at the top of a steep flight of stairs and inaccessible to prisoners with mobility difficulties, the small multi-faith room had been taken over for other use two months previously and Muslim prayers were held in an association area on F wing with no carpet or ablutions facilities. A new multi-faith area was due to be built as part of the rebuild. The coordinating chaplain had identified some basic errors in the design and it was unclear whether it would provide enough room for the number of prisoners expected to want to use it.

The article claims that the "independent board which monitors prisons admitted the Lewes cross was dropped after discussions with a Muslim priest", but if this is a reference to the actual prisons inspectorate, there's nothing on their site to suggest this is the case or contained in the report from over a year ago. It's the apoplexy of Phillip Davies that makes it all slightly worthwhile:

“It’s barmy politically-correct madness no doubt dreamed up by some white middle-class, lentil-eating, sandal-wearing do-gooder.

“This kind of thing does so much damage to race relations because it builds up resentment.”

Doesn't it just? I bet the percentage of the population that read the Daily Star and care about the facilities for different religions in prisons are absolutely fuming. I can't recall whether it was Simon Hoggart or the parliamentary column in Private Eye which described Davies, often mistaken for David Davis, as an "unpopular populist", but for passive aggression on the behalf of the outrageds of Tonbridge Wells who have never heard of him he deserves some sort of prize.

That label of unpopular populism probably applies equally well to the Daily Star itself. After all, anyone really that disgusted or concerned by the twin outrages of uncontrolled immigration and Muslims on the rates must have abandoned the Star a while ago: the Mail or the Express do that stuff without all the distracting women with huge tits in-between. The paper defended itself a while back with the claim that it wanted to give its readers a smile in the morning, and in fairness it's a rare occasion when the paper does go in for such front pages as today's or the one attacking the BBC, far more concerned as it with the tit situation already mentioned.

Which leads us to probably the best, most likely unintended juxtaposition of the gorgeous pouting Danielle Lloyd with the headline next to her. Lloyd, for those with slightly shorter memories, was one of those along with the single-monikered Jade and S Club 7 reject Jo whom bullied Shilpa Shetty on Celebrity Big Brother. Lloyd's most well-known contribution, apart from asking in the thickest in both senses of the word Scouse accent whether "those people who eat with their hands are Indian or from Chi-nah", was that Shetty "should fuck off home". Unlike Jade, who had to develop cancer before she could be successfully re-admitted to reality television, Lloyd continued in her furrow, much thanks to the readers of Zoo and Nuts not being too picky when it comes to the ideological status of the women they one-handedly admire the aesthetic beauty of. After all, doesn't Lloyd's success in her work suggest that as yet those filthy foreigners haven't managed to steal the jobs of our hard labouring British glamour models? Isn't that something to proud of, that the Daily Star promotes home-grown talent regardless of the foreigners' insidious attempts to thieve such jobs? British boobs for British men, and nothing but the best shall do!

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No mercy for Mercer.

I don't think a judge has ever or at least recently so succinctly and damningly summed up the utter vacuity behind a murder:

In sentencing Mercer, the judge Mr Justice Irwin said: "This offence arose from the stupid, brutal gang conflict which has struck this part of Liverpool. You were caught up in that from a young age, but it is clear you gloried in it. It is wrong to let anyone glorify or romanticise this king of gang conflict.

"You are not soldiers. You have no discipline, no training, no honour. You do not command respect. You may think you do, but that is because you cannot tell the difference between respect and fear. You are selfish, shallow criminals, remarkable only by the danger you pose to others."


This blog is often critical of authoritarian crime policies, but an extra ten years on the twenty-two before Mercer can be considered for release would I think have served the interests of justice even better. You take someone's youth in such a pointless, meaningless, random way, we take your youth from you. It might just make some think twice, if indeed those involved have the intellect to do even that.

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Scroungers.

Another letter from the Grauniad that really does say it all:

My father, Joe, was a miner all his working life and died because of the silicosis (coal dust on his lungs). When he died, at 77, following over 10 years of illness, he left no possessions, no house, no car, and no savings. Nothing.

To read your article (Lawyers made millions from sick miners, 12 December) only surprises me in the amount of money these lawyers took from this government fund. Our mam, Katie, now aged 93, struggled financially after our dad died. It was therefore good news when it seemed that some of this fund would be coming her way. We were initially hopeful at the number of phone calls we received from legal firms, but at the end our mam had to settle for a few hundred pounds. That was disappointing. But to learn that James Beresford took £16m from this fund and his firm removed a total of £115m beggars belief.

I read that the solicitors Beresford and Smith are to be struck off. Good. Pity it wasn't done some time ago. Clearly men such as these have no moral conscience. They cannot possibly understand how men like my father worked for 40 years underground, digging out the coal which kept the nation warm and fuelled, for a pittance. I bet my dad didn't earn in a lifetime what Beresford took in an hour.

Even in death my dad, and thousands of other miners, are still being stuffed by the fat cats. I am assuming that this money will be paid back into the fund and used for what it was intended.
Gerard McCabe
Colne, Lancashire


And as Justin has pointed out, we instead pour our anger and rage out on the likes of Karen Matthews instead.

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Monday, December 15, 2008 

Scum-watch: Is the paedophile still dead?

The Sun really can't give it a rest with the open apologia for the murder of a "paedophile" (Cunningham, going by what we know about him, is probably more accurately described as an hebephile or ephebophile), today publishing the views of a former girlfriend:

AN ex-girlfriend of murdered paedophile Andrew Cunningham said yesterday: “I’m glad he’s dead.”

Annette Morris, 47, claimed Cunningham, 52, bedded their 15-year-old babysitter — then detailed it in his diary.

She said: “What he wrote was disgusting.

“It made me feel physically sick.”

Annette, who had a daughter with Cunningham, was 17 when they first met.

She said: “Even I wasn’t young enough for him. He had this obsession for 15-year-olds.”

Annette said: “The world is a better place without him.”

Err, so he met her when he was 22 - but the way the paper has phrased it is to make you imagine that this was some sick much older man preying on a innocent young teenager. It would be interesting to know when Cunningham and Morris got together, especially so we could also place when his relationship with his ex-wife broke down. Presumably this 15-year-old babysitter was the one he was convicted of having unlawful sexual intercourse with. Even considering the somewhat unique circumstances, it seems rather over-the-top for Morris to be glad that he's dead and that the world's a better place without him, which does make you wonder whether that is what she really thinks - prompted possibly by financial reimbursement, or simply exaggerated somewhat by Antonella Lazzeri.

In any event, perhaps because the "evil peados deserve to die" group has already got bored and moved on, the comments are in fact this time rather more balanced:

What a blood thirsty bunch of people.We do not have the death penalty in this country, for good reason.If the courts cannot sentence criminals to death, then no member of the public has the right to arbitrarily decide who can happily be murdered.This is so wrong an attitude.No matter who or what he was.
I am the mother of one son who was brutally attacked years ago, aged 15 at the time, and raped by a man of 42 odd who was married with 3 kids of his own.Do I want him dead? No.Incarcerated yes,and he is.


So now we've gone from 'raping a child' to having consensual sex with a 15 year old.
And still the pitchfork mob cheer the lynching on here.
What a dreadful race the Brits have become.

Am I the only one to find the attitude of people towards this brutal and horrendous murder to be barbaric. He served the sentence which was passed, whether people agree with it is neither here nor there, no one has the right to take the law into their own hands and decide to brutally murder someone

Is the the first step to the complete breakdown of law and order ?

Yes funny how the lynch mob are still thirsting even though its now "consensual sex" with a 15 yr old!

In fact, the whole idea that he was killed by a mob is also being played down. The Wandsworth Guardian reports:

Detective Chief Inspector Nick Scola said he was keeping an open mind on suspects and motives, adding that no rowdy groups were seen in the area on the night.

There had been no reports of sex offences in recent years, quashing a rumour the 52-year-old had fondled a local two-year-old.


Elsewhere, predictably the Scum is making the most of the cock-up on the weekend's Strictly Come Dancing:

YOU can’t trust the BBC to organise a dance-off in a ballroom.

Millions had their weekend viewing ruined after yet another phone-vote shambles.

This time calls and texts to decide who made the final of Strictly Come Dancing were ruled invalid after a counting cock-up.

The Beeb have already been caught conning the public on Comic Relief, Children in Need, Blue Peter and Sport Relief.

The twerps in TV Centre should have learned from these mistakes.

Viewers will rightly expect that in future they behave like Strictly contestants.

And don’t put a foot wrong.

Indeed, who could possibly make similar mistakes? Certainly not ITV, where on programmes such as Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway those who rang in had no chance of winning if they weren't lively enough or in the right area, or on Soapstar Superstar, where the viewing public were asked to vote for which participant should sing certain songs when the production crew were the ones doing the selecting, or the X Factor, with this year's winner featuring on the Sun's front page today, where in 2005 13.9% of votes in the final were received too late to be included. I'm also sure that Sky's 17.9% share in ITV, with the X Factor being by far their most successful show, as well as competing with Strictly, has absolutely no influence whatsoever on the Sun's view of the BBC performance.

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Saturday, December 13, 2008 

Weekend links.

Before we get started, the Sun's clearly decided not to just leave it to the commenters on the their articles to justify the murder of paedophiles:

THE former wife of a child-sex beast who was hacked to death and his genitals mutilated declared last night: “He’s had what was coming to him.”

The mum poured out her hatred for Andrew Cunningham after a mob left the 52-year-old in a pool of blood.

Branding him “pure, cold evil”, she insisted: “No one should feel sorry for him.

“I know mob justice is wrong but he caused a lot of innocent kids a lot of unimaginable pain.”

I know it's wrong but no one should feel sorry for him. Even when this happens:

His daughter aged 22 — one of five sisters taken into care as youngsters — told how her father physically abused her and said she had wished him dead.

But even she was chilled by his savage murder.

...

She was left terrified yesterday after vigilantes attacked HER home.


The paper corrects their claim yesterday that Cunningham had raped a 13-year-old, without, naturally, admitting they had made a mistake. They also carry Sara Payne's denunciation, predictably, whilst telling everyone not to have any sympathy for him and that even his ex-wife thinks he deserved to die. Notably, the comments are also still open, with the same congratulatory mob in evidence, while strangely on "Dying dad is beaten to death", they're closed.

Elsewhere, the story of the weekend is undoubtedly the Jean Charles de Menezes inquest verdict. The Heresiarch and Lenin provide the blogging responses, while Harriet Wistrich in the Groan and Deborah Orr in the Indie tackle it in the broads. Most virulent response though was undoubtedly from the Indie's leader column, calling it [R]eckless, incompetent and lethal policing. For me, a letter in the Guardian says it all:

Princess Diana, killed in a car crash - unlawful killing. Six passengers and four crew killed when a man drives his Land Rover off the M62 on to the Selby rail line - unlawful killing. Man throws his son from the roof of a Greek hotel - unlawful killing. A UK soldier is killed in Iraq when a US pilot opens fire on him - unlawful killing. BBC journalist Kate Peyton shot - unlawful killing. Two policemen shoot an innocent man seven times in the head on a train in front of witness who say no warning was given - not unlawful killing. Could someone please explain?

Dan Tanzey
Thornton Cleveleys, Lancashire

To which you could add baby dies after social services fails to protect him. Within three weeks a report has apportioned blame, the social workers have been suspended and the woman in charge has been sacked. In the de Menezes case, no one accepts any blame or even that they did anything wrong, the officers are back on duty, and one of those in charge on the day has been promoted. If only Sharon Shoesmith had personally pumped 7 bullets into Baby P's head maybe she'd still be in a job.

Elsewhere, not to blow my own horn or anything, but there's my latest post on the Sun Lies involving the Sun's payments to a man who provided them with the video of Amy Winehouse supposedly smoking crack, who has just been jailed for two years for providing the drugs. Brendan O'Neill asks which part of no doesn't the EU understand, Paul Linford comments on Peter Mandelson and the Euro, Dave Semple examines the Barclay brothers throwing their toys out of the pram, anticant castigates Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, Tom Griffin reports on the Met's latest tactics involving demonstrations, Matthew Parris rather optimistically suggests the Tories' hands-off message might work given time, while Lynne Featherstone, who lost my respect over her involvement in the Baby P case has rather amusingly been criticised for calling out the fire brigade to deal with her boiler.

Finally, Brenda Almond takes the award for worst tabloid comment piece of the weekend for her why-oh-whying in the Mail over who will defend the family over the "liberal establishment's onslaught".

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Friday, December 12, 2008 

Scum-watch: Another victim of crime they don't pretend to feel the pain of.

Here's a conundrum for you: you set yourselves up as a crusading, justice seeking newspaper, demanding that heads roll when social services fail to protect the lives of beautiful blue-eyed baby boys, sharing the pain and agony of families that lose loved ones and providing space for their personal manifestos of what must change to prevent it happening again, no matter how unrealistic, and you call society "broken", mainly as a result of politically correct loons, entrenched socialism and welfare scroungers. How then do you react when an exclusive comes your way that suggests that a marauding mob might have murdered a man in cold blood?

Simple. You splash it on the front page and use the most base, unsympathetic and sensationalist language you can possibly muster:

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that he was a convicted sex offender, which, of course, makes all the difference. For comparison, the Times headlined their article "Paedophile stabbed to death in 'vigilante attack'", the Mail's story, which has been updated throughout the day, is now headlined "Convicted paedophile 'who struck again' stabbed to death, stripped and mutilated in suspected vigilante attack", while Sky goes with, simply "Paedophile Found Stabbed To Death". At the bottom of Sky's article there's an appeal:

:: Anyone with information is asked to contact the Metropolitan Police Incident Room on 020 8721 4138 or Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.


The Sun's is vaguely similar:

DID you know him? Call our newsdesk on 020 7782 4104, text 63000 or email exclusive@the-sun.co.uk.


Yes, don't call the police, call us first and possibly earn some money at the same time. Did he feel you up as well? Call now!

If all this is inspiring some deja vu, then the exact same thing which happened when the Sun published the details of the murder of Gordon Boon, another convicted sex offender murdered in mysterious circumstances is naturally now taking place underneath the story. Yes, did the evil dirty paedo deserve to die or should he only have had his bollocks chopped off?

no sympathy from me and lets hope the poice dont waste too much time looking for the people that did the world a favour


The best news I have read all morning. I say "1 down with plenty more to go "

Rot in hell Sicko.


This is what should happen to all sex offenders,paedophiles and child abusers. Anyone who ruins innocent childrens lives should suffer & rot in hell too.


I do not think that anyone deserves to die at the hands of a mob but the flip side of the argument is how many lives had he ruined with his actions and how many more could he have ruined ? Chemical castration is the answer , no one dies and the kids are safer...


Four months for raping a little girl? Yes he did deserve to die.

I will never agree with vigilante groups but when are the police and the courts going to do something about serial offenders?


As a father of 3...i think this is exactly the fate this man deserved you cannot molest children and expect karma to be kind to you..its a shame the government/courts dont take sex crimes against children more seriously then the people who killed the fiend would not now be looking at a murder charge. bring back capital punishment for convicted paedophiles simple.


I beleive this is called 'Justice'. Although I do not condone the overall violence of the incident this man surely deserved these actions. If the thugs and knife carriers on our streets are going to aim their anger at anyone it should be Paedophile's, Rapists and the like.


in reference to General26's comment 'did this man deserve to die?', er yes. did the girl under 13 deserve to be horrifically raped? er, no.

eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.


Mob Rule is the way forward. Police cannot rid the world of these people. I hope these vigilantes don't get caught, they did the Police and the world a favour.

And so it continues for 268 comments, the vast majority either giving the thumbs up or condoning the murder in the same contradictory way as some of those above. Only problem is, that as so often seems to be the case, the Sun article appears to be inaccurate. Not to give the Daily Mail any great credit, but they correct a couple of mistakes in the Scum's exclusive:

He had served four months in prison for a sex attack on a local schoolgirl aged 15, in 2000, and was on the Sex Offenders' Register until March this year.

The Guardian further explains that his offence seems to have been "unlawful sexual intercourse", also sometimes known as "statutory rape", where consent is usually given but the victim is under the age of consent. His apparent predilection for girls around the age of consent is backed up by a quote from a friend:

Linda Whelan, 43, a friend of Mr Cunningham, said: 'He was a lovely guy. He did used to like younger girls. Andrew was in his 50s and liked girls who were about 19 but that doesn't make him a paedophile. I can only imagine if he slept with someone under 16 that he didn't know she was underage.

Then there's the bit around a mob "burning his house down":

Mr Cunningham moved to the caravan because vigilantes set fire to a bag of rubbish outside his former house in Wandsworth in 2003. It came after he was arrested over allegations he was openly grooming children. He was released without charge.

No evidence then whatsoever that he had re-offended except hearsay, doubtless based understandably on his past.

As for his employer, who also found his body:

He said: 'He had a stab wound in his neck and there was blood everywhere. The bed was soaked with it and his head was lying in it. He was a lovely man, he couldn't do enough for me. The customers loved him, people used to say, "I don't want anyone else, I want Andy".'

A lovely man, but obviously a nonce who was asking for it.

In fairness to the Sun, both the Mail and Times also have their comment sections open, featuring much the same logic and faux-celebratory circle-jerking. The Mail at least though seems to have bothered to investigate slightly further, and not condemned the man in the same disgusting, judgemental terms as the Sun did:

But his warped lust for children had made him enemies for YEARS.

Despite there being little to no substantial evidence that was the case at all.

For a newspaper that so often claims to be on the side of the victims and uses their pain for its own ends, it shows remarkably little concern for their feelings when someone with a blemished record is murdered in such horrific circumstances. Don't they deserve something approaching respect, rather than having little more than open high-fiving facing them on the front page of the country's biggest selling daily newspaper? Or are they, simply by his crimes, branded as also being beyond sympathy and the normal reaction of civilised society?

Even the paper's usual first port of call when it comes to paedophilia, Sara Payne, is unequivocal:

Sara Payne, the campaigner whose daughter Sarah was murdered by a convicted paedophile in 2000, said the attacker or attackers were "no better" than the man they had killed and that his murder would set back her campaign for the names and addresses of sex offenders to be made available to the public.

The exact same campaign which the Sun supports and which would almost certainly lead to paedophiles being forced further underground, with more vigilante attacks taking place. Perhaps some good might come from the Scum's dog-whistling after all.

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Thursday, December 11, 2008 

Fudged.

Courtesy Beau Bo D'or.

If the response to the welfare reform white paper could be best described as tepid, the government as usual has no one other than itself to blame. For a party so apparently diametrically opposed to leaks, the real tabloid pleasing meat was released last week; single mums having to begin their back to work preparations as soon as their nippers turn 1, along with a massive increase in the work-shy having their appeals for money subject to voice detectors.

Strangely then, neither of those things are played up in the actual document itself. In fact, the entire thing is, like the response, broadly tepid. It's difficult to know entirely why this is: is it because the government, as it has repeatedly done in the past, has flew the same-old kites in the tabloid press, disgusted their own supporters deliberately, then watered down the proposals when it comes to the actual crunch; or is it because it's accepted that with the recession about to bite, this isn't exactly the most opportune time to suddenly dump many of those previously on incapacity benefit on the bonfire?

As so often, the answer is probably a bit of both. Coupled with that is that the worst excesses of the David Freud review, cobbled together in three weeks by an investment banker who admitted that prior to being asked to ask to write it he knew absolutely nothing about welfare, but who knew within those three weeks that a good proportion of those on incapacity benefit instantly shouldn't be on it, have been shaved off. The green paper, prior to this white paper, titled without a hint of irony "No One Written Off", had all the proposals of this one without the added pilot schemes and readjustments. While the emphasis in the green paper, despite the title, was on punitive reforms where a dirty great stick was being yielded while a carrot similar in size to Richard Littlejohn's cock was the supposed reward, the message here is on tough love.

Along with "fairness", another of those all things to all people terms which governments without any remaining ideology cling to in the hope that it will pass for a defining motif, the proposals, having initially been sold on the prospectus that they were all about at long last telling the scroungers that they would have to sing for their supper, are now instead advertised as being designed to "help" those in need, giving them the push that they've been without, helping them to help themselves. This is "personalised conditionality", with the set groups being designed around those mentioned in that quite wonderfully vivid and explanatory diagram posted last week. The vast majority of those previously on incapacity benefit, either now or shortly to be herded onto the new "Employment and Support Allowance", will be placed in the middle "progression to work" where they will be expected to co-produce a back-to-work plan. It doesn't seem to matter that the government themselves don't expect much to come of this, hence why those on it are not going to be expected to actively look for work, probably because they recognise that most of those on incapacity benefit are either on it because they are genuinely too sick to work or because they were put on it in to massage the unemployment statistics and are now unlikely to return to the workplace however many plans you put in front of them; pointless box-ticking, as Chris suggests, needs to be done to appease the tabloid press and convince them something is going to be done.

Make no mistake however, even with all the concessions made, there are still fundamental problems with much of the white paper. First, and most apparent, is that despite all these reforms about to be made and with the workload at JobCentrePlus increasing as the jobless figures inexorably rise, only a further £1.3 billion has been allocated initially to help. That's before a substantial further amount is creamed off by the private and voluntary sector to help with those still out of work a year after being on JSA, who will be paid for every individual they place in a job. This is meant to save the money that would otherwise be spent in paying them JSA, but it's by no means clear whether there will be any overall saving once the contractors have had their pay and the person in a job has potentially claimed tax credits. Furthermore, what's incredibly likely to happen is that the private sector will find it easy with those who've been tardy in trying to find a job who are now having to get one unless they want to spend four weeks doing unpaid work, while finding it just as difficult with those who have tried but have comprehensively failed to find work. At the same time, those in that group will be having to do the unpaid work because the anti-scrounger lobby demand it, even though it's no fault of their own. Breeding bitterness and resentment against those who are supposed to be helping you and against work itself is not the greatest of ideas, but that seems to have passed those drawing the reforms up by completely.

Most pertinently however is that nowhere in this document is it explained how when we're approaching 2 million unemployed with only 500,000 vacancies that all of those currently on any of the current benefit schemes, whether JSA, income support or incapacity benefit can find work. Nowhere is it also set out exactly what work those who, after a year without finding a job, will be expected to do. Will they be sent out wearing fluorescent jackets with "Community Payback" on as well, or what? Exactly how many will simply take any job, however demeaning or poorly paid, just to avoid such treatment? As Compass argue, the white paper assumes that work is an end in itself, a route out of poverty, when it quite often isn't. The government even further infantalises and keeps the low paid hooked on handouts from the state with the tax credits scheme, rather than raising the tax thresholds and lifting them out of paying income tax altogether, not to mention introducing a living wage or a citizen's basic income.

Overall, as again often occurs, the result is a fudge. The hope is to achieve right-wing support while not riling the backbenchers and the soft left vote too much. In this, the government appears to have achieved its aim: only the socialist left seems really concerned, while the Tories have said they'll support it. The only people left without a say seem to be those on benefits themselves.

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Wednesday, December 10, 2008 

Direct action and the democratic deficit.

Few described the inclination to riot as superbly as H. L. Mencken. He wrote that "[E]very normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and start slitting throats." Somewhat thankfully, even when riots break out, few often spit on their hands; slitting throats though...

The past few days have shown both the benefits and pitfalls of direct political action. Whatever your views on climate change, I defy anyone not to admire the chutzpah of those that succeeded in breaching Stansted airport security and shutting down the runway for three hours by barricading themselves together, then phoning the media. It's often difficult to know where to draw the line with such disruptive protests, knowing that you're always going to piss some people off regardless. The question is whether you piss off those that would otherwise be receptive to your cause, and while making the odd individual potentially miss a funeral or leaving foreign teenagers stranded without any idea how they're going to get home is not necessarily going to help matters, the occasional action where the only real downside is some having their holidays delayed by a few hours is probably worth it. Again, whatever you think about Fathers 4 Justice and their immature headline-grabbing stunts, there's no doubting that they drastically increased the perception of fathers being failed by a system which was biased in favour of the mother. Blocking a road by lying down in it and chaining yourself to others just annoys; blocking a runway, even while middle class, potentially inspires others.

Likewise in Greece, it's hard not to admire the results which at least the initial rioting, since turned into apparent looting and trashing which is far less appealing, brought from an recalcitrant government. The shooting of a 15-year-old boy by a police officer after rocks were thrown at a patrol quickly resulted after an uprising in the officer in question being charged with murder, his companion as accompany to it and the interior minister resigning, but not before saying that "exemplary punishment" would be sought against those responsible. It's all rather different to our own slow-turning cogs of justice: three years after an innocent man had 7 bullets pumped into his head and 3 into his shoulder after he was sadly mistaken for a suicide bomber, the coroner at the inquest decides that it would inappropriate for the jury to be able to consider a verdict of "unlawful killing", despite the previous conviction of the Metropolitan police for breaching health and safety law, the undisputed confusion and chaos which was going in the control room, the complete failure to accurately identify the Jean Charles de Menezes as Hussain Osman, partially due to the police not even having a complete photograph of him, and finally the apparent lies told by the firearms team themselves that they shouted armed police when they entered the tube carriage. That their version of events is at odds with that of the members of the public that witnessed the shooting, is, according to the corner, not necessarily lying in the strictest sense, as the jury should bear "in mind people tell lies for a variety of reasons, not necessarily to put their own part."

While the Jean Charles de Menezes case is an extreme example, when failed suicide bombers were after all on the loose and police officers potentially found themselves in a situation where they may well have thought that they and the others around them were going to die if they didn't act, perhaps the family of de Menezes shouldn't have expected any better if they had considered the case of Harry Stanley, shot dead, allegedly in the back (although the IPCC report decided it was likely he was facing towards the officers when shot), after someone reported that there was an "Irishman with a gun wrapped in a bag" on the loose. The "gun" was a chair leg. Like with the de Menezes case, at the initial inquest the coroner ruled that the jury could not return a verdict of unlawful killing, only for his widow to gain a judicial review which ordered a second inquest, which did return a verdict of unlawful killing. Rather than the people themselves rising up in outrage over an innocent man being shot dead, the firearms officers did instead in favour of their comrades. Subsequently, the officers' suspension was lifted, the verdict of unlawful killing was overturned, and a subsequent IPCC investigation decided the officers should face no further disciplinary action.

The riots in Greece are as much, it seems, about general discontent with the government and life in general as they are about the death of Alexandros Grigoropoulos, capitalised on additionally by anarchist elements which have long been strong in the country. His death though was the straw that broke the camel's back, just as the 2005 and 2007 riots in France, both after the deaths of individuals attempting to escape from the police were the catalyst for violence which reflected anger over dislocation from society as much as that over police brutality. It's impossible to tell whether the reaction to the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes might have been different if he hadn't been a Brazilian, initially reported, erroneously, to have overstayed his visa, and instead a British citizen, but it seems doubtful. Despite the riots in 2001, there have been few signs that there's a potentially similar conflagration building in this country: whether this is down to docility; a less corrupt police force; higher living standards helped by the unprecedented boom between 1994 and last summer, even though few of the benefits of that have been seen by the poorest; despite the scaremongering, less racism and better integration; or the fact that it seems to really take a lot for us to get into the spirit of Mencken, having not even taken any large role in the protests of 68 which rocked continental Europe, is unclear and absurdly difficult to know for certain.

It is however hard not to be struck by the increasing disconnect between parliament and the more boisterous, radical elements of society. As one of the Plane Stupid protesters said, she was of the Iraq generation, which had learned that a million or two taking to the streets could not stop a war we had absolutely no need whatsoever to take part in. Instead we had a government that with opposition support has still offered no formal inquiry into how we came to be taken to war, other than whitewashes which have either avoided looking at it in full or have obfuscated in their conclusions. Up until this year, and the revolt over 42 days, much the same could be said of the government's approach to civil liberties, and the casual way in which they have been diluted, surveillance has become the norm and we are no longer surprised by local councils that think that spying on newsagents employing paperboys is a good use of their time and resources. Again, perhaps some of this is down to individuals deciding that these things aren't go to apply or affect them; who after all cares if terrorists determined to kill us are locked away indefinitely, or subject to control orders, or held without charge for 90 days? Whatever you think of David Davis, he surely deserves some of the credit for changing perceptions at least over 42 days with his stand, whether the bill was doomed in the Lords or not.

The point is that we shouldn't have to rely on archaic institutions like the Lords to preserve our rights and freedoms. It could not be more ridiculous that such inanities and beyond fuckwitted measures as banning the display of cigarettes in stores, lest anyone be seduced by the shiny packets, messages of doom and now diseased organs which adorn them and decide that taking up smoking is a good idea are proposed and introduced so easily when issues involving censorship, such as the IWF, not to mention the keeping of the fingerprints and DNA profiles of the innocent go undiscussed in the supposed mother of all parliaments. Even when it talks about itself, as it did on Monday over the Damian Green affair, our current government thinks that it's appropriate and necessary to introduce three-line-whips to ensure that it or the police aren't embarrassed by the findings into a raid which was carried out without a warrant. For a government that often preaches the mantra of if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear, it was a performance of the most shabby variety. They probably thought they could get away it because no one out in the real world apparent from political geeks cares about a Tory MP being arrested, and they're probably right. That Labour backbenchers should agree with that though is just as shocking.

Also on Monday we had the sight of Jack Straw going cap in hand to the Daily Mail, agreeing with the view that the act that he saw the introduction of was right to been seen as a "terrorists' and villains' charter", the same convention which the previous Friday the Mail had been praising after the European Court found that the retention of DNA profiles from the innocent was illegal. We know from Paul Dacre's own speech that the real reason the Mail hates the Human Rights Act is because it potentially threatens the tabloids' business model of exposing sex scandals, not because of how it protects everyone else, but half the reason why we are in the mess we are is because the gutter press has been allowed to get away with the idea that rights are something which only criminals, scroungers and foreigners have and that they're the only ones who benefit. Instead of challenging this, the justice secretary either agrees of partially does. The Conservatives meanwhile, the supposed upholders of our civil rights, disgracefully denigrate the HRA and the ECHR as foreign when we ourselves were the major drafters, instead proposing to introduce a "British" bill of rights, as though the ECHR or HRA are not. Kenneth Clarke denounced this as "xenophobic nonsense", but the same people who spoke up for civil liberties keep this ignorant charade alive. Only Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats seem willing to defend the HRA.

The riots in Greece and France occurred not because of police brutality, but because of the desperation of those who saw what had happened and imagined that it could have been them instead. Abandoned by those in power, denied a voice, and only able to articulate themselves through carnage which targeted those in the same boat, our own parliament and politicians are surely in danger of repeating the same mistakes, of not listening and living in their own bubble. Whether it will result in violence in this country is uncertain, but the apathy and cynicism which we already have in spades is only likely to increase until our own sources of injustice and discontent are drained.

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Edifying.

Considering that due to an unfortunate slip of the tongue we'll now be hearing about how Gordon Brown single-handedly saved capitalism for prosperity for the next decade, it's instructive that the Labour benches, obviously in need of a good laugh, found a single mother with small children visiting Nick "Shagger" Clegg so hilarious (14 minutes 40 in). Even when you consider that describing the prime minister's rapid fall from grace as going from "Stalin to Mr Bean" is about the highest form of wit that's emanated from the House of Commons in years, it's still rather surprising that what would embarrass 10-year-olds as being rather unfunny still succeeds in making them roll in the aisles in parliament. All that need have been added was the Speaker to tell those falling about to get their minds out of the sewer and everyone would have been right back in the playground.

(via Justin)

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Tuesday, December 09, 2008 

Wikipaedia part 2.

Almost as quickly as it was imposed, the blocking of the Wikipedia entry on the Scorpions' Virgin Killer album has been lifted. Don't imagine however that this is because the Internet Watch Foundation has suddenly decided that the image after all isn't indecent, or that regarding the context of it, it's ridiculous to now declare 32 years after its original release that it is. Their statement again says it all:

Following representations from Wikipedia, IWF invoked its Appeals Procedure and has given careful consideration to the issues involved in this case. The procedure is now complete and has confirmed that the image in question is potentially in breach of the Protection of Children Act 1978. However, the IWF Board has today (9 December 2008) considered these findings and the contextual issues involved in this specific case and, in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to remove this webpage from our list.
Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted abroad, will not be added to the list. Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted in the UK will be assessed in line with IWF procedures.
IWF’s overriding objective is to minimise the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect. We regret the unintended consequences for Wikipedia and its users. Wikipedia have been informed of the outcome of this procedure and IWF Board’s subsequent decision.

In other words, the only mistake the IWF is owning up to is that they overreached themselves in blocking a site that was always likely to stand up to them. While admitting that they flagrantly failed to consider the contextual and extenuating circumstances surrounding the image, they make quite clear that if the image was hosted on a server in the UK that they reserve the right to demand that it either be taken down, and/or blocked. It is, after all, in their view, in breach of the Protection of Children Act 1978. That the "child" didn't object at the time and still doesn't object today is irrelevant, as is the context of the image when it isn't hosted on a encyclopaedic or shopping website.

The entire case highlights the secretive and undemocratic nature of the way the IWF operates. If, rather than Wikipedia, they had simply blocked a page on a Scorpions fan site, no one would probably have been any the wiser, and even if it had been noticed, seems unlikely to have spread beyond the tech based sites. It's only because they overreached themselves and completely failed to think through the consequences of blocking a site of the size of Wikipedia that they have come so unstuck.

It also highlights the disparity between the increasing tenor of our laws and those of our peers abroad. Once the ban on "extreme pornography" comes in, our own smut purveyors which dabble in such material will be essentially out of a job, unable to know what is and isn't illegal without running up obscene legal costs. Similarly, the same reason why there isn't much of a porn industry in this country is because of the draconian and ridiculous laws on, if you'll excuse the expression, "hard" copy distribution of the finished product. The only place you can legally buy a hardcore DVD from is a council sanctioned sex shop, again usually for an obscene price. This doesn't stop mail-order or internet companies from existing, but essentially they are breaking the law by operating in such a way. There is however no such ban on you importing hardcore material from abroad, although customs can still be sniffy about the more extreme material - meaning that our overseas cousins have a monopoly on the market. Some will think there's nothing wrong with that, as after all, pornography is without doubt exploitative, but it still seems ludicrous in this day and age.

The entire episode has also shown the haphazard way in the which the IWF was founded, and its rather curious legal position. As noted by Richard Jones in the comments on the previous post, the IWF or rather its predecessor, SafetyNet, came about primarily as an invention of ISPs to avoid direct government censorship, which our ever prurient media and police were advocating once it became public knowledge the delights that the internet could offer, with the Met threatening to raid an ISP over the contents of 132 newsgroups which it considered the ISP to be personally publishing by carrying. As laudatory as this was, this also means that there is no specific legislation concerning the IWF's legal status. Agreements between the government and the ISPs themselves effectively govern its entire being and what is and isn't censored. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has said that his first intention was to send in the lawyers - until they informed him that because the IWF isn't a statutory body it isn't even clear that they can be sued. That is remarkable in itself.

Moreover, the IWF has just more or less admitted that there is very little it can do about large foreign opponents complaining and attempting to get around the bans which it might well impose, come the 26th of January. They'll have no problems banning "extreme pornography" from UK servers, but considering very little of it exists as it is in this country, Longhurst's win might well turn out to be a pyrrhic victory. If the IWF shows the same level of intellect in blocking the likes of "Necrobabes" or other such sites as it has Wikipedia, it might well find itself being shown up as ineffective as well as unaccountable. That the IWF's blocks can easily be circumvented using anonymiser websites or open proxy servers should be irrelevant.

Again, it's worth stating that this is not primarily about child pornography, or "child sexual abuse images", as the IWF term them. No one has any real problem with what are clearly abusive images of children being either censored or removed from the internet, as images or video above the "level 2" scale are, with images at the "level 1" scale being very carefully considered before they are similarly removed. It's with the IWF's extending mandate and their apparent inability to exercise what appears to good common sense. After all, shouldn't a court establish what is and isn't material which incites racial hatred before they block it, especially when the IWF has no solid legal basis? You can argue that this is what it is doing in the Darryn Walker case, but should any fictional textual material now be considered to be potentially obscene in the first place? The IWF's whole existence is based on a compromise, one that we ought to be careful before we challenge, considering the potential to make things a whole lot worse rather than better, but shouldn't there at least be legislation put forward which sets up the organisation as a separate independent legal body, like the BBFC, which can be challenged and held to something approaching account, and so the organisation's current set-up can be discussed in parliament? By bringing itself into disrepute over something so apparently inconsequential, a whole hornet's nest has been opened up.

Related:
Wardman Wire - Privatised censorship
Frank Fisher - A nasty sting in the censors' tail

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Monday, December 08, 2008 

Wikipaedia.

Another erotic album cover pose?

It occasionally takes a decision made ultimately by an underling to expose the stupidity that often underlies some of the laws which govern us - and the moronic, for it can only be described as moronic, decision by someone simply doing their job at the Internet Watch Foundation that an album cover by an otherwise almost forgotten metal band from the 70s amounts to child pornography, although of the very lowest level, resulting in the blocking of the editing of Wikipedia for sections of the UK deserves to be one of those.

The Internet Watch Foundation's main work is blocking images of "child sexual abuse images" (according to them, terms such as child pornography "are not acceptable", as apparently the "use of such language acts to legitimise images which are not pornography, rather, they are permanent records of children being sexually abused", which suggests they don't just want to censor images but words also) which for the most part, with the exception more than ably illustrated today, is uncontroversial. Less well-known however is that they also block material which incites "racial hatred", although again how much of it they actually do block is impossible to know, but also material which potentially breaches the Obscene Publications Act. The OPA, notoriously, defines an obscene publication as something which is liable to both "deprave and corrupt", something wholly subjective and which juries, notably during the 1980s, could not decide upon when the "video nasties" were prosecuted. Some found some of the films brought before them to be obscene; others decided that the exact same films were in fact, not obscene. Most recently this remit resulted in the prosecution of Darryn Walker, author of a short story depicting the kidnap, rape and murder of the pop group Girls Aloud, apparently first reported to them and passed by them onto the police. His trial is upcoming.

That decision was one of the first to alert us to the vagaries of an apparently unaccountable organisation which still deigns fiction to be liable to bring out the inner Daily Mail reader in us all, but the blocking of the "Virgin Killer" cover is far more instructive of what might be yet to come. According to the IWF, the Virgin Killer cover amounts to level 1 indecent image of a child, as defined by the Sexual Offences Act 2003. Level 1 images depict "erotic posing with no sexual activity". Whilst all the successive levels involve actual sexual activity of one variety or another, level 1 is, like the OPA definition, utterly subjective. Is the girl in the image posing erotically? Quite possibly. Even if she is however, surely the extenuating circumstances surrounding the image should have been taken into consideration. Not only is the image over 30 years old, been available on the high street without causing any real high profile attention, but a tiny amount of background reading from the controversy that had arisen over it would have shown that the girl depicted was someone related to those behind the cover design, that she had posed willingly at the time and has no objections to it now still being used. That the image is not just available on Wikipedia, but also on Amazon (or at least was) and a dozen other places via a Google search, ought to have suggested that this should be a special case.

Instead what we have is an organisation which thinks that using a sledgehammer to crack a nut is both a good idea, and one which is only concerned by doing things entirely by the rules as set out before them. Image is, according to their thinking, obscene, therefore it must be blocked. As it isn't hosted in this country and therefore the ISP responsible cannot be ordered (surely asked politely? Ed.) to take it down, proxy servers and fake 404 pages are set-up to do the job. No thought is given to how this might affect what is after all a rather larger endeavour than a Scorpions album cover repository. The statement from the organisation doesn't even begin to delve into how the decision was came to be made in detail: instead, all they've done is added the URL to the list "provided to ISPs and other companies in the online sector to protect their customers from inadvertent exposure to a potentially illegal indecent image of a child". Protect is the key word; that's after all what they're doing. It doesn't matter that no one would ever be prosecuted over a single image, especially one in such wide circulation; the general public but most of all their customers needs to be saved from potential "inadvertent exposure".

Where after all does all of this end? As others have already pointed out, children have throughout art history been depicted naked, perhaps, it deserves to be pointed out, in more innocent, less hysterical times. Recently the London Underground briefly banned the image of a nude Venus lest anyone be sexually aroused by the advert for an exhibition. If someone for instance posted images of their children online in a photo album (not advisable by any yardstick), and one of these was reported by the same apparent busybody that reported this one to the IWF, and was decided by one of their employees to involve an "erotic pose", would that find itself being blocked too? If "Klara and Edda Belly Dancing" was reported to the IWF, would they demure from the police decision not to prosecute after it was seized from an exhibition and potentially suggest that it also involved erotic posing?

The real concern here though is not over idiotic individual decisions, but rather that from the end of January next year the IWF will also have the power to block "extreme pornography", the kind recently outlawed after parliament abjectly failed to prevent the campaign by Liz Longhurst reaching its ultimate conclusion. This will potentially lead to the blocking of any pornographic material, which is again subjective, which portrays the threatening of a person's life or which results or is likely to result in serious injury to a person's anus, breasts or genitalia, to say nothing of the ban it also places on apparent necrophilia or bestiality. The Heresiarch noted at the time of the Brand-Ross frenzy that the fragrant Georgina Baillie had appeared in material which could well find itself falling foul of the law and which the Daily Mail had republished. To suggest that the law in this case is nonsensical is perhaps to be too kind; the contradictions and lunacy of banning out and out pornographic material featuring necrophilia, for example, when "art" films such as Visitor Q, which features a man killing and then having sex with the corpse of his victim (although that's not by any means an adequate explanation of what goes on and it is a rather excellent film by the consistently outrageous Takashi Miike), Kissed and Love Me Deadly are considered fine to be seen by those over 18, despite the fact that what one man deems culture another deems beating off material have to literally (or ought to be) be seen to be believed. Who has any confidence whatsoever in the IWF making sensible decisions based on the current performance?

It would be nice to imagine that it ends there. But it doesn't. There are plans to ban drawn material which depicts "abuse" or sex between child and adult, which sounds fair enough, but which is likely to be used not just to ban "lolicon", as such anime-type material is known, but hentai and other anime where the age of those involved is not so obvious. Having therefore made those predisposed to sadomasochistic material potentially breach the law to otherwise further their perfectly legal personal habits, the government seems to wish to criminalise those that enjoy the likes of La Blue Girl (already admittedly banned or heavily cut when submitted to the BBFC) or other fantastical hentai as well. Along with the plans to prosecute those who have sex with prostitutes "controlled by others" with rape, with ignorance not being an excuse, you'd similarly be excused for imagining that the government was determined to diminish sexual freedom as a whole by stealth, all so that one-off campaigners and tabloid newspapers can sleep secure in their beds knowing that perverts aren't masturbating and potentially incubating deviant thoughts which they will subsequently carry out on others. Although whether someone will ever successfully create a tentacle monster remains to be seen.

If this sounds like a slippery slope argument, suggesting that child pornography isn't so bad really honest, then it isn't. It does however come down to whether you think that the likes of the Scorpion album cover is an image of abuse, as the IWF does. If you don't, then you have reason to be concerned not just that an organisation like the IWF which claims to be self-regulating has such a potentially chilling control over the internet in this country, but also that the government seems convinced that far less exploitative imagery must also be banned for all our sakes. Then we won't just that IWF to blame and attack, but ourselves also.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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