Saturday, February 14, 2009 

Weekend links.

No overall theme again this week, except for one story we shall leave until last. On the blogs, as good a place to start as any is those discussing other blogs, with both A Very Public Sociologist and BenSix examining the piss-poor LabourList, which in the words of Jamie Sport, "is little more than a big sign saying this is why you shouldn't vote Labour". Dave Osler asks what makes a great political pamphlet, Lee Griffin talks truancy, Tom Freeman takes on the Times over their criticism of the Lloyds takeover of HBOS, the Heresiarch commemorates the 20th anniversary of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, Lib Dem David Howarth is brilliant on prisons, BenSix (again) mocks the Mail over its hysteria about "persecuted" Christians and Alix Mortimer is horrified by the latest anti-terror proposal to make women suspicious of brown people by showing sinister films in hairdressers. Eric Allison also attacks the Tories' latest piece of opportunism, this time ringing the outrage bell about prisoners, shock horror, reading "unsuitable" literature.

As for the papers, there's not much of quality but for three articles: Jonathan Steele on Afghanistan, 20 years after the Soviets withdrew while looking at our own involvement, Peter Oborne, who is utterly wasted at the Mail, tackles Jacqui Smith's expenses, and Andrew Grice notes Labour is still terrified about the ghosts of old returning to haunt them.

Left till last for the worst tabloid pieces is predictably the nonsense being spouted about a 13-year-old fathering a child. Most amusing is the pique at the prospect of Alfie and Chantelle getting benefits in the Sun, which presumably has already paid a vast sum to their parents to obtain their story. Even more hilarious are these lines in the leader, which points the finger everywhere except at itself:

Then we must consider how our fashion industry sexualises children.

Stores are full of flirtatious clothes aimed at little girls.

Is it responsible for shops to target sexy bras and knickers at children of eight?


Ah yes, the "fashion industry" sexualising children. It's nothing to do with the media being overflowing with sex, is it, such as the newspaper which features a topless woman on its third page every day, certainly not. As per usual though, the Sun is a beacon of sanity compared to the Daily Mail, which yesterday had Melanie Phillips spitting tacks, and today has veteran worst comment piece winner Amanda Platell doing much the same, while its leader blames, naturally, the liberals. Platell's piece is instructive of how on a case by case basis it decides how to allot blame to either parents or the state, depending on their whim at the time:

I know there are those who will pour scorn on Alfie's head. Doubtless, he's not the sharpest pencil in the box. But the blame for this whole sorry episode lies elsewhere - and I don't mean with his 15-year-old 'girlfriend', Chantelle.

For their predicament is testament to the moral collapse that is the true legacy of a liberal establishment that has imposed its own values - or rather, lack of them - on the British people for the past four decades.


So while when Allison Pearson blamed the mother when her daughter was murdered, something she had no control over, Platell this time round blames the "liberal establishment" when the parents themselves had far more of the blame, should we wish to apportion it, to share. Platell at least puts this moral collapse down to four decades worth of "liberal" policies, unlike the Conservatives who predictably screamed about the broken society, even when the BBC rather shot them down by noting that the number of under-16s giving birth over the past decade has declined. Deborah Orr in the Independent is a voice of sanity, noting how incredibly rare such a situation is, and then skewering all involved:


The concern should not be only about the wisdom of the families involved, but about a media culture that is no better at preserving the innocence of childhood than the individuals it seeks to criticise.


Indeed.

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Friday, February 13, 2009 

Scum-watch: More heartlessness over Binyam Mohamed.

The Scum continues its shamefully heartless low-level campaign against Binyam Mohamed returning from Guantanamo:

AN AIR ambulance will bring Guantanamo Bay terror suspect Binyam Mohamed to Britain — at taxpayers’ expense.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband also sent a medic to treat Mohamed, who is on hunger strike.

The Ethiopian — whose right to live in Britain expired five YEARS ago — was set to arrive yesterday, but was too ill.

Perhaps we should charge the doubtless extravagant cost to the United States, considering they were the ones responsible for Mohamed's unlawful detention for the past five years. Suggesting something similar though would expose the Sun's long-term position: that it has never so much as once called for the closure of the Cuban camp and has opposed the return of every single British citizen and resident from there. It even went so far as to sneer at the concern raised about the conditions by comparing what was meted out to Daniel Pearl:

Whilst much of the media huffed and puffed about “bad conditions” in Guantanamo Bay, these very same terrorists were preparing to slit Daniel’s throat.

No Geneva Convention for Daniel. No orange suits in the Cuban sun.

Instead, these evil brutes filmed his murder on video and sent it to the Americans.


Likewise, when Moazzam Begg was returned it printed the following leader column:

IF you live in the Birmingham area, it’s possible you have a new neighbour who turned up in the past few days.

His name is Moazzam Begg and he’s one of the freed Guantanamo Four.

The legal papers on Begg released by the American Justice Department make disturbing reading.

America says Begg has received “extensive” terrorist training in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, including how to use AK-47 rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.

He was armed and prepared to fight American and allied troops, the documents state.

Begg denies this and claims he took his wife and children from Birmingham to Afghanistan to open a school in Kabul.

In a sworn statement, his wife claims they wanted to live in a society that was safe for their family.

Afghanistan, under the rule of the evil Taliban, safer than bringing up children in the Midlands?

Unbelievable, isn’t it?

Almost as unbelievable as the fact that, for political reasons, terrorist suspects are walking our streets.

Not a single one of the returned former Guantanamo detainees has been charged with any offence in this country, nor is there any indication that any have returned to any variety of Islamic militancy. Some might say the Sun is just being cautious, defensive, especially considering how some of them were to find themselves in American custody. Others might be inclined to believe that the paper finds nothing whatsoever wrong with "bad people" being locked up without charge or any chance of a fair trial, and that therefore to return these "bad men" to this good country is an outrage. There is however something astonishingly low about complaining about the cost of sending an air ambulance to care properly for a man who is quite clearly seriously ill, regardless of what he's accused of. Such basic humanity seems to be beyond the Sun's conscience, though:

AN air ambulance and a doctor have been sent by the Government to bring dangerous Guantanamo suspect Binyam Mohamed back to Britain.

Labour say we have no option but to take him back.

But laying on a private jet stinks.

Will they send a Rolls to the airport?

How should we have got him back then? Stuck him on a commercial flight from Havana and let the Sun's fearless journalists quiz the desperately ill man about how he's going to kill us all eventually but to begin with is just going to steal our benefits? The attempt at wit which is asking whether they'll send a Rolls to the airport is beneath contempt; far more likely is that they'll send another ambulance, but to consider that might again cause a few pangs of conscience.

Meanwhile, this is happening:



From the woman they wished would slither back under a rock to "the tragedy we all feared" in just more than 24 months.

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Thursday, February 12, 2009 

Sleepwalking towards a police state.

Such has been the casual but persistent dilution of liberties since New Labour came to power, it's become all too easy to scream about the coming police state, with the argument always focused on the dichotomy between security and liberty, that at times it's been rather swept under the carpet whether at times Labour has specifically intended to reach the position we're currently at. There's no doubt that they have encouraged and abetted, for example, the world's largest number of CCTV cameras, while there is not a single scrap of evidence that they even begin to prevent crime, even if they personally have not been behind the huge increase.

Likewise, when they introduced section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, they may not have intended that the police would routinely abuse it and use it as a power to stop and search when the other applicable authorisations could not be justified, but they must have known full well that whenever the police are given a new power to detain, search or arrest, that it takes a great deal of restraint for them not to routinely use it for purposes for which it was not intended.

With this in mind, it's incredibly easy to be greatly cynical about the new offence created in the latest and greatest "Counter-Terrorism" Act. Contained in section 76 is the criminalisation of "[E]liciting, publishing or communicating information about members of armed forces etc", which you would imagine ostensibly is intended to stop individuals, such as those convicted of plotting to kidnap and behead a Muslim soldier, from compiling information on potential targets, whether it be home addresses or photographs of soldiers themselves. That alone is contentious; what is even more contentious is that this covers not just members of the armed force and the intelligence services, but also humble police constables.

It's rather difficult not to connect this directly to what has become more than just individual, jumped-up officers of the law asking members of the public what they're doing when they're seen taking photographs of almost anything, as has become almost routine for some whose simple pleasures including taking pictures of buildings, or even getting a camera out in the vicinity of children. While this does not directly cover that, what it will directly cover is the photographing of police officers, which has also become something of a point of concern, with those photographed routinely demanding that such pictures be deleted, even going so far as to confiscate the devices if they're digital and doing it for them. This has been especially noted on demonstrations, where ironically there are now almost always dedicated teams of officers, known as Forward Intelligence Teams, who film and take photographs of everyone, regardless of whether there is even the slightest likelihood of violence or the breaking of the law. FIT was originally set up to monitor football crowds for hooligans; now those exact same methods are used to do little more than intimidate peaceful protesters.

In response, the likes of FIT Watch have been set up to give the officers a taste of their own medicine. It could be argued that the archives of FIT Watch could be used by those with less salubrious methods to target officers for far more than just tit for tat gestures, but the chances of this seem to be negligible. Rather, what section 76 does is simply put into law what the officers have already been unofficially practising for some time.

The consequences of this could not potentially be more serious. It essentially means that anyone who comes across an instance of the police abusing their powers and manages to record it can have their evidence destroyed with next to no powers of appeal. It will further empower officers to intervene with photographers regardless of what they are doing. It in effect gives carte blanche to the police to stop anyone from recording almost anything, with the excuse being they themselves might be the ones being targeted. Furthermore, because of the vagueness of the legislation, which is almost certainly deliberate, it's up to the police and the courts themselves to intrepret when there was a breach. It's a recipe for completely disempowering the individual while empowering the authorities of the state to do almost whatever they feel like, with little sanction for appeal.

I've long argued that rather than this country becoming a police state, as some have in the past seriously suggested, what we have instead become is an incompetent surveillance society, built on the false idea and justification that surveillance equals security. Section 76 however moves us on from there: it puts not just the armed forces and the security services but also the police force almost completely above the law, able to control anyone who dares to question their authority through the camera. Richard Thomas, the information commissioner has long said that we are sleepwalking into a surveillance society; we now in fact appear to be sleepwalking fully towards that long feared but prophesied police state.

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Wednesday, February 11, 2009 

The war on drugs marches on.

Partly because the moral panic about Ecstasy has long since died away, and partly because it was well-known that Jacqui Smith and the Home Office would reject any suggestion whatsoever that the drug should be downgraded to Class B, the publication of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs' report on the harm associated with the drug, and the predicted refusal to accept their advice to downgrade it have been rather underwhelmingly reported. This is a shame, because it's quite clear that when compared to the decision to upgrade cannabis to Class B, the refusal to downgrade Ecstasy is just as outrageous and contemptible.

The problem with our drug laws only gets more and more obvious as the years go by. The Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 is the root of all the problems: it is, to use the horrible cliche, not fit for purpose. The prohibition of drugs has not stopped their use; it has rather only increased it, enriched the criminals that sell them and made it even more difficult to treat those who become addicted. The key problem though is that the 1971 act is blanket prohibition masquerading, with the involvement of the ACMD, as a harm reduction strategy when it is nothing of the sort. This fiction is kept up by the three separate classes of drugs, with the most dangerous and most harmful in Class A, with the least harmful but still illegal in Class C. The classification system is however completely and utterly broken; it has the more or less completely harmless magic mushrooms in Class A, alongside the also relatively benign LSD and Ecstasy, while cigarettes which kill hundreds of thousands across the world every year, is in none of the categories. Likewise, alcohol, which can cause untold misery and precipitates violence, is also completely legal.

Both should of course remain completely legal; if individuals want to slowly poison themselves, especially with tobacco and nicotine, then they are perfectly entitled to do so as long as they don't harm others at the same time. Our liberated attitude towards tobacco and alcohol is in sharp contrast to that towards cannabis, which although can cause harm, as heavy use suggests that it can induce psychosis, as well as having similar effects on the lungs when smoked to tobacco, remains illegal and demonised by the popular press. Ecstasy is arguably even safer than cannabis: the ACMD report and David Nutt's previous article which compared MDMA use in harm terms to horse riding, both argue that the main danger when using the drug is that users become either dehydrated, from drinking too little while dancing, to becoming too hot, or more rarely, develop hyponatraemia, where too much water is drank, which notably was the actual cause of death in the case of Leah Betts. MDMA itself is only toxic when taken in very high doses, which is rare. It's also not addictive, there is little concrete evidence as yet that it has long-term side effects, although some studies have suggested there may be memory problems in later life, and unlike cocaine, heroin or indeed alcohol, it tends not to lead to violence among those who take it; quite the opposite, in fact. The other main cause for concern is directly associated with its illegality: it's impossible to know what else is in the pill other than MDMA, or indeed whether there is any MDMA in what you've bought at all, or whether it might instead contain its sister, MDA, or other substances. If anything, the levels of MDMA in the pills has declined over time: the pills which became exceptionally popular due to their intensity during the early 90s, named "love doves" after the dove stamped on them, have long gone, as have the similarly well-remembered initial "Mitsubishis", stamped with the car company's logo, from the late 90s. MDMA "powder", which is regarded as more likely to be purer, has increased in popularity as a result.

Compared to the insanity which is the Class A status of magic mushrooms, or Psilocybin mushrooms to give them their proper name, Ecstasy's status looks reasonably rational. That something which grows perfectly naturally of its own accord is illegal is a mind-twister by itself; when you consider that the number of people who have died as a result of taking shrooms numbers between 0 and 10 despite evidence that they have been used since before the earliest recorded history makes it even more ludicrous. The only thing that's going to damage someone from taking magic mushrooms is what a bad trip might do to their psyche, and even then most will get over it with no problems whatsoever.

The government itself knows that once the debate has moved on from the hysteria to the actual scientific evidence regarding harm, the blanket prohibition on drugs is now fast becoming completely untenable. This is why it has withdrawn from so much as bothering to argue their case regarding the softer drugs, and was doubtless ecstatic to be helped along regarding cannabis by the useful idiots in the press that claimed that the cannabis of today was 20 or 30 times stronger than before, when this was demonstrably not the case. Instead, it's had to settle on "sending a message"; it was sending a message that smoking cannabis was unacceptable by raising it to Class B, while emphasising the dangers of the new ultra-strength skunk, just as it is now sending a message that taking Ecstasy is unacceptable by keeping it in Class A. Ever since the initial moral panic over heroin in the 1960s, the press has helped with the idea that most drugs are unpredictably deadly, while public opinion has also stayed in much the same position, supporting prohibition and most recently the raising of cannabis back up to Class B.

The ACMD in essence completely wasted its time in bothering to review Ecstasy, because the government had already made plain and clear that regardless of what their review said, Ecstasy would stay in Class A, as Transform made more than clear in their submission to the ACMD (PDF). At least the policy on ecstasy has been consistent: the downgrading of cannabis, which was in line with the ACMD's recommendation, was then overturned once the government decided that to upgrade it again was politically expedient, regardless of their scientific analysis. If the members of the ACMD had something resembling guts, they would resign en masse, as after all, what is the point of an advisory council which delivers independent advice based on a review of the all the relative literature and evidence if that evidence is going to be completely disregarded because it doesn't fit with the government's pre-defined policy? Instead, David Nutt apologised to Jacqui Smithover his comparison of the dangers of Ecstasy and horse riding after she disgracefully criticised him in parliament. His article ruthlessly exposed the stupidity inherent in our current policy towards drugs, and also ruthlessly exposed our government ministers as being just as stupid, and just as cowardly in the face of the ignorance but deafening noise of the tabloid press. Evidence-based policy has never been such a contradiction in terms.

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Cowardice over Wilders.

The decision to bar entry to Geert Wilders ought to be completely baffling, but is instead indicative of the general cowardice which we have come to expect from the Home Office. Wilders is, above all, a crashing bore: someone who thought there was a need to physically connect passages from the Koran with terrorists and fundamentalists, as if the correlation were not already so obvious. Fitna was the sort of film which the average YouTuber can better and which still gets voted down, such was both its amateur production and message. You don't like Islam, and especially not the extremists; we get it.

Wilders is in fact typical of the majority of the European far-right: despite their own contempt for free speech, or freedom of thought, they pose as martyrs being persecuted for saying the unsayable. In Wilders case he actually is being persecuted, or rather prosecuted for just that: he's set to be tried for his anti-Islam sloganising and general bullheadedness. The irony is that Wilders himself believes that the Koran should be banned for being a "fascist" book, the man from the "Freedom" party who wants to deny religious freedom purely because of his own bigoted views.

The obvious response to those who want to hang themselves on their own personal cross is to deny them the opportunity to do so. All Wilders wanted to do was to visit the House of Lords, which was to show his film, and then take part in discussion about it. The Home Office claims that Wilders' mere presence would be enough to "threaten community harmony and therefore public security", when such a claim is clearly abject nonsense. It's quite apparent that it's not Wilders whom the Home Office is scared of, but rather of the protests his presence might well attract. Whether it fears a repeat of the Dutch embassy protests or not, this is clearly an excuse rather than anything even approaching an actual reason. Wilders himself meanwhile can add a further notch of self-satisfaction to his belt.

Rather than showing any sign of "Dhimmitude", as the jihadist watchers love to throw about, it instead shows New Labour's own authoritarian stance on where the boundary between freedom of speech and the freedom to offend and abuse lies. The government talks of challenging extremism in all its forms, but by taking such a provocative stance and banning Wilders from visiting it has only inflamed the situation far beyond what it would otherwise have been. Despite Lord Ahmed's claims that temporarily stopping the showing of Fitna in the House of Lords was a victory for the Muslim community, it seems highly doubtful that few if any would have turned up to protest against his visit: he just simply isn't worth bothering with. Wilders can now instead further boast of how he's banned from another European country which in his eyes is abandoning its values in order to appease its unruly minorities. The sad reality is that New Labour never had any values to abandon in the first place.

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Tuesday, February 10, 2009 

Butt out.

When it comes to Islamic extremism and eccentricity, few can quite measure up to such sane and well-balanced individuals as the likes of Omar Bakri Muhammad, the bearded, NHS-style spectacles wearing sheikh who went not denouncing pop songs is paying for his daughter's breast enlargement operation, or the even more zany David Myatt, or rather Abdul-Aziz ibn Myatt, who went from leading Combat 18, the violent far-right sect, to converting to the most radical shade of Islam and berating the "kuffar". Neither however seems to be as inwardly conflicted as Hassan Butt apparently is.

You might recall that Butt, along with Ed Husain, was one of the few who made the journey from being Islamists to becoming almost instant fixtures on our TV screens, giving their insights into how extremism could be tackled. Like Husain, Butt had been involved with Hizb-ut-Tahrir, the Islamic political party that advocates the re-establishment of the global caliphate, but was most well known for being the spokesman for Al-Muhajiroun, itself a split from Hizb-ut-Tahrir, led by the aforementioned Bakri. Butt's claims, as time went by, became ever more outlandish and potentially serious: not only did he claim that he had sent those he recruited in this country to train with al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but he finally also said that he had been personally involved with the bombing of the US consulate in Karachi in 2002, an attack blamed on al-Qaida. This eventually culminated in his arrest last year, and the police demanding access to the notes behind the book that Husain was working on with the journalist Shiv Malik.

Butt however, it seems, was a fantasist, a liar who loved attention who kept ratcheting up just how deeply he had been involved within the jihadist movement. With the police investigating his potential links with the Karachi bombing, as well as his claims that he was a recruiter, he admitted to them that he made most of the stories up, going so far as to fake his own injuries to give the impression that other violent extremists wanted him dead for what he was revealing to the media. Not that this was the first time that Butt had been arrested on suspicion of his involvement with terrorism: he was also picked up in 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2007, each time being released without charge, presumably for lack of evidence.

Butt's admittance that he was a liar though doesn't even begin to answer the far more interesting associated questions. It's beyond doubt both that he was Al-Muhajiroun's spokesman and that he was a radical Islamist, familiar with the ideology and willing to chew the fat with journalists far before his alliance with Malik, as an interview in Prospect magazine shortly after the 7/7 bombings but before Butt apparently renounced his jihadist outlook shows. Are his claims then to have renounced Islamism credible at all? Could this indeed have been all a front, designed to take the pressure off him while behind the scenes he continued with his involvement with the successors of Al-Muhajiroun? In court he claimed that this was not the case, and that although he had never been an active jihadist, he could indeed be accurately described as a radical. It's also true that he had relationships with at least three now convicted terrorists; apparently untrue was that he met Mohammed Siddique Khan, ringleader of 7/7, while it's unclear whether he knew the two British men who carried out the suicide bombing in Israel, although Husain in his book suggests that he had met Omar Khan Sharif through his own involvement with HuT.

Whatever the truth, Butt succeeded in duping not just Shiv Malik, but also Newsnight's Richard Watson, with the programme featuring him heavily during its own investigations into Islamic extremism in this country. He made waves over the pond too, appearing on 60 Minutes on CBS in 2006, after which a rather prescient Adrian Morgan questioned whether Butt had genuinely renounced radical Islam, saying that his stories simply didn't add up. It will doubtless also be a further embarrassment to Husain himself, who came under fire recently from those who had been up till then highly supportive, after he warned that the conflict in Gaza was radicalising youth and that the government's position was not helping. Husain had spoken of Butt going into hiding because of his new work helping to "deradicalise" youth in Manchester, while Butt himself on Newsnight had derided the idea that foreign policy had any role in terrorism, with similar articles in both the Observer and the Mail.

At its heart, Butt's is a case of someone exploiting the media for telling them what they wanted to hear: first that he was a recruiter who wanted to send young British Muslims to fight their countrymen in Afghanistan, then that he had turned his back on his old ways and that to blame foreign policy for terrorism in this country was to "do their work for them", when the real problem was Islamic theology itself. There is of course more than a little truth in that, but to ignore completely the role of foreign policy was always madness; the madness which some, such as this government and the pro-war left wanted to hear, with their ciphers in the press also delighted by it. Butt's fantasist ways shouldn't automatically discredit the likes of the Quilliam Foundation, set-up by Husain and another former HuT leader, Maajjid Nawaz, as it's clear they are also part of the solution, but it reminds us that where there's money to made and fame to be had, there will always be those prepared to embroider their stories to get to the centre of attention.

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Monday, February 09, 2009 

Why does lack of trust not equal lack of sales?

One of the most ponderous and unanswered questions concerning the British media is why, when survey after survey suggests that journalists, especially of the tabloid ilk, are trusted only slightly more than estate agents, the papers that lie the most to their readers continue to be the ones that are the most successful. Last month Edelman found that just 19% trust newspapers in this country, while the latest survey, this time for the Media Standards Trust, found that national newspapers were the least trusted of six institutions and organisation. The police, supermarkets, the BBC, hospitals and banks were all more highly trusted, although they did come second, behind the banks, when asked which should be more strictly regulated.

Historically, it's true that while newspapers may have been founded with the best of intentions, their owners were far less principled. The barons, for the most part, only had making money as a side interest; their first concern was propaganda and the status that owning a newspaper brought. This only changed when the barons gave way to the grocers, and now, in the form of Richard Desmond, and arguably before him Robert Maxwell and Conrad Black, the asset-strippers. Others might add the Barclay brothers, considering their current cuts at the Telegraph, to that list. Rupert Murdoch combines both making money with propaganda, the losses on the Times more than subsidised by the other sections of his empire and by the profits made by the Sun and News of the World. Murdoch's own contempt for accuracy in contrast to money-making could not be more exemplified than by his order that the presses should keep rolling when the Sunday Times printed the Hitler diaries, despite their exposure as a hoax.

It's also true that throughout their history newspapers have been criticised both for their intrusions into privacy, their salacious content and their downright lies. Only once though has a scandal and the complete contempt for accuracy directly resulted in a huge drop in circulation, when the Sun more or less lost 200,000 sales overnight after splashing, ironically, with "THE TRUTH" on its front page. Those 200,000 sales lost in Liverpool after their coverage of the Hillsborough disaster have also never returned.

It's with that in mind that we ought to be careful in suggesting that things now are worse than they have ever been, as few can honestly live up to the excesses of Kelvin MacKenzie's reign whilst editor of the Sun. Likewise, on the political front, it's also true that campaigns now are nowhere near as distorted as they once were, when popular papers of both left and right seemed to do battle to outdo themselves in their respective smears on Conservative and Labour alike. 1992 was the last real time that such partisanship potentially had an impact on the result itself, although the Sun's own claims that it "won it" for the Tories are highly dubious. Newspapers have always exaggerated their ability to influence their readers to vote a certain way; most, after all, read a newspaper that plays to their own prejudices or at least shares their own politics.

One of the explanations for the continuing sharp fall in trust is that trust across the board is declining. The British Journalism Review's collection of polls actually showed that last year trust in red-top journalists went up from 7% to 15%, a completely inexplicable rise, while trust as a whole only went up in leading Conservative politicians and people who run large companies, also inexplicable. That survey, which distinguished between journalists on the red-tops, middle-market, and the up-market papers, found trust of 20% in the former and 43% of the former. All were behind BBC, ITV and Channel 4 journalists.

Why then, when so many don't apparently trust a word of what they're reading, do they continue for the most part, even when we take into consideration falling sales, mainly explained for reasons quite different to falling trust, to buy the likes of the Mail and the Sun? Is it because they completely ignore most of the news coverage and especially the political reporting, and only focus on the sport and the features, is it macohism, or is that they don't really care about whether the newspaper they read tells the truth or not? Some of it might well be down to most newspapers' complete refusal to be self-critical or so much as suggest that they might get it wrong, except when they're forced to: after all, both Paul Dacre and Rebekah Wade recently gave defiant speeches in which they directly attacked those critical or cynical of where the newspaper industry is going, while Dacre unleashed an assault directly on Nick Davies' Flat Earth News, even if not naming it, one of the most critical books in years on the press, with the added sting that it was written by an industry insider, even if from the Guardian, probably the most critical and cynical newspaper on the wider press.

Fundamentally, the main issue is not trust in the press, but accountability. The same press which widely has taken to assailing the BBC for every slight misdemeanour is far less accountable than the publicly-funded broadcaster, yet this never enters into the discussion when the BBC so openly self-flagellates. As today's report by the Media Standard Trust points out, the Press Complaints Commission is more or less a direct cabal of the press itself, something which on almost any other industry regulator would be completely unacceptable. Its powers when it comes to imposing sanctions on those that breach its code are little more than a joke: often corrections and apologies are featured in derisory positions in the paper, far back from where the original ran. For every complaint which goes to adjudication, hundreds of others are either completely rejected or "resolved", which often means that nothing more than a note on the PCC website is posted to suggest there was ever an issue. Reading it is another of my incredibly boring pastimes: often there are potential scandals, especially those regarding intrusion into grief, in my mind amongst the most serious of the abuses which the press routinely involves itself in, which are never so much as mentioned again. Both the Mail and Mirror recently removed articles from their sites, wrote letters of apology and made donations to charity after their intrusive coverage of the death of a Preston teenager, but no one would have known that such serious action was taken to make amends unless they too perused the PCC site regularly. Surely the most serious omission which would go some way to reassuring the public would be if, like Ofcom, the PCC could impose financial penalties or full, front page apologies in the cases of the most serious breaches of the code; this though would defeat the whole purpose of the PCC, which was never meant to be an independent regulator with teeth but to be one which could prevent the government from having to introduce either a privacy law or another quango of dubious independence, to give the veneer of there being some sort of body which could provide redress.

The Media Standards Trust report concludes that without reform of the PCC there will be an even further decline in standards and that the freedom of the press itself is likely to further suffer. As we have seen however, it takes an error on the level of the Sun's Hillsbrough coverage for there to be anything resembling a public outcry; the coverage of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, probably the most recent example we have of a significant and extended period of libellous and indefensible journalism with its consequences being well-known, didn't have anything like a similar effect. It takes something on the scale of the Mirror publishing fake photographs of alleged mistreatment for its editor to be sacked, while Andy Coulson eventually left his position after the Clive Goodman affair. Notably, in both examples both have since gone on to greater things: Morgan becoming a celebrity in his own right while Coulson is now David Cameron's chief spin-doctor. The inference is obvious: only in banking can you both get away with more while there being a higher public desire for reform. The only difference is the rewards available.

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The British Cissy Party.

Thanks to my signing up some time back on the British National Party's website to argue with some knuckle-dragger that was linking here, I now get sent their irregular newsletter. Its usual content is banal in the extreme: the latest tales of where the Fuhrer himself and his "Truth Truck", or as it's otherwise known, the liar lorry, have visited this week in the multicultural hell-hole that is our fine country. Last week they were ecstatic about the Lindsey strikes, lying about how they had been given a warm welcome which in reality equated to them being told to go forth and multiply. This week they're outraged by a headteacher phoning up one of their local election candidates:

When BNP candidate for the Swanley by-election, Paul Golding, received a call from the Head Teacher of Swanley Technology College, he expected an adult conversation regards the election but instead found himself subjected to a tirade of anti-BNP hatred.

The Head Teacher in question, Julie Bramley, subjected Mr. Golding to a five minute ear-bashing during which she derided the BNP as "racist", "ignorant" "narrow-minded" and accused us of feeding on people's "insecurities" and "anxieties". She stated that Britain wasn't "full-up" with immigrants and that our people are not treated like second-class citizens.

Taken aback by this astonishing display of political intolerance from a so-called liberal, Mr. Golding ended the call. Nevertheless, we recommend that BNP E-News readers email Mrs Bramley and politely point out the terrible problems of immigration and multiculturalism and demand that she desist from attacking candidates in elections and concentrate on her job as a Head Teacher.

For a bunch of rough tough political realists the BNP really are a rather precious bunch, aren't they? This tirade of anti-BNP hatred, this astonishing display of political intolerance, known to the rest of us as statements of the bleeding obvious. While Julia Bramley's email inbox is probably already full to bursting with well-written, literate and polite criticisms of her vicious assault on a shocked, shy and retiring political animal, you might just want to email her as well with something approaching support: headteacher@swanley.kent.sch.uk

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