Monday, November 02, 2015 

Be as dissenting and creative as possible? Yeah, OK Tristram.

Once upon a time, the Daily Telegraph was a newspaper.  It was regarded as a very good newspaper, offering the widest and most in-depth news section of any of the broadsheets.  Even during the time Conrad Black was owner the news section remained in much the same shape as it always had, if the comment section went even further to the right.  Then came the reign of the Barclay brothers, who live offshore and favour profitability above everything else.  Gone has any real semblance of separation between the news and editorial sections, the lowest moment probably not being the paper's extremely limited coverage of the HSBC tax evasion scandal, due (allegedly) to the lucrative advertising contract between the two, but instead the paper's editor sending out an email the night before the general election urging readers to vote Conservative.

When the paper isn't shilling for any variety of grotesque regimes through sections paid for by said governments, it's running articles for which it doesn't have the slightest evidence but are motivated by doing over the Labour party in any way, shape or form.  Like today's piece claiming that Kate Godfrey, who previously said that Jeremy Corbyn's appointment of "fascism apologist" Seumas Milne as communications director was to devalue everything Labour stands for and shame it in front of the world, was rejected by unions at the first stage after she put her name forward to be the prospective parliamentary candidate for Oldham West and Royton.

The Telegraph's story is all but needless to say based on a single unnamed source, when a simpler explanation might be that 6 prospective candidates have already made the list, and there was little point putting someone on it who has criticised the party leadership in hyperbolic terms.  The sort of terms that make it very easy for journalists to put yet another "Corbyn's a terrorist sympathising loon" story in their paper.  Clearly, what Labour should have done is accepted Godfrey onto the shortlist just to make crystal how open and encompassing the party remains under Corbyn, just as the previous leadership would have done had someone openly critical of Blair, Brown or Miliband applied to stand.  Obviously, if a journalist went along for an interview with the Telegraph and said the Barclay brothers were a pair of weirdos running a once great newspaper into the ground and that editor Chris Evans was just a lackey for them without any ideas of his own, they would have been hired forthwith.

Such things are nonetheless to be expected, just as it was also predictable that newspapers would discover that a couple of years back Corbyn said he couldn't see much point to commemorating the first world war, except to remember the slaughter of so many.  It doesn't seem to matter he was referring directly to the government's plans for memorials, rather than any sort of reference to the yearly commemoration of all war dead, of which there was wider criticism and comment on.  According to Matthew d'Ancona this is still enough to with "no exaggeration" make Corbyn unfit to prime minister, as he is apparently unable to see "remembrance as a collective expression of gratitude" rather than a "celebration of warfare".

Trying to paint Corbyn as unpatriotic, as unsympathetic or hostile to Our Boys is just about the oldest trick in the book, which is no doubt why UKIP plan to run with it during the Oldham by-election.  We don't so much as need to mention that not donkey jacket, or need remember the Sun tried to do over Gordon Brown for daring to write a personal letter of condolence in his dodgy handwriting to the family of a soldier who died in Afghanistan to know where this is all going.  It also doesn't really need pointing out these renewed attacks came after Labour had a good week - Osborne fell into his own trap on tax credits, Corbyn accordingly trounced David Cameron at PMQs, time clearly to turn debate back to Corbyn and all those Labour MPs scared witless about being purged by this Marxist madman.

Step forward Tristram Hunt, whose comments have also been somewhat misconstrued, or rather used in probably the way he knew full well they would be.  The best way to serve the Corbyn leadership, he told students at Cambridge's Labour Club, was to be "as dissenting and creative as possible".  Tristram is determined to be the former while there's not as yet much to suggest he will ever be the latter, but let's give him a chance.  His comments on Labour becoming a sect are not in truth that far from a warning someone like, ahem, I would give: that there is a danger of falling into the fallacy of mistaking friendship circles on social media as representative and othering anyone who disagrees.  The same though obviously applies to the diminishing moderate or centrist wing of the party, currently priding itself on not being in thrall to Corbyn.

More questionable was Hunt's peroration, urging the 1% in attendance to "take responsibility and leadership" going forward.  You could argue it might just have been the PPE tendency in all parties that has led to Westminster becoming so derided and sneered at, that we need MPs from all backgrounds rather than a narrow elite.  Corbyn might not be the leader many of us would have chose if we were to pick someone both left-wing and electable, but he most certainly is an antidote to politics as usual.  Hunt and the other Corbyn-baiters in Labour have yet to offer a realistic alternative beyond the electoral strategy of winning 36% of the vote on a platform barely indistinguishable to that of the Conservatives, one that seems palatable neither to the electorate or Labour supporters and members.  When that creativity does occur, as it hopefully will, it deserves hearing and considering.  Till then, Hunt is doing little other than helping those who don't need any help in denigrating Labour.

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11/02/2015 07:57:00 pm | |

Thursday, October 10, 2013 

The feral press part 2.

Earlier in the week, Chris made a few good points about how us sad sacks tend to exaggerate the influence of the media in general.  It's an argument I'm more inclined to agree with than I was in the past, but I do think that over the longer-term biases against benefit claimants, asylum seekers and immigrants in general have had an impact that has contributed to the policies we're now seeing.  Of special concern is there's evidence that in some instances, the government and media have openly colluded with each other in such campaigns, as Peter Oborne revealed David Blunkett had with the Sun back in 2003.

It's more than reasonable then in light of the events of the last couple of days to wonder if the coalition has informally done a similar deal with the right-wing press over their sudden rage at the Guardian's revelations about GCHQ.  First we had the speech from Andrew Parker that gave them the laughable line that terrorists were being handed gifts via the Snowden files, accompanied by briefings that went even further.  Yesterday these were backed by the spokesman for the prime minister, who said he agreed entirely with Parker's choice of language, while today both Clegg and Cameron have come out and said the Graun is in effect helping terrorists.  The Mail and others meanwhile have further upped the ante by saying the paper "helps Britain's enemies" or is downright traitorous.

Quite apart from how this makes clear just how little it takes for the Mail to view someone or an institution as either hating Britain or guilty of treachery, it provides a quite wonderful contrast with last week.  Then we had the likes of Michael Gove defending the Daily Mail's right to tell lies about a dead man, which if said of someone alive would almost certainly have brought a libel suit, while other Tory politicians cautioned everyone to be mindful of the freedom of the press, as though criticism of the Mail equated to wanting to restrict its right to embarrass itself.  7 days later and we don't just have politicians attacking a newspaper on the grounds that its actions might have helped someone somewhere who wishes us harm, we have other sections of the press joining in, without so much as a thought to publish and be damned, as they have so often argued for in the past.

Criticising the Guardian on the basis that it hasn't properly thought through what its revelations could lead to is one thing.  To bring treachery, helping terrorists or putting lives at risk into it is quite another.  It's as though we've never been through these kind of controversies before: every single time the security services and government have shrieked about national security and lives being put at risk, and every single time they either fail to produce a single piece of evidence to back up their claims or they quietly drop them.  The prosecution against Chelsea Manning failed to provide one example of someone coming to harm due to the release of the files she leaked, and that was despite Wikileaks putting up the raw files for download, against the wishes of the media organisations they had worked with.  The claim by the prosecution counsel quoted in the Telegraph that agents have had to move due to the Snowden files isn't just ridiculous, it's an insult to our intelligence.

Despite having repeated the Guardian's articles, if we're to believe the Mail, Times and Telegraph, they now don't think the public have the right to know exactly what their intelligence agencies are up to.  They shouldn't have been told they were attempting to "master the internet", tapping into fibre optic cables and sucking up every single piece of data they can, that they're trying to break internet encryption, with all the potential consequences that could have, that they've been working hand in glove with the biggest internet companies behind the scenes, despite the denials of both in the past, and that all of this has been deemed lawful on the basis of a certificate a minister signs every six months, to focus on just the most notable things we've learned.  Indeed, according to the Mail all this has helped our enemies, while others quoted with approval suggest the paper should be prosecuted.

As John Kampfner points out, in the past the Mail has been (rightly) outraged over certain abuses by the security services.  That this time round it's taken the side of the government can't just be explained by anger at the Graun not agreeing with them on press regulation; it's that this is a government of a blue rather than a red hue.  It might not like Cameron much, but last week emphasised how it can expect nothing from a Labour government under Ed Miliband.  That their part in this campaign against the Graun betrays their readers' right to know seemingly doesn't matter, but then again, it never has in the past either.

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10/10/2013 07:37:00 pm | |

Wednesday, October 09, 2013 

The feral press, pathetic in the face of real power.

Wouldn't it be lovely to have a free press?  You know, the sort that, rather than concentrating on trivia or revelations along the lines that an X Factor contestant has two cousins who are convicted murderers, actually undertook investigations, exposed wrongdoing, and held governments and the state to account?  If you were to believe the likes of the Mail and the Sun, that's exactly what we have and exactly what we stand to lose should the government's royal charter be used to set-up a new press regulator.  That it seems the same newspapers that plunged the entire British media into a crisis will instead go their own way yet again doesn't enter into it.

Nonetheless, if you ever needed further evidence what we in fact have is an industry that doth protest too much, you only need to see how the Mail, Times and Telegraph all decided today that rather than stand up for press freedom and journalistic integrity, they would instead side with the government and the securocrats against the Guardian.  Not only did they focus in laser like on what was a mere couple of paragraphs in the speech by MI5 director general Andrew Parker, in which he didn't so much as mention either the Graun or Edward Snowden, they were also helpfully briefed by "sources" who told them that "Parker is furious about the Snowden leaks", that the Graun has essentially provided a "handbook" for terrorists in how to avoid detection and that they "find it incomprehensible" there needed to be a public debate about such piffling matters.

When David Miranda was detained at Heathrow under section 7 of the Terrorism Act, plenty of people were quick to point out the number of Sun and former News of the World journalists who have been arrested, many of whom remain on bail, not knowing if they will yet face charges.  It was a fair enough point, and there probably hasn't been enough coverage in the ex-broadsheet press about the impact of the phone hacking investigations on journalism in general.  It's surely equally absurd though to then regard Miranda's detention, and as Alan Rusbridger later revealed, the pyrrhic smashing of a hard drive containing the Snowden files, as anything other than intimidation of the most unsubtle kind.  For the Mail, which unlike the other right-wing tabloids opposed New Labour's worst excesses on civil liberties, to tacitly agree with the government that the real danger is not from surveillance programmes which have grown exponentially without any oversight but the journalism which exposed them is a betrayal of the very values it claims to uphold.

There are obviously other factors at work here other than just anger at the Graun for not going along with the press barons on the new regulator.  The paper was the Mail's harshest critic last week during the Ralph Miliband row (with the possible exception of the Mirror)  and it was the Graun's own Jonathan Freedland who started the ball rolling with his column in the Jewish Chronicle on whether there was a whiff of anti-Semitism about the original article and then editorial (I didn't think there was, but can see why some felt that way).  This doesn't however explain why the Telegraph has took the government/securocrat line, especially when it was one of the few to follow up the Guardian's initial revelations.  The idea that either the Times or Torygraph would have refused to publish the Snowden files had he gone to either rather than Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald is laughable in itself.

The simplest explanation is that the majority of the press, and indeed MPs, are in thrall to the security state.  Parker's speech yesterday was in fact for the most part a sober, dry, and rather dull update on where MI5 stands at this moment.  Contrary to some reports, he did not say that the threat from terrorism was increasing, rather than it was diversifying, as anyone who's watched the news over the past year can tell.  Unlike previous holders of the job he didn't engage in scaremongering, and even suggested that some had done so in the past.  Whether it's true that as he said, the number of those who wish to do us harm remains about the same as it has for the past few years we simply can't tell, but it wasn't by any means an attempt to alarm.  Where he did venture into politics, apart from the nonsense about "gifts" and "handing the advantage to the terrorists" was in his claims that the intelligence agencies are well regulated and monitored, as well as all but asking for the powers that GCHQ already has to be given a proper legal basis.

All of which are the sentiments you would expect from a MI5 director general.  It's when the government agrees with those sentiments, and essentially accuses a newspaper of helping terrorists that we get into territory that ought to receive a response from all those who claim to believe in freedom of expression and the press.  The idea that terrorists or anyone else aren't already highly paranoid about how they communicate is laughable, unless they're the kind we've mostly dealt with of late, the incompetents.  The revelations about Prism and Tempora merely made clear what we and they already suspected.  Indeed, the New York Times reports that the US letting slip it was listening in to communications between al-Qaida leaders has had a far more chilling effect than anything that's emerged about the NSA and GCHQ.

The securocrat attitude is that nothing they don't reveal themselves should enter the public domain. And who can blame them? The last few years have seen their methods during the first stage of the war on terror when they were complicit in the rendering and torture of British residents brought into harsh light. They then lied through their teeth to the Intelligence and Security Committee about what they knew, even claiming they couldn't understand how the Americans were getting those they had captured to talk. They feel so secure in their position that they can make outrageous claims along the line that the Snowden files have dealt them their biggest blow in their history, as though the Cambridge Five never existed.  That these ridiculous sentiments are then repeated in a supposed feral press without criticism only underlines how supine they are in the face of real power.

When the media won't do the very basics, how can we expect those with even less inclination to do so? Just remember, if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear. William Hague said as much.

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10/09/2013 09:50:00 pm | |

Tuesday, December 21, 2010 

He fought the war and the war won.


The Vince Cable "going to war with Murdoch" furore is one of those wonderful occasions in politics where absolutely everyone, with the exception of the person at the centre of the storm is in the wrong.

Seeing as the Telegraph kicked the whole thing off, we may as well start with them. There really is something desperately pathetic and certainly unethical about sending round hacks posing as constituents, not to expose any kind of serious wrongdoing but to instead just to secretly record gossip which can then be splashed on the front page for a cheap story in the run up to Christmas. Reading the censored transcript you can even note that Cable asked for what he was saying to not be quoted which the Telegraph completely ignored, something it would have almost certainly followed had he been talking freely to journalists. Rather than this being Cable spouting nonsense, boasting or showing off as the likes of Julian Glover have put it, it was instead him being perhaps indiscreet with two people he thought were Liberal Democrat voters. At worst he's exaggerating his influence and power in claiming he'd be able to bring down the coalition as a nuclear option by resigning, and very few politicians are guilty of humility. It's not even as if Cable said anything as originally reported by the Telegraph which the more enterprising journalist couldn't have found out and written up, even if without direct attribution; there are disagreements in any government, and anyone who isn't completely signed up to the Cameron agenda can see that their numerous reforms are going much too far far too quickly. These are hardly original thoughts, even coming from a minister.

Quite why then the Telegraph decided to omit Cable's one notable and arguably deserving of public knowledge comment, that he was going to war against Rupert Murdoch over the proposed News Corporation takeover of BSkyB, only for a "whistleblower" (read: disgruntled Telegraph hack) to leak the complete transcript to Robert Peston is a mystery, or rather isn't. Unless the Telegraph was holding it back for tomorrow's paper, something no one seems to believe, even though they have more secretly recorded conversations with MPs, then the only reason it decided not to include it is for the reason that they would have rather had someone as business secretary apparently prepared to block the takeover which they themselves oppose than say, Jeremy (C)Hunt, whose views on the constricting nature of our media ownership laws are already on record. It's a wonderful insight into how journalism, even on what used to be known as the broadsheets works: self-interest trumps everything else, including a politician potentially abusing his power.

The problem with that view is that the idea that politicians ever make decisions on their merits rather than either ideology or short-term advantage is fairly laughable. Vince Cable would have been absolutely right to block Murdoch's bid to fully own Sky on the grounds that he already has enough of a stranglehold over our media, regardless of what the European Commission thinks, even if he was against the takeover as a matter of principle. If you want a truly independent decision made, rather than just a "quasi-judicial one", as the business secretary's oversight was until today so deliciously referred to, then give it either to a judge or a quango rather than a politician. All that's been achieved by moving media and telecoms policy from the Department of Business to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport is a passing of the buck, albeit one which will delight both Murdoch and the Conservatives themselves, safe in the knowledge that Hunt rather than Cable can be relied upon to make the right decision.

That, more than anything, is the real lesson from today's antics. You simply can't be in any variety of government and be against Murdoch, let alone threaten to go to war against him, especially if you favour not having your voicemail messages listened in to. This is exactly why we've had the miserable sight of both Ed Miliband and John Denham rushing out to condemn Cable, even as Labour gets chewed to pieces in the Sun, as they still believe that one day it'll be their turn to bask once again in the warm glow of Murdoch media support.

As for the coalition itself, both Cameron and Clegg know only too well that Cable is the only remaining Liberal Democrat fig leaf in the cabinet. Removing him would have exposed Clegg and his main cronies entirely, something he simply couldn't countenance. Cameron will probably be secretly delighted; the decision over BSkyB given to Hunt to wave through, Cable emasculated and the prospect of having a true believer in David Laws ready to step in once he's been given the all clear. The real worries, as from the very beginning, remain with Clegg, knowing full well that should the coalition fall apart it's his party that'll suffer, not the Conservatives. Should Cable return to the backbenches he could well lead the discontent within the party, something that for now at least has been postponed. Whether that possibility becomes an inevitability remains to be seen.

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12/21/2010 11:19:00 pm | |

Wednesday, August 06, 2008 

The "smoking gun" Iraqi memo and Con Coughlin.

Continuing with the theme of hackery, although on a scale far, far removed from that involving Peaches Geldof, comes the allegations from Ron Suskind in his latest book that the White House ordered the CIA in the middle of 2003 to forge a letter from Iraq's former intelligence chief, Tahir Jalil Habbush, which was subsequently used as the smoking gun to prove links between Saddam Hussein's regime and al-Qaida. The letter claimed that Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the September the 11th attackers, had trained in Baghdad at the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal's camp, and that the Iraqi regime was deeply involved in the 9/11 plot.

The letter was the crudest of forgeries and has subsequently been exposed as such. It is however the first time that allegations have been made that the forging of the letter was authorised at the very highest levels of both the US government and the CIA itself. Suskind minces no words and suggests that is impeachment material. All sides, it must be said, have denied it, and there are reasons to believe, as suggested in the Salon review of Suskind's book, that this might be one of those stories that seem too good to be true because they are, more of which in the conclusion.

The same must be said for those who believed the provenance of the letter, especially considering which journalist was responsible for its publishing. Rather than going to an American source with the letter, perhaps considering the fallout that was yet to come over the leaking of dubious intelligence to Judith Miller of the New York Times and others, the memo was given to a British journalist, the Telegraph's Con Coughlin.

It's by no means the first time that Con Coughlin has been linked either with the security services or with putting into circulation dubious material which subsequently turned out to be fabricated or inaccurate. Back in 1995 Coughlin claimed that the son of the Libyan dictator Muammar Ghaddafi was involved in an attempted international currency fraud. Served with a libel writ, the Telegraph was forced to admit that its source for the story was none other than MI6, with the paper first being informed of the story during a lunch with the then Conservative foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind. Coughlin was briefed further by another MI6 officer on two occasions before the story was subsequently published.

Despite in this instance Coughlin's links with the security establishment coming back to haunt him, neither did it seemingly alter his friendly relations with them nor their apparent diligence in supplying him with little more in some circumstances than open propaganda. As well as being handed the forged smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qaida, he also happened to come across the fabled source for the claim that Iraq could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes of an order to use them. To call it a fantastical tale would not put be putting it too histrionically: Coughlin talks of a DHL flight targeted before he landed in Baghdad by "Saddam's Fedayeen (a Wikipedia article worth treating with the utmost scepticism due to the almost complete lack of sourcing)", that almost mythical organisation supposed to fight to the death for Saddam that didn't put up much of a fight during the invasion, let alone in the months following the fall of the Ba'ath party. The Iraqi colonel claims that weapons of mass destruction were distributed to the army prior to the invasion, but were never used because the army itself didn't put up a fight. It's strange that 5 years on none of these batches of WMD have ever been discovered, despite their apparent diffusion around the country.

Since then, Coughlin's sources have been no less convinced that we're all doomed. Back in November of 2006 Coughlin claimed that Iran is training the next generation of al-Qaida leaders, despite the organisation's view that Iran's brand of fundamentalist Shia Islam is heretical. Allegations have been made that Iran has been supplying help to the Taliban, despite previously helping with its overthrow, but even in the wildest dreams of conspiracy theorists and neo-conservative whack-jobs no one seriously believes that Iran would ever help al-Qaida, let alone train its next leaders. The nearest that anyone can really get to claiming links between Iran and al-Qaida is that some of its members are either hiding there or that its fighters have been using the country as a transit point.

In January of last year Coughlin was back with another exclusive, claiming that North Korea was helping Iran get ready to conduct its own nuclear test, after NK's own pitiful attempt had gone off "successfully" the previous October. This one was not quite as fantastical or laughable as the one linking Iran and al-Qaida, but was still murky in the extreme. The NIE intelligence assessment the following November concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear programme 4 years previously. That said, we should be cautious: the Israeli attack on the supposed Syrian nuclear processing plant came after evidence that it was modelled on the North Korean plant, and there are allegations along with that of heavy North Korean involvement in the operating and building of the plant, if it indeed, it must also be said, it was a nuclear site at all.

The latest revelations that Coughlin's 2003 report may well have originated from the very highest levels of US government only increases the level of scepticism with which any of his articles should be treated. At times journalists have to rely on security service figures to break stories which would otherwise never set the light of day, but as David Leigh wrote in an article from 2000, the very least that they should do if this unavoidable is be honest about the origins of such reports. It's one thing to get into bed temporarily with the intelligence community, it's quite another to act for years as their voice in the press, as Coughlin certainly appears to have done, spreading the most warped and questionable of their propaganda. As the Guardian reported in 2002 after the Telegraph admitted to the role of MI6 in their story on Ghaddafi, Coughlin was likely to recover from the indignity due to his good contacts within MI6. That certainly seems to have been exactly the case. Most humourously though, this was how Coughlin opened his commentary on the 2003 Iraqi memo:

For anyone attempting to find evidence to justify the war in Iraq, the discovery of a document that directly links Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks, with the Baghdad training camp of Abu Nidal, the infamous Palestinian terrorist, appears almost too good to be true.

As Coughlin must have certainly knew it was. Just how too good to be true has been left to Ron Suskind to expose.

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8/06/2008 11:37:00 pm | |

Saturday, June 07, 2008 

Terrorists have personalities too!

Amazingly, according to the Telegraph. Jihadist wit is also the same as every other sort of wit:

Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, a 30-year-old Kuwaiti said to have sent £60,000 to the 19 suicidal terrorists, made the press gallery snigger. Told by the judge that US military lawyers were being provided free of charge, he snapped back that America "tortured me free of charge, too".

You can't argue with that, can you?

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6/07/2008 07:02:00 pm | |

Saturday, February 23, 2008 

Say no to 24 hour thinking!

24-hour drinking fuels rise in crime, sighs the Telegraph. Nowhere in the article is the obvious pointed out: that because the change in the law has meant that the pubs/clubs now don't chuck out all at the same time, i.e. 11pm or 2am, it means that the police have been much better able to deal with offences that would have previously overwhelmed them.

As an actual police officer wrote on the Mailwatch blog:

The licensing act (24 hour) has also helped a great deal. Instead of kicking-out time for everywhere at 11pm, we’ve got slow dispersement into the night, so the police haven’t got a great mass of people all at once. Crime has ’shot up’ after the licensing Act because we CAN detect, arrest and deal with more people, rather than be swamped and therefore unable to arrest/detect any crime at all! This ‘crime-spike’ was intended by the Home Office and the police as a result of the above reason, but you won’t read that in the Daily Mail!

Nor in the Telegraph.

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2/23/2008 08:55:00 pm | |

Saturday, November 24, 2007 

Lord Guthrie treats Telegraph readers like fools.

Charles (Lord) Guthrie today authors a comment piece for the Telegraph:

Since I voiced my criticisms of government policy towards our Armed Forces during Thursday's defence debate in the Lords, many people have asked whether the five former defence chiefs who stood up were taking part in a planned ambush against the Government. They seem to think we all met up at Starbucks and plotted to give everyone in it a bloody nose.

In fact, the opposite happened. Far from being a co-ordinated plot, this was a spontaneous eruption from a group of people who find themselves at the end of their tether regarding the treatment of our Armed Forces.


As I wrote yesterday, all five of the Lords who spoke up in the debate on Thursday are either patrons or vice-presidents of the United Kingdom National Defence Association (a full list of its patrons, vice-presidents and policy board members is available from their website in a PDF).

I cannot of course prove that all five Lords did actively conspire to do what they did in the Lords on Thursday, or that it was, in Guthrie's words, anything other than a "spontaneous eruption," and so in these litigious times cannot come right out and call Guthrie a liar. He doesn't however deign to mention in his article the existence of the UKNDA, his patronship of it, or that all five of his fellow former chiefs of defence staff belong to it in their various guises. You can however make your own minds up about his less than honest disclosure.

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11/24/2007 08:40:00 pm | |

Friday, July 13, 2007 

Good riddance to Black rubbish.

Shed a tear then for poor, misunderstood clearly innocent Conrad Black. He faces a likely sentence of between 15 and 20 years in prison, after being convicted on three counts of mail fraud and one of obstructing justice. He was acquitted of nine other charges, among them wire fraud and racketeering.

The rise and fall of such haughty, arrogant and at times seemingly invincible public figures is always something to behold. While Black's denouement has nothing on when Cap'n Bob went for a unplanned dip in the Atlantic, to see him brought to account for his crimes while Maxwell's were only discovered after his death ought to gladden the hearts of all those who've previously found themselves defrauded by the uncaring corporate face of capitalism.

Unlike Maxwell however, the establishment chose to ennoble, recognise and salute Black. While Maxwell won the support of the electorate of his constituency for the duration of his six-year stay in parliament, it was that paragon of virtue Tony Blair that saw fit to elevate Black into the Lords. Black jumped through hoops, renouncing his Canadian citizenship, in order to sit in that most regal and outdated of chambers and become Baron Black of Crossharbour in Tower Hamlets. It was a cruel irony, and typical of the contempt that both New Labour and the Telegraph group which he once owned have for the poor that this most opulent, extravagant and decadent of press barons was in effect representing the most economically deprived borough in the country.

Questions will now again be raised of whether those within the Telegraph during Black's ignoble reign either knew what he was doing, or if they were over protective and unwilling to question their quick to anger and dismissive boss. Even now under Barclay brothers, the paper has still gone out of its way to be accommodating to its former owner, allowing him to write a riposte to Tom Bower's biography, the prose marked by the Telegraph's own description as in Black's "characteristically pugnacious manner". Others might call it his narcissistic unwillingness to accept any criticism of either himself or his gorgeous, pouting wife, Barbara Amiel, who once boasted that her own extravagance knew no bounds, since passed off as "self-satire". Even if she was being self-deprecating, that doesn't alter the fact that in a profile of her in Vogue the reporter drooled about her belongings:
"a fur closet, a sweater closet, a closet for shirts and T-shirts and a closet so crammed with evening gowns that the overflow has to be kept in yet more closets downstairs".

And there was more - a dozen Hermès Birkin bags, 30 or 40 handbags made by Renaud Pellegrino, and more than 100 pairs of Manolo Blahnik shoes.


Additionally, unlike Maxwell, who despite being a disastrous businessman, union basher and in the 60s declared unfit to head a public company was still a Labour supporter, Black turned the Telegraph and its titles even further to the right, introducing such calm and measured minds as Mark Steyn, currently convinced that Europe is about to be taken over by the Muslim hordes, and err, Barbara Amiel, given a whole page of broadsheet to pen her diatribes about how evil the BBC's coverage of Israel/Palestine is and why Ariel Sharon should have hit the Palestinians even harder than he dared. The editorial line on the same issue was almost as harsh, while support for war in Iraq was enthusiastic, although in mitigation the Tories' themselves were if anything more gung-ho in 2003 than Labour was.

His conviction ought to give us hope that more of the unaccountable, greedy and misleading purveyors of pure shit morning, noon and night can be brought down to size. Roy Greenslade, in a piece of apologism for Black which the lying, stealing bastard doesn't in the slightest deserve points out that he was not the worst of newspaper owners. True. Many of us can't wait for the day that Rupert Murdoch finds himself in the cell next to Black. Who will complain to us in print that they're like holiday camps then?

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7/13/2007 06:56:00 pm | |

Friday, February 23, 2007 

Pedants corner.

It's a small thing, but why is it that newspapers often refer to women as girls? The above is typical of the Daily Mail in general, referring in the same sentence to men as men but to ladies' tennis players as girls. It's not even correct technically, as Wimbledon also runs a junior boys and girls tournament, who definitely won't be receiving the same prize money as those who win the adult championship. The Telegraph did the same thing yesterday. Is it too much to ask for sub-editors not to go along with their newspaper's general stance on the sexes?

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2/23/2007 05:48:00 pm | |

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