Monday, December 03, 2012 

Ah, consistency.

Is there even the slightest logic to the coalition's policy on Israel-Palestine?  Last week William Hague, his mojo restored, stood up in the Commons and outlined how we would be abstaining on the recognition vote at the UN unless the Palestinians provided us with "assurances".  Requested "assurances" were duly not provided, and so we abstained while a mere 138 voted in favour, including some of our major European allies.

Israel has since responded in the only way she knows how, by declaring that a further 3,000 new homes will be built, illegally, on the occupied West Bank.  As a result, Foreign Office minister Alastair Burt summoned the Israeli ambassador to let him know our deep displeasure.  Here's a thought: considering that one of the assurances we required from the Palestinians was that they drop preconditions to talks, their only one being that the Israelis declare a halt to all settlement building in the occupied territories, wouldn't it have made sense to vote in favour of their first step towards statehood when the threatened Israeli response was to, err, accelerate settlement building even further?  Just who is it here that's in breach of international law?  When are we finally going to recognise that there isn't going to be a negotiated peace when Israel has no intention of evacuating the West Bank settlements, the presence of which make a Palestinian state unviable?  When, in short, are we going to start treating Israel as the rogue state it is?

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12/03/2012 08:20:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, November 28, 2012 

I'd like to give William Hague a few assurances as well.

How times change.  In Tony Blair's dog days, his refusal to push for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hizbullah-Lebanon war was in contrast to the stance of David Cameron's newly detoxified Conservative party, with William Hague denouncing the destruction of much of southern Lebanon as "disproportionate".  To begin with, it looked as though the Conservatives allied with the Liberal Democrats would continue with this more critical stance on Israel now they were in power: Cameron, visiting Turkey in the aftermath of the raid on the Gaza flotilla, described the impoverished and cut-off territory as a "prison camp".

It couldn't last.  After Hague decided that Hamas had "principal responsibility" for the week long slaughter fest in Gaza, ignoring entirely the timeline of events leading up to the assassination of Ahmed al-Jabar, and how this was by no means the first time Israel has launched an attack on the Palestinians with an election fact approaching, we now have the truly pitiful decision to abstain on the application for non-member observer status at the UN.  In the first place, to demand assurances from the Palestinian Authority in itself shows the disparity between what we ask of Israel, whom we merely chastise when they steal the identities of British citizens to kill a minor Hamas figure, and the recognised representatives of a people we helped put in this mess.

It's also that at least the first of the "assurances" demanded is so outrageous.  Just what exactly is the point of requiring the PA to return to peace talks without conditions when it's so abundantly clear that Israel is not prepared to make even the slightest of concessions, even as a gesture of goodwill?  If there is ever going to be a negotiated peace and a two-state solution, then the building of settlements in the occupied West Bank has to end.  It really is that simple.  Requesting that the PA set aside this most basic of requirements, one which it has to be remembered the Obama administration also demanded from the Israelis and was ignored over is ridiculous.

Indeed, this refusal by the Israelis to put even a temporary halt to settlement building is exactly what led to the process at the UN from the PA in the first place: they recognised, sadly, that the talks were going nowhere due to consistent Israeli intransigence, often backed by the US.  The Palestine papers revealed that Condoleezza Rice told them they would never have a state if they didn't accept that the settlements of Ariel and Ma'ale Adumim would remain Israeli territory, regardless of the illegality of both under international law.  The PA by contrast offered what even Tzipi Livni recognised was the "biggest Jerusalem in history", and yet was still rebuffed.

Easier to understand is Hague's second required "assurance", that should the PA gain non-member observer status they won't attempt to pursue Israel at the International Criminal Court.  Just as we were embarrassed by the attempt to have Livni arrested when she visited the UK, so we would be forever in the US's bad books should their true foremost ally find itself in trouble at the ICC.  The US of course refused to join lest its own overseas adventures come under scrutiny, leading Israel to make the same decision despite initially signing the Rome statute, most "moral military" on the planet or otherwise.

Hague's claim then that the PA's attempt to gain recognition could set back the peace process is a nonsense.  There is no peace process to be set back, for the reason that the situation on the ground has changed, both in Israel and Palestine.  Never has it been so clear that Israel's aim is to make the establishment of a viable Palestinian state impossible, such is the continued colonisation of the West Bank and the near to completion construction of the wall separating the occupied territory from Israel.  Anything less than something approaching the 1967 borders will be unacceptable to the Palestinian people, and Israel has no intention of repeating the evacuation of Gaza, even if it were to lead to peace.  At the same time, the PA has become almost an irrelevance, weakened both by Israel's emasculation of the West Bank and the rise of Hamas.  Rightly or not, the Palestinian and the Arab street see the resistance of Hamas as achieving results, while the PA's recognition of Israel has led to 20 years of unrelenting occupation.

If anything, the reluctance of some western states to support the Palestinian bid is likely to further weaken the PA and so the merest chance of a return to negotiations than it being the other way around.  They have after all tried renouncing violence, recognising Israel, face-to-face talks under successive American administrations, and applying for full recognition from the UN Security Council, all so far for nowt.  Non-member observer status would provide a moment of respite.  By not supporting even this slight move towards statehood for Palestine, it just further highlights the utter hypocrisy of our support for some liberation movements while stymieing the baby steps of others.

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11/28/2012 11:59:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, November 21, 2012 

Already looking forward to the next.

The news coming through this evening that a ceasefire has been agreed between Israel and Hamas is undoubtedly welcome.  Any halt to the violence, however short-lived, is to be applauded.  In practice however, the agreement brokered by Egypt has done little more than return us to the situation prior to the assassination of Ahmed al-Jabari last Wednesday.  While in theory the deal calls for the opening of the crossings into Gaza, the implementation of the lifting of the economic blockade of the strip is only to be discussed after 24 hours of "de-escalation", more than suggesting that as has happened before, further progress is highly unlikely.  Dubious as it always was that Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak would have countenanced any loosening of the blockade when the whole point of "Operation Pillar of Defense" was to show themselves as strong, decisive military leaders before a waiting electorate, the deal seems to have merely set up the next assault on a terrorised territory and its imprisoned people.

The deal seems to have achieved little for Hamas either.  Once again, their infrastructure in Gaza has been either destroyed or substantially damaged, and the people that both support and oppose them have suffered terribly in the process.  They may have shown they've acquired longer range missiles, yet the ability to fire rockets at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem serves little purpose when they either fail to hit their targets (if there is one in the first place) or are intercepted by the Iron Dome defence system.  The initial sounding of raid alarms in those cities might have a psychological effect in the short term and lead a few Israelis to wonder whether they really are being wisely led by their politicians, especially seeing as it was only after the assault on Gaza began that the Fajr-5s were fired, but it's liable to be fleeting in the extreme.

Also overstated has been the impact of the Arab spring.  Apart from visits to Gaza by the Egyptian prime minister, the Turkish foreign minister and a slight increase in the number of (newly elected) politicians denouncing Israel in no uncertain terms, hardly anything has really changed.  Indeed, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt have picked up where Mubarak left off, acting as intermediaries for ceasefire deals while refusing to open the crossing into Gaza that would have let some of the population escape the bombing.  When the far-right Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman praises Mohamed Morsi for his role, then it's clear that while the faces have changed the same old alliances remain.

Nor have our leaders altered their tune one iota.  Who knows whether behind the scenes pressure was put on Netanyahu not to launch a ground offensive as his predecessors did; what we do know is that there's been barely a word of public criticism for how the offensive was conducted.  Israel has once again got away with targeting ambulances, journalists, and targets that simply can't be in any way construed as connected with Hamas, while the deaths of innocents alongside alleged militants are no longer even "collateral damage", rather "operational failures".  

Look at the difference when it comes to an attack within Israel: the explosion on the bus in Tel Aviv happened directly outside the building where the IDF has been conducting its media operations from.  For all we know, the person who apparently threw the bomb onto the bus may well have been specifically targeting someone who works there and had just left the building.  Instantly however, both the wider media and politicians referred to it as a terrorist attack.  If that's a terrorist attack, and it's a description I wouldn't demur from, then what was the extra-judicial killing of Ahmed al-Jabari, a man who Israel had long worked with to contain the situation in Gaza, an attack that also killed innocent bystanders?

As so often in the past, this difference in approach is then reinforced by reporting that at worst actively dehumanises the Palestinians.  Jodi Rudoren's report for the New York Times of the Dalu family's funerals seemed determined to emphasise these apparent differences: they don't so much mourn as accept their fate, such is the "culture of martyrdom that pervades this place", nor are they "overcome with emotion nor fed up, perhaps because the current casualty count pales in comparison to the 1,400 lost four years ago".  Rudoren's inference seems clear: only when so many are killed does their numbness and anger get overwhelmed by sadness.  In posts on her Facebook page, Rudoren went further, saying the reaction from some of those who had lost relatives was "ho-hum".  Even the usually excellent Jeremy Bowen made similar references on his 10 O'Clock News broadcast last night.

It's true that some of the most hardline figures in Gaza do put martyrdom and resistance above everything else, and this is always going to be most evident when the international media are around.  That this is anything approaching universal however is utter nonsense, as countless photographs from Gaza show.  Whether it's the death of family members or the loss of their home, Palestinians, amazingly, do have emotions.  Cut them and they bleed.  

Remarkably, it's also the case as was shown during Operation Cast Lead that a minority of Israelis positively delight in the bombing of Gaza, when hundreds travelled to a hill overlooking the territory to get a better view of the assault.  We don't though tend to hear about how Israel has a militaristic culture, and that Arabs are too often treated as second-class citizens, as the former would be a generalisation much too far which would only ever feature, if at all, in a comment piece.  Rudoren it should be noted later clarified her comments after she was criticised by the Mondoweiss blog, but her piece in the Times has not been altered to reflect that.  Where she was right is this is a conflict that no one in the world actually wants to seem to solve, and today's events have not taken us closer to any sort of resolution.

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11/21/2012 11:44:00 pm | | | links to this post

Tuesday, November 20, 2012 

Neither one thing nor the other.

I realise it's a motif I've been over-dependent on recently, but such has been the scale of bullshit of late that it's been difficult not to feel like we've been mysteriously plunged into a parallel universe.  A couple of months back David Cameron appeared before the UN general assembly, and reaching for the most emotive imagery he could muster, he said the UN had been stained by the blood of children killed in Syria.  Not, you'll note, that China and Russia had the deaths of protesters on their consciences through their blocking of security council resolutions, but that the UN itself was in some way responsible for the impasse.  As for our own role, we naturally couldn't be blamed for having abused the doctrine of the responsibility to protect in Libya, overthrowing Gaddafi when the UN resolution which authorised the no-fly zone called for a ceasefire between the two sides, and so setting Russia and China dead against any repeat.

The use of language similar to Cameron's could of course never be countenanced in relation to Israel.  It doesn't matter how many minors are accidentally killed, or even deliberately targeted, of which there have been 1,338 since September 2000 in both the West Bank and Gaza, their blood simply isn't worth as much.  The closest our politicians have ever come to denouncing Israeli tactics is debating whether or not reducing much of Lebanon and Gaza to rubble is "disproportionate".  Those with exceptional memories might recall that during the Israel-Lebanon-Hizbullah war William Hague went so far as to use the D word, much to the outrage of Stephen Pollard.  Once in power, the Tories have returned to type, with Hague declaring Hamas "bears principal responsibility" for the latest murderous assault on an tiny, impoverished, cut-off territory.

Imagine my lack of surprise then when Hague stood up in the Commons today and announced that we would recognise the newly formed National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces as the "sole legitimate representative" of the Syrian people.  This is a group formed out of the ashes of the Syrian National Council, the previous attempt by exiles to rally support for the Syrian opposition, and one which had next to no support from within Syria itself, reminiscent of the exile groups which had a major hand in pushing for the invasion of Iraq.  Despite claims that this new formation is more representative and appealing to those actually fighting Assad's forces, rebels in Aleppo have already rejected its imposition on them.

Our vote of confidence in the national coalition is also in spite of how its leader, described almost universally as a moderate in our press, has some views that would doubtless sit comfortably with the more fundamentalist fighters.  Angry Arab notes that Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib, in a series of posts on his blog, variously describes one of Saddam Hussein's positives as he "terrified the Jews" (amongst other anti-Semitic remarks), Shiites as "rejectionists" and Facebook as a possible US-Israeli intelligence ploy.  He also believes masturbation causes TB, and praises Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Egyptian cleric the Tories took such a disliking to when Ken Livingstone brought him to London.

Isn't this almost irrelevant when the most important thing is to get rid of Assad?  Well yes, but clearly we have different standards when it comes to the Palestinians.  By any measure Hamas has far more popular support than this latest Syrian concoction, and yet we refuse to recognise it and its right to defend the people of Gaza against Israeli aggression.  Leaving aside Hamas, William Hague also made clear today that the government is yet to make its mind up as to whether support the move by the Palestinian Authority to apply for recognition at the UN general assembly.  If we won't even support the move by the Fatah leadership when we supposedly still want two states, why pursue such similarly futile gestures when it comes to Syria?

It's fairly apparent that despite the whisperings in the ear of Nick Robinson we have little to no intention of arming the Syrian opposition, let alone going further and actively intervening.  The most we seem willing to provide is communications equipment, and frankly, that's one thing the Syrian fighters on the ground seem to have plenty of.  I'm incidentally all for the arming of the Syrian opposition if the anti-aircraft missiles the rebels are desperate for head straight afterwards to Gaza to be used in self-defence against fighter jets, but not if they're soon being used to target passenger planes, something al-Qaida has previous in.

Our position is ultimately neither one thing nor the other.  We support the Saudis in wanting to maintain the Sunni domination of the Middle East while weakening Iran, not so much as mentioning the unpleasantness in Qatif, Bahrain or indeed in Jordan, and yet we leave the actual arming of those pursuing what has turned into a sectarian war in Syria to other people.  This peeves the Saudis and Qataris, and also peeves those like me who see the hypocrisy in our position of wanting a free Middle East except in those places where we always have and always will support despots.  Meanwhile, we ignore those who've yearned for their own state for over 60 years, while recognising a group which was created last Tuesday and has no real support whatsoever as the "sole legitimate representative" of the Syrian people.  Once upon a time, we were colonalists.  Now we simply act as though we still are.

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11/20/2012 11:47:00 pm | | | links to this post

Monday, November 19, 2012 

The cynicism of a terrorist state, exacerbated by the uselessness of the media.


There seems to be only one constant when it comes to Israel and Palestine: media coverage becomes more and more unbalanced.  Every separate assault by the Israelis on Gaza is treated as though it occurs in a vacuum, and is only launched with great reluctance in response to rocket fire from the territory Israel so bravely disengaged from.  At the end of last week the BBC news website made it look as though it was Hamas attacking Israel, and not the other way round.  There is very little, if any examination of the difference between the missiles launched from Gaza by resistance groups, often home-made, antiquated and weak, and the finest weaponry money can buy as used by the Israelis, and yet these attacks are reported as though they are all but identical.

Away from the accounts provided by sites such as Electronic Intifada, which notes this latest outbreak of violence effectively began when a 13-year-old Palestinian boy was killed by the IDF while he was playing football, sparking a wave of retaliatory rocket attacks, the most honest piece to feature in a British newspaper was in the Graun, written by the deputy head of Hamas's political bureau.  This is how skewed reporting on Gaza has become: while the IDF tweets incessantly and Israeli politicians and spokesmen use almost the exact same formulations as they did four years previous, all of which is lapped up by the mainstream media and barely questioned, those associated with Hamas, a supposed terrorist organisation dedicated to the destruction of Israel, are the ones telling the closest to the truth.

We shouldn't be in the slightest bit surprised then at the specific targeting of buildings used by Hamas's TV station (as well as foreign journalists) to try and get their side of the story across.  One such strike today killed three members of Islamic Jihad, with the IDF tweeting soon after that the men were hiding there and "not to be interviewed".  How they knew all of this is anyone's guess; what's clear is that their intelligence isn't always so good, as shown by yesterday's strike on the home of the Dalou family.  Believing that a Hamas target was inside the house, the IDF apparently wasn't aware or more likely didn't care that a strike on him would also kill innocents.  As it was, 10 members of the Dalou family were massacred, including 4 children.  The target wasn't among them.

Then again, in the eyes of Israeli politicians, the IDF and indeed much of the media, there is no such thing as an innocent Gazan citizen.  Anyone and anything can be targeted as long as they can be linked with Hamas, however tenuously.  Buildings struck are Hamas buildings; schools are Hamas-run, as are hospitals.  During Operation Cast Lead, the wholesale murder of police officers was justified on the basis they were Hamas police officers, and the argument has since been taken to its logical conclusion.  Israel is of course perfectly prepared to make long-standing agreements with Hamas, whereby Hamas pledges to do the best it can to keep rocket fire from other militant groups to a minimum in return for a cessation of air strikes, but when it's election time and there are votes to be won from an ever more hardline public, Hamas once again becomes the implacable genocidal foe that must be put out of commission once and for all.

It's this murderous cynicism that sickens more than anything.  It's not just Palestinians whose lives are put in the balance by this most vile form of electioneering, although they are overwhelming those most at risk; it's the Israelis in the path of the rockets who face uncertainty too.  As pathetic as the rockets fired from Gaza mostly are, 3 Israelis were killed directly as a consequence of the policies pursued by Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, believing that they can succeed where Kadima failed before.  They are backed to the hilt by our own leaders, who while condemning the bloodshed in Syria and say something must be done about Assad wring their hands over the carnage in Gaza, putting the blame almost wholly on Hamas.  In the US, one of the senators urging the arming of the Syrian rebels threatened Egypt with the cutting off of aid if they "kept inciting violence between the Israelis and Palestinians".   This same man would like the Islamists in Syria to get their hands on modern anti-air missiles, weapons which would almost inevitably find their way straight afterwards to Gaza.

As little as possible then is explained, lest it alter the narrative that Israel is the victim rather than the aggressor.  Electoral cynicism is skirted over, as is the blockade of Gaza that prevents civilians from escaping from what is effectively a free fire zone.  At least in Syria those in the firing line between rebels and the regime can for the most part escape should they choose; those in Gaza have no such option, unless they have a medical complaint so urgent that even the Israelis can't refuse them access to hospitals outside of the Strip.  The history of the occupation, the Oslo accords, the setting up of the Palestinian authority and the lack of progress ever since, overwhelmingly the result of Israeli intransigence, goes by unmentioned.  That the settlements in the West Bank continue to be expanded, with ever more Palestinian land seized and cut off isn't relevant.  Palestinian resistance is condemned, whether it's through rockets or stone throwing, while the attempt to gain statehood through the UN is blocked.  Despite all this injustice, the Palestinian cause only grows stronger, and the strength and belief of the people remains undimmed.  They will one day have a state, and one day Israel's crimes will be brought to account.  That day cannot come soon enough.

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11/19/2012 11:59:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, November 15, 2012 

Meanwhile, in bizarro world...

The UK is considering whether to officially recognise the Palestinian opposition, sources say.

Foreign Secretary William Hague is to meet leaders of Hamas and Fatah in London on Friday to discuss the "grave and worsening" situation in Gaza.

Although high profile US figures such as John McCain have long been calling for the arming of the Palestinians, up until now Britain has only offered "non-military" aid to the opposition.  According to BBC political editor Nick Robinson, David Cameron believes the bloody conflict in Gaza is reaching what one of his advisers calls "the something must be done stage" - the moment when the public will demand action to save the lives of ordinary Gazans unable to escape from the blockaded strip.

This new tone was reflected in a statement from William Hague:

"Israel bears principal responsibility for the current crisis.  It is crystal clear this is merely the latest shamefully cynical move by politicians desperate to show themselves as the toughest on the Palestinians ahead of an election, just as Operation Cast Lead was four years ago.  The extra-judicial killing of Ahmed al-Jabari shows the depths to which Israel is prepared to sink - killing a man who had long worked with them towards keeping the peace, and then posting a video of the attack on the internet.

"As has happened before, Israel broke a truce it signed up to, only to then claim to the world at large that rocket fire from Gaza had forced their hand.  Whilst we condemn the launching of missiles from Gaza that are impossible to aim accurately, we recognise that the bombing of the territory makes an already difficult life there intolerable.  Palestinians have the right to live without fear of attack from Israel.  The deaths of innocent children are especially difficult to take - as the father of 11-month old Omar al-Masharawi asked, what had his son possibly done to deserve his fate?

"We have long supported a two-state solution, but it is becoming increasingly clear that Israel is not prepared to be a partner for peace.  Ignoring international law, it continues to build settlements in the West Bank, and has made life ever more difficult for ordinary Palestinians.  Much as we support an urgent resumption of negotiations, we have little faith they would be successful.  As such, we are considering whether the time has come to arm the Palestinian opposition so they can adequately defend themselves."

Asked for a response, the Israeli government gave the exact same statement as it has after past attacks on Gaza:

"Terrorists human shields Hamas terrorists rocket fire terrorists deliberately target terrorists other side will have to pay intolerable nothing to do with election terrorists Hamas human shields escalation that will exact a price terrorists."

Bashar al-Assad is understandably delighted at all this.

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11/15/2012 10:28:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, September 19, 2012 

Two for the price of one.

There was widespread outrage today when a foreign publication published not just the paparazzi shots of Catherine Middleton sunbathing topless, but also a collage which superimposed her naked breasts onto an image of the prophet Muhammad.

The Albanian satirical magazine, Horatio Longoria, estimated to have a circulation of approximately 6 copies, went ahead with the printing out of this month's issue despite the legal action taken by the Royal family, and in spite of the widespread rioting across the Muslim world that greeted the sudden discovery on YouTube of a trailer for a movie of truly laughable production values.

Asked as to why he would do such a thing, the editor of Horatio Longoria, 14-year-old Simon Quinlack, was quoted to have said: "Well, it's for the profit. I might sell a few more copies to people at school. Never has then been so much fuss about such inconsequential things. And yes, I do mean that in more ways than one. Oh, and it was this week's hobby."

Albanian police, fearing that Quinlack might become a target for reprisals by deranged monarchists and hysterically hypocritical tabloid journalists have posted an armed guard outside his bedroom, which he is any case not allowed out of as he is grounded. Worldwide reaction to Horatio Longoria's slur on the prophet has so far been relatively muted, although Anjem Choudary is said to have called for Princess Eugenie to be beheaded.

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9/19/2012 05:56:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, June 07, 2012 

Ah, consistency, pt 2.


Today: no Foreign Office ministers will visit Ukraine during Euro 2012 in protest at the "selective justice" meted out to former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko. (Although, strangely, most accounts of her trial for abuse of office miss out the fact that her former coalition partner Viktor Yushchenko testified against her.)

Yesterday: Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa was welcomed into the UK for a handshake with a grinning Liz. Rajapaska's leading political opponent General Sarath Fonseka is currently imprisoned, having been found guilty first of corruption and then of daring to suggest that senior government officials were responsible for war crimes at the end of the country's civil war, something now so well documented as to be undeniable. The UN Secretary General's advisory panel found that tens of thousands of civilians died in the last 5 months of the war, with most killed as a result of Sri Lankan military shelling.

(Oh, and it does seem ever so slightly hypocritical we're not officially going to Euro 2012 when very shortly dozens of state representatives from far more repressive and authoritarian regimes than Ukraine will be coming to London for the Olympics. Ahmadinejad might not be travelling, but you can bet that the Saudis will, despite it being highly unlikely that the country will field a single female athlete.)

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6/07/2012 09:38:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, January 06, 2011 

Scum-watch: The appalling irresponsibility of EastEnders.

You may well have to forgive me for thinking there's something ever so slightly redundant about complaining over the sensationalist and unrealistic nature of soap opera storylines (especially considering a good part of this blog is regularly given over to doing something similar when it comes to tabloid newspapers, and indeed as this post is also going to). It's rather like whining about quiz shows for containing questions, moaning that Noel Edmonds pretends there's something more than pure luck to Deal or No Deal or being surprised when Live at the Apollo isn't funny.

It therefore doesn't really strike me as especially beyond the pale, insensitive or going too far for EastEnders to have a character's baby die of cot death and in a moment of grief stricken madness for her to swap it with a friend's perfectly healthy child. If anything, it seems in remarkably good taste compared to Emmerdale's infamous plane crash storyline, coming as it did close to the fifth anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing, and certainly no less plausible than Coronation Street marking its 50th anniversary with the the celebratory plot of a gas explosion causing a tram crash. This is to say nothing of Neighbours having characters apparently return from the grave, or Crossroads finish its short-lived revival with the revelation that the entire series had been the dream of a supermarket checkout assistant. It's true that EastEnders has unlike the other soaps somewhat tried in the past to deliver hard-hitting plotlines while giving over time to the social issues behind them, and tried to at least keep the notion of realism involved, even if not narrative realism as Claude argues, and this latest development goes somewhat against that, yet it still doesn't seem any more outlandish or offensive than the burying alive of Max Branning, which Ofcom decided was inappropriately shown before the watershed.

Where it starts to get even more ridiculous is when newspapers use editorial space* to attack broadcasters as a whole for even considering using such "warped sensationalism" as "entertainment". Already in the past year we've seen the Sun condemn the BBC for the perceived anti-Conservative bias of Basil Brush; now the paper has taken up the complaints of Anne Diamond and the apparently permanently indignant whingers at Mumsnet by calling the EastEnders storyline an "appalling misjudgement" when it could have tackled the subject "responsibly". Whether the paper was always going to strike out at the corporation over the subject regardless of being leaked the news that the actor portraying the character who lost her baby is leaving the show is impossible to know, but it hardly helps the paper's credibility that despite claiming she was leaving as a direct result of the storyline, her agent has since made clear that in fact the decision had been made months ago. Not such a "huge embarrassment" to the corporation then as the paper's editorial had so confidently stated.

The Sun taking almost any opportunity to criticise the BBC is hardly a new development. It does though really start to enter into the realms of abject hypocrisy when only last week the paper had to apologise for claiming that there was a specific al-Qaida threat against the filming of Coronation Street's live episode, despite Greater Manchester police making clear at the time that they were only involved in policing the perimeter of the set at the request of Granada, with the officers involved being paid by the production company for the time spent away from their normal duties. If anything smacks of warped sensationalism, such a ridiculous and potentially damaging story does; it hardly comes across as responsible either. While the paper had no problems finding the space to feature criticism of the BBC, it strangely didn't mention the controversy featured in other papers concerning Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights on Channel 4, something which doubtless has absolutely nothing to do with the man himself penning a column for none other than Sun rather than the paper deciding that it was a non-story.

Still, now that the storylines of fictional dramas are considered to be worthy of comment in the leader column of the paper's biggest selling newspaper, we can no doubt rely on the fact that the Sun will be giving the plots of the programmes on the new Sky Atlantic a similarly critical once over. It would certainly make a change to the company being plugged endlessly in every other section.

*As the Sun's editorials are not properly archived on the paper's website, the leader column in full can be read below:

COT death is a nightmare that haunts every parent of a new baby.

So who at the BBC imagined sensationalising such a heartbreaking theme would make good "entertainment"?

We are used to EastEnders being grim. It was no surprise that a particularly depressing episode was lined up for New Year's Eve.

But this time, the level of outrage proves the show went too far.

Actress Samantha Womack did her best to play tragic mum Ronnie Branning with sensitivity as she switched her dead baby for the infant son of Kat and Alfie Moon.

But, as The Sun reveals, Samantha was so distressed by the storyline she handed in her notice after seeing the script and will leave in May.

The actress made it clear she thought the plot was a mistake and would cause a backlash. But bosses ignored her.

Her resignation is a huge embarrassment to the BBC.

As broadcaster Anne Diamond, who lost her baby son to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, said, not even cot death was dramatic enough for EastEnders. It had to go one better with the ludicrous baby swap.

Campaigners like Anne have helped reduce the cot death toll from 2,000 a year to 300.

EastEnders could have helped that campaign by tackling the subject responsibly.

Reducing it to warped sensationalism was an appalling misjudgment.

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1/06/2011 11:38:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, September 29, 2010 

Liam Fox and a truly appalling leak.

It is remarkable, is it not, just how little comment there's been about the calling in of the police, albeit the Ministry of Defence police, to search for the source of the leak of a letter from Liam Fox to David Cameron which sets out in no uncertain terms just how the Strategic Defence and Strategy Review is going to affect his department? The nearest obvious comparison to make is with the arrest of Damian Green a little less than 2 years ago, having received numerous Home Office documents from Chris Galley, a civil servant who had previously applied to work for none other than Damian Green.

Clearly this isn't anywhere near as serious as this hasn't involved anti-terrorist police entering parliament and actually arresting an MP. Nonetheless, it still seems to be an over-the-top reaction to a leak which many would claim to have been in the public interest, regardless of how it involved private correspondence with the prime minister. The letter, while about national security, does not potentially put anyone in actual danger and should definitely not breach the Official Secrets Act. Things do however seem just as murky as they initially were in the Damian Green case: supposedly the MoD doesn't know who ordered the search, or at least wasn't telling the press.

Murkier still is that most initial suspicions as to who leaked the letter fell on Fox himself. Throughout the summer there's been numerous stories about how Fox has been doing battle against the Treasury, most notably over the potential replacement of Trident, with the MoD arguing for it to be paid for out of a separate fund from the defence budget, with George Osborne apparently refusing to budge. The letter however goes even further, Fox directly spelling exactly what might be lost should the SDSR turn into a more comprehensive spending review. It reads, as Mark Urban just said on Newsnight, like it was made to be leaked, with Fox appealing almost desperately and hinting at the consequences politically for the coalition should things continue as they are going, risking have their words on defence being the government's first priority being thrown back at them, the morale of the armed forces potentially damaged. It in fact surely edges into hyperbole; after all, this was a government which also came to power pledging to cut heavily. Liam Fox knew damn well that there were going to be "draconian" cuts; he himself argued for them, and it's not as if the defence budget isn't ripe for savings.

Special pleading similar to that from Fox is doubtless going on across Whitehall as October the 20th looms ever closer. Would however a minister go so far as to leak a letter himself, or if not, get an aide or sympathiser to do so? Without knowing who called in the MoD police, and on what authority, it's difficult to able to ascertain whether Fox would have taken the risk; did Cameron suggest the inquiry so as to be certain that his defence secretary isn't playing him off against the right-wing press, always sensitive to any sort of defence cuts? As ever, the question primarily has to be who benefits, and it's fairly clear that for the moment at least it's Fox, however much he protests about how appalling it is that such private letters have found their way into the hands of the Telegraph. More than anything, it just proves the point that you can change the government, but you can't change how they react when the press gets hold of "sensitive" information. Should something which benefits Labour and not the defence secretary go missing, one has to wonder what the response will then be.

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9/29/2010 10:57:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, August 04, 2010 

Scum-watch: "Sick, thick and deluded".

Never one to beat a dead horse when you can instead eviscerate the damn thing, the Sun takes the trouble to conduct a full interview with the mother cited in yesterday's leader contrasting the funerals of Raoul Moat and Alex Higgins. It is the silly season, after all, and why miss a perfect opportunity to attack all those things that the paper professes to loathe? Teresa Bystram is not just "sick, thick and deluded"; according to the paper's editorial by her actions she also proves "herself to be an unfit mother", whose kids should be put "in care". It would of course be interesting to know whether Bystram was paid by the Sun for the interview she gave, especially when unless she really is as thick as the paper claims she must have realised just how they were going to use it, as that might put their rage about how she's using her benefits into some sort of perspective, but never mind.

Far more instructive is that currently the article has 32 comments, a rather poor showing for a piece clearly written with the intention of causing widespread anger at Bystram's fecklessness and indolence. By contrast, yesterday's article on the murder of Robert Coello in Grendon prison has 43, which even taking into consideration a couple of multiple responses is still far higher. Then again, you can't blame them: delighting in the violent death of a child rapist isn't even close to the sickness required to be able empathise with another murderer. That sort of thing demands a front page and a fulminating editorial in the country's biggest selling daily newspaper. Anything less would be a journalistic dereliction of duty.

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8/04/2010 10:14:00 pm | | | links to this post

Tuesday, August 03, 2010 

Scum-watch: "They must have deserved it".

The Sun, still amazed that anyone could possibly find Raoul Moat worthy of sympathy, dedicates most of its leader column to contrasting the funerals of Moat and Alex Higgins. Higgins, in case you couldn't guess, is a hero, whilst Moat is a zero. The paper intones:

Moat was only a hero to anti-police ghouls. The fact people travelled miles to display admiration shows how damaged Britain has become.

One woman dragged her three teenage sons from Surrey on the overnight bus. She thinks Moat is a hero. She "absolutely loved him".

To the innocents injured and killed she said: "Fair enough, people died. But they must have deserved it."


The leader writer has a point. Why bother travelling miles to display admiration or declare that people who were killed must have deserved it when you can do the latter on the paper's website? For reasons known only to themselves, the paper has left the comment section open on the article detailing the death in prison of Robert Coello, who was serving a life term for raping a child. The responses are wholly predictable:

Best news I have read all day, just one question why waste 7 1/2 hours of valuable NHS resouces. My compliments to the attacker!!!!!!!!!!!

great news, we can live in hope this may inspire others to do the same!

if the crimal justice laws were sorted out.
we won't need so called scumbags to bring justice to these animals

why waste 7 1/2 hours of nhs time and resorces?...sounded like the guy was sub-human any way. they should have taken him to a vet and had him put down

There are, it must be said, some noble individuals going against the grain:

whilst he was vile, i don't believe anyone should take the law into their own hands. it makes that person as sick as the offender, despite the fact that this coello clearly deserved it

Well, clearly. To be fair, there are two others in the thread who demur from open celebration at the taking of Coello's life, but they're most certainly in the minority.

While hinting at it, the Sun's article doesn't explain how Grendon is different to other prisons, only noting it "offers unique therapeutic care for warped offenders who are required to express a genuine desire to change and stay drug free". The BBC steps into the breach:

If a prisoner is identified as a potential candidate for the treatment available at Grendon, staff assemble probation and psychiatric reports and intelligence from the prison service's offender assessment system. The prison's head of psychology decides which prisoners are appropriate to be admitted.

Once admitted, inmates are subject to three months of initial assessments before being allocated to one of five wings, each of which operates as an autonomous "therapeutic community".


These details might have softened the feelings expressed by some in the Sun's comment section, although probably not all of them.

In any case, this is hardly the first time the paper has "forgot" to close the comment section when reporting on the suspicious death of a convicted sex offender: it left them open when Gordon Boon was killed, subsequently it turned out by a fellow con and not by a vigilante, and also when Andy Cunningham was murdered, both with the same gleeful end result. Boon's son made the obvious point when appealing for information about his father's death:

"Even if you can't forgive him, please remember what we are going through," he said. "We can't ignore what he's done, but nobody deserves to be murdered."

Coello almost certainly has relatives and friends out there now in the same situation, who loathed his crime but still loved him as a family member or former companion. Seeing comments openly welcoming his death and lauding his murderer, even if they might have expected as much, is far beneath what a newspaper should ever consider publishing, regardless of how it comes to appear on their site. For a paper so disgusted and outraged that anyone could ever feel sympathy for or think a murderer should be celebrated as a hero, it's strange that it seems to think it's perfectly acceptable when the victim is also a criminal.

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8/03/2010 09:29:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, July 07, 2010 

Hypocrisy never changes.

If there's one thing that history tells us, it's that hypocrisy never changes, it just ends up being applied to different people. I recently read Francis Wheen's wonderful biography of the lovable scoundrel Tom Driberg, the notoriously promiscuous first William Hickey, Labour MP and finally Baron Driberg of Bradwell. Not only were his fellow members of parliament fully aware of his homosexuality and voracious sexual appetite, not least because he regaled them endlessly with the tales of his experiences, whether they wanted to hear them or not, but he was also protected when he was accused of indecent assault, with his employer Beaverbrook paying for his legal representation and for the most past the rest of Fleet Street staying completely silent about the case. All this happened while homosexuality was illegal and other, less well connected individuals found themselves prosecuted simply for who they were. Some others were less lucky than the likes of Driberg, Alan Turing among them.

When David Laws was recently inadvertently outed by the Daily Telegraph, the surprise was not that he was gay, something known about at Westminster or at least suspected, but that he had felt unable to be open about his sexuality, even in these apparently enlightened and liberated times. It's easy to forget that it was only in the 80s that Chris Smith because the first MP to be openly gay, and indeed that even those who were completely open about their sexuality to those they knew, such as Driberg, still felt the need to wed, entering a loveless and unconsummated marriage for a reason known only to himself.

It was therefore always unconscionable that politicians would demand of anyone in this country that they should be "discreet" about their sexuality when they should have absolutely nothing to fear or be worried about by being openly gay. The law is more than clear: it's the problem of those that object, not the person themselves. Why then was it ever government policy that those claiming asylum on the grounds of facing persecution or worse in their home country because of their sexuality were declined refugee status because they should be fine as long as they were "discreet"? They were fully prepared to condemn the men who won their appeal today at the supreme court to a culture which in Iran goes far beyond anything in this country when homosexuality was still prohibited, while the situation is scarcely much better in Cameroon. The idea in any case that by being discreet you should be able to avoid the lash or death in Iran or five years imprisonment in Cameroon is itself morally bankrupt. Everyone in those countries is discreet, including most if not all of those prosecuted; it doesn't save those who are condemned to the authorities or who make even just one mistake of being open, as the appellant from Cameroon apparently did, caught kissing his partner. His account of what followed was not disputed:

In the case of HT it is agreed that, following an occasion when he was seen kissing his then (male) partner in the garden of his home, the appellant was attacked by a crowd of people when leaving church. They beat him with sticks and threw stones at him. They pulled off his clothes and tried to cut off his penis with a knife. He attempted to defend himself and was cut just above the penis and on his hand. He was threatened with being killed imminently on the ground that "you people cannot be changed". Police officers arrived and demanded to know what was going on and why the crowd were assaulting him. They were told it was because he was gay. One of the policemen said to the appellant "How can you go with another man?" and punched him on the mouth. The policemen then kicked him until he passed out. As a result of the injuries which he received he was kept in hospital for two months. After that, he was taken home by a member of his church who told him that he feared for his life and safety if he remained in Cameroon. This man made travel arrangements for HT who flew to the United Kingdom via another European country.

Beyond that, it was always ludicrous that these men could possibly have been returned to their home countries when they would have been almost immediately arrested by the authorities on arrival; the man from Iran certainly would have been. Similarly, it was also a betrayal of our own values: the asylum system is there precisely because of individuals being indiscreet, of demanding change in their societies who are no longer safe as a result of doing so, whether it be directly political or not. It can certainly be argued that sex can take the form of a political act, especially when it takes the form of rebellion against or rejection of the prevailing culture.

Of course, it's always difficult when it comes to policy on asylum to know whether the government really was being homophobic on purpose or "accidentally"; whether it was doing it simply because it thought no fuss would be made, and that it was another way to keep the figures, so ferociously complained about in the tabloids, as low as possible. Whichever it was, the end result was the same: hypocrisy which it would never have demanded of those born here. The case was really moot in any event as the coalition, as well as pledging to end the detention of children in immigration centres, had already said it would not be returning asylum seekers at risk of persecution because of their sexuality back to their home nation. That's a coalition in which the Conservatives are the major force, the party that David Laws would probably have joined had it not been for its support for Section 28, putting the Labour party, the architects of almost all the liberalising measures on homosexuality, to shame. Something really was and remains thoroughly rotten at New Labour's core.

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7/07/2010 09:54:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, April 29, 2010 

Scum-watch: Tits out for the Human Rights Act!

It's long been clear that far from opposing the Human Rights Act because it's either a criminals or terrorists' charter as it has repeatedly claimed, the real reason for the Sun's antipathy for the HRA has been down to its potential to affect the paper's, and indeed the entire tabloid media's business model through Article 8 and how those clauses have been subsequently interpreted by judges.

Even while it's been their excesses and lies that have repeatedly resulted in their appearances in the courts, the Sun and its parent company News International have despite loathing it, always been prepared to use the HRA for their own hypocritical ends. The Times was in fact the very first to test it out after it was enshrined in UK law, a case which it won. More recently the highly esteemed chief lawyer for the News of the World Tom Crone objected bitterly to Tom Watson appearing on the culture, media and sport committee grilling the NotW over the phone-hacking at the paper because of a then on-going libel battle between him and the Sun, claiming that the HRA precluded him from appearing. And today, finally, the paper's biggest assets made clear how the HRA meant they had to be seen if not heard:


That's right, the HRA means that page 3 girls have the right to get their tits out and there's nothing that those interfering politicians can do about it! The same "hated" piece of legislation leading to "madness that is horrifying the country" is according to the four brains on display the only thing that stands between them and their being forced to put some clothes on! Can't these young women see that the HRA is an existential threat to the paper? Don't they know how it puts the rights of criminals above those of victims? How could they possibly defend a piece of legislation that the Conservatives are committed to repealing? Are the Tories going to put in their British Bill of Rights (sic) a specific clause which means that no spoilsport politician will ever be able to stop glamour models from expressing themselves in the only way they know how? It's the ultimate terrifying vista of a hung parliament; no more breasts in a newspaper. How will the Sun ever be able to balance its opposition to the HRA now?

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4/29/2010 09:28:00 pm | | | links to this post

Saturday, February 13, 2010 

Extracting rafters.

Reminded of how much I adore Marina Hyde by this wonderful paragraph out of a generally superb column:

The micro-managing parallels with New Labour are so striking that we must assume Cameron genuinely intends to reprise the shtick which made Blair's lot so uniquely loathsome to the public. It is history lacking the decency to repeat itself as farce. It is merely history ­repeating itself.

Equally reminded of how much I abhor Amanda Platell by her attack on supposed prospective WAGs, one of those loathsome modern abbreviations. She might have something approaching a point, but it's buried beneath venomous, visceral loathing for young, naive women, and intertwined with what it's difficult to describe as anything other than the green-eyed monster:

These long-legged fillies excitedly clatter down the stairs from pavement level, their hooves shod mostly in cheap stilettos so high they make them look ridiculously tall, slightly deformed, like creatures from Avatar.

And they all have the Victoria Beckham stoop that comes with such ridiculous shoes.

The girls' legs go on for ever; as do their dreams of pulling a footballer or a millionaire.

They sway suggestively to the blaring music, drinks clutched in by acrylic-tipped fingers, waving their bottoms at passing boys, thrusting their pert breasts, stroking their bare thighs, licking their lips, tossing their hair extensions.

I am witnessing the mating ritual of the Wannabe WAG. It's a sight worthy of a David Attenborough documentary. Think of a herd of frisky wildebeest stampeding through the Serengeti plain, stopping only to drink and procreate.

The skirts are so short they leave nothing to the imagination. I swear there is only one pair of undies in that club - and I am wearing them.

I know I'm one to talk, but the writing in places is also frankly abysmal:

They behave not so much like Stepford wives, as Stepford tarts, unabashed that they are using sex to procure designer clothes, utterly complicit in the cattle market that unfolds before me wherever I go.

It goes without saying that calling them Stepford tarts doesn't even make any sense, it's just the snatching of a lazy cultural allusion: as Platell elaborates elsewhere, these young women are not submissive and docile as the Stepford wives were, they know what they want and how to get it. They're using the men they're trying to attract just as much as the men are using them.

Any wider significance of what goes on in a tiny number of exclusive London clubs is completely buried under a layer of invective that says as much about Platell as it does about the women she followed for one night. It's also the usual hysterical Daily Mail hypocrisy: as Hagley Road to Ladywood notes, it's the likes of the Mail that help to perpetuate the false notion that there's something glamorous about hanging onto the arm of a footballer or dumb rich boy by their constant and consistent coverage of them, which is far from always being sneering or hectoring in tone. Someone once said that you should extract the rafter from your own eye before attempting to to extract the straw from someone else's eye, advice that our glorious modern media will never even begin to take.

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2/13/2010 08:59:00 pm | | | links to this post

Friday, January 08, 2010 

Here's to you, Mrs Robinson.

Surely if there's one thing that shows the progress in Northern Ireland, it's that Iris Robinson's lover has been revealed not just to be 19-years-old (now 21) but also a Catholic. To go from not sitting down with that man to laying down with him in little more than 10 years must mean there's hope for all other unsolved conflicts around the world.

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1/08/2010 09:04:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, January 06, 2010 

Redeemed by the red wine of Christ.

Isn't it strange how so often the most sanctimonious and deeply "moral" individuals who condemn others for their "sins" are those that end up being caught out? Back in 2008, Iris Robinson MP, while condemning the attack on Stephen Scott told Radio Ulster that:

"I have a very lovely psychiatrist who works with me in my offices and his Christian background is that he tries to help homosexuals trying to turn away from what they are engaged in.

If this self-same "very lovely" psychiatrist tried to help Robinson after she started having an affair, then it seems he didn't do that great a job; Robinson attempted suicide after telling her husband of her transgressions on March the 1st last year. Another strange decision considering Robinson's fundamentalist, Pentecostal branch of Christianity, for which the usual punishment for suicide is a lengthy vacation in the bowels of Hell.

Not that Robinson's comments on Stephen Scott were the only homophobic remarks she made. During the debate on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, she claimed that "[W]e are moving mountains to facilitate immorality ...". Whether she personally had to move mountains to facilitate her own bunk-up sessions with a man "who had suffered a bereavement" isn't clear, but one suspects that she didn't have to do anything so strenuous. Apart from the actual exertions involved, obviously.

Still, at least Robinson is confident that God has forgiven her, just like so many others before her are convinced through their very personal relationship with Our Dear Lord and Creator that their own inconsistencies with scripture are no big deal. Again though, it seems Robinson has different standards for herself and how God will treat her as compared to those abominable homosexuals. After complaints about her comments, the parliamentary ombudsman accounted for her remarks thus:

"Mrs Robinson made it clear in her first interview of June 6th that comments she had made in a previous discussion in which it appears she described homosexuality as an 'abomination' were, 'scriptural, and what I clarified it with was very very clear that my Christian belief teaches me that you love the sinner and hate the sin and that goes right across every type of sin'."

Or maybe that is how she's seen it all along: that she, the sinner, loves herself, while hating the "sin" she was committing. Not that the Old Testament wrathful, vengeful God saw it in the same way: there's not much nuance in Leviticus 20, for which the punishment for adultery is quite plainly death for both the adulterer and adulteress. Presumably Robinson has atoned for her sin in the same way in which she proposed Scott could be forgiven for his: redeemed by the blood of Christ. Or was that just the cheap red wine which made one thing lead to another?

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1/06/2010 08:35:00 pm | | | links to this post

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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12/15/2008 09:43:00 pm | | | links to this post

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