Saturday, March 20, 2010 

Scum-watch: A great victory for liars.

How then do you respond when it turns out you've been telling ludicrous lies, claiming that teachers couldn't confiscate 4-MMC when any actual teacher would have told you the absolute opposite?

Easy. Claim that the rules have been changed because of your highlighting of the problem:

TEACHERS were given the power to confiscate killer drug meow meow yesterday - in a victory for The Sun.

After dithering for days, Mr Coaker wrote to every head in England, saying: "Schools do have the power to confiscate inappropriate items, including a substance they believe to be mephedrone (or any other drug whatever its legal status). They do not have to return such confiscated substances."

As is abundantly clear, this is Coaker just reiterating what the current rules are. Here's part of his letter to schools unedited:

Some questions have been raised as to whether teachers can confiscate such substances, given that they are not prohibited substances. As current guidance makes clear, schools do have the power to confiscate inappropriate items, including a substance they believe to be mephedrone (or any other drug whatever its legal status) in line with the schools behaviour policy. They do not have to return such confiscated substances. As School discipline and pupil behaviour policies: Guidance for schools makes clear, schools may choose not to return an item to the pupil, including

  • Items of value which the pupil should not have brought to school or has misused in some way might – if the school judges this appropriate and reasonable – be stored safely at the school until a responsible family adult can come and retrieve them.
  • Items which the pupil should not have had in their possession – particularly of an unlawful or hazardous nature – may be given by the school to an external agency for disposal or further action as necessary. This should always be followed by a letter to the parents confirming that this has taken place and the reasons for such an action.

The Sun's claims that teachers had to give back 4-MMC to students as it isn't yet illegal have thus been utter nonsense from the very beginning, and their editing of Coaker's letter is cynical and misleading in the extreme.

Nonetheless, the paper's leader continues to claim that it's all thanks to them:

IN a victory for The Sun, teachers are told they DON'T have to give back a deadly drug seized from pupils...What's surprising is that there was a millisecond's doubt.

Day was when school heads could dictate what their pupils wore, how they behaved and whether they could use mobile phones during class.

Never mind not handing back meow meow because it is technically legal.

Makes you wonder precisely what those who run our schools these days are taking.


Or rather, it makes you wonder what those who write the newspapers are taking these days. The idea that heads don't decide on what pupils wear, how they behave or whether they can use mobile phones isn't just beyond ignorant, it's an outright lie. It really is impossible not to absolutely hate the scaremongering liars who write for the Sun, and to be incredibly fearful of the power which they continue to wield, both over this government and the one likely to come.

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Wednesday, March 10, 2010 

Eliza Manningham-Bullshitter.

Becoming a member of the security services is a little like converting to Islam - once you're in, you're in for life, unless you decide to turn whistleblower, ala, Peter Wright or David Shayler, although in the case of the latter it seems to have done little to help his state of mind. Most though stay a spook for the rest of their life, and even after retirement continue to deny reports about the antics of agents which are known to be true, and in the case of Eliza Manningham-Buller, continue to be at the very least economical with the truth.

According to the previous head of MI5, "the Americans were very keen that people like us did not discover what they were doing". Really? How then does that square with the "seven paragraphs" which very clearly show that the Americans were at the least indulging in "cruel and unusual punishment" when interviewing Binyam Mohamed, and which they were more than prepared to share with their friends in 5/6 back in 2002? How is Buller's claim not contradicted directly by the evidence of Craig Murray, who sent back evidence in 2002 and 03 that showed the CIA was using evidence obtained from the torture of dissidents and others in Uzbekistan, and which the government and security services already knew about in any case? Previously MI5/6 have claimed that they didn't properly realise that the US policy of mistreatment had extended as far as it had until the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, although they knew about the "ghost sites", which even then was stretching the realms of feasibility. Now Manningham-Buller claims that she didn't know why Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been so talkative until after her retirement when she discovered that he had been "waterboarded" 160 times.

If you were to believe Manningham-Buller, you'd also have to accept that the same people who are meant to be keeping us safe are also some of the most gullible and least inquisitive individuals around. There's plenty of things that you can call the security services, but those that rise to the top are not idiots, nor are they easily led or deceived. Did she really ask her underlings why KSM was talking and not even have an inkling that it might have something to do with the fact that the US was subjecting him to simulated drowning on a frighteningly regular basis? That's of course if this whole recollected conversation actually took place at all, which is itself unlikely. Why else after all were certain "high-value" detainees disappearing if they weren't being taken to "black sites", which MI5 and 6 have said they knew about? Then there's the little matter of Guantanamo Bay, established in December 2001, and where from the very beginning there were allegations of mistreatment. The only reasonable conclusion that can be reached is that Eliza Manningham-Buller is lying, and lying in a feeble attempt to protect both herself and MI5. Then again, why should we be surprised? When lying is what you do for a living, why stop when you retire?

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Friday, February 05, 2010 

BAE and Saudis finally brought to book.

Away from the country's obsession with what's happening in other people's bedrooms, BAE Systems was today finally forced into admitting what we all already knew: that its deals involving both Tanzania and Saudi Arabia were sweetened by massive bribery and corruption. Not that it was our dogged and determined investigators at the Serious Farce Office that managed to get the company, which may as well be nationalised considering just how closely it works with the government, to own up to operating a massive slush fund which enriched the already filthily wealthy Saudi royal family, but instead the far more tenacious US Department of Justice.

Blair of course forced the SFO into dropping its own investigation to the Al-Yamanah deal, on the grounds of national security, based on spurious but outrageous threats from the Saudis, and also on deeply questionable claims that there was no guarantee of a successful prosecution resulting from the inquiries. The opposite was the case: the SFO had just succeeded in persuading the Swiss to give them access to bank accounts which would have provided prima facie evidence of the payments from BAE to the intermediaries of the Saudi royal family. As the statement from the Department of Justice makes clear:

"BAE agreed to transfer sums totalling more than £10m and more than $9m to a bank account in Switzerland controlled by an intermediary. BAE was aware that there was a high probability that the intermediary would transfer part of these payments to the [Saudi] official."

To call that an understatement would be superfluous. It is though a withering indictment of both of our legal system when it comes to combating corruption and also our willingness to interfere with what ought to be untouchable: the rule of law itself. The Americans, whom we often sneer at, are both more prepared to stand up to threats from bullies and also to prosecute their own than our craven and opportunist equivalents are. New Labour has been responsible for many disgraces, but this really does rank up there, along with Iraq, as one of their very worst abuses of power.

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Wednesday, September 24, 2008 

Nadine Dorries just cannot stop lying.

What is it exactly that causes individuals to lie and mislead when they know full well that their untruths are likely to be quickly exposed? Is it because they genuinely can't help themselves or that they've got so used to repeatedly bending reality that they come to believe it themselves? I ask only because a repeated serial offender has been caught once again lying through her teeth:

Today I have received a letter from John Lyon CB - the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards - in response to a complaint made about my blog by a Liberal Democrat (sic).

...

For the record, John Lyon's letter to the complainant states the following:

"The position is that no Parliamentary resources have been used to fund Mrs Dorries' weblog. Questions about whether its content is consistent with the rules in relation to Parliamentary funding do not therefore arise."

He goes on to state, "No further action on any point is required, and therefore consider your complaint now closed."

Yes, we're referring to the glamorous and flagrant Ms Nadine Dorries, Conservative MP for mid-Bedfordshire, and the complaint made against her by Sunny Hundal regarding her blog being funded out of the incidental expenses allowance (since changed to the communications allowance), which expressly forbids such funds to be used for party political activities or campaigning. Sunny was good enough at the time to put up for all to see the complaint and the evidence which quite clearly showed that Dorries was apparently abusing the allowance, especially regarding her vindictive attacks on female Labour MPs in marginal seats who had a record of voting not to lower the time-limit on those seeking an abortion.

It was therefore a surprise to learn that John Lyon had dismissed the complaint so apparently out of hand when the evidence was so transparently damning of Dorries' conduct. Despite not claiming to know who Sunny was, and also erroneously describing him as a Liberal Democrat, Unity noted that Dorries or her web-hosts had subtly altered the site after the complaint had been submitted, removing the text which suggested that the site was funded out of the inicidental provisions allowance, and ostensibly moving the blog away from Dorries' constituency website, although it was quite obvious that both still used the same address. At the time Unity wondered whether she was going to plead ignorance and apologise, but by the account give by Dorries herself this apparently wasn't necessary, as John Lyon had cleared her entirely.

Except that wasn't the case at all. Sunny, having been busy with both preparing for a well-earned holiday and also attending the Labour party conference, hadn't had time to post himself on the response of Lyon to him regarding the complaint. He now has:

A few months ago I submitted a complaint, with the help of some Liberal Conspirators to the Parliamentary Standards Commission against Nadine Dorries MP. In short, it was regarding her blog. Last weekend I had a response.

The most relevant parts of the letter stated:

The rules of the house, however, do require Members to make a clear distinction between websites which are financed from public funds and any other domain. At the time of your complaint, Mrs Dorries’ website did not meet that requirement. Nor was it appropriate that she use the Portcullis emblem on the weblog given its contents. And the funding attribution on Mrs Dorries’ Home Page should have been updated to reflect that the funding came from the Communications Allowance and not from the Incidental Expenses Provision.

To these three technical aspects, our complaint was upheld. But, the Commissioner adds:

I am, however, satisfied that Mrs Dorries has take effective action to rectify the situation, for which she has apologised…. She has expressed her regret for the confusion caused.


In other words then, the complaint to all intents and purposes was upheld, and not only that, Dorries had apologised for the confusion caused. Presumably because Dorries provided evidence that showed that the blog had not been funded out of the incidental expenses provision after all, as the site claimed, Lyon decided to accept her apology and take the matter no further.

All of this though is rather different to the complete bill of health which Dorries gave her own readers the impression she had been given. She failed to inform them she had apologised or that she been upbraided on 3 separate counts, even if the complaint was not subsequently upheld. Iain Dale, the inventor of blogging, therefore took this up on his own site:

I have waited a few days to see if he might do us the honour of posting about it on Liberal Conspiracy, and maybe apologising to Nadine for the smear. But not a bit of it. He's remained silent on the matter.

There is no apologising to be done because the complaint itself was, as Lyon in his letter to Sunny makes clear, fully justified on almost all counts. Iain though seems to have been mislead by Dorries herself by yet again not revealing the full facts of the matter, and trying to make out that she has been the innocent party through blatant omission of them. Dorries ends her post with the following:

I think this has been a most revealing episode as to his type of politics - it's certainly not mine.

Dorries is of course quite right. Sunny and Liberal Conspiracy made a completely legitimate complaint about a member of parliament apparently abusing their allowance, one which the parliamentary standards commissioner agreed was wholly justified in bringing, and which was upheld on 3 counts, with Dorries herself apologising. Ms Dorries on the other hand has yet again lied to the very people that she is meant to be serving -- her constituents -- through omitting those facts and only revealing the parts of the letter which apparently exonerated her. It shows her up to be fundamentally dishonest, which has been the most overwhelming feature of her politics up till now. I think it's well worth repeating again the final paragraph of a previous post of mine:

Out of all the MPs that this blog has covered over the last few years, it's safe to say that none (with the exception of dear Tony) has been as underhand, as genuinely unpleasant, manipulative, vindictive and dishonest as both Dorries has been and apparently is. She is both a disgrace to politics as a whole and a liability to the Conservative party.

How many more examples of exactly the above does the Conservative party need before it takes action against Dorries for her behaviour? Perhaps that's one that Iain Dale could answer for us.

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Wednesday, August 13, 2008 

The Stagg hunt draws to a close.

It's difficult to think of someone more of a victim of the gutter press in this country than Colin Stagg. One other name does come to mind, but she used them as much as they used her. Here's a prediction: tomorrow the very same newspapers that stalked and hunted him for over a decade will be at the least less than happy with the £706,000 that Stagg through his solicitors has revealed he will receive in compensation for his treatment courtesy of the Metropolitan police. They will raise the amount which Rachel Nickell's son received, a derisory sum which could never even begin to account for how he was found, gripping his mother, covered in blood and begging her to get up. They will point out for a very long time indeed he was the only suspect; because the police themselves wanted him to remain the only suspect. Keith Pedder for one, the detective inspector in charge on the case, has written two self-affirming and congratulatory books on how Stagg had managed to get away with murder. It was only after a further investigation by a separate cold case team that another man, Robert Napper, a paranoid schizophrenic being held at Broadmoor indefinitely for two murders with similarities to the killing of Nickell that the police finally admitted to themselves that their hunt for Stagg had been futile.

Not that they have admitted publicly to that, or said the simplest words to Stagg personally that they got it wrong. Then again, why should they? After all, those other companions in the decade long stalking, baiting and smearing of Stagg, this country's finest tabloid newspapers, have never admitted they were wrong or said sorry either. Although almost of them were involved in pursuing him and ran articles calling either for the abolition of the laws on double jeopardy (which New Labour happily obliged in removing) or that implicated him in the murder if not directly accusing him, undoubtedly the most bile was delivered in the limp Sunday rag The People, which republished the letters which "Lizzie James", the Met's honeytrap exchanged with Stagg during the attempt to link him to the kind of bizarre sexual practices which the psychologist Paul Britton was convinced the perpetrator had. The Mail meanwhile, in the best practices which the newspaper retains for those that are accused of crimes, performed hatchet job after hatchet job, serialising Pedder's impotent book, and also ran an interview with Nickell's former boyfriend, who made a personal appeal for the double jeopardy law to be repealed. Their attitude towards Stagg could not be more summed up than by the words of John Junor, whom in an article purporting to ask the question whether Stagg would always be targeted as the killer who got away, wrote:

It would be terrible, however, to think that he is going to be hounded for the rest of his life for having been found not guilty of murder when it is certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility that he was indeed innocent.

How magnanimous and kind of both Junor and the Mail to admit that it was possible that Stagg was indeed innocent, despite his acquittal. The irony and amazing chutzpah of the Mail asking whether Stagg would remain to be stalked when it was the one leading the stalking, while also attempting to soften its line but failing miserably is something to behold.

Nick Cohen, writing in the Observer a couple of years back, linked the credulity and continuing belief that Stagg was guilty among the tabloid hacks to the influence of the police on them, to the closeness which gives them their stories, their exclusives, and the photographs of the suspects themselves either being brought in or when arrested. This is undoubtedly part of the reason, but I am far more cynical than Cohen. These reporters knew full well that Stagg was innocent, as did their editors. The best that can be said is that they convinced themselves in order to appraise their consciences of any guilt. This had to be done because there was no evidence whatsoever linking Stagg to Nickell except the Met's attempts to entrapment, which he even then rebuffed. No, these stories were not out of any public interest to ensure that the killer was brought to justice, they were because they knew they were what the public wants to read, that they want someone to blame when such horrible crimes are committed, even if the case is apparently unsolvable, and that most of all, they sold. Nickell's former boyfriend, already mentioned, noted this. His bitterness at being chased out of the country, forced to live in France to escape was more than palpable in his description of the hacks:

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

Quite so. Much is the same with any attractive woman or child that is tragically killed, murdered or abducted. Whether it be Nickell, Princess Diana, Sally Anne Bowman or Madeleine McCann, they stare out from the front pages, forever locked in their youthful beauty, demanding that something be done about their disappearance or deaths. They pretend that it's because they care, when in reality it's because of their own business models, the phoniness of providing a service while sucking the individual they've latched onto dry until they too can be dispensed with, when the trail finally dries up and everyone, except those being exploited, have moved on.

The police's insistence in having found the right person is the justification, not the reason why. We saw it again just a couple of weeks back with Barry George, where again hardly any journalists or anyone outside of the police really believed he was anywhere near capable of killing Jill Dando, let alone in the way in which she was assassinated. Yet they printed the police's self-serving, laughably weak attempts to still pretend that George was the murderer, even while they must surely have known it was not true. In Nickell's case, at least the police have now found a man who might well be her real murderer, while with Dando it seems incredibly unlikely that her killer will ever be brought to justice. The victims in both cases have been treated abominably, whether they be the relatives or those fitted up. And yet our supposed justice seeking media, which never lets up on the law and order agenda, defends and carries the squeals of innocence spoon-fed to them by their sources.

Stagg's award, despite its size, will never get him his life back. It seems doubtful, even now, that he'll find work, after being made unemployable because of his notoriety. There is however most certainly a case for the £706,000 not completely being stumped up by the taxpayer. No, the real damage was done not by the trial and the fit-up, but by the compliant media which demonised and destroyed day by day, week by week, month by month and year by year. It should be Associated Newspapers, the Mirror Group and News International that should be writing the cheques and stumping up at least half if not more of the money. The suffering they have caused and continue to cause to countless people through their complete lack of integrity and not knowing when enough is enough is such that it's time they were hit in the only place where it hurts: the pocket. Their power however protects them, and there is absolutely nothing it seems that we can do about it.

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Wednesday, May 14, 2008 

The hounds of love are calling.

All together now, everyone say "awwwww":

The Hounds of Hell are chasing me.

Her arguments debunked, the only thing left to Nadine Dorries to resort to is pure emotional blackmail, and to claims that her opponents are victimising her.

We received another unpleasant parcel in the post today. Nasty web sites set up, email account and post bag bombarded, people crawling all over my expenses, which they are entitled and I am very very happy for them to do...

Come now Nadine, let's not mess about with euphemisms, spit out exactly what was in this "unpleasant" parcel. See, the trouble is, when you either lie or be blatantly dishonest, or refuse to apologise to others when you've accused them of things they haven't done, it tends to make it more difficult to believe them when it comes to everything else. As Unity says, incidentally, if there is a moron out there sending Dorries dog shit or something similarly nasty, then don't, because as Dorries is attempting to do with this post, it then blackens everyone who is arguing against her pitiful campaign. It is worth questioning though where these "nasty" web sites are; as far as we're aware there are two that Dorries might claim are "nasty", one set-up to hold comments for her posts when she removed them from her own blog, and one which has now been dead for months. All the rest have been exposing her claims with at times remarkable restraint.

Scary, threatening angry and downright nasty phone calls. A message smeared on my window.

As said, I'm not going to say that Dorries is either making it up or lying about this stuff, but it would make it easier to believe if she provided some evidence beyond just a blog post, or indeed, informed the police of what's been happening.

This is all meant to destabilise or distract me.

I have a very clear message to those who are attempting to do this – back off. You will not stop me, you will not undermine me, you do not scare me. In fact, you make me much more determined than I ever was before. You give me strength.


And then just to rub in how she doesn't care for anyone else's opinion or indeed, the facts themselves, she once again posts the image of Samuel Armas with the doctor Joseph Bruner, lifting the baby's arm and gently putting it back in the womb, not the other way around, as both she and the photographer, Michael Clancy, continue to propogate. It would be difficult for an anaesthetized mother and/or child to move in such a way, but again, this just shows the sort of impervious to reason individual we are dealing with: despite formerly being a nurse, despite attempting to claim that she is arguing on the basis of science, she continues to use the most base pro-life propaganda for her cause.

You can almost understand why someone might send her their dog's defecation, can't you? It would also help if she and the others didn't have such apparent contempt for their opponent's points of view, as Simon Hoggart wrote in his sketch on Tuesday:

Dari Taylor, a Labour MP, made a moving speech in favour, describing how it might have meant she could have had the baby she yearned for. The effect was, I fear, slightly spoiled by Ann Widdecombe and Nadine Dorries - both vocal opponents - talking loudly on the Tory frontbench while she spoke.

Dorries herself reaches for the emotion and expects everyone to listen, and weep along with her at the tragedy of babies being brutally put to death, and then demand action. When someone else does the same thing, her intention is to drown it out. Yet it's us, "the hounds of hell", which are chasing her. Maybe it's actually her conscience trying to tell her something.

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Friday, May 09, 2008 

The lying lies and dirty secrets of Ms Nadine Dorries MP.

By her own admission, Nadine Dorries MP is a liar. Back in March she presented an known urban myth as an emotional case for why the current abortion limit of 24 weeks should be cut to 20 weeks, and when this was pointed out to her, she responded by making arguments that only exposed her ignorance. Dorries has a long record of never apologising and never admitting that she has made mistakes: last year she accused Ben Goldacre of "a serious breach of parliamentary procedure" after he downloaded information from a parliamentary committee's website which Dorries thought he had obtained from a committee member, something for which she never apologised for and when asked when she was going to do so on her blog she removed the comments sections. She additionally, after accusing Caroline Flint among other MPs of having been "bought by the abortion industry", a claim rejected by the parliamentary standards commission, not only refused to apologise to Flint after she confronted her but crowed about not doing so on her "blog".

Dorries is therefore the perfect figurehead for the "20 reasons for 20 weeks" campaign, a coalition of Conservative MPs with single token Liberal Democrat and Labour supporters, along with religious, mainly Christian anti-abortion organisations. Like her, they rely on abusing, misinterpreting and distorting available information for their views, or alternatively, on the evidence of individual doctors which has been called into question by others. As well as that, in order to not come across as opposing abortion in all circumstances, something which would result in their campaign becoming an even damper squib than it already is, they instead claim to be pro-choice but feel that the current limit is too long as more foetuses survive beyond the 20 week mark.

The only problem with this is that little by little, their real views are being exposed. The already noted lone Labour supporter of the 20 weeks campaign, Jim Dobbin, is in fact in favour of a 13-week limit, but regards the current campaign as being a step towards that. He is also, coincidentally, opposed to contraception. The Christian Medical Fellowship openly states that this is just the first step towards the abolition of the right to abortion altogether. CARE currently has a news article up on their web site expressing their horror at the European Parliament passing a resolution which states "
that women have a right to access safe and legal abortion, and calls on all member states to decriminalise abortion 'within reasonable gestational limits'". Christian Concern for Our Nation, whose website is the most clap-happy and even more religiously inclined than the Evangelical Alliance's is, urge their members to pray for "a great miracle" when the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill goes through the Commons. Coincidentally, a founder member of CCON is the man behind the 20 weeks' website, directly linking Dorries, who has mostly eschewed religious dogma in her personal campaign, with them. The LIFE charity only supports abortion where the life of the mother herself is threatened. The Prolife Alliance, as one would expect, is also completely opposed to abortion (PDF).

Perhaps those organisations might then be surprised to learn that Dorries herself, when a Conservative parliamentary candidate for Hazel Grove, campaigned on a pro-choice platform. It's not clear whether Dorries at the time was in favour of the limit as it stands, or whether it's just another example of her being wholly disingenuous, as she claimed, when questioned on her current views last year on the Spectator website, to favour a 9-week limit, even lower than that of Dobbin. She was also formerly a director of BUPA, one of the companies she now accuses of being part of the "abortion industry".

Unfortunately for Dorries, the shit over her underhand means is likely to hit the fan if not this weekend, then certainly next week. Dorries' website and blog is funded from the incidental expenses provision, the rules of which clearly state that such funds should not be used for campaigning on the behalf of a political party or a personal cause: Dorries' website is chock-full of her doing just that, the most egregious examples her vindictive posts on female pro-choice Labour MPs. A complaint to the commissioner for parliamentary standards is in the offing.

Meanwhile, Dorries has been highly vexed by the latest research published in the British Medical Journal, as reported today in the Grauniad and elsewhere. Like in the Epicure 2 study, this found that while the survival rates of babies born at 24 and 25 weeks is improving, there was no statistical improvement in those born at 23 and 22 weeks. At 23 weeks 18% survived; at 22 weeks none did. Her response to this peer-reviewed study, which completely blows her argument that neo-natal survival rates are increasing out of the water, was to say:

"I think this report insults the intelligence of the public and MPs alike. No improvement in neonatal care in 12 years? Really? So where has all the money that has been pumped into neonatal services gone then?" She called the study "the most desperate piece of tosh produced by the pro-choice lobby."

As BD says, the study actually does show that neonatal care has improved, just at 24 and 25 weeks. As those against lowering the limit have consistently argued, this research backs up the point that the viability threshold has been reached, and that those that have survived at 22 weeks are extremely welcome but overall rare anomalies and blips. They do not support lowering the current limit as it stands.

That though, despite the 20 weeks' campaign's insistence, has never been what they really thought. They want abortion restricted no matter what the science and evidence suggests, and if it takes one step at a time and hiding their real arguments behind pseudo-scientific bluster, so be it. Out of all the MPs that this blog has covered over the last few years, it's safe to say that none (with the exception of dear Tony) has been as underhand, as genuinely unpleasant, manipulative, vindictive and dishonest as both Dorries has been and apparently is. She is both a disgrace to politics as a whole and a liability to the Conservative party. The crushing of her current malignant campaign will be just the first step of the fightback.

Related posts:
Laurie Penny - 24 reasons for 24 weeks

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Thursday, February 21, 2008 

Rendition: the truth begins to seep out.

Unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories and that the officials are lying, that I am lying, that behind this there is some kind of secret state which is in league with some dark forces in the United States, and also let me say, we believe that Secretary Rice is lying, there simply is no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition full stop, because we have not been, and so what on earth a judicial inquiry would start to do I have no idea. I do not think it would be justified.
Oral evidence given by Jack Straw to the Foreign Affairs committee on 13th of December 2005.

To those who lived there, it was a paradise. Living purely off the land, the islanders, despite having no modern amenities, had an incredibly tranquil existence. That was until their island was considered as the prime location to be leased to the US military for a naval base, as another island was considered unsuitable because it was home to the rare Aldabra tortoise. The deal was signed, and the Americans requested that the island be "depopulated" for security reasons. The 2,000 inhabitants of Diego Garcia had their island invaded, their dogs shot and then they themselves were finally rounded up and taken to Mauritius, where they were subsequently dumped. The compensation they were given, which amounted to £400 each, was paid directly to the Mauritius government for them to be re-settled. They instead pocketed the money and denied that they had any right to do so. Most still live in hovels and the most severe poverty as a result.

All of this occurred under a Labour government, and it is undoubtedly one of the most despicable and shameful scandals in British history. Even now, despite numerous court rulings, the government refuses to allow them to return to their home, which has been taken over by a monolithic American base from which planes bombed Iraq. They seem to be hoping that those originally displaced that didn't commit suicide in the first place will die, and then be able to claim their children have no right whatsoever to return.

It almost seems fitting that a second scandal, also involving a Labour government, has now also come along concerning Diego Garcia. In a pathetic statement to the House of Commons, David Miliband today admitted that despite all their furious denials, despite the abundant evidence that flights linked to the US rendition program had landed here to at the least refuel, despite MI6 being involved in the rendition of Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil el-Banna to Guantanamo Bay, that evidence has now emerged that rendition flights had indeed landed on UK territory without the US asking for prior permission. Two flights in 2002 refuelled on Diego Garcia, carrying two unfortunates who according to the CIA, who have not told the truth once about the rendition program without being forced to, were not part of the "CIA's high-value terrorist interrogation program" but who nonetheless were taken to Guantanamo Bay and to Morocco respectively. Presumably the one lucky enough to be taken to Morocco was flown there so he could sample the local culture and high quality hashish, and not so he could be tortured like Binyam Mohammed was in the luxury of Moroccan custody. (Newsnight alleges that the plane used to transfer the detainee to Morocco was N397P, a CIA jet that has landed at UK airports on numerous occasions.)

The CIA has denied that Diego Garcia has served as one of the "black sites" where those in the rendition program were taken to be tortured so that the CIA didn't personally get its hands dirty. This is despite Barry McCaffrey, a former four-star US general on a number of occasions stating that prisoners are being held on Diego Garcia, as well as in other five-star US hotels such as Bagram airbase and numerous sites in Iraq, not to mention Gitmo itself.

The Guardian reported last October that the foreign affairs committee was to investigate claims that Garcia had a black site prison, but the revelation today seems to have come about because of the dogged attempts by the all party parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition, led by the tenacious Tory MP Andrew Tyrie, who had used the freedom of information act to request the minutes of political military talks between the US and UK in September last, a claim denied by the government who said that to release such information "would prejudice the defence" of territory by "exposing plans to counter possible terrorist attacks". Instead, they and the US seem to have decided to try and buy the committee off by admitting that rendition flights did use Diego Garcia, but that the island itself is not being used to hold any detainees themselves.

All those involved then are either "sorry" or "regret" this "unfortunate" happening. Never mind that from the very beginning this government has either directly lied, misled or tried to move the debate on when questioned about rendition flights. Jack Straw tried to tell us it was all a conspiracy theory, and from then on they've feigned ignorance at every turn. Andrew Tyrie has described it as "obfuscation and cover-up", and that seems bang on. They've done the very bare minimum from the very beginning in trying to placate critics, refusing to hold anything approaching a proper inquiry, failing to engage with EU-led efforts to investigate the rendition program and not asking of the US even the slightest of searching questions about what the planes linked to the rendition program were doing stopping over at our airports. Miliband now states that he'll compile a list of all said flights concerns have been expressed over and ask the US whether they too have been conveniently forgotten about. It screams of a government being desperate to wait until the initial disquiet and questioning was over before releasing the unsavoury reality. The real question is why they didn't do that as soon as the allegations were raised, with there being no evidence whatsoever that the government even asked the US whether the flights were anything other than kosher. They simply accepted that the US would have asked first before doing so, something now proved to be of the greatest gullibility and naivete. It of course helps that today most of the media are going to be more interested in the conviction of Steve Wright, and then there's also the other whitewash of the day, the inquiry into the bugging of Sadiq Khan.

This is of course from a government that has repeatedly condemned Guantanamo in various terms, most memorably as "an affront to justice". This same government has been complicit in that affront to justice, complicit in the torture of the various individuals caught up in the rendition program, many of whom have never been found guilty of any offence, let alone the "terrorism" which they are accused of being involved in. Indeed, one of those who was rendered through Diego Garcia has now been released, presumably without any compensation and most likely scarred irrevocably by their experience, living in constant fear of their life and without the slightest idea whether they will ever be released, or even put before the "military tribunals" now being set-up to try the most notorious of those held as "enemy combatants". This, as I've written before, ought to be a front-page scandal. Ministers should have resigned. A full judicial inquiry ought to have been set-up to examine not just ministerial complicity, but also security service involvement. Instead we had the whitewash provided by the Intelligence and Security committee. How deeply sad that the Chaggosians, who were treated as more expendable than animals, now know that they were not the only ones to abused in such a way on their paradise home.

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Friday, November 16, 2007 

Scum-watch: The day in a life of the tabloid.

Occasionally, you can get a complete picture of the world view of a newspaper simply by reading just one issue of it. While with most, especially the broadsheets, you might broadly know what it's in favour of, to really understand its exact philosophy you'd have to study it over a number of days, if not longer. Today's Sun, in one sense, is a masterpiece of gutter journalism: it gets its message across, leaves no nuance, uses the most alarmist, provocative and brutal language, and when it needs to, or doesn't need to, it lies and systematically distorts.

The report on Lord Chief Justice Phillips' speech to the Howard League for Penal Reform is partially the result of the tabloid conundrum: how do you convert a speech running to 26 pages in a PDF into a minor article of just over 200 words? The answer is that you only focus on a tiny piece of the actual speech, that of Phillips quite reasonably saying that the prisons are full to bursting and that Labour is chiefly responsible for that fact. On that, the Sun would broadly agree; what it doesn't agree with is that Phillips dares to believe that there is a better option rather than that of building ever more prisons, something he goes into at length in the actual speech. All this adds up to in the Sun's reportage is that he compares the price of 30 years' imprisonment to how it could be spent on education or health, one of his weakest arguments, considering that only murderers or terrorists are ever sentenced to 30 years, while ignoring his more coherent and forceful points about prisons in general. Then examine the language: rather than those in prison being offenders or criminals, they are variously either "villains", a Victorian way of describing them if ever there was one, or "crooks".

To further make clear the Sun's own viewpoint, the same journalist who wrote the report also submits a short "comment" piece, on the same page. In his words, "a record 80,000 villains are off our streets and behind bars," and when making the distinction between prison and other punishments, he describes the alternative to prison as "fines and soft community sentences." The latter part of Phillips' speech is dedicated to community punishments, which the Sun deems soft, and how they can be strengthened, yet none of this is deemed important enough to be distilled to the reader, presumably because it just might undermine the journalist's quavering indignation about it all: "Once again, the Lord Chief Justice has shown how out of touch he is. Ordinary people WANT crooks to be banged up." Phillips is so out of touch that he himself went on a day's community punishment "undercover" to see what it was like, and he describes his experience during the speech, something that a Sun hack is never likely to do, except to expose how "useless" they are. The statement that ordinary people WANT crooks to be banged up is the Sun pretending to be speaking up for the commoner, when there is no evidence to show that the general public do want "crooks" to banged up. Indeed, a recent Grauniad poll found the country split down the middle on whether the solution was more prisons. The Sun does have previous on distorting Phillips' public utterances; this time, rather than coming out with it in the actual report, it does it by its side instead.

Next up, the Sun reports on our friend Robert Stewart who was caught having sex with his bicycle. Another lesson in tabloid language: like with the various adjectives for criminals, he's a perv, a weirdo and an oddball. He might quite possibly be all three, but whether he ought to be humiliated any more for what he did is another matter.

Following on from prison and sex, the Sun settles on another best-seller and a moral panic to boot: the kids are most certainly not all right. Taking the government's survey of 115,000 10-15 year olds (PDF), it selects only the most troubling data from it and leaves all the rest on the editing floor:

"BINGE drinking, drug use and smoking is RIFE among Britain’s schoolchildren, an alarming new survey reveals.

At least one in seven kids aged 12 to 15 has dabbled with illegal substances, it found."

It starts by removing the 10 to 11 year olds from the equation so that the figures are even more potentially scare-worthy. The survey asks how many have taken an illegal substance in the past four weeks for example, with 80% saying they've never taken drugs, 7% saying they haven't in the last month, 9% that they've smoked cannabis, 3% solvents, 3% other drugs and 6% prefer not to say. Doesn't look so frightening then, does it? That's the thing with statistics, they can be incredibly easily manipulated, something that the Scum has accused the government of doing, but which it seems also more than prepared to do itself. It does this partially by converting the percentages into one in however many, which the average layman is less likely to easily understand, so that those who have taken a Class A drug becomes 1 in 30, which is almost meaningless unless you put it the context of it being the equivalent of around one child in the average class taking such a substance. It also doesn't make clear that the figures refer to in the last month, so it becomes "takes", giving the impression that they're regular users when that might not be the case at all.

Half of kids aged between ten and 15 admit to underage boozing and a fifth regularly get drunk. And more than one in five has smoked a cigarette.

Again, the question here was have you ever had an alcoholic drink, not just a sip. Unsurprisingly, 48% said yes. Most 10 to 15 year olds would have at some point in their life had a drink, and some parents might even encourage the continental approach of a glass of wine or similar with a meal, but the Sun converts innocent or supervised drinking into "underage boozing". More potentially worrying is that 40% of those over 13 admit to being drunk once in the last month, but the Sun strangely doesn't use that stat. 73% say they have never smoked a cigarette, which again, doesn't get an airing.

Tories last night claimed the figures were more proof of Britain’s “broken society” under Labour. Shadow children’s minister Tim Loughton said: “Gordon Brown is in denial about this problem, and his Government is unable to offer any solutions to it.

Finally then, we get the standard quote from the opposition political party capitalising on the more troubling parts of the survey. If anything, it actually provides plenty of evidence against the Tories' bullshit about the "broken society"; the biggest worry is exams, with 51% concerned by them, rather than bullying, which worries 25%. It certainly doesn't suggest that there has been a moral breakdown, or that today's children are any worst behaved than earlier generations. The best summings up are provided by the chief inspector of schools, and amazingly, Ed Balls:

"The survey presents much that is positive about life for children and young people today. However, it is also clear that more needs to be done to address children and young people’s worries and concerns about how safe they feel; about exams and tests; and about what would help them learn better and where they need to go for help when they have a problem."

"This survey shows that the majority of children and young people in England today feel happy, safe, enjoy life and are doing well at school. But the survey also shows challenges and pressures that we need to address with decisive action."

Right, so we've had crime and prisons; sexual perversion; kids on drugs and booze; what's left? Of course, immigration!

THE NUMBER of migrants coming to Britain has hit a record high – as officials admit underestimating figures AGAIN.

Some 591,000 arrived last year – up from 327,000 a decade ago.

Of the 400,000 leaving to go abroad, just over half were UK citizens – the first time that figure has gone above 200,000.

The figures were published as officials said the number of arrivals in 2004 and 2005 was 41,000 HIGHER than predicted.

Earlier this month ministers admitted 1.5million migrants had come to Britain since 1997 – TWICE their original estimate.


Here the Sun is hedging its bets ever so slightly. The number of migrants arriving here last year was a record - but only by 5,000 on 2004's figure. When you take into account that the net migration figure that year was 244,000, as compared to last year's 191,000, due to the rise in emigration, 2004, the year the A8 new European states joined, was in actual fact when the highest net number of migrants arrived. The Sun doesn't comment on the emigration figure, which includes just less than half of those who had already come here to work going back home, probably because that undermines the idea that all those who have migrated here have stayed. Figures for those who come here for less than a year then return home aren't kept; they're counted in, but not counted out, which also distorts the figures somewhat. Instead of pointing out how the figures of those migrating here have now dropped for two years, and that the emigrant figures suggest that we're now becoming a revolving door rather than a permanent stop for migrants, the Sun brings back up the mess up from earlier in the month, but gets it wrong. 1.5 million migrants have taken up new jobs since 1997, not have simply come here.

After all of that, we have the very voice of the Sun itself, just in case you can't detect it in any of the above. As the Sun often does, it returns to one of its very favourite themes - and lies about it. (Again, the article seems to have disappeared into the ether with it changing to tomorrow's leader rather than leaving a permanent entry, so you'll have to trust me on what it said.)

RABBLE-rousing Abu Hamza has used our liberal system of justice to get away with murder — almost literally.

Which is completely untrue to begin with. He hasn't got away with anything - as his current stay in a prison cell demonstrates. If the Sun's really so outraged by how long Hamza escaped justice for, it perhaps ought to take it up with the security services, who were more than aware of what Hamza was up to and might well have even had an agreement with him regarding how as long as he didn't advocate violence against the UK itself they left him alone.

Three of the four 7/7 Tube bombers were radicalised while attending the Finsbury Park mosque where he spouted his evil creed.

This is the real lie. There is no evidence whatsoever that the bombers were radicalised while visiting the Finsbury Park mosque; indeed, if they ever did attend it. The only source that has ever alleged that three of the bombers listened to Hamza was the Times, in just one story the day after Hamza was sentenced. No other newspapers have seen fit to investigate and follow up this potentially explosive revelation, which is usually the sure sign of it being untrue.

Convicted 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and shoe-bomber Richard Reid were fans.

Established facts? In the Sun? Amazing!

It was only after a campaign led by The Sun that he was locked away for inciting murder.

Ah yes, it was the Sun wot did it!

Some might balk at this post and wonder what the point of it is meant to be. After all, tabloids are meant to be provocative, entertaining, and strong, unrelenting voices: not all of us are going to want the staid tones of the Times or the Grauniad, or the pompous handed down opinions of the "commentariat"; that's why so many enjoy swearblogging and fisking, preferably with gratuitous insults. That's all more than fair, and I'm certainly not suggesting that they should be stopped from doing any of the above. It's also probably true that the tabloid press are not any worse than they've ever been; certainly, they have to now crouch pieces that would previously have been openly racist and bigoted in less certain terms, or cushion the blow through mealy-mouthed language which actually adds up to the same thing. It has to be remembered however that the Sun is still the highest selling newspaper in the country, shifting over 3 million copies. For some people, this newspaper is the main source of news, or the only source of news for those who aren't that interested. Through such openly biased, unfair and in some cases plain wrong reporting, a completely false image of this country comes across. As the quote at the top of this blog suggests, the very nature of the press affects the nature of politics, and who can argue that the Sun, or its owner, doesn't wield power that most politicians themselves would kill for? The examples in this post are just a small snapshot of how it sets about setting its own agenda on just one day. Isn't it time, rather than just blaming the politicians for the cynicism with which the public views politics, that we examine the fourth estate's role in furthering the disconnect that seems to be becoming ever more pronounced?

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Friday, November 02, 2007 

The migrant plague.

Five Chinese Crackers does his usual fine job of eviscerating the lies and deceptions on the front page of today's Daily Express. How very fitting that a scare story about immigration has at long last knocked Madeleine McCann from her perch: the fear of the unknown and foreign replacing the capitalising on err, the fear of the unknown and foreign.

While reading the obituary of Brigadier General Paul Tibbets, the man who piloted the Enola Gay, I was reminded of Wilfred Burchett and his exposing of the radiation poisoning effects of nuclear fallout on those who survived the initial dropping of the atomic bomb. His account appeared in the Express, and so embarrassed the Americans that General MacArthur personally barred him from Japan. You somehow can't imagine such a story ever leading the front page of the Express again.

Unless of course somehow immigrants were to blame.

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Tuesday, October 23, 2007 

First they came for the torrent websites...

If you want an example of how some of the mainstream media, especially those who have to get the BREAKING STORY out as fast possible rely on press releases, you only have to look at the articles up on the BBC and Sun websites about the closing of the OiNK music torrent community. (Wikipedia entry here.)

The statements from both Cleveland police and the IFPI are available here and here. Compare and contrast as you wish. Thing is, relying on such releases as your primary source means that you're incredibly likely to repeat blatant lies and twisting of the truth from those justifying their actions.

The police claim in their statement that the operating of OiNK was "extremely lucrative" and "members paid donations via debit or credit cards, ensuring their continued access to the site". The former is highly unlikely, while the latter is completely untrue. While I was not a member of OiNK, mainly because I already have more music than I can listen to, I have friends that were, and unlike some other private torrent trackers, where you can donate to bounce your download/upload ratio back up to 1.0, OiNK was well known as being one of the most vigorous pursuers of those who failed to keep their ratio at the required level. As one former user has wrote on a forum:

Donations were completely voluntary. At most you received advanced search features which allowed you to break down your searches by year/artist/album/genre etc. You also gained immunity from the inactivity ban sweeps. They put it this way: "No amount of money you donate will replace the bytes you're not uploading." All that donations did was give you two invites, give you a star, make your irc hostname end in .donor, give you advanced search abilities and access to statistics, no ratio changes, nothing.

Running a site with 180,000 users would incur significant server costs. OiNK, again like other sites do, never begged for donations towards those costs. For the police to claim that this was "extremely lucrative" smells like the proverbial, and for the Scum to suggest the man arrested was making hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, extrapolating from the statement that "this is big business, with hundreds of thousands of pounds being made" is outrageous.

Similarly disingenuous have been the claims, repeated by the BBC and others from the IFPI's statement that OiNK was the "primary source worldwide for illegal pre-release music". The statement itself actually almost tells the true story in this passage:

Closed internet communities known as “ripping groups” often get demos, early mixes of commercial releases and promotional copies of pre-release albums in advance of release with a view to distributing the music as widely and as far ahead of release as possible. Each ripping group gains cachet amongst its peers for being the first to get new music and uses torrent sites to distribute the music as widely as possible.

The first part of the paragraph is true, while the second is the biggest of lies. Ripping groups, those within the "scene", as it's known, do compete with one another to release music first and before each other. However, far from using torrent sites and wanting to distribute the music as far as possible, such groups are actually adamantly opposed to the public spreading of their work and use IRC and private FTPs to distribute their releases within the "scene" itself. Inevitably though their releases are quickly distributed outside it despite their own opposition, and OiNK, being one of the most popular private music sharing sites, was often one of the first places they appeared. Occasionally users on OiNK might have acquired copies of albums before their release date and posted them there, but the vast majority of pre-releases are from the "scene" groups.

Part of the reason why OiNK is being blamed for the above is that the "scene" groups are a problem of the music industry's own making. The vast majority of the members of those groups are those within the record companies themselves, or those once or twice removed from them: those who receive the promotional copies ultra early through their links, whether they're reviewers, family members, workers, DJs or otherwise. The music industry has made attempts to stop such releases occurring, notably only sending out promo copies of recent Foo Fighters and White Stripes' albums on tape or vinyl, putting watermarks on the CD which can lead the ripped copy back to the individual responsible, "promobots", which repeat "this is a promotional copy" or whatever every so often throughout the duration of the CD, etc, but mostly these attempts have failed. They're never going to completely shut down leaks, but it's the height of hypocrisy to blame places like OiNK when the industry itself is chiefly responsible for its own downfall. Also of note is that up until last night the OiNK servers were still operable, far from the statement's claim that they were seized last week, only highlighting the mendacity in their public releases.

The music industry has to realise that while places link OiNK are never going to disappear, their current head in the sand approach to both the quality and digital rights management on most of the music available for "legal download" is only exacerbating the piracy "problem". In effect, they're actually laughing: places like iTunes are hugely popular even though they mostly provide crippled, far from CD quality music. They no longer even have to produce the discs that previously bumped up the cost ever so slightly in such quantites! OiNK was especially noted for its section dedicated to FLAC rips; near lossless quality copies of the CD. No popular legal download site currently provides music either in WAV or FLAC format (juno.co.uk and bleep.com are occasional notable exceptions), and part of the reason why the Russian allofmp3.com was so popular, apart from its low prices, was that it provided the user with choice as to the quality and format of what they paid to download. The industry control freaks are opposed to that exact choice. The only way progress will be made against such piracy will be if they open up, and they have so far showed no signs of being prepared to do so.

Slight update: Torrent Freak, as well as providing excellent coverage, reports that the man arrested has been released on bail. There's also an official "OiNK memorial" blog been set-up.

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Thursday, October 04, 2007 

Express-watch: Diana: the lies.

If there's one headline that all newspapers should avoid using, it's THE TRUTH. Not only because the Scum infamously used it on the day that it printed the lies about Hillsborough, but because as we all know, the truth is a very loose concept.

It's an even more loose concept when it involves the Daily Express, and especially when it also has to do with Diana. Out of the three statements on the front page, only one is true: Diana was indeed on the pill. One would think that this would rather undermine the consistent, incipient claims that Diana was pregnant with Dodi's child, but not when you're the Daily Express or a conspiracy theorist. Rather, this proves that they were having sex and that she therefore quite possibly was pregnant, except if she was still taking the pill at the time, this would rather undermine the theory that she knew about it, that Dodi knew about it and that this was one of the reasons for why MI6/the Duke of Edinburgh/Muffin the Mule decided that she and Al-Fayed's son had to die.

All the above contradictions though are nothing to the average conspiracy theorist, and so the Express continues with its blatant misinformation. The Express claims that the inquest heard definitively that Henri Paul was not drunk, when it heard nothing of the sort. On the contrary, the court today heard that Paul had at the very least consumed two Ricards, and yesterday it heard conflicting evidence. The blood tests, which Al-Fayed in his fully swivel-eyed conspiratorial mind claims were "switched", showed that he was over both the French and British drink-drive limits, but those who saw him on the night claimed that he did not appear or seem drunk. That on its own proves nothing: you can look completely sober but still be unfit to drive due to what you've drunk, especially when you're mixing alcohol with drugs like anti-depressants.

Finally, it's true that Dodi had bought a diamond ring. You can make your own minds up on what he was going to do with it, but the simple fact that he had bought a ring does not mean that it was intended to be an engagement ring, let alone that he already asked Diana to marry him. Even if he had, what difference would it have made? Were MI6 so prepared for the eventuality and bugging their conversations that they would be able to organise such an op within potentially hours of learning of it? Leaving aside the spectacularly convoluted and complicated assassination plot necessary in order to kill the pair, with the driver apparently willing to sacrifice himself, or the "white Fiat Uno" being in exactly the right spot at the right time, does Al-Fayed's claim that the monarchy would be threatened by the step-father of the heir to the throne being a Muslim hold any water whatsoever? It would have meant precisely nothing - Diana had already had her title taken from her, and the royal family were already more than prepared to exclude her altogether and forget about her. She was a nuisance to them, but not one which meant that she had to be disposed of.

Can you honestly believe we've another 6 months of this shit to listen to? I don't think there's ever before been such a fantastical waste of time and money for the benefit of one lying, completely untrustworthy schemer with a more than open vendetta. When you consider that the government are denying an inquiry into 7/7, when 52 people died and where we still don't properly know whether the attacks could have prevented and how far the conspiracy went, it's even more aggravating, even if the two are separate issues. That there are newspapers prepared to back up Al-Fayed's bluster only shows how power, money and influence continue to determine far more than the deaths of numerous innocents does.

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Thursday, September 27, 2007 

Scum-watch: They're kidding, right?

The Scum is continuing its campaign for a referendum in its usual, completely hysterically hypocritical completely non-self aware way:

An untruth does not become true by constant repetition.

Propagandists have used such techniques — known as the Big Lie — through the ages.

The assumption is that if the porky is huge and complex enough, people will believe it simply because they cannot believe anyone would have the nerve to make it up.


The Sun should know, because it's one of the chief practitioners of the Big Lie. Monday's original leader on Europe was so full to the brim with deceptions, mistruths and out of context quotes that it would have shamed the writers of Pravda, as have previous articles on the reform treaty. It's told so many blatant lies about the "hated" Human Rights Act that many people do indeed now believe that it is a terrorists' and criminals' charter, which means that police have to take buckets of chicken to crime suspects refusing to come down from a roof, and aren't able to issue photographs of convicted murderers that have absconded from open prisons. It's only very occasionally that its smear jobs get shattered by being forced into issuing apologies, like that given to the Kalam family, which came a year and a month after the original articles were published.

As David Clark notes on CiF
, the Times has also been been ragging on Brown this week, with its pitiful front page story today with its shocking revelation that politicians sometimes say things that sound mighty similar, and a bizarre leader column arguing that Brown's underwhelming speech on Monday was somehow a lurch to the left. This isn't down to a campaign to "weaken Brown and prevent him from securing a strong mandate of his own" though, it's rather one of the periodical reminders from Murdoch if he so feels like it, he can unleash an outburst of critical reporting that'll leave Brown spinning so much he won't know here is when it finally comes to a stop.

Mostly this is down to Brown's enthusiastic wooing of the Daily Mail, and especially Paul Dacre, who Brown's struck up an unlikely, or rather dispiriting alliance with. Both seem to hold the view that the 50s, that rose-tinted decade of shortages, slums and squalor is an ideal model for modern Britain, where the poor and lower classes were still deferential, the extended nuclear family ruled and all those unpleasant parts of modern life were forced underground. Murdoch more than feels threatened by this dalliance with the Daily Mail, as he was Blair's only true lover, thanks to Blair's Faustian pact which guaranteed him the support of the Times and Sun, but also more helped with his downfall, thanks to Murdoch's unrelenting support for all things proposed by the Bush administration. He's now having to deal with the impertinence of his bitch going off and talking to other men under his nose, flirting disgracefully with the enemy. This week's campaign in the Sun and the Times' critical noises is meant to remind Brown that he is the one who still really has his balls in a vice; and he can turn the screw and crush them any time he feels like.

Clark finishes his article by saying that if Brown wins an election he could put Murdoch in his place as a result. This is pure wishful thinking. Even if Brown went to the polls and gained a slightly larger majority, the real opportunity to crush both Murdoch and the Mail was back in 1997, but Blair either squandered his chance or never had any notions of doing that, when he had the public behind him and was capable of doing so. None of our current politicians have either the courage of the backing of a majority of the electorate to be able to destroy our poisonous press once and for all, and they may well never will.

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