Saturday, May 31, 2008 

Murdoch and Obama sitting in a tree?

Rupert Murdoch's lavishing praise for Barack Obama, while stopping short of a complete endorsement, makes it look increasingly likely that the Dirty Digger is intending to swing his stalwart support from the Republicans over to the Democrats come the election.

The reason why Murdoch's gambit is so fascinating is that Obama on most issues is far to the left of Murdoch, and certainly far to the left of the Fox News channel, the New York Post and the Sun, whom lest we forget, former Murdoch editor Andrew Neil told us to read if we wanted to know what he's thinking. It's potentially even more eye-catching that Murdoch switching his support from the Conservatives to New Labour in 1997; Obama is certainly further left than Tony Blair ever was.

As always however, this isn't Murdoch going soft in the head in his adage: it's his typical, some would say cunning, others heartless thinking which abandons politicians or even whole political parties once they are no longer any use to him or when it's obvious that their power is ebbing away. While the presidential election is probably going to be tighter than the polls currently suggest, it's still Obama's to lose at this point. Murdoch, as we know, backs winners. Some Labour figures might take heart from the fact that Murdoch has of yet not showed anything like the praise he gave to Obama to David Cameron, or indeed to the Conservatives as a whole. The Sun especially is still notably sniffy, asking recently exactly what George Osborne would do differently to Alastair Darling.

The contradiction here though is that if Murdoch is close to switching to Obama, then no one yet has informed Fox News, who were at the forefront of the Pastor Wright fiasco, repeating the video of his speech asking his congregation to say "Goddamn America" over and over. Only last weekend a guest joked and laughed about the idea of Obama (and (correction) Osama) being assassinated, while Karl Rove, turd blossom himself, having left the White House is now a regular pundit. There's no prospect of the station's notorious right-wing bias being toned down, but if the network starts being fairer to the prospective Democratic candidate, John McCain just might start to worry.

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Friday, May 30, 2008 

Scum-watch: The dumped IVF twins who weren't.

If there's ever been a quicker reverse ferret in recent tabloid newspaper history, then the Sun's about turn on the IVF twins born in Wolverhampton to an Indian couple must rank up there with among the fastest.

Yesterday the paper ran a front-page story claiming that the twins, which were conceived using fertility treatment in India but which were born in this country after the couple returned, had been to all intents and purposes abandoned because they were girls. I can't go into full detail because the story already seems to have disappeared down the memory hole, which suggests that either the family has made a formal complaint or that the paper has realised just how wrong the story seems to have been. It did however claim that the twins had not been visited by the parents since their birth, something which seemed odd to begin with because the babies had already been moved to a hospital in Birmingham to be closer to the parents' home, having been delivered by caesarean in Wolverhampton as the maternity services in the Birmingham hospital at the time were all in use. More details of what the article alleged are outlined here:

The parents, who were born in India but are British citizens, reportedly told doctors they did not want the "wrong sex" babies immediately after the children were born by Caesarean section at New Cross hospital.

The newspaper said the husband then asked medics how long it would be before his wife was fit enough to fly back to India for more IVF treatment in the hope of getting a boy to continue the family name.

It was reported the twins have been transferred to a central Birmingham hospital, where they have not been visited a single time.

Added to the article was a leader which also commented on the story, in the traditional highly outraged tone.

As reports since have made clear, it seems obvious that there were problems with the Sun's story which its journalists ought to have investigated before rushing to publish. In any case of apparent abandonment, social services would have quickly been alerted. They had not been. Similarly, they were also not aware of any attempt by the parents to put the two baby girls up for adoption. Then there's the other glaring problem: considering that the mother is 59, her pregnancy would have been monitored extremely closely. If the couple had been as desperate for boys or a boy as the paper had made out, it seems odd that they hadn't made an attempt to ascertain the sex of the children at any of the ultrasound screenings the mother would have had, as can now be easily done. While it could have been too late to seek an abortion once the sex of the foetuses had been identified, it still appears strange that they didn't reveal their apparent true feelings until the birth.

From claiming that they had been abandoned because of cultural reasons, the Sun's story today has a rather different tone: WE DO LOVE 'EM, SAYS IVF FATHER. The article, going out of its way to give both the father and the babies' half-brother's side of the story, claims that it was all a misunderstanding because of the father's poor English, and how they made a "show" of visiting the babies yesterday. That this "show" might have been nothing of the sort except for journalists, attempting to follow up the Sun's "world exclusive" being in attendance, as the hospital's statement made clear that the parents had been "attentive" to their needs, doesn't seem to be necessary to relate to the Sun's readers.

It could of course have been all a misunderstanding. Perhaps there was something lost in translation with the doctors getting the wrong end of the stick; perhaps the mother's non-attendance at her babies' side because she was still recovering from the surgery was construed as them being abandoned; and IVF treatment at such a late age for both the father and mother is rightly highly controversial. It's hard not to detect however more than a hint of xenophobia, if not outright racism in the Sun's story. If the paper has put two and two together and made five, as it seems to have done, it also jumped on the possibility of it all being because the couple wanted a boy to continue the name. The very fact that the father err, already has a son, albeit with a former wife who passed away in 1981, seems to have been completely ignored. Their ethnicity shouldn't really have entered into it: if they were abandoning their children or putting them up for adoption because they were girls, that was a story in itself, especially after seeking IVF treatment in the first place.

This being the news environment we now inhabit, the story had already gone around the world before the Sun pulled it and before other media groups had inquired and found it wanting. Google News tracks 182 separate reports. In addition, the Sun's forum for discussing news has a thread on the story. Among some of the choice comments are:

These parents if they are in this country should be locked up, And every thing they own sold to pay to some one to look after these two lovely little girls, I would personaly give the father a kicking that he would remember to his dieing day

THIS GOVERNMENT STANDS FOR THE THREE CARD TRICK

TWO OLD AGE PENSIONERS, a mum age 59, and dad 72, after receiving IVF treatment returned to England from India for the birth, after the birth the parents originally from India,
told horrified medics they did not want the twin girls because they wanted a boy to carry on the family name? And they want to go back to India to start the treatment again?

KNOWING THE WAY THIS GOVERNMENT WORKS, THEY WILL BE OFFERED THE MONEY IN BENEFITS FOR THE AIR FARE AND TREATMENT.

For someone to take care of the girls Until they reach 18, will the selfish BAST#ARDS be presented with a monthly bill?
THATS IF THEY LIVE THAT LONG?

NO, IT WILL BE LEFT TO THE HARD WORKING TAXPAYERS TO PICK UP THE TAB.

It's not religion persay Lousie...it's their traditional culture..... Alien and horrible to us.

Yes Gwenny...uncivilised is the word. It's not that many years since India outlawed the practice of Suti.....where a wife was burned alive on the funeral pyre of her husband!

Vile backward monsters.They should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. What the hell is this IVF all about?

WHY DID THE NHS ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN? AND WHY ARE THEY NOT BEING PROSECUTED FOR CHILD ABANDONMENT.
I AM SO ANGRY I HAVE JUST STARTED A GROUP ON FACEBOOK TO GET THESE THINGS NAMED, SHAMED AND PROSECUTED PLEASE JOIN.
#####//####facebook.com/group.php?gid=15961478162

WELL DONT TO THE SUN FOR GETTING THIS STORY OUT INTO THE PUBLIC DOMAIN AND IT WONT BE LONG BEFORE SOMEONE IN THIS HOSPITAL SPILLS ALL THE BEANS IM SURE. THE SOONER THE BETTER


There is also this one however:

Hmmm. Did no-one else see that this story has been rejected by other sources as being false, including the local police and NHS services?

I notice also that The Sun seems to have pulled it from its front page online here. Does that make anyone wonder whether the witless wonders at The Sun have actually made a huge error here and that the story is actually wrong/ made-up/ spurious* (*delete as applicable).

Ah well, I'm sure they'll be running a full front page apology tomorrow if it does turn out to be false...

Quite so. The Sun is so apologetic about the story that beneath its follow-up today it's still allowing reader comments, such as:

YEH RIGHT, THEY LOVE THE TWINS. YES NOW THEY LOVE THEM BECAUSE, THEY NOW KNOW THE OUT CRY IT HAS CAUSED. IF THEY HAD JUST LEFT THE TWINS WITH THE AUTHORITIES, THEN WHEN THEY WENT BACK TO TRY AGAIN TO GET HER PREGNANT THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN ANOTHER AND BIGGER OUTCRY. IF THEY AGAIN FAIL TO PRODUCE A MALE THE SAME THING WILL HAPPEN. I HOPE THE TWINS ARE MONITORED SO NOTHING HAPPENS TO THEM, LIKE THEY DO TO FEMALE CHILDREN BACK IN INDIA.

CANNOT BELEIVE THAT NHS WORKER CAN CLAIM"THEY ARE ATTENTIVE TO THE BABIES NEED" HELLLLLOOOO THEY HAVE NOT IN ANY WAY SHOWN THE MORALS OF GOOD PARENTS 1)THEY WERE'NT HAPPY THEY WERE GIRLS 2)THEY LEFT THEM FOR TWO WEEKS 3)DID THEY EVEN THINK WHO WILL BRING THEM UP WHEN THEY'RE GONE LETS FACE THEIR NOT YOUNG 4)THEIR ALREADY GOING BACK TO TRY FOR A BOY THIS IS ONE FOR SOCIAL SERVICES BUT THAT WON'T HAPPEN THEY'LL BE KNOCKING MY DOOR CAUSE MY CLEAN LOVED AND CARED FOR DAUGHTER FELL PLAYING IN THE GARDEN ! ! !

And finally, just to show how sorry it is about getting the story so apparently wrong, Lorraine Kelly dedicates her column in Saturday's paper to just how selfish the parents are in any case:

After some confusion it transpires that she and her 72-year-old husband DO want to keep their babies after all, but at their time of life I think it all reeks of utter selfishness.

They returned to the UK to have the babies and first reports claimed they "abandoned" them simply because they were girls.

I could not believe that any mother or father could be so cold and heartless — and was immensely relieved when family members claimed it was all a misunderstanding and the little girls were only left in hospital because they needed special care.


There is of course no mention that the confusion and misunderstanding was on the part of the very newspaper in which she was writing. Indeed, the paper has already moved on to its next target, as Saturday's leader column evidences:

IF ever there was a woman who should not be allowed to have babies it is junkie Michaela Mullen.

As a coroner said yesterday, she has spent her squalid life giving birth to babies addicted to heroin.

Her second baby, Chelsey, spent three months in agony as a result of her mother’s relentless heroin intake.

Then she died of a heart attack.

Mullen was not at Chelsey’s inquest. She was in hospital — having another baby.

God help us.


Don't be too surprised if it turns out on Monday that Michaela Mullen has never been addicted to heroin and has also never been pregnant.

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Thursday, May 29, 2008 

Standpoint magazine and the marginalisation of Christianity.

It can't be bad going for the first issue of a magazine to get one of its main articles featured on the front page of two national newspapers; it's only when you realise that the magazine in question is being published by the Social Affairs Unit and edited by Daniel Johnson, son of Paul, that it starts to make slightly more sense.

Before we get onto "his grace" Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, it's instructive to read Johnson's own piece on just why we need Standpoint itself. He opens with:

“When you have a good idea, start a magazine.” This, according to our board member Gertrude Himmelfarb, is the motto of her husband Irving Kristol. In a long and fruitful life, he has started three. (Their son Bill has started one, too.)

That would be the Weekly Standard, the neo-conservative bible published by Rupert Murdoch. It starts to make even more sense as he continues:

Ever since it folded at the end of the Cold War, many people in Europe and America have lamented the old Encounter. But it was only when a new kind of assault came from a very different quarter on 11 September 2001 that a new Encounter again became an urgent necessity. The aftermath revealed such moral cowardice and intellectual confusion on both sides of the Atlantic that the battle of ideas has sometimes seemed in danger of being lost by default. To defend and celebrate Western civilisation is not merely desirable; it is imperative.

To call this breathtaking would be to do a disservice to the first gulp taken by someone who has just emerged from a coma. "Moral cowardice and intellectual confusion" after 9/11? There was such confusion that it took just slightly less than four weeks before the bombing in response began; and less than a year and six months after that before the next stage of the response too was set in motion.

The intention of Standpoint is to provide a lever which can indeed move the world, by invoking the noblest ideals to which humanity has aspired. Free speech and a free press; the dignity of the individual and the family; the liberty to worship and to refrain from worship; scientific inquiry limited only by respect for human life; the rule of law; parliamentary democracy and the free market; human rights balanced by reciprocal duties; toleration of minority views and practices, but not at the price of moral relativism.

Motherhood and apple pie too no doubt. Exactly who is it that is opposing these noblest ideals? If the idea, as it appears to be, is to provide a counter-point to the left and its "moral relativism", then this is a waste of time, as it too shares all of the above. It's not too bold to suggest that the entire establishment of this magazine appears to be to fight against a straw man, the view shared by some on the right and also by what we've come to refer to as the "muscular liberals" that the left-wing bastions in both the United States and the United Kingdom are acquiescent, cowardly in the face of the new challenges posed post-9/11, i.e. Islamic fundamentalism, and almost willing to commit collective suicide in the face of this apparently ascendant new screed. It is, of course, the most exquisite of bollocks.

The thing I find most galling about this point of view is that it is so inherently contradictory. In the history of civilisation, never before has one system been so triumphant yet at the same time so lacking in apparent self-confidence. When Francis Fukuyama wrote the End of History, now so universally derided, he was, and still is, to an extent right. The end of the cold war did signify the victory of free-market capitalism, of human rights, of democracy. Where it fell short was in not realising that rather than there being anything to oppose such distinct hegemony, something which has still not emerged and seems highly unlikely to in the near future, was that so many of the true believers in all those values themselves could so easily become convinced that all they had achieved and yearned for could be snatched away so apparently easily. 9/11 and its aftermath was the cataclysm which they had failed to predict, but which when it happened, changed everything.

Except that it didn't. Johnson and his cohorts however think that it did. He writes:

As it dawns on us that the West is vulnerable, its adversaries gloat, while its champions often feel despondent.

How by any stretch of the imagination can the West really be termed as "vulnerable"? Jihadist violence against the West, as in innocent civilians who have died in terrorist attacks, has claimed less than 4,000 lives since 2001. Even in the most doom-mongering scenarios, an attack could not possibly destroy Western civilisation as we know; it could hardly even destroy a small-town. Just to get a inkling of this kind of thinking which Standpoint is encouraging, here's another of its lead articles, by Michael Burleigh:

In the United States, by contrast, the Senate committee on homeland security heard evidence in April about the likely effects of a terrorist nuclear attack on Washington DC. The chairman, Senator Joe Lieberman, said, “The scenarios we discuss today are very hard for us to contemplate, and so emotionally traumatic and unsettling that it is tempting to push them aside.”

By coincidence, this just happens to be the same thing which some on the jihadist bulletin boards have been thinking about. The two things are connected: they are dreams, fantasies, which are about as likely to happen as Melanie Phillips deciding tomorrow to strap a bomb to herself and execute a "martyrdom operation" on the tube. The power of nightmares is fuelling this entire boom in such self-defeating and shockingly negative thinking from those who are meant to be pillars of strength while their opponents are so weak. We're so incalculably strong, our methods are just and our ideology is right, yet this towering, indefatigable mansion is apparently threatened by the molehill on the lawn.

Such muddled thinking runs through Nazir-Ali's piece. Its summary essentially means you don't have to struggle through the 3,653 words: "Christianity is central to British identity, but its marginalisation has created a moral vacuum which radical Islam threatens to fill." Straight off, it's impossible to ignore the central flaw: that Christianity is not being marginalised in the slightest. There's an huge streak of irony that runs through that idea when Nazir-Ali's warning that Christianity is being marginalised manages to make the front page of the Daily Mail and Telegraph. If it was, would he and his cohorts, both in the Church of England and in the Catholic church still have such a stranglehold over moral issues, as we've seen once again over the past few weeks?

Others more qualified to comment on Nazir-Ali's main thesis dispute it here and here, but I'm more interested in the thrust rather than the intricate details. The whole idea that Christianity is in decline or being marginalised while Islam is in the ascendant is not the real point here. That's just a sideshow to again, what was similarly going on yesterday, which is the revolt against 60s liberalism. Nazir-Ali blames Marxism, saying:

The aim was to overturn what I have called the Evangelical-Enlightenment consensus so that revolution might be possible. One of the ingredients in their tactics was to encourage a social and sexual revolution so that a political one would, in due course, come about.

This is, quite simply, garbage. The advancements of the 60s didn't come about because some homogeneous mass wanted a revolution but in the meantime was prepared to turn on fucking and social freedom while that happened; they occurred because society as a whole was changing, the economic security following the austerity of the post-war years enabling it to happen. Enlightenment values were also at the very heart of it, while the Evangelism and judgemental attitudes were being abandoned.

It's the rise of unbelief which is Nazir-Ali's real bugbear. Britain has become an overwhelmingly secular society, with even those that believe in God doing very little in actual worshipping or practising terms. Nazir-Ali, as a man of the church, regards this as a threat, as he well would. He and Standpoint as a whole seem to be mistaking this change as a sign of decadence and of weakness, somehow imaging that radical Islam is benefiting from it. They believe that we need a religious counterpoint to a threatening religious revival, which is a false dichotomy. It's the same old you're either with this or you're against us. It doesn't seem to occur that you can be for one side without going in for all of its arguments.

Jamie T calls it curiously Stalinist, and that seems to sum it up nicely. Stalin, the ever defining image of an iron leader, but one that was so paranoid and so insecure that he purged thousands of his own officers and politburo while murdering millions. The left is often accused of brooking no dissent and only looking to confirm its own prejudices: Standpoint and its inherent swivel-eyed looking for traitors could not more live up to that caricature.

Related post:
Dave Osler - Bishop Nazir-Ali and the collapse of Christianity

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Scum-watch: Getting drilled.

In the old saying, just what exactly does this have to do with the price of cheese?

A DENTIST drills teeth — while his girlfriend thrills men with sex shows upstairs.

The blonde called Tiny charges £100 an hour for her exhibitions.


Yes, I realise this is the Sun, but not even this most crass of papers usually plumbs the depths of such Sunday scandal-sheet salacious shit.

The Sun investigated her seedy business after dental patients alarmed at "sex noises" contacted us.

Oh, I get it. The dentist or "Tiny" must have done something to piss off someone in the Sun chain of command. Which "dental patient" exactly was this?

Conveniently for anyone living in Watford, the Sun has happily snapped the outside of the dentist surgery, meaning that anyone who wishes to sample the delights of Tiny as the reporter did, who only excused himself after Tiny had performed her act, can quite easily follow in Alex West's footsteps.

Of course, the Sun is by no means the most hysterical of hypocrites in this case. Not only does it not run a topless lovely on its third page every day, but it also doesn't run a sordid competition every year where it encourages its readers to get naked for the wonderful prize of £5,000 and a year's modeling contract. It also doesn't encourage women on their social network to do the same, and neither does it run a page 3 idol tour, where again, the sort of display which Tiny provides is only slightly more explicit than that which it doesn't give the local leering lads.

Elsewhere, it wouldn't be another day in the life of the tabloid that never prints a bad word about MySpace if there wasn't an article about how awful Facebook is:

TEENAGE revellers trashed a Spanish mansion worth £4.4 million - after the schoolgirl host posted an open invite on Facebook.

Why anyone in this country would care is a question worth posing.

Finally, the paper is reporting the tragic case of Nisha Patel-Nasri in the only way it knows:

THE evil husband of stabbed cop Nisha Patel-Nasri plotted her murder during a day-long sex marathon with his prostitute lover, The Sun can reveal.

And the evidence for this is?

The lovers checked into the Alpine-themed Coppid Beech Hotel in Bracknell, where they romped once before.

Records show Nasri submitted the life insurance application to Legal & General at about the same time he and Mockiene watched two porn films.


Ah, conclusive proof! And just to show that there are no depths to which the paper won't sink, it's also got the "Say No to Knives" petition link on the page, which has now been signed by a massive 3,129 people. Classy doesn't begin to cover it.

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Wednesday, May 28, 2008 

Revoke the spirit.

Revisionism, mixed with a distinct longing for an idealised past seems to be increasingly en vogue at the moment. While the old grey left celebrates and reminisces about 1968, one of the very events that fired and continues to fire the moralist and reactionary right (memo to the 68ers: you and we might have won the social battle, but have failed completely on almost every other front) the right, aided by the BBC, celebrate the Mary Whitehouse experience while decrying the state that Britain is apparently currently in. Tomorrow morning's front pages have the words of a Bishop, for God's sake, telling us how we've all gone so very wrong.

Some of this is doubtless influenced by the Conservative rhetoric on our so-called "Broken Society", which is one of their few repeated mantras that they've come to spout whenever given time to, as it also is by newspaper campaigns that use the truth as something to be bent and knocked into shape for their own short-term causes. It's also though because some of the 60s ideals which have become so loathed and blamed in equal measure by certain individuals are under threat - last week we saw the most disingenuous and obscurantist campaign in recent memory, led by Nadine Dorries MP, to cut the time limit on that hard-won 60s right, abortion. Very few people would have had a problem with the campaign by Dorries and others to cut the limit if they had come out and been honest with their reasons for doing so, either because they completely oppose the right to choose or favour a time-limit below even the lowest option offered to the Commons, but they didn't, and nor did they make clear how they were being funded by Christian fundamentalist organisations looking to remove the right to abortion one step at a time. Instead they appealed directly to emotion, while lying about or completely distorting the medical evidence around the viability of the foetus at 20 and 22 weeks. Even this wasn't enough for Dorries, who despite being unable to get the 200 supporters she said she had through the voting chambers, then came up with a concocted story, repeated verbatim in the Daily Mail, that there had been either a three-line-whip to attend or that the awful Harriet Harman had been organising when she shouldn't have been to stop the Dorries amendment.

It's apparent that most of the advancements made over the decades are not at risk, nor will they be if the Conservatives gain power at the next election. What is worrying however is how completely irrelevant issues, such as another of the votes on the Embryology bill, with the Commons voting in favour of removing the requirement for "a father" from the legislation, making it easier for single parents and lesbian couples to seek IVF treatment are blown out of all proportion or are conflated as being an attack not just on the family, but almost men themselves as a whole. It's as if the debate about gay marriage (or "civil partnerships" as we managed to call it so as to upset as few people as possible) was taking place again, with the idea that same-sex couples wanting to settle down and, shock, bring up a family like a "normal" couple is something completely alien which must be resisted at all costs. The argument against seems to narrow down to the sending a message variety so popular at the moment, that enshrining in law that a child doesn't need a father is beyond the pale just as so many have reached the conclusion that family breakdown and the lack of a father figure have much to do with the listlessness and feckless we see in wider society and on the streets. It's a debate worth having, but again, what does that have to do with lesbian couples or a single woman that want to provide a loving home for a child which they dearly want but which are unable to have through little to no fault of their own? Haven't they, just by their dedication to wanting a child, shown how much love it's likely to receive?

Perhaps some of this attitude could be summed up by one of those warriors against the horror of today's culture, the collective suicide of Western civilisation, as she likes to call it:

Absolutely untrue. All these problems, experienced disproportionately by those at the bottom of the heap, were foisted upon them by the overclass of which India Knight is a member. It was the champagne socialist intelligentsia which destroyed the traditional family, demonised men, incentivised mass fatherlessness and declared never-married motherhood an inalienable human right, emptied education of content and cut off the escape routes out of disadvantage by withering the grammar schools, declared morality to be a dirty word, paralysed the police through political correctness, enslaved the poor through dependency on the state and then finally destroyed their brains by telling them to eat cannabis cake while themselves showing the way by snorting cocaine on the Square Mile or in recording studios, or getting legless on Crackdaddy cocktails at Boujis nightclub.

Culture is transmitted top-down, not bottom up. It is the supercilious overclass, with its self-obsessed nihilism and the money to get itself out of trouble, which is responsible for our social degradation and collapse — and it is odious in the extreme to blame those whose lives and prospects it has so irresponsibly and irrevocably destroyed.

Before you even get started on just how mindbogglingly wrong Melanie Phillips is in this case, it's the sheer hypocrisy of her statements which so immediately grate. She worked at the heart of champagne socialism, the Guardian and Observer, for so many years before recanting all of her previous canards, and she writes a column for the Daily Mail, the newspaper which does so much to transmit that culture she so disdains to the middle classes and below through its witless celebrity coverage. That almost none of the above can reasonably be ascribed to the current government, apart from doing nothing to alter it, is neither here nor there while they are the current enemy. Incidentally, Unity tears apart the canards of Phillips and those she supports.

This is the symptom which leads to the sudden, bewildering reappraisals of the likes of Whitehouse. They look at the reality television that currently afflicts us (and I'm far from being a defender of Big Brother), the computer games that the young play, and some of the movies and television programmes and they suddenly decide that maybe La Whitehouse had a point. It doesn't seem to register that what Whitehouse was actually opposed to was progress, and that rather than culture influencing society, culture tends to reflect society. This was why the programme that set Whitehouse off on her crusade was one discussing sex before marriage, a very real issue in the melting pot of change which was the 60s. What Whitehouse objected to was that it was going on at all, let alone that the BBC of all places should be discussing what was happening. The programme itself tried to suggest that this was not the case, with Whitehouse humourously whilst out on a walk through the woods coming across two men she knew in the throes of passion and apparently thinking nothing of it, or at least feigning it, the sort of artistic licence that seems beyond believability. Apart from her campaign against the so-called video nasties, which resulted in the chilling introduction of the Video Recordings Act which enabled the BBFC to cut and ban films that its director James Ferman took personal exception to on a scale beyond any other country in the Western world apart from perhaps Germany, and pornography in all its forms, her targets were usually high culture, rather than low culture, as evidenced by her attempt to privately prosecute Michael Bogdanov, director of the Romans in Britain, which featured a simulated anal rape. This was despite Whitehouse herself not personally bothering to see the play for herself, a common trait, with her claiming she didn't need to see the things to know how awful they were when others could do that for her. It also ignores her vindictive streak, which nearly resulted in the editor of Gay News serving a nine-month prison sentence for daring to publish a poem which a court ruled as "blasphemously libellous".

Even more bizarre is that this current government is still taking the blame for such things when its record on authoritarianism, which some increasingly demand, is so transparently excellent. What other government could boast about the conviction of someone for daring to read the names of the Iraq war dead out at the cenotaph without permission? Which has just reclassified cannabis after hysteria from the Daily Mail? Which has also just succeeded in make illegal "extreme pornography", which will fall hardest on those who dare to enjoy sadomasochistic material, all because one man strangled a woman he was making love to, apparently because he had an obsession with such material? Which is now talking of criminalising drawings and computer-generated images of what to one eye might be child sex abuse but which to another is something entirely different? Yes, we really honestly have reached the stage where we're considering making badly drawn cartoons illegal lest some pervert get kicks from them. Mary Whitehouse would be proud of all the above, although the first might be a stretch even for her.

Really, only where this government would have let Whitehouse down was over the (final) legalisation of hardcore pornography, which came about in 2000 as a result of court action, not through the government deciding that it was suddenly acceptable, and how the BBFC has thankfully reformed itself into something approaching a reasonable, accountable organisation, even if it gets decisions such as the banning of Manhunt 2 still horribly wrong, maybe because it didn't want to risk the ire of Whitehouse's few remaining minions who aren't reminiscing about her without wearing rose-tinted spectacles.

Perhaps the most ironic thing is that what Whitehouse and others like Phillips really object to is the freedom to choose. Whitehouse always maintained the pretence that she wasn't doing what she did to protect adults, but rather to protect children, whilst at the same time denying the thinking, breathing and critical adults themselves the decision to choose what they wanted to watch. Just as "choice" has become a political idea to be embraced, even if the public in some circumstances apparently don't want it or haven't asked for it, others still want to deny that choice for completely opposite reasons. On almost all the things that Phillips lists and rages against, the choice is there: the traditional family, which has apparently been destroyed, still has hegemony, as do men who don't seem to have become obsolete yet; grammar schools are still up and running in the boroughs that want them, as is morality, dependency on the state, taking drugs and getting drunk. The impotence and idealism seems to be because the argument has been lost; but in the meantime, they're never going to forgive us for making that choice, and they're also not going to stop letting us know about it.

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Scum-watch: "Britain at night is more dangerous than Iraq."

Just to prove that nothing too stupid can grace the pages of the Sun, or at least its website, here's today's latest in the paper's quest to prove that Britain is the most dangerous place on the face of the Earth:

A HERO paratrooper attacked with an iron bar as he went to buy a pizza last night branded Broken Britain "more dangerous than Iraq". The victim said: "At least in Iraq you know who the enemy is. Over here it can be anyone. I genuinely believe that when you go out at night over here its more dangerous than Iraq."

Quite so. By the lowest estimate, since the 2003 invasion 150,000 Iraqis have died in violent circumstances, with the numbers injured incalculable. By contrast, the murder rate in the UK stubbornly sticks in the region of the mid 700s, or at least has done now for quite some time. It's one thing to sympathise with the man because he's just suffered an horrific attack, but nonetheless point out he couldn't be more wrong by mentioning the actual figures, but the Sun hasn't bothered to do that. It's instead currently collating more or less all the violent incidents it can get hold of, without deigning to mention such things are by their nature incredibly rare, and might happen in a certain area once without anything untoward then happening for years. Like with previous campaigns, absolutely any evidence will do to try and prove the overall point, that Britain is a broken society, even if everything suggests that this is just another scare campaign meant to send a message to politicians while selling newspapers.

Speaking of which, the Sun has launched another glorious petition crusade, demanding that the government make knife possession an offence that leads to an automatic prosecution. It's a great success so far - a whole 2,284 people have currently signed up. How could Gordon Brown possibly resist when such force is behind the cause?

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Tuesday, May 27, 2008 

Of bank holidays, churnalism, and tax cuts.

Ah, bank holidays. Carefree days to share with the family while the heavens open outdoors. Or, alternatively, if you're a churnalist, a rather less carefree day struggling to fill up your newspaper. How about a story about a cat that's the only employee left at a Japanese railway station? Purrfect! Another middle class white teenager dies after an atypical drunken argument which happens across the land every weekend tragically gets out of hand? Time to restart the "Broken Britain" campaign in typically hysterical fashion! And, if you're the Grauniad, you can fill up the pages and your Comment is Fatuous blog site with all the news that's fit to flush from the increasingly tedious Hay-on-Wye book festival it just happens to sponsor.

If you're really, really desperate, you can even get an MP to write a comment piece for you. And lo, the Daily Telegraph comment editor saw it, and it was good, for he had managed to get Denis MacShane, from that bunch of socialist money thieves known as the Labour party to write an article calling for a smaller state and a cut in tax. Never mind that MacShane has always been on the right of the party, thought that the Iraq war was a fantastic idea and still thinks so, but this can be presented as a Labour MP speaking the unspeakable.

Or something. As it is, MacShane has produced an article almost as irritating as the Hay festival. In all his glory, MacShane tries to present the opinion that the poor should pay less tax as though no one on the left has ever said it, just as err, everyone realises that the tax credit scheme is hugely wasteful, costing a bomb and even then not working as efficiently as it should be. The answer has been obvious for quite some time: abolish the damn thing, raise the personal allowance significantly so that the poorest up to the middle-earners pay either very little or no tax at all, and fill the gap by raising the top rate of the very richest, taxing the non-doms, by ignoring the demands of the CBI, by not raising the inheritance tax threshold beyond the entirely reasonable £500,000, and imposing windfall taxes when companies such as oil firms make obscene profits because of the current oil bubble.

MacShane isn't finished there however. No, he also wants to target the waste in local councils, of the corpulent spending on press officers and consultants, on the ministers flying off on their jaunts. It doesn't matter that under Blair, who MacShane defended to the hilt time and again, this sort of spending got completely out of hand; he instead shrugs this off by saying that he doesn't know of a single minister "who doesn't privately despair of the waste of money" on the above. Why not publicly instead of privately despair? MacShane hasn't even mentioned the biggest and most egregious of the wastes: the private finance initiative, which has been used by Brown to keep so much of the spending and borrowing off the balance sheet.

If MacShane was hoping for a decent response from Telegraph readers he was wrong, as the Telegraph censors even less than the Grauniad (quite rightly, given some of the comments left for dear old Denis) and they let rip with both barrels, even if most of them are deluding themselves thinking that the new Blairites in the Conservative party are going to offer anything different whatsoever other than piecemeal cuts here and there while Whitehall remains just as bloated, if not more so, as the trend is for ever more spending on consultants and PR experts, not less, especially while the Conservative fightback is being helmed by ex-News of the Screws editor Andy Coulson. You can of course take completely the opposite view to MacShane and not be necessarily wrong either, as Bob Piper and Stan Rosenthal say:

What on earth is an ex-Labour minister doing writing an article for a right-wing newspaper that feeds into right-wing propoganda about the tax system?

Probably because dear old Denis is actually pretty right-wing himself.

Let's not kid ourselves though - this was partly to fill a gap after a slow news day and partly some of the thinkers outside the cabinet being let off the leash to suggest that there might be changes afoot. MacShane's offering is in fact probably more likely to be pursued than the course of action suggested by Compass for example, as to do as they suggest would have the tabloids and Telegraph in even more of a rage, even if it might, just might win back some of the support lost. And again, who knows, considering that the hauliers are throwing their rattles out of their collective pram again, while completely ignoring that even if tax makes up around 70% of the cost of diesel/petrol it's the oil price that has led to it spiralling to nearly £1.30 a litre, which the government seems ever more likely to give in to, tax cuts or the cancelling of rises could yet be back in vogue.

MacShane isn't the only way helping with the churning, as Dave Osler notes, with the Guardian bigging up a piece in Prospect by a former Blair speech writer who thinks that (yes, I realise it's just an example) if asthma patients want to spend their money on double-glazing, then they should allowed to be. It's a quite superb idea, it must be said, and shows where all the new thinking is coming from, and it isn't on the "old" left, that's for sure. Collins rounds it off by saying that the Blairites are increasingly impressed by David Cameron, which couldn't be because he's prepared to go the distance Blair couldn't, and that the real difference is "between the liberal and the authoritarian, not left and right". It doesn't seem to matter that by any scale, the new Blairites are just as authoritarian, if not more so than new Labour, as evidenced by boot camps for the unemployed, promises of zero tolerance and limits on immigration. If elected they'll probably have to stick with abolishing ID cards, although again, considering how much Labour have already spent on them, they (and us) might be stuck with them, but I don't believe for a second that they'll stick with their opposition to extending detention without charge once they don't have to pretend to give a fig about what Liberty thinks.

If the "new" new left is dead, then the new new new left is sure going to take some beating. Especially on bank holidays.

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Scum-watch: Yet more bad news stories on Facebook.

The Sun's managed to get itself a quite brilliant story today on a "lag" who's managing to use a social networking site via a smuggled mobile phone whilst still in prison, detailing his conversations with his friends and his boasts about he's also got access to cocaine inside.

It's therefore incredibly lucky that Robert “Rug” Abrams, 23, uses Facebook rather than MySpace, as the latter would mean the story couldn't possibly be used, lest it give a bad impression of the quite wonderful Murdoch owned networking site. After all, it's only criminals and prisoners that use Facebook, right?

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Monday, May 26, 2008 

On yer chain-gang!

As Labour prepare yet another doomed comeback, it's instructive to examine exactly what it is that's going to be replacing our current overlords in a couple of years' time. If you thought that New Labour was heartless, callous and Machiavellian, you ain't seen nothing yet:

A future Conservative government will bring in "boot camps" for unemployed young people aged between 18 and 21 who refuse to take a job, Chris Grayling, the party's welfare spokesman, will say tomorrow.

In a significant hardening of Conservative policy towards welfare claimants, he will announce the abolition of benefit payments for any able-bodied person under 21 who is out of work for more than three months and who refuses to go on a compulsory community service programme or a "boot camp" training course aimed at improving their work discipline and giving them basic skills to get a job.


It's about time that someone broke down the barrier between the unemployed and the criminal classes, because, let's face it, they're one and the same. Both are robbing from the taxpayer and both only understand one thing: the cold steel. Thought that boot camps were only for those that broke the law? Think again!

To be slightly more serious, who can honestly say that they're surprised that it's the weakest in society who can look forward to getting whacked again once we're back under the security of a Conservative government? They've got off slightly under Labour, despite all the rhetoric about getting tough on welfare and the triangulation policies that have already led to Brown stealing some of the Tories' original idea, but the unemployed, single mothers and foreigners can all be assured that the old guard are back in town. Nasty party doesn't even begin to cover it.

You can also rest assured that this would just be the rolling out of it to begin with. The "healthy" young (the so-called NEETs can almost always be defined by their depression, desperation and profound pessimism about their chances of getting anywhere, and mostly they're right to be) are the easiest to demonise: after all, if you can't find a job within 3 months when you're that age, they might as well be put down and save the taxpayer the money entirely. It doesn't seem to matter that this is the equivalent of the bringing back of the workhouse, getting the poor to sing for their supper rather than allowing them to sit on their arses all day, as that's clearly what they do with their time. The Tories would put them to work on "community service programmes", doing all the jobs that even the immigrants won't do: cleaning the graffiti that they probably sprayed up in the first place off, washing out drains, cutting the grass, picking up rubbish, and all for much less than £70 a week! As we're so often reminded, there's the deserving poor and the undeserving poor, the aspirational and the feckless, and the feckless will be made to face up to their lot in life by receiving far, far less than minimum wage for doing so.

The community service programme will be what the lucky get off with. "Boot camp" training course, it just sounds so inviting, encouraging and bound to enthuse, doesn't it? It's just what these kids need, discipline, a jumped-up man with a thin moustache screaming at them when they put a foot wrong, ensuring that they get the "basic skills" needed for a job. First question: can you read what this tin says? If yes, please report to nearest supermarket for the rest of your life. If you work hard enough, you might even get to become manager in 20 years time! Now that's an aspiration we can all respect.

If you thought Labour wanted to privatise everything and use PFI to build everything, then again, the Tories are prepared to go that little bit further. It's quite obvious that the welfare system just isn't working at the moment: the Jobcentre Plus is providing jobs mainly for the private sector, so why don't we just square the circle? The private and "voluntary" sector can pick up the slack straight away, and we all know that they'll be far more efficient and realistic with the unemployed than the current lot, who tend to get attached to those they're working with. There's no room for sentiment in big business, and when there's the dirty great big carrot of £5,000 for every young person they stick in a dead-end job which makes hell look like an attractive proposition, they'll soon forget there's an actual person they're dealing with and instead turn it into the conveyor belt one size fits all system which it should be. Doubtless, these firms won't be providing the Tories with funds in the mean time, or be directly offering money to Tory shadow ministers studying the portfolio. That would be an unthinkable slur and allegation of corruption.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The Conservatives under Cameron have looked at New Labour under Blair and found a lot of it that they like. Just one problem: it's not quite right-wing enough, and the Conservatives are determined to be even less subtle than the Blairites. All the things Blair wished he could have done they will be straight on to push through, and this welfare package is just the beginning. Inheritance tax will be next, then a huge expansion of the "academy" system, directly bribing the middle classes, a huge prison building programme, a major rise in defence spending, tax cuts for those who declare that they are "one of us", while all will be forgotten about those they're currently trying to appeal to over the 10p rate. As for tackling tax avoidance, which some studies suggest takes far more from the exchequer than the welfare system even does, that won't even get a mention. The Conservatives are the new, real Blairites. And Labour only has itself to blame.

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Saturday, May 24, 2008 

Required reading.

Just some links for today:

Flying Rodent - Cameron: By-Election Victory a "Triumph for Managed Democracy"

As the Simpsons so sagely pointed out, it's funny because it's true.

Rhetorically Speaking - Nadine Dorries and her followers are *still* lying.

Grauniad - The scandal of the masters student who downloaded an al-Qaida manual from a US governmnet website who was arrested and held in custody for six days.

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Friday, May 23, 2008 

All change at Crewe.

Just like how it was a foregone conclusion that Labour would win the general election in 2005, the question was only by how much, it was much the same in Crewe and Nantwich yesterday. The swing to the Conservatives was slightly less than 20%, but the more stark figure was the majority of over 8,000. Mid-term blues, economic woes and everything else besides, to go from having a 8,000 majority in one of your safest seats to being beaten by over 8,000 votes three years later is nothing short of a catastrophe.

While the above and the horrendously bad Labour campaign strategy are the main reasons for the loss, it's the crystallisation of everything that has been wrong with New Labour which makes this defeat different. At long last, the hollowness of Labour's words has been exposed, and by, in the unpleasant euphemism, Labour's "core". New Labour's election strategy has been simple and up till now effective: firstly, stress economic competence and how wonderful the end of boom and bust has been, as well as the spending on public services; second, be as authoritarian on law and order as possible without pissing off the Grauniad-left too much and without pleasing the Sun/Daily Mail enough; and lastly, make clear how awful it would be if those Tories got back in.

All three of these things were in evidence in Crewe, except the economic confidence line had been reversed. Rather than stressing how wonderful everything is, which would be suicidal, the decision was to put that Brown and his puppet Darling would make everything all right again after the "global" circumstances have calmed down. This has always been a specious line when Northern Rock has been one of the biggest casualties of what used to be called a crisis of capitalism rather than a "credit crunch", and this was brought home by the anger in Crewe about the 10p rate, hitting home just as the bills are beginning to pile up. All of Labour's huffing and puffing over criminal justice policies in the past few months, the Daily Mail bribing over cannabis, Jacqui Smith's advocating of the police behaving in exactly the same way as the "yobs" themselves and the continuing, bizarre, obsession with 42 days, none did anything to placate the electorate, and nor did the blatantly xenophobic and insulting playing up of how the Conservatives don't support ID cards for either foreign nationals or us lucky normal citizens. Last, the playing up of the "toff" card was the substitute for "don't let the Tories wreck everything" ploy and it was both so pathetic, so desperate and so vacant that it should have been the final straw for the activists themselves.

The loss could have been mitigated somewhat if Labour had bothered to notice just one or two things. If you were going to do a personal attack, don't be so staggeringly obvious and unsubtle. Instead of targeting Timpson for being well-off or a "toff", attack him for being another identikit Tory politician in a sharp suit in either his 30s or 40s who doesn't seem to know what he's talking about other than what he's told by the higher-ups. Timpson's winning speech was stunning in its crassness and triumphalism; some might say he's entitled to be after such a campaign, but all I saw was the sneer which so often also appears to be on the face of George Osborne, who he more than resembles. It was impossible to do this though because of Labour's biggest mistake: Tamsin Dunwoody herself. If Timpson was unpleasant, then the fourth(?) generation of the Dunwoody political clan was both charmless and sour. Again, perhaps being given such a poisoned chalice excuses her mood somewhat, but being so directly to interviewers as she was is not going to help you win over the floating voter. Gwyneth herself might have had those qualities also, but she made up for them through her independence and contempt for New Labour, neither of which her daughter obviously had, as the campaign made clear. After all, what is more contemptuous, imposing a rich boy in a suit on a working-class town or a party which is meant to be all about equality and the dead-end of meritocracy sticking another Dunwoody on the ballot and expecting the electorate to not notice the difference?

Moreover, Labour missed the most gaping, open goal since the footing slipped from under John Terry on Wednesday. In one of his rare forays into the hostile world of the normal person, or at least those inclined to give him a harder time than others seem to, David Cameron was faced by an almost Paxman-esque local who demanded, three times, whether the Tories would reinstate the 10p rate. Each time Cameron refused to answer, for the reason we all know being that he and the rest of his party couldn't give a stuff about it in actuality but are playing on it because of the damage it's caused. How did Labour fail to seize on this, and not make clear that the hole had been filled (somewhat) and that the Conservatives were not even offering any solid policy on what they would do other than keep public spending at the same level as Labour initially before moving towards "sharing the proceeds of growth"?

Granted, doing either of these things was not going to win the seat for Labour. With a better run campaign however, it could have at least stopped the swing being so damaging that it really does look as if it's curtains, if not for Gordon Brown immediately, then definitely for Labour itself. Credit due to Cameron, he has the same knack as Blair occasionally did for capturing the moment, and his declaration that "this is the death of New Labour" is now going to be next to impossible to shake off. Coming with another wounding performance in the Commons on Wednesday, where Brown walked straight into Cameron's trap, for all his lack of difference with the Blair vision of a modern politician, Cameron now looks almost unassailable as the next prime minister. As others have stated, this result is still not a vote of confidence in Tory policy; it's still far too sparse for that. What it is however is a sign that voters now think that Cameron and his party are worth a go, so fed up have they become with Labour and also, sadly, Gordon Brown himself.

I say sadly because I still think that Brown had the qualities to be a great prime minister. Unlike Blair up until his messianic streak took him wholly and Major entirely, Brown does believe in what he's doing, and always has. He's however stumbled into the top job and not found it like he thought it would be; no longer can he play like he's still in opposition like he did at the Treasury, running an insurgency against Blair and his worst attempts at pitiful and needless reforms, making the right arguments and often winning. He can't distance himself any longer from the government as a whole; he is the government, and his continuation of the worst of Blairism while not making the changes he's promised has brought both the party and himself to the brink, although it was always Blair that did the damage in the first place, and continues to do through the memoirs and constant recollections.

Again then we go through the suggestions, advice and in some cases, pleas from both outsiders and insiders on what he needs to do. Again there is no sign that Brown is really listening. Both John McDonnell on the socialist left and Compass on the soft left urge and urge again that they stop the dismal triangulation and return to Labour's roots. Last week's draft Queen speech showed that Brown has no intentions of doing that, and he's hardly going to rip that up and start again. It would actually make him even weaker if he did that, welcome as it would be. The least worst thing he could do would be a reshuffle: acknowledge the walking disaster that is "Wacky" Jacqui Smith and sack her; get rid of Hazel fucking Blears and send her to the gulag; perhaps move Jack Straw to be chancellor; and swallow his pride and bring back some of the old big beasts, like Alan Milburn, Charles Clarke and Frank Field, if only because it's better for them to be inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in. Then more or less do what was suggested after the local elections, by getting rid of ID cards, bringing the troops back from Iraq, scrapping 42 days and most radically of all, abolish tax credits and raise the very poorest out of tax altogether while helping the reasonably well-off that also benefit through taking away in the first place less, all raised by either a windfall tax on the obscene oil/gas profits and/or by taxing the rich and especially the super-rich more.

All of this would completely wrong foot the Tories. They could play it as desperation and it might work but it would also truly show Brown to be listening. However, as we've seen time and time again when politicians have promised to listen, all they've done is carry on just as before. With no real chance of a leadership challenge, and with even the possibility of one only turning the electorate off more with the party gazing at its navel, Crewe and Nantwich along with David Cameron seem to have written Labour's epitaph.

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Giving a message to Hazel Blears.

Keeping it short and sweet, as you too might after spending the best part of the evening swapping round IDE cables and jumpers in a random fashion as that's apparently the only way to fix the piece of crap I'm currently laboured with, could someone be good enough to "give a message" to Hazel Blears by taking her out and shooting her in the fucking head?

Thanks in advance.

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Don't panic, but he might be Islamic!

So, a man walks into a Giraffe...

Err....

It does seem almost like a joke, doesn't it? Guy chooses a Giraffe restaurant, of all places, to go in (the one here advertises "global burgers" and is probably fair-traded and feng shuied out of the stratosphere), orders a drink, then goes to the toilets and explodes. Still, it was nice of this not quite Mr Creosote to go pop out where it was unlikely anyone else would have got hurt, wasn't it?

You also have to hand it to the police. The explosion took place at around 12:50 this afternoon. By just before 10, the police had managed to investigate to such an extent that they felt confident enough to know exactly why Nicky Reilly did what he did: apparently he is a recent convert to Islam, suffers from mental illness, and, in their words, was "was preyed upon and radicalised." That's a pretty decent turn around for any investigation, and the police's decision to announce their initial conclusions before any charges have been laid, and before the dust had even settled can only be welcomed. 42 days? Apparently all they really need is 42 hours.

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Wednesday, May 21, 2008 

The final words on Dorries (for now).

Unity provides all the necessary information on why Cameron shouldn't be allowed to get away with calling Gordon Brown a ditherer after his machinations over the abortion bill, but most sweet after last night's votes is Nadine Dorries' response: to carry on as if nothing happened.

Following yesterday's attempt in the House of Commons to reduce the upper the limit for abortions from 24 to 20 weeks, Nadine is to join forces with Labour MP Frank Field in a cross party to campaign to reduce the number of abortions, tackle teenage pregnancy and improve sexual health. During yesterday's debate on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, MPs voted on an amendment tabled by Nadine to reduce the upper limit for abortions from 24 to weeks to 20 weeks.

Nadine said, "While I am clearly disappointed that we were unsuccessful in the vote on reducing the upper limit for abortions, I believe we have achieved a great deal in making more people aware as to what the methodology of an abortion actually involves. Following the campaign I believe we have also brought into the public domain important information such as the viability of a foetus below 24 weeks, the issue of foetal pain and the long term consequences in terms of mental health for many women who choose to have an abortion. The vote may have been lost, but I feel we certainly won the arguments.

I have a great deal of sympathy when people say politicians - and MPs in particular - are out of touch with the views of the public. Opinion polls consistently show that the public wants to see a reduction in the upper limits for abortions, which is already one of the highest in Europe, yet yesterday the majority of MPs defied the views of the majority of their constituents and voted for the status quo.

However, I will continue to campaign for a reduction of abortions in the UK and the broader issues of tackling teenage pregnancy and improving sexual health, particularly amongst young people. I am delighted that following yesterday's vote I received a telephone call from the widely respected Labour MP, Frank Field MP, who told me that after listening to my speech in the House of Commons yesterday evening, he changed his mind and decided to vote for my amendment. We have decided to establish a new, cross party group to continue the campaign to tackle issues surrounding the rise of teenage abortions and pregnancy."

You have to admire Dorries' chutzpah: she couldn't even get the 200 supporters she repeatedly claimed she had to vote for the 20 weeks amendment, yet she and those who, um, decided that it wasn't worth the effort after all were the ones who won the argument. And indeed, they're right. When it comes to repeating mendacious bullshit, ignoring all the evidence from the studies in this country which show that the viability of the foetus under 24 weeks has not changed over the last decade or more, claiming that foetuses feel pain on the evidence of one doctor while others vehemently disagree and bringing up the issue of mental health when pregnancy has such a major effect on a woman's psychology without even considering the moral implications of seeking an abortion, Dorries and her band of followers are second to none. They can be truly proud of lowering the already base tone of politics in this country to its almost lowest ebb. Perhaps it doesn't need to be mentioned that Tony Blair too believed he had won the argument over 90 days detention; he never recovered from that defeat.

It also does little to add to Dorries' claims of overwhelming public support for a reduction when Marie Stopes yesterday unveiled their latest survey which showed that 61% of women of child bearing age supported the right to seek an abortion between 20 and 24 weeks. Previous polls reached different results, but this one asked specifically in which circumstances in which it would be acceptable, reflecting the real issues why someone might still need an abortion at such a period into pregnancy, rather than just abitrarily asking which limit they supported.

Most hilarious of all though is that Dorries will be continuing to attempt to find a "middle way". The "middle way" was Cameron's chatroom sofa supported 22 weeks; it failed by 71 votes. Maybe, just maybe, if Dorries hadn't been allowed to run the campaign, that vote might have been successful. As for Frank Field's new found relationship with Dorries, you couldn't be happier for such a wonderfully matched couple. If he really was impressed by Dorries' speech, so aptly described by Dawn Primarolo as "assert[ing] many things to be facts that are not," and completely overbearing in the emotional, factless sense, with her continuing to draw on her suspicious witnessing and involvement in late-term abortions, then he really has gone crackers. Either that or the old goat fancies her.

Round one goes against Dorries then. The next round might just concern her seat itself.

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Scum-watch: More wild rumours, thoughts on why some crimes get more coverage than others, and typical Facebook bashing.

Having spent yesterday speculating wildly and potentially tramuatisingly on the fate of Rosimeiri Boxall, the hacks on the Sun having seemingly decided that it won't do to just attempt readers to sympathise with her fate; no, you can't have open and shut, black and white cases when no one really knows what happened. To alleviate such a objectionable situation, the Sun today publishes yet more rumours, except this time on what Boxall had consumed alcohol wise:

VICAR’S daughter Rosi Boxall downed wine and spirits before she plunged to her death from a window, it was claimed yesterday.

Hostel resident Holly Dowse told how 19-year-old Rosi was drunk by lunchtime after boozing with two teenage pals.

Holly, 17, said the girls were sinking Lambrini — advertised as a sweet wine for "girls who just wanna have fun" — and strong almond liqueur Amaretto.

Holly, who lives in the flat below in Blackheath, South East London, said: "I went upstairs at midday to tell the girls to be quiet.

"They were in the flat with two boys. I could see they had bottles of Lambrini and a bottle of Amaretto.

"One was dancing around in a black corset while the other was being loud and giggling with Rosi. They all seemed well on their way to being drunk even then."


Ah, see, it turns out she was a binge-drinking yob all along! The point of reporting this "fact" seems to be to cast doubt on the initial picture entirely, as after all, if you're drunk and messing around you can quite easily fall out of windows. Is it really too much to ask for the police to be left to investigate what happens without the press publishing such contradictory churnalism? Of course it is.

On an almost related point, there's an interesting letter in the Grauniad today from a bereaved father over the lack of coverage of his son's violent death:

I, too, am puzzled by media reporting of killings (Brothers guilty of running down father-of-two, May 15). My 22-year-old stepson, Tom Easton, was stabbed to death in September 2006 in a recording studio, where he was helping disadvantaged young people develop their talents. Like Jonathan Zito, he was killed by someone with schizophrenia, who has now been committed to Broadmoor. Yet the national media coverage of Tom's death was virtually non-existent. This lack of interest can't be explained away by "black-on-black" killings, or by nasty people doing nasty things to each other, as Professor Peter Cole asserts. Tom was white, middle-class, at work and an innocent victim of a savage attack. As a family who have lost someone in these circumstances, we're certainly not interested in column inches. What we do want is more debate about what must be done to prevent these tragedies, and government action. That debate has been muted, which is why Through Unity, a coalition of families like ours, has been formed. Maybe together our voices will be heard above the din of press sensationalism and celebrity journalism.

Peter Sinclair
Chair, Tom Easton Flavasum Trust

It isn't an exact science working out why some cases make all the headlines and some don't, but it's difficult to dismiss the notion that it is (mostly) about class and race when there's some evidence to suggest that in most cases that is exactly why some are reported so volubly and others not. Jimmy Mizen is a case that provides a number of reasons why his death was so widely covered, and others, often involving either black youths or ethnic minority youths who died in different circumstances haven't: he was white; middle class; he was, in the words of his parents, a perfect son, a good Catholic, and already had an apprenticeship lined up; his parents were telegenic and more than prepared to talk to the media; and, which I also don't doubt was a factor, one of his sisters additionally has down syndrome, always likely to inspire further sympathy.

As to why Tom Easton didn't receive similar coverage, I do vaguely remember his case, so it wasn't completely ignored or forgotten. Why he didn't receive the same though, although he was white and middle class and filled all the other usual particulars for which cases usually gain coverage, might well be because of what he was doing. Unfortunately, cynicism is hard-set in for good reasons in most hacks, especially those on the right-wing tabloids, and you can bet that some would have thought, if not voiced, that Easton might have been asking for it for working with such hoodlums, or at least he was putting himself in harms way, unlike Mizen who refused to fight.

In a similar way, it's perhaps why
Sophie Lancaster's mother hasn't received the overwhelming sympathy or coverage that Helen Newlove did; she happened to a youth worker who believed in compassion, letting live and and forgiving, and despite initial and understandable soul-searching about whether she could continue in such a job, she's decided she will. Contrast that to Newlove: the woman out not for justice, but for apparent vengeance, who gives the kind of quotes the tabloids adore, such as saying how she'd give her husband's killers the lethal injection herself, while demanding that new, deeply authoritarian and illiberal laws be brought in to stop such youths killing in the future. When met with individuals who don't want to pursue a vendetta, or even, God forbid, forgive their tormentors, as Anthony Walker's mother famously did, they don't understand it or consider it worthy of further coverage, except to ask how they possibly could do such a thing. The embittered and angry always make for better copy than the reflective ones who want to move on.

It's obviously clear why some of the apparent "black-on-black" knife crime deaths haven't received hardly any coverage beyond the initial reports; no one cares when "scum" appears to have killed "scum", not even the police, who might for other cases have issued press release after press release, as the Metropolitan police did after the murder of Tom ap Rhys Price, while the death of
Balbir Matharu was met with little other than silence, from both press and police themselves, until Ian Blair opened his mouth about it.

We can't place all the blame on journalists, especially when they might well have got the story only for it to be spiked or not used later. Sometimes there generally is no reason why murders receive no coverage, apart from maybe the changing practices of the media, increasingly obsessed with the urban centres while ignoring rural areas. Even if not a particularly heinous murder is committed during a time of slow news or especially the silly season, it's always likely to receive more coverage than it might otherwise do. When cases do receive obviously less coverage because of the race or class of the victim, or as witnessed recently when involving less sympathetic figures such as
Fiona MacKeown and the Matthews clan, we ought to speak louder. It is an issue however that does require a lot more study and research for any clear conclusions to be drawn; until then, Peter Sinclair's suggestions are wise ones which ought to acted on. Unfortunately, in the current media climate, it seems unlikely that anything will change.

Speaking of which, here's how the Sun reports the news that "crooks" are turning to social-networking sites to sell their ill-gotten gains:

Naturally, the fact that a certain social networking site owned by the Sun's proprietor is also doubtless home to such activity is nary mentioned.

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