Thursday, 18th November 2010
The London Review of Bigotry
2:11pm
The ever-more impressive Just Journalism has published an important critique of the London Review of Books, one of the most poisonously Judeophobic periodicals in western society. It is important because the LRB plays a key role in defining the terms of debate for the British intelligentsia, influencing beyond them the so-called thinking classes in the rest of the English-speaking world. For many years under its current editor Mary-Kay Wilmers – herself surely a prime example of Howard Jacobson’s ‘Ashamed Jews’ -- it has been helping turn that debate into a verbal pogrom against Israel through an unbroken stream of hate-fuelled articles. And it receives British taxpayers’ money to do so. As the report’s executive summary states:
...A Freedom of Information request revealed that since its inception the LRB has received over £767,000 from Arts Council England, funded by
Wednesday, 17th November 2010
Britain on its knees, with a human rights noose round its neck
11:56pm
It is hard to overstate how much of a disaster for both Britain and the west is the British government’s decision – all but buried under yesterday’s Royal wedding media hysteria – to award an unspecified sum of compensation, estimated variously between £10 million and £30 million, to 16 former detainees of Guantánamo Bay to avoid running up a £50 million legal bill if their cases went to court, and to avoid the security service being forced to compromise its intelligence sources.
And what was the reason the British government faced this court case? Why, the ex-Guantanamo inmates claimed British complicity with torture. Not that the British committed torture, but that they were complicit with it. They claim that the UK fed information and questions to their interrogators, or gave information to the CIA so it could arrest British suspects...
Monday, 15th November 2010
Britain's comic Prime Minister
5:16pm
What a jovial place Britain has become! What a larky government it now has, led by its first ever satirical Prime Minister who, it now becomes clear, considers the main purpose of his great office is to enhance the gaiety of the nation!
For just look at what he is now proposing: a national index of well-being to measure how happy everyone is! Those dry and dusty number-crunchers of the Office of National Statistics are now going be told to perform the modern equivalent of extracting sunbeams from cucumbers – applying an objective measurement to subjective feelings that non-one can even define, let alone measure!
What a tremendously jolly jape! What a glorious, two-fingers up to stuffy old political leadership kind of frolic! What a playfully post-modern ironical joke at the expense of all those humourless individuals who are...
Daily Mail, 18 November 2010
Burying bad news is an example of political sharp practice through which the hapless British public has long been manipulated.
If politicians have something to impart which shows them up in a bad light, they use this ruse to minimise the damage that might be done to them.
They deliberately release that information at precisely the moment when the attention of the nation — or to be more precise, the nation’s media — is heavily distracted by a more sensational story which serves to bury the disagreeable disclosure virtually out of sight.
This week served up a prime example of such disreputable political stage-management. During the 24 hours that followed Tuesday morning’s announcement, newspapers and news bulletins were carrying wall-to-wall coverage of the royal engagement.
It was a story that knocked everything else into the background, as was only to be expected. However, buried underneath all the avalanche of detail about the royal proposal, the ring and the romance lurked a potentially explosive bit of other news that passed almost without notice.
The Prime Minister had decided to remove his personal ‘vanity’ photographer Andy Parsons and ‘WebCameron’ film-maker Nicky Woodhouse from the £35,000-a-year civil service jobs he had given them and send them back to work for Conservative Central Office.
On any other day, this would have been a big story — and not one that would have presented David Cameron in a flattering light. For these ‘vanity’ appointments on the public payroll had been a cause of intense controversy.
In making them, the Prime Minister had reportedly overridden the advice of at least one senior civil servant that such a move would antagonise the public.
As indeed it did. There was widespread astonishment and outrage that, at a time when some half a million public servants were facing the sack and the public was facing a new ‘age of austerity’, Mr Cameron was using taxpayers’ money to make himself look good.
Despite the uproar, however, the Prime Minister had dug in his heels and refused to budge. Yet now, all of a sudden, he was caving in after all, saying that he had reluctantly come to accept that the move had sent the public the ‘wrong message’.
Political correspondents were briefed on Tuesday morning about this decision and it was then reported in the London Evening Standard.
Yes, No 10 deserves credit for belatedly recognising that they’d got it wrong, but the timing of the U-turn looks distinctly fishy. Inevitably, almost as soon as it hit the news-stands, the story was submerged from general view as royal wedding fever hit the nation, with the Prime Minister basking instead in the reflected glow of the happy news from Clarence House.
This looked like a classic example of burying bad news, and various MPs duly smelled a rat.
But the Prime Minister’s office responded by adopting an air of injured innocence. The Prime Minister had only been told about the royal engagement, it maintained, when his Permanent Secretary interrupted Tuesday morning’s Cabinet meeting to pass him the news.
Well, forgive me for being just a wee bit cynical, but if you believe that, you’ll believe anything. For it is scarcely credible that no one in the government machine had the faintest inkling of the delightful news that was about to be announced that morning.
It is not as if it concerned a minor royal. It was about the impending marriage of the second-in-line to succeed the Queen as the head of state, an event with consequences for the monarchy itself. On that score alone, it is very hard to believe that Her Majesty’s Government was not informed in advance.
It is even harder to believe that the Palace suddenly blurted out this momentous news without careful preparation as to the best time to announce it.
And it is surely quite unthinkable that it would have sprung it on the Prime Minister without advance warning, knowing full well that it would disrupt political life for the rest of that day at least.
Yet Downing Street insists that it was all a complete surprise. So what are we to conclude? That Her Majesty committed a wholly uncharacteristic and tactless blunder by throwing her Government’s programme for the day into chaos? Or that the Prime Minister’s office is being somewhat, ah, economical with the truth?
And, maybe, even the release of the embarrassing news about the Government being forced to make multi-million-pound compensation payments to former terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay could also be interpreted as possible evidence of No 10’s willingness to manipulate the bad news agenda.
Even if we accept that this most fortuitous timing was, indeed, just a coincidence, Mr Cameron cannot be allowed to wriggle off this particular hook. For look at the issue involved in his embarrassing volte-face.
Taxpayers were being expected to foot the bill for photographs and film coverage of the Prime Minister shot to display him in the most favourable light.
Last year, there was controversy when Mr Parsons organised a photoshoot for Mr Cameron, then Leader of the Opposition, at Westminster Abbey’s Field of Remembrance, where he posed for some 20 minutes. Not surprisingly, war veterans protested he was using the Armistice Day commemoration for personal political gain.
During the Tory Party conference, Mr Parsons filmed Mr Cameron in supposedly unguarded moments, including feeding his baby daughter Florence hours before he made his keynote speech. And one of Ms Woodhouse’s WebCameron video blogs showed him washing up while dealing with his noisy children off-screen.
Putting these image-makers onto the public payroll was simply outrageous, since public money was being used here not to serve the public interest, but merely to advance Mr Cameron’s political fortunes.
Yet the Prime Minister tried to justify doing so — on the breathtaking grounds that this would actually save taxpayers’ money, since Mr Parsons and Ms Woodhouse would work across Whitehall and would thus save departments from having to hire freelance photographers to chronicle official events.
This reveals a quite considerable degree of contempt, not just for the poor beleaguered taxpayer, but also for the integrity of the great office that Mr Cameron temporarily occupies.
For what was so unacceptable was not merely the self-serving purpose of these ‘vanity’ pictures, but the fact that party political advantage was being substituted for the national interest.
It was improper for Mr Parsons and Ms Woodhouse to be paid for out of the public purse because they were filling a party political role in enhancing David Cameron’s image — and also, for that matter, the image of his ministers. That’s why it is only right and proper that they should be employed not as civil servants, but as employees of the Conservative Party.
It was, of course, Tony Blair who deliberately muddied the waters between party and country, claiming notoriously — and chillingly — that the Labour Party was the ‘political arm of the British people’.
On that totally unacceptable basis, he proceeded to fleece the taxpayer to pay for the spin operation aimed at keeping Labour in power — an operation which developed the tactic of burying bad news into a veritable art form.
David Cameron’s arrival in Downing Street was supposed to put an end to all that and restore the integrity of government and politics by connecting once again with the people.
Yet through a quite monumental display of both vanity and arrogance, Mr Cameron has shown himself to be sealed from reality. It’s as if he exists within a kind of power bubble, impervious not only to his original gross error of judgment, but to the self-serving manner in which he sought to justify it.
At Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, he sought to defend himself against Labour taunts over this affair by declaring: ‘I’ll tell you who we wouldn’t employ. Special advisers to indulge in spin.’
Indeed, who needs special advisers or even photographers to spin his message, when he does such a brazenly disingenuous job of it himself?
Posts
