Britannia Radio

Rod Liddle Sunday Times on Shami Chakrabati & Gadaffi


Saturday, 12 March, 2011 23:09

How's this for hypocrisy writ large?  

Rod Liddle: Libya is bad, LSE, but how do you explain Ms Liberty? 

The  Sunday Times, 6 March 2011.  Shami Chakrabati seldom turns down a request to appear on Question   

Time for Liberty, nor did she turn down a donation from Colonel Gadaffi     
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/columns/rodliddle/  article570195.ece   
How do they get these jobs (part 356)? 

This week we examine the case   of Shami Chakrabarti CBE, the hand-wringing director
of the pressure   group Liberty for the past eight years and almost weekly performer 
on   the BBC’s Question Time.  

If she’s not patronising you on Question Time, she’ll be patronising   
you on some other programme.  
There she will be, lightly chiding you in a compassionate manner as if   
you were a five-year old who had just had a little accident.   

Chakrabarti is not simply the director of Liberty but also, it   transpired last 
week, a member of the council which governs my old   university, 
the London School of Economics and Political Science.  

She is also, for what it’s worth, a governor of the British Film   Institute — 
perhaps because she once watched a film — 
and chancellor of   Oxford Brookes University. 

Oh, and visiting fellow at Nuffield College   
and also master of the Bench of Middle Temple — 
this last may be   something to do with our legal system, 
or connected in some way with   Hogwarts. 

How are these jobs doled out, when so many are jobless? 

What   exactly are her duties at these many august institutions — or do they   
just employ her because she is a nice, articulate, young, middle-class   
Asian lady with agreeably left-of-centre views? Can’t have enough of   those, can we?  

Liberty is an organisation that is dedicated to upholding human rights   throughout the world. 

That’s why you often see Chakrabarti on Question   Time, shaking her head sadly at the audience 

or the panel because they   have somehow missed the crucial human rights element on some issue, 
to   our moral detriment.   

As a member of the council and court of governors of my old university   she was also part of a decision to accept a 
large donation from Colonel  Gadaffi in return for training 400 of his stooges 
to administer his   vicious, totalitarian regime. She did not balk at this. 

She said   nothing.   

Amnesty International and other human rights organisations report that   under Gadaffi 
the Libyan people had no freedom of speech, freedom of   conscience or freedom of assembly. 

Nor did they ever get the chance to   vote. Opponents of the regime were imprisoned, tortured or killed.   

Libya is — or was — one of the five or six least politically free   states in the world. 
This did not remotely bother Chakrabarti, who   merely admitted to having been — retrospectively, 
mind you —   embarrassed. Yes, we know now that you’re embarrassed, you hypocrite;   
how about resigning, then, from one or another of your posts, if you   can remember what they all are?  

She was not alone, mind, at the LSE.  

A cabal of almost exclusively Blairite academics, appointed by God   
knows who, and former security service monkeys waved through the   donation 
from old Muammar along with a decision to award his smug,   half-witted son, 
Saif al-Islam, a PhD, despite the fact that his work   was almost certainly stolen 
from someone else. One of the cabal was   

Anthony Giddens, now Baron Giddens — a shallow sociologist who was   nonetheless 
adored by new Labour for championing a “third way” in   politics — who ended up as 
a Gadaffi groupie, applauding his speeches   on meeting the fruitcake in a tent in 
the desert.   

Can you imagine for a moment the LSE council and court of governors   accepting a 
donation from the Israeli government — despite the   unquestioned fact that that 
country is several shades closer to a pure   democracy than anything envisaged by 
Gadaffi? If that had been   suggested, you would have had Chakrabarti resigning 
live on air during   Question Time and Giddens penning an angry pamphlet 
(which nobody would   read).  

There is some truth in the suggestion that our universities felt   
compelled to act as whores in pursuit of money as a consequence of   seeing their 
funding cut — and none whored it more than the LSE. 

But   whoring it with the Libyans, under new Labour, was seen somehow as   
clean-whoring, almost radical-whoring, and therefore okay.  The LSE director, 
Sir Howard Davies, has had the decency to resign.   

Shouldn’t Chakrabarti and Giddens do the same?