Tag Archive for 'Britain'

How many corporate journalists really challenge power in society?

Published on 12 July 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Very few. Because they know their bosses won’t allow it. Or they’ll be shunned by business or government interests. This is across the Murdoch empire and beyond. Truly independent reporting is a rare beast, indeed.

Former Labour minister in Britain Peter Mandelson acknowledges his government never challenged the Murdoch empire. Why? “We simply chose to be cowed because we were too fearful to do otherwise.”

George Monbiot demands changes:

Is Murdoch now finished in the UK? As the pursuit of Gordon Brown by the Sunday Times and the Sun blows the ¬hacking scandal into new corners of the old man’s empire, this story begins to feel like the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. The naked ¬attempt to destroy Brown by any means, including hacking the medical files of his sick baby son, means that there is no obvious limit to the story’s ¬ramifications(1).

The scandal radically changes public perceptions of how politics works, the danger corporate power presents to democracy, and the extent to which it has compromised and corrupted the Metropolitan police, who have now been dragged in so deep they are beginning to look like ¬Murdoch’s private army. It has electrified a dozy parliament and subjected the least accountable and most corrupt profession in Britain – journalism – to belated public scrutiny.

The cracks are appearing in the most unexpected places. Look at the remarkable admission by the rightwing columnist Janet Daley in this week’s Sunday Telegraph. “British political journalism is basically a club to which politicians and journalists both belong,” she wrote. “It is this familiarity, this intimacy, this set of shared assumptions … which is the real corruptor of political life. The self-limiting spectrum of what can and cannot be said … the self-reinforcing cowardice which takes for granted that certain vested interests are too powerful to be worth confronting. All of these things are constant dangers in the political life of any democracy.”(2)

Most national journalists are embedded: immersed in the society, beliefs and culture of the people they are meant to hold to account. They are fascinated by power struggles among the elite but have little interest in the conflict between the elite and those they dominate. They celebrate those with agency and ignore those without. But this is just part of the problem. Daley stopped short of naming the most persuasive force: the interests of the owner and the corporate class to which he belongs. The proprietor appoints editors in his own image, who in turn impress their views on their staff.

…

So what can be done? Because of the peculiar threat they present to democracy, there’s a case to be made for breaking up all majority interests in media companies, and for a board of governors, appointed perhaps by Commons committee, to act as a counterweight to the shareholders’ business interests. But even if that’s a workable idea, it’s a long way off. For now, the best hope might be to mobilise readers to demand that journalists answer to them, not just their proprietors. One means of doing this is to lobby journalists to commit themselves to a kind of Hippocratic Oath. Here’s a rough stab at a first draft. I hope others can improve it. Ideally, I’d like to see the National Union of Journalists encouraging its members to sign.

‘Our primary task is to hold power to account. We will prioritise those stories and issues which expose the interests of power. We will be wary of the relationships we form with the rich and powerful, and ensure that we don’t become embedded in their society. We will not curry favour with politicians, businesses or other dominant groups by withholding scrutiny of their affairs, or twisting a story to suit their interests.

“We will stand up to the interests of the businesses we work for, and the advertisers which fund them. We will never take money for promulgating a particular opinion.

“We will recognise and understand the power we wield and how it originates. We will challenge ourselves and our perception of the world as much as we challenge other people. When we turn out to be wrong, we will say so.”

So Murdoch will close down his own rogue outlets, yes?

Published on 12 July 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

If consistency is his thing:

Medical records disclosing that Gordon Brown’s infant son had cystic fibrosis were illegally obtained by The Sun newspaper as part of a News International campaign against him and his family, friends of the former prime minister claims.

Mr Brown was a repeated target for investigators working for the tabloid and its sister newspapers, The Sunday Times and the News of the World, it was alleged.

The newspapers obtained highly personal medical and financial information about him and his family.

The most emotive claim relates to Mr Brown’s son, Fraser, diagnosed with cystic fibrosis in 2006, soon after his birth. His condition was disclosed on The Sun’s website in November 2006, when he was four months old.

Mr Brown and his wife, Sarah, had only recently learned of their son’s condition, which often leads to a shortened lifespan. They were dismayed the paper had details of his illness.

Mrs Brown said she was sad to learn about the alleged invasions of her family’s privacy. She wrote on Twitter: “It is very personal and really hurtful if all true.”

As if firing News of the World journalists is enough to save Murdoch’s credibility

Published on 11 July 2011 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , .

In his nightmares:

Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of BSkyB appeared to be dead in the water last night after proof emerged that executives at his British newspaper empire mounted a cover-up of the full scale of alleged criminal wrongdoing at the News of the World.

In another extraordinary day in the phone-hacking scandal, Downing Street sources confirmed that Government lawyers were drawing up a strategy to halt the £9bn deal which looked a certainty only a week ago.

As Nick Clegg threatened to split the Coalition by siding with a Labour plan to block the takeover, a senior Government source said last night: “We are working on a plan to suspend the deal while the police investigation is taking place. But we have to ensure it doesn’t get thrown out by judicial review.”

The U-turn came after one of News International’s own papers revealed that an internal report carried out in 2007, after the News of the World’s royal editor Clive Goodman was jailed, had found evidence that illegally accessing voicemails was more widespread at the paper – and that payments had been made to police officers.

An anonymous executive was quoted as saying that the report had been like a “ticking time bomb”. The report suggests there was a deliberate cover-up by unidentified executives at News International, which had told Parliamentary inquiries in 2007 and 2009 there was no evidence journalists other than Goodman had been involved in phone hacking, nor that it had attempted to suppress evidence of illegality.

Robert Fisk on why he left Murdoch’s Times (blind Zionism is the crime)

Published on 11 July 2011 in Israel. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

The veteran reporter rightly couldn’t tolerate an owner who put his love for Israel above the truth (which is something we still see in Murdoch titles across the world):

Oddly, he [Murdoch] never appeared the ogre of evil, darkness and poison that he’s been made out to be these past few days. Maybe it’s because his editors and sub-editors and reporters repeatedly second-guessed what Murdoch would say. Murdoch was owner of The Times when I covered the blood-soaked Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982. Not a line was removed from my reports, however critical they were of Israel. After the invasion, Douglas-Home and Murdoch were invited by the Israelis to take a military helicopter trip into Lebanon. The Israelis tried to rubbish my reporting; Douglas-Home said he stood up for me. On the flight back to London, Douglas-Home and Murdoch sat together. “I knew Rupert was interested in what I was writing,” he told me later. “He sort of waited for me to tell him what it was, although he didn’t demand it. I didn’t show it to him.”

But things changed. Before he was editor, Douglas-Home would write for the Arabic-language Al-Majella magazine, often deeply critical of Israel. Now his Times editorials took an optimistic view of the Israeli invasion. He stated that “there is now no worthy Palestinian to whom the world can talk” and – for heaven’s sake – that “perhaps at last the Palestinians on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip will stop hoping that stage-strutters like Mr Arafat can rescue them miraculously from doing business with the Israelis.”

All of which, of course, was official Israeli government policy at the time.

Then, in the spring of 1983, another change. I had, with Douglas-Home’s full agreement, spent months investigating the death of seven Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners of the Israelis in Sidon. It was obvious, I concluded, that the men had been murdered – the grave-digger even told me that their corpses had been brought to him, hands tied behind their backs, showing marks of bruising. But now Douglas-Home couldn’t see how we would be “justified” in running a report “so long after the event”.

In other words, the very system of investigative journalism – of fact-checking and months of interviews – became self-defeating. When we got the facts, too much time had passed to print them. I asked the Israelis if they would carry out a military inquiry and, anxious to show how humanitarian they were, they duly told us there would be an official investigation. The Israeli “inquiry” was, I suspected, a fiction. But it was enough to “justify” publishing my long and detailed report. Once the Israelis could look like good guys, Douglas-Home’s concerns evaporated.

…

These past two weeks, I have been thinking of what it was like to work for Murdoch, what was wrong about it, about the use of power by proxy. For Murdoch could never be blamed. Murdoch was more caliph than ever, no more responsible for an editorial or a “news” story than a president of Syria is for a massacre – the latter would be carried out on the orders of governors who could always be tried or sacked or sent off as adviser to a prime minister – and the leader would invariably anoint his son as his successor. Think of Hafez and Bashar Assad or Hosni and Gamal Mubarak or Rupert and James. In the Middle East, Arab journalists knew what their masters wanted, and helped to create a journalistic desert without the water of freedom, an utterly skewed version of reality. So, too, within the Murdoch empire.

George Galloway: “Rupert Murdoch was hacking the phones of our dead soldiers”

Published on 11 July 2011 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , .

Murdoch empire made of rock, cheese and bullets

Published on 11 July 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , .

How Rupert should think about Watergate and worry

Published on 10 July 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

One half of the Watergate investigators who hasn’t spent the last decades fawning before power, Carl Bernstein, writes in Newsweek that the current Murdoch controversy has historical reverberations:

But now the empire is shaking, and there’s no telling when it will stop. My conversations with British journalists and politicians—all of them insistent on speaking anonymously to protect themselves from retribution by the still-enormously powerful mogul—make evident that the shuttering of News of the World, and the official inquiries announced by the British government, are the beginning, not the end, of the seismic event.

News International, the British arm of Murdoch’s media empire, “has always worked on the principle of omertà: ‘Do not say anything to anybody outside the family, and we will look after you,’ ” notes a former Murdoch editor who knows the system well. “Now they are hanging people out to dry. The moment you do that, the omertà is gone, and people are going to talk. It looks like a circular firing squad.”

News of the World was always Murdoch’s “baby,” one of the largest dailies in the English-speaking world, with 2.6 million readers. As anyone in the business will tell you, the standards and culture of a journalistic institution are set from the top down, by its owner, publisher, and top editors. Reporters and editors do not routinely break the law, bribe policemen, wiretap, and generally conduct themselves like thugs unless it is a matter of recognized and understood policy. Private detectives and phone hackers do not become the primary sources of a newspaper’s information without the tacit knowledge and approval of the people at the top, all the more so in the case of newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch, according to those who know him best.

As one of his former top executives—once a close aide—told me, “This scandal and all its implications could not have happened anywhere else. Only in Murdoch’s orbit. The hacking at News of the World was done on an industrial scale. More than anyone, Murdoch invented and established this culture in the newsroom, where you do whatever it takes to get the story, take no prisoners, destroy the competition, and the end will justify the means.”

“In the end, what you sow is what you reap,” said this same executive. “Now Murdoch is a victim of the culture that he created. It is a logical conclusion, and it is his people at the top who encouraged lawbreaking and hacking phones and condoned it.”

Could Murdoch eventually be criminally charged? He has always surrounded himself with trusted subordinates and family members, so perhaps it is unlikely. Though Murdoch has strenuously denied any knowledge at all of the hacking and bribery, it’s hard to believe that his top deputies at the paper didn’t think they had a green light from him to use such untraditional reportorial methods. Investigators are already assembling voluminous records that demonstrate the systemic lawbreaking at News of the World, and Scotland Yard seems to believe what was happening in the newsroom was endemic at the highest levels at the paper and evident within the corporate structure. Checks have been found showing tens of thousands of dollars of payments at a time.

For this reporter, it is impossible not to consider these facts through the prism of Watergate. When Bob Woodward and I came up against difficult ethical questions, such as whether to approach grand jurors for information (which we did, and perhaps shouldn’t have), we sought executive editor Ben Bradlee’s counsel, and he in turn called in the company lawyers, who gave the go-ahead and outlined the legal issues in full. Publisher Katharine Graham was informed. Likewise, Bradlee was aware when I obtained private telephone and credit-card records of one of the Watergate figures.

All institutions have lapses, even great ones, especially by individual rogue employees—famously in recent years at The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the three original TV networks. But can anyone who knows and understands the journalistic process imagine the kind of tactics regularly employed by the Murdoch press, especially at News of the World, being condoned at the Post or the Times?

And then there’s the other inevitable Watergate comparison. The circumstances of the alleged lawbreaking within News Corp. suggests more than a passing resemblance to Richard Nixon presiding over a criminal conspiracy in which he insulated himself from specific knowledge of numerous individual criminal acts while being himself responsible for and authorizing general policies that routinely resulted in lawbreaking and unconstitutional conduct. Not to mention his role in the cover-up. It will remain for British authorities and, presumably, disgusted and/or legally squeezed News Corp. executives and editors to reveal exactly where the rot came from at News of the World, and whether Rupert Murdoch enabled, approved, or opposed the obvious corruption that infected his underlings.

Strong reasons Murdoch should be shunned from decent society

Published on 10 July 2011 in General. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , .

One:

Throughout his years in power, Blair had regular secret meetings with Murdoch, many abroad, and was in regular telephone contact. Price has gone as far as to claim that Murdoch “seemed like the 24th member of the cabinet”.

Blair insisted no record was ever kept of the meetings or calls, so they were totally deniable. Cherie Blair has said that her husband’s decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003 was a “close call”. So it was – and there is evidence that the final decision was taken only after Murdoch’s encouragement was received and his blessing given. Blair talked to the media tycoon three times on the telephone in the 10 days before the US-led invasion. Details obtained under freedom of information show Blair called Murdoch on 11 March, 13 March and 19 March 2003. British and US troops began the invasion on 20 March, with the Times and Sun voicing total support.

Two:

To begin with, [David] Cameron was wary of Murdoch. His first meetings with the tycoon went badly. After one meeting, a senior News International figure complained to me: “We told David exactly what to say and how to say it in order to please Rupert. But Cameron wouldn’t play ball. I can’t understand it.”

Cameron had made the deliberate decision to gain power without Murdoch’s assistance. Urged on by his senior aide – and probably his closest political friend, Steve Hilton – the future prime minister kept his distance.

But this strategy led to disaster in the polls. David Cameron was mocked and ridiculed in the Labour supporting Murdoch press, and by the summer of 2007 matters reached a crisis. There was talk that Gordon Brown, newly elected as Labour leader and Prime Minister, would call a snap election that autumn which he was widely expected to win handsomely.

It was at this point that George Osborne, then shadow chancellor and also Cameron’s closest strategic advisor, entered the fray. The immensely ambitious Osborne – who was already cultivating his own links with News International – made the case that Cameron should hire Andy Coulson.

Coulson was a brilliant News of the World executive, hand picked by Murdoch himself to go to the very top of the News International organisation. But his career had met with a setback a few months previously when he had been forced to resign as editor after the royal reporter Clive Goodman was sentenced to jail for hacking into the mobile phones of members of the royal household.

Cameron accepted Osborne’s view that there was no need to worry about this blot on Coulson’s record. This turned out to be a fatal miscalculation. Disastrously, Cameron imported Coulson into his inner team of advisors. In the short term, Coulson proved to be an excellent decision. He gave sound strategic advice, which helped Cameron see off the threat from Brown and enjoy a remarkable recovery in the opinion polls. But Coulson also performed one other function. He helped draw Cameron deep into the inner circle that surrounds Rupert Murdoch. In particular Cameron allowed himself to become a member of what is now known as the Chipping Norton set, a group of louche and affluent Londoners who centred around Rebekah Brooks’s Oxfordshire home, barely a mile from Cameron’s constituency residence.

Soon News International, through Coulson, had a key say in Conservative Party decision-making and even personnel appointments. It was News International, once again acting through Coulson, which effectively ordered Cameron to sack Dominic Grieve as his shadow home secretary in the autumn of 2008. Grieve was duly reshuffled in January 2009, after less than a year in the job. The irony of that decision is bitter today, for the decision given by News International for wanting Grieve out was that he was too soft on crime. Finally Cameron’s friendship with News International delivered the ultimate prize – the support of the Sun in the 2010 general election.

Handy advice to News Limited

Published on 9 July 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Rupert cares about family and power; ideology always comes second

Published on 9 July 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Andreas Whittam Smith in the Independent reminds us what the Murdoch empire is really about:

At its heart, News Corporation, for all its immense global interests, is a family company.

The Murdochs may not control all the voting rights in the group, but they run it as if they did. It is not a place where shareholders come first. Nor do employees (see the plight of the News of the World staff), nor old servants (see Andy Coulson thrown to the wolves). First, second, third, and last come Rupert Murdoch and his children. Not Rupert’s wives, as it happens, because they can be let go – as they have been. Rebekah Brooks isn’t a family member and that is why she should remain apprehensive.

For everything and anything will be sacrificed to maintain the family’s position. It is not so much the Murdochs’ financial interests that weigh heaviest in the balance, though they are important, but their power. Essentially they say to the world: this is ours and we are not going to let it go.

Rupert and his son James are bullies with the characteristic that often accompanies a ruthless manner – there is something cowardly about them. They won’t face their staff in meetings when they have bad news to deliver. Rupert Murdoch wouldn’t say a word when confronted by TV reporters in the US on Thursday evening. Rebekah Brooks, who apes the Murdoch manner, hurried away from the News of the World newsroom after announcing the closure of the newspaper on Thursday, only addressing shocked staff yesterday. This former editor doesn’t appear on television in case she stumbles over her words.

British Labour MP Chris Bryant takes on Murdoch and shows politicians how to lead

Published on 9 July 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger on Murdoch’s week of shame (and it ain’t over)

Published on 9 July 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Tabloid hack claims phone-hacking is good for democracy

Published on 9 July 2011 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

My Al Jazeera English interview on Murdoch’s excessive global power

Published on 9 July 2011 in General, Interviews and Video. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , .

As Rupert Murdoch’s empire faces unprecedented pressure in Britain over phone-hacking, criminality, ethical breaches and romancing of the political and media elites, it’s time to assess how one man and one family has amassed so much power in countless Western democracies. It should be challenged.

Here’s my interview on Al Jazeera English yesterday:

Murdoch only powerful because our elites allowed themselves to be seduced

Published on 9 July 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Handy reminder from the New York Times on the kind of political and media culture that exists in Britain (and Australia, too) that allows a war mongering media mogul to exercise so much power:

When David Cameron became prime minister in May 2010, one of his first visitors at 10 Downing Street — within 24 hours, and entering by a back door, according to accounts in British newspapers — was Rupert Murdoch.

Fourteen months later, with Mr. Murdoch’s media empire in Britain reeling, Mr. Cameron may feel that his close relationship with Mr. Murdoch, which included a range of social contacts with members of the Murdoch family and the tycoon’s senior executives, has been a costly overreach.

Those concerns were intensified by the arrest on Friday of Andy Coulson, the former editor of The News of the World and, until he resigned in January this year, Mr. Cameron’s media chief at Downing Street.

…

For now, though, Mr. Murdoch and the executives of News International, the Murdoch subsidiary that controls his newspaper and television holdings in Britain, may be less concerned about the impact that the scandal may have on their political influence than on the more immediate legal challenges they face.

The company’s decision to close The News of the World will not end the scrutiny of the newspaper’s practices by the police, courts and Parliament and by a public panel of inquiry that Mr. Cameron has promised to appoint. Together, these investigations seem likely to make for an inquisition that could run for years, causing further erosion in the credibility of the Murdoch brand and costing News International millions of dollars in potential legal settlements.

…

But for all the questions about how Mr. Cameron will weather the scandal, Mr. Murdoch has been much the larger target. Simon Hoggart, a columnist for The Guardian, described the relief among British politicians at seeing the Murdoch empire brought low.

For years, members of Parliament “have been terrified of the Murdoch press — terrified they might lose support, terrified, in some cases, that their private lives might be exposed,” he wrote. “But that has gone. News International has crossed a line and M.P.’s feel, like political prisoners after a tyrant has been condemned to death by a people’s tribunal, that they are at last free.”

Murdoch’s lament; News of the World sleaze will reappear in his empire

Published on 9 July 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Name me a leading corporate politician who doesn’t bow to Murdoch?

Published on 8 July 2011 in General. 2 Comments Tags: , , , .

The New Statesman says it well:

Finally, our leaders are outraged. The claim that the mobile phone of the murdered teenager Milly Dowler was hacked by the News of the World has been described as “truly dreadful” (David Cameron), “totally shocking” (Ed Miliband) and “grotesque” (Nick Clegg). Could this be the moment that Britain’s spineless politicians begin to break free from the pernicious grip of the Murdoch media empire?

In recent years, there has been no more sickening – and, I should add, undemocratic – spectacle in British public life than that of elected politicians kneeling before the throne of King Rupert. Paying homage in person to the billionaire boss of News Corporation became almost a rite of passage for new party leaders. Tony Blair, famously, flew out to address News Corp’s annual conference on an island off Australia in 1995. “We were thrilled when Tony was invited to be the keynote speaker,” writes Blair’s ex-chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, in his memoir.

The day after his speech in front of the media mogul, an editorial in the Murdoch-owned Sun declared: “Mr Blair has vision, he has purpose and he speaks our language on morality and family life.” By 1997, the Sun – which had heaped such abuse and ridicule on the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock – had officially come out for Blair and, in the wake of his landslide election victory, the new prime minister thanked the Sun for its “magnificent support” that “really did make the difference”.

But it didn’t. “I think the Sun came out for us because they knew we were going to win,” says Blair’s former communications chief, Alastair Campbell, now. In a study for the Centre for Research into Elections and Social Trends in 1999, Professor John Curtice of the University of Strathclyde concluded that it “was not the Sun wot won it in 1997″, adding: “[T]he pattern of vote switching during the campaign amongst readers of the Sun or any other ex-Tory newspaper proved to be much like that of those who did not read a newspaper at all.”

Yet Blair – and, lest we forget, Gordon Brown – continued to hug Murdoch close. “He seemed like the 24th member of the cabinet,” the former Downing Street spin doctor Lance Price has observed. On issues like crime, immigration and Europe, “his voice was rarely heard . . . but his presence was always felt”. Little has changed under Cameron. He appointed Andy Coulson as his director of communications in July 2007 – just six months after the latter had resigned as News of the World editor over the original phone-hacking scandal.

The Tory leader then made his own pilgrimage to the see the Sun King in August 2008, joining Murdoch on his yacht off the coast of Greece. It is said that he removed the liberal Dominic Grieve as shadow home secretary in 2009, on the insistence of News International’s chief executive – and close personal friend – Rebekah Brooks, who is now under pressure to quit over her alleged role in the hacking affair. The Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, waved through proposals to allow Murdoch to buy all of BSkyB – in the midst of the hacking row.

Interview with Nick Davies, key Guardian journalist chasing Murdoch hacking

Published on 8 July 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Paranoia inside the Murdoch bucker

Published on 8 July 2011 in General. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch:

More here, here and here.

Amnesty UK calls for end to privatised removals from Britain

Published on 7 July 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

As Western countries increasingly outsource many aspects of life to unaccountable corporations desperate to make money from misery, resistance is both necessary and moral. Bravo Amnesty UK:

The UK Government must conduct a complete and radical overhaul of the current system of enforced removals from the UK, according to a new briefing and campaign launched today (7 July) by Amnesty International UK.

Private security companies, contracted by the UK Government, have reportedly used dangerous and improper control and restraint techniques. In the 2010 case of Jimmy Mubenga at least, these appear to have resulted in someone’s death. One such technique was nick-named by contractors “Carpet Karaoke”, as it involved forcing an individual’s face down towards the carpet with such force that they were only able to scream inarticulately ‘like a bad karaoke singer’. It involves the seated detainee being handcuffed, with a tight seatbelt through the cuffs and their head pushed down between their legs. There is a serious risk of death by positional asphyxia when this technique is used.

Other cases featured in the Amnesty briefing include a Moroccan national who claims his arm was broken when he was restrained by his arms and legs and was dropped down the stairs of the airplane; and a refused asylum seeker from the Democratic Republic of Congo, who said he struggled to breathe and feared he was going to die when security staff put a knee on his chest and sat on him, after he resisted his removal at Heathrow.

Sources with direct working experience of enforced removals have told Amnesty about serious failings in the training of private contractors conducting forced removals. Staff are trained in control and restraint techniques that are unsuitable for use on aircraft; there is no mandatory training in the safe use of handcuffs and restraints; and there is no watertight system in place to ensure that those accredited to conduct removals have received the required level of training. The reportedly widespread use of sub-contractors to fill staff shortages also raises further serious concerns about training and accountability.