Thursday, January 29, 2015 

You mean these ridiculously subjective rules apply to us as well?

It's hard not to feel at least a smidgen of sympathy for the good burghers behind the Durham free school and the Grindon Hall Christian school in Sunderland.  After all, what's the point of allowing any Tom, Dick or Toby Young to open up a new place of learning if they can't then attempt to instil whichever belief system they adhere to into their young charges?  If the parents want it, clearly they will come.  Who quite frankly is the government or Ofsted to stick their noses in and say a school in an overwhelmingly "White British" area is failing to "prepare its students for life in modern Britain"?  What is this outrageous political correctness being foisted on Christian and Jewish establishments when everyone knows the problem is with the Muslims?  Why is Durham free school having its funding pulled while the "Trojan Horse" schools remain open, albeit unable to recruit new teachers?

A weaker man would at the same time as feeling a twinge of sympathy also have a jolly good laugh.  From the very moment the panic over the schools in Birmingham erupted you could see this was going to happen.  There can't be one rule for schools in areas mostly populated by parents who, like it or not, might prefer education with an Islamic influence for their children, and another for those whom for whatever reason feel the need to bring God into it at every turn.  The fact the schools at the centre of the Trojan Horse affair did not specifically have a Islamic ethos and were rather academies is by the by: start insisting every child must know what British values are, despite the vast majority of adults not having the first clue, and you get the kind of results the Daily Mail has been wailing about.  Kids asked if they know anyone who's gay!  Girl possibly asked if she was a virgin!  Child who says "terrorism" when questioned about Islam branded a bigot!  Schools failed on the grounds of being Christian!

Except, typically, if you bother to read the reports on either school the whole "not preparing students for life in modern Britain" angle, while there, is rather secondary to the schools just not being any good in general.  The Durham free school's governors, damningly, are said to "place too much emphasis on religious credentials when they are recruiting key staff and not enough on seeking candidates with excellent leadership and teaching skills."  I mean, blimey, who could have predicted that might happen with free schools?  Much the same is said of Grindon Hall, where "Many appointments are made without fair and open competition."

This does not make Ofsted's approach, which seems to be to ask young children questions on things they might not have the first idea about for perfectly innocent reasons, a good one.  How can they possibly conclude an answer which indicates lack of preparation for life in modern Britain™ is a reflection of the school's citizenship efforts rather than that of their life outside of school?  Why should the onus be on the school and not on the parents anyway, or would that be a government interference too far?  Worth remembering is that for all the shock and horror over the schools in Birmingham, there was not the slightest evidence presented of active radicalisation or that extremism was being taught.  Cohesion, folks, is a two-way street.  If clinging on to religion in a country that's become secular is seen as marking you out as not wanting to be a part of modern Britain®, might I suggest it could be time to join forces rather than spit out the dummy and say it's not fair?

Most amusing of all is the idea the ultimate architect behind this nonsense, one senor Michael Gove, was trying "to promote a politically correct diversity agenda".  Yes, that's exactly what Mr Drain the Swamp was doing.  Ofsted has been essentially recreated in Gove's image, even though he's now been replaced by Nicky Morgan, who coincidentally voted against gay marriage partly on the basis of, you guessed it, her religious views, so clearly more evidence of bias there.  The wiser heads might have seen the way this was going and spoke out at the time, before the education of more children was disrupted.  Such though is the way of those determined to leave their mark, regardless of the consequences.

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Thursday, May 29, 2014 

Spectators of suicide.

Visitors to our house can be left in no doubt as to which pop stars my daughter Jessica likes.

Drinks are taken from a Suicide cup, their age-worn faces blearily staring out at us at breakfast, lunch and dinner.

The band's debut album, also titled Suicide, is on permanent loop, while at weekends Jessica deafens all and sundry with the lo-fi recordings captured between 1977-78 of their live shows.  Posters of Alan Vega (64) and Martin Rev (age unknown) stare down from her bedroom wall.

Alan is her favourite, she tells me on a daily basis.  She believes he can do no wrong. Last week, when my wife calmly suggested the late Sid Vicious was a better singer than Alan, World War III broke out.

Tears were shed and in the fallout, I found myself under attack for claiming, months earlier, that X-Ray Spex were more successful than Suicide.

I'll admit this makes my daughter rather strange.  While all her friends are devoted to the likes of One Direction, she delights in the ten minute long Frankie Teardrop, a song about a Vietnam veteran who kills his wife and child in despair.

And you know what, I'm glad she likes an obscure proto-punk band who despite their lack of commercial success have been highly influential.  I could be the type of father who is so devoted to the well-being of my daughter that I'm willing to write about her for a national newspaper, pretending to feel let down by her heroes appearing to smoke cannabis.  I could be the type of father who denies taking his little girl to a concert by her favourite group on the basis she's too young, despite knowing full well 8-year-olds are the prime audience for One Direction, and now feels smug about it in light of the shock revelation.  I could be the type of father who finds the fact young men in a beat combo are liable to get tattoos, have pop-star girlfriends and occasionally sample "Mary J" an example of their lack of responsibility, a betrayal of our trust, as proof they are unworthy of my daughter's loving affection, just as other men also will be in the future.

But I'm not.  Mainly because I'm not real, and am just a device to weakly mock a Daily Mail article.  If I was though, I'd be glad my daughter is already at a young age discovering what real life is like.  At times it will feel like you're having axes thrown at you, as happened to Suicide at a gig in Glasgow.  The sooner you learn that, the better.  It might also stop my daughter from rebelling against my overly protective, 19th century values by getting knocked up when she's 15 by a kid called Spud.  Your choice.

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5/29/2014 09:56:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, May 07, 2014 

It gets better, despite the scaremongering.

The case of Hannah Smith is as desperately tragic as they come. The 14-year-old killed herself in August last year, writing a note found by her father asking whether her life was ever going to get any better. Her family say she had been bullied for up to three years, her personality changing markedly after going to a party where she was assaulted, her head twice hit against a wall. She became more insular and introverted, and as the inquest into her death heard, told friends on Facebook she was thinking of ending her life.

As terrible as every teenage suicide is, with the taboos around depression and mental illness still making it an exceptionally difficult topic to broach, in spite of the increased recognition of how many young people do struggle during what is already a difficult period of their lives, Smith's death wouldn't have become national news had it not been blamed in part on cyber-bullying. Coming just after the storm of media interest in the abuse meted out on Twitter to Caroline Criado-Perez and others involved in the Jane Austen banknote campaign, it looked another example of the dark side of the internet and the misuse of online anonymity by those without a care for others and no sense of responsibility.

Only as has now been confirmed at the inquest and was claimed by Ask.fm's owners within days of the story becoming front page news, the messages left on her page were not from bullies, but written by Hannah herself.  Giving evidence, investigating officer Wayne Simmons said the messages had originated from the same IP address as Hannah's, and also ruled out that the could have been spoofed.  On the balance of probabilities, she had resorted to a relatively new form of self-harm - attacking herself via different accounts, whether in an attempt to garner sympathy from friends and get them to defend her, or as just another representation of the self-loathing she felt.

The tabloids, and indeed, the prime minister, were not to know this had been the case.  Nonetheless, putting all of the blame onto Ask.fm and by turn social networking as they did, with calls for the site to be shut down and David Cameron supporting a boycott, was precisely the kind of response that hinders rather than helps with understanding how the way teenagers live has changed so radically in a little over a decade.  Cyber-bullying is certainly a problem - I for one am beyond thankful I left school behind just before the inexorable rise of social media, when the main hangout was MSN Messenger rather than sites like Ask.  Anonymous trolling or bullying by those not personally known to the victim is however very much a rarity, compared to the online continuation of torment by schoolmates, something that can make it seem as though there is absolutely no escape from your own personal hell.

This emphasis on the medium rather than message and on one specific factor as the overriding cause is to ignore most of what we know about depression and mental illness.  At times there can be one underlying reason - be it bullying, general unhappiness with life, the end of a relationship, the death of a relative or friend, but often it's a culmination of a number of things.  There are also usually warning signs, in Hannah's case both physical and mental self-harm, as well as talking about suicide.  Even if it were possible, shutting down somewhere like Ask would only result in another such site popping up in its place.  Understandable as it is to want to try and control these new apparent threats, it's just as undesirable and overbearing as doing the equivalent of wrapping children in cotton wool.

The danger is in overreaction, curtailing something that has given traditional outsiders or those being bullied precisely because they are "different" a refuge, a place where they can be reassured their interests or sexuality are not weird or character flaws.  For every teenager whose death has been blamed in some way on the internet, whether rightly or wrongly, there are hundreds of thousands, almost certainly millions whose lives have been transformed or made worth continuing with thanks to making new friends through social media or otherwise.  Without wanting to turn this into old versus new media, that's something the newspapers, always searching for the next passing frenzy, have to be forced if necessary to recognise.

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Tuesday, March 18, 2014 

No sympathy for the devil.

There's only one question editors should ask themselves when offered photographs of a famous figure who has just been told the most shattering news: how would I like to be splashed across the next morning's papers, grief etched across my face, in what ought to be regardless of it happening in a public place, an intensely private moment?

If they would truly answer that reporting the level of grief outweighs the considerations of not intruding into it, something that the PCC code makes clear should always be approached sensitively, then they should make that case themselves. More likely is as is so often the case, should any paper even dream of reporting on the private life of a fellow editor, there would soon be phone calls a plenty and threats flying, with both sides usually backing down. Hence why the tabloids didn't report on Rebekah Wade (as was) splitting up with Ross Kemp, let alone the employment tribunal finding that Andy Coulson bullied and unfairly dismissed Matt Driscoll from the News of the World.

However Paul Dacre and the editors at the Mirror and Star defended it to themselves, they must have seen just how distasteful it was to fill all but their entire front pages with the image of Mick Jagger in such obvious distress. The Sun, perhaps stung by the criticism it received following the death of Reeva Steenkamp, having decided an image of the model appearing to undo her bikini top was the best way to illustrate the news, opted for a far smaller inset of the image used by the others, still obviously objectionable but not on the same scale as using it to fill the page.

It does of course raises questions about what now is beyond the pale. The extremely long lens shots of the People's Kate sunbathing topless were, but the Sun decided Harry buck-ass naked in a hotel wasn't.  The tabloids had an attack of the vapours when an Italian documentary used the images of Princess Diana lying mortally injured in the back of the Mercedes, despite having arguably contributed to the crash, yet don't think an ashed faced rock star learning of a personal tragedy deserves the same protection. This isn't about Leveson, as you shouldn't need a judge to tell you to feel the most basic compassion and human empathy. It's about a tabloid press that has never set itself a boundary it hasn't subsequently broken.

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Saturday, October 12, 2013 

Let the shitstorm commence.

Paul Dacre, then, has broken cover.  It's interesting that like so many tabloid editors before him he won't actually be interviewed and instead leaves that to his underlings, only prepared to engage with critics on his own terms, but such is the way of those who demand accountability from everyone else and accept none themselves.

A few points:

1. Dacre's obsession with the BBC is a wonderful projection of how he seems to imagine the left is obsessed with his paper (although it must be said, some are).  It would be nice to get an audit on just how many hours of programming were devoted to discussing the Mail's attack on Ralph Miliband, but I'm willing to wager right now that it doesn't amount to hundreds.  Dacre and the Mail also wouldn't attract quite as much hostility if they didn't resort to hyperbole at the first opportunity; it was obvious by Thursday that some within Labour were trying to exploit the issue shamelessly, and the use of Alastair Campbell was questionable.  The point remains however that the BBC was entitled to cover the issue when it wasn't just Labour or the "Twitterati" but politicians on all sides who raised concerns.

2. Even now Dacre is repeating his and Geoffrey Levy's lies about Ralph Miliband.  He did not give "unqualified support" to Russian totalitarianism until the mid-50s, and besides there is nothing in Levy's article to back up that claim.  As Chris and a myriad others pointed out, being a Marxist does not make you a Stalinist or a Leninist, which is something that either the pair cannot get their heads round, or as you have to suspect, are being willfully misleading about.  If we want to get into how political beliefs have resulted in "evil", then we have to discuss both right and left, as well as how governments both Labour and Tory have supported authoritarians and dictators when it's suited them.  If hating Britain is not liking its institutions, as Dacre has repeatedly argued, then he clearly loathes modern Britain.  Now that is a paradox.

3. Dacre, again like numerous tabloid editors before him, justifies his paper's viewpoints on the basis that he's reflecting his readers' interests, which just so happen to also be his.  Regardless of the political party in power, in Dacre world Britain is constantly ruled over by the liberal left, and all Daily Mail readers object most strongly to this elite and their contempt for ordinary people.  In Dacre world the politicians don't fight like rats in a sack for the support of the middle classes and the centre ground, they only represent the "metropolitan classes" and sneer at decent working Britons.  Only the Mail stands up and protects these salt of the earth victims from having their interests ignored, and thank goodness it does.

4.  Gosh, Labour really is a ghastly party, isn't it?  No other political party has engaged in "corruption" like that of Damian McBride, except all of them (nor has any journalist ever facilitated the exchange of smears).  The Mail only focused on Ralph Miliband because his son wants to reintroduce price fixing, an unacceptable form of state intervention quite unlike Help to Buy, or the Stalinist seizing of land, quite unlike the compulsory purchase order legislation that has been on the statute book for decades.  They even covered up unnecessary and horrific deaths in NHS hospitals, except the Care Quality Commission disagrees entirely with that interpretation.

5. When everything else has failed, resort to a straw man argument.  Who suggested that the Ralph Miliband article necessitated statutory regulation?  Precisely no one, but that didn't stop Tory politicians from acting as though that's what the criticism implied, nor does it stop Dacre now.  Dacre would have a point in saying politicians can't be trusted with the freedom of the press after this week's assault on the Graun, if err, his paper hadn't led the charge after friendly briefings from those same politicians and indeed MI5 itself.  Amazingly, he attacks the BBC more than he does the Graun for "ignoring" the story, as though leading on it repeatedly over the last couple of days was trying to push it down the news agenda.  Apparently they should have focused more on Jack Straw's criticisms of the paper.  After all, who better than the foreign secretary who called the initial reports on the rendition programme "conspiracy theories" at the same time as he signed off on the rendition of two Libyan men back to Gaddafi's torture chambers to lecture the Guardian on the importance of such things remaining secret?

6. Which says everything about what this has really been about.  After accusing the Graun of treachery, he now of course wants to get the paper on side in rejecting the newly agreed press charter.  While I think the last couple of days has made clear both the press and government charter are untenable, the idea that you suddenly forget both sides have said you're helping terrorists and choose one over the other is hilarious.

7. Dacre says if you dish it out, you take it.  Except as is obvious, he doesn't take it, he throws even more shit back in return.  To quote Glenn, it's time to throw so much shit back at him that he can't pick up shit, he can't throw shit, he can't do shit.  On your marks everyone.

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10/12/2013 09:00:00 am | | | links to this post

Thursday, October 10, 2013 

The feral press part 2.

Earlier in the week, Chris made a few good points about how us sad sacks tend to exaggerate the influence of the media in general.  It's an argument I'm more inclined to agree with than I was in the past, but I do think that over the longer-term biases against benefit claimants, asylum seekers and immigrants in general have had an impact that has contributed to the policies we're now seeing.  Of special concern is there's evidence that in some instances, the government and media have openly colluded with each other in such campaigns, as Peter Oborne revealed David Blunkett had with the Sun back in 2003.

It's more than reasonable then in light of the events of the last couple of days to wonder if the coalition has informally done a similar deal with the right-wing press over their sudden rage at the Guardian's revelations about GCHQ.  First we had the speech from Andrew Parker that gave them the laughable line that terrorists were being handed gifts via the Snowden files, accompanied by briefings that went even further.  Yesterday these were backed by the spokesman for the prime minister, who said he agreed entirely with Parker's choice of language, while today both Clegg and Cameron have come out and said the Graun is in effect helping terrorists.  The Mail and others meanwhile have further upped the ante by saying the paper "helps Britain's enemies" or is downright traitorous.

Quite apart from how this makes clear just how little it takes for the Mail to view someone or an institution as either hating Britain or guilty of treachery, it provides a quite wonderful contrast with last week.  Then we had the likes of Michael Gove defending the Daily Mail's right to tell lies about a dead man, which if said of someone alive would almost certainly have brought a libel suit, while other Tory politicians cautioned everyone to be mindful of the freedom of the press, as though criticism of the Mail equated to wanting to restrict its right to embarrass itself.  7 days later and we don't just have politicians attacking a newspaper on the grounds that its actions might have helped someone somewhere who wishes us harm, we have other sections of the press joining in, without so much as a thought to publish and be damned, as they have so often argued for in the past.

Criticising the Guardian on the basis that it hasn't properly thought through what its revelations could lead to is one thing.  To bring treachery, helping terrorists or putting lives at risk into it is quite another.  It's as though we've never been through these kind of controversies before: every single time the security services and government have shrieked about national security and lives being put at risk, and every single time they either fail to produce a single piece of evidence to back up their claims or they quietly drop them.  The prosecution against Chelsea Manning failed to provide one example of someone coming to harm due to the release of the files she leaked, and that was despite Wikileaks putting up the raw files for download, against the wishes of the media organisations they had worked with.  The claim by the prosecution counsel quoted in the Telegraph that agents have had to move due to the Snowden files isn't just ridiculous, it's an insult to our intelligence.

Despite having repeated the Guardian's articles, if we're to believe the Mail, Times and Telegraph, they now don't think the public have the right to know exactly what their intelligence agencies are up to.  They shouldn't have been told they were attempting to "master the internet", tapping into fibre optic cables and sucking up every single piece of data they can, that they're trying to break internet encryption, with all the potential consequences that could have, that they've been working hand in glove with the biggest internet companies behind the scenes, despite the denials of both in the past, and that all of this has been deemed lawful on the basis of a certificate a minister signs every six months, to focus on just the most notable things we've learned.  Indeed, according to the Mail all this has helped our enemies, while others quoted with approval suggest the paper should be prosecuted.

As John Kampfner points out, in the past the Mail has been (rightly) outraged over certain abuses by the security services.  That this time round it's taken the side of the government can't just be explained by anger at the Graun not agreeing with them on press regulation; it's that this is a government of a blue rather than a red hue.  It might not like Cameron much, but last week emphasised how it can expect nothing from a Labour government under Ed Miliband.  That their part in this campaign against the Graun betrays their readers' right to know seemingly doesn't matter, but then again, it never has in the past either.

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10/10/2013 07:37:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, October 09, 2013 

The feral press, pathetic in the face of real power.

Wouldn't it be lovely to have a free press?  You know, the sort that, rather than concentrating on trivia or revelations along the lines that an X Factor contestant has two cousins who are convicted murderers, actually undertook investigations, exposed wrongdoing, and held governments and the state to account?  If you were to believe the likes of the Mail and the Sun, that's exactly what we have and exactly what we stand to lose should the government's royal charter be used to set-up a new press regulator.  That it seems the same newspapers that plunged the entire British media into a crisis will instead go their own way yet again doesn't enter into it.

Nonetheless, if you ever needed further evidence what we in fact have is an industry that doth protest too much, you only need to see how the Mail, Times and Telegraph all decided today that rather than stand up for press freedom and journalistic integrity, they would instead side with the government and the securocrats against the Guardian.  Not only did they focus in laser like on what was a mere couple of paragraphs in the speech by MI5 director general Andrew Parker, in which he didn't so much as mention either the Graun or Edward Snowden, they were also helpfully briefed by "sources" who told them that "Parker is furious about the Snowden leaks", that the Graun has essentially provided a "handbook" for terrorists in how to avoid detection and that they "find it incomprehensible" there needed to be a public debate about such piffling matters.

When David Miranda was detained at Heathrow under section 7 of the Terrorism Act, plenty of people were quick to point out the number of Sun and former News of the World journalists who have been arrested, many of whom remain on bail, not knowing if they will yet face charges.  It was a fair enough point, and there probably hasn't been enough coverage in the ex-broadsheet press about the impact of the phone hacking investigations on journalism in general.  It's surely equally absurd though to then regard Miranda's detention, and as Alan Rusbridger later revealed, the pyrrhic smashing of a hard drive containing the Snowden files, as anything other than intimidation of the most unsubtle kind.  For the Mail, which unlike the other right-wing tabloids opposed New Labour's worst excesses on civil liberties, to tacitly agree with the government that the real danger is not from surveillance programmes which have grown exponentially without any oversight but the journalism which exposed them is a betrayal of the very values it claims to uphold.

There are obviously other factors at work here other than just anger at the Graun for not going along with the press barons on the new regulator.  The paper was the Mail's harshest critic last week during the Ralph Miliband row (with the possible exception of the Mirror)  and it was the Graun's own Jonathan Freedland who started the ball rolling with his column in the Jewish Chronicle on whether there was a whiff of anti-Semitism about the original article and then editorial (I didn't think there was, but can see why some felt that way).  This doesn't however explain why the Telegraph has took the government/securocrat line, especially when it was one of the few to follow up the Guardian's initial revelations.  The idea that either the Times or Torygraph would have refused to publish the Snowden files had he gone to either rather than Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald is laughable in itself.

The simplest explanation is that the majority of the press, and indeed MPs, are in thrall to the security state.  Parker's speech yesterday was in fact for the most part a sober, dry, and rather dull update on where MI5 stands at this moment.  Contrary to some reports, he did not say that the threat from terrorism was increasing, rather than it was diversifying, as anyone who's watched the news over the past year can tell.  Unlike previous holders of the job he didn't engage in scaremongering, and even suggested that some had done so in the past.  Whether it's true that as he said, the number of those who wish to do us harm remains about the same as it has for the past few years we simply can't tell, but it wasn't by any means an attempt to alarm.  Where he did venture into politics, apart from the nonsense about "gifts" and "handing the advantage to the terrorists" was in his claims that the intelligence agencies are well regulated and monitored, as well as all but asking for the powers that GCHQ already has to be given a proper legal basis.

All of which are the sentiments you would expect from a MI5 director general.  It's when the government agrees with those sentiments, and essentially accuses a newspaper of helping terrorists that we get into territory that ought to receive a response from all those who claim to believe in freedom of expression and the press.  The idea that terrorists or anyone else aren't already highly paranoid about how they communicate is laughable, unless they're the kind we've mostly dealt with of late, the incompetents.  The revelations about Prism and Tempora merely made clear what we and they already suspected.  Indeed, the New York Times reports that the US letting slip it was listening in to communications between al-Qaida leaders has had a far more chilling effect than anything that's emerged about the NSA and GCHQ.

The securocrat attitude is that nothing they don't reveal themselves should enter the public domain. And who can blame them? The last few years have seen their methods during the first stage of the war on terror when they were complicit in the rendering and torture of British residents brought into harsh light. They then lied through their teeth to the Intelligence and Security Committee about what they knew, even claiming they couldn't understand how the Americans were getting those they had captured to talk. They feel so secure in their position that they can make outrageous claims along the line that the Snowden files have dealt them their biggest blow in their history, as though the Cambridge Five never existed.  That these ridiculous sentiments are then repeated in a supposed feral press without criticism only underlines how supine they are in the face of real power.

When the media won't do the very basics, how can we expect those with even less inclination to do so? Just remember, if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear. William Hague said as much.

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10/09/2013 09:50:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, October 03, 2013 

No one to blame but himself.

When the Mail gets it wrong, it tends to get it spectacularly, boneheadedly, irredeemably wrong. Ever since Geoffrey Levy and (presumably) Paul Dacre decided it was a great idea to portray the deceased father of the Labour leader as a man who hated the country that gave him refuge and which he had to request to serve in the navy for, it has just kept on digging. Mocked for claiming a juvenile diary entry proved his loathing, it shifted to claiming his Marxism is why he hated our freedom. Except, as scholars and those who were taught by him have pointed out, his Marxism never extended to apologia for the Soviet Union or any other communist state. His socialism was democratic, just to the left of that offered by Labour. All they can point to is that his home played host to other thinkers on the left, not all of whom entirely rejected communism. By the same yardstick countless of those on the right could be equally condemned for their cosying up to authoritarians and dictators.  That his son is now the leader of the party he wrote would always betray the working class also gives the lie to the idea that he is a "dangerous" influence.

Quite what the executives who sent the reporter to the memorial service for Miliband's uncle possibly thought they would achieve is therefore difficult to ascertain. Did they seriously imagine those there would tell them something they could use? Or was this simply classic tabloid behaviour, deliberately pestering them simply because Ed had dared to respond in kind?  The PCC code (which is still in operation, fact fans) forbids journalists from entering private sections of hospitals unless there is a public interest in doing so, which while Paul Dacre would inevitably claim there was, is quite apparently not there.

It's Dacre's role since the beginning which is major point in all this.  Was he the one who decided upon the "man who hated Britain" headline?  Was he the executive who sent the Mail on Sunday hack to Professor Harry Keen's memorial?  And was he also responsible for deciding this morning that the paper shouldn't apologise, the MoS editor Geordie Greig, who was apparently unaware of the doorstepping, having told Miliband one would be issued this morning?  If so, then he seems to have made miscalculation after miscalculation, not expecting that Miliband would go to Rothermere himself with his complaint.

One thing people shouldn't be getting however is carried away.  While this has been classic Mail behaviour, it pales in comparison to the kind those who aren't leaders of the opposition have gone through.  For now at least, Miliband and the Labour leadership have judged their response just about right, but the letter to Rothermere almost crosses the boundary between justified complaint and the suggestion that they should think twice before writing anything.  Miliband might be dead right in saying that this entire episode is indicative of the Mail's culture and practices, or at least is of Paul Dacre's, as that's clearly the sentiment being expressed, but there's an extremely fine line between criticising newspapers for going beyond what's acceptable and politicians being seen to be potentially intimidating their critics.

That, frankly, is what some either within Labour or now outside have been attempting to do.  We can all agree that Alastair Campbell's lambasting of the Mail's Jon Steafel on Newsnight made for great television, yet Campbell is the absolute last person to be taking the moral high ground when it comes to smear stories.  One aspect of the Damian McBride book serialisation which was undeveloped was that neither he nor Campbell, or those in the Blair camp after Campbell left could have run their operations without the help of journalists willing to write up their attacks on each other.  Politics is only as dirty as the media that facilitate such briefings.  Nor is this a Milly Dowler moment, and for the likes of John Prescott to be trying to make it into one by suggesting to advertisers that they should stop doing business with the Mail is absurd.

The most significant thing is that unlike during the 80s, when tabloid smearing of Labour figures was par for the course, this time politicians of all parties have been explicit in condemning the Mail.  True, Cameron and Boris Johnson claimed not to have read or seen the piece and so only said they would defend their fathers from unfair criticism as well, but others such as Francis Maude have gone far beyond that.  With the Sun clearly in decline, not least thanks to Murdoch's decision to put it behind a paywall, the Mail is without doubt the most powerful newspaper in the country.  If some Tories are now prepared to go against it, it's indicative of just how quickly the influence the media barons once had is declining.  And how delicious that Dacre has no one to blame but himself.

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10/03/2013 10:15:00 pm | | | links to this post

Tuesday, October 01, 2013 

Better living through irony.

It used to be said, by our more patronising commentators, that Americans didn't "get" irony. They always have of course, it's just that different countries have different traditions of comedy. To get things off to an exceptionally meta start, it's highly ironic that some of us seem to have forgotten what irony is.

Like, for instance, referring to the Labour leader as "Red Ed" non-ironically.  As an insult or jibe, it just doesn't work on any level other than it rhyming.  The closest Ed or the party he leads come to being "red" in the old socialist style is that he answered in the affirmative recently when asked whether he would bring socialism back, when he clearly meant social democracy, the same principle part of the coalition continues to profess to adhere to, and that the party laughably continues to sing the "Red Flag" come the end of conference.  It signifies about as much as the way Putin's Russia continues to display the ever deteriorating rubberised corpse of Lenin.  Think of the way the Sun took to calling Heather Mills Lady Mucca, on the basis that she had once posed for some softcore snaps, highly similar to those appearing on the paper's third page every day.  It was and is phenomenally stupid, but seems to please the little minds in charge of the nation's gutter rags.

Then again, part of our media and political class don't seem to like having even an occasional joke, let alone descend into silliness for say, the reason of having fun.  I can't quite believe I'm defending Godfrey Bloom, but the whole "sluts" row at the UKIP conference was mindboggling in its inanity.  I don't care whether he was using "sluts" in either the sexually promiscuous or lazy sense of the word, everyone in attendance laughed.  It wasn't meant seriously, no one in the room was offended, and had it not been for the fact he then went out and smacked Michael Crick with the conference programme, it most likely would have been brushed off just as his "bongo bongo" jibe was, when he should have been held to account then.  That the UKIP programme declared that the "new face of politics" was entirely white, as befits a party that can be summed up as being consumed with first world problems, ought to have been enough rope to hang them in the first place.

Not that we can just point the finger at those who think politics and humour shouldn't mix outside of Yes, Minister, The Thick of It or sketch columns.  Last week also saw Alastair Campbell reaching new levels of sanctimony, touring television studios lecturing Tesco and Asda for the crime of selling Halloween costumes that apparently stigmatised or belittled those with mental health problems, reinforcing prejudices that we should instead be seeking to overcome.  Fine sentiments indeed, but coming from the man who did more than anyone other than bloggers to paint Gordon Brown as "psychologically flawed", to put it in the politest possible terms, and over fucking Halloween costumes that simply reproduced age-old tropes from horror films and would never have been taken seriously by anyone other than those looking to be offended, came uncomfortably close to beggaring belief.  I couldn't give a toss about Halloween, but if for one night a year people want to dress up as figures from history or in other potentially offensive ways in the spirit of enjoying themselves, perhaps the rest of us should, within reason, get over ourselves? Yes?  No. Of course not.

Then we come to the levels of hypocrisy as well as irony in the Daily Mail deciding to smear Red Ed's long deceased old man.  As someone born in the 80s, I don't remember the good old days when the Tory press used to savage the "loony left" time after time, and have only read about it.  When such overbearing Tory bias hits you straight in the face then, as it has since Miliband's speech last week, it's a bit of a shock.  Yes, the Sun was bad during Labour's last term when it declared the country was on the brink of anarchy, even as crime continued to fall, something it believes is happening now the natural party of government is back in charge, but this is something else.  We saw a bit of it after Nick Clegg's performances in the debates, and earlier in the year during the Eastleigh by-election as the Mail splashed on Lord Rennard repeatedly, but to really invoke the hammer and sickle?  If it wasn't so ridiculous and truly meant it would be comical.

The Mail describes Ed's piece in response to Geoffrey Levy's obviously Paul Dacre-approved hatchet job as "tetchy and menacing".  Anyone who reads it can see it is neither.  It is in fact a tender defence of his father, setting out exactly what he owed to this country and how he loved rather than hated it.  You would have thought that Dacre, notoriously sensitive about the bringing up of the Mail's support for the Blackshirts in the 30s, might have realised that questioning the dedication of a man who fought for Britain would lead to critics pointing to the treachery of those who the Mail applauded, but apparently not.  Levy and Dacre in their deliberately obtuse manner can't imagine why a 17-year-old Jewish refugee from the Nazis was suspicious of nationalisms of all varieties.  The only other evidence it has for his hatred for this country is that he attacked the establishment, the self same establishment that Dacre has repeatedly said he rejoices in "tweaking the nose of".

Giving up any semblance of reasonable critique, the paper's editorial in response to Miliband's demand for a right of reply indulges in classic red-baiting, as Martin Kettle writes.  Ralph Miliband was a life-long Marxist, ergo even if he didn't support the Soviet Union, he "validated this most pernicious doctrine", which presumably is the "evil legacy" the editorial is concerned with.  It then lets the cat out of the bag by going straight on to the paper's monomaniacal obsession with the proposed royal charter on press regulation, as though whatever emerges from that tortured process will be anything approximate to actual state control of the press.  Indeed, when press freedom is genuinely threatened, as it has been by the government's response to the Guardian's revelations of surveillance of the internet by GCHQ, the Mail has taken the side of... the government.

Irony, as a rather good band once had it, smothers us.  It infects our speech and actions whether we like it or not.  Some, however, like the Mail, ignore the way it nags and carry on regardless.  Like George Osborne promising to run a budget surplus if the Tories are re-elected when he couldn't even keep his promise to eliminate the deficit in this parliament, thanks to the plan he now lauds as having laid the foundations for the recovery, just the three years later than scheduled.  That level of chutzpah still doesn't come close though to that of the newspaper that pretends, as Miliband scathingly put it, to uphold "the best of British values of decency", even as it has repeatedly attacked and smeared those who can't answer for themselves.  As when the Sun attacked Gordon Brown for his handwriting, the Mail might well find that this time it's gone that one step beyond the pale.

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10/01/2013 09:45:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, August 08, 2013 

Save us from the trolls Dave!

There is growing pressure on social networking sites to do something about something tonight, as politicians and newspapers alike blame them for every single problem in the world today.

The prime minister David Cameron led the way, urging everyone to boycott ask.fm until it stopped working as any sort of service.  Speaking to Sky News, Cameron said: "These people have got to step up to the chicken basket and show some responsibility.  Simply allowing users of the site to block anonymous messages isn't good enough.  If someone makes nuisance phone calls, we obviously don't hold the caller responsible; we blame BT for allowing the call through in the first place, even if they have so-called call blocking available.  The same goes for the postal service.  If a mail bomb slips through the net and it kills someone, then obviously the postman who delivered it should be held accountable.  It's just common sense."

Expanding on his theme, Cameron continued: "Now while it's true that I hadn't heard of this ask.fm website until yesterday, that shouldn't stop me from talking about something I know absolutely nothing about.  I really do encourage a boycott, as I've also been told that the one organised by the delightful Caitlin Moran on Twitter was such a huge success last Sunday, at least until the new Doctor Who was announced.  If we stop using these sites, there's absolutely no chance whatsoever that people will simply move elsewhere, or that bullies will strike offline rather than online.  We must drain this eco-system of hate."

The tabloids meanwhile have called for more meaningful action.  Both the Sun and Daily Mail have demanded that ask.fm be banned, once again demonstrating their profound understanding of how the internet works.  Neither paper has any truck with bullies, as the comments section on the Mail website regularly demonstrates, regarded universally as a haven of informed, reasonable debate.  Likewise, columnists Richard Littlejohn and Jan Moir would never dream of writing about minorities in a prejudiced or inflammatory style.  As for the Sun, only those with extremely long memories can recall that during its campaign for Baby Peter the social workers involved with his case were urged to kill themselves by those commenting online, something that might cause a few regrets considering that two of the paper's journalists charged in connection with Operation Elveden have since had their own mental health problems.

We asked a random nerd slamming away at a keyboard for his take on these events.  "It's all a bit knee jerk, isn't it?  For a start, we don't know exactly why these four young people took their own lives.  Were they just being bullied on ask.fm, or were they being bullied offline as well?  Did they have other relationship problems, or had any relatives or friends recently been ill or died?  I've had depression myself, and I find it difficult to believe that it was just bullying online that led them to take such a drastic step.  It could have been the trigger, or the last straw certainly, but we can't just blame a website without knowing the full facts, and you would have thought anti-bullying and children's campaigners would know that."

"Besides, why is it that parental responsibility seems such a foreign concept when it comes to the internet?  Yes, it's difficult if you don't understand the technology and the slang, and when you can't have complete control due to almost every device now having net access, but clearly you have to talk with your kids about the sites they use and let them know they can always come to you if they don't feel safe.  It's no use blaming a service if you don't use the privacy settings it has available.  Those truly responsible here are the pathetic little shits who think it's hilarious to tell 14-year-old girls they're fat and ugly and should die. How about we go after the messengers rather than the message provider?"

"As for the tabloids, could you possibly tell it's the silly season? Any passing frenzy will do, even if it's likely that the internet as a whole helps those who feel excluded in real life far more than it harms those already vulnerable (just look at the It Gets Better campaign). They're also looking for anything to distract from their own far from honourable record when it comes to treating those who come to their attention with respect, especially as argument continues over the royal charter to establish the new press regulator."

A reward (a wine gum and a can of cream soda) is being offered for any information that leads to the tracking down of a Labour shadow minister.

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8/08/2013 07:18:00 pm | | | links to this post

Tuesday, July 30, 2013 

Political dog-whistling: still not working in 2013.

It took a while, but by the end of last week the government's billboard campaign telling illegal immigrants to "go home or face arrest" had attracted the wider press attention it deserved from the outset.  One of the old chestnuts we often hear when it comes to debating immigration is that politicians of old shut down debate by calling people racist.  Accurate or not, we now have the opposite problem: politicians are afraid to say that some of those opposed to immigration are racist, as one thing racists don't like being told is that they are racist.  Hence despite criticism of the campaign coming from the Lib Dems, a few Labour MPs (although not the leadership, again presumably because they fear it being used as "evidence" of their weakness) and even Nigel Farage for goodness sake, who in the next breath scaremongers about a Romanian crime wave, none have called a spade a spade.

It's therefore only lunatics on the left and the "pro-immigration industry" that believe such a straightforward message is racist, says Mark Harper, the immigration minister described by Nick Clegg as "a very good guy", given space in the Mail. He doesn't expand on just which organisations make up the pro-immigration industry, but perhaps he means the Office for Budget Responsibility, set-up by the coalition, which only last week published research on the continuing benefits. Harper for his part doesn't even bother to engage with the argument as to why the billboards are racist, which is that they reprise the old NF slogan and play on the most obvious of racist sentiments, he instead uses attack as defence, saying that those critical are encouraging the breaking of the law. To call this a non sequitur doesn't quite cover it; a billboard threatening illegal immigrants with arrest if they don't leave voluntarily is hardly the most striking example of the law being enforced. Rather, it only underlines the reality: it's completely unfeasible to deport every person here illegally.  Continuing to claim it is only raises unrealistic expectations which then feed further discontent.

For such a short piece, Harper makes up for it by packing in as many distortions as he can. He conflates perfectly legal migration with the illegal by going into the standard riff on Labour's supposed "open borders" policy, says there is evidence that migration has pushed down wages when there's plenty (PDF) that contradicts the claim, that some areas have faced "intolerable" pressure due to migration, despite services continuing to function, then tops it off by saying the government is controlling immigration, if failing to meet their target of bringing net migration down to 100,000 by 53,000 can possibly be considered controlling.

He ends by saying that if the poster campaign helps tackle illegal immigration, who could oppose it? Considering a poll for the Sun suggests that there's almost an even split between those in favour of and those opposed, a remarkable result when there's such a prevailing sentiment against immigration, it suggests plenty don't like such "stupid and offensive" campaigns, even if they don't regard them as racist.  Seeing as Harper doesn't even repeat the actual wording used on the billboards, perhaps he secretly feels the same.  Either way, someone ought to explain to Lynton Crosby that if dog-whistling didn't work in 2005, it isn't going to now.

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7/30/2013 08:32:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, April 04, 2013 

Apathetic about tabloid predictability.

I think I've all but reached the point where I no longer care what the tabloids think about a whole range of issues.  I say this as I'm struggling to raise any emotion other than "meh" at the Daily Mail and Sun's blaming of the welfare state for the deaths of six of the children of Mick Philpott.  It's one thing to get upset when Jan Moir declares "there was nothing natural" about the death of Stephen Gately, or Richard Littlejohn says the murder of five sex workers was "no great loss" in the grand scheme of things, or when the same man makes a vindictive attack on Lucy Meadows, who later decides to end her life having complained about being harassed by the media, to pick on just three of a whole host of thoroughly despicable pieces that have appeared in the Mail.  When it comes to attacking the welfare system, it's just expected.  I knew full well when the verdicts came through on Tuesday that regardless of what the judge said when sentencing Philpott, his wife Mairead and their friend Paul Mosley, the state would in one way or another feel the full force of Paul Dacre's ire.  It was as predictable as yesterday's front page was dull. 

Mrs Justice Thirlwall's sentencing remarks, which are well worth reading in full, make no concessions to the Mail's view. She only mentions benefits once, to make clear that any payments to Mairead or Lisa Willis, Philpott's live-in mistress, were paid into his bank account as a measure of his control over them. Despite the prosecution's suggestions that a side motive to the setting of the fire was an attempt to get a larger council house, or that his determination to get Willis back was to keep the child benefit payments he received for her 5 children, Justice Thirlwall makes no allusions to either.  She puts the onus entirely on Philpott's twin obsessions with Willis and his local image as the head of a large family, a man who brooked no dissent. The loss of Willis and her children was a slight too far, and he was prepared to concoct the most ridiculous, dangerous and imbecilec plan imaginable in an attempt to get them back.

This isn't to say that there isn't room for debate on whether families should continue to receive extra benefit for every child they have, although the idea this should be restricted to just two certainly is ridiculous. The media seem to fluctuate between damning immigration and then wanting to punish larger families, as though the problem we will be facing shortly of an ageing population with fewer workers will just go away.
 
It's extremely dubious as to whether this would have had any major impact on Philpott's lifestyle in any case. They were apparently receiving £8,000 in child benefit a year, yet the total with other benefits is being quoted as being £60,000. Whether this is accurate or not seems dubious: both Mairead and Willis were working, but apparently also claiming income support (which is still going through the process of abolition, even before the introduction of universal credit). Whether Philpott himself was claiming anything is also unclear: he claimed to be a house husband, suggesting he was living off his wife and mistress, but it wouldn't be a surprise if he was also on income support or JSA. Whatever the merits or otherwise of the benefit cap, clearly if they were getting £60,000 a year this would shortly be about to cease, which drastically diminishes the chances of anyone deciding Philpott's was a model worth emulating.

But honestly, who would?  Philpott only succeeded in living as he did through taking advantage of vulnerable women, then controlling them through threats and violence.  He used his children not just as a status symbol but as another way to ensure their mothers would think twice before leaving.  How would they cope on their own with so many children when they had nowhere to go, especially if their past life had been just as grim as their current one?

Hopi Sen writes that somewhere along the line we failed the women he treated as chattel, and arguable as this is, it will be interesting to see what the serious case review into social service dealings with the family finds.  If it does turn out that regardless of how their parents lived, the children were being adequately cared for as it seems they were, although whether by Philpott himself is questionable, then it raises the question of just what the state was supposed to do.  It can't tell people how to live their lives if they aren't actively harming anyone else, nor intervene simply on the number of children being born if the parents were capable of looking after them.

Should Philpott himself have been monitored more closely after his release from jail, especially if the relationship with Mairead while she was underage was sexual?  Perhaps, but this would have required resources beyond what are currently available, especially if no complaints or concerns were passed on.  As so often, some seem to want it both ways: that the state stays out of the lives of "decent" people while interfering ever more with those deemed to be feckless or shameless, or as it seems will soon be the case, not earning enough.  The reality is that the state has to be blind, and any further powers handed to social workers will have to apply across the board. 
 
Despite what a local Tory councillor said, the Philpotts clearly are the exception to end all exceptions.  As the statistics compiled by the Guardian datablog show, there are only around 2,000 families in the country where there are 8 or more children living under one roof, and only a fraction of those are on one form or another of out of work benefits.  The current trend is in fact towards smaller families, as alluded to above.  It's also hardly just the supposed shameless that have unusual sexual relationships, or as damaging ones as in this case: there might not be that many examples of a controlling man "persuading" his wife to actually let his mistress move in with them, but there are numerous where wives put up with their husband's philandering, or indeed where husbands bear being cuckolded, to not even concern ourselves with swinging couples.

The fact is that people aren't stupid.  They might regard the welfare state as not helping in this instance, but it clearly wasn't to blame for the deaths of those 6 children.   That was the responsibility purely of Mick Philpott, aided and abetted by his wife and their friend Paul Mosley, as even Anne Widdecombe has acknowledged.  Who knows whether or not AN Wilson genuinely believes that it's the fault of benefits, just as you don't really know whether or not he supports sterilisation, but Paul Dacre isn't that obtuse.  As he said in his speech to the Society of Editors some years back, his main aim as much as anything is to "tweak the noses of the liberalocracy which effectively run Britain".  He and the Mail want the Guardianistas and everyone else to react in the way they have.  The best way to respond is to just let him get on with it.  This isn't to say there aren't lessons to be learned from the Philpott case, but the Mail most certainly isn't providing the answers.

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4/04/2013 08:32:00 pm | | | links to this post

Tuesday, February 19, 2013 

A plastic newspaper, edited to mislead.

When it comes to taking comments out of context, or to be accurate, deliberately misconstruing them, the hatchet job being performed on Hilary Mantel comes second only to the monstering Jeremy Clarkson received in late 2011 when his joke on the One Show was misunderstood by nincompoops.  "Venomous", says the Daily Mail's front page, Mantel savaged for daring to suggest the People's Kate is perhaps a little dull, as though she was "machine-made" for her role as duchess and (eventual) queen.  "Completely wrong and misguided", says David Cameron, taking a break from selling weapons to foreign johnnies to talk to the media, and what's more, she's "a fantastic ambassador for Britain".

A comment which says pretty much everything about how politics now sees the royal family.  Almost 80 years ago the then prime minister tried but ultimately failed to persuade Edward the VIII not to abdicate; now their usefulness extends only to how they influence Brand Britain.  As for how the rest of us view a family on welfare that is most certainly exempt from the bedroom tax, much of it comes from a media that doesn't really know what to do with them, post-Diana.  Once the likes of the Mirror urged royal princesses to make their mind up on whether to marry or not; now the closest they get is pondering as to whether they should publish incredibly grainy shots of Kate in a bikini.  The Sun might print Harry buck naked, covering his crown jewels with his hands, or indeed put a model wearing just a bikini and a pout on its front page the day after her violent death, but to publish snatched shots of a pregnant princess is now beyond the pale.

The end result of this decision as to which members of the royal family should be protected or venerated and which should be mocked or held in contempt is, as always, the most cynical humbug and hypocrisy.  While none of the papers would touch the shots of Kate on holiday with a barge pole, they will of course describe her as "putting her bump on parade" when she does venture out into the glare of the cameras.  Harry, meanwhile, used as a propaganda prop by the MoD, was treated even worse, his "comments" about killing Taliban which were in fact nothing of the sort becoming the story in part because of his open disgust for the media as made clear in the interview.  No one can say anything even slightly detrimental about Brenda herself, while it's all but permanent open season on Charles and her other two sons.

Even the most cursory glance at Mantel's speech makes clear that she is not saying unequivocally that Kate is an automaton, without character or personality or any of the other things that the Mail and other papers have got up in arms about, but rather that this is how the media and indeed the royals themselves have constructed her image.  Mantel writes in her very first paragraph that she "saw Kate becoming a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung", not that she is, or was.  Mantel sees her like this because this is how either the royals or the media want her to be seen, and in her view, it's as far from the image of Diana, as she was presented and later presented herself as it's possible to imagine.  The worst that can be said about Mantel's depiction of Kate is as the Heresiarch says, it comes across occasionally as "gratuitously mean", even if it also seems to be all but confirmed by the responses from Cameron and the boss of her charity.

More intriguing though is quite how far Mantel appears to fall for the cult of Diana.  This entire paragraph, taken from mid-way through the speech is almost certainly a shoe-in for the next Pseuds Corner:


In the next stage of her story, she passed through trials, through ordeals at the world’s hands. For a time the public refrained from demanding her blood so she shed it herself, cutting her arms and legs. Her death still makes me shudder because although I know it was an accident, it wasn’t just an accident. It was fate showing her hand, fate with her twisted grin. Diana visited the most feminine of cities to meet her end as a woman: to move on, from the City of Light to the place beyond black. She went into the underpass to be reborn, but reborn this time without a physical body: the airy subject of a hundred thousand photographs, a flicker at the corner of the eye, a sigh on the breeze.

A sticky stain on the newspaper, perhaps?  Quite why Diana continues to inspire this kind of almost idolatry is unclear: Mantel describes her as both receptive and passive, but she was also manipulative and more than capable of playing the media at their own game.  Her Panorama interview with Martin Bashir is the ultimate example of the underdog turning the tables on her accusers, and while she may have been uninformed by history as Mantel writes, she succeeded in writing her own.  Charles undoubtedly deserves all he gets and more, yet the idea that there were three people in the marriage is to completely forget about Diana's lovers, as indeed she wanted the public to.

That slight diversion into pretension aside, Mantel's speech is beautifully written, and if nothing else its seizure by the Mail means that many more will read and hear it than otherwise would have done.  I haven't read any of her novels so can't comment on how they ultimately play out, but her speech portrays the monarchy as a centuries long tragedy, and brings out the loneliness and futility of being a part of it, whether it be the guests at Buckingham Palace avoiding speaking to Brenda or the detritus of the event Charles was attending which he must notice everywhere he goes.  Where I part company with the Heresiarch is when he says "Kate herself is an entirely blameless woman, doing her best to make sense of her bizarre role in national life".  The second part is certainly true, and she may well be blameless, but she most definitely did have a choice as to whether or not to join the entire rotten institution.  She may not be able to control the way she has since been projected, or how her sister (or just a part of her anatomy) has been made into a sex object in her stead, but she didn't have to go along with the pantomime.  And ultimately, that's why she has to put up with the occasional jibe thrown her way, misconstrued in repetition or otherwise.

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2/19/2013 07:41:00 pm | | | links to this post

Monday, December 10, 2012 

The Daily Mail has spoken.


The great tradition when new reports on drug policy are produced is to see what the blessed Daily Mail thinks.  Last time round the Mail claimed the UK Drug Policy Commission's final report said using cannabis was comparable to eating junk food when it naturally said nothing of the kind.  If anything, the Mail has today misrepresented the Home Affairs Select Committee's ninth report on drugs to an even greater extent: it takes the committee's recommendation that ministers visit Portugal, where possession has been decriminalised, and implies this means the government's considering legalising "heroine and crack".  Getting quite so many distortions into one headline takes real talent.

As was inevitable then, this latest report has been dismissed by those wielding actual power.  It doesn't matter whether or not Jeremy Browne is prepared to go and visit Portugal, a no doubt very agreeable junket should he delay his journey until midway through next year, as David Cameron has already decided we don't need a royal commission into drug policy.  According to him, the current policy is working swimmingly as drug use amongst the population is at its lowest rate since 1996.  The same message has also come from the Home Office, which claimed quite incredibly that current laws "draw on the best available evidence".  As lies go, this ranks up there with the best produced by the Mail, considering that the HO have completely ignored the last two recommendations from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs to keep cannabis in Class C and downgrade MDMA to Class B respectively.

We've had so many similar reports produced now, all recommending more or less the same things, all recognising that prohibition has failed miserably and that we have to move from criminalisation towards decriminalisation that it's apparent we need a major, front line politician unafraid to take on the tabloid press in order to make progress.  Some, amazingly, thought David Cameron might be that politician, seeing as he served on the HASC prior to becoming leader of the Conservatives.  More realistically, it needs to be someone in opposition who can set out their stance and then claim a mandate for change should their party win the election.  The problem with this is that, if anything, the post-Brownite wing of Labour tends to be more authoritarian on drugs than even the Tories.  Could this be the perfect next campaign for Stella Creasy?

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12/10/2012 04:16:00 pm | | | links to this post

Monday, October 15, 2012 

Want a true legacy, Nick?

Whenever there's a new, in-depth, excellently researched and extremely carefully worded report released which calls for a reform of our increasingly antiquated drug laws, it's always worth going and seeing what the Daily Mail has written about it.  The influence of newspapers may well be in long-term decline, but when it comes to social policy it's still the right-wing tabloids that rule the roost.  If they're against it, it's an incredibly brave government that does the opposite.  

Much as we now spit at the very mention of the name Tony Blair, it's worth remembering that on occasion he did go against the puritanism of the Mail; not on crime, obviously, as that was a battle he was at one with them on, but as for the liberalisation of gambling, the licensing laws and also on the reclassification of cannabis to Class C he ignored Paul Dacre's opposition and pushed the reforms through.  One of Gordon Brown's first acts as prime minister was to ignore the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and put cannabis back in Class B, in an act that certainly wasn't meant to curry favour with his pal Dacre.  Supposedly meant to "send a message" that use of any recreational drugs wasn't OK, all it did was waste more money and police time.

The UK Drug Policy Commission's final report has then, as you might have expected, been giving the Mail treatment.  Their article, which doesn't feature on the voluminous front page of their website, does the classic trick of misrepresenting the report by picking on one comparison it uses, ignoring a crucial sentence which clarifies their stance, and then asks those opposed to the use of recreational drugs in all circumstances to comment on this calumny.  Hence the Mail's report claims the report says "smoking cannabis is just like eating junk food", when it naturally says nothing of the sort. What it does say is (on page 108, PDF):


A small but significant segment of the population will use drugs. We do not believe that pursuing the goal of encouraging responsible behaviour means seeking to prevent all drug use in every circumstance. This is not to say that we consider drug use to be desirable. Just like with gambling or eating junk food, there are some moderately selfish or risky behaviours that free societies accept will occur and seek to limit to the least damaging manifestations, rather than to prevent entirely.

The Mail quotes the second half of the paragraph, but not the first part which makes clear why they're making the comparison.   Much of the rest of the Mail's report is a fair summing up of the UKDPC's conclusions, but it's the headline and opening sentence that as always set the tone.

It's a great shame, and shows exactly the hurdles that still need to be leapt through to get anything approaching sensible coverage of calls for drug law reform, especially as the report's conclusions are thoroughly conservative and incremental rather than revolutionary.  It doesn't advocate the decriminalisation of all drugs, let alone their legalisation; what it does suggest is that the possession of a small amount of a controlled drug could be made a civil rather than a criminal offence, leading to fines and referrals to drug awareness or treatment sessions rather than sanctions through the criminal courts.  The report recommends that cannabis would be a good place to start, and if and only if evaluations of the policy suggested there hadn't been a substantial increase in usage or other negative effects, then it could be extended to other drugs.  Similarly, it suggests that either decriminalising or altering the sanctions for the growing of cannabis for personal use could strike a blow against the current situation where empty houses or warehouses are rented or broken into and used by criminal gangs to grow the high-strength strains of the drug that have caused such concern over recent years.

For those who, like me, think we could go relatively quickly from prohibition to the strict regulation and sale of the relatively safe recreational drugs, such as cannabis, MDMA, LSD and "magic mushrooms" with few problems, while decriminalising the harder "Class As", this report is far less radical than it thinks it is.  Where it shines though is in the area which is less sensational: with recommendations for supporting "responsible behaviour", recognising that drug specific education as it stands doesn't work, through to further encouraging the use of needle exchanges up to pill testing services it isn't afraid to say that drug use, like it or not, isn't going to disappear or be eradicated regardless of the apparent fall in use.  It also notes that recovery has to be tailored to the individual, despite what some influential recovered addicts have been given an hour of prime time television to claim.  Most of all, it accepts we need better research into prohibited drugs across the board, something made all the more difficult by their very illegality.

More optimistically, it calls for a cross-party political forum to be set up to examine where drug policy to go from here.  Sadly, even if one were to be created, should it come up with the "wrong" conclusions and proposals then it's highly unlikely it would get us any further.  With both the main parties clearly wedded to prohibition, regardless of how this report has apparently been welcomed even by the likes of Jack Straw, ideally there should be someone from the third party with a high profile who could make a break with the failed policies of the past by being clear about where we've been going wrong for so long.  Want a legacy that could eventually sideline your role in the coalition, Nick?

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10/15/2012 09:21:00 pm | | | links to this post

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