billaricaydickey – why are you so keen to defend fucking Gilligan? Mate of yours? Sure you’re not him? We have to ask these things, unfortunately, owing to past events. Here’s an example of why your trust is misplaced. Gilligan argued in his column a few months back that operating bendy buses cost more than non-bendy equivalents, which is wholly untrue (the replacements cost substantially more to run, as the public tender announcements revealed – Gilligan conveniently forgot to allow for increased capacity) and based on wilful misreading of publicly available facts. It wasn’t even a particularly clever untruth, so he did it because he knew no one powerful enough to stop him would bother checking. Result: the public get an entirely inaccurate view of the world based on Gilligan’s absurd prejudices and due to the Standard’s shockingly bad journalistic standards. They eventually published the correct details some months later, but I think we can guess whether or not Gilligan’s card was marked for making incomplete and misleading statements.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23578147-details/Ignore+the+bleatings+of+the+bendy+bus+brigade/article.do

Therefore we *know* he’s a bad journalist, we’ve known it for years (being right about WMDs but not being able to back it up should give you a clue here, as well as being given a job by Boris Johnson, that notably bad judge of character). That he has reputationally self-destructed spectacularly over the last year purely as a result of a couple of horrible little bloggers working out what he was up to rather confirms this, don’t you think? A man with actual integrity rather than a carefully constructed image of integrity (see his Wikipedia entry history for attempts to maintain this) would have laughed us off, surely, rather than smear us repeatedly in his column and then comment on CiF in such an unpleasant way that a lot of people with no particular interest in London politics decided there and then that he was a first-order tit.

All of which doesn’t exonerate Lee Jasper*, but at least puts huge question marks over the validity of Gilligan’s campaign. We know how he works now, and it’s likely that’s how he’s worked for years, since the Standard’s management had no interest in accuracy. Seriously, mate, give up supporting the bastard. It’s making you look like a fool.

* Boris’s borough bovver boys not being able to lay a finger on him legally would appear to do this, however. Democratic political activity of which one doesn’t personally approve is not the crime of the century, it’s what happens when the other lot are in power. See No2ID for an example of the correct way to fight it.

‘Sorry – for taking you for granted’
‘Sorry – for being negative’
X MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE!’

LOL – the makers of that film have almost as much to apologise for as the Standard’s editors! Is this campaign a cheap attempt to stall criticism from those writers on the actual left who have been critical of the Standard in the past, and so would be familiar with the font of its masthead and the little naked angel thing? Because most Londoners won’t be familiar with those things, and won’t know what the ballyhoo it’s all about.

Heed the chorus of this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REsezs6cQRc “It’s too late to apologise”

Cohen’s “What’s Left” is what libertarian lefties like me have been saying for years about the mainstream, largely Trotskyist, left. They have been completely unable to adapt to a changing world and trot out the same old mantras that haven’t worked in the past and certainly won’t in the furure.

Of course the Standard campaign about Lee Jasper was politically motivated but it wasn’t a smear campaign. Jasper handed them his scalp on a plate and brought down Livingston. It is no good saying that because no one has yet been charged that Jasper has been exonerated because he hasn’t. Whatever you think of Gilligan every single fact that he wrote about the whole affair was true and twist and turn as you may you will not alter that.

Interesting article by Gilligan today on Baroness Pola Uddin taking up from the Sunday Telegraph expose. This is just the tip of the iceberg in East London there is more to come. Picked up fifty thousand eight page tabloid newspapers this morning which are the core of the Hackney TUC anti BNP campaign. Big meeting tonight to start distributing them to groups all over the borough. This is the Hackney end of the biggest anti fascist campaign ever mounted in this country. If anyone in Hackney wants to get involved contact HackneyUnites@btinternet.com and the national campaign is on http://www.hopenothate.org.uk

(Definitely not me though, I’d be gobsmacked if I suddenly found out I had a baby daughter!)

Congratulations!

5cc: *giggle*

It intrigues me that all of the competitors in the London evening paper market seem to be right-wing apologists. I’m fairly sure that London as a whole is still not Tory, despite Boris; I just suspect that more Tories vote, which is a problem for everyone else.

‘Sorry – for taking you for granted’
‘Sorry – for being negative’
X MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE!’

Oh, what a shame that’s too good to be true.

Congrats Tim F

Oh, and congratulations, Tim!

Nick Cohen has.

In 2003 he was still recognisably of the left, albeit someone a bit too fond of taking what he thought were unpopular stances.

Christ knows how you’d define him now, but barring economic issues, there’s virtually nothing (cough) left.

I’m no Fan of Cohen, but you can’t seriously mean that. Can you?