Exclusive: EDM against Rod Liddle; admits to nasty comments; more emerges
I’ll try and keep this succinct because the trail is long and interesting. Firstly, it looks like Liddle is being contradicted by the website’s admin (who denies they were hacked) and secondly, he has admitted to some of the comments I highlighted earlier.
Today there will be an Early Day Motion in Parliament against Liddle’s possible appointment as editor of the Indy. It will be tabled by Paul Flynn and Diane Abbott MPs, confirmed here last night, and has been prompted by the comments I published Sunday evening.
Monkeymfc
Let’s start with Liddle’s claim that others were making comments on his behalf. The Mail on Sunday reported:
When first contacted by The Mail on Sunday, Mr Liddle denied writing the BNP message, adding: ‘I often get opposition fans logging in under my name to try to embarrass me. I wouldn’t go near the racist ones.’
…
And he denied writing the comment about racial intelligence, saying the site’s administrator had told him it had been left by someone using a different computer to his.
Yesterday Roy Greenslade reported that Vikram Dodd was told by Rod Liddle that, “he was the victim of hacking due to other users of the site guessing his password.”
I asked in an earlier post when he found out his login was hacked and whether he told others this had happened.
Yesterday evening, a website admin posted this message.
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Exclusive: Screencaps of new Tory campaign video
We’ve had our spies out working overtime this week and they’ve surpassed themselves and come up with a gem of an exclusive – the first set of screen captures from the Conservative Party launch video for its upcoming draft education manifesto, which includes a guest appearance by Cameron’s maths Tsar, Carole Vorderman.
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We’ll bring you more information as it’s uncovered by our spies, although we understand that this video is expected to carry sponsorship from a leading financial services company…
Boris suddenly ‘shocked’ over bankers bonuses
The Evening Standard has come out swinging for its mayor Boris Johnson again today in a loudly trumpeted report that he was “shocked and baffled” that banks had failed to acknowledge public outrage over the multi-billion-pound payouts.
The new position comes only a week after Boris was angrily claiming that the Treasury’s tax on bankers bonuses would drive them out of the city.
In a reversal, he told the Evening Standard:
Nobody can possibly defend the huge sums of bonuses being awarded. The banks should not be paying out huge bonuses as though it was business as usual. They have to show they recognise the game changed when the taxpayer bailed them out.
He also apparently suggested banks should skim money off bonuses to set up a fund to help small and medium-sized businesses in the capital.
That is expected to go down in the City like a lead balloon.
Only last week Boris expressed his opposition to a temporary 50% levy on banking bonuses over £25,000, saying it would drive 9,000 bankers out of the City.
But this claim was undermined by the chair of his own London Development Agency, Harvey McGrath, who told the London assembly: “I am not aware of any specific financial institution that has declared that it will relocate from London.”
How the Tories u-turned on NHS plans
A few months ago I was hanging out at the back of a fringe event at the Tory conference, bored and exhausted and frankly wondering whether I could justify going home, when Mike Penning said something that suddenly made me start listening.
Penning, a shadow health minister, casually mentioned that a Tory government would take from the poor and give to the rich.
He didn’t put it in those terms, of course. But that, nonetheless, was the implication. The government, he said, had done all sorts of iffy things to the formula that distributes money around the NHS. They’d over-emphasised poverty. They’d under-emphasised age.
They’d done this for political reasons, to redirect cash to their own voters, and as a result a lot of sweet old ladies in nice, Tory constituencies were snuffing it with distressing speed.
The Tories would correct all that. They’d “de-politicise” that formula. No longer would those old ladies have to die.
So I looked into this. Yes, a press officer told me, this was actual policy.
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Deluded
Nick Cohen has not written anything on international issues for a while, but he was back on form in the Observer this week. “Opponents of the Iraq war are deluded if they think Chiclott will find the allied intervention was illegal” he thundered, The “central allegation that the second Iraq war was ‘illegal’ is unsustainable,” he concludes.
An inquiry into the Netherlands’ support for the invasion of Iraq says it was not justified by UN resolutions. The Dutch Committee of Inquiry on Iraq said UN Security Council resolutions did not “constitute a mandate for… intervention in 2003″.
The inquiry was launched after foreign ministry memos were leaked that cast doubt on the legal basis for the war.
But what would they know, eh Nick.
Meanwhile the Economist has some reasonable questions for the inquiry to put to Tony Blair:
When they question Mr Blair about WMD, Sir John and his colleagues should concentrate on nuclear weapons—and in particular on the government’s assertion that Saddam might develop one “in between one and two years”. These nuclear allegations, which helped Mr Blair call the threat from Iraq “serious and current”, need further probing.
A second focus should be on how raw intelligence was changed. Mr Blair described as “extensive, detailed and authoritative” intelligence that was, in fact, patchy and old; he described conclusions that were speculative as “beyond doubt”. At the inquiry, Mr Campbell drew a distinction between shifting lines and paragraphs in dossiers and actually fabricating intelligence. . . . .
There is also a string of outstanding questions about the conduct and aftermath of the war. For instance, why did some British troops seem not to have been fully equipped for the task? . . . . Another concern is the increasingly vexed issue of when, precisely, Mr Blair committed British forces to the invasion—and whether he simultaneously said different things to George Bush and the British public. And why did he enter the war without much assurance that the Americans had a plan for post-war reconstruction?
Social media has huge impact on Haiti Appeal
Social media websites were the biggest referrers to the Disasters Emergency Coalition fund-raising appeal on Haiti, the organisation has claimed.
The DEC says it had raised £10m in 24 hours after the Haiti Earthquake Appeal was launched.
Facebook and Twitter were by far the biggest referrers to their site after Google and BBC.
The amount includes online and phone donations only, with amounts from corporate, postal, events, SMS and over-the-counter donations still to be recorded.
The DEC issued a statement saying social media “played a crucial part in raising funds and awareness” in the 36 hours following the appeal.
Although the TV ads was not broadcast until Friday evening, £8m was raised online following the first DEC announcement on Twitter at 7.41pm on Wednesday.
You’re the first to know – DEC #Haiti Earthquake Appeal now live, UK broadcast appeals to follow
An SMS donation system was launched shortly afterwards and by Saturday morning a total of 148,000 people had donated online.
The DEC Facebook page now counts over 11,000 fans as of Sunday morning – a phenomenal rise up from 800 five days earlier.
Bloggers showed their support by adding DEC banners and buttons to hundreds of UK blogs.
DEC Chief Executive Brendan Gormley said:
Their donations mean our member agencies can continue to source and deliver the emergency supplies needed like safe water, shelter, medicine and food. We hope people will continue to give their support so that more emergency aid can be added to what will be a massive humanitarian effort.
Photograph sharing site Flickr has also been used to host images from the DEC’s member agencies, with 34,000 views of the DEC account on Friday.
The ability to pool resources on sharing sites and follow the DEC’s 13 member agencies through newly implemented Twitter ‘lists’ has also proved invaluable to the committee in updating the public on developments.
Examples of what donations will go to include:
* £25 will supply a kit of household essentials.
* £50 buys a food pack to feed a family for a fortnight.
* £100 provides temporary shelter for two families.
To make a donation to the DEC Haiti Earthquake Appeal visit www.dec.org.ukor call 0370 60 60 900
Britain cannot let Haiti be pushed to ‘shock capitalism’
As political leaders there is much more Barack Obama and Gordon Brown could be doing to help Haiti. Above all they must make sure that the disaster is not compiled by the cynical exploitation of the current crisis.
In an article for The Nation Richard Kim details how Haiti has been crippled by its indebtedness to Western powers.
Following Haiti’s liberation from the French in 1804 it was forced by 1825, under threat of embargo from France and other Western powers, to pay 150 million francs in reparations to French slave owners. It turned primarily to Germany and the US for help.
However, it has never escaped from this spiral of debt and also has been subjected to the imposition of ’structural adjustment policies’ by the World Bank and IMF.
All of which have contributed to Haiti being not just the poorest but also one of the most unequal societies in the Western hemisphere.
According to a report;
It is second only to Namibia in income inequality (Jadotte 2006) , and has the most millionaires per capita in the region. Margarethe Thenusla, a 34-year old factory worker and mother of two said, “When they ask for aid for the needy, you hear that they release thousands of dollars for aid in Haiti. But when it comes you can’t see anything that they did with the food aid. You see it in the market, they’re selling it. Us poor people don’t see it”.
How a Twitter joke led to terror arrest and ban
When heavy snowfall threatened to scupper Paul Chambers’s travel plans, he decided to vent his frustrations on Twitter by tapping out a comment to amuse his friends.
“Robin Hood airport is closed,” he wrote. “You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”
Unfortunately for Mr Chambers, the police didn’t see the funny side. A week after posting the message on the social networking site, he was arrested under the Terrorism Act and questioned for almost seven hours by detectives who interpreted his post as a security threat.
After he was released on bail, he was suspended from work pending an internal investigation, and has, he says, been banned from the Doncaster airport for life. “I would never have thought, in a thousand years, that any of this would have happened because of a Twitter post,” said Mr Chambers, 26. “I’m the most mild-mannered guy you could imagine.”
29 ideas to clean up politics put to nation
Weekend voting, ‘none of the above’ on ballot papers and the public setting MPs’ wages are some of the top 29 ideas to mend Britain’s broken politics.
The 29 reforms were selected by a group of British citizens scientifically chosen to represent the UK as a whole at a unique deliberative event held last weekend as part of the Power2010 campaign.
Those on the shortlist all received 50% or more support from participants at the end of the two day “Deliberative Polling” event.
The group’s recommendations will be put to the country ahead of the General Election in a nationwide poll starting this week on www.power2010.org.uk.
James Fishkin, Director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University said:
This was a good microcosm of the entire country brought to a single place. They came from all regions, walks of life and political viewpoints. They worked hard to clarify their priorities and on about two thirds of the issues their views changed significantly. They wanted more deliberation, by citizens in public consultations and by Parliament in Select Committees.
They moved away from populist proposals such as direct election of the Prime Minister or making party manifestos legally binding. They really weighed the competing arguments and told us what they thought the country needed now.
Participants were asked to rate the proposed reforms before they started the weekend’s debate, and again at the end.
The campaign, which has already signed up more than 10,000 people, is launching the nationwide vote today to find the five most popular ideas to fix politics and put them to every candidate standing at this year’s General Election.
The 29 ideas (in order of how highly they were rated by the group) are:
* Strengthening select committees
* Allowing voters to vote for ‘none of the above’ on ballot papers
* Increasing the number of issues decided by free votes
* Establishing a duty of public consultation on controversial matters
* Limiting or doing away with state databases that violate individual citizens privacy and scrapping the plans for a National Identity Card
* Scheduling Election Day on a weekend
* Using public consultation to compose a stronger Bill of Rights
* Reducing the governments use of statutory instruments to bypass parliamentary scrutiny
* Allowing a special referendum on whether to remove an MP from office if enough of his or her constituents request it AND holding a fresh election to choose a new MP
* Expanding the scope of the Freedom of Information Act
* Consulting the public on the wages expenses and working conditions of MPs
* Holding a referendum on replacing the pound with the euro
* Giving MPs control of the parliamentary timetable
* Requiring political parties to practice more internal democracy
* Having compulsory politics lessons in school
* Allowing only English MPs to vote on matters affecting only England and only English and Welsh MPs to vote on matters affecting only England and Wales
* Banning members of the House of Lords from becoming government ministers
* Giving more decision making and taxation powers to local government
* Requiring full disclosure of MPs and civil servants communications with lobbyists
* Limiting the amount of money that individuals can donate to parties and candidates
* Having a parliament sit for a fixed term
* Banning retired MPs from working in private sector jobs associated with their former positions for a period of years
* Changing the electoral system to allow for Proportional Representation
* Choosing the Mayors of population centres by direct election
* Barring the appointment of former MPs to the House of Lords
* Having a written constitution
* Creating an Upper Chamber that represents different sectors like education transport and financial services
* Having a fully elected House of Lords
* Lowering the voting age to 16
Participants were asked to rank each proposal on a scale of 1-10. The ranking of the shortlist of 29 is based on the mean score given to each reform.
From a press release
Did Rod Liddle also post these racist comments?
When the Mail on Sunday first approached Rod Liddle yesterday about comments posted on the MillwallFC site under the pseudonym ‘monkeymfc’, he denied posting some of the inflammatory comments.
He said the comments had been made by a hacker. Later he admitted making some comments, though not all.
I often get opposition fans logging in under my name to try to embarrass me. I wouldn’t go near the racist ones.
It’s worth pointing out that registered members of that messageboard can only post under specific usernames with a login. No one else can pretend to be a specific user unless they know the password.
We’ve done some digging and found very vile comments posted there ‘monkeymfc’, and have some questions for Rod Liddle.
1. He claims these extreme racist comments were put there by “hackers”. How did these hackers get his password to break into his account?
2. I’ve tried to find instances where he complained to moderators about his account being hacked, or distanced himself from messages supposedly posted under his name but couldn’t find any examples. Could he show any? Since Rod Liddle has met people from the messageboard at games, surely he would be concerned about his reputation being besmirched?
continue reading… »
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