Here’s one of those especially crass Sun articles written with the type of feigned ignorance so prevalent in the tabloids:

ILLEGAL immigrants are getting the VIP treatment when booted out of Britain – with personal security escorts costing almost £500 each.

Yes, you read that right – the VIP treatment. I don’t know what VIP means to you, but I somehow doubt that those who considered themselves such would put up for long with what the average failed asylum seeker or illegal immigrant faces prior to their deportation, often provided by the same private security firms.

The last report into Colnbrook (PDF) immigration removal centre, ran by Serco (glossy corporate, touchy-feely everything is wonderful page), where many are held prior to their deportation due to its location near to Heathrow, found that it was struggling to cope and that safety was a significant concern.

The reason why “personal security escorts” are used is twofold – firstly because there are few officials and staff within the UK Border Agency who are authorised to use force and as result many first attempts to deport individuals are abandoned because those whose time has come dare to resist – and secondly as many within the UKBA are not prepared to actually see the policies which they implement put into effect.
continue reading… »

At the weekend Peter Oborne treated us to a treatise on how the Conservatives have put together the most radical program for government since Oliver Cromwell, or words similar to that effect.

But in reality, as yesterday’s launch of the party’s education policies showed, somehow managing to be even worse than Labour at reforming our benighted education system.

After all, it really ought to be an open goal. Even after almost 13 years under New Labour, still barely 50% manage to get 5 “good GCSEs”, a record so appalling that it can’t be stressed often enough.

There have been improvements made, although considering the amount of money pumped in it would be incredible if there hadn’t been, and diplomas as introduced by Ed Balls, is one of the few reforms which has been a step in the right direction.

So when Cameron then immediately decides that the most important thing which will decide whether or not a child succeeds is not their background, the curricula, the type of school or the amount of funding it receives but the person who teaches them, he’s on the verge of talking nonsense on stilts.
continue reading… »

Facing the outright fury of the Murdochs for daring to provide a free news website, as yet there wasn’t a set-out policy on how the BBC could be emasculated by the Tories.

Thankfully, Policy Exchange, the right-wing think-tank with notable links to the few within the Cameron set with an ideological bent has come up with a step-by-step guide on how destroy the BBC by a thousand cuts which doesn’t so much as mention Murdoch.

Not that Policy Exchange itself is completely free from Murdoch devotees or those who call him their boss. The trustees of the think-tank include Camilla Cavendish and Alice Thomson, both Times hacks, while Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph and who refused to pay the licence fee until Jonathan Ross left the corporation is the chairman of the board.

Also a trustee is Rachel Whetstone, whose partner is Steve Hilton, Cameron’s director of strategy. Whetstone was also a godparent to the late Ivan Cameron. The report itself is by Mark Oliver, who was director of strategy at the Beeb between 1989 and 1995, during John Birt’s much-loved tenure as director-general.
continue reading… »

It’s difficult not to feel the sensation of deja vu when you see Alastair Campbell once again holding forth, defiantly as ever, before a cringing committee of the great and good tasked with supposedly wringing the truth out of him.

That they’d have more chance of draining red viscous fluid from a hard inanimate object is ever the unspoken reality.

It is also touching though, almost heart-warming to see just how loyal Blair’s ever faithful spin doctor remains to his former boss. Blair after all feels no such compunction to keep up the pretence that Iraq was all about the weapons of mass destruction and not the re-ordering of things while the pieces were still in flux, admitting as he did to that noted Rottweiler Fern Britton that he would have invaded even if he had known that there were no WMDs.

Christopher Meyer, the ambassador to Washington at the time, made clear in his evidence that he felt the government never resisted the march to war once it was clear that the US was going to take action regardless of anything or anyone else.

At various points, Campbell’s evidence made you wonder whether his stubbornness to admit almost any mistake is not in fact borne of his continuing loyalty to Blair, but in fact that he has to keep telling both himself and the world how he got everything right while everyone else has repeatedly got it wrong in order to convince himself that he is still on the side of the angels.

Hence he’ll defend “every single word” of the dossier and almost anything which contradicts his evidence is a conspiracy theory, like the Guardian report of yesterday which suggested that he changed a part of the dossier to bring it into line with a claim made by Dick Cheney.

It is though perhaps instructive to compare how we conduct inquiries with the Dutch. Previously the government of the Netherlands resigned after a damning report into the Dutch military’s failures at Srebrenica.

By coincidence, their own inquiry today into their role in the Iraq war has concluded that it was illegal, as UN resolution 1441 could not be used as a mandate for armed conflict.

Back here, we’re still regarding Alastair Campbell as though he’s a reliable witness. One suspects that the Chilcott inquiry’s conclusions won’t be anywhere near as incisive.

Back in November the Sun decided that it was time to resort to the old tabloid trick of attacking someone by association when they couldn’t lay a finger on the target himself personally.

David Nutt, a senior adviser on drugs to the ACMD, had just been defenestrated by Alan Johnson for daring to argue again that cannabis isn’t as dangerous as either the government claims or its classification suggests.

So naturally it was time to go scouting around his children’s social networking pages to see if they could find any pay dirt.

The result, an article which accused his son Stephen of partaking in cannabis because he was smoking what was clearly a roll-up and not a normal, honest, cigarette, his daughter Lydia of drinking underage, and the by no means hypocritical sneering at his eldest son for appearing naked in the snow in Sweden, ended up being removed with days of it appearing.

Yesterday the Press Complaints Commission published Stephen Nutt’s letter of complaint on their website (h/t Tabloid Watch):

The complaint was resolved when the newspaper removed the article from the website, undertook not to repeat the story and published the following letter:

FURTHER to your article about photographs of me on my Facebook site, (November 14) I would like to make clear the pictures were not posted by me and while I had been drinking I was smoking a rolled-up cigarette which did not contain cannabis as the article insinuated. My younger sister Lydia was not intoxicated, so was not drinking under age.

My older brother lives in Sweden where it is custom to use a sauna followed by a ‘romp’ in the snow in winter. He was neither drunk nor under the influence of intoxicants. Innocuous photographs were taken out of context in an attempt to discredit my father’s work.

Which is about as comprehensive and wounding a clarification as ever gets published in the Sun.

The article was so obviously in breach of the PCC’s code on privacy, not to mention accuracy, that it should never have been published in the first place though; why then should the paper get away without making anything approaching an apology, only having to print a clarification buried away on the letters page?

Anjem Choudary is brilliant at professional media trolling. He knows exactly what to say, what to do and who to talk to, and also when to do it.

As strokes of genius go, nothing is more likely to wind up the nutters outside of his own clique than a half-baked supposed plan to march through Wootton Bassett, which may as well be our current Jerusalem, a holy place which cannot in any way be defiled, such is how it’s been sanctified both by the press and politicians.

As for his rather less amusing supposed plan for “sending letters” to the families of those bereaved through the current deployment to Afghanistan, urging them, according to that notoriously accurate source, the Sun, that they should embrace Islam “to save [themselves] from the hellfire”, it seems more likely that this would only be through the “open letter” which appeared on the Islam4UK website, which is currently 403ing.

Calling for a sense of perspective is of course a complete waste of time. It doesn’t matter that Islam4UK, the umpteenth successor organisation to Al-Muhjarioun.
continue reading… »

When Labour’s best political boast is now more or less that they won’t be as brutal as the Conservatives will, it’s well worth remembering how the government treats some of the most vulnerable in society.

Not content with having expanded the prison population to such an extent that as soon as a new wing or establishment is built it is almost immediately filled, it also seems hell-bent on continuing with the detention of those whose only crime is to be the children of asylum seekers who have had their application for refugee status rejected.

Not that the government itself has the guts to be personally responsible for their detention. Probably the most notorious detention centre in the country, Yarl’s Wood in Bedfordshire, is run by SERCO.

In the last report on Yarl’s Wood, the chief inspector of prisons Anne Owers noted (PDF) while Yarl’s Wood should seek to improve the “plight of children” who were being held in the centre, they were “ultimately issues” for the UK Border Agency.
continue reading… »

A late contender for post of the year, this superb treatise on local racism, the decay and depression of outer-city housing estates and with it the potential for extremism, also contains a paragraph that gives me heart that permanently pulling up the tabloids on their bullshit, however many times you repeat yourself, is worth it:

The impulse to segregate was compounded by the messages that seemed to reinforce the idea that the treatment in Southmead reflected the mood and views of the rest of Britain. “Hundreds of thousands of migrants here for handouts, says senior judge“. “Britain paying migrants £1,700 to return home BEFORE they’ve even got here” “The violent new breed of migrants who will let nothing stop them coming to Britain“.

These headlines were just three of many that were printed in the Mail, a right-wing daily during my time in Southmead. I don’t usually take much notice of the headlines in the Sun and the Mail unless they are truly shocking, but in Southmead the headlines seemed to have an impact on the treatment we received. The level of low-level hostility from adults seemed to be directly linked to the content of the headlines. More outright hostility from younger adults and children followed a day or so later.

Do go and read the whole thing.

Having attacked Gordon Brown personally last week and came off the worst for it, this week the Sun seems to have decided to stand on surer ground, by attacking Labour on crime.

Problem is, it can’t seem to do so without telling some whopping great lies, as yesterday’s leader shows:

Prison policy, in particular, has become a joke. Early on, Labour decided not to build more jails and instead focus on alternatives to prison and early release for prisoners.

In 1997 the average prison population was 61,470 (page 4). The population last Friday was 84,593 (DOC), a rise in just 12 years of more than 20,300. I can’t seem to find any concrete figures on just what the total number of places available in 1997 was, but ministers themselves boast that they have created over 20,000 additional places, and the Prison Reform Trust agrees, noting in this year’s Bromley report that the number of places has increased by 33% since the party came to power (page 5).
continue reading… »

The story of the Glasgow North East by-election is not that Labour won an overwhelming victory, although it would have been if they’d lost, in what is a modern rotten borough for the party. It also isn’t that the Conservatives received only 1,075 votes, or indeed that the British National Party was only 62 votes behind, although it might be if Chris Dillow’s observation that heroin is probably more popular than the Tories was more widely disseminated.

Nor is it that unsurprisingly, being a “celebrity”, isn’t an automatic vote winner: John Smeaton got 258 ballots while Mikey Hughes, a former Big Brother contestant, got 54. It also isn’t, although it’s again interesting, that the Socialist Labour vote completely collapsed on the 2005 result, when they got an astounding 4,036 votes, down this time to an appalling 47, most likely because Labour was on the ballot when it wasn’t previously as a result of Michael Martin standing as the “Speaker”.
continue reading… »

One of the motifs of the past few months has been that politicians of all colours “just don’t get it”. Ironically, when it comes to the continuing debacle over the DNA database, you rather imagine that they did get it and now they’re utterly bewildered at how things have turned out.

Here, after all, is what ought to be a standard tabloid outrage scandal: because of the “unaccountable” European Court of Human Rights, the government is having to change its policy on keeping all the DNA profiles of those arrested but not charged indefinitely, potentially raising the spectre of the guilty getting away with their crimes. The Sun, that flag-bearer of social authoritarianism, did originally raise its voice, but has since barely made a peep about the S and Marper case and its implications.

For a government that has so often treated with contempt the concerns of civil libertarians, with the full connivance of the vast majority of the tabloid press, the Daily Mail only recently deciding that it’s time to join the other side, it must be wondering where all those who believe if they’ve got nothing to hide they’ve got nothing to fear have disappeared to.
continue reading… »

There’s a distinct air of unreality which must around hang around newspaper offices and also the realms of Whitehall. The reaction to the killing of 5 British soldiers by an Afghan police officer was one of a still aloof nation that regards it as unbelievable that it can be so apparently easy to kill Our Boys, while also perplexed at how “Terry Taliban” isn’t prepared to play by good old fashioned Queensbury rules.

It wasn’t so long ago that IEDs were being described as “new” and “asymmetrical” tactics, as if guerilla warfare was some new concept, and that it was perfectly beastly that the other side weren’t allowing themselves to be shot out in the open like the clearly inferior fighters that they are. How dare they make the greatest, best trained army the world has ever seen look bad?

The problem the attack poses though is obvious: when our policy is to train the Afghan army and police and then get out, or at least that’s what it’s meant to be, that this officer was apparently not a new recruit and had been in the police for three years raises the nightmare that there may be many more “cells” where we have in fact trained those will then turn on us when the chance arises.

This isn’t exactly new either though: the Iraqi police and army were and probably still are riddled with those with their own distinct agendas, and that was in a country where there are only two major sects in conflict with each other.
continue reading… »

At the weekend Ed Husain wrote an eminently reasonable, measured and very restrained attack on the more out-there views of Melanie Phillips. Husain clearly feels that Phillips is a potential ally in the battle against radical Islam, although quite why judging by her record it’s difficult to tell.

His main concern now seems to be that rather than being an ally, she’s becoming a prominent obstacle to any kind of progress. Especially in the way she seems determined to see conspiracies where there are none, in this instance with Inayat Bunglawala and his determined opposition to the remnants of al-Muhajiroun.

Again, this isn’t anything new with Phillips: a few years back she was convinced that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction had been buried beneath the Euphrates and that Saddam’s crack team of WMD experts had upped sticks and moved to Syria.

Nonetheless, it was also going to be interesting to see how Phillips responded.
continue reading… »

Eric Joyce’s resignation as PPS to defence minister Bob Ainsworth is to say the least, intriguing.

Joyce is most certainly on the Blairite wing of Labour, and even under Brown until recently a major loyalist, and with little chance of influencing any sort of attempt to overthrow the prime minister, it seems his decision to go is based purely on his considerable discontent over the war in Afghanistan.

Joyce sets out, while clearly trying to be as non-threatening and as lightly critical as he can while questioning the entire current strategy, that the public is not so stupid as to believe or to much longer put up with the “terrorism” justification, that we are punching way above our weight in our current operations, and that we should be able to make clear that there has to be some sort of timetable outlining just how long our commitment is both able and willing to last.

All of this should be way beyond controversy, yet already we have the ludicrous sentiment from both Bob Ainsworth and the even more ridiculous Lord West that they don’t recognise the picture which Joyce sets out (”confused and disjointed” was West described it).

The only part which it’s difficult to agree with Joyce on is his criticism of the other NATO countries’ contribution: who can possibly blame France, Germany and Italy for not wanting to spend a similar amount of both their blood and treasure to us on a war in which they can’t even begin to claim as we do that it’s preventing terrorism on their streets?

The reason why it doesn’t seem right to truly coruscate Labour over the utter cowardice of their current lack of a policy is that it’s a failure of leadership which is shared across all three of the major parties. For all their protests and attacks on the government over Afghanistan, you could barely get a cigarette paper between both the Conservatives and Lib Dems’ own ideas on what we should be doing.

All still think, at least in public, despite doubtless their private misgivings, that this is both a war that is worth fighting and one which can be “won”, whatever their own idea is of a victory.

Finally then, we learn some of the identities of those who were targeted by various national newspapers and magazines via Steve Whittamore, the details of which have previously been kept back by the Information Commissioner’s office.

And what an obvious collection of searches in the wider public interest they are. Whether blagging their way into BT’s databases to get home addresses and ex-directory numbers, the social security system, the DVLA or the police national computer, these are names to conjure with.

Some of these uses of a private detective to obtain information could have been in the public interest: politicians from all the main parties are also represented, among them Peter Mandelson, Peter Hain, Chris Patten, Peter Kilfoyle, a couple of then union leaders. Most though are just scurrilous attempts to back up gossip.

The other thing that Guardian’s obtaining of the information signifies is that it also knows exactly which journalists or even editors were themselves requesting information, as Whittamore also kept their details, maybe in case he was caught and so he could attempt to bring them down with him.
continue reading… »

The waiting then is finally over. The moment the nation has been looking forward to has arrived. After months of tension, irritation and terrible puns, not to mention writing, the next editor of the Sun, taking over from Rebekah Wade will be… Dominic Moron (surely Mohan? Ed.).

Who he? Well, he’s probably best known for being a former editor of the Sun’s Bizarre showbiz pages, which is increasingly becoming a signifier for going on to “greatness”, with Piers Morgan and Andy Coulson both formerly helming the columns.

More recently he’s been the deputy editor for the last couple of years, although even the sad individuals like myself who “watch” the Sun will have been hard pressed to see any of his personal influence on the paper.

Indeed, he’s even been editing the paper for the last month while Wade, sorry, I mean Brooks, has been getting to know her new husband even better, and I doubt anyone has noticed any difference whatsoever.

continue reading… »

The latest figures released on the use of tasers by police forces across the country are starting to look concerning. While the jump from 187 uses between October to December 2008 to 250 during January to March this year can be explained by how the Home Office allowed Chief Officers to decide when “specially-trained” units can be deployed with the weapons, it doesn’t explain why different forces are using them far more readily than others.

The most startling are the number of uses by Northumbria police, which since April 2004 has used tasers in one way or another on 704 occasions, 4 more than even the Met has. This is an astounding number, especially when compared to another force of similar size and with a similar urban environment, Merseyside, who also took part in the same trial as Northumbria and which has used them just 76 times in total.
continue reading… »

France and Germany have both respectively pulled out of recession, by a whopping 0.3%. Keeping in mind that these are preliminary figures, which could yet be revised in either direction, this can either prove everything or absolutely nothing.

Those predisposed (like myself) to further stimulus measures will note that both France and Germany have had far larger such packages than we have, although both also had more room for manoeuvre than we did in terms of borrowing and less personal debt to consider.

Neither was as predisposed and reliant on the financial sector as we were, although there’s certainly an argument that Germany is too reliant on its own manufacturing base, although it seems for now as if it’s just that base which has helped it pull clear. Vince Cable is also pushing this argument.

Then there’s the Conservatives (such as George Osborne) who are quite naturally crowing about how Gordon Brown was telling us all about how well placed we were and how we’d be one of the first out.
continue reading… »

One of the more cutting criticisms made by the Joint Committee on Human Rights last week was that while the head of MI5 had no problems in talking to the media, he seemed to regard it as an unacceptable chore to have to appear in front of a few jumped-up parliamentarians.

This week the head of MI6, “Sir” John Scarlett appeared on a Radio 4 documentary into the Secret Intelligence Service, where he naturally denied that MI6 had ever so much as hurt a hair on anyone’s head, or more or less the equivalent, as Spy Blog sets out.

This would of course be the same MI6 that passed on information to the CIA regarding Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil el-Banna which resulted in their arrest in Gambia and subsequent rendition to Guantanamo Bay, and indeed the same MI6 which along with MI5 interviewed Binyam Mohamed while he was being detained in Pakistan, where we now know he was being tortured.
continue reading… »

The Sun’s exclusive on Theresa Winters, the woman from Luton who has had all thirteen of her children taken into care and is now pregnant with her fourteenth, ticks all the paper’s buttons. Broken Britain, scrounging feckless layabouts and of course the bourgeois journalists working for a “working class” newspaper sneering at their own target market.

It doesn’t really make much difference that I can’t think of anything less feckless than being perpetually pregnant, and that yet again the paper is pushing for benefit reform by finding the most extreme case it can, regardless of how the kind of reform it demands would punish those who are deserving as well as those who “aren’t”.

Combine this with the casual dehumanisation which infects all such stories, with Winters described as the “Baby Machine”, leeches and slobs and you have a classic example of a newspaper providing its readers with a target they can hate without feeling bad about doing so.
continue reading… »