I’ve spotted a couple of references recently to the ‘perfect memory’ of the Internet and how it can come back to haunt you in later life. It breeds a peculiar form of self-censorship. First, the now-outed Girl With A One Track Mind says:

I wish my blog wouldn’t continue to bite me on the arse (not in the good way); I’ve held my finger over “Delete Blog?” button so many times.

I can understand why Zoe might want to start afresh, but this sentiment feels wrong and offensive – like book burning.

The other worry is for those who might want to start a political career. James Joyner at the Outside the Beltway blog discusses Philosopher Kings and the potential for a blogger-turned politician. continue reading… »

This originally appeared on ‘Though Cowards Flinch’, here and here

It has come to our attention that the magazine ‘Total Politics’ is planning to publish an interview with Nick Griffin, the racist leader of the British National Party.

Yesterday, we made an initial call to bloggers to consider a boycott of this year’s ‘Total Politics Blog Awards’, in the event that this magazine chooses to publish as planned an extended interview with Nick Griffin, the racist leader of the BNP.

The initial call was greeted favourably by some bloggers who saw it, and we are therefore seeking to extend the call. continue reading… »

When the Metropolitan Police shot the innocent Jean Charles de Menezes in the head, seven times, we didn’t get the truth. We got anonymous sources briefing the media that de Menezes had run away from police, that he’d leaped the barriers at Stockwell tube, that he’d been wearing a heavy coat thought to be concealing a suicide bomb. It was all spin – or as it used to be called, lies.

Luckily for the police it distracted the press for a long time – at least until an inquest was finally able to white-wash the case.

When a Met officer struck newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson with a baton and pushed him to the ground without provocation, we didn’t get the truth. After Tomlinson collapsed and died, the police briefed the media that Tomlinson was a rowdy protestor, that he suffered a heart attack, and that G20 protestors pelted an ambulance with bottles as it struggled to reach the dying man.

It was all lies – but almost all the MSM swallowed it, at least until The Guardian obtained damaging video evidence to the contrary.

So we know that the police lie when they mess up. By now, you’d hope the media would be alive to their tricks. Sadly not. continue reading… »

For the third general election in a row, the run-up is seeing numerous meetings and articles asking whether this election will be the first internet general election.

However, much – in fact, nearly all – of the discussion falls into two traps which are common across political journalism in the UK. First, an undue focus on the central, national picture and, second, an undue focus on the novel.

Ask those involved in organising internet campaigning for any of the major parties about what really matters and you’ll get two answers repeated. They repeatedly – and rightly – emphasise the importance of the internet for local campaigning and they also emphasise its importance for the equivalent of plumbing and sewage systems in a political party – that mostly hidden infrastructure which is vital to effective operation. continue reading… »

Picture this. You open the newspaper one grey morning, and there in a bright pixel smear on the third page is a full-length photograph of a young man. The young man is almost naked; a flesh-coloured thong clings tightly to his hairless cock and balls; he looks over his shoulder at you, his jaw a perfect masculine square, his dark eyes smouldering. Everywhere, this young man is hard, smooth, impenetrable and yet submissive, wanting you to consume him. You turn the page.

There are more young men on each of the pages that follow, naked or scantily clothed, poreless, flawless, with broad shoulders and rock-hard arses and muscles that bunch and gleam under oiled skin. You are used to the sight of these young men; these days, they hardly even arouse you. Their glassy eyes follow you on public transport, on the internet, on television, in the fashion spreads of magazines.

Picture this. Every one of the men and boys whose images you see repeated thousands of times a day is impossibly perfect, hewn from some arcane piece of rock on the platonic plane. Not one of them is over thirty-three. In the shadow of their hard, robotic masculinity, the possibility of paunches and puppy fat and male-pattern balding is unthinkable . They rarely speak, and when they do speak, they ventriloquise; they implore you to look at them, to understand their silent semiotics of commercial masculinity; they threaten and seduce you in a boring parade of billboards, adverts, music videos.

These men don’t seem to be doing very much. Usually, they are moronically thrusting and jerking around cereal boxes, insurance packages, bottles of shampoo and soap. They seem to beg to be penetrated, but it is they who have invaded your body and brain, as if the images were trying to force themselves out through your skin. Some of them are known to you by name or sobriquet, as singers or actors, or as the sons or lovers of powerful women. They grimace beautifully as they drape their impossible bodies over stages and sets, showing off watches and shoes and beautiful clothing that hangs from their perfect torsos in artful folds and flutters in artificial winds. Their images cluster in everywhere , unseeing, bored, as if they can’t quite decide whether to fuck you or punch you.

You know that it’s not real, of course. continue reading… »

The BBC’s proposal to cut 6Music and the Asian Network is, I fear, a portent of coming cuts in government spending – because it shows that when a top-down organization makes cuts, it does so on the basis of power, not efficiency.

Put it this way. If the BBC were to restructure itself according to public service broadcasting principles it would abolish BBC3 (£115m a year for a pile of crap), privatize Radio 1 and possibly Radio 2 , and stop paying huge salaries for “talent” – though the fact that Anne Robinson gets £3m a year suggests this word is used very elastically.

So, why does it leave all these alone and target instead two radio stations which seem to fulfil the public service remit by offering things which the commercial sector probably wouldn’t? continue reading… »

Last night the Muslim Council of Britain held a special closed-meeting of parliamentarians, journalists, police, public servants, community representatives, academics and, erm, me. The topic of discussion was Tackling Islamophobia: Reducing Street Violence Against British Muslims.

The event was timely. “Since 9/11 anti-Muslim hate crimes appear to have become more prevalent than racist hate crimes where black and Asian Londoners are the victims.” (PDF) Testimony from a range of academic experts and politicians substantiated the claim that street violence against Muslims is rising.

Speakers stressed that there are “tangible links between Islamophobia or anti-Muslim bigotry in both mainstream political and media discourse…extremist nationalist discourse, and anti-Muslim hate crimes”. Peter Oborne – a journalist on the Conservative right by his own admission – described how after 7/7 he became aware that journalists in mainstream newspapers got away with telling lies and distorting facts about Islam and Muslims on a regular basis. Indeed he collected his findings and took them to Channel 4, who turned them into a special episode of Dispatches. This sort of dishonesty – he said – would not be tolerated if it were directed at any other minority group. Yet the smearing of British Muslims, usually playing on fears of terrorism, is standard fare in the British media.
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Calls in favour of reducing the cost of running the BBC by 25% haven’t gone down well. Facebook campaigns are being set up and accusations are being flung that the cuts are “politically motivated” to butter up the Tories.

In short, the sceptics argue that weakening the BBC will be a gift to its private competitors and a blow to public services on both radio and television.

I am totally in favour of the BBC. I think a competitive state-owned TV is sacrosanct and whoever thinks the BBC should be dismantled and/or privatised is purely driven by rampant ideology.

However, the current cost of a TV licence is £142.50. In 2000, it was just £104. In ten years, an increase of around 36% – without anyone asking licence payers if they agreed with the way the corporation expanded.
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Two radio stations I have never listened to in my life are about to get the chop. Being the sort of bloke former BBC boss Greg Dyke famously describes as ‘hideously white’, and pushing 50 to boot, the suits at Broadcasting House probably assume that I couldn’t less.

Yet somehow the death sentences pronounced on BBC 6 Music and Asian Network strike me as something of a dealbreaker. The whole idea of the BBC is that it offers the nation a package deal. We pay for the lot, irrespective of the parts we choose to take up.

In its way, Britain’s state broadcaster is a standing rebuke to free market fundamentalism. No wonder Murdoch and the Tories hate it.

Its very existence represents implicit recognition that private sector provision necessarily gravitates towards mass market pap, rather than intelligent programming. That’s why Mastermind doesn’t run on Men & Motors.

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In a recent interview TPA chief exec Matthew Elliot claimed he is ‘not sure which party we are closest to’. Alas this sudden outbreak of openmindedness doesn’t seem to have lasted long.

The TPA has announced it’s moving to plush new offices in Tufton Street, close to Westminster.

They boasts that its neighbours include Big Brother Watch (unsurprisingly – as Big Brother Watch is pretty much the TPA), Civitas, the Conservative Cooperative Movement, the New Culture Forum, the Centre for Policy Studies, and the Nothing British campaign among other right-wing groups.
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Something terrible is happening to young women. Despite the dazzling gains made for bourgeois white women by reformist feminism, we’re….well, we’re turning into sluts. Look around you: the streets are littered with half-naked young hussies vomiting their A-levels into spillovers with their skirts hoiked round their waists. At the merest flash of a web-camera, young ladies from nice homes will flash their tits for Nuts magazine.

Conservatives and a small number of high-profile feminists are unanimous in their assertion that contemporary culture has made desperate sexual victims of all women under thirty. The reaction to the Home Office report into the ’sexualisation of children’ has been gleefully priggish, with Conservative leader David Cameron telling the BBC that: “We’ve all read stories about padded bras and Lolita beds…children are growing up too fast and missing out on childhood.” Oh David, with your nice hair and your nice wife and your house in Knightsbridge, only you can save Broken Britain from the march of the underage slags.
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contribution by 5 Chinese Crackers

On the back of my article last week, I started looking for the evidence behind the idea that the government was involved in a dastardly sercet plot to increase immigration ‘for social reasons’.

That is of course code for ‘increasing multiculturalism’ or worse still ‘importing people who will vote Labour’.

The first set of reports in the press were apparently based on an early draft of the Executive Summary of a document produced by Civil Servants from the Home Office and Cabinet Office.  We were treated to nice little snippets in the Mail showing us exactly what had been removed. 

Imagine the dishonesty of taking things out of a document.   There’s definitely a secret plot if someone does that.
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What sort of newspaper runs with headlines such as ‘We must arm ourselves for a class war’?

I mean, not even publications of the kind that get flogged outside Dalston Kingsland shopping centre of a Saturday routinely urge the comrades to break out the Kalashnikovs. That sort of juvenile ultraleftism is just embarrassing.

If you were just about to say Socialist Worker in response to my opening question, you may be surprised to learn that the correct answer is the Daily Telegraph this morning. No kid.

In fairness to economics editor Edmund Conway, I suspect the subs were getting a little carried away.

The piece at no point actively incites the bourgeoisie to stockpile automatic weaponry in anticipation of the need to gun down hordes of Jobseekers’ Allowance claimants on the rampage through the leafier parts of Richmond upon Thames.

But the article does offer an insight into what sections of the right are thinking right now.
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I’ve always argued that the trouble with Pol Pot is that he was just too damn soft on the urban petit bourgeoisie, and I was pleased to learn this morning that Simon Heffer shares that assessment.

The Daily Telegraph pundit’s big problem with the genocidaire prime minister of Democratic Kampuchea is not so much his penchant for trivial workaday misdemeanours like the annihilation of a quarter of all living Cambodians, but rather that he tried to ‘impose fairness’.

Just like Harriet Harman and her ‘mad Equality Bill’, in fact. Unfortunately, Simon doesn’t quite clinch the parallel by nailing Hattie on her policy on forced agrarian collectivisation. But let’s not quibble; all but fools will instantly identify the immediately obvious basic underlying continuity of the two politicians’ inherently socialist thought processes.

All this and more can be found in the somewhat febrile if highly entertaining examination of Labour’s latest campaign slogan – ‘A future fair for all’ – to which Heffer devotes his column today.
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Last week Tim Luckhurst was upset that Rod Liddle is not going to be be editor of the Independent. Although I can understand why he is annoyed that something he wants to happen is not going to happen, his ire against the “Liberals” who foiled Liddle is somewhat bizarre.
He wrote:

Rod Liddle will not be editor of the Independent. The screechingly intolerant campaign of hostility directed against him by metropolitan critics has done its job.

They call themselves liberals. If they are right then the word has come to have as little meaning as its common counterpart “progressive”. Sincere liberals do not censor opinion, still less should they caricature it in order to intensify hostility. True liberals oppose arguments they despise by demonstrating the greater value of better ones.

In his people’s red tunic Sunny Hundal has mounted horseback and set loose the dogs of Facebook to trash Liddle’s chances of editing the Independent.

Tim argues that having an opinion, registering that opinion publicly and taking action to see it realised is illiberal.
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contribution by 5 Chinese Crackers

A few months ago, Andrew Neather wrote a pro-immigration column in the Standard saying that although immigration was a good thing and there were sound economic resons behind allowing it to increase, there was also an undercurrent in early 2000s Labour thinking that reasoned that immigration would also increase multiculturalism, which was a good thing.  That made him uncomfortable.

The tabs seized on this and turned the main reason for Labour’s immigration policy into a dastardly master plan to change the face of Britain on purpose, just to hack off Conservatives.  Mwuh-huh-huh-huh-haaah!

Neather reacted to this by writing a rebuttal, ‘How I became the story and why the Right is wrong’ in which he said:

Somehow this has become distorted by excitable Right-wing newspaper columnists into being a “plot” to make Britain multicultural.

There was no plot.

But this idea of a secret plot has resurfaced, because MigrationWatch sent out an FoI request and now they’ve got the smoking gun that proves Labour did deliberately increase immigration on purpose as a secret scheme to encourage multiculturalism! 
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There was a good example of the open contempt which the media have for ordinary people and for democracy in the Times recently. Mourning the “profoundly depressing”, “colossal loss” of James Purnell standing down from Parliament, their leader included a spoof recruitment advert:

Wanted: a highly intelligent, experienced person to kick his heels for at least five years. Travelling to and fro from some of the most inconvenient places in the country, you will have the opportunity to work seven days a week. On Sundays you will be able to enjoy attending civic events.

We promise to select your immediate boss from among your worst enemies. In return we will pay you less than half of what you might earn elsewhere. You will have to shoulder your own expenses. We are seeking a candidate willing to endure repeated insults from customers.

This is a window into the minds of a sneering, out of touch, hard to reach elite.

Thanks to journalists and Tories for the fake concern about what a devastating blow Purnell’s departure from parliament is for the centre left, but somehow I think we will cope.
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And I thought Nicholas Winterton was out of touch with ordinary working people!

Never fear, Nick, the BBC’s outdone you. Here’s BBC News (from 6 mins 45 secs in) commenting on Geoffrey Howe’s approach to post-recession fiscal management in 1981:

Then he planned to tighten the budget even as the country was coming out of recession.

And this was the reaction: a letter from the Times from 364 economists arguing he was doing the wrong thing. The eminent list of academics included Professor King, now Governor of the Bank of England.

History proved Geoffrey Howe to be more right than they were.

You fucking what? Try telling that to people who needed a job in the 1980s.
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As is well-known enough, I have no sense of humour to speak of. Indeed, Cllr Bob Piper contends that I am a “dour humourless git who can’t take a joke”. And he’s in the same party so I must be a right prattish killjoy.

So I’m perhaps not the best person to judge whether the Conservatives’ new foray into humorous anti-Labour posters (pictured) hits the spot, or not.

But as a self-important, pseudo-intellectual twat of a leftie analyst, I am in an excellent position to point out the following key aspect to the new campaign.
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It’s not just Conservative Central Office who’re having a few graphic design problems at the moment.

This is the actual poster that The Spectator are using to promote an upcoming education conference called ‘The Schools Revolution’ at which the Tories Education spokesman, Michael Gove, is the headline act:

Does it remind you of anything? Like, say, this…?

Or perhaps this…?

Maybe this makes things a bit more explicit…?

Memo to the Spectator’s design department… not the best choice of colour scheme there guys, D’oh!