The Sage of Crewe at Zelo Street posted a very encouraging piece yesterday about the value of the Scum as a going financial concern. The good news is, it doesn’t have one. It’s worth priceless nada, zip, zero. News Corp Holdings UK and Ireland, which oversees Newsgroup newspapers has posted its annual accounts up to June last year. And the company made a massive £201 million loss, despite cutting sales and marketing costs by forty per cent, and purging staff from 605 to 546. More than 80 per cent of the loss were one-off payments made to the phone hacking victims to stop their cases coming to court and costing Dirty Rupe and his gang even more. The wretched newspaper also made a payment to the Lib Dem MP Simon Hughes last Thursday, who felt he had been illegally targeted by reporters wishing to out his sexuality.
The Groan, reporting on the Scum’s parlous accounts, as quoted and amended by Zelo Street, also said that
“[News Group Newspapers] wrote down [the Sun and Sun on Sunday’s] value to zero. The £84m non-cash ‘impairment of publishing rights’ essentially means the publisher does not believe the titles will return to positive growth”.
Zelo Street commented
TheSun is no longer worth even publishing. Its continuing presence on news stands serves only as clickbait for other Murdoch group enterprises, and as a right-wing propaganda sheet. Many of those 546 staff are not receiving the obscenely inflated remuneration enjoyed by those at the top. But all are now candidates for the dole queue.
He also concludes that it raises questions about the viability of the rest of Fleet Street, as many of them were also involved in the phone hacking. He states that it may not signal the end of Britain’s free and fearless press, but you can see it from here.
This follows what Lobster and others have said about Murdoch’s other British title, the Times. It’s readership has fallen far beyond the figure at which any other paper would have been wound up. But because it’s Britain’s paper of record, it allows the grubby smut merchant a place at the cabinet table with our politicos. And so he keeps it going. I also suspect that the Scum and the Times will be kept going as tax losses for the rest of the Murdoch empire.
But this is highly encouraging, if alarming for the old media and the lamestream reporters, who lament the passage of the days when they could form public opinion and who are now complaining that public opinion is more fragmented and polarised than ever. Yes, there’s a problem there, but the lamestream media is responsible for maintaining a corrupt and highly exploitative neoliberal economic system which is ruining our country and driving its people further into poverty and despair. And there has been no greater supporter of the Thatcherite consensus than the Scum. It’s run, written and edited by post boys pretending to be working class to get Britain’s working people to vote against their interests. And it has always been extremely racist. About two decades or so ago Private Eye carried a piece about yet another judgement by the Press Complaints Commission as was about the wretched paper’s racism, that said that there had been 19 such judgements against it. And this is quite apart from the attacks on Scargill and the miners’ during the miners’ strike and the smearing of the Liverpool fans after the Hillsborough stadium disaster.
The Scum always was morally worthless. Now we know its financially worthless too. If you want real news, start looking at Novara Media, the Canary, the Skwawkbox and other left-wing news sites. And if you want informed comment, then it’s Zelo Street and Mike’s blog over at Vox Political, as well as Another Angry Voice. You know, all the people the Scum and its mates would describe as evil Commies or anti-Semites because they supported Corbyn or otherwise challenge virtuous capitalism. They’re worth reading.
But the Scum is worthless. It’s time it was wound up, and the rest of the right-wing press likewise.
The documentary then moves on to January, 2009 and the invasion of Gaza, and allegations of Human Rights abuses by Israeli forces were still circulating months later. But Oborne points out that you wouldn’t know it from the contents of the News of the World and the Mirror. Both these rags ran stories instead about the threat to Israel from the surrounding Arab nations. The hacks behind these pieces had been given free trips to Israel by BICOM, one of the wealthiest lobby groups in Britain. Oborne then goes on to interview David Newman in his office in Jerusalem. Newman worked alongside BICOM in disseminating Israeli propaganda in British universities. Newman states that there is indeed a debate within Israel about the status of the settlements in Palestinian territory. Groups like BICOM close down this debate abroad, and instead demand absolute for Israel.
Plocha Zabludowicz, the head of BICOM, is the 18th richest person in Britain. And he is very definitely not part of traditional British Anglo-Jewish society, but came up through the Jewish Leadership Council, who are described as the lords of the big Jewish donors. Oborne then interviews the head of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue, Rabbi Emeritus David Goldberg, and asks if he knows him. Goldberg states that his name doesn’t ring a bell. Zabludowicz is actually of Polish ancestry. He is a Finnish citizen with a house in north London. His father made a fortune peddling Israeli arms, as did Zabludowicz himself before moving into property and casinos. His company is registered in Lichtenstein. He is, in short, ‘a rank outsider’. He was also one of the guests at Madonna’s birthday party in Italy.
Zabludowicz generously bankrolls BICOM, to whom he gave £800,000, who wrote a clause into their accounts recognising his generosity. He had given them £1.3 million in the previous three years, and has business interests in the Middle East. These cast doubt on the possibility of reaching a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. Oborne then goes on to discuss the case of one of the illegal Israeli settlements in Occupied Palestine, whose supermarket is owned by Zabludowicz. Newman states this indicates the direction in which BICOM is moving. Rabbi Goldberg states that it shows that Zabludowicz calculates that the settlement won’t be returning to the Palestinians, even under the most generous peace deal. As for Zabludowicz himself, he declined to meet the Dispatches team, but instead released a statement claiming that he was a major supporter of the creation of a separate Palestinian state, and that he understood that concessions would need to be made. Oborne was, however, successful in talking to Lorna Fitzsimons, BICOM’s chief executive. She claimed that BICOM was very open, that their donors do not influence policy. When asked about Zabludowicz, she claimed he was different from anyone else and she didn’t know about his business connections. All the organisation was doing was to make journos and people aware of the different strands of the debate on Israel.
Oborne moves on to the other groups involved in the Israel lobby – the Jewish Leadership Council, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Zionist Federation, and states that some members of these groups are very aggressive towards the TV and press. He then interviews Alan Rusbridger about his experiences of dealing with them. Rusbridger states that some TV editors warned him to stay away from them and the whole subject of Israel and the Palestinians. The Guardian was attacked for criticising Israel in a way that no other country does. There was a special meeting at the Israeli embassy between the ambassador, Zabludowicz, Grunewald of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the property magnate Gerald Reuben. They were unhappy about a Groaniad article comparing the Israeli’s occupation of Palestine with apartheid South Africa. So Grunewald and his mate, Roman Leidel, decided to pay Rusbridger a visit. Grunewald is a lawyer, claimed that the article was fomenting anti-Semitism, and would encourage people to attack Jews on the street, a risible accusation which Rusbridger denied. This was followed by complaints to the Press Complaints Commission about the article by the pro-Israel American group, CAMERA, or Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, which specialising in attacking journos critical of Israel. The Press Complaints Commission duly investigated the article, and found that only one fact was wrong. When asked about this, Rabbi Goldberg states that Israel is indeed an apartheid state. There are two road systems, one for use by Israelis and one for the Palestinians. There are two legal systems in operation. The Israelis are governed by Israeli law, while the Palestinians are governed by military law. When asked what will happen to him when his comments are broadcast, the good rabbi simply laughs and says that he’ll be attacked once against as being an ant-Semitic, self-hating Jew.
Many other Jews are also critical of Israel. Oborne goes on to talk to Tony Lerman, formerly of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, and now a Groaniad journo. Lerman states that the Israel lobby don’t take into account the diversity of Jewish views on Israel. This is confirmed by Avi Shlaim, who says that there is a split in the Jewish community over Israel. The community’s leaders are largely pro-Israel with a narrow rightwing agenda that is not typical of Jewish Brits. And libelling Israel’s critics as ‘anti-Semitic’ is now common policy.
One example of this use of libel is a New York blogger, ‘Hawkeye’, who hunts through the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ column, claiming it is full of anti-Semitic bias. Rusbridger states that this is dangerous and disreputable. ‘Hawkeye’ attacked Lerman in particular as a nasty anti-Semite. Lerman states that this tactic has been adopted because it’s a useful defence of Israel. Rabbi Goldberg concedes that some people might be seriously anti-Semitic, others are just voicing genuine opinions, which should be respected. Michael Ancram, even, was accused of being anti-Semitic, which he said he takes with a pinch of salt.
But this leads into the whole question of whether the BBC has been corrupted by the influence of the Israel lobby. On record, BBC journos and spokespeople claim that the Corporation’s reporting of Israel is unbiased. Off-record, the stories different. News staff state that there is always pressure from top management for a pro-Israel slant. Oborne then interview Charlie Brebitt, an accountant at the LSE, who was formerly of Channel 4, who confirms that there is a very strong and active Israel lobby, and a sizable body of sympathy with Israel. The BBC has no choice but to respond. Honest Reporting, another pro-Israel media attack dog, and the other parts of the Israel lobby take advantage of this, alleging that there is an institutional bias at the Corporation against Israel.
In 2003 during the Iraq invasion the Beeb broadcast a hard-hitting documentary investigating Israel’s secret nuclear weapon’s programme, entitled ‘Israel’s Secret Weapon’ on the 16th March. The Israeli Press Office issued a statement comparing this to the worst of Nazi propaganda, and imposed restrictions on BBC staff in Israel. When Ariel Sharon, the Israeli leader, visited Downing Street, the only journos banned from covering the meeting were the Beeb. Honest Reporting UK complained that the programme was part of a campaign to vilify Israel. One member of the group, Nathan Sharansky, complained that the late Orla Guerin, here shown with two eyes, was anti-Semitic, and that she shared the goals of Palestinian terror groups.
This is a long piece posted on YouTube from Dick Coughlan’s ‘Left-Wing Propaganda’ podcast, where the comedian and vlogger against racism, sexism and anti-gay prejudice comments on Katie Hopkin’s final departure from mainstream British media.
Hopkins was the loser on British version of The Apprentice, who then went on to make a career out of being a right-wing, racist, corporate loudmouth. This is the woman who said she wanted helicopter gunships to shoot down the immigrants crossing the Med in boats, and who sneered at the father of the little boy, whose body was washed ashore in Turkey after one of them went down. She’s a prize, nasty piece of work. But one no longer welcome in British media. She lost her job with the Daily Mail the other day, and has now gone off to join Rebel Media. They’re another far right outfit with a nice line in racist, anti-immigrant politics. They’re Canadian, and if she moves to that country, it’ll be highly ironic, as she’ll be an immigrant. And way back in the 19th or early 20th century, the descendants of the original European settlers in Canada were campaigning against the influx of large numbers of new immigrants from Britain. But all this will be forgotten, as the new breed of extreme nationalists in Europe and America simply hate non-Whites.
Coughlan goes through the various newspapers and organisations that I have picked her up and then sacked her, or released her, because her views were just too toxic even for them. The Heil is simply the latest. She’s also been given the heave-ho by LBC and the Scum amongst others. He also talks about some of the monstrous comments she’s made, and her foot-in-mouth appearance on Philip Schofield’s show on ITV. This was in a piece about children’s names. Hopkins stated that she wouldn’t want her child going to school with children named after places, because it gave the messages that the parents were low-class and uneducated. Or words to that effect. Schofield then pointed out that she’d called her daughter India. To which Hopkins replied that ‘India is not a place.’ Really? That must surprised the nearly 1 1/4 billion people, who live there, as well as all the people of Indian descent over here!
As for being sacked from the Scum and the Heil, how right-wing do you have to be? The Heil is the newspaper, which ran the headline ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ praising Mosley and the BUF to the skies, when they were goose-stepping around in the 1930s, and in whose pages the father of the current editor, Paul Dacre, ranted about how wonderful Adolf Hitler was. The Mail has been consistently anti-immigrant, with a vicious hatred of the unemployed, the poor and disabled people on benefit, as well as unmarried mothers and anybody else they think is a threat to Tory values.
As for the Scum, that paper’s notorious for its racism. Always has been. Way back in the first years of this century, Private Eye published a piece stating that the Scum had been judged guilty of racism on 19 occasions by the Press Complaints Commission, as was. It comes to something indeed when Hopkins is far too toxic even for them.
Anyway, she out of British media. At least for the time being.
Mike put up a piece on his blog today, commenting on the distinction the lamestream media makes between White and Muslim terrorists. He was discussing the coverage of Darren Osborne, the islamophobe who deliberately drove his car into a crowd of worshippers leaving two mosques in London. Osborne had become obsessed with killing Muslims after watching a documentary on the Muslim grooming gangs and radicalised by following various anti-Islamic groups, including the notorious Britain First, on the net.
What drew Mike’s ire was the way Osborne was described as a ‘loner’, in sharp contrast to the various Islamist mass murderers, who were rightly described as terrorists. They were. So is Osborne. He killed and maimed innocent people for a political ideology. And there is no difference in the pattern of his radicalisation from the Islamists. Many of them were self-radicalised, turning to hatred and violence by following the propaganda spewed over the internet by groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS. They were described as ‘lone wolves’, which I think is how the Islamists themselves want to promote them and their actions.
But White killers like Osborne aren’t described as what they are – terrorists.
Mike wonders if this was propaganda. And he has a Tweet by Tom London, who also comments on this distinction, and makes the point that to understand these peoples’ action, you need to understand the causes.
Mike and Mr London aren’t the only people, who’ve noticed this peculiar double standard. The American left-wing and progressive news shows – The Young Turks, in particular, – have also commented repeatedly on the way the media in America also makes this distinction. Whites are ‘loners’, Muslims are ‘terrorists’. And Islamist terrorism is taken very seriously. As it should. White racist terrorism should also be treated in the same way. In fact, it deserves more attention and effort to combat it, as there’s actually more of it than Islamist violence. But Trump’s decided to just about close down the parts of the FBI dedicated to monitoring and tracking White supremacist terrorist organisations. Of course, some of this is self-interest for Trump, as he’s received strong backing from White Supremacist groups, most notably the Alt-Right. Which has its own gang of violent, SA-type thugs in the ‘Proud Boys’, who believe that combating the threat to White America means going out and beating up Anti-Fascists.
But there’s a wider, underlying assumption here. It’s that White America and Britain is tolerant and non-racist, and that the threats to British and American society come from outside. From the ‘unassimilable immigrants’ the Daily Mail, Express and the Torygraph talked so much about under Thatcher, and continue to discuss in those terms. And when the Scum declares that we are a tolerant society, attacking a White racist outrage, you have to be amazed at their hypocrisy. This is a paper that never missed a trick to vilify Blacks and other ethnic minorities. Nearly twenty years ago Private Eye ran a piece about the rag’s double standards, pointing out that there had been 19 complaints against the Scum for racism upheld by the Press Complaints Commission, as was.
Now I don’t doubt that most Brits now aren’t racist, although there still is lingering prejudice, particularly towards Muslims. Some of that is the result of the War on Terror and Israeli propaganda – when the word ‘terrorist’ began entered widespread use in the 1960s-70s, it was always in the context of Muslim and Palestinian/Arab terror. It was the deliberate use of language to present Israel as the noble, wronged party, standing against murderous fanatics. Who were, as orientals, terrible others to be feared and hated. And some of it comes from the real fanatics, who organised demonstrations demanding the death of Salman Rushdie and the Pope, waving banner proclaiming that we would soon be visited for our crimes by the jihadis. And some of this is media bias, as the counterdemonstrations organised by far more tolerant, liberal Muslims against the bigots, firebrands and wannabe mass murderers didn’t receive nearly so much coverage.
There are also dangers with accusing White society en masse of racism. Nobody likes to be told they’re racist, and I’m afraid some of the self-proclaimed anti-racist and Black and ethnic minority advocacy groups did go too far in claiming that British racism was endemic and widespread. Some of them really did give the impression that they regarded all White people as racist. And this has provoked a backlash. Way back around 2004 the Spectator ran a piece, ‘Blackened Whites’, attacking anti-racist groups for unfairly smearing the White British majority, and particularly White men. It was the Tories attempt to use the Republicans’ tactic of appealing to ‘angry White men’, who feel threatened and demonised by feminism and the rise of Blacks and other ethnic minorities. Pushing anti-racist campaigning too far, and labelling all Whites, or nearly all Whites racist, risks further alienating ordinary people, who would otherwise be sympathetic. It plays into the hands of the Tories, who would like to present themselves as the nice, anti-racist party, in contrast to all the White proles in the Labour movement. See Owen Jones’ book Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, for the way the media deliberately misrepresented an industrial dispute about the use of immigrant workers to see how the Tories and their lapdogs in the press do this.
But there is real racism there. The Tory party was riven in the 1980s with groups declaring their support for ‘racial nationalism’ – the ideology of the National Front and BNP. The Conservative youth organisations were notorious for it, before they were shut down by Norman Fowler and merged into Conservative Future. But these racists haven’t gone away, and neither has the anti-immigrant rhetoric. It’s still there in the right-wing press. A little while ago that side of the Tories tended to decamp to UKIP. But now that UKIP’s very definitely on the rocks, they’re all coming back. In the meantime, there’s always Boris Johnson and Toby Young to make horrifically racist pronouncements, although in fairness to Johnson, he did apologise for his comments about ‘picaninnies’ with ‘watermelon grins’.
And so a White racist, who killed and injured innocent people, simply because of their religion, gets called a ‘loner’, but not the terrorist he is.
Mike today put up a piece blowing away another lie that the Tories and their servants in the media have hawking: that the Left is full of misogynists, who harass and abuse women MPs. In fact Amnesty International have published a report showing that the opposite is true: most abuse comes from the right. And the female politico, who most often suffers it is Diane Abbott.
Who in the Left is honestly surprised by this? There are Conservative varieties of feminism, as you’d expect, but feminism, or women’s lib as it was known in the 1970s, is most often associated with the Left. And as the Austrian democratic socialist Marxist, Karl Kautsky argued, socialism is all about equality. This is why they champion the working class, and why left-wing governments, particularly Communist, have encouraged women to enter politics and the workplace, even if their countries’ traditional culture is very sexist, as it is in Russia and some of the countries of the former eastern bloc.
Conservatives, on the other hand, stress the importance of tradition, and despite having given Britain two female prime ministers, Maggie Thatcher and now Theresa May, this usually also means stressing and promoting traditional gender roles. Thus, while the right-wing broadsheets may earnestly discuss the issue of getting more women into the boardroom, and equal pay, the Daily Heil has been telling its female readers that stable families, and indeed western civilization as a whole, needs women to concentrate on staying at home to raise children, rather than both pursuing independent careers. The image the right projects of feminism is of angry misandrists, which has been a factor in why so many young women a few years ago rejected the term ‘feminism’, even when they had strong feelings about winning equality and rejecting sexism.
There’s also more than a little racism on the Tories’ side as well. The Tory right has always had links to Fascist right, including inviting members of central American death squads over to their annual dinners. A few days ago I put up a piece about Owen Jones’ video on YouTube, in which he commented on an odious conversation by the Tory youth movement, Activate, about gassing chavs and shooting peasants. This wasn’t the first time they had made Nazi comments and bullied the poor and underprivileged by a very long chalk. Jones discussed some prize examples of their foul behavior. This included the members of Oxford University Conservative society goose-stepping around like the real Nazis, singing songs about ‘Dashing through the Reich … killing lots of ****’, the last a very unpleasant terms for Jews. Their comrades north of the border ain’t no better either. This crew thought it would be jolly fun for one of them to dress up as a slave master, while another cringed before him as a slave. It wasn’t that long ago that the Tories in Scotland were known as the Unionist party, and their antics and Thatcher’s complete dismissal of the country was a large factor in the decision of so many Scots to vote for the SNP.
As for the Tory press, they’ve been consistently against coloured immigration since Windrush. And long before then, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries they were busy campaigning against allowing ‘aliens’ – that is, eastern European Jews, to enter this country as asylum seekers fleeing the pogroms in eastern Europe. This anti-immigration stance has frequently been blatantly racist. Private Eye, when covering the prosecution of the Scum yet again for racism by the Press Complaints Commission, as it then was, noted that the wretched paper had had 19 judgements against it previously for its racist content. I can remember how the Torygraph, Mail and Express back in the 1980s railed against ‘unassimilable’ immigrants and the way they were forming little ghettoes.
Racism became a major issue in that decade following the 1981/2 riots, and the publication of government reports that revealed a massive culture of institutional racism and Black deprivation in Britain. To the Tory press, however, the riots were all the fault of racist Blacks. While there have been Black and Asian politicians before, Diane Abbott was one of the group of very visible Black politicians and activists to achieve public office during the decade, along with Paul Boateng and Bernie Grant, the leader of Brent Council. They were all very vocal in their opposition to racism. Grant died the other year, and I think Boateng more or less vanished into the depths of Whitehall. There are a number of other Black politicos, like David Lammy, Chuka Umunna and Oona King, but Abbott is one of the longest-serving and most reviled. The Scum tried running a Communism scare against the Labour party in the 1987 election, by putting up a two-page spread with the photographs of Labour MPs and candidates, below which was a few brief quotes or comments showing how they were a threat to British society. Red Ken is supposed to have said that he wasn’t in favour of the British army, but wanted the workers to be armed so they could guard the factories. Under Abbott’s was a quote, ‘All Whites are racist.’
That was very much the image she had at the time. She’s supposed to be very keen on tackling racism, because she felt that her mother’s career was blocked because of her colour. This is actually quite likely. But it’s highly questionable that she’s anti-White. Many of the stories the press published about the supposed hard-left extremists in the Labour party at the time were either exaggerations or completely made up. Ken Livingstone, whom the Eye has frequently mocked under the nickname, Ken Leninspart, really did believe in worker’s control. But he was never a Marxist, and in fact worker’s control used to form only a small part of the subjects he discussed with the, um, ‘gentlemen’ of the press. Most of the time it was rather more mundane. But they played up the worker’s control, and attacked it, because it frightened their proprietors and editors, quite apart from the rest of the middle class. The veteran gay rights activist, Peter Tatchell, who was also beginning his career as a Labour politico, was another who was made to appear much more extreme than he was. At one point the papers published a story about him going on holiday to one of the great gay centres on the American west coast. Except that he hadn’t, and didn’t even know the place existed. They also did the same thing to Marc Almond. In his case, they didn’t think he looked sufficiently effeminate, and so retouched his photograph.
Given this long record of telling porky pies about radical politicians, you can’t be sure that Abbot made the above comment, or that it represents her views now. But as Sid James remarked to Tony Hancock in ‘The Scandal Magazine’, mud always sticks, boy. They’ve carried on portraying her as a threat to White history and culture. A few years ago, the Daily Mail ran a story about how the London borough she represents in parliament decided to replace the paintings in their civic offices. Down came the traditional portraits of the White guys, who had previously served on the council, and up came paintings of Black children.
The story was part of a larger article about her, and didn’t offer any details about this, nor the reasons for the decision. Without putting it in so many words, it was presented merely as Abbott’s coterie of angry Blacks removing Whites from the history of the borough. How this supposed racist anger compares with her appearing regularly alongside Michael Portillo on Andrew Neil’s The Daily Politics, where she appears perfectly calm and genial with her White presenters, as befits a grande dame of British politics, I really don’t know.
Nevertheless, she remains a Tory bete noir, and given the fact that there have always been members of the party, who can’t understand why a Black person could ever object to golliwogs, the Black and White Minstrels or why you can make derogatory comments about Black people’s supposed character defects as a race, or use the unpleasant terms previous generations used to insult them, and it becomes quite easy to see why she should be the target for so much abuse.
As for the supposed sexism in the Labour ranks, there was never much substance to that anyway. It was never more than an attempt by wealthy, entitled right-wing Labour female politicians to smear their male rivals. These women had nothing to offer ordinary working Brits, including women. While ordinary women are finding it difficult to pay the bills and feed their families, thanks to the ravages of neoliberalism, these female politicians simply offered more of the same. More cuts, more privatization, more precarity. But like Hillary Clinton, from whom they got the tactic, they wanted to present themselves as representing women in general, even if in fact they only represented rich, entitled women like themselves. And so just Clinton was outraged by the popularity of Bernie Sanders, these women were infuriated by Jeremy Corbyn. Clinton claimed that she had been vilified by the ‘Bernie Bros’, who didn’t actually exist. And so her counterparts in the Labour party over here decided to follow her, and lie about how they were the victims of savage misogyny from Corbyn and the Old Left.
The reality is the opposite. I don’t doubt that there is racism and sexism on the Left. But there’s far less of it than on the right. But the press are still liars for claiming otherwise.
Antisocial Media is a vlogger, who makes videos laying into the far right and its various denizens. In this long video – it’s an hour and four minutes long – he presents the unlovely story of Katie Hopkins. Hopkins is the professional troll and Sun writer, who in 2015 wrote that she didn’t care about the thousands of dead migrants killed attempting to cross the Med into Europe, but wanted them deterred with gunboats. She then compared them to ‘cockroaches’. She has also applauded Trump’s avowed policy of banning Muslim emigration to the US. She has also made other statements aimed at working up hate and vilifying Muslims, such as blaming them as a whole for the atrocities committed by the Islamists and complaining that Muslims don’t do enough to distance themselves from the terrorists. She has also sneered at the Scots, fat people and written a long piece defended the footballer Adam Johnson after he was convicted of grooming and having underage sex with a 15 year old girl. Oh yes, and she also sneers at her own sex, women, for being too weak and pathetic. Because she didn’t like the Pussy Marchers at the Women’s March in Washington against Trump. And then she has appeared talking to Dave ‘Alt Right’ Rubin, of the Rubin Report, who tells her that he hasn’t seen anything racist or anti-Semitic in her material.
The clip begins with The Apprentice, the show that launched her on her path to infamy. Antisocial Media has a particular animus against the show, because not only has it launched her, but it also has Karen Brady as one of Alan Sugar’s little helpers. Yes, Karen Brady, who was elevated to the House of Lords, where she voted for tax cuts, which hurt the poor the most. Plus, The Apprentice is presented in the US by Trump. He also thinks that Alan Sugar looks like an angry testicle. Well, it’s a point of view, I suppose.
Hopkins was not a winner, but fell on her sword as she couldn’t guarantee to Sugar that she would take up the post with him if it was offered.
There then follows a clip with Sugar amazing everyone, when he appears on Breakfast TV to say he felt sorry for her. For all of five minutes. This was because there was an aftershow rap party, but she had made no friends on the programme and so no-one was talking to her.
Then there’s a clip of her appearing on Philip Schofield’s show, where she talks about how she doesn’t like very working class names like Charmaine or Bradley, because they show the child comes from a certain type of background characterized by bad behavior. Basically, she’s afraid they’re too chavvy. Opposing her is a woman, Anna-May Mangan, the daughter of an Irish immigrant, and a working-class mother. She makes the point that she was also isolated at school, because some parents didn’t want their children playing with an Irish girl. However, her daughter and working class friends have gone on to university, and despite having names like Kylie that Hopkins sneers at, have qualified as doctors and lawyers. Schofield then reads out a list of high achieving Americans, including doctors, sports people and musicians, who have the names Hopkins detests.
Antisocial Media then points out that you can see the direction of Hopkins’ future career there, as she deliberately takes up a position that she knows will be inflammatory and unpopular. However, despite the fact that the show is only watched by the elderly, housewives and the unemployed, the segment was immediately picked up and circulated on social media.
That led to Hopkins getting a job at the Sun, and, in 2015, making those vile comments about migrants. This part of the film includes a clip from Russell Brand taking her apart for this. Brand rightly points out that when she called them ‘cockroaches’, she was using exactly the same language as Heinrich Himmler, the head of SS, when he described Jews as ‘rats’ and ‘vermin’.
Also not impressed by this terminology was Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye. He interviewed Hopkins, who tried lying her way out of it. No, she wasn’t being malicious when she described them as ‘cockroaches’. She was admiring their fortitude and endurance, as we were all told that in the event of a nuclear war only cockroaches would survive. This is plainly bullsh*t of the highest order, and Hislop rightly calls her out on it. He simply goes on to read out the other hateful stuff she wrote about them.
She also gets short shrift from the comedian Josie Long, who also makes the point that describing these people as ‘cockroaches’ and saying ‘we need a final solution’ is very much the same language that the Nazis used of the Jews, and is very definitely not a joke.
Russell Brand also argues that there’s no point in hating Hopkins herself, as she’s just the product of the hatred and racism in a section of British and society and media. Or in his graphic phrase, ‘the pus oozing from the pimple’. Quite so. Antisocial Media then discusses how her comments led to a petition calling on her to be banned. He makes the point that this has allowed her to position herself as someone standing up for free speech, saying what can’t be said because of political and media bias. He argues instead that pressure should have been placed on the Sun’s editor and publishers, so that they should have to think very carefully before they give a job to someone like her, or publish their comments. And Josie Long points out that it isn’t enough to ignore her. She’s tried to that long enough already, and Hopkins is still here, along with Nigel Farage and other creatures of the extreme right.
Hopkins also tried defending her comments about Trump’s Muslim ban on Andrew Neil’s politics programme. She got shredded there too. Neil pointed out several times that she was accusing him of saying things he never had. When she then talked about how we had lost control of our cities to aggressive migrants, particularly Muslims, Neil pointed out that while insulting behavior was unpleasant, they hadn’t lost control as she said. He asked her to name one city where this had occurred. Hopkins couldn’t, and so started challenging him to join her in going round such a city to show what would happen. Neil said he’d quite like to, but they couldn’t if she wouldn’t tell them which area it would be. She then very obviously changed the subject to her joy that her child’s school still has a Nativity play, which Neil also pointed out. As for the Muslim community not condemning the acts of terror committed in their name, Neil rightly points out that they’ve done so. There have been marches by them against the terrorists.
Too right. There have any number of Muslim clerics, who have condemned the Islamists and terrorism across the Middle East. In India something like 200 of them signed a document condemning them. But this is too few of them, according to Hopkins.
One of Hopkins’ supporters is Paul Joseph Watson, of Infowars fame. Watson, pontificating about Muslim terrorism, declared that there were no cases of terrorists shouting ‘Katie Hopkins’ instead of ‘Allahu Akbar!’. Except there were. A group of White racists had daubed on a mosque somewhere the message ‘***** Leave’ and ‘We need a final solution’.
And her bigoted racist comments have garnered her support from the real Nazis. One of those who supported one of her statements on Twitter signed himself ‘Antijuden SS’. ‘Juden’ is the German word for ‘Jews’. Hopkins took the comment down, but it was up there for a year before she did so.
Then there’s the clip of her going on America television to attack fat people. She claimed fat people were unhappy, and so put on and then lost 50 pounds in order to shame them, make the point that they shouldn’t make excuses for themselves, and could lose weight without having a chef or personal trainer. Antisocial Media says he sort-of agrees with her, in a way, but still thinks she’s wrong because she’s obviously not going to encourage anyone to lose weight when she so obviously hates them.
As for Adam Johnson, Antisocial Media rips into her long screed in support of the footballer by stating that he was indeed grooming the girl, and that by blaming her, and claiming she seduced him, she was blaming the victim. And yes, legally you can make a judgement concerning what is the proper age of consent.
Antisocial media also states that, thanks to the Scots dying before the age of sixty, because they’re too lazy to work till the age of retirement, Hopkins has now gained the same notoriety as Alt-Right troll Milo Yiannopolis over in the US. Hopkins made the comment on the same day, but just before, a terrible helicopter crash, which made her comments appear even more offensive than they were. Now, like Yiannopolis, she’s guaranteed to produce a crowd of protesters whenever or wherever she appears.
As for her appearance with Dave Rubin, when he states that Hopkins has, in his opinion, never said anything racist or anti-Semitic, the video shows this to be completely untrue by putting up a selection of some of the disgusting things she’s said about Blacks and Muslims. She also talks about how Britain is succumbing to Islam, because of the rise of Muslim mayor in many British cities, such as the mayor of London. She also talks about the global schemes of George Soros.
You can here something like a wolf howling at this point. I think it’s been put in because it’s ‘dog whistle’ politics. It’s a racist statement, that’s coded so that only people aware of this type of racist language recognize it. Soros is very much a bete noir of the Far Right. He’s also a Hungarian Jew. This is why the Fascists running Hungary are putting up posters attacking him on bus stops all over their country and in the media. Soros funds various democracy and open society groups and institutes in Hungary, which is clearly a threat to the anti-Semites now goose-stepping around the corridors of power.
This also shows how selective the accusations of anti-Semitism may be the Zionists are. Soros is very anti-Zionist. He despises them because of the way Kasztner, the head of the Zionists in Hungary, betrayed his people to the Nazis. He allowed the Nazis to deport them in the hope that the Nazis would allow some of the survivors to go to Israel. So Soros doesn’t support Israel, and won’t give money to Zionist organisations.
This has sent Netanyahu and the Israeli government berserk, and they have been only too glad to give their support to the Hungarian stormtroopers in their demonization of Soros. For further information on this, see the article on Tony Greenstein’s blog at http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/israel-supports-viktor-orban-and.html.
As for Katie Hopkin’s appearance with Dave Rubin, it’s telling that amongst some of the stars of the Alt Right he gives prominence too is Millennial Woes. Millennial Woes is someone, who can only be described as a racist and a Nazi. He hates coloured immigrants, has said that they should be gunned down by warships, and also recommends the reintroduction of slavery. He is definitely not someone any decent person would want to share their views, or be associated with politically.
I dare say Katie Hopkins will be around for years to come. Because she is a troll, who gets off on being hated, she’s an unperson on Mike’s blog. He won’t mention her unless he really has to, and then he uses a suitable pseudonym or circumlocution.
On the other hand, Josie Long is right. She isn’t going away. I signed a petition on Change.org to get rid of her after her vile comments about a ‘final solution’. But I think Antisocial Media has a point when he says that the people, who really need to feel the heat are the editor and publishers of the Sun. But frankly, considering the Scum’s long history of appearing before organisations like the Press Complaints’ Commission for racism, and the apparently cavalier way Murdoch regards libel, I don’t think there’s much chance of them heeding the opinions of the British public on this issue.
My drawing of Boris Johnson, who seems to have been in some pain. Make up your own jokes.
Earlier today, Mike put up an audio clip of Boris Johnson, Tory MP for Henley on Thames, former editor of the Spectator, mayor of London, and frequent guest on Have I Got News For You being interviewed on the Queen’s Speech by Eddie Mair on Radio 4. Boris has got a reputation as an incompetent buffoon, based on the fact that things have gone spectacularly wrong with him in charge in public for years. Like, for example, when he tried coming down a zipline for some event, and got stuck halfway along and had to be rescued. Or when he shut himself out of his own house in front of reporters. Or when he held a press meeting for some campaign he was involved in, only to have the video go wrong, as reported in Private Eye.
This interview will most certainly not have dispelled that reputation.
Mair begins by asking Johnson about Theresa May’s comments last year about tackling various injustices. What was there in the Queen’s Speech today, about correcting the harsher treatment Blacks receive in court?
Johnson’s reply was a series a mumbled ‘ers’, followed by ‘I’ve got it here somewhere’ and rustling sounds.
So Mair moved on to his next question, which was about what plans the government may have to tackle mental health issues.
More mumbling and sounds of ignorance from Johnson, who then tried to change the subject and go back to the previous question.
At which point Mair brought him up sharp with the words, ‘No, Boris, this isn’t the Two Ronnies, where you can answer the question before last’, referring to that sketch which gently sent up Mastermind.
He then asked Boris about the contents of the Queen’s Speech in general. BoJo didn’t know, and so Mair told him. Or rather, he listed all the subjects and policies May had said she would tackle in her manifesto, which she has now discarded. 13.7 million people voted for that manifesto, said Mair. Was it right that this should now be thrown away?
More mumbling and muttering from Boris, who blustered something about ‘changed circumstances’.
Along with the clip, Mike has also put up some of the responses to it on social media, including those of the Labour politicos John Prescott and Chuka Umunna, and the left-wing writer and journo, Owen Jones. All of them make the point that this was a dreadful interview, comparable to that of Diane Abbott a few weeks ago. This resulted in Abbott being ridiculed across the media. Now Boris has given a similarly bad one, so will he get the same treatment?
No surprise there. The French Philosophical Feline, Guy Debord’s Cat, made this point over a fortnight ago when Abbott was forced to pull out of the campaign due to ill health. People started muttering about how this showed she was incompetent, while May asked the rhetorical question if people wanted this woman as Home Secretary? La Chat Philosophique Francaise compared this to the 1970s racist campaign against the Labour party, in which voters were explicitly told that if you wanted a ‘coloured’ living next to you, you should vote for the Labour party. Or to put it crudely, ‘If you want a n***er for a neighbour, vote Labour’. He writes
In the last week or so, we’ve heard May and her Tories say “Would you want Diane Abbott as Home Secretary”? Such a question is predicated on the knowledge of the Other. The idea that the Home Office will be run not only by a woman, but a black woman is too much to bear for our crypto-racists. Better to have a white woman or a white man in charge, eh? Where are the black faces in May’s cabinet? There are none. There are a couple of Asian millionaires but no black people.
Diane Abbott has been attacked precisely because she is black and because she’s a woman. Boris Johnson is allowed to make as many gaffes as he likes and get away with it. He’s given plenty of latitude when he indulges in racism and his thuggish behaviour is regularly overlooked, even laughed off. He’s a clown, so we’re told.
He concludes
When you base your competency argument on a handful of gaffes rather than a person’s record, then you play the bully’s game. If you can’t see the obvious racism that underpins the bullying of Abbott and prefer to focus on her presumed incompetency, then you need to have a word with yourself.
Part of the issue in Abbott’s case, I suspect, is the fact that challenging racism has been a very important part of Abbott’s political career. Her parents were both working class. The Daily Mail a little while ago in an article on her claimed that she was personally embittered because she believed that her mother had been passed over for promotion because of her colour. Which is very possible, given the racism of the times.
As a result, Abbott got a reputation as someone, who was prejudiced against Whites. In the 1987 one of the Tory papers – I think it was the Scum – ran a double spread of photographs of various Labour politicians, underneath which was a quote designed to frighten all right-thinking British Thatcherites. Underneath Red Ken’s fizzog was the quotation ‘I am not in favour of the army. I am in favour of arming the working classes to guard the factories.’
And below Abbot’s was the statement ‘All White people are racist’.
This was designed to show how far left and unfit for government the Labour party was. As it stands, Ken Livingstone was in favour of workers’ control, though this was only one aspect of his views on industry and government. And as some of his Tory opponents and colleagues in London admitted, Livingstone was far from a lunatic.
I’m sure the same can be said for Abbott. The quotations from the Scum sound plausible, but that’s what effective propaganda has to be. If it sounds like lies, then people won’t believe it. And it isn’t as though the Scum doesn’t have a reputation for lying. As one of the premier organs of Thatcherite propaganda, it shares all the mendacity of the party is loudly supports.
And this is quite apart from its blatant racism. Way back at the end of the 1990s or the first years of this century, Private Eye ran an article on yet another case in which the Scum had been hauled up before the Press Complaints Commission, as was, for racism. The Eye pointed out that the wretched paper had had 19 decisions against it by the Commission for racism over the years. And that was then. Who knows what the count is now!
As for Abbott, she seems perfectly at home with Michael Portillo and Andrew Neil on The Daily Politics. I did hear a little while ago that Portillo was her baby’s godfather, though I’m not sure if this is right. If it is, it confirms that she’s fitted right in as a politician of long and distinguished standing.
Will Boris get pilloried for his dreadful performance? Of course he won’t! He’s White, pukka old Etonian establishment – the type of people, who believe that they have an unquestionable right to govern the rest of us, and who the right-wing media, including the Beeb, will support against challengers like Abbott. Or Jeremy Corbyn, for that matter, who was also ridiculed after failing to know the answer to a question posed by Woman’s Hour.
Which will just show just how biased in terms of class and race the Beeb and media are.
And for fans of classic comedy, here’s the Two Ronnies Sketch in question.
Yesterday the French philosophical feline, Guy Debord’s Cat, put up a great article rightly condemning the Scum and the Daily Heil for claiming that Jeremy Corbyn is somehow a supporter of terrorism. This follows leaked information that MI5 kept a file on him in the 1980s because he, along with many other members of the Labour party and the Left at the time, advocated talking to the IRA in order to end the cycle of violence in Northern Ireland.
I’ve already posted a couple of pieces about this smear. It also appeared in the Torygraph and the Sunday Torygraph, as well as the Scum and Mail. Buddy Hell describes how the Sun’s editorial column, ‘The Sun Says’ claimed that innocent people were murdered because Corbyn and John McConnell ‘sucked up to the IRA’. Mr Hell states that this was an attempt to make Corbyn appear somehow responsible for Monday nights horrific terrorist attack in Manchester.
Equally grotesque was the cartoon by the Daily Mail’s ‘Mac’, real name Stanley McMurty. This shows a couple peering out from behind their curtains as a couple of men with Kalashnikovs and black ski masks head up the drive. Below is the hilarious caption, “Oh dear. Will you answer the door? I think they’re canvassing for Jeremy Corbyn”.
The Cat describes the Sun’s attack on Corbyn as what it is: libel. He says
isn’t journalism or anything like it. It’s a blatant smear; a character assassination that is based entirely upon a historical revisionism. But The Cat has a question: who signed this off? This is evidently libellous and we know Murdoch has pockets that are as deep and as wide as the Pacific Ocean, but did The S*n’s editorial team think it could swerve around the law? Clearly it did and the paper has learned nothing from the Leveson Report.
As for Mac’s wretched cartoon,
Mac can claim he’s being humorous, but it doesn’t wash: this is a blatant piece of propaganda dressed up as humour. In this, it is reminiscent of the cartoons found in Der Sturmer, the official newspaper of the Nazi Party (below).
Underneath is a cartoon from the Nazi newspaper showing a cowed, blonde ‘Europa’, being shown off by a stereotypical evil Jew to a stereotypically thuggish Black man. Unfortunately, this type of racism and the racist conspiracy theory it produced didn’t die when Hitler blew his brains out in the Berlin bunker. The real, anti-Semitic neo-Nazis really do believe that the Jews are promoting racial intermixing between Whites, Blacks and other people of colour in order to destroy the White race. This presumably includes the members of the Alt-Right screaming about ‘White genocide’ whenever they see a film or TV series with a non-White as the star. And especially if the lead is female.
The Cat goes on to make the point that
What is quite absent from the claims about Corbyn’s non-existent sympathy with terrorists, is any acknowledgement on the part of the media’s interviewers and commentators of the role of the British state in Loyalist violence. Worse, perhaps is the morbid nostalgia that seems to accompany these claims. It’s as though the Good Friday Agreement never happened and the power-sharing government never existed. Instead, what we’re treated to are selected fragments of Tory memory larded with a narrative that’s been constructed from misrepresentations and outright lies. For the Tories and others, the Provisional IRA is still active and still bombing the country. Meanwhile, the Loyalist paramilitaries are treated, in not so many words, as heroes or simply not mentioned.
He also points out that May is trying to look like a stateswoman again, after her party cut the police, army and firefighters over the past seven years. He concludes
Who’s the bigger threat to the country? I’d say it’s Theresa May and the British press. (Emphasis mine).
There’s an abundance of evidence showing that the British secret state colluded with Loyalist terrorists in Ulster, and that the SAS operated in secret there, beyond the control of the regular army, as a death squad murdering prominent republicans. The parapolitics magazine, Lobster, has published any number of articles on this over the years.
Regarding the question of who signed off on the Scum’s smear of Corbyn, it may well have been the paper’s editor, without any referral to the Dirty Digger himself. One of the facts that emerged about Murdoch’s sordid empire has been that, while Murdoch has tried to present himself as being a ‘hands-off proprietor’, he still bears the responsibility for the actions of his underlings. They’re very carefully selected to do exactly what he wants them to do. He doesn’t have to interfere in the day to day running of his empire of filth, because he knows they’ll do exactly what he wants anyway.
And in cases where the Digger’s own views are required, Murdoch has a very cavalier attitude to libel. It was reported by one of his underlings that when the question of libel comes up, Murdoch used to look over to his legal advisor, who would hold up the number of fingers representing the thousands of pounds or so that News International would have to pay in fines and damages if the victim sued. Murdoch would take note of the figure, and if it was low enough compared to the number of papers he hoped to sell with the smear, authorise its publication.
As the judge tells Norman Stanley Fletcher in the voiceover in the opening titles of the Beeb’s prison comedy, Porridge, he’s ‘an habitual criminal’. Unfortunately, unlike the character played by Ronnie Barker, he has never been sent to HM Prison Slade for five years.
The Sun itself also has form for publishing racist material. Way back in the 1990s, or the first years of this century, Private Eye reported that the Scum had had 19 judgements against it by the Press Complaints Commission on this score. This includes its cartoons. One of the most noxious showed a couple peering at a line of pigs marching in the street waving placards. The caption read ‘Now the pigs are protesting against being compared to Arabs’.
And Mac in the Daily Mail has also published other racist, or racially offensive, cartoons. This seems to clash with the effort of at least one of their cartoonists to appear hip and bohemian. I remember a documentary on TV back in the 1990s, which featured the Heil and showed its cartoonist at the time. From what I recall, he seemed to be dressed in the Beatnik style of 1950s intellectuals. This made an impression, as the Daily Mail is anything but hip and bohemian. It’s ferociously anti-intellectual to the point where I get the distinct impression that Paul Dacre and the entire editorial staff would have a fit if they caught someone in the office reading Sartre or any of the French phenomenologists.
Also, the title of the Sun’s editorial column is surely a misnomer. The Scum has slavered, screamed, shrieked, yelled, ranted, raved, accused, denounced, thundered and harangued, but it has never, ever merely ‘said’ anything.
And through its history, it has spread lies and smears about the Labour party and its leaders. It’s started doing it again, doing to Corbyn precisely what it did to Michael Foot, Ken Livingstone and the others back in 1983.
Don’t be taken in by the lies and hysteria.
Vote Labour on June 8th for a genuinely safer Britain. Without the Sun’s and Daily Mail’s xenophobia and ultra-nationalism.
Here’s a bit of real, Old Labour Socialism coming through. In this clip, the veteran Labour MP Dennis Skinner, the ‘Beast of Bolsover’, invites the Foreign Secretary to go back with him to the time when he was hiding under the stairs as Britain was being bombed by two Fascist dictators, Mussolini and Hitler. Now May is walking hand in hand with another Fascist, Donald Trump. He calls on the Foreign Secretary to condemn Trump’s visit and states that the Orange Dictator isn’t fit to walk in the footsteps of Nelson Mandela.
There’s another clip of this speech, which shows BoJo rising up to respond to Skinner, saying that he is mistaken about Mussolini bombing Britain, but he hears his criticism. He then tries to answer it by saying that the government rejects the recommendation to cancel Trump’s visit, and instead will work to get the best deal for British citizens.
I left that out because, quite honestly, it’s more infuriating Tory lies. May and the Conservatives made the same claim about working to get the best deal for Britain with Brexit. And what they’ve actually managed to get is quite the opposite: a very bad deal for Britain, which has left millions of people worried about their jobs and how they’ll manage with the expected rise in prices now we’re outside the EU tariff wall.
And Mike this week put up a piece, which made it very plain that what limited criticism the Tories have made about Trump was motivated by their desire to defend a Muslim Tory MP from being stopped if he goes to America.
In fact, it seems to me that vast parts of the Tory party and press are solidly behind the ban. The Daily Mail, the Express and the Torygraph have for years attacked non-White immigration. I remember a number of articles from these papers in the 1980s where they talked about the growth of ‘unassimilable’ immigrants. As for the Scum, way back in the 1990s when the Sun was very loudly trying to tell the world that it was somehow non- or even anti-racist, Private Eye reminded its readers that the paper had been convicted something like 19 or 21 times by the Press Complaints Commission of racism. In one of the most repellent of the cases, the Scum ran a cartoon showing pigs marching in protest with banners. The caption read, ‘Even now the pigs are complaining about being compared to Arabs’. Or if not those precise words, then something very similar.
The party that was appealing for illegal immigrants to hand themselves in so they could be deported, amongst other anti-immigrant policies is not going to condemn Trump for his hardline stance against Muslim immigration. However much David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith may have tried to present the Tory party as now entirely anti-racist and comfortable with multiculturalism.
This is yet another story about racism, though this time it’s about the deeply entrenched racism of the Murdoch press, and how they’re now trying to play it against Jeremy Corbyn.
Yesterday, Mike over at Vox Political put up a piece from the Skwawkbox commenting on a racist cartoon in the Times. The Skwawkbox discussed the way the ‘Leave’ campaigners had started backtracking on their slogans about Britain taking back control of immigration within hours of winning the Brexit vote. All the rubbish they were promoting about a ‘Leave’ victory allowing Britain to cut back or end immigration has been gradually whittled down to nothing, or almost nothing, if we want to maintain trade links.
After Jeremy Corbyn on Wednesday made a speech in the Commons stating that he would not make any false promises on immigration, the Times published a cartoon of the Labour leader at the helm of a ship with the name ‘Corbyn Cruises’, stuffed with generic foreign types. The cartoon has the caption ‘Migrant Ferry Across the Mersey’, a reference to the Labour party holding its conference in Liverpool.
The Skwawkbox rightly attacks this as racist and xenophobic, and notes that it shows the Establishment’s terror at Jeremy Corbyn’s authenticity. He refuses to treat the British public as fools, to be manipulated by mendacious sloganeering and lies, that are discarded as soon as they have served their purpose.
The Skwawkbox makes the point that the Times is a Murdoch rag, but still purports to have the same gravitas as a serious broadsheet. Well, it lost some of that same gravitas about four decades or so ago when the Dirty Digger was allowed to buy it by Maggie Thatcher. When it was edited by Harold Evans, there was a serious attempt to make the paper impartial. It was sceptical of the unions, yes, but Evans also stated that he wanted to make the paper sceptical of the powerful in general, including in business and government. This policy was seriously harmed by Murdoch’s take-over, and it became as shrilly right-wing in its attacks on Michael Foot and the Labour party as the other right-wing rags.
And it continued to make stupid decisions that harmed the paper’s reputation. Remember the scandal about the ‘Hitler Diaries’. These were forgeries, written in modern ink in a modern exercise book. Nevertheless, they briefly took in Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre, a historian, who has written the introduction to the OUP edition of Hitler’s Table-Talk. After initially endorsing them, Trevor-Roper began having doubts about their authenticity. So the Times editor rang up Murdoch. Who then decided to maintain his reputation for high journalistic standards with the reply, ‘I don’t want to hear about that’, and commanded the Times editor to publish Trevor-Roper’s initial decision that the diaries were genuine. The result: Murdoch shifted more copies of the Times, at the expense of Trevor-Roper unfairly looking stupid.
Then in the 1990s the Times’ editor, David Leppard, decided to publish the allegations of the Soviet defector and notorious liar, Oleg Gordievsky, that Michael Foot was a KGB agent, codenamed ‘Boot’. This was all lies, but it followed the Tory line in the 1980s that Labour had been infiltrated by Communists, all set on taking over Britain. Foot was too left-wing to win an election, but he was certainly no traitor. Foot sued, and Murdoch had to pay damages for libel. And the Times was left looking untrustworthy yet again. In fact, according to the accounts of people who’ve worked in Murdoch’s libel department, the Disgrace to Australian Journalism has little qualms about libelling people. He’s not worried about losing so much as how much he has to pay out in damages afterwards. If the amount he stands to lose in a libel case is less than the profits he’ll make on a story, he decides it’s worth it and publishes. Even though he and his lawyers know the story’s a lie.
As for racism, the Murdoch press also has a very long, and ignominious tradition of this, though usually it’s confined to the Scum. I also remember reading a story in Private Eye in the 1990s or early part of this century that reported yet another case brought against the Scum for racism before the Press Complaints Commission. This stated that up to that time, the alleged ‘newspaper’ had had 19 judgements for racism against it by the Council. This followed a Scum cartoon showing a line of pigs demonstrating against racist slander, observed by two men, with the caption, ‘Now pigs complain about being compared to Arabs.’ This is the type of journalism, that provoked the journos on Murdoch’s papers in Oz and New York to go on strike in the 1970s and ’80s. They complained that, thanks to the Digger’s highly populist attitude to journalism, he’d turned them and their papers into a laughing stock. Most journalists, at least at that time, took their profession very seriously, and wanted to do the best job they could. And this was being frustrated by Murdoch and his very low sensibilities.
So now the Times, like the Scum, is playing up racism and xenophobia again to promote its Conservative stance against the Labour party and Jeremy Corbyn. And the Skwawkbox is entirely right: it does show the establishment’s fear of Corbyn’s authenticity. Mike has blogged time and again about the repeated failure of the Tories to carry out their promise to cut down on immigration. And he rightly reported that Brexit also wouldn’t cut down on immigration either, because of the economics involved, and the number of foreign workers and students required by industry and the university sector. Mike was proved right. The Tories and ‘Leave’ campaign were liars.
But Corbyn isn’t. He’s been honest and stated he is not going to make false promises. It’s a refreshing attitude from a politician, a profession that is generally distrusted and viewed with increasing contempt and derision by the British public, precisely because of all the lies and PR spin. The Tories are past masters of this. David Cameron was a former PR man, and the Tories arguably started the professionalization of political lying when Margaret Thatcher made Bernard Ingham her press secretary.
Corbyn told the truth, and in a political culture poisoned by mendacity, this makes him dangerous. Especially when it’s about immigration, which has always been used as a propaganda tool by the Tories and their lackeys in the press. And so the Times has once again lived down to Rupert Murdoch’s journalistic standards, and attacked Corbyn in a racist and xenophobic cartoon. Which itself shows how right Murdoch’s critics were when they opposed his acquisition of the paper. Maggie was told fairly and squarely that he was not a fit or proper person to own the newspaper. And as this cartoon shows, they were right.
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